by JA Schneider
The cubicle fell into fretful silence. From adjoining ER cubicles and the wide hall outside came sounds of voices, moans, beeping monitors, and an occasional dog barking. The dog sounds had a chilling effect.
Inside the cubicle, the silence stretched.
Then Jill blinked and said, “I almost forgot. I’ve got more useless-for-now DNA for you.” She pointed to her wet jacket hanging from a hook. “Nash bloodied Rick Burrell’s nose. In my pocket are tissues I used to help him wipe it.”
Keri was up fast, pulling on gloves and getting the tissues into a small plastic bag. “Couldn’t hurt,” she said; and Pappas asked Jill, “Describe Burrell. Attitude, body language.”
“Ordinary, late thirties, bored, dissatisfied with his bowling abilities but glad to be improving.” Jill shrugged. Her head hurt. “Nash’s other nurse, Greg Clark, is more muscular than Burrell, who’s wiry. There wasn’t a whole lot going on behind either of their eyes that I could see.”
She suddenly remembered her medallion and fingered it, looking from Alex to Keri.
“Don’t you want this back?”
“Keep it longer,” Alex said.
Pappas blew air out his cheeks, patted Jill’s arm again, and rose. By the cubicle entrance, the three detectives hesitated.
“If you see or hear anything, let us know,” Pappas said gravely. “I’m thinking the killer’s still out there, scoping his next victim or…this hospital, somehow.”
Jill and David knew he was remembering yesterday, in the neurosurgery hall showing them the threat left on Nikki Sheehan’s pillow: “The devil’s spawn and his workshop MUST BE DESTROYED!”
Now Pappas inhaled, fretfully bunching some of the cubicle curtain in his hand as if he could take it with him, keep it safe.
“Stay sharp,” he said heavily, looking back. “A smart psycho is resourceful. There could be ways to sneak explosives past the dogs.”
David squeezed Jill’s shoulder. “God forbid,” he said.
33
When they were alone, he got her into a new scrub top, threw her bloodied one into a bin, and helped her stiffly off the exam table.
“Can you stand?” he asked her gently, his hands under her arms.
He let go, and she stood, trying to be stoic. “Damned hip hurts.”
“Percocet kicking in?”
“Yeah.” She managed a weak smile. Lifted her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Come fly with me.”
“Come sleep with me.” He took her in his arms and dropped his face to the crook of her neck. “I so hated this.” His voice was muffled. “Went nuts not being there, then really lost it when I heard about the church, an ambulance on its way – I couldn’t believe it.”
“Ditto. Me in an ambulance, I can’t believe it either.” She squeezed him tighter. The arms worked, at least. Her eyes were closed against his warmth, but the mind started up again. She found herself frowning. “How could someone get explosives past the dogs?”
“Dunno.” He pulled away slightly, looking down, inhaling. “Okay, you’re standing, great. Now let’s see if you can walk.”
She did. Put one foot in front of the other, looking like she was fearfully walking a tightrope. “Oh look,” she said with weak brightness. “Two steps.”
“Do two more. Do four.”
She did just two, then gripped his arm. “Damned hip. Hurts a lot.”
He bent and palpated where Jim Holloway had.
She sucked air in under her teeth and pushed his hand away. “Yikes.”
“I think we should get this X-rayed,” he said.
The timing was good, because the curtains swished open, and one of the surgical interns poked in.
“Is this one free yet?” she asked. “We’ve got a gunshot coming.”
After a brief semi-dispute - “What are you going to do? Hop up there on one foot?” – David got Jill looking peeved into a wheelchair. And into the mostly empty staff elevator, and up to Radiology on the fourth floor.
He had called ahead, requesting stat. The X-ray tech was waiting in her green, heavy lead apron by the table, and they got Jill onto it, on her back.
“Shield my ovaries!” Jill said; David and the tech both said, yes, yes, as the tech laid a rectangular, heavy lead drape over Jill’s lower abdomen.
“Don’t you worry honey,” the tech soothed, sliding the conical X-ray tube along its ceiling track. Her nametag read Sherry Burke.
David told her, “I want to screen for a fracture or fragment dislocation,” and filled out the requisition form while Sherry, smiling encouragingly, X-rayed first a frontal view of Jill’s hip, then bent to change the cassette.
“Next part’s going to hurt a little,” Sherry said, sweetly apologetic as she got Jill to roll onto her side, injured side down, closest to the film.
Jill gritted her teeth; held her breath until the second film was taken. Seconds later she was on her back again, then David helped her into a sitting position with her head down, feet hanging off the edge.
“You okay?” he asked, bending to her slightly and trying to catch her eye.
“Yeah, peachy.” She seemed suddenly abstracted; was fiddling with the rectangular lead drape.
“Amazing,” she said, hefting it. “This is the smallest drape and it’s so heavy. It’s only, what? Twelve by thirty inches, roughly? Seems like it weighs a ton.”
“For radiation protection. It’s made of lead.” David looked up to greet a radiology resident named Andy Chow who’d just come trotting in, apologizing for being late, his running shoe laces flopping. The X-rays were ready and both of them clipped the films into the viewer box to examine them.
Sherry, seeing Jill still fiddling with the drape, stuck a thumb into her thick green apron. It covered from her chest to her knees, like long, weighty overalls. “You think that’s heavy?” she said. “This damn thing weighs twenty pounds.”
“Twenty pounds!”
“Feels more like fifty. It’s pure lead filaments inside and I gotta wear it all day. Well, it beats getting radiated.”
By the viewer box, Andy Chow turned. “Hey Jill, good news. You’ve got maybe a hairline fracture in the shaft of your femur. It’s so thin I can barely see it.”
She looked at him, relieved. David scowled at the film and Andy pointed to it. “You can walk on it,” he said. “Just don’t run or ice skate and take it easy for a few days. No plaster or brace needed, maybe a crutch if you get extra achy. Use pain reliever if needed, and no more falling through floors, okay? Deal?”
Jill promised not to fall through any more floors.
They thanked him. Andy gave a cheery wave back, and off he jogged.
As David helped Jill limp out, Sherry nudged her arm. “Pain reliever if needed?” she scoffed. “You give yourself good stuff, hear?”
“Already am.” Jill gave a goofy grin and jerked her thumb to David. “He started me on Percocet.”
“Give her more,” Sherry told him sternly.
They both needed to see Jesse.
The little guy was sleeping, his curled fist to his face, under his blue blanket in his isolette. Jill settled in the rocking chair and cradled him. After long, nightmare hours it felt so good to hold him; Jesse was comforting her. David pulled his chair close, and ran a gentle finger down the baby’s cheek. The nursery was softly lit, a place of innocence with pictures of lambs and puppies on the wall.
A nurse just leaving smiled at them. “He’s all fed and changed,” she said. “Hoovered his formula and just went back to sleep. He’s so easy.”
Then the nurse remembered. It had been on TV and all over the hospital and the media. “Oh!” She looked at Jill. “How are you?”
“Achy,” Jill told her. “Really achy.”
“Been there,” the nurse said. “Fell off the garage roof trying to get my kid’s Wiffle ball. Not too smart, huh? Well, feel better fast. I think it feels better to move. That’s what I did.”
She smiled and left.
Silence
again, long, blessed moments of it. “Wiffle balls,” David said finally. Inhaled. “Can you picture Jesse old enough to start flinging balls around?”
“I so want to.”
She handed the baby to him. He grinned, cradling him, adjusting the little blue blanket. Jesse squirmed, and a tiny fist came out. David held it, and smiled down at the sleeping little face as if he’d never held a newborn before.
Like a new dad.
Jill leaned closer. Said yearningly, “I so want to adopt him.”
David said nothing, still holding the warm bundle, the tiny fist.
“Others are clamoring for him. If we don’t speak up…”
Conflicting emotions crossed David’s face. He swallowed hard. “I cannot imagine someone else going off with him,” he said softly. “Walking away with him.” A troubled hesitation. “But-”
“I know. We’re targets for every weirdo. With us, he gets recognized, targeted, maybe bullied as he grows up.” Jill raised her hands helplessly. “But maybe less as the world gets used to…him, to this thing that Cliff Arnett did. You heard that patient Kim the Lawyer ask if this could be done for her?”
“It’ll be ages before they figure how Arnett did it.”
“Who ever believed man would walk on the moon?”
David’s cell phone chirped. He twisted so Jill could get it out of his pocket.
She listened, her features suddenly dropping to beyond exhaustion. “Emergency,” she sighed, giving David his phone back. “Urgent.”
Their respite had lasted barely twenty minutes. Reluctantly, they put Jesse back in his isolette, and hurried past the uniformed nursery guard and the young cop seated just outside with his sleeping Shepherd.
The dog was instantly awake, eyeing them warily.
“It’s okay, Maverick,” the cop told him, giving them a little wave. Maverick put his head back down.
Overhead in the hall, the PA was softly calling their names. Urgent, urgent…
Adrenalin spiked, and Jill moved fast by favoring her good leg. It created a lurching effect.
The elevator got them speedier than usual to the teeming ER. Jill lurched stoically behind David. He glanced back and couldn’t restrain a little snicker.
“You look like Quasimodo.”
“It feels better to move. It’s not like I rolled off a garage.”
34
The wrenching scene they never got used to: red and blue lights flashing, beep beep as the ambulance backed up to the ER dock. EMTs opened the ambulance doors and rushed in to a gurney laden with someone suffering, bleeding, maybe dying.
“Wait here,” David said, rushing out to help get the gurney through Emergency’s double sliding doors. One EMT, holding up the IV, yelled, “Abdominal stab wound, patient female, airway open, pulse 140, blood pressure 150/90, respiration 26, head trauma.”
Abdominal stab wound and head trauma? David reached Jill and they traded looks.
She lurched alongside as they got the gurney into a cubicle. The woman was semi-conscious, her face smeared with blood from a gash to her head. With the IV in place and her vitals known, David ordered two tubes of blood drawn: one for the hemoglobin and hematocrit, the other for type and cross match.
“Any I.D.?” he said through his mask, his gloved hands examining the stabbed belly, moving his stethoscope carefully over it. His breath caught. “She’s about three months pregnant. There’s still a fetal heartbeat.”
Another tense glance to Jill, swabbing blood from the woman’s face.
Her expression had turned to dread.
“What’s this?” David again.
He was running his gloved fingertips over the belly’s bloody surface. “I’m feeling some sort of particles in the blood.”
Fast, he yanked the needle off a syringe, drew up three cc’s of blood, emptied the syringe into a test tube, and ordered it sent up to the Hematology lab. “Determine nature of granules found in blood,” he dictated to a nurse, who filled out the tube’s label and ran out with it.
Jaw clenched, he asked the second nurse to carefully collect the woman’s clothes, shoes, and her purse the EMTs had brought in.
Jill suddenly stopped what she was doing.
“David,” she breathed.
He raised his eyes to her.
She was blinking down at the woman, a gauze pad bright with blood in her hand.
“It’s…” She looked at him, her eyes wide, incredulous. “Dara Walsh.”
He stepped closer, removing his stethoscope.
“Dara?” he said, stunned. “What in hell-”
The curtains flew open and Sam MacIntrye ran in. “Got your call, we just finished upstairs,” he said in a rush. Then frowned, read their expressions. “What?”
They told him, and his jaw dropped. “Dara Walsh?”
“Three months pregnant,” David said. “The stab is close to or involving the uterus, but there’s still a fetal heartbeat.”
MacIntrye stared incredulously, absorbing this. “We gotta take her up.”
David double-checked the nurse collecting Dara’s belongings, then glanced at Jill. “Call the O.R. Describe and tell them to be ready.”
By the time they were scrubbed and entering the O.R., Dara was anesthetized and intubated, with whole blood hanging on the IV pole ready to go into her tubing. The respirator whooshed and two separate monitors beeped: Dara’s and her unborn child’s. At three months gestation, the fetal heart rate on the oscilloscope screen was normal at 160 beats a minute.
A good sign…so far. And a quick MRI had shown no cerebral damage.
David made a vertical incision adjacent to the stab wound, long enough so he could explore the outside of the uterus and adjacent organs for injury.
Then they retracted the incision, MacIntyre’s gloved hands holding it apart as Jill inserted the stainless steel retractors.
Blood welled the cavity and David couldn’t see. A nurse suctioned out the blood. Jill reached a bit jerkily to start new IV blood flowing into Dara’s tubing.
“Uterus just nicked,” David said as soon as the field was clear. “She and the baby are lucky, stab didn’t go through.”
“The stab’s just five centimeters deep.” MacIntyre was frowning above his mask. “Two inches.”
“Yeah. Not very penetrating.”
“Funny shaped stab too. Angled like from a box cutter.”
“Yup.” Quickly, David inspected the adjacent bowel and blood vessels. “No damage there either,” he muttered. “Lucky again.”
“Too lucky?” MacIntyre’s frown deepened. “There’s something weird about this. That head wound was superficial. It’s like her attacker only wanted to do minimal damage.”
“I was thinking that.”
Her attacker. Something weird about this. Jill’s mind whirled. Dara Walsh? She closed her eyes for a second. No way to understand…
With a curved needle and absorbable sutures, David closed the small uterine wound, took a last look around for other internal injury, and then sutured closed the layers of abdominal wall: fibrous tissue, abdominal muscle, and finally the skin.
“Done.” He glanced at one of the nurses. “She can go to Recovery now.”
The nurses wheeled Dara on her O.R. table through swinging doors.
While the doctors scrubbed out, different nurses in the recovery room cubicle followed Dara’s vital signs, her pulse, blood pressure, respiration and temperature.
“How long before she wakes up?” asked a younger nurse.
“Ten minutes,” said an older nurse. “The anesthesia only lasts as long as it’s being administered, plus a few minutes, give or take.”
She glanced out. “As soon as she wakes, start her painkillers. She’ll be groggy but the cops want to talk to her.”
“Why don’t we just sleep here? Pack a bag, bring our toothbrushes?”
Pappas wasn’t surprised to be back already. Once a detective caught a case, it was his through sleepless days and nights. Alex groused
about the lumpy cots in the stationhouse dorm, and Pappas said he’d lost count of the times his wife had threatened to divorce him.
David smiled grimly, sitting, wiping his wet hands and forearms on paper towels. His expression changed. He was still stunned. “The victim this time is Dara Walsh. It doesn’t make sense.”
Pappas took a last swig of coffee and grimaced. Someone else on call had made it obscenely strong. “Well, we know it’s not Nash,” he said, exhaling. “The killer’s still out there, in a rage, getting careless. Can’t get to his snakes because the church is now surrounded by cops cars, Health Department gets to work in the morning. He probably saw it on the news.”
“Has to be Brian Walsh.” Brand looked stymied too. “But what could his beef with Dara be?”
“Besides the fact that she didn’t seem to like him?” David asked.
They all looked tense and exhausted. Going on their nerves. Before them on the OB lounge coffee table were empty Styrofoam coffee cups.
The detectives had been on the phone with the CSU. M.O. was the same. Dara had been pulled into an alley and attacked while on her way to her night job. So far no DNA, no fibers, evidence, or witnesses. They’d also been trying to find Brian Walsh. He wasn’t answering his phone – no surprise - and uniforms sent to his apartment reported nobody there. They were waiting for a warrant to break in. Fat chance at this hour.
Jill had been with them briefly, then excused herself saying she’d be right back.
And back she came now, hobbling on a crutch. “Just temporary,” she managed. “Standing at an O.R. table starts hurting even if you haven’t fallen through a floor.” She was still shaky from the shock of Dara’s attack. Still incredulous. What did it mean?
“Percocet?” David asked her.
“Almost time for the next one.” Pale, she sat with a small groan next to David, propping her crutch on a near chair.
David rubbed his unshaven cheek. “There’s something wrong about Dara’s attack,” he said gravely. Unconsciously he touched his drooping dark hair. “For starters, her head bash wasn’t serious. The scalp is very vascular. Even a small laceration can produce a lot of blood. Her attacker didn’t hit her hard like the others. Not even close.”
