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then tapped pen to paper.
    She opened her mouth to tell him he didn’t need to worry about Klee, but then changed her mind. If Bing wanted to run the Dutch artist who’d been gone for almost seventy years through the system, let him.
    “ Anything else you want to tell me at this point?”
    “ I already told you everything.”
    He huffed, watched her for a long moment, his eyes, the color of burned sienna, narrowing. “All right. I’m going to see what Joe found out there. I’ll be back in a while. You stay right here.”
    She knew that tone. The captain blamed her for all this. She couldn’t bear the thought of more interrogations to come. If her father found out…
    The thought about stopped her heart.
    Her father couldn’t find out. Whatever she had to do, she had to keep her new batch of troubles secret. She had to find a way to clear her name and make this all go away, and she had to do it in a hurry.
    * * *
    Jack Sullivan saw the bright light again. This time, he wasn’t about to march blindly ahead. Screw the light. With superhuman effort, he willed himself awake. His eyelids going up felt as if someone was dragging sandpaper over his eyeballs. It hurt to breathe.
    “ Welcome back, Jack.”
    Bing’s face swam into focus.
    “ Captain.” He cleared his throat, then tried for something better than the weak whisper. “What happened?”
    “ Do you know how much paperwork I have to fill out every time one of my men gets injured?”
    He blinked at the hospital room around him—white walls, green sheets, strange-looking medical equipment—and wrinkled his nose at the smell of iodine. “I’ll try not to make a habit of it. I’m fine.”
    “ You might think differently when the painkillers wear off,” the man said in a voice that leaned toward gentle. Not something Jack had heard from Bing before. He had to be dying.
    He tried to sit up. Couldn’t. What the hell?
    “ Take it easy, son.”
    Nobody had called him son in at least a decade. And Bing wasn’t yet forty. They had less than a decade between them. Oh, hell. He had to be in even worse shape than he’d thought. Pain stabbed his side. He’d been hurt, badly, but couldn’t remember how.
    Bing leaned forward, the chair creaking under his weight. Not that he was fat by any measure, but solidly built with muscle. He put in his share of time in training at the station’s gym. He required his team to keep in shape and would never ask anything of them that he himself wasn’t prepared to do. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
    Jack forced his mind to focus. “Going out on an anonymous call. Suspicious activity reported at an abandoned farmhouse.” At first he’d thought drugs. Then he’d gotten there and saw that chunk of bone.
    Memories flashed across his mind suddenly, a horror movie on fast-forward. His teeth clenched. “It was Blackwell.”
    Bing went still. “You think too much about the man. You were in a lot of pain. Your mind came up with—”
    “ Blackwell,” he said again. “I had time to make positive ID.”
    Bing sat up straighter, stared at Jack for a long moment. “They got some DNA from under a couple of your fingernails, but it’ll be a while before the results come in. Do you know if the FBI has DNA on him?”
    “ They don’t.” Adrenaline spiked through him. If they gained enough DNA, if it matched to something in the database…
    Bing rubbed his hand over his knee as he watched him, that look of doubt still in his eyes. “Do you remember enough for a sketch? I can have someone here in ten minutes.”
    Jack shook his head. The images that had come back to him were only of the lower half of his own body, a cement floor stained with his blood, Blackwell’s boots. He gritted his teeth. “He kept me blindfolded. But he talked about the others.” The bastard had taunted him while he’d tortured him.
    “ I might recognize his voice.” That he wasn’t sure he would killed him. But there’d been a fan rattling