A Woman Worth Waiting For

  “Hello, Max, it’s been a while.”

  Max McMurray looked down into Ginny’s huge green eyes. Those eyes, a pert nose spread with caramel-colored freckles and a smile as wide as Australia had been his undoing six years ago.

  And his reason for returning to this country.

  He was damned if they weren’t still affecting him.

  The eyes, that is. And the freckles. He hadn’t seen the smile yet and, judging by the wariness in the sea-green depths, might not see it for some time. But the lips were the same—the deep V in the middle of the top one, the slight upward tilt as if they were always getting ready to smile.…

  Dear Reader,

  In this, the fifth “Sara Kemp” book, I return to a large provincial city where Sarah is working in the E.R. department. I think I’ve started to get carried away with the mystery element of these books, and in this one I introduce a serial killer. In a romance? Yes! Because the romance is still there. The kind of romance I like, where the man from the past returns to claim his one true love.

  Only, she doesn’t want to be claimed—not when he’s hurt her once before.

  The serial killer does in another victim, the hero hopes to reconquer the heroine and Sarah is determined to sort out who did what to whom before anyone else is killed.

  At the moment, this is the last of the “forensic” books, but who knows what the future holds?

  Happy reading!

  A Woman Worth Waiting For

  Meredith Webber

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘THEY’RE fairly basic,’ Joe Allen, one of the senior security staff at Ellison General, said to Sarah as he led her up the flight of three wide steps to a veranda which stretched along the front of the low, brick building.

  ‘I’m used to basic, having done locums in some far-flung places,’ Sarah assured him.

  Joe produced keys from his pocket as he moved past the first door towards the third, in the middle of the row of five.

  ‘Dr Willis is in the first flat. She’s been looking to buy something in the area but hasn’t found what she wants. A psychologist, some chap here for a short course or to do a survey or something, is coming into the second for a few weeks. You’re in here and the two beyond this one are empty.’

  Sarah nodded. She’d already met Virginia—‘call me Ginny’—Willis over at the A and E department. The young woman had seemed open and friendly—though, no doubt, part of the welcome was because she’d have more help, now Sarah had arrived to hold the fort until a new doctor could be appointed to the team.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll all get along very well though, from previous experience, there’s not much time for socialising after hours.’

  Joe nodded, then pushed open the door to reveal what Sarah had come to think of as a typical hospital flat. They walked into a living room, furnished with one two-seater and two single vinyl-covered armchairs, with a cheap laminated coffee-table set in front of them. The living space merged into the kitchen, separated by a low counter. Three stools along the counter made it into a dining table of sorts.

  Across from the kitchen was a hall, with two doors opening off it, one bedroom and one bathroom—hers for a fortnight.

  ‘You know about the extra security?’ Joe asked, and Sarah nodded.

  ‘Ring for an escort if moving around the hospital grounds on my own after dark.’ She repeated the order Joe had already given her. Then, as they walked back onto the veranda, she looked around and waved her hand towards the flat paved space in front of the flats. ‘Though this area seems well lit, and all I have to do is cross the road to be in the hospital car park.’

  ‘The police think Dr Craig was taken from the hospital car park,’ Joe told her, ‘though she was murdered somewhere else.’

  Sarah nodded. Her own recent close call with abduction, when a psychotic woman had forced her into a vehicle then tried to kill her, was enough to make her wary.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t take any risks,’ she promised. ‘You can even escort me back, if you’re going that way. Although I don’t officially start until tomorrow, I’ll bring my car across and unpack my things, then go over to A and E. It looked as if Dr Willis could do with a hand, and I like to get a feel for places before I begin work.’

  Joe shut the door and handed her the keys.

  ‘The second key is for the back door. All the locks were changed recently—a regular upgrade to more effective deadlocks. The doors lock automatically when you shut them, and you need a key to open them from inside or outside.’

  Sarah slipped the keys into her handbag as they followed the path skirting the parking area. Her thoughts were on Isobel Craig, the woman she was temporarily replacing. No locks had kept her safe from an attacker who, police suspected, had already killed twice before killing Isobel and dumping her body in scrubland on the outskirts of the city.

  ‘Where did the other two young women come from?’ she asked Joe. ‘Did they have any connection with the hospital?’

  ‘No, thank goodness,’ he replied. ‘Can you imagine the panic among the women who work here if they thought hospital staff were being targeted?’

  ‘It’d be pretty bad,’ Sarah agreed.

  They crossed the road and entered the main staff car park, passing the boom gate that provided some security for the staff cars.

  Though not enough to keep Isobel safe, she thought sadly.

  ‘You’ll get a swipe card for the boom gate when you get your photo ID from the personnel department,’ Joe told her, indicating the metal box where cards could be swiped.

  ‘Do you have camera surveillance of the car park?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Some,’ he admitted. ‘We’re putting in more now. Dr Markham, Dr Craig’s husband, he’s offered to pay for it himself, though that won’t help Dr Craig. He said he always told his wife to park in the corner where the cameras were, but you can’t always get a space where you want it.’

  Joe’s explanation carried undercurrents of gloom, but Sarah was wondering how Paul Markham was coping. She didn’t know the man, although she’d heard his name and knew him to be one of the breed of young specialists who’d hitched their wagons to the bright star of nuclear medicine.

  Thanking Joe for his help, she retrieved her own vehicle from the visitors’ car park, drove across to the flats and unpacked her clothes, some ‘basic’ provisions and a few knick-knacks she’d brought with her. Once satisfied the place felt a little like home, she walked back to the hospital, entering A and E through the ambulance entrance.

  To her surprise, the department was relatively quiet. A green-curtained cubicle suggested that a patient was resting in the makeshift room, no doubt waiting to be transported to a ward, and two nurses, both male, were shifting papers at the main desk, while another woman, possibly a clerk, spoke on the phone.

  ‘Is Dr Willis around?’ Sarah asked one of the nurses.

  He nodded towards the end of the long room.

  ‘She’s up there somewhere,’ he said, without asking Sarah who she was or what business she had in the department.

  Hospital security isn’t your concern, she reminded herself as she headed in the direction he’d indicated.

  Then regretted it when she saw Ginny Willis, in a corner provided by an undrawn curtain and the wall, in close conversation with a handsomely beautiful, dark-haired man. He wasn’t m
uch taller than the woman doctor, but he leant towards her, and something in his posture suggested a possessiveness—almost intimacy.

  It was too late to back away for Ginny had seen her and, after a word of explanation to the man and a light touch on his forearm, the younger doctor stepped away, greeting Sarah as she approached.

  ‘You’ve been shown your new home?’ she asked, and Sarah nodded, while her eyes were drawn again to the departing man.

  He was beautiful, though she’d always considered the word inappropriate for describing male members of the species. Beautiful, and not hanging around for introductions—he was already halfway to the bank of lifts at the end of the room.

  Ginny caught her interest.

  ‘That was Paul Markham,’ she said to Sarah. ‘He’s taking Isobel’s death hard, and drifts about the place as if he’s still looking for her. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you, but I thought introducing you as her replacement, even though only temporary, might be upsetting for him.’

  ‘Of course it would have been. Actually, I’m surprised he’s back at work so soon,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s been what—two weeks?’

  ‘Just about, but he only took a couple of days off—says he was going mad at home. I guess the staff members are like family to him. He did his intern and resident years here, then, after studying overseas, was appointed to head the new nuclear medicine division of the radiology department. With Isobel working in A and E, we were used to him popping in and out.’

  ‘What was she like—Isobel?’ Sarah asked, but the question was doomed to remain unanswered as a wailing ambulance siren heralded the arrival of an emergency.

  Ginny rushed away, and Sarah followed more slowly, stopping at the desk to see if her security pass had come down from the human resources department.

  Once tagged as an official member of the team, she checked on Ginny’s new patient, an elderly woman found unconscious in her home, the ambulance alerted by her meals-on-wheels provider.

  ‘We’ll rehydrate her, take blood for tests to see if we can discover what happened,’ Ginny said, waving away Sarah’s offer of help.

  Left to her own devices, she walked down the short corridor between the emergency entrance and the A and E waiting room, where she offered her services to the clerk and nursing sister organising the walk-in patients.

  ‘We’re not busy today,’ Ruth Storey, the nursing sister on duty, told her. ‘The intern seems to be managing, so why don’t you have a look around, see what’s what, introduce yourself to the staff, and generally get a feel for the place?’

  ‘I noticed two trauma rooms out the back. Do you handle much trauma?’

  ‘Not as much as we used to,’ Ruth said. ‘Nowadays most severe trauma cases—serious MVAs, burns or gunshot wounds, that kind of thing—are airlifted straight to one of the major hospitals in Brisbane. Once a Medivac helicopter is in the air, it’s only another twenty minutes and, with trained trauma personnel on board, they can do as much as we could on the ground.’

  ‘What about a bad motor vehicle accident locally?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘They’d come here,’ Ruth told her, ‘then, if necessary, critically injured victims would be airlifted on to Brisbane. We get minor things—two-car collisions at intersections with fractures of ankles, concussion or contusions—but the worst of the MVAs are out on the motorway, and if the helicopter’s called in it makes sense to take the injured straight to a major city hospital.’

  Sarah nodded, knowing the major hospitals had both the trained trauma teams ready to roll into action when a patient was admitted and more specialist surgeons, neurologists and physicians to call in as consultants.

  She chatted for a while longer with Ruth, before excusing herself to look around. The arrangement of the waiting room, with its admission area and line of small numbered cubicles, was standard for a hospital the size of Ellison General.

  ‘Mrs Warren to Room Five,’ a voice, distorted to mechanical blandness by the intercom, intoned.

  A large woman responded to the summons, struggling to her feet then waddling towards the door marked with a bold figure five. A young man, nursing a toddler, was the only other patient, and when he was called to collect a prescription for the pharmacy, the waiting room was empty.

  ‘It’s a rare sight,’ the clerk told her, ‘so make the most of it. Do you want to come into the office and use the second computer to familiarise yourself with our record-keeping procedures?’

  Deciding it was a good idea, Sarah waited while Ruth pressed code buttons to admit her into the secure office area, then slipped into the room.

  As she settled in front of the computer, the outer doors slid open and a tall, rangy man with over-long, sun-streaked, honey-coloured hair ushered a harassed-looking woman into the room. She was dragging a blond-haired, white-faced child behind her. One look at the child’s arm was enough to tell its own tale.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, heading to the reception counter like a lemming to a cliff-top. ‘You’d think there was a prize for the most hospital visits, the way this kid gets into mischief. Connolly, Fletcher. He’s already got a file a mile long. Will we go straight through to X-Ray?’

  ‘In a minute, Mrs Connolly,’ the clerk said, tapping the information into her keyboard to find Fletcher’s file number.

  Fletcher, meanwhile, had slunk off to a chair, where he sat and gingerly nursed his injured arm.

  The tall man stood back, as if content to watch from the sidelines whatever drama played out.

  A few minutes later, a nurse appeared with Fletcher’s file and led the woman and child through to X-Ray.

  ‘There are a couple of things I need to check, Mr Connolly,’ the clerk said, and the tall man turned to look behind him.

  ‘Aren’t you Mr Connolly?’ the clerk persisted.

  The man frowned at her.

  ‘No,’ he said, then he crossed to a self-serve drink machine, pressed money into it, retrieved a bottle of mineral water and, settling into one of the waiting-room chairs, proceeded to drink it.

  ‘I keep doing that!’ the clerk said crossly to Sarah. ‘Assuming people are married to each other. For all I know, he could be the fourth father figure in little Fletch’s life. I’ve got to get into the habit of phrasing things better.’

  She was berating herself so forcefully that Sarah had to smile, but something in the man’s movements—or perhaps simply his presence—made her study him more closely.

  So she couldn’t help but pick up on his reaction when Ginny Willis whirled through the room.

  He glanced up, patently disinterested, then his eyes—too far away for Sarah to discern their colour—seemed to focus more intently. He half rose, shook his head, peered down the corridor in the direction Ginny had taken, then slumped back into his chair.

  Still shaking his head.

  Sarah puzzled over it as she returned to her exploration of the computer system, but the arrival of more patients soon put paid to any thought of an easy day.

  Patching minor wounds, admitting patients with more serious ailments—the day slid into a pattern more typical of a small regional city A and E department.

  ‘Come on, let’s go while there’s a lull, otherwise we’ll be here all night,’ Ginny said to her, much later. ‘You weren’t supposed to be working at all, and look at you. You’ve been here all day.’

  They were slumped in chairs in the doctors’ office in the back section of the department, glass windows revealing the continuing bustle of activity in this behind-the-scenes area of Accident and Emergency.

  ‘I’ll just get my handbag. I left it in the reception area, where I was looking at computer files.’

  ‘We can walk out that way,’ Ginny suggested, shucking her white coat and dropping it over the back of a chair. ‘Pretend we’re real people, not doctors.’

  She followed Sarah out of the room and down the short corridor to the reception area and waiting room.

  Sarah saw the man with the blond-streaked h
air, and heard Ginny’s gasp of surprise at the same time, then, as Sarah wondered if Security should be advised of his presence, Ginny whispered, ‘Max!’ She turned tail, almost running back towards the ambulance admittance area.

  The man, who wouldn’t have heard the gasp but had probably noticed the movement, looked up, studied Sarah for a minute, then returned his attention to a magazine open on his lap. Sarah sensed he had more interest in the people in the room than in the magazine but whether he was studying the patients in general, or seeking a particular person, she couldn’t tell.

  What she did know was that the man unsettled her. Given the recent murders of three women in the town, including one from this department, someone should be made aware of his continuing presence.

  Ginny had retreated to the doctors’ office again, then realised she couldn’t react in any of the ways she favoured—screaming, beating her hands against her head—when everyone in the department would be able to see her.

  She sat down in a chair and pressed her hand to her chest, dismayed with her body for reacting the way it had—over a man who’d rejected her such a very long time ago!

  Perhaps it hadn’t been Max. After all, there had to be more than one tall, rangy, streaked-blond-haired man in the world. Besides, Max had returned to the United States so he couldn’t possibly be sitting in the A and E waiting room at a regional city hospital in Australia. She had to pull herself together! Sarah Kemp must be wondering what had happened to her, but there was no way—no way—she could walk out there again.

  Just in case!

  She stared through the window, eyes seeing but not seeing, while her mind churned with shocked emotion—attraction, love, hope, fear, determination and then despair. In retrospect, it always seemed as if she’d run through the whole gamut of human emotions in three short months. The memories tumbled about in her head like clothes in a dryer, glimpses of them flashing through her mind.

  Max walking in to her tutorial group that first day, and her own instant recognition of him as ‘her’ man.