* * *
Seth ended the call to Captain Wilson and slipped his cell phone back in his pocket. It hadn’t taken long to find out that Dan’s SUV had been transported to an all-night tow service in midtown. Captain Wilson said Callie’s bags had been taken out of the car and were waiting in the business’s office to be picked up. Now if she would just come on, he might be able to get her settled at her uncle’s and get himself home in time for a little sleep before going back to work in the morning.
He glanced at his watch and frowned. He hadn’t expected Callie to be gone so long, but he could understand her reluctance to leave her uncle. Perhaps he should have gone back upstairs with her. Dan might have taken a turn for the worse.
He yawned and had just dropped down in a chair when a voice blared over the intercom system. “Security stat! Security stat!”
Seth bolted to his feet and let his gaze sweep the room. He knew what that alert meant. Security was shutting down the hospital because of a threat somewhere. Could it have something to do with Dan?
At that moment, a hospital security guard ran into the waiting room and stopped at the receptionist’s desk. “Have you seen a man in scrubs run through here in the past few minutes?” he demanded. Before she could answer, Seth pulled out his badge and ran over to the man.
“What’s happened?”
His eyes scanned the badge before he responded. “Someone tried to kill a patient in the Critical Care Unit.”
A groan rumbled in Seth’s throat. He ran from the room and raced to the stairs. He didn’t have time to wait for an elevator. When he burst into the fourth-floor hallway, his knees grew weak at the activity outside the unit. Bleary-eyed people huddled in small groups in the waiting room. He’d been here enough on the job to know they were family members who spent long nights as close to injured loved ones as they could get. Nurses scurried around, and two security officers guarded the entrance to the Critical Care Unit.
He ran toward the guards with his badge held high. “Detective Seth Dawtry, MPD. Has something happened to Judge Lattimer?”
One of the men held up his hand, and Seth skidded to a stop next to him. “There’s been an attempt on his life. His niece interrupted it and called for help, but when the marshal who was guarding him intervened, he was shot and has been taken to surgery.”
Seth’s heart constricted. He glanced into the waiting room in hopes of seeing Callie, but she wasn’t there. “Where’s Judge Lattimer’s niece?”
The security guard inclined his head toward the unit. “She’s in with her uncle. Do you want to see her?”
“Yes.”
The man opened the door, and Seth rushed in. Callie, her purse clutched in a death grip, sat in a chair at the foot of her uncle’s bed. She turned a tear-stained face toward him as he entered. “What happened?”
He listened in disbelief as Callie related the events of the past few minutes. When she finished, she shook her head and groaned. “They almost succeeded this time, Seth. Uncle Dan was just seconds away from death.”
Her body trembled, and he reached for her hand. “Then we have to be thankful you left your purse. Have you heard anything from the marshals yet?”
As if in answer to his question, the door to the unit swung open, and Rob Grant rushed into the room. He stopped next to Seth. “I was on my way here when I received a call that the judge had been attacked and our marshal had been shot.”