The FBI Thrillers Collection

by Catherine Coulter

  He stomped the snow off his boots and got himself, Brewster, and the woman quietly into the house.

  “Okay, Brewster, you hit the floor and I’ll get her onto the sofa.” She wasn’t particularly wet so he spread two afghans over her, unlaced her boots, and pulled them off her feet. She was wearing thick wool socks, which were still nice and dry.

  He pulled his cell out of his pocket and dialed nine-one-one. His dispatcher, Amalee Witten, answered. “Yo, Sheriff, what’s up?”

  “I found an injured woman in the woods by my house. I need the paramedics as fast as you can get them out here, Amalee.”

  Amalee was fifty-two years old and weighed 211 pounds, but when it was urgent, she could move out faster than Rob when it was his turn to clean the bathroom. “Hold tight, Sheriff.”

  “Hey, Dad, is she going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know, Rob, I can’t get her to wake up. Go make some hot tea. Let’s see if we can get it down her.”

  Not five minutes later, his son came into the living room cradling a cup of tea between his palms. “It isn’t too hot so she won’t scald her mouth.”

  “Good.” Dix lifted her, pressed the edge of the cup to her bottom lip. “Come on, smell that Lipton’s, best tea in captivity. Rob made it just right so you can open up and take a big gulp. It’ll warm your insides.”

  To his surprise, her mouth opened and she sipped it. She opened her eyes, looked at him, and drank more tea.

  “Are you in pain?”

  She slowly shook her head. Her voice came out thin as thread. “Only my head.” She tried to raise her hand, but Dix held it down.

  “You’ve got a cut on the left side, above your temple. I’m going to leave it for the paramedics to do it right.”

  Brewster jumped onto the sofa and hunkered down next to her. “This is Brewster and he found you in the woods just before the snow started coming down hard.”

  “Brewster,” she said, reaching out her hand to his little face, “thank you.”

  “I’m Dixon Noble, sheriff of Maestro. The guy who made the tea is my son Rob. Can you tell me your name?”

  “I’m . . .” She nuzzled her chin against Brewster, who was licking her. “This is very strange,” she said after a moment, turning back to look up at him. “Do you know, I really don’t have a clue.”

  Dix stood slowly. She looked suddenly scared and the last thing he wanted was for her to freak out. He said calmly, “Whatever else happened to you, you got a big whack against your head. Maybe that could account for you not remembering. The doctor can tell us what’s going on. I’m sure it’s temporary, so try not to worry, okay? Let me check the pockets of your jacket for ID.” He heard the ambulance sirens in the distance. “You don’t seem to have anything at all in your pockets. Did you have a purse or a wallet with you, do you remember?”

  He saw her eyes were dilated and that concerned him. “Don’t worry about it. Maybe you’ve got something in your jeans pockets. They can check at the hospital. I don’t want to move you around. Tomorrow I’ll check the woods for a purse.”

  “This is nuts,” she said, and he saw her wiggling beneath the afghans. She was obviously searching her jeans herself. Then she lifted her hand and checked the jacket herself. “I can’t find anything. That doesn’t make any sense. Where’s my cell phone? Did I have a purse? No, that’s not likely. I never take a purse.”

  He waited patiently.

  “Never.”

  “But you know you had a cell phone?”

  “Yes. Oh dear, I think so.” She started humming.

  Rob said, “Why are you humming?”

  “I don’t like to curse so I hum when I’m unhappy about something.”

  “That’s cool,” said Rafe, who was standing behind the sofa, looking down at her.

  “That’s my other son, Rafer. Okay, things are coming back. Don’t push it. There’s always an explanation for everything.”

  “What you just said—that sounded really familiar, like I say that to people.”

  The paramedics followed Rob into the living room. Ten minutes later, Dix and the woman were in the ambulance headed to Loudoun County Community Hospital, some twelve miles away. It was snowing really hard, so it took a good thirty minutes to get there. She was pale and her eyes looked glassy. He held her hand. She wasn’t wearing any rings, only a no-nonsense multifunctional black watch. The emergency room wasn’t a zoo yet, but everyone was preparing for the worst.

  Dix sat himself in the nearly empty waiting room after they had wheeled her away, and prepared to read his way through a National Geographic magazine dated 1997.

  He heard her cry out. He rose automatically, took a step toward the curtained-off cubicle.

  “Sheriff, we need to do some paperwork here.”

  He did his best, but since he had no clue who she was or what her medical history was, there were mostly blank lines left on the forms after her name, Jane Doe.

  Dix pulled out his cell and called Emory Cox for a status report. “This is weird, Sheriff, we’ve only had one call. It was a wrong number if you can believe that.”

  “No, I don’t believe that. It was probably an abuse call, and chances are the wife will show up tomorrow with a broken nose and bruises everywhere. We’ll see.”

  “So far everyone seems to be staying in tonight, not being stupid.”

  “Let’s hope our luck holds up, Emory. I’m at the hospital. I do have something of a situation here.” He detailed to Emory how he’d found the woman, knowing of course that Amalee had probably already told half the people in town all about it. “I want you to send two of our disaster deputies—Claus and B.B. Claus can drive his four-wheeler out to my property. They need to find the woman’s car—No, I don’t know what kind of car she was driving because, as I said, she can’t seem to remember anything right now. I want you to check around the county for any reports of missing young women. If she can’t tell us who she is by tomorrow morning, we’ll run her fingerprints through IAFIS; maybe we’ll get lucky. Tomorrow, if necessary, you can take a photo of her, and we’ll send it out. Check all the local B-and-Bs, hotels, and motels within a fifteen-mile radius of Maestro. All I can say is that she’s in her mid-thirties, dark hair, light complexion, really green eyes. She’s on the lean side, a runner maybe. Her arms and legs felt strong when I checked her for broken bones. She’s tall, maybe five-foot-nine, -ten. Of course, the car would tell us everything we need to know. Her ID’s probably in there, or we can identify her from the plates, so emphasize to Claus and B.B. that the car’s the priority.”

  Thirty minutes later, Dr. Mason Crocker came over to him in the waiting room. “She seems to be all right, Sheriff, at least physically. The CT scan was clear. There is no evidence of any anatomic injury other than that head wound. She may have suffered a concussion, but I think she’s also got some drugs on board. Her eyes don’t seem right to me; they’re dilated and glassy. She’s restless and her heart rate is up. I can’t quite place it—it’s not one of the usual drug effects we see. We’ve sent off a toxicology screen on her.”

  “Do you think she was drugged? Poisoned?”

  Dr. Crocker shrugged. “I wouldn’t discount it. She seems to be coming out of it. We’ll need to keep her for a while, though.”

  “Yeah, check it out, that’s good.”

  “You said you found her in your woods.”

  “Yeah. Brewster did, actually.”

  “No ID?”

  “There could be a purse out there somewhere but she told me she never took a purse out—to do what, she didn’t remember. I’ll send my boys out to look tomorrow.”

  Dr. Crocker said, “She says she can’t remember who she is, how she was hurt, or how she ended up unconscious in your woods.”

  “Do you think she’s faking it?”

  Dr. Crocker shook his head. “No, I don’t. It could be what we call hysterical amnesia. Her memory loss relates to particular memories, and is sharply bounded. For example, she can tell
me who the president is, she can talk about the pitiable state of the Redskins. Sometimes when people are badly hurt or terrorized, they need to forget for a while, to protect themselves. Hey, I hope she’s not an escapee from Dobb’s Women’s Prison.”

  “I hope not, too. Tell you what, I’ll give them a call, have them do a bed check. That was a joke, Doc.”

  “Maybe she was out camping, something like that.”

  “In this weather?”

  “Hey, maybe she’s from California. You know, Sheriff, if someone struck her on the head to rob her, they could have taken her ID.”

  Eyebrow up, Dix said, “Yeah, that occurred to me.”

  “So what are we going to do with her? If she does okay tonight, she can be out of here, medically, in the morning.”

  “I’ll have to think about that. Hope you stay bored tonight, Doc.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “THANKS FOR THE lift, Penny,” Dix said to his thirty-year-old deputy, who knew how to box and was married to the local funeral home director, as she pulled into his driveway. “Hope you got a lot of hot coffee.”

  “Tommy wouldn’t let me out the front door unless I filled his super-giant-size thermos to the brim with the sludge he calls coffee. I’ll be fine, Sheriff.”

  Brewster and both boys were waiting for him and wanted every gory detail. It wasn’t until well after one in the morning that Dix, Brewster curled up against his back, finally got himself to sleep.

  The snow was back to a light powder the following morning, with about a new foot on the ground. Dix made breakfast while the boys shoveled the driveway and looked in the woods where he had found the woman. Brewster supervised, which meant he ran around them in circles until he was exhausted. Rob brought him back into the house and left him in the kitchen, next to the warm stove. “He nearly bought it in a deep patch of snow, Dad. I think he’s had enough. We didn’t find the lady’s wallet, or a purse, or anything. There’s too much snow.”

  “I appreciate your looking. Come and sit down now, breakfast is ready.”

  If there was something Dix considered himself good at, it was breakfast. The house smelled of fried bacon, eggs over easy, brown sugar on oatmeal, and blueberry muffins.

  By ten o’clock, the boys were off with their sleds slung over their shoulders to Breaker’s Hill, where most of Maestro’s teenagers would be congregated along with some of the hardier parents. Dix finished shoveling the driveway and drove to the hospital. On the way, he checked in with his deputies, who, thankfully, had nothing dire to report, no six-car pileups or downed electrical wires.

  Nor had anyone found an abandoned car. Nor were there any local missing persons reported. And not a single woman of her description had registered at any B-and-B or motel in the immediate area. Dix supposed he’d expected her to be registered at Bud Bailey’s Bed & Breakfast, where most people stayed if they visited Maestro. Someone had obviously hit her. Had they left her unconscious in his woods, or had she managed somehow to get away from them, and then collapsed in the woods? All he needed was her car. Could the people who whacked her over the head have driven it off? Hidden it somewhere?

  Maybe she’d come here for a specific reason, a reason someone didn’t like. Or maybe that someone had moved her a good distance away from where she’d been brought down.

  The main roads were already plowed and the light snow falling wasn’t going to be much of a problem. The forecast was for more snow, though, becoming heavy in the late afternoon.

  Emory called to check in.

  Dix said, “Someone’s got to have seen her, sold her gas, supplies, something.”

  “Maybe she’s here with someone.”

  “If that were the case, they surely would have called us when she went missing.”

  Emory sighed. “Maybe her old man is the one who tried to off her.”

  “She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring,” Dix said.

  “I don’t either, Sheriff, and I’m so married Marty can finish my sentences.”

  “It’s odd, but she didn’t seem married to me.”

  Emory wondered what that meant, but he let it go.

  Dix found Dr. Crocker, more rumpled than he’d been the night before, a stethoscope nearly falling off his neck, at the nurses’ station on the second floor.

  “You ever go home last night, Doc?”

  “Nah, I haven’t left the hospital for six weeks now. Just kidding, Sheriff. Now, our girl is trying really hard not to show it, but she’s scared—understandable since she had a pretty rough night of it and still can’t remember who she is or how she came to be in your woods. The head wound’s okay. Since it’s the weekend, most of the toxicology screen won’t be ready until sometime Monday.”

  Dix asked Dr. Crocker a few more questions, then he found room 214. It was a double room, but she was the only occupant. She was sitting up, staring at muted cartoons on the TV. There was a white strip of keri tape over her temple, nothing more. She wasn’t moving.

  When she saw him, she said, “Do you use meters?”

  “What? Meters? Well, no, I think in feet and inches, like most Americans. Why meters?”

  “It popped into my head a little while ago. I realized I know all about meters and centimeters, how to convert back and forth. I don’t sound like I’m from Europe, do I?”

  “Nope, you’re American to the bone. I’d say Washington, Maryland, around there.”

  “Maybe I’m a math teacher and I teach the metric system.”

  “Could be. Sounds to me like you’re nearly ready to remember everything, but don’t push it, okay? Just relax. How’s your head feel?”

  “Hurts, but I can handle it.”

  Odd, but it seemed to him she could handle about anything. He pulled a small black plastic kit from his jacket pocket, opened it, and spread out the paraphernalia on the bedside table.

  She watched him a moment, said, “You’re going to take my fingerprints?”

  “Yes, that’s right. This is my portable kit since you’re not up to going to the station to scan them in. It could be you had a job that required fingerprints.”

  “Could I be in NCIC?” The instant the words were out of her mouth, she froze.

  “NCIC—you know what that means?”

  He could tell she was trying really hard, and he raised his hand. “No, let it go. I’m sending your fingerprints electronically to IAFIS. That’s the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. If you’re one of the forty million folks in the civil fingerprint file, we should hear back within twenty-four hours.”

  “I forgot your name.”

  “Dixon Noble. I’m the sheriff of Maestro.”

  “Maestro. What a strange name, charming, but strange.”

  “I prefer it to Tulip, Montana.”

  She smiled, but it wasn’t a simple smile, there were remnants of pain in her eyes. He knew that look when he saw it, knew it to his bones. And he could practically feel her controlling her sense of panic. “You want some aspirin?”

  “No, it isn’t bad. I heard the nurses talking about me earlier. They wondered what the doctors were going to do with me.”

  “Not a problem,” Dix said. “I’m taking you home with me.”

  THE HOSPITAL INSISTED she ride in a wheelchair to the front door. Once she was seat-belted inside the Range Rover, she turned to watch the sheriff as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway. Then she stared out the window to watch the bright morning sun glisten off the snow. “It’s beautiful, and it feels familiar down to my bones, so I guess I’m not from Arizona.”

  “Now that’s interesting. Some deep part of you feels at one with this atrocious weather.”

  “Kind of sad, actually.”

  “My boys looked in the woods where I found you, but there was nothing there. More snow’s forecasted for this afternoon, but it’s beginning to look like the weather guys are wrong again. Emory’s coming to the house later to take some photos. We’ll show them all over the area. Someone had to
have seen you, someone will remember you.”

  “I don’t live around here, I’m pretty sure of that, so that means I had to have a room somewhere. I like your Range Rover,” she said, surprising him. “They’re really good off-road, but I think they make me nauseous when I’m a passenger and there are too many bumps.”

  “What do you own?”

  “A BMW—oh, nice how you did that—but I’m not sure, sorry. BMW popped into my mind, so maybe. I sure hope you find my car, whatever it is, soon. You can find out who I am in about two seconds flat.”

  “How?”

  “From the VIN, not to mention the license plate.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “I’ve got people out looking for your car. If the person who struck you tried to hide it, he’s in luck. With all this snow it could be well camouflaged.”

  She cleared her throat. “Seems like someone tried to obliterate me, and sort of has.”

  “You’ll be okay,” he said matter-of-factly. “But I am wondering how you got to my house.”

  “Maybe the woods were just handy?” She didn’t sound upset, and that was surely strange for a civilian. She sounded curious, not at all scared, like she had a problem to solve.

  “Or maybe you managed to walk into my woods.”

  “Who knows?” She laughed, actually laughed. “Here I am as useless as a lifeguard who can’t swim. What could I have been doing here to make someone go to all this trouble?”

  “I can see your eyes nearly crossing. Stop straining. Relax. Stuff is coming back really fast now. It won’t be much longer. Do you think your Beemer is one of those SUVs?”

  “It’s not an SUV, it’s an SAV. It’s not a pedestrian utility vehicle, it’s an activity vehicle.” She started laughing again. “Oh goodness, can you believe that?”

  “Dr. Crocker told me, probably told you, too, that bits and pieces of things may float back to you, but some big chunks might stay out of sight for a while. Like I said, stop straining. When we find your wuss SAV, maybe you’ll recognize it.”