Instead, she heard a window open and close.
She called to her partner, “Hamill! Other side of the building! Someone coming out the window!”
Her heart was pounding again. She felt something trickle down her face. She touched her cheek and winced. She saw bright red blood on her hand.
She jumped up, whipped around the corner, and strode quickly down the hallway, both hands on her gun. She thought of her girls, kissing them last night. And her husband, her hand on his chest.
She reached the door and kicked it the rest of the way open.
A big man with a huge belly, receding hair, in a sweatshirt and tracksuit pants, was sitting on the edge of the bed.
He had his hands up in the air. “I just sold him a bag,” he said. “That’s all.”
The room reeked of marijuana. The air was hazy with it. Cold air blew in the open window, swirling the smoke. Dana heard shouts from outside. She kept the gun on the man, walking sideways to the window to hear better. “Down!” she heard. “Down!” And in the distance, growing louder, sirens.
She turned back to the man. “George Lambert?”
There were dark smudges beneath his eyes. “I don’t make enough.”
“What?”
“Caretaking, landscaping. I swear, man, I work. I work constantly. This just helps me make a little extra. It’s just weed. That’s all. It’s just weed.”
“Are you George Lambert?” she repeated, louder.
“Yes. Yes.” Lambert’s hands were still in the air. He looked terrified.
“Who ran?”
“He’s just a kid from the neighborhood, man.”
“You sell to kids?”
“It’s just weed.”
“You said that.”
Dana felt her pulse easing. She slowly lowered the gun. “I’m going to put this away. You’re just going to sit there, keep your hands in the air.”
“You need a towel, ma’am. I’m sorry.” He moved to cover his face, like he was going to cry. Dana hadn’t holstered the weapon yet and brought it back up, pointing it at Lambert. “I said keep your hands up.”
The man nodded, blubbering, raising his arms like they were heavy as concrete.
“Who threw the thing at me?”
“They’re just kids. Bladen did.”
“Bladen? The kid’s name is Bladen?”
More nods, big tears falling, George Lambert’s face all scrunched up. He opened his eyes again and looked at Dana. “You can use my bathroom. Hey, they’re just kids. They don’t buy much. Couple of his friends were outside. He thought it was them, playing a prank, you know? Saying ‘Police! Open up!’ You know?”
“Be quiet.” She strained to hear what was going on outside.
“Use my bathroom, ma’am. You’re bleeding all over your shirt. I’m sorry. I really am.”
Dana wasn’t about to leave Lambert until backup arrived. And she had a hard time believing she had sounded like a teenage kid pulling a prank. Then again, maybe that was what happened when you were stoned. Everything sounded like a joke.
She heard the door bang open in the room behind her. More sirens joined the chorus outside, an ambulance warble adding to the cacophony. Dana finally holstered her weapon. She looked around at the shitty digs of George Lambert. One lumpy bed, one beat-up chest of drawers, piles of clothes, a few posters of half-naked women on the wall. It struck her that Lambert was another man still acting like a child, and she felt a twinge of bitterness about her partner. But then she felt concerned about him.
“Hamill?” She raised her voice above the din.
She heard back, distantly, “Good! Got him.”
She carefully leaned against the wall by the open window. She heard car doors opening and slamming; the cavalry arriving. She looked down at her white shirt, which was covered in blood. She wondered how bad it was. She didn’t want to think about it. Her face scarred. The girls would see it every time they looked at her. Shawn would be appalled. It would be a constant reminder of her job, of her life, of all the risks. And it would be a reminder that she was a woman, because no one gave a shit about a man with a few scars. Didn’t matter what you did for a job, women had the social pressure to stay attractive. That was how it was. All because some teenager had thrown a remote control at her.
“What do you know about Sonia Taylor and Holly Arbruster?”
George stopped his blubbering for a moment and looked confused. “The missing girls?”
“No, they’re not missing. They’re dead. You’re the caretaker of the house they rent.”
“I had no idea,” he said.
“Oh no? You don’t look at them a little bit, maybe, when you come over to fix the toilet? You haven’t stuck a little secret camera in there somewhere to watch them pee?” She left the wall, walked towards him. She pointed the gun at his head.
“No, nothing like that.” Lambert looked mortified. “I have my own daughter, ma’am. She’s fifteen. She goes to—”
She stopped in front of him, the barrel of the gun inches from his eyeball. “You don’t think about them? Wonder what it would be like to take them out on a date? Have sex with them?”
Lambert shrank away from the weapon, pulling his large body up further onto the bed. “No,” he said, tears drying on his fat face, shaking his head back and forth.
“And when they don’t want you, when they push you away, you give them a little something, yeah? Relaxes them, doesn’t it? Like phenobarbital? Roofies? Or how about something even better, makes them go limp, turns their muscles to mush? What about monkshood, George? Am I going to search this place and find some bottles of something? Shipped from China? Makes them more pliable, right? But you don’t rape them. Maybe because you can’t get it up. Maybe you just look at them. Poke at them . . .”
Lambert was just repeating no, no, over and over again. Dana dropped down to one knee, suddenly dizzy. She reached out and grabbed the edge of Lambert’s bed. Her hand made a red mark on the grubby white comforter. “I’m sorry,” she heard Lambert say, and then she slumped forward. “I’m sorry,” she heard again. She realized it wasn’t Lambert. It was her speaking. Then the world went black.
DAY THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN / Prognosis
In her dream, the girls were young. It was that stage of family life where the children destroyed everything in the home. Stickers, colored pencils, crayons, glue; these were the tools of mayhem. Walls covered with stickers which peeled off the paint, crayons mashed into every crevasse, unidentified goop crusted to the floor. Ria would find books and draw in them — textbooks, manuals, Shawn’s paperbacks — whatever she could get her three-year-old hands on. How did you explain to a toddler that you could draw in a coloring book but not scribble in a Stephen King?
When she came to, Dana immediately felt that something was wrong. She was worried that she had fallen asleep and missed something vital. One of the girls had cut a tooth, taken a first step, and she hadn’t been there.
But the sensation faded.
She remembered things in reverse order, starting with her captain, the county prosecutor, and internal affairs — talking with them about what had happened, going through the whole thing in fine detail. Before that, the doctor telling her the glass which shattered in front of her face had broken into a few big chunks, but it was the splintery pieces that had done the damage. Then, going further back: arriving at the hospital, reluctantly, wheeled in on a gurney; the EMTs forcing her to sit down while they examined her; standing in front of George Lambert, gun to his head, who trembled on the bed, his body quivering like Jell-O; slinking through Lambert’s apartment, blood dripping from her face — one fat drop of it falling on the cheap linoleum in the kitchen; the window exploding, glass showering her, sharp into her skin.
She touched her face. There was a large bandage beneath her left eye, and several bandages on her chin, one on her nose. The bandage beneath her eye felt damp, as if she’d been crying. She wanted to look in the mirror. She
swung her legs from the bed and stopped, realizing she was tethered to an IV drip. She looked around. She was alone in the small hospital room. The door was ajar. She could hear the murmur of voices and activity and machines in the hall. She stood up, her feet bare on the cold floor, grabbed the IV drip which was on wheels, and went into the bathroom.
She flipped on the light. Her image took her breath away.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” a voice said from behind her.
She turned and saw a pleasant-looking woman standing in OR scrubs, with a stethoscope around her neck.
“It looks pretty bad,” Dana replied.
Dana walked back into the room, wheeling the IV, trying not to get the tubes caught on the bathroom doorknob. “And it’s not about vanity,” she said. “It’s about doing my job.”
“I understand. Can you sit down? I want to give you a look over.”
Dana obliged and sat on the edge of the bed while the doctor inspected her. She was plain, with short, silvery hair. Dana could smell floral soap as the doctor leaned in and scrutinized Dana’s left eye.
“Do you know where my husband is? My girls?”
“You really have a beautiful family. Um, your husband took your daughters out for dinner. They wanted to let you rest.”
Dana looked around the room for a clock. “What time is it?”
“Just before seven p.m.”
“Saturday?”
The doctor inspected each of Dana’s eyes, back and forth. “Sunday. When you fell, you got a concussion. The body needs time to heal. I’m Alice Stearns. I’m an ophthalmologist.” She smiled and took Dana’s hand.
“What’s the damage?”
“Could’ve been a lot worse.”
“So I’ve been hearing,” she said, and tried a smile. It felt strange, the way her skin pulled and stretched against the bandages taped to her face.
Stearns smiled back. “You could’ve lost an eye. Or both of them.”
“You told me there were some small pieces . . . ?”
Stearns nodded. She picked up the clipboard hanging from the end of the bed. “That’s right. Some chips of glass got into your eye. You have a torn tear duct. And a minor corneal abrasion.”
“And all the rest of this?”
“Superficial cuts. They bled quite a bit, but only a few stitches were required. You may have some minor scars, but probably nothing that anyone else will notice. Maybe the one around your eye, which runs vertical, mostly below the eye, will be visible; a little pink line.”
“But the eye is okay? I looked in the mirror and . . . I don’t know. It was blurry.”
“Well, Detective, the lacrimal gland secretes a water-like substance, what we call tears. You’ve had a small rip in that gland. It can cause leakage.”
“Leakage.” She remembered that the bandage beneath her eye felt wet.
Stearns put the chart back and folded her arms. “Your eye may run.”
“Can you fix it?”
“It’s operable.”
“You mean surgery?”
“They couldn’t just stitch you up in the ER.” Stearns smiled and pointed at her own eye. “It’s delicate in there.”
“When could you do it?”
“Tomorrow. Maybe the day after. I need to talk to the chief of staff.”
Dana was already shaking her head. Standing up from the bed again. “I can’t. I’m in the middle of a case.”
Stearns nodded sympathetically. “We can postpone. But, as time goes by it can be more difficult to operate.”
“Why?”
“The body wants to heal itself. Only it may not form the correct way. The way it was before.”
“How bad is the . . . corneal abrasion?”
“Like we keep saying, you were very lucky. But laser surgery can smooth that right over. How do things look? See any spotting? Visual anomalies? Do you see anything floating?”
Stearns approached her again, pulling a pen light out of her pocket as if she was going to shine it in Dana’s eyes. Dana held up her hands, keeping Stearns back.
“So, if we don’t operate right away . . . ?”
The doctor seemed to slump a little at Dana’s standoffishness, but then she perked back up. Surely she dealt with difficult patients all the time. Dana wondered where the kid who threw the remote was now. Probably they had grilled him through the night. Maybe the drug cops from Plattsburgh. Hamill had probably worked on George Lambert. Dana was eager to harness the information that would have come out by now.
“If you don’t do anything, I can’t say what will happen,” Stearns warned. “You could develop a cataract. You could lose vision in the eye. The cornea could be infected. It’s a small scratch, but the eye is full of bacteria. You’re on antibiotics right now. Maybe that takes care of it, maybe not.”
“I can live with all of that.”
Stearns looked at Dana for a moment, and then her pager went off. She gave it a glance. She seemed to finally accept what she was dealing with.
“You’ll likely have worsening symptoms in sunlight, wind, cold temperatures. You’ll want to keep something handy, a clean handkerchief, washed regularly.”
Dana was confused for a moment. She’d been suddenly back in the apartment, in the kitchen, gun drawn, getting ready to go down that hallway, her face bleeding.
“For any leaking,” Stearns said.
“Yeah,” Dana nodded. She smiled demurely. “So, can I go?”
“We’ll discharge you shortly, if that’s what you want. In the meantime, why don’t you wait until your family returns?”
Dana felt a mote of judgment from Stearns. And she felt that pang of guilt again. Because she had just forgotten about them. Her husband and three girls out there having a meal, their wife and mother in the hospital with on-the-job injuries. A job that kept her away from home for days at a time. A ghost, slipping in at night while they slept.
She didn’t want to be here any longer, but forcing her way out, and before her family came back to check on her, was a bad move. And IA still had to do a full workup on her. There were no shots fired, so at least there was that. They’d want to do a psych evaluation, though — to see how she was doing. Far as she was concerned, the clock was ticking for more potential victims, and that was all that mattered.
“Where’s my phone?” Dana asked.
“All of your effects are in that closet right there. Are you hungry? I’ll have a nurse come in with a menu from our cafeteria.”
“Thank you.”
Her stomach growled at the mention of food. Stearns said goodbye. Dana walked to the closet and rummaged around in her pea coat until she found her phone. She returned to the bed. She hated the ridiculous hospital gown and could feel the draft up her backside. She decided this justified getting back under the covers.
She looked in her phone contacts and stared at Lori Stender’s name. She put her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. She saw what Doctor Stearns had asked about — a floater, like a red cloud, moving across the back of her eyelid. It morphed through various shapes. She opened her eyes and blinked several times before returning her attention to the phone. She went into her pictures, to photos of Scott Dunham’s artworks. Scott was the boy who’d found Sonia Taylor in the river.
She remembered one of them vividly. The detail, the maturity. A lithe, sexless body, with the head of a bull.
A tear running from its eye.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN / The Book
She spent an hour with Shawn and the girls, then told them to go home. She reminded Shawn that they all had school in the morning, and he reminded her that their mother was in the hospital, and school could wait. It had been an awkward visit. After the greeting, tight hugs from her daughters, after a tentative kiss on the lips from Shawn, who looked into her eyes but didn’t show much emotion, they had sat around the room and made small talk. She didn’t say anything about the case to them. She offered a vague explanation that, during the course of investigation, sh
e had been following a lead, and cut herself on glass from a window. Shawn knew there was more, of course, so did Sarah — anyone could see that. But the girls inevitably fell into bickering over use of the hospital bathroom, which featured an oversized tub, and the talk waned. Shawn gave them some loose bills for the vending machine to get an after-dinner treat. They paraded out of the room, their high voices sinking into the hospital din. Shawn sat in the chair by the bed and stared at Dana.
She explained about the surgery, and how she would do it as soon as possible.
“Doctor Stearns said it doesn’t take long. You’d recover in a few hours,” Shawn said.
“I’d have to keep a bandage over my eye for forty-eight hours, lose all depth perception,” Dana said. “I just can’t do that right now.”
“But won’t they . . . won’t you get a little time?”
He meant sick leave from the job. “I don’t want time. I don’t have it. The girls don’t have it.”
“The girls?”
“The girls, the students, being drugged and drowned.”
They fell silent. She knew what he’d meant, and she resented it. And of course they were going to try to get her to take recovery time. She just didn’t want to think about that. The hooks were set deep, and there would be no getting free of the line until it was over.
Shawn continued to watch her with a resigned look. For thirty-nine, her husband was in great shape. Carpentry kept him fit, but he also ate well, and made sure their daughters had a healthy diet. He had dirty-blonde hair and eyes she thought were the color of the sea. He was an excellent partner. The best man she could think of to raise a family with, and all she wanted him to do was leave the hospital.
He was no dummy. When the girls came back he gathered them up in their coats and had them say goodbye to their mother. He bent and kissed her again, this time a perfunctory peck on the cheek, and asked quietly, “You’ll be home tonight?”
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 11
