Fallen

by Karin Slaughter

  “You’re sure that’s a gang symbol—the N inside a heart?”

  “One of ’em. Everybody who joins up has to bring in more people.”

  “Like Wiccans,” Junior provided.

  “Exactly. Lots of ’em drop out or move on. Ricardo there can’t be big-time. He don’t got the fingers.” Larry held up his hand again, this time with his index finger crossed in front of his middle finger. “Usually looks like this, with the Puerto Rican flag around the wrist. They’re all about independence. At least that’s what they say.”

  Sara remembered what Will had told her. “I thought Ricardo had the Los Texicanos tattoo on his chest?”

  “Yeah, like I said, a lot of ’em drop out or move on. Brother must’ve moved on and up. Neta ain’t got pull here like Texicanos.” He hissed air through his teeth. “Scary stuff, man. Them Texicanos don’t screw around.”

  “Does the ME’s office know all of this?”

  “They sent the pictures to the gang unit. Neta’s the top organization in PR. They’ll be in the Bible.”

  The Gang Bible was the book used by police officers to track gang signs and movements. “Was there anything on the Asian men? The other victims?”

  “One was a student. Some kind of math whiz. Won all kinds of prizes or some shit.”

  Sara remembered Hironobu Kwon’s photo from the news. “I thought he was at Georgia State?” State wasn’t a bad school, but a math prodigy would end up at Georgia Tech.

  “That’s all I know. They’re doing the other guy right now. That apartment fire got us backed up big-time. Six bodies.” He shook his head. “Two dogs. Man, I hate when it’s dogs.”

  Junior said, “I feel ya, bro.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said. “Thank you both.”

  Junior pounded the side of his fist against his chest. “Be good to my man Dale.”

  Sara left before more fists were bumped. She dug her hand into her pocket, trying to find her cell phone as she walked down the hallway. Most of the staff carried so many electronic devices that they were all likely going to die of radiation poisoning. She had a BlackBerry she received lab reports and hospital communiqués on as well as an iPhone for personal use. Her hospital cell phone was a flip-style that had previously belonged to someone with very sticky hands. Two pagers were clipped to her coat pocket, one for the emergency department and one for the pediatrics ward. Her personal phone was slim and usually the last thing she found, which was the case this time.

  She scrolled through the numbers, pausing on Amanda Wagner’s name, then scrolling back up to Will Trent. His phone rang twice before he picked up.

  “Trent.”

  Sara was inexplicably tongue-tied by the sound of his voice. In the silence, she could hear wind blowing, the sound of children playing.

  He said, “Hello?”

  “Hi, Will—sorry.” She cleared her throat. “I was calling because I talked to someone at the ME’s office. Like you asked.” She felt her face turning red. “Like Amanda asked.”

  He mumbled something, probably to Amanda. “What’d you find out?”

  “The Texicanos victim, Ricardo. No last name as of yet, but he was probably Puerto Rican.” She waited while he relayed this information to Amanda. She asked the same question Sara had. Sara answered, “He had a tattoo on his hand for a gang, the Neta, which is in Puerto Rico. The man I talked with said Ricardo probably switched affiliations when he came to Atlanta.” Again, she waited for him to tell Amanda. “He also had a belly full of heroin.”

  “Heroin?” His voice went up in surprise. “How much?”

  “I’m not sure. The man I spoke with said the powder was packed in balloons. When Faith shot him, the heroin was released. That alone would’ve killed him.”

  Will told Amanda as much, then came back on the line. “Amanda says thank you for checking into this.”

  “I’m sorry there’s not more.”

  “That’s great what you came up with.” He clarified, “I mean, thank you, Dr. Linton. This is all very useful information to have.”

  She knew he couldn’t talk in front of Amanda, but she didn’t want to let him go. “How’s it going on your end?”

  “The prison was a bust. We’re standing outside Hironobu Kwon’s house right now. He lived with his mother in Grant Park.” He was less than fifteen minutes away from Grady. “The neighbor says his mother should be home soon. I guess she’s probably making arrangements. She lives across the street from the zoo. We had to park about a mile away. Or, I did. Amanda made me drop her off.” He finally paused for breath. “How are you doing?”

  Sara smiled. He seemed to want to stay on the phone as much as she did. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “Not much. How about you?”

  She tried to think of something flirty to say, but settled on, “Not much.”

  Amanda’s voice was too muffled to understand, but Sara got the tone. Will said, “So, I’ll talk to you later. Thank you again, Dr. Linton.”

  Sara felt foolish as she ended the call. Maybe she should go back up to the lounge and gossip with Nan.

  Or maybe she should talk to Dale Dugan and nip this in the bud before they both got any more embarrassed. Sara took out her hospital BlackBerry and looked up Dale’s email address, then started to enter it into her iPhone. She would ask him to meet her in the cafeteria so they could talk this through. Or maybe she should suggest the parking lot. She didn’t want to cause more gossip than was already circulating.

  Up ahead, the elevator bell dinged and she caught sight of Dale. He was laughing with one of the nurses. Junior must’ve told him she was down here. Sara chickened out. She opened the first door she came to, which happened to be the records department. Two older women with matching, tightly groomed perms sat behind desks piled with charts. They were typing furiously on their computer keyboards and barely looked up at Sara.

  One of them asked, “Help you?” turning the page on the chart opened beside her.

  Sara stood there, momentarily unsure of herself. She realized that somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been thinking about the records office since she got on the elevator. She dropped her iPhone back into her coat pocket.

  “What is it, darlin’?” the woman asked. They were both staring at Sara now.

  She held up her hospital ID. “I need an old chart from nineteen …” She did the math quickly in her head. “Seventy-six, maybe?”

  The woman handed her a pad and paper. “Give me the name. That’ll make it easier.”

  Sara knew even as she wrote down Will’s name that what she was doing was wrong, and not just because she was breaking federal privacy laws and risking immediate termination. Will had been at the Atlanta Children’s Home from infancy. There wouldn’t have been a family physician managing his care. All of his medical needs would have been handled through Grady. His entire childhood was stored here, and Sara was using her hospital ID to gain access to it.

  “No middle name?” the woman asked.

  Sara shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “Gimme a minute. These won’t be in the computer yet or you’d be able to pull them up on your tablet. We’ve barely dipped our toe into 1970.” She was out of her chair and through the door marked “File Room” before Sara could tell her to stop.

  The other woman went back to her typing, her long red fingernails making a sound like a cat running across a tile floor. Sara looked down at her shoes, which were stained with God knows what from this morning’s cases. In her mind, she went over the possible culprits, but as hard as she tried, she could not shake the feeling that what she was doing was absolutely and without a doubt the most unethical thing she had ever done in her life. What’s more, it was a complete betrayal of Will’s trust.

  And she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it.

  This wasn’t the way Sara operated. She was normally a forthright person. If she wanted to know about Will’s suicide attempt, or any details about his chil
dhood, then she should ask him, not sneak around his back and look at his medical chart.

  The woman was back. “No William, but I found a Wilbur.” She had a file tucked under her arm. “Nineteen seventy-five.”

  Sara had used paper charts the majority of her career. Most healthy kids had a chart with twenty or so pages by the time they reached eighteen years of age. An unhealthy kid’s file could run around fifty. Will’s chart was over an inch thick. A decaying rubber band held together faded sheets of yellow and white paper.

  “No middle name,” the woman said. “I’m sure he had one at some point, but a lot of these kids fell through the cracks back then.”

  Her partner supplied, “Ellis Island and Tuskegee rolled up into one.”

  Sara reached for the file, then stopped herself. Her hand hovered in the air.

  “You all right, darlin’?” The woman glanced back at her office mate, then to Sara. “You need to sit down?”

  Sara dropped her hand. “I don’t think I need that after all. I’m sorry to waste your time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Sara nodded. She could not remember the last time she had felt this awful. Even her run-in with Angie Trent hadn’t produced this amount of guilt. “I’m so sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. Felt good to get up.” She started to tuck the file under her arm but the rubber band broke, sending papers flying onto the floor.

  Automatically, Sara bent down to help. She gathered the pages together, willing herself not to read the words. There were lab reports printed in dot matrix, reams of chart notations, and what looked like an ancient Atlanta police report. She blurred her vision, praying she wouldn’t pick up a word or a sentence.

  “Look at this.”

  Sara looked up. It was a natural thing to do. The woman held a faded Polaroid picture in her hand. The shot was a close-up of a child’s mouth. A small silver ruler was beside a laceration running the width of the philtrum, the midline groove between the top of the lip and nose. The injury wasn’t from a tumble or bump. The impact had been significant enough to rend the flesh in two, revealing the teeth. Thick black sutures pulled together the wound. The skin was puffy and irritated. Sara was more accustomed to seeing this kind of baseball stitching in a morgue, not on a child’s face.

  “I bet he was in that poly-what’s-it study,” the woman said. She showed the photo to her friend.

  “Polyglycolic acid.” She explained to Sara, “Grady piloted a study on different types of absorbable sutures they were working on at Tech. Looks like he’s one of the kids that had an allergic reaction. Poor little thing.” She went back to her typing. “I guess it was better than sticking a bunch of leeches on him.”

  The other woman asked Sara, “You all right, hon?”

  Sara felt as if she was going to be sick. She straightened up and left the room. She didn’t stop walking until she had bolted up two flights of stairs and was outside, breathing fresh air.

  She paced in front of the closed door. Her emotions pinballed back and forth between anger and shame. He was just a child. He’d been admitted for treatment and they had experimented on him like an animal. To this day, he probably had no idea what they had done. Sara wished to God she didn’t know herself, though it served her right for prying. She should’ve never asked for his chart. But she had, and now Sara couldn’t get that picture out of her head—his beautiful mouth crudely pulled together with a suture that couldn’t meet the basic standards for government approval.

  The faded Polaroid would be burned into her memory until she died. She had gotten exactly what she deserved.

  “Hey, you.”

  She spun around. A young woman was standing behind her. She was painfully thin. Her greasy blonde hair hung to her waist. She scratched at the fresh needle tracks on her arms. “Are you a doctor?”

  Sara felt her guard go up. Junkies lurked around the hospital. Some of them could be violent. “You should go inside if you need treatment.”

  “It’s not me. There’s a guy over there.” She pointed to the Dumpster in a corner behind the hospital. Even in full daylight, the area was shadowed by the looming façade of the building. “He’s been there all night. I think he’s dead.”

  Sara moderated her tone. “Let’s go inside and talk about this.”

  Anger flashed in the girl’s eyes. “Lookit, I’m just trying to do the right thing. You don’t gotta go all high and mighty on me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I hope he gives you AIDS, bitch.” She limped off, mumbling more insults.

  “Christ,” Sara breathed, wondering how her day could get any worse. How she missed the manners of good country people, when even the junkies called her “ma’am.” She started back toward the hospital, then stopped. The girl could’ve been telling the truth.

  Sara walked back toward the Dumpster, not getting too close in case the girl’s accomplice was hiding inside. The trash wasn’t collected over the weekend. Boxes and plastic bags spilled out of the metal container and littered the ground. Sara took a step closer. There was someone lying underneath a blue plastic bag. She saw a hand. A deep gash splayed open the palm. Sara took another step closer, then stopped. Working at Grady had made her hyper-cautious. This could still be a trap. Instead of going to the body, she turned around and jogged toward the ambulance bay so that she could get help.

  Three EMTs were standing around talking. She directed them toward the back and they followed her with a gurney. Sara pulled away the trash. The man was breathing but unconscious. His eyes were closed. His brown skin had a yellow, waxy look. His T-shirt was soaked in blood, obviously from a penetrating wound in his lower abdomen. Sara pressed her fingers to his carotid and saw a familiar tattoo on his neck: a Texas star with a rattlesnake wrapped around it.

  Will’s missing Type B-negative.

  “Let’s move it,” one of the EMTs said.

  Sara ran beside the gurney as they rolled the man into the hospital. She listened to the medics run down vitals as she pulled back the gauze over his belly. The entrance to the wound was thin, probably from a kitchen knife. The edge was rough from the serration. There was very little fresh blood, indicating a closed bleed. The gut was distended, and the telltale odor of rotting flesh told her that there was not much that she would be able to do for him in the ER.

  A tall man in a dark suit jogged alongside her. He asked, “Is he going to make it?”

  Sara looked for George. The security guard was nowhere to be found. “You need to stay out of the way.”

  “Doctor—” He held up his wallet. She saw the flash of gold shield. “I’m a cop. Is he going to make it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, pressing the gauze back in place. Then, because the patient might hear, she said, “Maybe.”

  The cop dropped back. She glanced up the hall, but he was gone.

  The trauma team set up immediately, cutting off the man’s clothes, drawing blood, connecting lines to hook him up to various machines. A cut-down tray was laid out. Surgical packs were opened. The crash cart appeared.

  Sara called for two large-bore IVs to force fluids. She checked the ABCs: airway clear, breathing okay, circulation as good as could be expected. She noticed the pace slow considerably as people began to realize what they were dealing with. The team thinned. Eventually, she was down to just one nurse.

  “No wallet,” the nurse said. “Nothing in his pockets but lint.”

  “Sir?” Sara tried, opening the man’s eyes. His pupils were fixed and dilated. She checked for a head injury, gently pressing her fingers in a clockwise pattern around his skull. At the occipital bone, she felt a fracture that splintered into the brainpan. She looked at her gloved hand. There was no fresh blood from the wound.

  The nurse pulled the curtain closed to give the man some privacy. “X-ray? CT the belly?”

  Sara was technically doing the regular attending’s job. She asked, “Can you get Krakauer?”

  The nurse left, and Sara did a
more thorough exam, though she was sure Krakauer would take one look at the man’s vitals and agree with her. There was no emergency here. The patient could not survive general anesthesia and he likely would not survive his injuries. They could only load him up with antibiotics and wait for time to decide the patient’s fate.

  The privacy curtain pulled back. A young man peered in. He was clean-shaven, wearing a black warm-up jacket and a black baseball hat pulled down low on his head.

  “You can’t be back here,” she told him. “If you’re looking for—”

  He punched Sara in the chest so hard that she fell back onto the floor. Her shoulder slammed against one of the trays. Metal instruments clattered around her—scalpels, hemostats, scissors. The young man pointed a gun at the patient’s head and shot him twice at pointblank range.

  Sara heard screaming. It was her. The sound was coming out of her own mouth. The man pointed the gun at her head and she stopped. He moved toward her. She groped blindly for something to protect herself. Her hand wrapped around one of the scalpels.

  He was closer, almost on top of her. Was he going to shoot her or was he going to leave? Sara didn’t give him time to decide. She slashed out, cutting the inside of his thigh. The man groaned, dropping the gun. The wound was deep. Blood sprayed from the femoral artery. He fell to one knee. They both saw the gun at the same time. She kicked it away. He reached for Sara instead, grabbing the hand that held the scalpel. She tried to pull back but his grip tightened around her wrists. Panic took hold as she realized what he was doing. The blade was moving toward her neck. She used both her hands, trying to push him away as he inched the blade closer and closer.

  “Please … no …”

  He was on top of her, pressing her into the ground with the weight of his body. She stared into his green eyes. The whites were crisscrossed with a road map of red. His mouth was a straight line. His body shook so hard that she felt it in her spine.

  “Drop it!” George, the security guard, stood with his gun locked out in front of him. “Now, asshole!”