Good people heal and comfort each other. Jill knew in her heart that Jesse would be one of those good people.
He crawled from David to her lap, cuddled, popped his thumb in his mouth, and resumed being a baby again.
It felt so good.
Author’s Note
Hello, and thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the book. If you have the time to write a review, let me know and I will thank you from the bottom of my heart. Writing is so solitary! Your feedback would cheer me no end; also re-charge my batteries to keep going with the next book. Your review on Amazon or Goodreads would also help others decide if they would enjoy the book.
Visit my Facebook Page, click the Like thingie and say hi…?
https://www.facebook.com/JASchneiderAuthor
Here’s my Twitter handle too:
https://twitter.com/JoyceSchneider1
More books are in the works, so I hope you join my Newsletter at http://jaschneiderauthor.net You’ll be the first to know when new books are available, and more!
Thanks again for reading!
~ Joyce
Read on for an excerpt from
EMBRYO 4: CATCH ME
by J.A. Schneider
Order it today!
http://jaschneiderauthor.net
1
He weighed forty pounds, and his little skinned knees stung as he ran, terrified.
Thorns in the brush caught his shorts. The sun was gone and it was getting darker, colder. He struggled forward, his breath coming fast in mewling little cries. The blood on his tee shirt made it stick to his skin but he was unaware as ahead, suddenly, he saw someone running. His heart beat so hard that his vision blurred as he thrashed to the clearing.
Two giant shapes were emerging from the darker dark of the tunnel, coming closer. His mouth opened, and he burst into wails. He just stood there sobbing, his little body bent at the waist with his fists clenched.
Beauty had sensed trouble seconds before, had stopped short, and pawed and shied.
“Hey, easy girl,” Terry Novak said. His partner had already seen the little boy by the side of the jogging trail. “Oh, jeez!”
Both cops dismounted and ran to him. He was shivering and hysterical. The front of his white tee shirt was blood-soaked, but – they checked – the blood wasn’t his. “Mommy! Mommy!” he wailed as Novak pulled off his jacket, wrapped it around the child, lifted him into a hug and tried to comfort. His partner Rob was radioing for help.
“Where’s your Mommy?” Novak kept asking gently. The child sobbed, didn’t answer, then finally craned back to where he’d come from and squirmed to get free. “Mommy!” he screamed.
Novak peered up through the dusk to the sloping stretch of woods between the trail and the wall lining Fifth Avenue. The brush was too thick to see anything.
Blue-and-whites were already arriving, their lights blazing, doors flying open.
“Up there.” Novak indicated the slope. Patrolmen saw him holding the bloodied child and headed up. Grimly, carefully, fanning out around what was probably going to be a crime scene.
And was.
“Christ, another one,” breathed one man as they approached the couple. Yards apart this time instead of in a lovers’ heap. In the deeper dark under the trees, flashlights beamed on the man, face down in the fall leaves with a wide, reddened puncture on his shirted back. The woman lay on her side, eyes closed, her blouse and shorts bloodied.
“Man’s dead.” A patrolman straightened from feeling the still carotid. Another man in uniform looked up from the woman. “Still breathing! Where’s –”
But EMTs were suddenly there. The first detective too, his unmarked car parked below behind the ambulance.
“Third attack,” Alex Brand said grimly, pulling on latex gloves.
“The Couples Killer,” a patrolman answered in the same tone. “First time in daylight.”
“Sunset,” Brand muttered, kneeling to the dead man as EMTs tended the woman. Something caught his eye. “What’s this?”
He reached to a tightly balled paper feet away. It looked like it had been tossed. Carefully, he opened it, and read. It was computer-printed on standard paper. Probably had no prints on it like the last one they’d found; the killer wore gloves.
“COPS LOSE AGAIN!” read the taunt. Which was signed, “CATCH ME.”
“Another?” One of the cops leaned closer and knew what he was seeing.
“Yeah,” Brand said. “This makes two messages. He left nothing at the first attack.”
“He’s getting more brazen.”
“Planning more kills, too. This third one makes him a serial.”
Brand rose, holding the paper. He drew in a long breath, stared out at the Central Park Reservoir to think for a moment. The last glints of warming sunset had left the water, leaving it in gloom.
He started back down to his partner.
Kerri Blasco was taking the little boy from Novak, kneeling to him and getting him into her jacket.
She tried to comfort. “What’s your name, honey?” Kerri asked gently. “Did you see what happened?”
He had stopped crying and looked in shock. He trembled and his thumb pushed hard into his mouth, but he let her hug him. A second ambulance arrived. Police radios crackled. The woman was alive, Kerri heard.
Strolling couples, two cyclists, and joggers had gathered, gape-mouthed.
“Anyone see anything?” a patrolman called out. He and another cop separated the group. “You see or hear anything?” the second cop asked. “Like gunshots?”
Heads shook. “Traffic’s too noisy…I was wearing my headphones…Just saw joggers.”
Names were taken anyway as Victorian-style lampposts turned on. People who’d been questioned moved away, troubled, under pools of the lamplight that was supposed to keep the park safe. The sky above had turned mauve and blue and dark blue.
Kerri’s partner, Alex Brand, came up to her, bent and patted the little boy’s shoulder. The child shuddered, cringed into Kerri’s hug.
“I’ll go with him in the ambulance,” she said low. “Meet you at the hospital.”
“Madison Memorial.” Alex gave her a significant look.
She gave back the same look and quick-glanced at the child. “Think he saw anything?” she whispered.
“They may have both seen something. Mom’s gonna make it.” Alex held up an evidence bag holding the crinkled paper. “We got another message.” He watched Kerri’s lips tighten, then turned for their unmarked car. “See you at Madison.”
She carried the little boy into the first ambulance, sat him on a side bench, and wrapped him in a blanket. He seemed about four, but well developed like a child who was normally very active. He breathed hard and fast, pulled his knees to his stomach, sucked harder on his thumb.
“What’s your name, honey?” she tried again feelingly, offering him one of the ambulance’s emergency teddy bears. He turned away from it into her hug, squeezed his eyes shut, and his body shook.
Until the clatter of cops helping to upload the gurney and two EMTs piled in, one holding up an IV and the other radioing in the patient’s vital signs.
The child emitted a dull, aching cry and jerked away from Kerri. The EMT pocketing her phone reached to control him as Kerri let him go.
He crawled to his mother, crying. Her eyes were closed, her dark hair clammy on her brow, and her pretty face was pale under the oxygen mask. Her child’s right hand touched her cheek, and his left hand moved to her blanketed chest, wanting to hug her. The female EMT restrained him gently, telling him how important those wires and tubes going into Mommy were.
“Here,” she told him, indicating a place further down the blanket. “You can hug Mommy here.”
He did. As the ambulance pulled out and swayed into traffic, he hugged his mother’s knees and lay his head down on them, wailing softly.
The siren outside shrilled. Over the sound Kerri heard the second EMT call to her.
“What?”
His face was tight. “You gotta see who she is.”
Kerri pulled on latex gloves and took the wallet from the purse they’d found. ID papers were inside, along with photos of a happy mom with her grinning little boy.
Kerri read the ID info. It hit hard. She’d been holding her breath and her hurting heart until this moment; now a surge of fury shot through her.
“Son of a bitch!” she whispered.
With shaking hands she got out her phone and punched her speed dial.
2
“Where’d the sun go?” Jill Raney looked out gloomily.
“Days are getting shorter,” muttered Tricia Donovan, Jill’s best friend since med school. They’d survived internship together, and been first-year residents since last July first. Were amazed it was early October already.
Now they lay, sprawled in their scrubs and thin white jackets, on the rug of the hospital staff’s 24/7 childcare suite, surrounded by baby babble, bright noisy toys, and a few other parents. Tricia squirmed her slightly plump body and scowled through her wire-rimmed glasses to the window at the end of the room. Only six o’clock; twilight already out there.
She looked back and groaned. “I haven’t looked out this whole stressful, crappy day. Was it nice out?”
“Yeah.” Jill was up on an elbow squeaking a yellow duck. “Great sunset too. Saw it from the cafeteria. Ouch. Not on Mommy’s ribs, honey. David had to remind me to look out.”
She was taking a break, playing with Jesse. Times like this were usually her happy times. David’s too. Friends of theirs often joined them, enjoyed stretching out like this and goofing around with Jesse.
Marveling at him, too, although now he was goofing around on his own, chortling and clambering over Jill, pulling at her long dark hair she’d just loosened from a ponytail, tumbling down from her hip (“ooo!” he squealed), climbing back up again like a little buckaroo. One night, in David’s and Jill’s apartment, she had discovered that no matter how exhausted she was, just sprawling on the rug, closing her eyes and letting Jesse climb on her was immensely entertaining to their rambunctious almost-one-year-old.
Almost.
Jill was fretting about that, getting angst-ridden again. After a blessed long lull, the media was starting up again. Running sensational stories about “the miracle baby, almost a year old and normal by all accounts.”
There were also smaller articles about a symposium the hospital had scheduled for researchers to hear about Jesse’s progress. Four days from now, dammit! Six days before Jesse’s birthday. Doctors and researchers were coming from all over the world to see him.
Put him on bleeping display, is how Jill saw it.
So she’d been fretting on two fronts: about the mounting media harassment and the coming symposium, arguing with hospital big wigs who’d argued and pleaded back. Jesse had made Madison Memorial Hospital more famous than ever. David, in his more rationalizing moments, said the symposium would at least be a chance to show that Jesse was just a sweet little kid. Smart, yes. Advancing somewhat faster than most little ones, yes - but that happened with kids born through regular pregnancies, too.
Jill screwed up her lovely features and smirked. “Maybe he’ll sock Simpson in the nose.” Willard Simpson, M.D., was Chief of Madison’s Genetic Counseling Committee, and a world expert in embryonic epidemiology and high risk obstetrics.
“Nah,” Tricia said, her pudgy fingers squishing a squeaky blue whale she’d been toying with. “Jesse likes Simpson. Likes to tweak his pointy little nose and pull his fat pink jowls and smear his glasses.”
The subject of the damned symposium had become obsessive in the last few days.
“Practice your speech?” Jill sighed.
“What’s to practice? We’re all just gonna march up to the podium like five school kids and tell how we ‘interacted’ – love Simpson’s word – with Jesse for the three months before his birth. We’ll blow ‘em away! We interacted with an unborn fetus! Before this nobody’s ever seen the unborn except through murky dark sonograms. We hugged his cylinder, made smiley goofy faces, and he responded.”
“Made him grin.” Jill allowed herself a crooked smile, ruffling Jesse’s wisp of light brown hair. He was tired now, cuddling against her.
“Played music. Bogeyed like idiots for him. Kept him company at every chance… Please stop obsessing,” Tricia said emotionally. “Try to relax for half a minute.”
Jill fell silent, briefly. “Is half a minute up?”
Tricia barked laughter, then paused for a thoughtful moment. “Sure doesn’t seem like a year,” she said.
“Time flies when you’re frantic.”
“C’mon, it hasn’t all been frantic,” Tricia deadpanned. “Except for two killers three months apart and the hospital swarming with cops and bomb sniffing dogs. Lately it’s been calm for months.”
Jill’s large, soulful green eyes grew more troubled. “I still get nightmares.”
Tricia knew that; exhaled. Couldn’t think of anything else comforting to say. They’d talked about it a lot - Tricia, Jill and her David. The good news was that Jill’s nightmares and night sweats had eased off…mostly. David was her rock. Still, it was incredible to think that so much, miraculous and terrifying, had been crammed into the last fifteen months.
They grew silent, remembering...
Almost a year ago, in a delivery room during a lull, Tricia, Jill, David Levine and two other close friends had lifted Jesse, wet with amniotic-like fluid, from the silicone cylinder a crazed genius doctor named Clifford Arnett had created for him to serve as a man-made uterus. The stunned hospital didn’t announce his arrival right away. Monitored him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for over two weeks while the media gnashed their teeth, dug furiously for leaks, ran creepy blurry pictures of him floating in his glass cylinder at just six months’ gestation when Jill – then staff running in - first discovered him in a hidden lab. When the hospital finally announced that Jesse was fine, normal and here, headlines exploded: ARTIFICIAL WOMB, DESIGNER BABY, EMBRYO FARM and BRAVE NEW WORLD.
Now the media was at it again. Some of it beyond stupid.
“BIRTHDAY APPROACHES!... ABLE TO LEAP TALL BUILDINGS?”
There were more photos, too. Shots of Jill and David carrying Jesse to their apartment a block away; Jesse squealing with delight at a nurse making a goofy face; Jesse giving another baby his toy monkey. Photos were taken or leaked. Jill and David had had to relax about it, couldn’t even think of trying to stop it.
“…just like any little kid!” David had told reporters as he carried Jesse home. That was last summer, Jesse at nine months. Click! Click!
Now Jesse, at almost a year, was ahead in language development and several other things in the baby development schedule. He was also hugely loveable.
“Mammy ‘scope!” chortled little Mr. Miracle, yanking at the tubing of Jill’s stethoscope. His two front bottom teeth were in, and when he grinned he looked like a happy imp.
“Honey, don’t chew on that.” Jill gently pulled her stethoscope away, distracting him easily with a plastic toy truck.
A surgical resident – and fellow mom in the room – leaned to them from her son and a nurse playing with her little girl.
“He said ‘scope?” The resident watched bug-eyed as Jesse flopped his truck over and inspected a wheel. “Amazing.”
“We talk to him a lot,” Jill said absently, frowning down into her cell phone; and the nurse exclaimed, “He repeats everything. It may sound like babble but he’s trying…”
Tricia agreed, turned back to Jill and saw her glaring into her phone’s window. “Hey, stop reading headlines.”
Jill edged closer, and in the softest voice, a little high, she read: “…more accessible to visitors and hospital staff since the couple adopted him…unusually sociable for a child not yet one-”
“So people are fascinated. You gotta accept-”
Jill’s phone chirped in her hand. She gave Trish a confused lo
ok; recognized the number of Kerri Blasco, her good friend and a cop. Leaned closer and held the phone so Tricia could hear.
“I’m in an ambulance headed to you,” Kerri said tightly. “A third couple’s been shot. One survivor, female, pregnant.”
“Oh no…” Jill’s heart dropped. Third couple in a week. The first two attacks already held the city in terror. One couple - tourists - making out near Times Square, a second couple in Soho. Both attacks at night in crowds, faulty eyewitness accounts of the shooter.
“Three means a serial,” Jill breathed.
Tricia felt her body go cold: the Couples Killer, ohmygod. Three couples made it six victims: four dead, one survivor in another hospital, now a second survivor coming here. She and some of the others helped Jill and David help the cops with rapes, assaults, statutory rapes and child molestation, but...
This was a nightmare for the whole city, the country.
The other resident, dealing with her suddenly howling daughter who wanted Jesse’s truck, leaned in to Tricia. “Thought Jill was off tonight.”
“She is.” Tricia’s lips were dry. “Hardly slept last night.”
The howling made it hard to hear. Jill gripped the phone tighter.
“…about three months along,” Kerri was saying. “And she’s…” Her seasoned cop voice sounded uncharacteristically bitter. “An Iraq war vet.”
“Oh God…” Jill felt tears well, met Tricia’s stricken gaze.
“David available?”
“In a delivery. MacIntyre and Greenberg are free.” Sam MacIntyre and Woody Greenberg, the two other close friends who’d helped “deliver” Jesse.
“Okay,” Kerri said. “You’ll get us evidence? We need help.”
Jill said of course, told Kerri to meet her in the usual place, and hung up.
“Iraq war vet,” Tricia whimpered, getting to her feet with Jill. She saw Jill looking haunted again, a look she’d seen so many times, and realized she felt the same.
Raney & Levine Page 22
