Raney & Levine

EMBRYO 3:
Raney & Levine

A Novel

by

J.A. Schneider

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EMBRYO:

“It is rare that a book can elicit that much emotion so early in the story. I was blown away. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS BOOK!!”

The Kindle Book Review

“After reading EMBRYO, I had to take a breath. This was one of the most intense books I've ever read.”

The Indie Bookshelf

“Readers will absolutely love it!”

Literati Literature Lovers

“What a ride! I literally found myself turning pages until they finally ran out. The action builds up, there is anthropology, genetics, murder, kidnap, romance and danger. As a physician, I saw quite accurate depiction until the end, where it gets into a bit of sci-fi, but even then, intense and stunning. Highly recommend, and like somebody else said, would make quite a movie.”

John Ellis, M.D.

“As a nurse, I appreciate the medical details being correct! Stayed up all night to read!”

Carol Meeker, R.N.

“OMG, David Levine is the best hero ever!!”

Becky Sayers, Amazon reviewer

“Move Over Medical Thriller Author Tess Gerritson…EMBRYO’s writing is superb, the action tense, the characters fully developed, and the research flawless.”

Gail M. Baugniet, bestselling author of For Every Action

PRAISE FOR EMBRYO 2: CROSSHAIRS

“Again, this new thriller deserves so much MORE than the regular 5 star rating!! Embryo 2 is a follow up book to the characters and storyline of EMBRYO, and equally just as good. As I said in my review of the first book, anyone who enjoys a brilliantly paced thriller, with fact and fiction mixed in, will thoroughly enjoy Embryo 2. This will leave you breathless!!”

The Kindle Book Review

“Holy hell, what a read!! Both this book, and the first EMBRYO, start from page one and DO.NOT.STOP. The suspense is continuous!”

The Reading Café

“Immediately reels you into a whirlwind!”

Readers Favorite

“Doctors as a new detective duo, what a concept! Stunning and brilliant in a whole new way!”

Literati Literature Lovers

“J.A. Schneider has followed up her first suspense-filled medical thriller with this second one which is as fast paced and non stop emotional. It’s a stunner!”

Top Mystery Thrillers

“Just as explosive as the first Embryo!”

Amazon reviewer Melanie Adkins

“You fall in love with main characters.... It is the most captivating read I have had in a while. This is a great thriller and leaves you wanting more. Can’t wait for the next one! Excellent! *****”

Jane Smith, Amazon reviewer

“I absolutely loved this book! A brilliant follow up to the first Embryo, and I've just learned there's a third in the works! A medical thriller of gripping proportions, I encourage everyone who loves a good psychological thriller to give this series a go!”

Reviewer Andrew Baker

“This book had my heart rocketing again, it took a lot to tear me away from my Kindle. There were some truly scary parts (I don't think I'll ever look at a chicken in the same way again!!) The clown ~ arrrgh... I truly dislike clowns and this made me even more certain of that!!”

Amazon reviewer Emily Graff

“J.A. Schneider did it again and if I could have given this book a 10 plus rating I would have. To all who have not read this, please do, you will not be disappointed, so do something good for yourself and read this book!”

Amazon reviewer Louann Van Riper

PRAISE FOR EMBRYO 3: RANEY & LEVINE

“...truly scary and chilling with an intense storyline and non-stop action. It goes at a breakneck pace with few lulls to let you catch your breath.”

The Kindle Book Review

“Doctors vs. religious fanatics – BOOM!”

Tricia Simon, Amazon reviewer

“Hang on for a great ride! I read all three books in 5 days (had to work 2 of those days) or would have finished sooner. Loved the series and just found out #4 is in the works! A great mix of genres, medical, sci-fi, police procedural, and mystery. It grabs from the beginning and doesn't let go!!”

The Reading Café

“Once you read the first “Embryo” you will be hooked!! This series is so captivating that I read one right after the other. We will be reading more from this amazing author.”

Top Suspense Thrillers

“One of the best thrillers I’ve ever read. It is almost too exciting with something happening constantly. Like the first two I loved it. I even cried, such a great storyteller.”

Jean Lewis, Amazon Reviewer

“...a classic murder mystery with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the very end. The hospital setting, characters, and premise are all fully developed, pulling you into the heart of a gripping story. Masterfully, the author takes you into the minds of the characters, exposing their inner fears, their religious interpretations and, in more than one case, their lunacy. I strongly recommend this book to all mystery lovers.”

Readers Favorite

“Could NOT put this series down!!! I raced through all three of the Embryo books and was on the edge of my seat the entire time. The series raises interesting questions regarding IVF and Genetics in obstetrics in general and makes you question whether, indeed, a child could be born outside the mother! Then add to it true nut cases who are bound and determined to kill people, perhaps harm the hospital/institution that provides that genetic development - and you have a clear winner of a series! I have been in medicine for over 40 years and J.A. Schneider has her facts down well - everything is spot on in the medical descriptions and such! Just a FANTASTIC series of books and I HOPE she writes more about Rainey and Levine!!! You feel as though you know them by the end of even book 1!!!! Can't say enough about these books!!! They are real thrillers! Bravo!”

Karen Miller, R.N.

“Loved, loved, loved this series!! Hated to finish them!! I'm hoping this gifted author writes more books updating Jesse's progress and life growing up. Loved all the characters but especially the two main characters and the love they have for each other and Jesse. Now I guess I'm going to have to find something (hopefully) to hold my interest until this author maybe (Please!) decides to continue this series and puts us all out of our misery!”

Teresa Dunnagan, reviewer

“Wow...a stunning trilogy that I would love to see them make into a movie or mini series. Fast paced…engaging...with so much that MAKES YOU THINK.”

Holly Simons, reviewer

PRAISE FOR EMBRYO 4: CATCH ME

“One of the Best
Thriller Series I’ve Read in Years! This entire thrilling series features
masterful storytelling and terrific characters. Cannot Wait for the Next One!”

Hillel
Kaminsky, Amazon Reviewer

“Tension in
every line, another fabulous thriller. I’d give ten stars if I could!”

Literati
Literature Lovers

“The author’s
done it again with another heart-stopping stunner. I am so addicted to this
series!”

The Kindle
Book Review

“J.A.
Schneider’s brought us another thriller
that starts with the first line!
How does she DO that? The grabber is these wonderful, original characters, with
good guys we’ve come to love!”

The Reading Café

“Best of a very wonderful series! I love the family and friends
relationships and the constant thrills and chills of adding the very scary
Couples Killer. I have read every one of J.A. Schneider's books and have loved
them all!”

Lyn Askew, Amazon Reviewer

“From the tension of the story’s
opening line, Schneider lets readers know they’re in for an action-packed ride.
A child’s screams, a bloody dead body, another still alive? The police have
already dubbed the murders leading up to this incident as The Couples Killer.
The little touches, small compassionate comments, are what drew me and held me
throughout, and what really gripped my heart.”

Gail M. Baugniet, bestselling
Author of For Every Action

“Another
brilliant addition to the Embryo series! Heart-racing from the first line, with
the whimpering toddler running, terrified…”

Brenda Telford

“I love this passage: ‘Victims needed a voice, and found it in Jill
Raney and David Levine. They felt that hospitals don’t help police as much as
they should in cases of assault, child molestation, and sex crimes. The
compassion and courage of these two doctor detectives is what makes this series
very, very special.’”

Top Thrillers

“Doctor Duo
Detectives – what a concept! These books really have quite a few amazing
dynamics. First is Jill and David's relationship. We have been able to watch it
grow and blossom into a deep and serious relationship. Jill is emotional,
stubborn, reckless, intuitive, and brilliant - and the teamwork of these two
doctors with the police is amazing.”

Trista
Borgwardt, Amazon Reviewer

“How can you improve on
perfection, well J.A. Schneider has with Embryo 4, Catch Me. These books are
all spellbinding, explosive. Once you start you cannot stop. All of the
characters are great, but I just love following Jill Raney and David Levine,
seeing their amazing, supportive relationship as well as their helpful
relationship with the police. I got hooked with the first Embryo and with each
new book I got more enthralled. Can’t wait for the next one!”

Louann Van Riper

New! EMBRYO 5: SILVER GIRL

A beautiful young TV star, Jody Merrill, dies mysteriously and police are stumped. They are even more at a loss when the grisly remains of yet another actress, Jody’s co-star, are found. Detectives request the help of doctors Jill Raney and David Levine, police friends and detectives on their own. For Jill and David this is personal; they are heartbroken since both young women were their friends. Furiously they resolve to find the killer: to skirt the law as they always do in cases of sex crimes, child abuse and murder, helping where cops’ hands are tied (“No warrant? No problem!”), or in ways that police forensics never imagined.

The killer, capable of unspeakable savagery, must commit more murders in order to hide…possibly behind the gilded cover of Show Biz Hell. Or as Jody Merrill called it, “That gorgeous, sparkly bubble that closes you in, bloats your ego in some weird, alternate universe where you lose all bearings, lose yourself.
Fame is unhealthy.”

Publisher Information

Embryo 3: Raney & Levine
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, institutions or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 J.A. Schneider.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce or transmit this book, in any part thereof, in any form or by any means whatsoever, whether now existing or devised at a future time, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

For more information about the author, please visit
http://jaschneiderauthor.net

1


“D
ead bodies ahead.”

Allie Dodd cringed. She considered herself a strong woman,
but yesterday’s first day in the anatomy lab nearly undid her. She was still
feeling queasy.

She’d been a chemistry major, had so far avoided most of the
squishy bits of biology in her education.
But this was it.
Dissecting
cadavers time, day two.
She followed her group through the short hall, her
fists clenched in her scrub pockets, trying to focus on last week’s no-sweat
class lectures. Welcome to your first course of your first term of your first
year of medical school. Here are your new books and surgical tools. This is how
you hold a scalpel. Watch these videos. Choose three lab partners.

Hearing about an experience isn’t the same as actually doing
it. Ha, no kidding!

Now, someone ahead opened the double-swinging doors, and
Allie followed into the big white room of thirty dead bodies. She shuddered.
The first thing that hit her, like yesterday, was the acrid sick smell of
embalming fluid.
Pleeese don’t let me humiliate myself.
The next thing
was the room’s chill. She’d worn an old sweatshirt under her scrubs. Rubbed
goose pimples on her arms, felt herself already turning green.

But stayed steady, tried to anyway, when one of her lab
partners named Jay Fleming called to her from their appointed cadaver. The dear
boy was one of those eager beaver types, “stoked to be starting!” Already
latex-gloved, pulling back the cadaver’s black tarpaulin and peeking under the
gauze wrapped around the body’s head.

“C’mon, Allie, you’ll get used to it,” he said a bit
impatiently; and her second partner, wise guy Aaron Smith, made it worse by
saying, “Just don’t faint into the bucket.”

The bucket. Oh why’d he have to say that?
Don’t look,
don’t look
…

She couldn’t help it. Allie’s eyes dropped to the damned
thing. Her stomach rolled at the orange biohazard bucket under the table to
catch falling pieces of human skin and fat. There was already mush in it from
yesterday.

The room spun. Was full of orange bio-buckets under every
table.

“She’s not gonna faint,” snapped Allie’s third partner, Tara
Wicks, who shot her a warning look:
Don’t let them call us wimps.

All three of them were already at work. Allie steeled
herself and got to it. Don’t be stupid, she thought. This was so important,
wasn’t it? The chance to learn about the human body without the pressure of
life and death? Her hand shook as her scalpel made its first cut. And then
another. Maybe this wasn’t so bad, she thought, trying to calm. In a way the
cadaver didn’t even seem like a real person, though she knew it had been a man.
But now the skin was hard and rubbery, and a weird color of
brownish-pinkish-grey.

Yesterday they’d made their first cuts in the standard
H-shape. The first one from left to right at the top of the chest, under the
clavicle; the next straight down the midline to below the ribcage; and the last
horizontally under the bottom of the ribcage. They’d wait a bit before lifting
the ribs. Allie was still holding her breath, but working was starting to make
her feel better. She was doing it! Holding a scalpel and helping to dissect!
Cutting through skin flaps, seeing muscles, nerves and blood vessels, vaguely
hearing Tara mutter dammit, they’d gotten a fat one, had the extra work of
cutting through layers of icky fat.

“Time to raise the hood,” Jay Fleming said. He put his
gloved fingers into the bottom incision they’d made yesterday, and started to
lift the ribs.

“Need the cutter,” he said, and Aaron fired up the bone saw;
cut through the bigger ribs.

The saw’s screech and the smell of bones being cut was
awful. Allie’s chin dropped down. Yesterday’s nausea was back, big time, rising
in her gorge.

Peripherally she saw Jay lift the ribs, and peer with Aaron
and Tara into the thoracic cavity. For a half second, stunned silence.

Then, screaming.

“Holy shit!” and “Oh Jeeezus!” as all three leaped back from
the table.

Wha…?

Allie peered in. Terror blurred her vision as the snake,
twisted into a knot between the heart and lungs, sprang from the corpse, slid
down to the table and then to the floor.

More screaming, yelling. Scrubs at adjoining tables saw and
froze in horror. Allie sank to the floor, clutching her belly. The snake was
only feet away. Black and semi-coiled by the next table’s wheel.

She was aware of Tara kneeling to her, clutching her arm,
and Jay too on her other side with Aaron over him yelling something, but it was
too late, the vomit came. Allie lurched for the bio-bucket and heaved. Cried
too, wept bitterly. Some sicko had shown up her weakness, her lack of nerve.
She’d never last here. All those years of studying and struggling and losing
sleep, and
she was finished, done…

They were calling to her but she didn’t hear. She was crying
her eyes out, and retching again.

He came at a fast walk. Faster than his overweight old
bones usually moved, because this didn’t look like the usual newbie hurler,
they were all yelling.

One of them had the vile thing and was holding it up. Black
and twisting, about three feet long. Revolted faces searched his as student
Aaron Smith carefully handed it to him.

“Son of a bitch,” breathed Carl Hutchins, M.D., PhD. Well
this beat anything he’d seen in his thirty years of teaching anatomy. He held
the snake with both gloved hands, his face grim.

Then his gaze fell to the miserable young woman, dry heaving
now. Allie Dodd, her name was. He always took care to learn their names.

Gripping the snake in one hand and adjusting his wire-rimmed
glasses, he knelt – painfully, oh, the knees – put his free arm around her, and
lay the damned thing on the floor where she could see it.

“It’s okay, Allie,” he comforted. “
It’s fake
. Made of
rubber. Someone’s cruel prank.” He pounded the snake with his fist, and it
bounced.

Her face was pale, clammy, and the back of her scrub suit
was drenched in sweat. But he’d seen her in orientation. She was a spirited,
determined girl.

One more dry heave. Then she looked up, still clinging to
the bucket like a life preserver, and peeked worriedly at the snake.
“Rubber?”
she managed.

“Yeah. Someone’s disgusting…joke.” Hutch hoped none of them
crowding anxiously around caught the hesitation in his voice.

Only, Jay Fleming was bending over him and scowling at the
snake. “So bleeping
real
looking,” he said. “Cripes, what’s those
other
things near its head? They look like worms. One, two, three…jeez, six of ‘em.”

“Rubber worms,” Hutch said evasively. He didn’t want to
scare them with what he was thinking.

Jay reached to pat Allie’s arm. She was sitting straighter
on the floor, but looking crushed, just mortified. “C’mon Al, it’s okay. I
puked into a fetal pig once.
They made me hose it down.”

Her swollen eyes peered up at him. Glanced at Professor
Hutchins, then back to Jay.

“You hadda hose it down?”

“Yeah. And I puked
again
!”

She grinned feebly, and scrubs around them laughed. Yuks
erupted over personal episodes of losing it.

“Okay, okay, back to work,” Hutch said, giving Allie’s
shoulder a final encouraging squeeze. He picked up the wretched snake and rose
with difficulty, one hand gripping the stainless steel table with his knees
screaming in pain. Aaron Smith helped him.

Allie pulled herself up too. Shakily.

“Want to take a break?” Hutch asked her. “Grab a shower?”

She gave a wan yes and thanked him, saying she’d be back ASAP.

“That’s the spirit,” Hutch said, watching her go, watching
the others file back to their tables and get to work.

Now he could fret.

He carried the snake to the tall window, and fingered it. It
looked so real: black, semi-coiled, the skin scaly with three light stripes along its length. Hutch pulled at it,
stretched it, coiled it tightly.

Then put it coiled onto the wide sill and let go. It sprang
open, seemed to dart, as they’d described it jerking from the cadaver.

And the rubber worms sewn near its head weren’t worms at
all.

They were fake baby snakes.

Which made it a seven-headed snake.

He’d grown up in the projects; had had some crazy raving
Baptists in his family. Was this what he feared? Or a cruel prank based on it?
He picked up the snake again, held it up to the late afternoon light. Someone
had gone to trouble sewing on the baby snakes’ heads. Black thread, and what
had to have been an upholstery needle, something like that, to push through the
rubber.

Worriedly, Hutch looked out the window. The anatomy lab was
on the first floor of the med school, across the wide Emergency entrance with
its ambulances, police cars, and – today – a crowd pressing against the police
line guarding the hospital entrance. TV vans lined the avenue behind the
reporters, cheering advocates, and protesters.

It was the protesters who bothered him. Today was a big day
for the hospital, and people had come running. The crowd bristled with signs
and placards.

One of the signs, garish and jostling furiously, read SPAWN
OF THE DEVIL. Its owner had a megaphone and was yelling into it, arguing too
with those near him.

The sign troubled Hutch.

It troubled him bad.