Hooked

by Jaime Maddox

  Jess’s face brightened. “Yeah, it is. The sale is pending. I should own it soon.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Where do you live?” Jess asked.

  Mac laughed. It might bother some people, but not her. She was exactly where she wanted to be. “I actually live at a campground.”

  “Like in a motor home?”

  “Yes and no. There are motor homes there, but I live in a house. Most of the year I’m surrounded by campers of one sort or another.”

  Jess looked intrigued. “How’d you end up there?”

  “I was raised there. My grandparents owned it, and their house was on the property. I borrowed a little piece of land with a stream behind and a lake in front and built a cabin.”

  “You have utilities, right?”

  Mac wasn’t sure if Jess was serious, but she was enjoying her company, so she went along. “Nah.” Running her fingers through her hair, she shook her head. “I keep my hair short so I only have to wash it every few days, and I use a strong deodorant.”

  Jess swallowed any further comment and then Mac began laughing. “Just kidding.”

  Jess chuckled. “I guess that was a stupid question. But it sounds like fun. Where is it?”

  Mac told her.

  “So that’s a half-hour drive. You really are an early riser, huh?”

  Mac shrugged. How could she tell her she spent her nights thinking about cases and had difficulty quieting her mind enough to sleep? She couldn’t help wondering if Jess had similar troubles.

  “How often do you work overnight?” Mac asked.

  “About six days a month.”

  “That’s hard, isn’t it? Going from days to nights?”

  “It’s the worst. I usually sleep between shifts, but since I’m off tomorrow, I’m just going to stay awake today and make it an early night. It’s already nine. If I can last another ten hours, I’ll be great.”

  “Do you have a hard time sleeping after work?” Mac was curious about Jess, and it had to do with more than the case she was working on. Jess just seemed so confident, in spite of what she’d been through. It was as if she really didn’t give a shit about anyone else’s opinion. She’d disappeared after her abduction and could have damaged the case against Hawk, but it seemed she knew Mac wouldn’t come looking for her. Or perhaps Jess would have come back to testify if Mac had found her. And although she thanked Mac for helping get Hawk indicted, she never apologized for disappearing.

  Jess took a bite of a cinnamon roll and licked the sugary goo from her fingers. It was heavenly, and she told Mac so. Then she thought about Mac’s question. Some days, she was so busy at work that she came home physically exhausted and fell into bed, unconscious in seconds. Other times, it wasn’t so easy. “Sometimes. It’s hard not to bring work home, especially when it doesn’t go well. I tend to dwell on everything and go over it all in my mind. What if I’d done something differently?” She looked at Mac and saw understanding there. Suddenly Jess realized the detective probably dealt with some of the same difficult issues that she did. She was probably first on the scene to all kinds of accidents and homicides, and, just like Jess, she probably had to tell the survivors that their loved ones were dead.

  “Does that help?”

  “I think it does. I sort of work on a plan, so things might turn out differently the next time.”

  Mac put down her coffee and cocked her head, and Jess couldn’t help noticing how attractive she was. Sitting in the oversized chair, she looked so calm and poised, yet Jess detected an energy around the detective that seemed to make the room brighter. As Jess studied her, the sun rays filtered through the spikes of her gelled hair and dusted her nose and cheeks with color. Radiant. The detective looked radiant.

  “So your patient today? What would you do differently next time?”

  The question was so far from where her mind had been that she needed a moment to regroup. Sighing, she studied the ceiling. “I’m not sure. I suppose I’ll wait for the autopsy report. When I find out what caused his heart to stop, maybe it’ll help.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “There’s not too much on the list of things that kill people quickly. At his age, it was probably his heart. When I talked with the wife, she mentioned that his father had died at a young age, too.”

  “Don’t they check for things like that?”

  It was one of her great frustrations as a physician, and she frowned as she looked at the detective. “People who are healthy sometimes avoid the doctor until it’s too late. If he’d gone for a checkup in the past decade, someone would have gotten a family history and checked his blood pressure and cholesterol, and his day would have ended a lot differently.”

  Watching discreetly, Jess thought the detective seemed to digest her words, looking for inconsistencies or lies, but when she raised her head and Jess met her eyes, she saw something else there. In that moment Jess realized it was no longer the detective she was talking with, but the woman. “So you get to talk to the families, too?”

  Considering her job, Jess wasn’t sure what the detective meant. “You mean I get to talk to the families when I’m treating the patients? Or I get to talk to the survivors, just like you do?”

  “Both.”

  Jess was pleased that she’d caught the subtle reference. Calabrese seemed to take it all in, and Jess wouldn’t be surprised if most people missed things like that when talking to her. “You must see some awful shit.”

  “It can be difficult, yes.”

  “Does it ever get to you?”

  “You’d have to be dead to not let it get to you.”

  “How do you deal with it?” Jess asked, curious. Did the state police offer counseling? Would it make an officer appear weak if he or she signed up for it? And did this particular officer have to try harder to avoid such suspicions, because of her gender?

  The detective smiled again. “I go to the range and shoot things.”

  Jess laughed. She could relate. It took a great deal of concentration to eye a target, to synchronize her breathing and heartbeat until everything else in the universe faded. “I like to shoot things, too. It’s calming, like yoga.”

  “That’s quite the dichotomy, Dr. Benson.”

  “That’s quite a big word, Detective.”

  “Cops do go to school.”

  Jess laughed. “Touché.”

  “So how’d you learn to shoot?”

  “I grew up at Towering Pines. I learned to shoot as a child.” Her mind flashed to her last visit at the cabin, and she shook her head to chase the thought away. “I don’t think I’ll be heading out there for a while.” She smiled to lighten her mood.

  Mac shifted in her seat and leaned forward, her forearms resting on her knees, seeming to understand. “If you want to shoot, I’ll take you.”

  “I haven’t done it in a while.”

  “Maybe this is a good time to get back into it.”

  Jess wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Would a gun have helped her in her struggle with Hawk? Probably not. More than likely, Hawk would have wrestled the gun from her and used it to shoot her.

  “We’ll see,” she said, and smiled, holding up her coffee. “Thanks for this. What’s it going to cost me?”

  The detective’s eyes flew up in surprise as she defended her motives with both hands raised.

  Jess smiled. Her attempt at humor had been a success. “Kidding, Detective. Just kidding.”

  Shaking her head, she pulled a recorder out of some pocket or another, and Jess caught a flash of the gun on her right hip. “Why don’t you call me Mac?”

  Jess liked that idea. “Okay. Mac it is.”

  “All right, enough chitchat. Let’s get to work. Start at the beginning, wherever you think that is,” she said as she pressed the record button and spoke. “This is Detective Calabrese recording an interview with Dr. Jessica Benson at her home on Tulip Street in Garden.”

  Jess noticed another smile tilt th
e corner of Mac’s mouth, and she gave the date and time as well. When her eyes met Jess’s she saw gentle encouragement there, and Jess swallowed before she began to speak.

  “It actually happened pretty quickly. Ward—uh, Dr. Thrasher called me to tell me her suspicions about Hawk—Dr. Edward Hawk. She mentioned that three of his patients had died of air embolisms in the past few months, at other hospitals around the Poconos and Endless Mountains. Embolisms are rather rare, so it was kind of surprising that Hawk would see three of them. Then I received an email from the coroner, Wendy Clemens, telling me that one of Hawk’s patients at Garden had also died of an embolus. I just sort of felt like this couldn’t be a coincidence. First of all, the odds are impossible. But I also just had a bad feeling about him. He was sort of creepy. I decided to go into the hospital to review Hawk’s patient’s chart and to check out other cases Hawk had. I was there only a minute when he attacked me. He knocked me to the floor in my office and stabbed me in the thigh. I had no idea what was going on after I felt the sting of the needle, only that I felt weak. Hawk told me he had used succinylcholine to paralyze me, and then I understood. Do you know what succinylcholine is?” Jess asked.

  “I didn’t, until this case.”

  “Okay, I just wanted to be sure you understand me. He told me he would let me live if I told him what I knew about Christian Cooney—that’s the kid who died at Garden from the fatal embolus. Then he told me he enjoyed killing, and he would really appreciate it if I could tell him what tipped me off so he could avoid making the same mistakes in the future.”

  Suddenly it all came back to her, like a gust of wind cutting through a calm day. As Jess began to shake all over, the coffee in her cup spilled in her hand. She looked down but seemed helpless to stop the trembling. From out of nowhere, the detective’s hands appeared, holding a pile of napkins, which they used to remove the coffee cup and then wipe Jess and the table and the floor.

  “I should have gotten iced,” she said, but when her eyes met Jessica’s she knew she hadn’t appreciated her attempt at levity.

  “I knew-knew-knew I was go-go-going to d-die.” Jess closed her eyes and leaned into Mac.

  Mac abandoned all other thoughts and pulled Jess into her arms, back into the couch and to safety. Her few encounters with Hawk since the brutal attacks at the hospital and hunting club had shown him to be unremorseful, and at the moment Mac felt like murdering him for what he’d put this woman through. No wonder she’d skipped town instead of testifying. Mac couldn’t imagine what it would have been like for her to be paralyzed beneath the hands of a cold-blooded killer. Not that she was minimizing the coroner’s experience, but at least she had the benefit of knowing Jess was still alive after suffering the same ordeal.

  “It’s okay. He’s behind bars, Jess, and he can’t hurt you now. Shush,” she said, over and over again, and she held Jess’s head to her shoulder, pressed her body against her. “It’s okay, Jess. Shush, it’s okay.”

  They sat that way for an hour; Mac could testify to it because she watched the minutes tick by on the large mantel clock. Every few minutes Jess would take a deep sobbing breath and seem ready to emerge from her trance, only to begin again, collapsing into Mac for comfort.

  She’d never done this before, and Mac felt out of her element. Hell, she could count on one hand the number of times she’d brought coffee and pastries for women she was dating. She never, ever did it for a witness. Yet something told her she needed to progress carefully with Dr. Benson, and what harm was there in offering comfort to a woman in distress? As long as no one ever found out about it, it wasn’t a problem. And she was pretty sure neither of them would ever say a word.

  “I think the coffee’s cooled off, Detective,” Jess said without moving.

  “Mac. Call me Mac.”

  “Yes, you did say that, didn’t you?”

  “Should I throw some ice into it, Jess? Make it official?”

  Jess nodded and released her hold on Mac. “On the door,” she said as she watched the very shapely behind of the lead detective, trying to put her abductor out of her mind. Even in this condition, she had a hard time ignoring Mac’s ass.

  She sat back and felt cold in all the places Mac had touched her. It had been so nice to be held. Mac had made her feel safe and cared for. It was just what she’d needed, but she had to get it together. Mac was working on the Hawk case, and Jess was sure that meant she was off-limits. It was hard not to notice her, though. Everything about her was striking.

  A moment later, Jess took the proffered cup of coffee from Mac and sipped. “Perfect,” she said, and meant it. “That’s a nice coffee shop, isn’t it?” she asked, trying to redirect them.

  “It sure is.” Mac, too, seemed a little awkward after their time on the couch, and she sat at a distance, concentrating on a piece of fruit tart she pulled from the pastry box. Jess was grateful for the space and relieved Mac seemed to understand that the hug meant nothing, could never mean anything.

  After moments of silence punctuated by shy smiles and the sounds of chewing and swallowing, Mac sat back and stared at her. “It’s a life-changing experience. Being attacked. The vulnerability takes away your confidence and your strength. You feel insecure and isolated. But you’re none of those things. You’re a successful doctor. You have a family. You have friends. Many other women—with much less going for them—have felt what you feel, and they’ve gotten through it, come out even better than before.”

  How, though? Jess had thought her month at Hartley had strengthened her, but all it took was a few seconds with Mac, talking about Hawk, and she’d fallen apart. Just from telling a small part of her story.

  “One of the best ways to feel emotionally strong is to be physically strong. A gun, for instance. But I also teach a self-defense class. And, coincidentally, a new series is starting tomorrow. You should come.”

  “I don’t know…Mac. I have a hard time talking about it.”

  “So will they. This class is at the Safe House, in Scranton, so there are people there—gay boys and transgender teens, battered partners—all kinds of people who’ve lost trust. They not only learn to trust each other in class but also to defend themselves, so they never have to endure abuse again. You never have to go through something like this again, Jess. That knowledge doesn’t change what happened to you, but it can give you strength to face tomorrow.”

  “Is our interview over?” She didn’t think she had the strength to endure another question from Mac. All she wanted was to crawl beneath her blankets and go to sleep. In her own, safe, house. She suddenly wished for a Xanax, or three, to help settle her nerves. One of the things she’d learned at the clinic was to dissolve her stress within a stream of deep breaths, but here at home, the technique didn’t seem to work.

  Pulling the pillow to her chest protectively, she leaned back into the couch, willing Mac away, willing a bottle of pills to appear before her.

  Mac nodded. “We’ll finish another time,” she said, and Jess didn’t bother to walk her out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hot Wheels

  Watching the strip-mall parking lot from his usual perch behind the van’s steering wheel, Derek popped a pill and swallowed it with water from a plastic bottle. It was a typical day, a busy day, with Dr. Ball’s patients coming and going, some with stops at the pharmacy, and the other doctors’ patients keeping pace. Derek was happy for the flurry of activity; it meant his business would be good, too.

  Grateful for the overcast sky, he rolled down the van’s window and spit out a wad of gum. Chewing was a great release of nervous energy, but his gum had become flat-tasting and stiff, and it was time for a new piece. He popped one into his mouth just as a shiny, silver BMW convertible pulled into the lot. Even though it wasn’t an ideal day for a convertible, with gray skies and the threat of rain, the top was down and he recognized the driver immediately. It was her. Dr. Ball’s new patient.

  He’d guessed her reasons for seeing the doctor when he
r parents had escorted her to the office, but now that she’d appeared for three consecutive days, he was sure. The doctor brought his addicted patients back frequently, to adjust medication doses and monitor side effects. He’d watched the pattern just as ancient astronomers watched the stars in the night sky, and it never changed. The addicts would come in for several days in a row, then a week later, then a month after that. Once they were stabilized, he’d see them monthly, with the exception of surprise drug screens meant to identify the bad boys and girls.

  Just as he’d watched so many others, he watched the girl come and go, first with her parents in their big, expensive car, and then with just her mother. This was the first visit to the office she’d made on her own. She parked illegally in front of the building and hopped out of her car, leaving the roof open and the interior exposed to the elements. He supposed that would make it that much easier for the towing company, if anyone actually followed through with the warning printed on the sign where she parked.

  She was a curiosity, the girl. Wealthy, for sure. Beautiful. Defiant. He could tell that the moment he first saw her, when she’d walked proudly behind her parents, dismissing him with a turn of her head.

  The prospect of business interrupted his musings, and he met one of his regular customers at her car. They concluded their exchange quickly, and then another customer appeared from within the orthopedics office. Derek watched him disappear into the pharmacy and then reappear a few minutes later. After giving up all of his medication for a few bills, the man limped away happily. Instead of heading back to the safety of the van, Derek edged closer to the building, his senses on high alert. Of course he had a legitimate reason for being there, but he still worried the wrong person or one of security cameras scattered around the parking lot would observe one of his dealings. He’d been told the cameras weren’t operating, but he didn’t want to take any chances.