Emma knew what he really meant. She’d come close to being on that table herself and they all worried how her work would affect her.
Feeling a twinge in her ribs, she straightened her spine. “Let’s do it.”
“We got a couple of new techs while you were gone.” Following her into the room, Skitch flicked a wall switch with a sweep of one hand, fully illuminating the third workstation. “Fresh meat, straight from med school. One of them even came from Harvard.”
He gave his last word a drawn-out inflection that eased the tension in Emma’s jaw. She led him across the shadowed room to the pool of light that showered their station.
“How are they working out?” she asked.
“Not grade-A but they pass inspection.” He began to set up the equipment tray, his long brown fingers arranging the stainless steel appliances with graceful ease. “Harvard, of course, thinks he knows it all.”
“If I recall, so did you your first few weeks on the job.” Emma’s gaze ran over the draped body but she didn’t remove the covering. Not yet. Not yet.
“Yeah but I did know most of it. Admit it, Dr. St. Clair. I’m the cream of the crop.” His dark eyes gleamed like hot mocha. “I’m rarely wrong about anything.”
“And rarely modest.” She snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. “You assisted Dr. Powell while I was gone?”
“Uh-huh.” Skitch positioned the equipment tray and locked its rollers. “I prefer to work with you or Dr. Reiser.”
A stilted silence settled as both of them remembered they would never work with Dr. Brian Reiser again. Emma spoke quickly to fill the gap. “I talked to Brian’s parents last night. They said to thank you for the Godivas you sent.”
“Dr. Reiser always sent his mom chocolates at Easter. Since he wasn’t here…” Skitch shrugged, meek when it mattered. “I’m really glad you’re back, Dr. St. Clair. I couldn’t handle one more shift with Dr. Powell. He’s so mayonnaise-on-white-bread, if you know what I mean.”
Emma had forgotten Skitch’s odd habit of associating everything with food. “Strait-laced?”
“That’s it. You’re more fun to work with and you don’t blow your top every time I drop a liver on the floor.” He chuckled when Emma lifted an eyebrow. “Just kidding. But I did splatter some stomach fluids on his… Well, Dr. Powell shouldn’t have removed his scrubs before I got the specimen tray out of here.”
“Oh, Skitch.” Emma swallowed a laugh as she pulled her face shield into place. “You are so lucky I’m back.”
“Don’t I know it.” Skitch lowered his own shield. “So, do you have plans for lunch?”
“I’m meeting Marta.”
“Ah, the delectable ADA Marta Zamora.” His dark eyes went dreamy. “Can I come?”
“Maybe next time. We want to catch up on our girl-talk today.” She took a deep breath. “Well, let’s get to it.”
Gently, she drew back the sheet to reveal the patient’s head. White hair, matted with blood, blue veins showing through the thin flesh of a bony forehead and…
For a moment the room seemed to spin in a clockwise motion while Emma’s stomach careened in the opposite direction.
“You okay?” Skitch leaned into her line of sight and his dark brown face smeared across the fluorescent lighting. “Doc?”
“Fine.” The room steadied slowly. “I’m fine.”
“You’re the color of scrambled eggs.”
“I’m okay.” Emma tried not to think about the fact that half the victim’s face was missing.
“Doc?” Skitch said again.
She inhaled deeply, getting control of her racing pulse. “Turn on the recorder, Skitch. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
He reached for the overhead control panel and pressed the switch to start the audio recorder. “I don’t think there’s much to look for,” he said, peering over her shoulder.
“Not much at all,” Emma agreed. “Read the file.”
“The file.” Skitch swore under his breath. “Sorry, Doc. I left it on my desk upstairs.”
Emma forced herself to look at the corpse, to study what was left of the woman’s face, taking in the lines around the slack mouth, the papery texture of bloodless skin folded about the neck. And the wound… No one deserved an end like this.
“Go get it, Skitch,” she quietly said as she turned off the recorder.
“I’ll be right back.”
A chill breathed over Emma’s skin as Skitch left. Looking down at this body as she had stood looking at so many others, she experienced a sense of unreality. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the woman had opened the one eye left to her and spoken.
This is exactly what Edgar hinted might happen. She closed her eyes as another wave of dizziness swept over her. She reached out to steady herself against the table and her gloved fingers brushed the arm of the dead woman.
“Here now.”
Emma’s eyes popped open. Feminine and faint, the voice shimmied up her spine.
“I wanted to watch that hospital show,” the voice went on. “I always watch that hospital show on Monday night.”
Looking up, Emma saw a woman standing in the shadows near the cooler room door. Her features were difficult to make out in the dimness, so Emma lifted her face shield. It didn’t help.
“Jaime wanted to watch that silly game. ‘Here now,’ I said to him, ‘I watch my hospital show on Monday night’.” The woman’s voice quivered with age. She sounded Hispanic.
Emma narrowed her eyes, taking in the woman’s white cotton housedress and slippers. This isn’t one of the new technicians, she realized.
The woman gestured toward the body. “Jaime did this.”
Shaking off her surprise, Emma moved forward. “Ma’am, you can’t be in here.”
“I had to tell you about Jaime. My brother. He shot me and ran out the back.”
Tiny hairs on Emma’s arms prickled beneath the sleeves of her lab coat. She stopped near the middle autopsy station and studied the other woman’s form again. Small and slight, the figure seemed almost a part of the shadows and, somehow, not quite right. Emma wished that Skitch would return.
“Ma’am, you really have to leave,” she said.
“Here now, young lady.” The woman’s voice shook again, as if she couldn’t quite catch her breath. “I had to tell you what my brother did.”
Emma’s gaze ran over the shadowed form. “You said your brother shot you. Are you hurt? Shall I have someone take you to a hospital?”
“I’m getting tired but I do not hurt, Dr. St. Clair.”
Emma caught her breath. “You know my name?”
The woman stepped forward at last, into the pale light.
Bile welled in the back of Emma’s throat. That face. The woman’s face, lined with age and as dry and pale as paper, stared at her with dark eyes.
Emma jerked around and looked at the body on the table.
“You’re…” Words wedged their way past the bile in Emma’s throat. “You’re her.”
When Emma turned back, the space in front of the cooler room door was empty. The woman had vanished.
Chapter Three
Emma’s colon turned to water. Pushing away from the table, she stepped toward the shadowed end of the long room but stopped when her trembling knees sent pain vibrating down the freshly knit tibia of her left leg. Her heart beat at her fractured ribs and both lungs threatened to collapse.
Hauling in one breath after another, she looked back at the ruined face of the woman on the autopsy table and tried to put the scientific, analytical part of her mind to work. But science had abandoned her and no matter how many ways she analyzed what she’d seen, she came to the same conclusion.
The face of the woman on the table was the same as that of the woman in the shadows.
“They’re related, that’s all.” Her tongue brushed thick and gummy against her teeth as she spoke aloud. “They must be related.”
Turning her back on the corpse, she removed her face shie
ld and gloves and shoved them inside a hazardous waste bin. If the woman had been related to the victim, then seeing her kin in such a state would have been a terrible shock. That would account for the strange things the woman had said. That or she really had been shot. Maybe at the same time that Amalia Campanero had been killed.
Stripping off her lab coat, shoe covers and hair cap, Emma dumped them into a laundry bin and then shoved open the door to the connecting shower area.
“Ma’am?” she called out. No one responded. “Ma’am, please answer me.”
Empty shower and dressing stalls yawned at her as she hurried through the shower area. Although her knees had stopped shaking, her quick steps and turns took a toll on her left leg, forcing her to slow down. Footsteps echoing against the tile floor, she moved through the locker and laundry rooms until she finally entered the main corridor.
A door stood at each end of the long gray hallway, each one leading to staff parking areas. One other door near the central elevator led into the front public area of the building. All three doors required special electronic card keys to be opened from the outside. It was impossible for anyone to get through them without one of those keys.
Emma forced herself to breathe slowly, to think. How could the woman have vanished so quickly? So quietly?
Almost as if she hadn’t really existed.
Emma took another breath and exhaled away that notion. Of course the woman had existed.
Emma looked at the elevator. The dial above it indicated the car was parked here on the first floor. As slowly as the elevator moved, the woman couldn’t have reached an upper floor and sent it back down already. Besides, the elevator led to labs and staff offices and it too required a card key to operate.
Bypassing the elevator, Emma opened the door leading to the public area of the building. The receptionist sat alone in the lobby straight ahead. But that didn’t mean she’d been alone for all of the past few minutes.
Emma hurried into the lobby. “Cory, did an elderly woman just come through here?”
Cory Kendall looked up from the medical textbook she was studying, her hazel eyes sleepy behind the lenses of her glasses. “No one has been in all morning, Dr. St. Clair.”
“Someone was in the autopsy suite a few minutes ago. An older woman. Please have the security guard check outside.”
Cory’s eyes went wide. “You saw her in the autopsy suite? While you were working? Oh, Dr. St. Clair, that’s not good.”
“Tell the guard she was wearing a plain white dress, almost like a nightgown. I’ll check the family rooms and the chapel.”
Cory grabbed the phone. “I’ll page the guard now.”
“Thanks.” Leaving the reception area, Emma walked down the corridor and into the first of the three family rooms. A tweed sofa of faded blue-gray and two matching chairs furnished the room. Plants stood in each corner of the windowless area and simple landscapes hung on pale gray walls. Magazines were neatly stacked beside tissue boxes and empty wastebaskets stood discreetly beneath each end table. Emma checked the other rooms and found them the same. Other than the elderly murder victim, there were no bodies waiting to be autopsied so there were no families waiting for news.
Leaving the family area, she headed in the other direction, toward the chapel. The double doors stood open. Stepping inside, Emma turned on the overhead lights. Pale walls reflected the soothing sea foam green of the carpet, forming a hazy atmosphere in the cool, quiet chapel.
“Is anyone here?” she called out.
Moving up the center aisle, she searched each pew but found no sign of the woman or anyone else. Finally, she reached the altar. It was simple, made of teakwood and adorned only with unlit candles. A stained glass window hung high above it, depicting a cloudless blue sky and a beam of soft, golden light.
Emma stared up at the window as memory swept over her. A golden light at the end of a long tunnel…
A chill crawled through her and her throat tightened. Maybe the woman hadn’t been a member of Amalia Campanero’s family who had somehow slipped into the restricted area.
Maybe she was a ghost.
Emma shook her head. Where did that absurd idea come from?
She turned. The tightness in her throat released in a startled gasp as she collided with a hard body. Jerking back, Emma gripped the backrest of the nearest pew and stared at the man into whom she’d run. Dark, shaggy hair, traces of gold that glimmered in worried eyes…
Her besieged mind began to spin. He was the man from her ER dream, the man the voice had urged her to help.
“Dr. St. Clair?” Catching her left arm, he eased her down on the seat of the pew.
Emma kept staring. Strange sensations filled her as they had in her ER dream, an urge to help him and…something more. But that was ridiculous. She didn’t know the man, couldn’t know that he needed help, had no help to offer him.
“The receptionist told me you were here.” He watched her with concern. “Are you all right? Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head. This was all too much. “I just need to sit for a minute.”
His gaze moved over her face, studying, assessing. “I’ll sit with you.”
Emma realized she was still shaking her head and made a great effort to keep it still.
“I’m Jason MacKenzie.” Releasing her at last, he produced a badge. “Clear Harbor Police Department. I’ve been trying to contact you.”
His name clicked in her confused mind. MacKenzie. Jason MacKenzie. The detective. He had called her when she was in the hospital, then again at her parents’ home. And hadn’t Brian mentioned him a few times, saying they were friends?
Emma pressed her fingertips against her temples and tried to make sense of what was happening. He was the man from the hospital. But he’d also been Brian’s friend and the detective who’d phoned her. And…and…
Oh, God.
Other images flooded her mind as she stared into those golden-brown eyes. Images from other dreams that she’d forgotten. Private, intimate dreams.
Dreams of him.
“I’m sorry.” She spoke slowly, still trying to take it in, to ignore the impossible sense of familiarity. “I know you wanted to talk to me but I’ve been out of town.”
“Recuperating at your folks’ home in Wyoming.”
She realized her hands were trembling and quickly hid them in her lap. This man was real. But that only proved that her ER dream had been some strange bridge between her subconscious and her traumatic memories. But the other dreams…
Suddenly Emma wished she’d stayed with her parents in Jackson, that she’d never returned to Clear Harbor, that she was talking to her loving and supportive father instead of this man who shouldn’t be real.
More adult feelings swept in and she longed suddenly for his arms. Arms that she’d felt embrace her inside her own mind. In dreams his hands had touched her, caressed her…how had she forgotten such dreams? Since her accident, they had filled her sleeping hours with comforting fantasies that somehow, in waking hours, had slipped to the recesses of her mind.
“I heard you were doing the autopsy on Amalia Campanero,” the detective said.
The name brought back the other image, knocking her for another loop. The woman in the autopsy suite…
“Dr. St. Clair?”
Blinking, she realized he was bending over her. She felt the heat from his body, smelled the tang of salt on his sun-darkened skin. A familiar scent made her dizzier. Old Spice.
“I’m fine.” She heard the lie in her voice. She hovered on the edge of some kind of nervous breakdown and she would fall over that edge if she didn’t get a grip on something soon. Trying to anchor herself in the moment, she asked, “Did you just come in from the main parking lot?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see a woman out there? An elderly woman?”
“What elderly woman?”
Emma’s mind raced as Detective MacKenzie answered her question with his own. If there was no
woman, had she imagined the incident? Had she been so nervous about the autopsy that she’d suffered a stress-induced hallucination? She had been pushing herself since she’d returned to work and she hadn’t been sleeping well. Stress. It was just stress.
“Dr. St. Clair?”
She took another deep breath, caught a whiff of his aftershave again. A scent from her grandfather’s generation, solid and rugged and masculine, it suited him. Suited him and appealed to her. Grounded by the scent, Emma decided she should deal with the image from her dream first. She should find an explanation for…him.
Forcing herself to meet his curious gaze, she said, “You were at the hospital the night of my accident.”
His dark eyes glimmered with wariness. “I’m surprised you know that.”
“I was…drifting in and out of consciousness.”
That much was true. Obviously she’d been conscious more than she’d thought. And yet her first glimpse of him had been from above. That part had certainly been a dream. It must have been.
“My partner and I have been assigned to your hit-and-run case,” he said, still studying her too closely. “I wanted to talk to you about that too. Let’s grab some coffee.”
She clenched her still trembling hands. “Coffee is the last thing I need.”
“Okay. A cup of herbal tea.” He inclined his head toward her and those dark eyes took on a different expression. “Or maybe a stiff drink?”
Somehow, compassion from him was no more comforting than his wariness had been.
“I’m fine.” She pressed her hands open against her thighs and took yet another breath, hoping more oxygen would slow her racing heart. “Do you have information about my case?”
“No but I have questions about it and about Ms. Campanero’s murder.” His dark eyes glimmered again, appearing almost angry. “You’ve avoided talking to me for a while now.”
“I did talk to you.” Defensive, she tried to calm down. But it was impossible beneath that gaze. “On the phone. In the hospital.”
“I told you I needed to speak with you in person.”
Final Words Page 3
