Doctor's Orders

by Jessica Andersen

  “Not just Aimee. The entire front desk staff.” He didn’t look the slightest bit ashamed. “Something told me you were going to go off on your own.”

  “I wouldn’t have had to if you’d listened to me and admitted it made sense to reinterview the victims’ friends and families.” Mandy’s knee and shin were pressed warmly against Parker’s thigh, sending unwelcome shimmers of awareness through her system. She glanced down at the floor, wondering fleetingly if she could duck under the table.

  “Don’t even try it,” he said conversationally. “You won’t like what happens.”

  “Fine.” She scowled. “So what now? You’re not seriously going to put me on round-the-clock shifts, are you?”

  “I should.”

  Something loosened inside her. “But you won’t.”

  “Don’t you care that you’re in danger?”

  “Of course, but I’m not going to let the fear run my life, and I’m sure as heck not hiding out when I could be helping with the investigation.”

  “Because of what happened to your mother.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I’m trying not to think of it that way,” she said evenly, though the memory was never far from her consciousness. “But, yes, that’s part of it. If I can help Irene’s kids with the closure I never got, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

  She expected an argument. Instead Radcliff stood and looked down at her for a long moment, eyes unreadable. Then he extended his hand. “Come on.”

  She stood, confused. “Where are we going?”

  “Stankowski ordered a full-fledged forensic autopsy of Irene’s body. I’m due at the Medical Examiner’s in a half hour, and I guess you’re coming along for the ride.”

  PARKER HATED signing both of them out for a long lunch, but the E.R. was relatively quiet. Just in case, he called in two residents to cover the rest of the shift on the theory that it was better to be overstaffed than under.

  Mandy was quiet during the short cab ride across town to the M.E. lab that served the entire city. He wasn’t sure if she was thinking about the case or fuming that he’d elbowed in on her interview, and didn’t particularly care. She was going to have to get one thing straight: whether or not either of them liked it, he was keeping close watch on her for the duration.

  He knew all too well what happened to people who went rushing into dangerous situations running on emotion rather than logic.

  She didn’t break the silence until they were headed up the stairs to the big stone building that housed state offices on the main and second floors, the M.E.’s complex on the lower floor.

  As they pushed through the doors and waited to be checked through security, she glanced at him. “Thanks for bringing me along. I know it must’ve seriously pained you to take me off shift.”

  “Don’t get used to it,” he said, ignoring the faint tug of disquiet at how well she knew him. “And don’t expect preferential treatment once this is over.”

  He didn’t know why he said that, and knew he sounded like an ass the moment the words left his mouth.

  Her lips tightened. “Trust me, expectations are the last thing on my mind right now. I’m just trying to find some answers for Irene’s family. Whatever else she might have been, she was my patient.”

  They jogged down a wide stone stairway to the M.E.’s complex, which looked both high-tech and sterile, with wide, polished hallways and neatly labeled doors.

  Unable to let the conversation lie, though he knew that he absolutely, positively ought to, Parker stopped and snagged her arm, forcing her to swing around and face him.

  Not sure where the impulse had come from, he gave in and touched her face, tipping her chin up so she looked him in the eyes. As it had been the night before when he’d brought her home with him, her expression was soft and vulnerable. The sight of her reached inside and twisted at him, leaving a burn of sensation he didn’t recognize, one that screamed danger.

  He let his hand fall away. “You need to learn to turn off the emotions, Mandy, and forget the losses. It’s the only way you’re going to survive in E.R. medicine.” It wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but he fell back on habit when nothing else made sense.

  She looked at him for a long moment before she stepped away from him and shook her head. “I owe it to my patients not to forget them. If that means I lose some sleep, so be it. But maybe, hopefully, someday those memories will make me slow down and do one more test, ask one more question.” She tilted her head. “Which makes me wonder about your strategy. How do you learn from your mistakes if you forget them the moment they’re out of your life?”

  “I don’t make them in the first place.” Parker turned away and started walking. “Come on, the M.E.’s waiting.”

  It turned out that he wasn’t waiting at all. When Parker pushed through the door to the tile-and-steel autopsy room, he found the head pathologist, Dr. Augustus Robicheau, already at work.

  The dead woman’s body was laid out in the classic position, flat on her back with her arms at her sides and her legs straight and slightly apart. Her skin was gray under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, and there were faint needle tracks in the crooks of both of her arms, where the medical professionals had taken blood and run IVs, all to no avail. Several small cuts on her body, along with the neat rows of specimen jars and evidence bags suggested that the gross external exam was well underway, but the lack of a Y-incision indicated that the pathologist had yet to get to the internal organs.

  A computer sat on a rolling caddy near the autopsy table, its keyboard covered in protective plastic.

  Gus Robicheau, tall and lean to the point of almost being cadaverous himself, wearing a long blue smock, yellow gloves and a face shield, looked up when they entered. “You’re late.”

  “Sorry,” Parker said. “We got hung up in an interview.”

  Gus transferred his attention to Mandy. “Who’s this?”

  “An associate of mine,” Parker said before she could answer. “Stankowski wants her in on this.”

  “She gonna puke?”

  “Of course not. She’s a—” Parker broke off when he turned and saw that Mandy had gone decidedly pale. She was staring at the body, her eyes stark holes in her head, and as he watched, she swallowed hard as though holding bile at bay.

  The funk in the air was unmistakable—the smell of old death and decomp, overlain with sanitizer. That was nothing to the average doctor, though, and couldn’t have accounted for Mandy’s sudden pallor.

  No, this was something more.

  Parker cursed himself inwardly for not remembering how close this case was cutting to her mother’s death. She rarely spoke of it, but from the few hints he’d gathered during their time together, he knew she’d been out with her father and they’d come home to find her mother dead in the family kitchen, surrounded by a pool of blood.

  This wasn’t the same, but the two cases had become linked in her mind, and he could only imagine what she was actually seeing as she looked at Irene Dulbecco’s body laid out on the metal table.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. “You okay?”

  She collected herself with a visible effort, and nodded. “Yes, I’m sorry. Please continue.”

  Gus gave her a long look before he nodded and returned his attention to the body. “I’ve done the external and taken double samples like Stankowski wanted, one set for our lab, one set for you.” He didn’t seem upset by the duplication of effort. “I found something interesting on the X-rays. Have a look at this.” He used a pencil to tap a few computer keys and a digital X-ray popped up on the screen, showing a human skull in profile, along with the top few cervical vertebrae.

  There was a small glowing spot near the occipital bone at the back of the skull.

  “What is that?” Parker leaned in, noting the cylindrical shape and smooth edges of the object, which was about the size of the eraser on the end of the pathologist’s pencil. “A small caliber bullet?” He frowned and glanced at Mandy. “She wasn
’t shot as far as we know.”

  “It’s not a bullet.”

  “Then what is it?” Parker asked.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute if you’ll let me get back to work.” Gus lifted a set of electric clippers and flicked them on, effectively ending the conversation.

  He bent over the body and shaved a small section of her scalp, behind her right ear. Gus clicked on a small recording device. “Removal of the hair above the site of the X-ray anomaly reveals a circular bruise, approximately one centimeter in diameter. Estimated two or three days antemortem.”

  He took several photographs of the bruise. Then, tipping her head to the side, he used a scalpel to cut around the area on three sides. He pulled back the resulting skin flap, muttering, “Not much in the way of tissue right here. Assuming it’s not in the bone, it’s gotta be just under—Aha! Gotcha.”

  Documenting each step with photographs, he used a pair of forceps to tease out a small metal oblong, which he dropped into a specimen jar. He capped the jar and handed it to Parker. “What do you make of this?”

  “You’re right, it’s not a bullet.” He held the container at eye level and looked at the object, which appeared completely smooth and regular, as though it was simply a metal pellet. “Not sure what it is, though.” He handed the jar to Mandy. “You have any ideas? This some sort of funky homeopathic pressure point implant or something?”

  She looked at it long and hard, but shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  Parker set the jar with the others. “Hopefully the police techs will be able to place it.”

  Gus nodded. “I’ll keep it in-house and see what we come up with.” He straightened away from the slab. “That’s it for externals.” He reached for a large scalpel to begin the Y-incision. “Let’s get started with—”

  A siren shrilled from an overhead speaker, interrupting him.

  Mandy gasped and Parker jolted. “What the hell?”

  Gus glared up at the speaker and raised his voice to be heard over the din. “Fire alarm. Idiots are supposed to warn us ahead of time when they’re going to pull a drill.”

  The pathologist stood for a minute, poised with the scalpel in his hand as if trying to decide whether to ignore the alarm and keep going with the autopsy. Finally he cursed and dropped the scalpel back into the instrument tray. “Come on.” He stripped off his gloves and smock, revealing suit pants and a neatly buttoned shirt beneath. “Just in case it’s not a drill.”

  He moved around the room, efficiently locking up the evidence and putting his computer on pass-coded standby.

  There was the sound of hurried footsteps in the hallway, along with scattered shouts of inquiry. Parker caught the words bomb threat and upstairs, and his every sense went on high alert.

  “Do you think this is a coincidence?” Mandy said to him under the din.

  “Maybe.” Probably not, he thought, gripping her arm and keeping her close as they followed Gus out the door.

  The pathologist tapped a few keys on the coded keypad beside the door, and glanced at the other two. “The fire chief has the codes.”

  Which meant the body was safe from anyone without official access.

  The three of them joined the flow of human traffic in the hallway. Parker kept close to Mandy, but it was difficult with the crowd teetering on the edge of hysteria.

  “I smell smoke,” one frazzled-looking woman said, shouting over the blare of the alarm. “Do you smell it?”

  “I heard there was only sixty seconds left on the countdown,” a man’s voice shouted. “The place could go at any minute!”

  Howls of panic greeted that announcement and the crowd surged forward, funneling into the narrow stairwell headed up. Parker lost his grip on Mandy’s arm as she was jostled away from him. Seconds later, he realized he couldn’t see her anymore.

  “Mandy!” he shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth as fear spiked. “Mandy!”

  There was no answer.

  She’d disappeared.

  Chapter Seven

  “Help!” Mandy screamed as she was shoved into a restroom so quickly nobody around her noticed. “Help me!” She thrashed against her captor’s hold, but the alarm drowned out her cries and he was far stronger than she.

  “Shut up!” He spun her, shoved her face-first into the wall beside a paper towel dispenser and yanked her arms up behind her back.

  Craning her neck, she saw hard gray eyes glittering above a surgical mask. He wore latex gloves on his hands, blue ones this time.

  Heart pounding, she struggled against his grip, only half aware of the inhuman sobbing noises she was making in her terror.

  Her captor shifted, holding her wrists in one hand. Pain flared in her arm and her consciousness dimmed. Everything went gray and fuzzy, and she sagged to the floor, barely conscious.

  She was vaguely aware of a thud in her skull and a second prick in her arm, but it all seemed very far away for a few seconds. A voice whispered from very near her ear, “Start the clock. Seventy-two hours until you’re dead.”

  The jolt of adrenaline cleared the mild sedative he must’ve hit her with first. Reality returned in a rush and she scrambled to her feet, fighting to get away from the man in the hooded sweatshirt, mask and gloves, who advanced on her, gray eyes set.

  She screamed, “Radcliff!”

  Seconds later, the bathroom door burst inward. Radcliff bared his teeth and lunged at the hooded figure. The men went down, struggling and cursing.

  Radcliff must have gone for his concealed weapon and lost hold of it in the struggle, because a gun went skidding across the tiles and into a nearby bathroom stall.

  “Get that!” he shouted, hanging on as the hooded man lunged to his feet and kicked Radcliff in the gut, trying to escape.

  “Got it,” Mandy shouted as she scrambled to the toilet stall and crouched down, fishing for the weapon Radcliff had lost. Her head spun, her arm hurt like fury and her stomach was heaving with the knowledge that her attacker had injected her with the toxin they hadn’t yet been able to identify. “Don’t let him get away. We need to know what’s in the poison!”

  Her fingers touched smooth metal. She grabbed the weapon and came up firing.

  Nothing happened.

  Breath sobbing in her lungs, blood a pained inferno in her veins, Mandy fumbled for the safety as the hooded man tore himself away from Radcliff and bolted for the door. She fired, blowing a chunk out of the doorjamb as he dove through. Just as Radcliff lunged in pursuit she fired again. He shouted and dove for the floor, and the bullet lodged in the door head-high.

  “Stop shooting, damn it!” He surged to his feet, grabbed the gun from her and slammed through the door in pursuit. He stopped dead when the swing of the door brought a heavy cloud of smoke into the room. He reeled back, choking.

  “Come on!” He beckoned for Mandy. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  He grabbed her arm, but let go when she screamed in pain.

  His eyes went hollow. “Did he get you?” When she didn’t answer right away, he shook her slightly, “Mandy! Were you injected?”

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  “Where’d the syringe go?”

  “I don’t know,” she said miserably, beginning to wheeze with the smoke. “He must’ve used a short-acting sedative. I remember a thud, then the injection, but none of the details.”

  He made a quick search. “I don’t see the syringe, damn it. He must’ve taken it with him.” He took her other arm, gently this time, and urged her toward the door. “I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to make a run for it. I’m not sure what’s going on out there, but I know I’d rather be outside than in here.” He paused. “Can you make it?”

  She nodded without speaking, afraid she’d burst into tears if she opened her mouth.

  Apparently sensing that she was teetering on the edge, he slid his hand down her arm, linked his fingers with hers and squeezed. “I’m here. I’ve got you. Tru
st me.”

  She nodded miserably, and followed him out the door and into the smoke-filled corridor.

  They were halfway up the stairs, gagging and coughing, when they met a group of firefighters going the other way. The team leader immediately detached two of the rescuers to get Mandy and Parker safely outside.

  Before he went, Parker grabbed the team leader’s arm. “There may be a man down there. He’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt and dark jeans, and may have gloves or a mask on. He’s dangerous, and he’s wanted by the police. Be careful with him, but whatever you do, don’t let him get away!”

  Then they were being hustled outside, into the blessed fresh air. Mandy collapsed to the curb on the opposite side of the street from the smoke-filled building. There was smoke but no fire. She’d heard someone say there had been six smoke bombs set to go off simultaneously in different parts of the building, but the information had only registered on the surface of her brain.

  She was vaguely aware of fire trucks and police cars in the road, and groups of people gathered on either side of the road, but most of her attention was focused inward, at the changes she could feel beginning inside her body.

  Her arm was throbbing and her hands and feet tingled, though she didn’t know if the tingling was from the injection or fear. Ditto the nausea that clamped her belly, making her want to retch, and the shivers that racked her body. Seventy-two hours, he’d said. She had three days until she wound up stretched out on a slab like Irene Dulbecco.

  “Stankowski assigned us a car to get you to Boston General,” Radcliff said, coming up beside her and crouching down to touch her shoulder in the gentlest of squeezes. “It would’ve been best to test what was in the syringe, but if we take blood now, the toxin shouldn’t have broken down into metabolites. We should be able to identify it, and figure out how to treat it…” He trailed off. “Aw, hell. Come here.” He pulled her to her feet, wrapped his arms around her and hung on. “I’m sorry, Mandy. I’m so damned sorry.”