by Mary McBride
“She pulled off his mask, anyway.”
“And survived.” She shivered, then rubbed her upper arms with her hands. “I’ll be glad to go back to day shift next week, I can tell you that. How many women has that creep killed now? Six? Seven?”
“Seven.” He swore softly, swallowed the last of his coffee and crushed the cup in his fist. “I really thought we had him today.”
“You’ll get him. At least you’ve got a witness now.”
“Yeah.” He lobbed the crumpled cup into the trash can, then glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s been two hours, Lucy. What the hell are they doing to her?”
“CAT scan. An EEG, too, I think. It shouldn’t be much longer.” She looked at the clock, too, then sighed as she stood up. “Well, back to the trenches.”
Then she stood there that one extra, telltale moment, looking at him with those soft blue eyes that held the faintest glimmer of wanting, waiting for him to ask her what time she got off work or what she was doing next Saturday night and did she like Chinese or Italian. Hell. She might just as well have been waiting for him to recite the Constitution, including the Preamble and all the damned amendments, backward. He couldn’t.
“Take it easy, Luce,” he said, and watched that little glimmer fade to dull disappointment as she turned to leave.
I can’t, babe. That’s what he should have said. I just can’t. Not yet.
No sooner had Lucy left the room than Maggie O’Connor came in, looking like she’d worked every single second of their sixteen-hour day. She scowled at the empty coffeepot.
“Oh, damn. I really needed some of that poison. I’m about to fall asleep on my feet here.”
“There’s still some in my thermos out in the car,” Joe said. “Want me to get it for you?”
“Thanks anyway. There’s probably not time. They’re about to take our girl up to a room.”
Joe sat up straighter. “Did she come to?”
Maggie shook her head. “But the brain scan didn’t show any damage. Kuhlmann thinks it’s a concussion, that she’ll just take a while to come around, probably with a hell of a headache.”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “And a clear memory?”
“I was too tired to ask.” She sagged into a chair, leaned back and put her feet on a magazine-covered coffee table. “You look a little beat yourself, partner.”
“Nah. I was born looking beat. Why don’t you go home, Maggie? I’m going to stick around here, anyway .”
“I don’t think she’s going to come around that fast, Decker.”
“Probably not,” he said, “but our masked marvel doesn’t know that, does he?”
Maggie opened her eyes wider. “You think he’s going to try to pop her? Here? At Saint Cat’s?”
Joe shrugged. “I would if I were looking at the electric chair and she was the only one who could ID me. Did you talk to Carson? They get any prints off the vehicles?”
“Just hers all over the Land Cruiser. Our friend was wearing gloves.”
“Naturally.”
“Oh. I almost forgot.” Maggie sat up. “This is hers.” She shrugged her shoulder from the leather strap of a large handbag she’d been holding on her lap. “The guys who towed her car found this under the seat.”
He reached out for it, nearly dropping the bag once Maggie had let go. “Jesus. What’s in here? Bricks?”
Maggie laughed. “It’s just a lady’s purse. Most of us like to be prepared, you know, Decker.”
“For what? Six weeks in the wilderness?”
“Well, you never know.” She stood up, stretching, sighing. “Okay. I’m outta here, then. I’ll take the car and pick you up in the morning.”
“Want me to walk you out, Mag?”
“Nope. There’s a gorgeous new guy on security who’s just dying to do that. G’night, Decker. Get some sleep, will you?”
He mumbled noncommittally, his hand already in the depths of the black leather handbag, exploring for a wallet. “Bingo.” It was a good one—red, made of a soft and supple cowhide. He undid the snap and stared at the driver’s license in its little plastic frame. The redhead gazed back at him with her deep-set, round green eyes. Her head was tilted just a little and her mouth, too, as if the camera or its operator amused her. As if she had a secret. A delicious one. Or dangerous.
His gaze moved to the name beneath the photo.
“What do you know, pretty Sara Campbell?” he whispered. “Who did you see?”
Despite the ID he’d discovered in her purse, Joe kept her on the hospital records as a Jane Doe. He walked beside her bed as they wheeled it briskly down the corridor, into an elevator and up to a private room on the sixth floor. He didn’t know the floor nurse, a sixfoot, two-hundred-pound black drill sergeant whose name tag bore the surprisingly delicate name of Caressa Green.
After she got her patient situated and Joe had made it clear that he wasn’t leaving, the big nurse glowered at him from the door. “Don’t you be trying to wake her up now and bother her with a bunch of questions. You hear?”
Joe put his hand over his heart. “Trust me, Caressa.”
She snorted. “That’s Ms. Green to you, Lieutenant.” Then she flipped off the overhead light and was gone.
He settled into a chair in the corner of the room. Danish modern, he thought bleakly. Probably to discourage visitors. “It’s going to be a long night, pretty Sara,” he said softly in the direction of the high bed where her body hardly fleshed out the covers. Her driver’s license put her at a hundred fifteen pounds. He thought one ten was probably closer. Maybe even one oh-five.
With a sigh, he returned to exploring the contents of her wallet. If she still lived at 5300 Westbury Boulevard, that meant she was only a few blocks from home when she got hit. He tried to picture the house—mansion, actually, like all the others that sat on their manicured lawns just north of Patriot’s Park. So, his Sara wasn’t only pretty, she was filthy rich. Chances were good that her family would snatch her out of Saint Cat’s and move her to Central Methodist before the sun was up tomorrow. If anybody notified them.
It suddenly occurred to him then that he hadn’t checked her hand for a wedding ring. He hesitated a second before he looked and then realized that he was holding his breath, harboring some weird, misguided wish that the fourth finger of her left hand would be ringless, unencumbered. When he saw that it was, he let out his breath and felt his mouth twitching with a goofy little grin.
“Get a grip, Decker,” he muttered, going back to his exploration of the chunky red wallet. Miss Sara Campbell would be thirty-one next week, or at least she would be if he had anything to do with it. If she could come through with a solid ID, maybe he’d be able to give her the Ripper’s head on a platter for her birthday.
Forty-seven dollars in cash. Visa. MasterCard. Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The suits of Saint Cat’s would be plenty relieved to see that, he thought. State Farm. Auto club. A careful girl, his Sara. Zoo membership. Art museum. Public TV. Generous, too. Association of Antique Dealers. Psychiatric Associates—Brendan Bourne, MD. Hmm. Maybe that explained all the plastic prescription vials rattling around in the depths of the bag, as well as the little collapsible cup.
Cell phone. Tampax. Lipstick—Chocolate Silk. Hairbrush. Notebook—blank. A big fat fountain pen. And mints. Six, seven, no, eight rolls of mints, in various stages of consumption. So, his Sara had a sweet tooth, did she? He thought of Edie, forever digging in her hulk of a handbag and coming up with a grin and a linty Life Saver.
“You’re going to get hairballs one of these days, baby,” he’d warned her, “just like a cat.”
Ah, damn. He felt his throat constricting all of a sudden.
He zipped the bag and put it on the floor, then slid down in the chair to rest his head on its inhospitable back. Three years, long ones, and those memories could still catch him unawares, sneaking up and clobbering him with the force of a ball peen hammer. That was one of the reasons he worked the long hours he did. The le
ss time he had for memories, the less he hurt.
The job had always been important to him, but since Edie’s death, the job was everything. It was all he had. He’d been a cop for seventeen years, the last ten of those as a detective in Homicide, working his own cases and mopping up the botched cases of guys like Freiheit and Brown—the Geriatric Squad, as they were called behind their backs—who ate doughnuts and watched the clock and counted down the months till their retirement.
The Maniac. That’s what they called him behind his back and sometimes to his face. It didn’t bother him. Not really. Hell, he probably was. Anybody who looked for excuses to hang around the precinct house instead of going home was slightly maniacal, he supposed. The other nickname the guys had for him was Sue, which had nothing to do with his virility but instead was short for suicide. He wasn’t suicidal, though. He’d always taken risks. Now, since Edie was gone, he just took more. That was all.
Joe opened his eyes when he heard soft, rubber-soled footsteps in the doorway. Caressa Green moved toward the bed like a huge, efficient ghost. She leaned over and pointed the beam of a penlight into the Campbell woman’s eye.
“How’s she doing?” Joe asked quietly.
“The same,” she said, talking while she ticked off the beats of the woman’s pulse. “She moved any?”
“Nope.”
The nurse gave a little cluck of her tongue while she wrote on the chart, then she turned to leave but paused just inside the door. “You want a cot, Lieutenant? A pillow?”
“Why, Caressa.” Joe smiled. “I didn’t think you cared.”
“I just don’t want to be treating your sad ass when you wake up with a stiff neck tomorrow.”
He chuckled. “A pillow would be nice.”
“I’ll be right back.”
She didn’t get far down the corridor, though, before he heard her stern admonishment. “That room’s private, mister. You see that sign? No visitors.”
“Police,” came the reply, and Joe immediately recognized the sandpapery, three-pack-a-day voice of Captain Frank Cobble, his boss. For a guy who put in the shortest hours possible, and most of those at his fussily neat desk, he was up unusually late, Joe thought. He didn’t bother to stand or even to straighten up when the captain came into the room.
“Who’s there?” Cobble growled, staring across the darkness toward the chair.
“Decker.”
“I don’t recall assigning any overtime on this.”
Here we go again. “You didn’t, boss. I’m just hanging around here on my own. What brings you out on a night like this?”
“I was at that damn fund-raiser for the mayor. Just thought I’d stop and check on things here before I went home.” He moved closer to the bed, angling his head to get a better view in the dim light that filtered in from the corridor. “You got a name for our Jane Doe yet?”
“Campbell, Sara, 5300 Westbury Boulevard.”
Cobble’s head jerked up. “Campbell? The candy family? That Campbell?”
“Dunno. I figured with that address she was worth at least a mil.”
“Try ten or twenty.” He looked at Sara, studying her face as if trying to ascertain her exact net worth. “Has she said anything yet? What do the doctors say?”
“That she’ll probably come around tomorrow with a beauty of a headache.”
“Okay. Well, let me know when she comes around, will you? I’ll be at my desk by nine. And don’t bother putting in any requests for overtime, Decker. If you want to play hero or bodyguard, you do it on your own time. Understand?”
Joe leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Right.” He would have added “asshole” as Cobble went out the door, but the captain didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Not that Joe would have meant it humorously, anyway.
“So you’re a candy heiress, pretty Sara,” he said softly. “That makes sense. With a sweet face like that.”
“Wake up, partner.”
Maggie’s voice clanged in his head, and Joe opened one eye just in time to see Caressa Green open the drapes with a single vicious pull and nearly blind him with harsh November light. He groaned as he sat upright, trying to work the kinks out of his neck.
“You look like the cat’s breakfast, Lieutenant,” the big nurse informed him.
“Meow.” Maggie purred unsympathetically as she put a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. “Drink up. Our girl looks like she’s going to come around pretty soon. I’ve got a sketch artist on call just in case she remembers anything.”
He glanced toward the bed to see that its head had been raised a few degrees. Instead of looking out cold as she had the night before, Sara Campbell appeared to be merely sleeping. Then, almost as if he’d wished it, her eyes blinked open.
“Bingo!” He was out of his chair and bedside in two seconds flat. “You’re awake,” he said, trying not to frighten her any more than she already looked. “You’re in the hospital, Miss Campbell. Saint Catherine’s.”
Caressa wedged herself between Joe and the bed rail. “Don’t you be hassling her right now, Lieutenant. You hear me?” She pressed the call button and informed the nurses’ station that her patient was conscious. “Page that neurology resident, Harker, good and loud. He’s probably sleeping somewhere.”
Sara Campbell was gazing around the room like somebody who’d just awakened on another planet. It was obvious she didn’t know where she was, or why. How many times had he come to the same way? Joe wondered. Four, maybe five. But always to Edie’s worried face hovering above him and her hand all warm in his. He took Sara’s hand in his and said, “You’re going to be just fine, Miss Campbell. I promise.”
Her hand clasped his in return, and her green eyes, big with fear, fastened on his face. “Home,” she whispered. “I want to go home.”
“I want to go home,” she said to the doctor who was peeling back her eyelids and aiming the bright beam of a flashlight into her pupils.
“How’s the head? Hurt any?” he asked her.
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, but Sara thought they might not let her go if she confessed that there was a big bass drum between her temples and somebody was beating on it relentlessly. “Really.”
“Do you know where you are, Miss Campbell?”
“Saint Catherine’s, I think.” She glanced at the man who had held her hand so warmly a little while ago. “Isn’t that right?”
Her hand holder smiled encouragingly from the window where he had one jeans-clad hip perched on the sill. His gray eyes fastened on her so intensely that it was difficult for her to look away, or even to think, for that matter. When the doctor asked her if she knew what day it was, for a minute Sara wasn’t even sure she could come up with the right month.
“Miss Campbell?”
“November,” she blurted. “Wasn’t yesterday Monday? So this must be Tuesday, the eighth.”
He murmured, “That’s right,” much to her relief, then said, “now can you count backward from twenty for me? By threes?”
“I hate math.”
“Do it anyway. Twenty. Seventeen.”
Sara let out a little sigh. “Fourteen. Eleven. Um. Eight...”
“Okay. Looks good. All in all, I’d say you’re doing a lot better than we expected.” He turned toward the window. “She can leave any time, Lieutenant.”
“Lieutenant?” Sara looked once more at the man sitting on the windowsill. He stood and kind of sauntered toward her bed.
“I’m Lieutenant Joe Decker, Miss Campbell. This is my partner, Maggie O’Connor. Now that you’re better, we’d like to ask you a few questions about what happened yesterday.”
Yesterday. Sara tried to make her brain cut through the infernal clamor of the drumbeat inside her head. Yesterday. Yes, she remembered. She had told Dr. Bourne she was going home for good. She had driven home in the rain. Only... Only she never got there. Her heart took a sudden extra beat, and she could feel the prickle of panic beginning.
“I just want to go home.”
She swung her legs out from under the covers and started to get out of the high bed, but the lieutenant’s hand clasped her shoulder.
“Whoa, now. You might want to wait just a minute here. Maggie, are her clothes in the closet?”
“They’re in here.” The big nurse came forward, opened a drawer and took out a plastic bag. “She’ll have to sign for those. The release form’s taped on the other side.” She tossed it onto the bed.
Only then did Sara realize why the man had stopped her. She was wearing only a thin cotton hospital gown, probably pure daylight in the back. Or if not daylight, then a very full moon. She wished she could think more clearly. But she would, once she got home.
“We’ll wait outside,” he said. “After you’re dressed, we’ll drive you home. We can question you there. Come on, Maggie.”
“Question me?” Sara murmured once they were gone.
The nurse picked up a handbag from the floor. “This yours?”
Sara nodded, accepting the handbag, enjoying its familiar weight. “Why do they need to question me? What in the world about?”
“You don’t remember the accident you were in?”
“Well, sure.” She frowned, once more aware of the static inside her head. “Well, sort of. Vaguely. It was raining and there was a stalled car and then...bam!”
The nurse shrugged. “Well, I guess it’s that bam they want to find out a little more about. I don’t know. All I know is that lieutenant stuck to you like glue all through the night.”
“Did he?” Sara blinked. She couldn’t imagine being in the same room with a man like that and not being aware of him, even if she was unconscious. It made her feel uncomfortable but at the same time oddly safe.
“Uh-huh. Now let’s get you dressed so you can go home.”
“Oh, yes. Please.”
The woman’s knuckles had been a pearly white on the arms of the wheelchair all the way from her room to the rear exit of the hospital, and she appeared just as ill at ease in the car, maybe more so, but that was understandable, Joe thought, since the last time Sara Campbell had been in a car somebody had crashed into her and then assaulted her. He didn’t wish the woman unpleasant memories, but the more she remembered, the easier his job would be and the sooner the Ripper would be on his way to the chair.
