Prescription: Makeover

William Caine—The FBI agent turned medical investigator would rather work alone than risk the lives of the people around him, as he seeks to bring down a murderous medical conspiracy called The Nine.

Einstein (Ike) Rombout—Highly claustrophobic and rebelIious, Ike is a trained computer hacker who has her own reasons for going after The Nine—and good luck to the man who tries to get in her way.

Michael Grosskill—The Nine have someone on the inside of the FBI. Could it be William’s former boss?

Maximilian Vasek—The cofounder of Vasek & Caine Investigations has a new wife to protect when things get ugly.

Raine Montgomery—Max’s wife and Ike have never seen eye to eye.

Lukas Kupfer—His research on muscular dystrophy is poised for a revolutionary breakthrough. Is he the conspirators’ next target, or is he one of them?

Dominic Firenzetti—Kupfer’s former partner has a shady past.

Sandy Albrecht—Kupfer’s head lab tech loves to gossip. Could she have revealed sensitive information to the wrong person?

Dekker Smith—Sandy’s boyfriend checks out…at least on the surface.

Prescription:

Makeover

Jessica

Andersen

To Kathryn Huse, for saving my bacon

with the loan of a laptop.

This one’s all for you.

Contents

CAST OF CHARACTERS

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 Thirteen

Chapter One

“I’ve never met anyone like you before.” Zed Brimley’s dark eyes glinted as he toyed with the three glittering studs that marched their way up the curve of Ike Rombout’s ear. “You’re…different from other women. Independent. Undemanding.”

“Clever man. Flattery will get you exactly where you want to be.” Ike nestled closer to Zed, who was a third-year resident at Boston General Hospital and her current weekend bed buddy. The movement caused the ascending ski lift to sway beneath them.

She pulled her ski cap down over her ears, which were bared by her pixie-short black hair, and looked across ski slopes that shined white beneath a perfect Vermont winter sky.

Let’s hear it for separating personal stuff from professional garbage, she thought as she took a deep breath of crisp air and felt the solid press of Zed’s body against hers.

Professionally, she was skirting the edge of some serious trouble. Personally, she was exactly where she wanted to be—taking a long weekend with a handsome, charming guy.

Zed grinned down at her. “Want to hit the lodge after this run? I could use a little something to warm me up.” A suggestive tilt of his eyebrows said he wasn’t talking about coffee. “First one down gets to choose the position?”

“I vote for the Jacuzzi,” Ike said, mentally rolling her eyes. Most guys loved that she’d rather be on top during sex. They didn’t question it, didn’t make her admit that she couldn’t stand the sensation of being trapped. But Zed was one of the ones who automatically wanted what he couldn’t have.

It was the only glitch in an otherwise perfect casual relationship.

“Sounds like a plan.” When the lift reached the top of the slope, he dropped onto the groomed snow and skied toward a marked trail, calling over his shoulder, “See you at the bottom. Last one down is buying dinner!”

Ike grinned, hopped off the lift and followed with a smooth stroke of her glossy black skis. Now that was her kind of challenge. “Then you’d better start warming up your credit card,” she shouted, “’cause here I come!”

Zed laughed and called a masculine taunt that was lost in a chilly burst of crosswind. Clad in a formfitting black jacket and thermal pants, he cut a powerful figure as he dodged a middle-aged woman snowplowing her way toward an easier run and shot down the double-black-diamond trail.

Excitement kindled in Ike’s blood—the love of the outdoors, the thrill of speed and danger. She whooped and followed, hurtling along the top element of the run, a stomach-pitching drop that kicked her from zero to flying in the space of a few heartbeats.

She angled her skis straight down the mountain and felt the strain in her leg muscles, a warning that she was getting soft. But now that things were quieter with both her freelance investigative work and her “real” job as communications director at Boston General, she should be able to get back to the important stuff, like working out. Like acting out.

No way was she letting herself settle too deeply into a rut. Routines were for boring nine-to-fivers. She was all about spontaneity and living on the edge.

Because of it, she let out a yell as she angled between two lines of snow-frosted pine trees and whipped around a corner. There! Zed’s strong figure sluiced a neat zigzag path up ahead, teasing her. Taunting her.

Ike threw back her head and felt laughter bubble up. “Ready or not, here I come!” She accelerated into the next curve, zeroing in on her lover’s broad back as he disappeared around the bend.

She heard a sharp crack and thought for a second that one of the nearby trees had lost a branch. Then she rounded the turn and saw a body sprawled on the trail. Her heart froze in her chest and she screamed, “Zed!”

Going too fast to stop, she tried to turn but hit a patch of ice beneath the loose powder. She cried out and slid sideways, losing control.

Her skis hooked Zed’s motionless form with a sickening jolt. Momentum carried her up and over, and the world exploded in a pinwheel of sky and snow and trees. She flipped twice, slammed to the ground and skidded downhill.

She heard another crack. Recognizing gunfire, she grabbed for the weapon she often carried at the small of her back while freelancing. But the .22 wasn’t there. She was on vacation, damn it!

The Nine don’t care, a small voice said inside her. They’ll get you wherever they find you. Max Vasek warned you, but you didn’t believe him.

Ike’s heart pounded, the rapid thud nearly drowning out all other sounds as she tried to scramble to her feet. This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening.Please God, let this be a nightmare.

But she knew it wasn’t a dream the moment another skier flew around the corner, saw Zed’s motionless body and wiped out with a startled yell. A second skier appeared, then a third. She heard their shouts, saw them gesture wildly at Zed, then farther down the slope to where she lay.

One skied toward her, a tall, broad-shouldered man who looked to be in his early forties. He was dressed entirely in gray, and his eyes were shielded behind tinted goggles. He crouched beside her. “Lie still. The ski patrol is on its way.”

“Help me get these things off.” Ike yanked at her skis, cursing the bindings she habitually overtightened to get maximum speed on the slopes. “I work at a hospital. I can help him.”

“You’re hurt. You should—”

“Shut up and help me!” she snapped, and when her would-be rescuer tried to press her down flat, she fought him off, dragged herself to her feet and limped upslope.

She elbowed her way through the growing crowd and dropped down beside Zed’s limp form. He had a bloodstained hand clamped to the side of his neck, and the snow beneath him was slushy and stained red.

“Oh, God. Zed.” She pressed her hand over his in an effort to keep him from bleeding out.

“You probably shouldn’t touch him,” a female voice said from the crowd. “That must’ve been a hell of a wipeout. He could’ve broken his back or something.”

Ike whipped her head around and glared at the speaker, a teenaged snowboarder wearing a purple hoodie. “Shut up and call the ski patrol again. Tell them we’re going to need a helicopter evac and the cops.”

She didn’t mention he’d been shot because she didn’t have time to deal with questions or panic. Zed was her only focus right now. Besides, it hadn’t been a random sniping, one where the gathering crowd would be at risk.

No, there had been a single target, and the shooter was long gone.

“Come on, Zed, stay with me.” She kept up the pressure while she searched for a second wound, but it looked as though he’d only caught the one bullet. Unfortunately it was a hell of a hit. She was a computer jockey, not a doctor, but she knew an arterial bleed when she saw one.

“Where’s the damn ski patrol?” she shouted, her voice sharpening with panic when his breath rattled in his lungs.

“Almost here,” someone said. Zed groaned and shifted, fighting back toward consciousness.

Ike struggled to keep the pressure on when he tried to pull away. “Lie still, Zed. Help’s coming.”

He cried out in pain, opened his eyes and looked around wildly for a few seconds, then zeroed in on her face. His mouth pulled back in a rictus of disbelief, then worked as he tried to say something.

“Hush.” Ike leaned close, trying to shield him from the crowd, trying to will away the grayness she saw creeping over his skin. “Don’t try to talk. Concentrate on breathing, okay?”

He reached up and grabbed her wrist with his free hand, hanging on as though he were sinking. Eyes locked on hers, he managed to say, “Why?”

Tears streaming down her face, Ike leaned closer and said, “Sh. Just breathe.” But deep down inside, guilt stabbed deep at the knowledge that she knew exactly why. The sniper hadn’t been shooting at Zed.

The bullet had been meant for her.

Chapter Two

Three months later

“I can’t believe I have to wear a coat in my own office,” William Caine muttered. “It’s spring already. Isn’t it supposed to be warm out?”

He sent a glare toward the thermostat, which was set at a chill fifty degrees, and yanked on his leather bomber jacket before returning to his desk, where a computer competed for space with a multiline phone and a pile of papers. Off to one side, a coffee mug overflowed with the pens that seemed to breed in his pockets.

“You got a better idea for cutting costs?” his partner’s voice asked from the hall.

“Nope.” William looked up and saw Max Vasek, the other half of Vasek & Caine Investigations, standing in the doorway.

Max was as tall and dark and tough-looking as he’d ever been, but these days his craggy features sported new lines, new worries. William had seen the same signs in the mirror just that morning. A recent trim of his short brown hair and a fresh morning shave hadn’t done much to disguise the strain.

Vasek & Caine wasn’t doing well, and the bills on the New York office suite were the least of their concerns.

Four months ago the company had been a growing enterprise, bringing in new medical-type investigations on a weekly basis. Then Max had gotten himself caught up with his ex and her female sex enhancement drug, Thriller. The product tampering case had put Vasek & Caine smack in the crosshairs of The Nine, a group of very powerful scientists rumored to control worldwide scientific progress through a combination of bribery and extortion. In effect, they were the biotech mafia. Unfortunately, almost nobody outside of Max, Raine and William actually believed they existed.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Vasek & Caine’s clients had started drying up after that, though. The blackballing was a punishment. A warning, backed up by an anonymous note slid under the waiting room door a couple of months earlier.

You stay out of our business and we’ll leave you and yours alone.

Thing was, neither Max nor William took kindly to extortion. Hell, that was why they’d gone into business together in the first place.

They’d met at Boston General Hospital, where ex-FBI agent William had been freelancing for a medical investigations group called Hospitals for Humanity—HFH—and Max worked in a lab. They’d both needed a change of scenery around the same time and they’d both wanted to make a difference. It had seemed natural to combine their specialties into private medical investigations, with a focus on cases like that of drug developer Raine Montgomery, the ex-flame who’d become Max’s wife three months earlier.

At the thought of her, William glanced at his watch. “It’s Friday night. Aren’t you and Raine supposed to be somewhere?” He made the question seem casual, as though he didn’t care when his partner left the office.

“I’m on my way right now.” But Max stayed put. “Listen, I need to ask a favor, and you’re not going to like it.”

“That’s a heck of a sales technique. No wonder we’re down to our last few paying clients.”

Max grimaced. “No, that would be the part where we discovered Raine’s drug was being sabotaged by a scientific cartel that isn’t supposed to exist. Which brings me to the favor.”

“You don’t have to ask me to investigate the bastards,” William said. “I’m already on it.”

“I know. And I also know I haven’t been much help lately,” Max said.

“You’ve had other things to worry about, like making sure Raine’s drug returns to the market without any more glitches.” And making sure she stays safe, William thought but didn’t say.

Though Max and Raine had engineered the arrest of Frederick Forsythe, the man directly responsible for sabotaging Thriller, there were at least eight other members of The Nine to watch out for, along with their underlings. Any one of them might decide to finish the job, which was why William intended to finish them first. His was an ordered world, structured around laws and categories. There were good guys and bad guys, and The Nine were very bad guys.

Problem was, they also apparently had enough power to sway even his old bosses. That was the only logical explanation for why the evidence Max and Raine had amassed months earlier hadn’t been enough to convince the feds to open an investigation. Instead they’d decided Forsythe had acted alone, which was just ridiculous. It didn’t account for the subsequent attack on Ike Rombout, the tech-savvy, terminally annoying woman who’d helped Max track down Forsythe, and it didn’t account for whoever was blackballing Vasek & Caine now.

That left it up to Vasek & Caine—or rather left it up to William—to identify the other eight members of the supposedly nonexistent group and bring them to justice. He’d be ensuring the company’s safety and future. He’d be saving the scientific community from their very own version of organized crime. And as an added bonus, he’d be showing up his former boss, FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael Grosskill.

The thought had William checking his watch again. “You’re going to be late if you don’t get going, and we both know Raine doesn’t do late.”

William liked Max’s wife a great deal, but she fell square into the high-maintenance category in his brain. Not because she liked expensive clothes and makeup—hell, he liked his women to look like women, and that required some mirror time. But Raine also ran a company of her own, and since the wedding, Max had been putting as much effort into Rainey Days as he was into Vasek & Caine.

William understood that a man had to protect what was his, but he had a strong feeling he wasn’t going to like Max’s solution. Mentally bracing himself, he said, “Come on, give with the favor. It can’t be that bad.”

“I want to take on someone to help you. Someone who can do the data crunching while you pound the pavement.”

William shrugged. “Tempting, but we can’t afford a receptionist, never mind a—” He broke off as he made the connection. His mind clicked on the image of a tall, lean woman with a killer body, three earrings in one ear, a mean-ass attitude and a fondness for tight black leather. His blood flared hot, then cold, and he said, “Oh, no, you don’t. Hell no. You’re not saddling me with that know-it-all Matrix wannabe.”

“Ike is hell on wheels with computers,” Max argued. “She knows way more than either of us about data mining and she’s got sources we can’t even dream of. She could help you find the names. Maybe even identify the next target.”

I already have a name, William thought. I’ve even got a meeting set up. But he kept that to himself, instead saying, “The Nine already went after Ike once. What’s to stop them from trying again if she gets involved?” He might find her annoying, but a woman’s skin was a woman’s skin, and it was no place for a bullet wound. Worse, a man had died when The Nine had attacked Ike earlier in the year. The Vermont cops had ruled the ski slope shooting a random homicide, and Grosskill and the rest of the FBI had agreed, but Max, William and Ike knew better. They knew it had been a warning from The Nine. Stay out of our business or else.

Max grimaced. “Trust me, I don’t want her involved. But she’s got another opinion.”

“Now there’s a surprise,” William muttered, leaning back in his chair. As far as he could tell, Ike Rombout was all about opinions. “And in case you missed it the first time, no. I don’t care how good she is with the tech stuff, I don’t want her anywhere near The Nine.” And I don’t want her anywhere near me.

He wasn’t sure where the thought came from, but it struck a chord. Ike wasn’t his type of woman—she was too brash and in-your-face. And she wasn’t his idea of a coworker for a potentially dangerous op—she had breasts.

He wasn’t proud of the chauvinism, but he figured he had a damn good reason for it.

“She’ll stay in Boston, I promise,” Max persisted. “Give her some data to crunch, some leads to dead end, I don’t care. Just let her feel involved. She needs this, William. They killed someone she cared about.”

That resonated, but William was no fool. “If all you wanted was some long-distance data crunching, you would’ve just turned her loose. Hell, that was how she found Forsythe for you. So give. What do you want from me?”

Max grimaced. “I need you to keep her busy and I need you to make sure she stays in Boston.”

A chill skittered through William. “You don’t think she’d actually go looking for—” He broke off and muttered a curse. “Of course she would. Hell. I don’t have time for this.” He glanced at Max. “And neither do you. But you’re still trying to save her from herself, aren’t you?”

Max shrugged, rueful amusement tugging at his lips. “Ike calls it my DIDS. Damsel in Distress Syndrome. I can’t stop myself from trying to save them.”

William could relate to that, but where Max saved people one at a time, William focused on the big picture, which sometimes demanded individual sacrifices in the name of the greater good.

Like Sharilee? a small thought prompted from within, bringing the smell of blood and gunfire and the sound of a soft body hitting the floor.

“Fine,” he said before the memory could form. “You owe me big-time, but I’ll keep an eye on Ike for you, starting tomorrow.”

He already had plans for tonight.

HOPING NOBODY HAD seen her sneak across the dark, deserted seventeenth green, Ike shimmied up the side of the brick building, her breath adding white puffs to the clinging fog.

She couldn’t believe she was actually doing this on her own, but what other choice did she have? Educated guesswork and an intercepted e-mail ghost had convinced her that several members of The Nine were meeting here at the Coach House, a posh country club restaurant outside Greenwich, Connecticut. She’d thought about asking Max to meet her, but given the way he’d been behaving lately, all Neanderthal and pat-the-little-woman on-the-head, she’d nixed that idea and driven down from Boston alone.

It was just recon, after all.

But as she hauled herself up to a narrow ledge of stone trim that ran most of the way around the second story of the brick building, her doubts crowded closer. She was a computer geek; she wasn’t trained for this sort of thing. Sure, she’d done surveillance before, both for freelance gigs and for HFH. And, yeah, she’d been on the edge of the action once or twice, even before Max had stumbled over evidence indicating that The Nine really existed.

This time, though, she was on her own. There was no employer backing her, nobody waiting for her to check in.

You’ve got your gun, she told herself. You can handle this. More importantly, she had to handle it. Zed deserved more than he’d gotten in the way of justice. She owed him.

Taking a breath of damp air that threatened rain, she edged across the brick wall. A series of lights set high on the building were tilted to illuminate the golf course beyond, their beams furred with mist. That same mist slicked her hand- and footholds as she pressed herself against the flat surface and began to move, using her black-gloved fingers to grip a thin pipe overhead while she clung to the narrow stone ledge by the toes of her black rubber-soled running shoes.

Her destination was a half-open window about fifty feet away. Based on her assessment of downloaded blueprints, the window should open into the meeting space. Even better, the rear wing angled off the main building near the window, forming a corner where she could fade into the shadows.

Score one for all black, Ike thought, comfortable in her trademark tight dark clothes, one of the few constants she allowed herself.

“Over here,” a male voice said unexpectedly from below.

Ike froze. Too late she heard the sound of footsteps on wet pavement.

Pressing herself against the building, heart hammering, she held her breath and tried to become one with the rough bricks.

Don’t look up, she thought. Please don’t look up.

“You got the stuff?” a second male voice asked, higher and a little nasal.

“You got the cash?”

She relaxed slightly at the sound of crinkling paper and plastic. It was just a drug buy, she thought, then quirked her lips at the just. Under other circumstances, she might’ve waded in and tried to scare some sense into the idiots. As it was, she’d wait them out.

She was after a bigger score.

Once their business was concluded, the men moved off. One headed out across the golf course on foot, past the pro shop where Ike had hidden her Jeep. The other disappeared around the corner. Moments later, a car door slammed and an engine started, revved and then faded with distance.

After a minute, Ike started breathing again, though her pulse stayed high at the near miss. She resumed her careful journey, crabbing sideways on the narrow ledge until she reached the shadows near the half-open window. Then she paused and listened.

In the room beyond, low-voiced conversation was punctuated by the clink of glasses. The quiet, civilized sounds suggested the meeting hadn’t started yet. Perfect.

Unperturbed by the height, Ike leaned back in the vee formed by the connecting stone walls and braced her feet on the molding. Once she was relatively stable, she spun her black leather fanny pack around to her front and dug out the palm-size telescoping mirror she used at work to look at hard-to-reach computer connections.

Praying she wasn’t about to bounce a reflected beam of light into the room, she edged the mirror past the frosted glass windowpane, to the open spot where heated indoor air hit the damp, cool outdoors and created a faint mist.

The mirror fogged momentarily, then cleared, showing her an expensively furnished room, all wood paneling, burgundy leather and a huge Oriental carpet she thought might be Heriz, based on a childhood spent haunting the antique shops of Vermont with her mother and father, before—