Raney & Levine (17 page)

33


W
hen they were alone, he got her into a new scrub top,
threw her bloodied one into a bin, and helped her stiffly off the exam table.

“Can you stand?” he asked her gently, his hands under her
arms.

He let go, and she stood, trying to be stoic. “Damned hip
hurts.”

“Percocet kicking in?”

“Yeah.” She managed a weak smile. Lifted her arms around his
neck and hugged him. “Come fly with me.”

“Come sleep with me.” He took her in his arms and dropped
his face to the crook of her neck. “I so
hated
this.” His voice was
muffled. “Went nuts not being there, then really lost it when I heard about the
church, an ambulance on its way – I couldn’t believe it.”

“Ditto. Me in an ambulance, I can’t believe it either.” She
squeezed him tighter. The arms worked, at least. Her eyes were closed against
his warmth, but the mind started up again. She found herself frowning. “How
could someone get explosives past the dogs?”

“Dunno.” He pulled away slightly, looking down, inhaling.
“Okay, you’re standing, great. Now let’s see if you can walk.”

She did. Put one foot in front of the other, looking like
she was fearfully walking a tightrope. “Oh look,” she said with weak
brightness. “Two steps.”

“Do two more. Do four.”

She did just two, then gripped his arm. “Damned hip. Hurts a
lot.”

He bent and palpated where Jim Holloway had.

She sucked air in under her teeth and pushed his hand away.
“Yikes.”

“I think we should get this X-rayed,” he said.

The timing was good, because the curtains swished open, and
one of the surgical interns poked in.

“Is this one free yet?” she asked. “We’ve got a gunshot
coming.”

After a brief semi-dispute -
“What are you going to do?
Hop up there on one foot?”
– David got Jill looking peeved into a
wheelchair. And into the mostly empty staff elevator, and up to Radiology on
the fourth floor.

He had called ahead, requesting stat. The X-ray tech was
waiting in her green, heavy lead apron by the table, and they got Jill onto it,
on her back.

“Shield my ovaries!” Jill said; David and the tech both
said, yes, yes, as the tech laid a rectangular, heavy lead drape over Jill’s
lower abdomen.

“Don’t you worry honey,” the tech soothed, sliding the
conical X-ray tube along its ceiling track. Her nametag read Sherry Burke.

David told her, “I want to screen for a fracture or fragment
dislocation,” and filled out the requisition form while Sherry, smiling
encouragingly, X-rayed first a frontal view of Jill’s hip, then bent to change
the cassette.

“Next part’s going to hurt a little,” Sherry said, sweetly
apologetic as she got Jill to roll onto her side, injured side down, closest to
the film.

Jill gritted her teeth; held her breath until the second
film was taken. Seconds later she was on her back again, then David helped her
into a sitting position with her head down, feet hanging off the edge.

“You okay?” he asked, bending to her slightly and trying to
catch her eye.

“Yeah, peachy.” She seemed suddenly abstracted; was fiddling
with the rectangular lead drape.

“Amazing,” she said, hefting it. “This is the smallest drape
and it’s so
heavy.
It’s only, what? Twelve by thirty inches, roughly?
Seems like it weighs a ton.”

“For radiation protection. It’s made of lead.” David looked
up to greet a radiology resident named Andy Chow who’d just come trotting in,
apologizing for being late, his running shoe laces flopping. The X-rays were
ready and both of them clipped the films into the viewer box to examine them.

Sherry, seeing Jill still fiddling with the drape, stuck a
thumb into her thick green apron. It covered from her chest to her knees, like
long, weighty overalls. “You think
that’s
heavy?” she said. “This damn
thing weighs twenty pounds.”

“Twenty pounds!”

“Feels more like fifty. It’s pure lead filaments inside and
I gotta wear it all day. Well, it beats getting radiated.”

By the viewer box, Andy Chow turned. “Hey Jill, good news.
You’ve got
maybe
a hairline fracture in the shaft of your femur. It’s so
thin I can barely see it.”

She looked at him, relieved. David scowled at the film and
Andy pointed to it. “You can walk on it,” he said. “Just don’t run or ice skate
and take it easy for a few days. No plaster or brace needed, maybe a crutch if
you get extra achy. Use pain reliever if needed, and no more falling through
floors, okay? Deal?”

Jill promised not to fall through any more floors.

They thanked him. Andy gave a cheery wave back, and off he
jogged.

As David helped Jill limp out, Sherry nudged her arm. “Pain
reliever
if needed
?” she scoffed. “You give yourself
good stuff
,
hear?”

“Already am.” Jill gave a goofy grin and jerked her thumb to
David. “He started me on Percocet.”

“Give her
more
,” Sherry told him sternly.

They both needed to see Jesse.

The little guy was sleeping, his curled fist to his face,
under his blue blanket in his isolette. Jill settled in the rocking chair and
cradled him. After long, nightmare hours it felt so good to hold him;
Jesse
was comforting her.
David pulled his chair close, and ran a gentle finger
down the baby’s cheek. The nursery was softly lit, a place of innocence with
pictures of lambs and puppies on the wall.

A nurse just leaving smiled at them. “He’s all fed and
changed,” she said. “Hoovered his formula and just went back to sleep. He’s so
easy
.”

Then the nurse remembered. It had been on TV and all over
the hospital and the media. “Oh!” She looked at Jill. “How are
you
?”

“Achy,” Jill told her. “Really achy.”

“Been there,” the nurse said. “Fell off the garage roof
trying to get my kid’s Wiffle ball. Not too smart, huh? Well, feel better fast.
I think it feels better to
move
. That’s what I did.”

She smiled and left.

Silence again, long, blessed moments of it. “Wiffle balls,”
David said finally. Inhaled. “Can you picture Jesse old enough to start
flinging balls around?”

“I so want to.”

She handed the baby to him. He grinned, cradling him,
adjusting the little blue blanket. Jesse squirmed, and a tiny fist came out.
David held it, and smiled down at the sleeping little face as if he’d never
held a newborn before.

Like a new dad.

Jill leaned closer. Said yearningly, “I so want to adopt
him.”

David said nothing, still holding the warm bundle, the tiny
fist.

“Others are clamoring for him. If we don’t speak up…”

Conflicting emotions crossed David’s face. He swallowed
hard. “I cannot imagine someone else going off with him,” he said softly. “Walking
away with him.” A troubled hesitation. “But-”

“I know. We’re targets for every weirdo. With us,
he
gets recognized, targeted, maybe bullied as he grows up.” Jill raised her hands
helplessly. “But maybe
less
as the world gets used to…him, to this
thing
that Cliff Arnett did. You heard that patient Kim the Lawyer ask if this could
be done for her?”

“It’ll be ages before they figure how Arnett did it.”

“Who ever believed man would walk on the moon?”

David’s cell phone chirped. He twisted so Jill could get it
out of his pocket.

She listened, her features suddenly dropping to beyond
exhaustion. “Emergency,” she sighed, giving David his phone back. “Urgent.”

Their respite had lasted barely twenty minutes. Reluctantly,
they put Jesse back in his isolette, and hurried past the uniformed nursery
guard and the young cop seated just outside with his sleeping Shepherd.

The dog was instantly awake, eyeing them warily.

“It’s okay, Maverick,” the cop told him, giving them a
little wave. Maverick put his head back down.

Overhead in the hall, the PA was softly calling their names.
Urgent, urgent…

Adrenalin spiked, and Jill moved fast by favoring her good
leg. It created a lurching effect.

The elevator got them speedier than usual to the teeming ER.
Jill lurched stoically behind David. He glanced back and couldn’t restrain a
little snicker.

“You look like Quasimodo.”

“It feels
better
to move. It’s not like I rolled off
a garage.”

34


T
he wrenching scene they never got used to: red and
blue lights flashing,
beep beep
as the ambulance backed up to the ER
dock. EMTs opened the ambulance doors and rushed in to a gurney laden with
someone suffering, bleeding, maybe dying.

“Wait here,” David said, rushing out to help get the gurney
through Emergency’s double sliding doors. One EMT, holding up the IV, yelled,
“Abdominal stab wound, patient female, airway open, pulse 140, blood pressure
150/90, respiration 26, head trauma.”

Abdominal stab wound and head trauma?
David reached
Jill and they traded looks.

She lurched alongside as they got the gurney into a cubicle.
The woman was semi-conscious, her face smeared with blood from a gash to her
head. With the IV in place and her vitals known, David ordered two tubes of
blood drawn: one for the hemoglobin and hematocrit, the other for type and
cross match.

“Any I.D.?” he said through his mask, his gloved hands examining
the stabbed belly, moving his stethoscope carefully over it. His breath caught.
“She’s about three months pregnant. There’s still a fetal heartbeat.”

Another tense glance to Jill, swabbing blood from the
woman’s face.

Her expression had turned to dread.

“What’s
this
?” David again.

He was running his gloved fingertips over the belly’s bloody
surface. “I’m feeling
some sort of particles in the blood.”

Fast, he yanked the needle off a syringe, drew up three cc’s
of blood, emptied the syringe into a test tube, and ordered it sent up to the
Hematology lab. “Determine nature of granules found in blood,” he dictated to a
nurse, who filled out the tube’s label and ran out with it.

Jaw clenched, he asked the second nurse to carefully collect
the woman’s clothes, shoes, and her purse the EMTs had brought in.

Jill suddenly stopped what she was doing.

“David,” she breathed.

He raised his eyes to her.

She was blinking down at the woman, a gauze pad bright with
blood in her hand.

“It’s…” She looked at him, her eyes wide, incredulous.
“Dara
Walsh.
”

He stepped closer, removing his stethoscope.

“Dara?” he said, stunned. “What in hell-”

The curtains flew open and Sam MacIntrye ran in. “Got your
call, we just finished upstairs,” he said in a rush. Then frowned, read their
expressions.
“What?”

They told him, and his jaw dropped. “Dara Walsh?”

“Three months pregnant,” David said. “The stab is close to
or involving the uterus, but there’s still a fetal heartbeat.”

MacIntrye stared incredulously, absorbing this. “We gotta
take her up.”

David double-checked the nurse collecting Dara’s belongings,
then glanced at Jill. “Call the O.R. Describe and tell them to be ready.”

By the time they were scrubbed and entering the O.R., Dara
was anesthetized and intubated, with whole blood hanging on the IV pole ready
to go into her tubing. The respirator whooshed and two separate monitors
beeped: Dara’s and her unborn child’s. At three months gestation, the fetal
heart rate on the oscilloscope screen was normal at 160 beats a minute.

A good sign…so far. And a quick MRI had shown no cerebral
damage.

David made a vertical incision adjacent to the stab wound,
long enough so he could explore the outside of the uterus and adjacent organs
for injury.

Then they retracted the incision, MacIntyre’s gloved hands
holding it apart as Jill inserted the stainless
steel
retractors.

Blood welled the cavity and David couldn’t see. A nurse
suctioned out the blood. Jill reached a bit jerkily to start new IV blood
flowing into Dara’s tubing.

“Uterus just nicked,” David said as soon as the field was
clear. “She and the baby are lucky, stab didn’t go through.”

“The stab’s just five centimeters deep.” MacIntyre was
frowning above his mask. “Two inches.”

“Yeah. Not very penetrating.”

“Funny
shaped
stab too. Angled like from a box
cutter.”

“Yup.” Quickly, David inspected the adjacent bowel and blood
vessels. “No damage there either,” he muttered. “Lucky again.”

“
Too
lucky?” MacIntyre’s frown deepened. “There’s
something weird about this. That head wound was superficial. It’s like her
attacker
only wanted to do minimal damage.”

“I was thinking that.”

Her attacker. Something weird about this
. Jill’s mind
whirled.
Dara Walsh?
She closed her eyes for a second. No way to
understand…

With a curved needle and absorbable sutures, David closed
the small uterine wound, took a last look around for other internal injury, and
then sutured closed the layers of abdominal wall: fibrous tissue, abdominal
muscle, and finally the skin.

“Done.” He glanced at one of the nurses. “She can go to Recovery
now.”

The nurses wheeled Dara on her O.R. table through swinging
doors.

While the doctors scrubbed out, different nurses in the
recovery room cubicle followed Dara’s vital signs, her pulse, blood pressure,
respiration and temperature.

“How long before she wakes up?” asked a younger nurse.

“Ten minutes,” said an older nurse. “The anesthesia only
lasts as long as it’s being administered, plus a few minutes, give or take.”

She glanced out. “As soon as she wakes, start her
painkillers. She’ll be groggy but the cops want to talk to her.”

“Why don’t we just sleep
here?
Pack a bag, bring
our toothbrushes?”

Pappas wasn’t surprised to be back already. Once a detective
caught a case, it was his through sleepless days and nights. Alex groused about
the lumpy cots in the stationhouse dorm, and Pappas said he’d lost count of the
times his wife had threatened to divorce him.

David smiled grimly, sitting, wiping his wet hands and
forearms on paper towels. His expression changed. He was still stunned. “The
victim this time is Dara Walsh. It doesn’t make sense.”

Pappas took a last swig of coffee and grimaced. Someone else
on call had made it obscenely strong. “Well, we know it’s not Nash,” he said,
exhaling. “The killer’s still out there, in a rage, getting careless. Can’t get
to his snakes because the church is now surrounded by cops cars, Health
Department gets to work in the morning. He probably saw it on the news.”

“
Has
to be Brian Walsh.” Brand looked stymied too.
“But what could his beef with Dara be?”

“Besides the fact that she didn’t seem to like him?” David
asked.

They all looked tense and exhausted. Going on their nerves.
Before them on the OB lounge coffee table were empty Styrofoam coffee cups.

The detectives had been on the phone with the CSU. M.O. was
the same. Dara had been pulled into an alley and attacked while on her way to
her night job. So far no DNA, no fibers, evidence, or witnesses. They’d also
been trying to find Brian Walsh. He wasn’t answering his phone – no surprise -
and uniforms sent to his apartment reported nobody there. They were waiting for
a warrant to break in. Fat chance at this hour.

Jill had been with them briefly, then excused herself saying
she’d be right back.

And back she came now, hobbling on a crutch. “Just
temporary,” she managed. “Standing at an O.R. table starts hurting even if you
haven’t fallen through a floor.” She was still shaky from the shock of Dara’s
attack. Still incredulous.
What did it mean?

“Percocet?” David asked her.

“Almost time for the next one.” Pale, she sat with a small
groan next to David, propping her crutch on a near chair.

David rubbed his unshaven cheek. “There’s something wrong
about Dara’s attack,” he said gravely. Unconsciously he touched his drooping
dark hair. “For starters, her head bash wasn’t serious. The scalp is very
vascular. Even a small laceration can produce a lot of blood. Her attacker
didn’t
hit her hard
like the others. Not even close.”

Both cops looked at him. Brand got out his notebook, started
scribbling.

“And that stab wound…” David faltered.

“Was
off
,” Jill said nervously. “Off target and not
very penetrating. Why? Because he didn’t want to go
too
deep, plus he
didn’t
know where a three-month uterus and fetus are.”

Alex looked up. “Where are they?”

Jill held her hand to her mid section. “At three months the
uterus hasn’t grown much. It reaches barely up to the navel.”

“And the stab was just above,” David said. “Externally
missed by a couple of inches, though the angle in nicked the uterus.”

Jill frowned anxiously. “Also he didn’t kick the belly like
the other women. Could this be a different guy? A
ring
of baddies?”

Pappas didn’t think so. It just felt like the same
assailant. Someone who knew where Dara would be, where to follow her, and
brought her down first with a bash to the head.

“Still,” Jill said. “Whoever did it
still could have
stabbed harder,
and he didn’t
.”

Pappas thought about that, his lips tightening. “If the
smaller stab was deliberate,” he finally said, “this creep’s still in control.
Dara
could have been a message.
But what does it mean?” The detective rubbed his
aching brow.

“The cut was in the shape of a box cutter,” David said. “He
could have adjusted it to stab only superficially.” As both detectives nodded,
agreeing, he glanced at bulging plastic bags on the table. “Dara’s evidence
from the ER?” he asked.

“Yes, including her cell phone, thanks.” Pappas put on
gloves and pulled it from a bag. He started to scroll names, thanking again
because they never could have gotten a warrant for the phone. “Recognize anyone
here?”

He showed them, scrolling. They didn’t recognize any of the
names until he got to Rick Burrell and Gary Clark.

Jill wasn’t surprised. “They said they’d gotten roped into
helping with that save-the-church group, Burrell especially.” Her lips were
dry. She fiddled with the medallion she still wore. “Plus, that group had been
emailing a lot. Other names might be other members-”

Pappas’s phone rang.

He listened. Grunted, “Interesting. Thanks.”

And looked from Jill to David. “Dara made several calls to
Burrell.
More
, recently.”

“Because the rally was approaching?” Jill ventured. “She was
trying to get him to do more.”

A nurse came in to tell them Dara Walsh was awake.

Jill and David gave both detectives sterile gowns, and all
four of them went into the recovery room.

Dara was groggy. Confused. Weakly crying.

“Do you know who did this to you?” Pappas asked, bending to
her.

“He!” Dara’s eyes squinted open, alarmed. “Didn’t…
believe!
”
It was a feeble cry.

Pappas tried again. “Who didn’t believe? Did you see your
attacker?”

“He…
wouldn’t!
”

David, watching Dara’s monitor, whispered to Pappas to cool
it, her blood pressure was rising.

The cops traded frustrated looks. David nodded, and Pappas
tried a last, gentle approach. “Would it comfort you if a friend came to visit?
Would you like to see…Rick Burrell?”

The name calmed Dara. Her b.p. readout dropped instantly and
a quivering smile crossed her lips. “Rick,” she breathed.

Looks crossed between Jill, David and the two detectives.
So
who was “he?”

Back in the hall, near the cop assigned to guard Dara,
Pappas used his phone to call Burrell. “No answer. Getting his voice mail.”

“At this hour probably asleep,” Alex muttered tiredly.

Pappas left his message, identifying himself. “Your friend
Dara Walsh has been attacked. She’s being treated for injuries at Madison
Memorial. She’d be comforted by your visit.”

He pocketed his phone, eyes narrowed in thought. “Those
emails. They all know each other. Maybe Burrell has an idea where Brian is.”

“Or not?” David said grimly. “Walsh could be anywhere. Maybe
he and Dara fought and he’s passed out drunk in his apartment.”

Jill grimaced at David. “Time for the next Percocet.”

From somewhere, a dog barked.

Looking alarmed, the two detectives said good night and
left.