Warning Signs

by C. J. Lyons

She started down the steps again, resisting the urge to watch her left foot, scrutinize its every movement. She continued down to the basement tunnels and began to travel the dark and twisty tunnels to pathology. The morgue was here too, along with the autopsy suites—as was the original hospital infrastructure: the crematorium, boiler room, laundry facilities, mechanical room, storage, and so on.

  This main building of the hospital had sections that went back more than a hundred and fifty years. As the building was remodeled and expanded and remodeled again, the tunnel complex grew into a maze combining the occasional brightly lit, recently painted corridors with the original tile-walled, cement-floor tunnels.

  Once when she’d taken a wrong turn down here, she’d even found an area of painted brick walls—some of the original passageways rumored to connect the hospital with the cemetery across the street.

  Amanda shivered at the thought and hugged her coat around her tighter. Her footsteps rang out on the concrete. It was lunchtime and the tunnels were deserted. Her stomach rumbled as she thought about lunch, but she needed to get Becky’s pathology results first.

  She rounded a corner, trying to breathe shallowly. She could swear the closer she got to pathology the more she could smell the sweet stench of decay.

  It was just her imagination. Pathology was in one of the newer sections, and the lab workers took pride in the fact that modern technology helped them eliminate 99 percent of the odors associated with their work. But still she swore she smelled something … overripe, like peaches left in the sun too long.

  One more turn and she’d be back in the well-lit, modern length of tunnel. A steam pipe burped overhead and she jumped. She quickened her steps, turned the corner, and plowed into a man rushing from the other direction.

  She recognized Lucas Stone just as her heels skidded out from under her. Her hands flailed about, knocking against him. He kept his balance, but the sheaf of papers he carried went flying in all directions as Amanda landed flat on her butt.

  The impact thudded through her, almost as bad as when she’d done a banana-peel slip on the ice last winter. Worse was the humiliation.

  As she struggled to catch her breath, Lucas was chuck-ling even as he knelt beside her. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” Ouch. No. She resisted the urge to massage her bruised hip and tugged her dress down in attempt to regain some dignity. “I’m fine.”

  “Really? Sounded like you hit pretty hard.”

  Damn it, if only he’d stop looking at her. She started to push up to her knees. “I said I’m fine.”

  He wrapped his hands around her wrists to help leverage her to her feet, bringing them both up to standing in one smooth motion. She felt his breath against the top of her head, her face almost touching his chest for one brief moment. Then he dropped his hands and stepped back.

  “Took me twenty minutes to get these results in order,” he said, crouching to collect the scattered papers.

  “What are they?”

  “Becky Sanborn’s path results—most of them at least. Ken Rosen still has some micro sections.”

  Now guilt added to embarrassment. It was her job to take care of stuff like paperwork—not her attending’s. “I was going to get those for you.”

  She bent down to grab a stray sheet of paper and her left leg began to quiver. Damn it, not now.

  Carefully, she retrieved the lab result and stood again, hovering close to the wall, hoping he didn’t notice.

  “You were at your appointment and I left Jim monitoring Tracey. I don’t mind; I wanted to look at the slides myself anyway.” His voice trailed off as he leaned over to grab a sheet that had skittered across the hall to land beside her feet.

  She would have backed off but she didn’t trust her leg to move. Strange electrical shocks raced through the side of her calf, and she bit her lip to keep from crying out in pain.

  Lucas knelt at her feet, the paper forgotten as he touched a finger to her calf, eliciting a lightning strike of pain. “Amanda.” He rocked back, looked up at her. She had her fist against her mouth, trying to fight back both pain and fear. “What the hell is going on?”

  Amanda gulped in two deep breaths. “Dr. Nelson is running some tests, but he said everything is going to be fine.”

  His shoulders hunched, and he practically bared his teeth at the mention of Dr. Nelson. “Fine. Right.”

  He stood and faced her, his expression twisted with a strange mix of concern and annoyance. “Wait here; I’ll be right back. Then we’re going to have a long talk.”

  If she had had the strength she would have walked away, leaving him. She hated the way he presumed he was smarter than Dr. Nelson or that he had any right to order her about. Hated even more that he had seen her weakness. But her left leg was now quivering uncontrollably and wouldn’t hold her weight, so walking away wasn’t an option.

  Even more frightening was that when she looked down she could see muscle fasciculations—abnormal contractions that writhed below the skin like a nest of riled-up copperheads. Oh boy, that wasn’t good. Tracey Parker had had muscle fasciculations; so had Becky Sanborn, a day before she died.

  Before her morbid thoughts could proceed down that path any further, Lucas returned with a rolling office chair from the lab down the hall.

  “Sit,” he directed, giving her no choice as he took her elbows and steered her into the chair. Then he gathered the rest of Becky’s results and thrust the papers at her to hold while he pushed her down the hall.

  “I’m fine,” she protested as the cramping and electrical shocks faded. She glanced down at her leg. The fasciculations had stopped as well. Tentatively she flexed her foot. Everything seemed back to normal. “Dr. Nelson said it was probably an electrolyte imbalance—I haven’t had anything to eat or drink all day.”

  Lucas shoved open the door to the lab. It was one of the small conference rooms, equipped with a table, an electronic microscope, and a large monitor. No one else was using the room. He rolled her chair over the threshold and parked her at the table.

  “It’s after noon. When was the last time you had anything to eat?” he demanded, sweeping through the room and bringing her a glass of water from the cooler in the corner.

  She had to think. She’d grabbed a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich on her way to the boathouse this morning. “About four-thirty or so. I’m fine, Dr. Stone. Really.”

  She pushed out of the chair and stood, stomping her foot up and down to prove her point. She didn’t tell him about the numbness. No need to stir him up again.

  He peered at her as if she were under the microscope rather than standing in front of it. “Sit. Drink this. I’m going to find you some food, and when I get back you’re going to tell me everything about your symptoms. Everything,” he added when she opened her mouth to protest. “From the beginning.”

  He stepped to the inside door leading into the main lab complex. “Don’t even think of leaving—unless you want to fail this rotation.”

  He started to close the door behind him, then stopped to look back around the frame, again scrutinizing her intently. Intense. That was Lucas Stone, she thought as he finally closed the door behind him. As intense as an owl eyeing a mouse, deciding whether it was worth the effort of catching and eating.

  She was not a mouse. She gulped down the rest of the water, stood, and tested her balance. A few black spots washed over her vision, and then she was fine. She took a few experimental steps, staying close to the table. Just fine.

  Her pager blared, sending a jolt of adrenaline through her. Damn thing. She glanced at the screen. The PICU. Alice Kazmierko.

  She was fine—just needed to take better care of herself, was all. And there was nothing Lucas Stone was going to say that would make her stop doing her job. She didn’t care what kind of threats he made.

  Besides, she already had a brilliant doctor taking care of her—who needed Lucas Stone, anyway? She marched out of the room, taking Becky’s misarranged chart with her. She’d tak
e care of Alice, grab a candy bar from the vending machines, and dissect Becky’s chart so that by the time Lucas tracked her down, she’d already have the work done for him.

  And maybe she’d find some clues to help Tracey Parker along the way. She made it to the elevator without trouble—except for the occasional scuff of her left toes against the floor. The elevator doors opened onto the fourth floor. As she turned the corner toward the PICU she stumbled slightly, easily catching her balance.

  The doors to the PICU whooshed her inside, and she saw a man leaning over Alice’s bed, pushing the nurses away, inconsolable. Amanda shoved Becky’s lab work into her coat pocket and rushed over to help.

  AS SOON AS NORA, JANET, AND TANESHA LEFT, Boyle collapsed back against the gurney. “Aw, shit.”

  Lydia glanced at Trey, figuring he’d be more forthcoming with answers than the stoic detective. As she used her trauma shears to cut away the blood-soaked jacket sleeve, she asked once more, “What happened?”

  “Janet and Captain America here were interviewing a witness over in East Liberty when they heard a commotion. Turns out some pimp—”

  “Yancy Gates,” Boyle supplied, closing his eyes as the fabric of his suit parted. Wrapped around his left forearm was a compression bandage stained with blood.

  “Was beating one of his girls,” Trey continued, helping to ease Boyle free from the remnants of his jacket. Underneath he wore only a T-shirt. Trey had undoubtedly removed Jerry’s dress shirt at the scene before applying the dressing. “Jerry rushed in, saved the girl, and got sliced for his trouble.”

  “Surprised Janet didn’t shoot Yancy. Or did she and the guy’s DOA?” Lydia began to cut through the layers of the dressing.

  Trey hooked Boyle up to the monitor, ignoring his feeble protest at the “fuss over just a cut.”

  “Janet couldn’t get a clear shot,” Trey continued. “Guy got away.”

  “Hmm. What’d he use? Must have been sharp. This looks pretty clean.” The wound sliced down the inside of Boyle’s arm; now that she had removed the compression dressing, blood flowed in a steady stream from it. “Deep, but clean.”

  “Straight razor,” Boyle answered, his face pale. A thin bead of sweat covered his upper lip, and his heart rate was on the high side. “Son of a bitch carries it on his belt, like a pocket watch, chain and all. It’s his trademark.”

  “Lovely.” Lydia assessed the damage.

  Trey pulled the exam light over for her and inflated the blood pressure cuff above the wound, giving her a clear field to examine.

  “You got off lucky. I don’t see any permanent damage. We’ll do a two-layer closure, update your tetanus, and you’ll be good to go. First, let me get you some pain meds; this is going to take a while.”

  “No meds, I need to stay sharp.”

  Lydia knew he’d say that. “All right. You’re still going to need some fluids. I’ll have a nurse start an IV, we’ll get some volume in you, then I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Check on Tanesha. Make sure Janet hasn’t scared her to death.”

  “Anyone living the life Tanesha is, she isn’t going to be scared easily.”

  Boyle opened his eyes and glanced up at her words. He knew about Lydia’s background—more than Trey did, even. She stood and stripped off her gloves, ignoring his expression of concern.

  “Just check on her. I don’t want to lose her as a witness when we nail Yancy.”

  Right. They both knew how good the odds were of a teenage prostitute staying clean and sober and in one place long enough to testify. But unlike his partner, Lydia knew Boyle’s main concern wasn’t his case—it was his witness. For a cop, the guy had a soft heart. “Sure thing.”

  “Can’t believe I was so stupid,” Boyle muttered. “Good thing it wasn’t Gina who showed up in the ambulance—she would have killed me for sure.”

  TWELVE

  Thursday, 1:11 P.M.

  AFTER BRIBING THE MANICURIST TO TELL LaRose that Gina had been called away and turning her phone off, Gina had driven aimlessly through the streets of Shadyside and East Liberty, chain-smoking her way through half a pack of Gitanes, trying to decide what to do about her parents’ latest bombshell.

  She’d ended up at Angels. As she pulled into the visitors’ parking garage—officially forbidden to students and residents, but where Gina routinely parked—she considered the best way to sneak into her own hospital.

  Avoiding the ER—where if Lydia didn’t spot her, Nora was certain to—Gina walked around the memorial gardens, past the patient tower and outpatient clinics, and ended up at the research tower. She glanced up at the steel-and-glass building, a starkly modern contrast to the older brick patient care wing connected to it via two sky-walks. The research building was sleek, bold, promising answers with its confident stance.

  Answers were exactly what she needed—and the man who held them, Dr. Ken Rosen, had his lab here in this building. Gina pursed her lips, then yanked the glass door open.

  Ken Rosen’s seventh-floor immunology lab resembled a cross between a frat house and Frankenstein’s laboratory. Gina paused inside the doorway, assaulted by dueling boom boxes—one blaring Bach’s Fugue in G Minor, the other Drowning Pool.

  No one was around to lay claim to the noisemakers or to the coffee boiling over on a Bunsen burner, the leaning towers of petri dishes, reams of paper wadded into fist-sized balls, the collection of Steeler bobbleheads, a mountain of empty soda cans spilling out from a recycle bin, or the pair of mice with their noses pressed up against their cage as if welcoming Gina as their savior.

  As an ER doc, Gina prided herself on her ability to thrive on chaos, but this OSHA inspector’s nightmare—how could anyone work here?

  She clicked off one of the boom boxes. Drowning Pool’s impassioned plea to let the bodies hit the floor never sounded so good.

  Immediately a man bounded out from an office in the rear of the lab. “Who turned off that music?” Ken Rosen demanded. He lunged across the room, swiping at the boom box, reinstating the cacophony. “Are you trying to sabotage two years’ worth of work?”

  “No,” Gina yelled above the din. “Just trying to hear myself think.”

  He blinked at her as if she were one of the specimens stacked in the glass cabinets lining the wall behind her. He was average height, wiry but solidly muscled, with dark hair that curled below the collar of the denim shirt he wore over a Godsmack T-shirt. “Gina.”

  That was it, just her name. A man of few words. He turned and walked back to his office, never looking to see if she followed. Which of course irritated the hell out of her because, sure as sure, here she was following him. And admiring the way his ass fit his well-worn Dockers.

  Stop it. She thought of Jerry. The worried, exhausted look on his face the last time she’d seen him, how his hands felt on her body. The way he believed in her—despite knowing the worst about her. He was the man for her.

  Ken Rosen was merely an annoyance, but an annoyance she hoped could help her find the answers she needed.

  Somehow the thought wasn’t enough to totally erase a smidge of guilt as she stepped into Ken Rosen’s office and he closed the door behind them.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, his smile welcoming.

  Gina squirmed. “Maybe this was a mistake.”

  Actually, she was certain it was. She’d had this same weird reaction to Ken the first time they met—huddled together beneath a barrage of bullets. This twisty, Jell-O feeling that made her toes curl.

  Ken merely stared at her, waiting.

  “The EMS guys are no help,” she blurted out, not bothering to explain. “They act like this kind of thing happens all the time.” The mandatory counseling session her residency director had sent her to after the shooting was equally worthless. She’d stayed only long enough to tell the shrink what he wanted to hear and get her chit signed.

  It had been almost as bad as sophomore year at college when her parents found out she’d been seeing a counsel
or. That had rated a triple D on the Gina Freeman Parental Disgust Scale. They’d been dismayed, distraught, and disappointed.

  “What do you need to see a counselor for?” LaRose had whined. “You know you can tell us anything, that we’d do anything for you.”

  Right, anything except postpone a trip to Barbados or, let’s get really radical, listen to their daughter for once.

  “We taught you how to stand on your own two feet, to have some pride,” Moses had preached as he sipped his third martini of the afternoon. “There’s nothing you can’t handle on your own, young woman. Not if you get off your lazy ass and put your mind to it. Remember, what you do reflects on your mother and me as much as it does on you.”

  Somehow “putting her mind to it” hadn’t stopped the nightmares or cold sweats of terror that overcame her at the thought of returning to the streets. “Putting her mind to it” seemed poor protection against a bullet.

  Attitude was everything in this business. And somewhere back on that street in Homewood she’d lost hers.

  But not Ken Rosen. He’d ignored the danger, ignored the bullets—almost getting himself killed as he tried to save an innocent bystander. And had done it all with the same calm, placid, Zen monk demeanor he had now as he waited for her to continue.

  No one could be that content, complacent. At least no one in Gina’s world. She burned with a sudden urge to shatter his calm, to prove to herself that he was as human and fallible as she.

  “So,” he finally said, a slow smile simmering across his features, “you dodged any bullets lately, Gina?”

  “Smartass,” she snapped, leaning up against the wall and crossing her arms in front of her, leveling her best she-who-must-be-obeyed stare on him. Usually it worked on everyone except her father.

  He kicked back, perching on the edge of his cluttered desk. The music from the other room was muted, but the bass line rattled the wall she leaned against, marching its imperative beat into her bones.

  Their staring contest lasted long enough for Gina to realize she had met her match. Mr. Inscrutable didn’t seem to need to blink. He simply met her gaze, placid, unwavering.