by Steven James
She shoved her other notes aside, tapped at her keyboard, and began to search through the articles she’d written, looking for references to anyone named John.
24
Cheyenne and I arrived at Baptist Memorial Hospital, one of the oldest and most respected hospitals in the state of Colorado, at 9:46 a.m.
The hospital administration had been renovating the eastern wing for the last six months, and I could see that they still had a long way to go. Local press coverage had emphasized how “patient care had not been compromised in the least” during the current renovations, but over the years I’ve seen how much spin finds its way into press releases, so I hadn’t been completely convinced by the hospital administrator’s carefully worded PR statements.
I was stepping out of the car when my cell rang.
“What did we do before cell phones?” Cheyenne said good-naturedly.
“Got into fewer car accidents.” I looked at the caller ID picture on the screen.
Lien-hua Jiang.
OK, this was inconvenient. Cheyenne glanced at me. “Excuse me for a minute,” I said.
“Sure.” She started across the parking lot, and I waited until she was out of earshot.
“Hey,” I said to Lien-hua.
“Hello, Pat. How are you?”
“Good. Things are good, pretty good.” A stiff and meaningless response. I began to follow Cheyenne but made sure I stayed far enough back so she wouldn’t hear my conversation. “How are you?”
“I’m OK. Thanks for asking.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah.” A pause that spoke volumes. “Pat, you know why I’m calling, I think.”
Wow. Well, she’s not wasting any time, is she?
“I’m thinking maybe I can guess.” The words had a bite to them, and I knew it, but I let them stand.
“Please, it’s hard enough doing this over the phone. You don’t have to make it worse.”
“I’m not trying to-” I really did not want to be doing this. Not here, not now. Twenty meters in front of me Cheyenne was entering the hospital. “Look, can we talk about this later, maybe later today?”
“I’m going on assignment to Boston and I don’t want to have this hanging over my head. It’s nothing against you, Pat. You know that.” I could hear pain in her voice but no condemnation. She still cared about me, wasn’t blaming me. And that just made this harder.
“It’s just…” she said. “Things haven’t been… It’s not working.”
For more than a month now things had been deteriorating, and we’d both been dancing around the issue, avoiding saying what we both knew we needed to. “Really, Lien-hua, this isn’t a good-”
“It’s over, Pat.”
I felt a sting, a deep sense of finality and regret. “No, we’ll talk about it later. Maybe when I get to DC later this week we can-”
“No. Please. It would be too hard for me.” Her voice wasn’t harsh, but it was firm.
A long pause followed her words. I had no idea what to say.
I tried to formulate the right words, but they escaped me, “So then…”
“Yes.”
I arrived at the hospital’s automatic sliding doors, and they whisked open. I was barely aware of myself stepping inside.
On a better day, either Lien-hua or I might have found something helpful or healing to say before we ended the call, but on this day, neither of us did. A few thick moments of silence fell between us until at last she said good-bye and I said good-bye, and then the conversation was over. Long before I was ready for it to be.
The sliding doors closed behind me, and I stood staring blankly at the phone until I felt Cheyenne’s presence beside me.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes,” I lied.
I slipped the phone into my pocket, and it felt unusually awkward and uncomfortable. I pulled it out and jammed it back in, harder.
She looked at me with understanding and concern. “No, it’s not.”
“I’m all right,” I said, but I didn’t look her in the eye. “Let’s go.”
A few minutes later we were being escorted down the hall by Lance Rietlin, a fidgety man in his late twenties who spent the walk telling Cheyenne how much he appreciated being able to work under someone as experienced and respected as Dr. Bender, but I wasn’t really listening. Instead, I was trying to convince myself that Lien-hua and I could still be friends, that we would be able to put aside the deep feelings we’d had for each other and move back to the way things were before we started going out-because that’s what you tell yourself at times like this.
You tell yourself those things, you hide inside naivety, because the truth is too painful to admit.
And the truth was: from now on it would be difficult to work with Lien-hua; I would be jealous of the attention she gave to other men and I would always wonder if we-I-could have done more to salvage our relationship.
Lance led us down a set of stairs and into the hospital’s lower level past a series of custodial supply closets and the physical therapy room. “They’re doing some kind of maintenance on the elevators,” he explained as we passed the “out of order” signs taped across the doors. “They’re supposed to have ’em up and running in an hour or so. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
As my thoughts wandered back to Lien-hua, I realized that getting things out in the open was somewhat of a relief-even though going our separate ways was something I’d never wanted.
We arrived at the morgue and Lance unlocked the door. “Pretty full in there this week. Dr. Bender and I have been… Well.”
He didn’t need to say more.
“Have at it.” He swung the door open. The overly sharp smell of hospital disinfectants filled the air. “Eric should be by in about ten minutes.”
I noticed Cheyenne glance at her watch.
“I’ll be upstairs,” Lance said. “Unless you want me to stay?”
“No,” I replied. “We’ll be fine.”
He gave me a small nod. “If you need anything, just call the admitting department. They’ll page me.” He told me the number, I thanked him, and after he’d stepped away Cheyenne and I entered the sterile white chamber where death is dissected and studied.
The room looked like most of the morgues I’ve visited over the past fifteen years: stainless steel counters, bright fluorescent lights, microscopes, scales, sanitary disposal units, trays of instruments. An empty gurney.
And, of course, the vibrating electric Stryker saws for cutting through skulls without destroying the tender brain matter inside, Hagedorn needles for sewing up body cavities, skull chisels, bone saws, rib cutters.
Tools of the trade.
The gurneys that bore the dead would be in the freezer.
As I crossed the room, I thought about how we design morgues to be as impersonal and institutional as possible. Despite how messy and nauseating dead bodies are, the place where we probe them is sparkling and clean and carefully sanitized to cover up the smell of decay.
Maybe it’s our way of dealing with death, of helping us forget the laughter and tears and smiles of the people we’re dissecting.
Maybe that’s a good thing-being able to forget.
We reached the freezer, and I stared at the door for a moment.
“OK,” I said softly. “Let’s have a look at the governor.”
25
I unlatched the door to the morgue’s freezer. Swung it open.
A swirl of cold air nudged out and encircled me. I could see five gurneys inside.
Dead lips whispering to me, “Why? Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you come sooner?”
On each gurney, a cadaver. I recognized the faces of three of them as the victims from earlier this week. Strangely, none of the bodies were covered, and two of the corpses were headless-two, not one. Not just Sebastian Taylor’s.
What’s going-?
And then as I took my first step into the freezer, I saw her. A woman, s
eated against the far wall, with the missing sheets from the bodies draped across her shoulders and arms. Her eyes were open.
I rushed toward her, Cheyenne beside me.
As I bent over the woman and felt for a pulse, I realized I’d seen her before at one of the coffeehouses I visit regularly. I didn’t know her name, just her face, but somehow, recognizing her made things all the more urgent. Her skin was cold to the touch. Her lips, bluish, cyanotic, but she was still breathing. I found a faint heartbeat. “She’s alive,” I said to Cheyenne.
“Thank God. Let’s get her out of here.”
“Ma’am,” I said. “We’re going to help you.” She moved her lips but made no sound. I noticed that she wasn’t shivering, which meant she was in the advanced stages of hypothermia.
Cheyenne reached for one of her armpits to lift her.
“Careful.” From my rock climbing trips I knew that moving people with severe hypothermia can jar them, cause them to go into shock or cardiac arrhythmia, but I didn’t want to say that within earshot of the woman. “I’ll get her.”
As gently as I could, I lifted the woman. She had a slight frame, but still I felt a twitch of pain in my side where Grant had driven the axe handle into my ribs the day before.
I carried her to the empty gurney in the exam room, and Cheyenne ran ahead of me, pressed the intercom button, and called for a doctor to report to the morgue, stat!
I eased the woman onto the gurney. “We’re going to get you warmed up.”
As long as she remains conscious, she should be all right.
“It’s going to be OK,” Cheyenne said, but she must have realized how serious the woman’s condition was because she whispered, only for my ears, “I’m not sure we can wait for a doctor.”
“She’ll be all right.”
But as I was evaluating whether or not we should wait for a doctor or go looking for one, I saw the woman’s eyes roll back. Cheyenne slapped her cheek firmly to keep her awake. “Stay with me,” she said. “Stay with me!” But the woman’s breathing was becoming choppier. Cheyenne called, “Pat-”
“I know.”
The woman shuddered. Cheyenne slapped her cheek again, but this time she didn’t respond.
I grabbed the end of the gurney to push it into the hall. “We have to warm her. Now.”
26
As I passed through the door I remembered that the elevator on this level was out of service.
No!
In the wilderness you’d remove someone’s clothes and lay beside her to share your body heat, but I figured we could do better than that here at the hospital.
I glanced down the hallway, reviewing the rooms we’d passed on the way to the morgue.
“The PT room,” I mumbled and began to wheel the woman down the hallway as fast as I could.
“What is it?” Cheyenne caught up with me.
“Physical therapy, we passed it on the way here. They’ll have a whirlpool.”
Cheyenne hurried ahead of me and held open the door. I eased the gurney inside. “We’re going to help you,” I told the woman. “It’s all right.”
Gently, I took her in my arms.
He locked her in the morgue.
The killer tried to freeze her to death.
The sadistic, merciless nature of his crimes stunned me, nauseated me.
No one else was present, but I saw Cheyenne motion toward me from the far side of the room. “The whirlpool’s over here.”
The pool had been built into the floor, and as I descended the steps and entered the warm water, I saw Cheyenne reach for the control panel. “Leave the jets off,” I said. “It might be too much of a shock to her system.”
“Right.”
Supporting her weight, I carefully lowered the woman into the water, but she began to shake, weak quivers running through her body. I lifted her a little, then lowered her again, more slowly, while Cheyenne spoke to her, comforting her, reassuring her from beside the pool.
A few moments later the woman coughed and blinked her eyes rapidly. The color was returning to her face.
“He…” She was speaking softly, but at least she was speaking. “He left me in…”
“I know,” I said. “Who was it? Who did this to you?” She shook her head. She didn’t know. “What’s your name?”
She gasped. Took a breath. “Kelsey.”
“We’re going to get you warmed up, Kelsey. You’ll be OK.”
She gave a small nod.
Moments passed. Curls of warm steam rose from the water and meandered around us.
Kelsey’s breathing began to grow more normal, more steady. Then I heard running in the hall.
“It’s the doctor,” I called to Cheyenne, but she was already heading for the door. A moment later a man in doctor’s scrubs, a nurse, and Lance Rietlin came hurrying into the room. “Over here!” I yelled as I lifted Kelsey from the water and carefully stepped out of the whirlpool.
“Let’s get her on the gurney,” Lance said, then helped me lay her down. He touched her hand lightly. “What’s your name?”
“Her name’s Kelsey,” Cheyenne said, then brushed some wet hair out of Kelsey’s eyes.
“We need to get you out of these clothes,” the nurse said to Kelsey. “Is that all right?”
Kelsey nodded, and Cheyenne and the nurse removed her wet clothes while Lance retrieved some towels and blankets from the linen closet. Then he handed them to the nurse, who quickly and thoroughly dried her off and laid the blankets over her.
The doctor, a balding man in his fifties with a look of permanent worry etched on his face, checked Kelsey’s eyes with a penlight. “Whose idea was it to warm her in the pool?”
“Mine,” I said. “There was no other way to heat her up. No doctors here, no elevators. She was going into shock. We needed to do something.”
“We came down the elevators,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.
“They were out of service when I brought them down here,” Lance explained.
After a moment of reflection, the doctor seemed to accept that. “All right. Well, let’s get her out of here.” Then Cheyenne told me she’d reconnect with me in a few minutes, there was a rush and swirl of bodies, she left with the medical crew and I was alone in the room.
I grabbed a towel and wiped it across my face and arms. Right now Kelsey had plenty of people helping her, so I decided to return to the morgue and have a look around, especially now that it was a crime scene for attempted murder.
I threw the towel on the pile. Turned toward the hall.
A man stood in the doorway. “Hey, Pat. Good to see you.”
The profiler, Special Agent Jake Vanderveld, had arrived.
27
“Hello, Jake,” I said.
He stepped into the room. Four years younger than I am. Handsome. Smart. On his way up. Jake had tousled blond hair, intensely blue eyes, and he wore his neatly trimmed mustache like a badge. Even a decade after graduating with his master’s degree in abnormal psychology, he still had the honed physique of the Division I swimmer that he’d been at Cornell.
“So, Assistant Director Wellington tells me you can use a little help on this case.” He was staring at my dripping clothes. “I’m glad I was available.” He was smirking.
“I thought you weren’t arriving until this afternoon?”
“Shifted my schedule around. I figured you’d be glad to have an extra set of eyes on this thing. So that woman they were taking down the hall, what happened?”
As I summarized, I noticed that in the haste to get Kelsey to a room, her clothes had been left on the floor. Jake watched me pick them up, and the gears seemed to be turning in his head. “You took her into the whirlpool?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I could have been here to help.”
Immediately, I sensed that his words could be taken two ways: either as an expression of genuine concern or as a lame and completely inappropriate joke. His tone of voice made me think it was
the latter of the two, but before I could respond to him, my phone rang. I was amazed the water hadn’t shorted it out.
Tessa’s face came up on my caller ID and I told Jake to hang on a second, then answered the cell. “I’m in the middle of something, Tessa. This isn’t the best time to talk.”
“Um, Agent Jiang called, like, half an hour ago. She left a message on my cell. Said she’d tried you first.”
She must have called before you turned on your cell.
“She must really be trying to get a hold of you,” Tessa went on. “You’re supposed to give her a shout.”
It’d been bad enough talking to Lien-hua with Cheyenne nearby; I definitely did not want to do it in front of Jake Vanderveld. I laid the phone against my chest to muffle the sound. “Hey, could you give me a couple minutes? Call dispatch, get a CSU team over here to process the morgue.”
A small grin from him. “I’ll see you soon, Pat.”
“All right, Jake.”
Then he left and I told Tessa, “I talked with Agent Jiang about twenty minutes ago.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Is it official?”
This girl was more observant than most of the agents I work with.
“It’s been that evident, huh?”
“That would be a yes.”
“Well, I guess, you could say that, yes; it’s official. Listen, about lunch-”
“Your decision or hers?”
“Not so much a decision as a mutual acknowledgment.” I headed for the hall. “I have to take care of a few things, maybe I can call you later.”
“I’m sorry, Patrick.” It sounded like she really meant it. “Breaking up sucks.”
“I’m a big boy, Raven. I can handle it.”
“Doesn’t matter how big you are.” She paused. I heard her take a sip of something. “It still sucks.”
Here I was, getting relationship counseling from a teenage girl.
I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well, thanks.”
Since my clothes were soaked, after I’d had a chance to have a look around the morgue, I would need to get changed, and that meant swinging home. “Are we still on for lunch?”
