The Fifth Justice (Michael Gresham Legal Thrillers Book 10)

by John Ellsworth

  Unlikely, but it had happened before.

  Chapter 6: Chloe Constance

  MONTHS EARLIER

  Since Chloe wasn’t getting any answers from the hospital staff, she turned inward. It was that exact moment when Chloe was ready to explode from the uncertainty of her life that Maddy came forward. Chloe was just sitting there with her dinner in front of her on the tray attached to the hospital bed when rage-filled adrenaline surged from nowhere. Maddy appeared. There was something about Maddy that relieved Chloe. Something close and oh, so familiar. The visitor was that part of Chloe’s personality who expressed the rage and derring-do of the abused teenager. Maddy was that abused teenager, the young woman who took the abuse for Chloe in her teens. A whipping boy, if you will, a stand-in. Maddy carried a history for Chloe that Chloe would never overcome. Abuse had created the several personalities alive in her and Maddy was one of the most vocal.

  Maddy didn’t wear a hospital gown like Chloe. She wore regular clothes, sports pants, and a sweatshirt. But she didn’t have the injuries that Chloe did. Maddy was blond, like Chloe, but her hair was longer, wavy, and caught in a ponytail. Or so she said.

  Chloe was glad for the company. They could relate since they’d both been through the VW accident, while Chloe alone had to recover from the physical and mental scars of the hell Maddy had put her through beginning with the actual theft of the VW then driving it off the road. What was the attraction that Chloe even took time to speak with Maddy? It was that Maddy seemed to have answers about Chloe’s life that Chloe wouldn’t ever realize without Maddy whispering in her ear.

  Plus, Maddy was tough. She didn’t take shit from anyone. And she had plans for her future that didn’t include this damn hospital. If she was honest, Maddy was butch, but Chloe could appreciate that. And Maddy promised to come back as often as Chloe wanted.

  On one occasion, Chloe asked Nai Trang, her day nurse what had happened to her.

  Trang said, “You were in a coma for a long time. When you woke up, the accident had knocked you back to square one where you knew nothing and were incapable of even the smallest daily task. You’re having to relearn everything—eating, walking. But the things you were good at in the past have been easy to relearn. You figured out computers in two weeks, for example. You’re having to re-learn how to write. But it might take years to regain certain social skills. You have lost the connections to many memories before the accident. They may never come back. Some memories may appear to you like old snapshots now that you’ve had time enough for the brain-swell to relent. The memories still exist, but they seem like unrelated pictures. However, in the beginning, you didn’t have them at all.

  “You’re a very different person than you were. Before the accident, you were witty, charming, and urbane. After the accident, you are blunt and esoteric.”

  “How do you know about me?” Chloe asked Trang.

  “I’m guessing, based on the beginnings I see in you. Call it an educated guess. I’ve been on this floor a long time, and I know a lot.”

  “I’m glad you’re my nurse.”

  “Much of this will change over time, and you will become increasingly who you once were. At least that’s my hope for you.”

  Chloe was relentless with the questions when she got Trang to answer. “Will I ever know anyone from before? I mean, will I ever recognize them?”

  “Maybe you will if you see them. Maybe you won’t. We must wait and see when that happens. Or doesn’t.”

  “So what we know is we know little.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better,” Trang said with a smile. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. But head injuries like yours aren’t localized, so it’s tough to predict what will happen. While a tumor in a temporal lobe might produce predictable results, yours is more like someone who has many tumors at different points. Many areas of damage are at play here. So it’s not an easy case.”

  “Well, when can I get out of the hospital and go home?”

  She must be sick of this refrain since Chloe asked her several times daily.

  Trang stared at her, studying her as one would a song that played only so much and then looped back to the beginning. It was endless, this going home riff.

  “Well, we need to figure out where home is first. Don’t you agree?”

  “I agree. We don’t know where I belong.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Or who I belong to.”

  “That’s right. We don’t know.”

  “I hope someone comes for me. That would help.”

  “We’ll just have to see. The police are looking for information. We’ll see if anyone knows anything about you.”

  “Someone is coming for me, Trang. I need to be ready.”

  “You will be who you are when it happens.”

  Chloe nodded. “That works.”

  Trang opened her mouth to say something else, but then just smiled at Chloe.

  “What?” Chloe asked. “What?”

  But Trang was gone, off to work with someone else.

  There was always Maddy. Her alter would come talk to Chloe day or night whether she was in bed or the therapy pool. Maddy showed up full of piss and vinegar, ranted sometimes, told her truth, and then faded away.

  But Chloe didn’t talk about Maddy to anyone. It was very confusing to her, and she didn’t want to go down that road. So she kept quiet.

  Sometimes that was very convenient.

  And there were others inside Maddy, too. They had been silent since the brain injury. But Chloe knew they would return. Maddy reminded Chloe of Reno Rivera, not an alter but a man to watch out for. She’d rolled down several hills in her life, hit her head or been hit in her head more than once, and the others always would come back even when quieted for a season by abuse. Reno Rivera had been one of those abusers, forever the worst of the worst. And now he was out there, waiting, waiting to intersect with her life again, use her, dissect out her mental well-being, and mold her into what best served him. Maddy knew this; Chloe had forgotten, her memory wiped by the crash.

  Reno was ruthless.

  But so was Justin Maybe, the combat veteran who lived inside Chloe who would kill anyone who came near Chloe to hurt her. Reno’s abuse had created Justin.

  Justin would never forget.

  And he damn sure would never forgive.

  Chapter 7: Chloe Constance

  ONE MONTH EARLIER

  There was physical therapy on her body. It was never-ending.

  Knees (dashboard sprains) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Fine motor function was every day. That’s when Chloe turned things over to Justin Maybe, when the PT hurt too much to bear by herself.

  Justin was the second alter coming back to her after the accident. His was the first face she recognized. And it wasn’t through a memory. No, he showed up one day during a PT session, so Chloe let him have at it. By that point, she had been so drained that she could use the break. No mention of anything in her prior life, like information Justin could have shared with her, just there to backstop her like always. Except he did remind her it had been like this since the time of the sexual abuse: Justin had taken over and kept her alive. That was it, he had pulled her through. He promised he would do so again.

  Justin liked challenging himself, sweating. And his physical condition was important to him. But he also used those times during physical therapy to garner information from the staff he thought was important for Chloe.

  “How will I support myself?” Justin asked.

  The therapist stopped rotating the post-surgery shoulder and looked down into Chloe’s eyes. “Becoming self-supporting is the job of vocational rehab. I’m sorry I don’t have that answer for you. But they will, so not to worry.”

  Vocational rehab, group—the efforts to heal her continued without letup between the hours of nine and four every day, seven days a week. Chloe was learning how to write again. And she was learning how to recognize faces by using visual cues about people she comm
itted to memory. She did this by attaching a name to the clue. Dr. Gorski: petite with sparkling teeth and blue eyes. Nurse Carrie: short and stout with gold-rimmed glasses and a ballpoint pen hanging from her wrist loop. And on and on.

  Studying her own face in the mirror, Chloe didn’t recognize the person she saw, but she knew the clues: the thin face, olive complexion, blue eyes, blond hair, the scar across the forehead, scars on either side of the nose. She opened her swollen lips to see new refrigerator-white teeth. She bit down and felt the rebuilt left jaw not yet healed, swollen to golf-ball size. Her parts no longer fit. She never looked familiar to herself. She looked desperate as if all the meds had stopped working.

  They called it face blindness. Dr. Gorski called it prosopagnosia. She told her it was a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces. “It’s very rare,” she said, “occurring in less than one percent of the population.”

  “Why do I have it?”

  “Same answer as always—you hit your head so hard you injured the part of your brain that can recognize faces. But don’t worry, in trauma cases, the ability to recognize faces is one of the first things that comes back., I’ve only ever seen one other case of face blindness.”

  “What happened?”

  “She learned to recognize her family.”

  “Wow.”

  “I’ll remember for you since you can’t,” Justin Maybe told her. “Let me handle it, please.”

  The next time she looked in the mirror, she recognized the face.

  It wasn’t her own, but it was familiar.

  It was handled.

  Chapter 8: Chloe Constance

  ONE MONTH EARLIER

  Chloe was re-learning to read and write. It was all very slow. She was a snail crawling across a pane of glass. But, by now, the routine was familiar. The medical staff told her she had been in the hospital for months. They told her she would soon transfer to a rehab home. She didn’t want to go to a rehab home; she wanted to go to her home.

  The psych team said her affect was flat. They said she was all but emotionless because of the head injury. The part of her brain that experienced and expressed emotions didn’t work. So they were training her to experience and remember typical responses she might one day feel in the life of a woman her age of thirty-six—a date established by the oral surgeon from her teeth as he was unsuccessfully looking for a match. Red light at the crosswalk: feel fear. See a baby: feel love, feel happiness, feel joy. Some events were multifaceted in this manner. A baby could mean several feelings jumbled together. So could assault and battery.

  The psych team reported to Judi Gorski, the psychiatrist who had her case. The team included a priest.

  “A priest is what?” she asked Dr. Gorski.

  “A priest is a spiritual leader.”

  “I need his services for what?”

  “Just meet with him. Maybe it will click and maybe it won’t.”

  So Chloe did, and it didn’t click. She couldn’t imagine a spirit without a body. So she humored the man in black with the cross dangling from his belt. She was courteous but distant. Plus, there was a deep-seated dislike—hatred?—that she had for the priest. Her therapist believed she had somehow encountered the priesthood in her previous life.

  The speech therapist wrestled with Jane’s deficits. Words came and went. What she learned today she misplaced tomorrow. Much of it came in and out of her mind, and there was no way to predict any of it. Words were random events, nebulae that hung in the void as she went sweeping past, straining to grasp them.

  Speech therapy started with simple sounds and words and graduated into more challenging expressions and abstractions. Weeks into it, her reading skills had improved to a fourth-grade level. Then junior high. Then senior high. It was coming back, but the staff was earning their salary in working with her.

  Then she was working with another therapist, a woman with a Ph.D. in psychology. She was a middle-aged woman named Maggie.

  “Jane Doe,” said the therapist to Chloe. “When we say a man is a kind man, what are we saying?”

  “A kind man listens.”

  “Is that all?”

  “A kind man doesn’t hurt me.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “A kind man doesn’t hit me.”

  “Good, good.”

  “A kind man doesn’t sex me?”

  “Well, yes and no. Some kind men sex a woman. Especially when they’re married.”

  “Am I married?”

  Dr. Maggie sat back, her forehead furrowed and her lips pursed. It’s what Chloe knew to be Dr. Maggie’s perplexed look. “We don’t know if you’re married or unmarried. There’s a wedding ring but even that’s inconclusive.”

  “Where’s my ring?”

  “With your valuables in safekeeping.”

  “What other valuables did I have?”

  “None, actually.”

  “Where’s my husband?”

  “We don’t know if there is a husband.”

  “Has he been to see me?”

  “No husband has seen you.”

  “Will he come?”

  “We hope so. If there is a husband at all. But so far we don’t know.”

  “When will we know?”

  Dr. Maggie hesitated, glancing away from Chloe before she reconnected and looked Chloe straight in the eye. “The police are running fingerprints, still inconclusive. They’re also showing your picture around. You signed a release for that. We’re asking for anyone who recognizes you to contact us.”

  “Who will it be?”

  “That, we don’t know. We’ll just have to see.”

  “How should I feel about it?”

  “Well, I would imagine you might feel hopeful. Excited. Maybe a little frightened.”

  “Three things. I feel excitement in my stomach, and I feel hopeful in my chest. Hope feels like a bubble. Frightened feels like weak legs. I can feel all three at the same time?”

  “Yes, you can. Humans can feel a mix of feelings.”

  “So I will feel hopeful, excited, and a little frightened. It’s a challenge.”

  “Excellent, Jane Doe! Nice work!”

  “You can see how hard I’m trying. I need to find my husband.”

  “Jane, your husband will show up at the exact moment he’s supposed to. I promise.”

  “Good. A promise gives me hope. Hope feels warm in my abdomen.”

  “Excellent.”

  And on and on it went. She had endeared herself to the staff with her willingness to get well. She had endeared herself with her belief in their powers. The staff would do anything to avoid letting her down. Anything short of producing a husband for her.

  That was one thing they couldn’t do.

  Chapter 9: Michael Gresham

  Verona’s home health supervisor made no bones about it: the sooner we resumed normal activities, the better it would be for Verona. So Marcel and I continued with our plans to go to Alton in search for Chloe. I kissed Verona goodbye and told her how much I loved her. I made everyone promise to call me on my iWatch if there was the slightest change. They promised they would. I didn’t feel like I needed to push it because they’d done this a hundred times to my never-before. So I left her there, in Evanston, with her staff and her rehab walks and diet and all the rest of it that was becoming her new life.

  Marcel and I arrived in Alton on Saturday, just after noon. We had left Chicago before daybreak and had driven straight through, stopping only twice, including once for breakfast. Both times I called home. Both times, the home health staff answered and reassured me. “She isn’t fragile, Michael,” said the day nurse, a rather bossy, fifty-ish woman who reminded me of Mia Farrow. “You need to dig your claws out of her life and do whatever it is you do. I’ve got this end of things pretty well buttoned-up. When you get back, we’ll talk about going to rehab visits.”

  “Without nurses around?”

  “Michael, we wouldn’t be here now except fo
r your insistence. It’s time to let go and let us do our job. Now, rock on, mister.”

  So I pried my fingers off the pulse of things back home and put my mind to finding Chloe.

  We continued driving south.

  Alton on Saturday, when we arrived, looked like every pickup truck in the county was on Alton Avenue headed for Home Depot. Marcel was driving my car, eyes on the road, dodging DIY’ers while I looked for the street address he got from Interpol. I was praying the address was current and that Reno was there.

  My wife, Dania—Danny—had died several years after being raped. The pain never left me, the sorrow was always there, just beneath the surface of the Michael Gresham who always smiled at the world. It was all a lie. Even though I had remarried and loved my new wife, I loved Danny even more. I still dreamt about her. Sometimes I thought I glimpsed her in the crowd of ahead of me on the Chicago sidewalks. Feeling this loss, magnified by the proximity of yet another killer, my eyes blurred with tears as I read house numbers. “Slow down,” I told Marcel through a breaking voice.

  “Slowing down, Boss.”

  I two-fingered my eyes, my head turned away so Marcel couldn’t see. He was a great respecter of people and their feelings, my investigator: if he noticed anything about me he didn’t say a word.

  We turned a corner and drew abreast of the address. I sat up in my seat, an electric feeling rippling along my chest and arms—fight or flight? My breathing shallowed out as we pulled through a gate and headed up the drive. It was an older house, near to downtown, of the Prairie style so popular in the 1900s when much of America was built. Marcel cut the engine after rolling alongside the front porch, and we climbed out of the sedan without slamming our doors. Marcel led us up three concrete steps onto the wide porch where he stepped up to the storm door and rapped his knuckles hard on the aluminum door frame. He also jabbed the doorbell several times. We waited, and then he knocked again, this time more forcefully.