“It’s hard to say,” Kendall admitted. “Chances are that maybe Frank did this a few weeks ago and Jack was the target. When he didn’t get out in his boat as soon as he wanted him to, he went into the house for the kill. That seems most likely, but we’re not ruling out any possibilities right now.”
Nick nodded slowly. “So, what do we do?”
The detective sighed. “For starters, I’d recommend you call your bodyguard back down here. I’ll assume you all will be staying in town while Josh is hospitalized?” Annie and Katie nodded eagerly, and Nick followed suit. “I still feel like he’s probably left town by now, but at this point, I don’t want to take any chances.”
“Nick--” Annie placed her hand in his shoulder gently. “You’re supposed to go back into the studio with the guys next week,” she reminded him.
“So?” Nick eyed her dubiously.
“So….it’s okay if you want to go back to LA like you’d planned. Katie and I will take care of each other.”
Nick gave her hand a little squeeze. “I appreciate that, but for now, I’d rather be right here.” Annie fought back grateful tears. Nick had truly been her rock throughout this whole ordeal, and deep down, she didn’t really mean it when she said he could go back to LA and leave her there. Still, though, offering felt like the right thing to do, and she didn’t doubt that she actually could handle herself and her sister-in-law if Nick did in fact head back to Los Angeles. “I need to call one of the guys,” Nick announced. He let go of Annie’s hand, and with his one useable arm, he instinctively reached for his pants pocket. Except, he didn’t have pockets. Seeing that he was cold and wet, an ER nurse insisted that he change out of his clothes and into a set of green hospital-issued scrubs. Even if his phone was indeed still in his pants pocket and not at the bottom of the bay, it surely wouldn’t be functional. He sighed and started to ask Annie if he could borrow her phone when it started to ring from inside her purse.
She quickly retrieved it, looked at the screen, and handed it to Nick. “It’s AJ,” she said with a shrug.
Nick took the phone and held it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Oh, thank God!” AJ’s voice bellowed at him. “Where’s your phone and why aren’t you answering it?”
“Uh, I’d say it’s somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic about now,” Nick answered quietly.
“Holy shi-- vas! We didn’t think of that!”
“Holy what?”
“Hell if I know, but I’ve got a baby girl on the way, and little princesses aren’t supposed to cuss, so I’m trying to quit.”
“I see.” Nick smirked, despite the grave situation. “What’s up, J?”
“You’re on Access Hollywood. Actually, there’s a picture of what I think used to be a boat, and they’re saying you were there. Are you okay??” he almost shouted.
“I--” Nick paused and looked at Drew, sleeping soundly across two waiting room chairs, then at Annie and Katie, both visibly shaken, but otherwise holding up pretty well. Then he looked at Kendall Jones, who was now seated in a chair across from them and flipping through notes in a small stenographer’s pad. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Hmm….”
“Hmm… what?”
“But?”
“What?” Nick furrowed his brows in confusion.
“You’re okay, but...”
Nick sighed. “But Josh was driving the boat, and he’s-- he’s not okay, AJ,” he stammered.
“And neither are you,” AJ observed knowingly.
“Neither am I,” Nick admitted with a sigh.
While Nick continued his quiet conversation with AJ, Detective Jones turned his attention to Annie, leaning towards her attentively with his pen poised over the pad of paper resting on his knee. “Where were you at the time of the crash?” he asked.
“I was in the beach house,” she answered. “After your team cleared the crime scene, we brought in a professional cleaner and started getting it ready to sell.”
“That’s usually what happens in cases like this,” Kendall noted. “So, since you’ve been in and around the house a lot lately, have you noticed anything strange?”
“Strange? Strange how?” She could tell him all kinds of strange things-- like how strange it felt to be pilfering through her parents’ belongings without either of them present, the strange sense of calm she felt about their deaths, the strange visions of her late husband…
“Have you found anything else out of place? Noticed anyone loitering around the property?”
“Well, I still haven’t found my wedding album,” she told him. “But if you really think Frank’s murdering my parents didn’t have anything to do with Nick or me, I don’t know what he could possibly want with it.”
“It is strange,” Kendall admitted. “Anything else you can think of? What about while you were there alone before the accident?”
Annie opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. She’d almost told him about seeing Andrew’s doppleganger walking on the beach, but then realized just how crazy that might sound. She imagined that if she told the detective she’d been seeing her dead husband practically every day since the murders, she might end up in the psych ward instead of the ICU waiting room. “No. Nothing else.”
********************
Just as the doctor had warned them, Josh contracted an infection within only a few days. “He’s septic,” the doctor lamented in the ICU waiting room three days after the crash.
“What’s his blood pressure?” Annie asked immediately.
“Sixty-five over thirty-two maxed out on Levophed and dopamine,” the intensivist answered without missing a beat.
“His temp?”
“103.4 with acetaminophen.”
“His heart rate?”
“40-- give or take.” Nick watched curiously as Annie continued to interrogate her brother’s doctor. These days it was easy to forget about that “M.D.” at the end of her name, but right now, the M.D. was coming out of the concerned sister loud and clear. He couldn’t help but be a bit in awe of her. This bright woman spouting off medical jargon, and subsequently interpreting it, was the woman he was going to marry in just two and a half months. Crazy.
Meanwhile, Annie’s heart sank as the took in the information being relayed to her. “He has a fever, which usually increases heart rate, he’s maxed out on dopamine and Levophed, and his heart rate’s still only 40 beats per minute,” she said, a dejected sense of dread filling her heart with each passing second.
“Yes,” Josh’s doctor answered solemnly.
Annie reached for the chair behind her and eased herself down. Nick followed suit beside her, but Katie kept standing, her arms crossed protectively across her chest while she shifted her weight back and forth from one foot to the other nervously. “Have you tried Neo-Synephrine?” Annie asked meekly, looking up at the doctor with hopeful eyes.
“We considered it,” he answered with a knowing nod. “But because of his burns…”
“You don’t want to cause too much vasoconstriction,” she finished for him with a defeated sigh. “Without adequate blood flow, they’ll never heal, and he’d be at an even higher risk of losing his limbs.” The doctor nodded. “Josh wouldn’t want that,” Annie declared, eyeing Katie cautiously.
“No, he wouldn’t,” his wife agreed, her voice barely above a whisper.
Annie gulped and got back down to business. “How’s his kidney function?”
“His serum creatinine jumped from 1.5 to 2.7 this morning. His kidneys are failing.”
“His LFTs?”
“High. His liver’s taken a hit, too.”
“What antibiotics do you have him on?”
“Vancomycin, Zosyn, and gentamicin since he got here.”
“So they’re not working,” Annie surmised, her voice on edge.
He shook his head slowly. “No, they’re not. Given the extent of his burns…”
She help her hand up, palm outward towards the man in the white coat. “You don’t need to explain. I get it.”
The doctor pursed his lips and studied her. “What else do you want to know?”
“Is he in any pain?” Katie interjected from her position standing beside her husband’s doctor. Annie groaned softly and looked down at the floor, gripping the sides of her chair until her knuckles turned white, bracing herself for the doctor's inevitable answer and her sister-in-law's response.
He took off his glasses and sighed, then placed his hand gently on Katie’s shoulder and looked directly into her eyes. “We’re doing the best we can to control his pain, Mrs. Donohue, but it’s a delicate balancing act between keeping him sedated and keeping his heart rate and blood pressure from dropping any further. Unfortunately, yes, he’s in some pain. We’re giving him morphine, but the dose that his body is able to tolerate without becoming too bradycardic or hypotensive isn’t really enough to adequately control his pain. In severe burn cases like these, the nerve endings are exposed and often damaged. Topical anesthetics help some, but can may cause further tissue damage. We’re using them anyway. He’s semi-conscious, but if we were better able to control his heart rate and blood pressure, I’d have him completely knocked out just because it’s so painful.”
Katie let out a sob while Annie blinked back the tears what welled up in her eyes. Nick looked at her and caught a tear drop with the pad of his thumb as it trailed down her pale cheek. “He’s dying, Katie,” she told her sister-in-law, her voice cracking in agony.
“I know,” Katie whispered.
Run by emily_michele
