Sweet Dreams Boxed Set

by Brenda Novak

  Cruz grabbed the bottle. Vodka? In her bedroom? But he wasn’t going to question her when she was wielding a surgical knife about.

  She doused her instruments and the wound with the vodka and cut an X-incision around the entry point, which caused a spurt of bleeding. “Staunch that,” she ordered.

  While he daubed the wound with sterile gauze from the kit, she deftly probed with forceps in the open, bloody wound until she pulled something out with a cry of triumph. “Ha, got you, you little bugger!”

  Ten minutes later she’d stitched the opening, bandaged it carefully, and stripped off her gloves. Cruz watched her closely, marveling at the look of calm satisfaction in her expression. She was amazing. “You do this often?”

  She smiled at last. “He’s not out of danger yet. Let’s get him on the bed.”

  Cruz frowned. “He’s a bloody, filthy mess.”

  She arched both brows this time. “You think I care about my bed linen right now?”

  Annoyed, he stood and walked into the hall. He’d noticed the narrow closet on his way in, one of those abstract facts you store unaware in your mind. A linen closet. He opened the door and reached for the most worn-looking sheets and blankets he saw.

  “This’ll do,” he said, spreading a blanket and a torn, but clean sheet over the light lavender comforter.

  She’d already begun cutting off Cole’s clothing with scissors, stripping him naked. Cole’s body was white and dingy and aromatic. Together they worked to get him on the bed, and Frankie wrapped him closely in the other sheet and blanket, leaving the left part of his chest exposed.

  “Now what?” Cruz asked.

  “Now we wait to see if he lives,” Frankie answered.

  They stared at the homeless man for long moments.

  “Why do you keep a bottle of vodka in your bedroom?” Cruz asked in a rare moment of non-sequitur.

  Chapter 44

  Cruz never made it to breakfast with Slater the next – or rather, this – morning. After tending to Cole’s wounds, he and Frankie had tanked on volumes of coffee to keep their minds sharp enough to figure out what the hell they’d gotten themselves into.

  Slater would have to wait.

  Cruz turned off his cell phone after the first several voice mails and text messages that started with the same annoying question, “Where the hell are you, Cruz?”

  Frankie stared at Cruz across the kitchen table, holding a coffee cup to her lips. “You should call him back,” she suggested, nodding toward the cell phone. “It might be important.”

  Cruz swiped a weary hand across his damp forehead. Like this wasn’t important? But she was right. While she went upstairs to check on Cole, he dialed the Sheriff.

  A cloudy, moody pallor shadowed the view through the living room windows as Cruz looked out onto the calm residential street. He powered up his phone. Another voice-mail message.

  Slater.

  “We’ve got deep, crazy shit going on, Chago.” Slater’s voice was rushed and tremulous. “Patch finished Dickey’s autopsy. Dr. Foster’s report was correct. He died from blunt force trauma to the head, but hell, it’s strange. The internal exam was different from the Hightower girl’s autopsy. Although Patch found Valerie didn’t have an – ”

  The voice message exceed the time limit and ended abruptly. Cruz dialed Slater’s cell. Direct to voice mail. This revolving machine crap was wearing on Cruz’s nerves. He walked back into the kitchen, finding Frankie there, puzzling over the note.

  “We’re going to work on this now?” He heard the sharp tone in his voice.

  “All right, then let’s talk about tonight,” she retorted. “Like who attacked us? In fact, who was the man after? Me – or Cole? How did he find out I was here? That enough for you to chew on?”

  Frankie lifted one brow, but remained silent after the brief outburst. Resigned, he refilled his coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. “You’re right. The answer to all those questions is – I don’t know. Maybe you were followed from the station house earlier?”

  She’d already begun shaking her head. “Pretty sure I wasn’t.”

  “So neither of us knows. Let’s look at the note.”

  Both stared at the scribbled, incomprehensible letters. “I got nothing,” Cruz said after a few moments. “But I’ve been wanting to ask you a question.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You admitted to keeping secret medical records on the inmates that passed through your clinic.”

  He cocked his head to examine her normally passive face. Right now it was pale and deep shadows lay under her eyes. He imagined he looked just as haggard. “What made you suspicious in the first place?”

  She shrugged uncomfortably, her face flushed with momentary color. “I just thought that something illegal – or at least ethically wrong – was going on in the prison.”

  “Is that why you specifically targeted Pelican Bay?”

  She shook her head negligently. “That was sheer accident. An opening came up and I applied. I just – you know – wanted to stay close to Rosedale, where I’d been raised.”

  She would not tell him about her father unless it was absolutely necessary, she vowed. That was private, personal business, and anyway, she didn’t want her father’s situation to color Cruz’s view of the facts.

  He gazed at her shrewdly and took another sip of his coffee. Was she so transparent?

  “There’s other prisons,” he pointed out. “Vacaville – it’s less than an hour from Rosedale. Or Folsom, almost around the corner.” He tried to keep his voice casual, tried not to probe even though he suspected the story she was telling him was not the whole truth.

  She’d been toying with a napkin and now snapped her eyes up to meet his. “Does it matter? Why the interrogation? Crescent City had an immediate opening.”

  Frankie Jones was definitely holding back. His gaze wandered back to the cell phone’s cryptic message. What got Slater jazzed up about Dickey’s autopsy?

  “Okay,” he said. “What did you find at Pelican Bay?”

  Frankie had been suspicious from the first week of work, she explained. An underlying system of graft was lining the pockets of some correctional officers at PBSP. She’d seen the lax protocol of dispensing drugs to patients, and suspected some of the nurses who worked the clinic were pilfering from the medicine cabinet.

  The locked one, with her the only possessor of the key.

  “Obviously, someone had access to the controlled medications,” Cruz said.

  Frankie had made a duplicate copy the second day on the job, disliking the idea that as the prescribing physician she had only one key to obtain the Schedule III and IV drugs needed for her terminally ill patients.

  After ten months working at the prison, she had enough proof to nail the guilty officers and inmates.

  “That’s it? Stealing and selling drugs?” he asked.

  Her gaze shifted away from his. “Yeah,” she answered after a moment.

  Cruz knew she was lying. He prickled at the idea. She’d found something else going on at Pelican Bay. But if it didn’t relate to the murders in Rosedale, he didn’t care.

  Chapter 45

  Cole ran a slight fever.

  While Frankie rounded up some old clothes that had belonged to her father, Cruz tried to sponge the street dirt off the ex-con. Together the two of them cleaned and dressed him without disturbing or aggravating his wounds.

  Feeling an irrational moment of jealousy, Cruz considered asking Frankie about the male clothing – who did they belong to? – but decided against it.

  When they returned to the kitchen, Cruz motioned toward the kitchen chair, and as if their conversation hadn’t been interrupted, asked, “So first you noticed the missing drug supplies at the prison. And then what?”

  “Yes, it was so negligible I couldn’t be sure.” Frankie smiled wanly. “Everyone thinks items are strictly accounted for – medical supplies, instruments, drugs – but it’s hard to get precise counts. Ther
e’s an emergency, staff get careless, the cabinet is left open for easier access. Supplies are dropped on the floor, contaminated, then thrown away.”

  She shrugged. “The clinic is a fast-track event one day, a leisure-cruise the next. If we get several days’ worth of emergencies in a row, items... just get lost.”

  Some kind of buying and selling was going on in D Block, she explained, but it wasn’t just the drugs that were pilfered from her clinic. After a few months she saw a pattern of visitation to the clinic and disappearance from the secured medications cabinet. The doses were small, so infinitesimal she could’ve considered it a miscount or human error.

  Gradually, she heard snippets of conversation among the inmates. The prisoners were astonishingly loose-mouthed around her, as though her white medical jacket separated her from the guards. Like they had immunity around her, or knew she wouldn’t snitch.

  She’d finally put the bits and pieces together. Inmates could buy or sell just about anything – cell phones, cigarettes, drugs – and a few of the guards turned a blind eye for a kick back. Since she kept such meticulous records, she was finally able to pin the disappearance of drugs from the clinic on two particular inmates – both white and members of the Lords – and one of her staff nurses.

  And this was just the pilfering she’d been able to document within the clinic. Apparently, quite a lot of trafficking went on in D Block, all under the direction of the Lords of Death.

  Cruz rested his chin on his fist. “So you started your – what do you call it? – your secret database. When was that?” Cruz asked.

  “The beginning of my second week on the job, early in February.” She stretched sore muscles. “Yes, I started inputting data for every patient who visited the clinic.”

  “What kind of data?”

  “Anything. Vitals, symptoms, drugs,” Frankie enumerated. “My eventual intent was to do a non-critical health evaluation on each inmate in the prison.”

  “That’s an ambitious goal,” he murmured. “Is it prison protocol?”

  “Yes, ambitious, and no, not protocol at all. Usually the physician in charge responds to requests or complaints from individual inmates. Some go years without seeing a doctor or dentist.”

  Cruz rose and got each of them a glass of water. “Did anyone notice what you were doing?”

  “No one said anything at the time, but – but now I think there must’ve been all kinds of questions and rumors flying around.” She took a deep drink of water, wiped her upper lip with her fingers. “Why was I examining all inmates? Was I looking for something specific? Was I trying to upset the system, make trouble?” She frowned. “Nothing from admin, though, which surprised me.”

  “Were you getting routine evaluations?”

  “Just one, about three months into the job. That was it, nothing else.”

  “Did you find anything concrete, something you could take to the CDCR board?” Cruz asked.

  Frankie looked serious and disturbed, her porcelain face like a doll’s ready to crack, her wide gray eyes turbulent and angry, her mouth a thin, tight line. “Yes, I did. When I had a large enough sample, I noticed an unusually high number of abdominal surgical scars among the inmates. Statistically speaking.”

  Cruz was confused. What the hell did that mean? He stomped down his impatience, letting her tell the story her own way.

  Noting his perplexity, Frankie continued, “A statistically high number of inmates at Pelican Bay have had an organ removed – appendix, gall bladder, but probably a kidney.”

  “That’s ... irregular?”

  “Let me explain it this way: you have fifty friends, random people not related to each other. Out of the fifty, over twenty of them – that’s forty percent or more – have had a kidney, gallstone, appendix removed.”

  “That’s a lot, but why? How?”

  “I don’t know, but someone in the prison is performing abdominal surgeries on prison inmates. While a few of the scars are old, too many of them are recently performed.”

  Cruz shoved back in his chair, astonished. “You can tell by looking at the scars?”

  Frankie nodded.

  “Could it be a coincidence?”

  “No, not possible, statistically speaking. While these men are incarcerated they’re having some kind of surgery that appears to be unnecessary.” Frankie troubled her bottom lip. “I can’t tell which organs are missing – there’s no surgical record – but they’re not vital ones, or the patient would die. Probably a kidney.”

  “Shit,” Cruz exclaimed. “What’s going on at that prison?”

  “I don’t know,” Frankie confessed, “but it scares the hell out of me.”

  “We’ve got to take this to Slater,” he muttered. “Right away. It might be tied to our murders here in the county.”

  Chapter 46

  He’d been expecting the order for more merchandise, but still the shock of it rumbled through his body like thunder. He needed a good stiff drink. He reached for dependable old Jimmy Bean, and poured himself a shot, neat.

  Did the men he supplied have any idea how hard his part of this ungodly bargain was? Slicing through human flesh and removing delicate organs without damaging them? The skill and delicacy of the blade? The surgeon-like precision of each stroke?

  Keeping them viable, packed in ice, the timing of communication and delivery? Hoping they could use the merchandise, that the blood types matched? A dozen important details.

  So far, they’d taken the organs regardless, so he speculated they had a wide customer base. Wealthy-beyond-belief people who could bypass hundreds of names on a donator list and soar straight to the top. Or a lot of filthy rich someones who could hire rogue doctors willing to perform an operation on the down-low for an insane fee.

  It was as risky for them to distribute as it was for him to procure, but they must have a large force of thugs to execute their work, while he was the solitary person slicing and dicing the general public. At least he thought he was the only one.

  He grunted mockingly, on his way to being stinking drunk.

  He’d gotten smarter about the procedures. More selective at choosing the “client,” and more wily about the surgeries themselves. He was no board-certified surgeon, of course, but he knew how to remove major organs. The trick was not damaging them.

  There was no real concern about the patient dying under the knife, however. He snorted, sluicing whiskey up his nose. He fell into a fit of coughing as he grinned at the irony.

  Nonetheless, the greater the risk, the higher the profit. And he was very pleased with the profit. How many, though, before he turned a profit for himself?

  “Do you have a gun?” Cruz asked, thinking wildly of the invasion, and Cole Hansen upstairs and no help at all. His filthy clothes in the dumpster, no longer staining Frankie’s pristine bed linens.

  “What?”

  He didn’t like the fact that they hadn’t called emergency services, but if they took him to a hospital, they’d be required to report a bullet wound to the police.

  “We don’t want that kind of scrutiny until we know who we can trust,” Frankie had explained.

  Cruz agreed. “Local police could be in on this. We don’t know how wide Anson Stark’s ring of corruption reaches.”

  She hadn’t gotten a good look at the intruder who shot Cole, but Cruz guessed by the fact the man ran off that he was a gang banger, some punk-ass member of the Lords of Death sent to frighten or kill Frankie. Or Cole, who certainly had a target on his back by now.

  “What?” Frankie repeated.

  “A gun. You need protection.”

  “Don’t worry, I have several guns.”

  That surprised him. Most doctors he knew were anti-gun people. “Know how to use them?”

  She laughed, as if he’d said something amusing. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “My father taught me. I could shoot cans off a fence when I was barely able to steady a pistol. Dad took me hunting eve
ry year – deer, elk, bear in season, here and in Utah and Idaho.” She sounded nostalgic, and a little proud.

  “Where is Dad now?”

  Her face shut down fast, a smooth-as-glass calmness that made her look like she was made of crystal. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”

  More secrets, but concern for the immediate dilemma made Cruz decide to let the subject drop. “Show me the guns.”

  Upstairs in a smaller bedroom, clearly used as an office now, was a locked gun cabinet. Not only did Frankie have a .22 rifle, but a 12-gauge shotgun, and two hand guns – a .40-caliber Beretta and a larger, heavier Glock. Cruz was impressed. Anyone with this kind of small arsenal definitely knew how to handle a loaded weapon.

  “Cartridges?”

  She opened a locked drawer on the side of a wide mahogany desk where rows of magazines, cartridges, and bullets filled the inside.

  He smiled. “Guess I don’t have to worry about leaving you alone.”

  He gently put one hand on her shoulder. “It’d still be a mistake to underestimate these guys. They caught you off guard once. They can do it again.”

  “I thought I was safe here,” she admitted, “that no one knew about this house. That won’t happen again.” Her stormy gray eyes darkened like a thunder cloud rolling across a heavy sky. “I’ll have more than a baseball bat next time.”

  “Let’s hope there won’t be a next time.”

  From his car Cruz listened to Slater’s message again and called him. The Sheriff picked up right away.

  “Slater, what’s going on?”

  “You won’t believe it,” the Sheriff answered. “Meet me at the morgue in twenty minutes.”

  “Wait!” Cruz shouted. “A lot has happened since I talked to you – a hell of a lot of messed-up shit.”

  “Same here. Make it quick. Best not to talk over the phone.”

  “Aw, hell!” Cruz hung up, thinking what Slater had to say couldn’t possibly be worse that what he had to tell the Sheriff.