Before I Wake (32 page)

Nathan moved through the room to shove off the heater unit and push open the window. He threw back the drapes to let in as much light as he could.

Bruce headed to Rae and shook her still form. “Rae, wake up. Come on, honey. Wake up.” He shook her harder, but she was limp, his hand feeling the heat in her through the shirt she wore. “You’re not doing this, Rae.” She didn’t look blue from lack of oxygen or that sickening red of carbon-monoxide poisoning he’d seen before. But she wasn’t responding at all.

Nathan placed an urgent call to the dispatcher for an ambulance.

Bruce held his hand just above her nose and mouth. “She’s barely breathing. Get me ice, cold rags, anything that will cool her down.”

Nathan was already dumping the little that was left from the melted ice bucket into a towel. “Whatever it is, she likely ingested it.” He passed over the cold bundle, scanning the room fast. “I’m seeing a drinking glass on the end table, a soda can in the trash. Candy-bar wrappers, aspirin packets, a box of wheat crackers, one tube of them open and half gone. We ate the same dinner she did; it’s not the pizza.”

“We try to get her to toss her stomach, and she’s going to aspirate it and choke to death.” Bruce used the towel to try to wipe down Rae’s face and neck. Her hair was already damp from the heat inside her and her very stillness made him worry at how she was slipping away even as he watched.

Nathan hurried into the restroom and turned on the sink taps. He drenched three more towels in cold water and brought them back with him. “She’s got to fight whatever is taking her under this hard. Why did she shove on the heat to full?”

“You’re assuming she did it.” Bruce buried her in the cold towels, draping them behind her neck, across her arms, along her face.

“The chain was on the door you just kicked open; it’s possible someone went through the connecting door to the next room, but that lock is on this side and it’s closed. She was alone whenever this hit.”

“The rate she’s sweating, she hasn’t been cold for some time. She’s still dressed in what she wore yesterday. Assume best case based on when we left her, she would have turned in by three at the latest if she were coherent enough to crawl into bed. At a minimum it’s been four hours of this already.”

Nathan felt for a pulse at her neck under the towel and shook his head. “It’s taking her under like a rock. Get her up, Bruce. We’re walking her, same as a sedative overdose.”

Bruce surged to his feet and reached down. He lifted her from the bed and to her feet. Nathan got her arm across his shoulder while Bruce took her other side. “Walk, Rae. Move your feet,” Bruce ordered. Between them they walked her, even as Rae’s legs barely stirred.

“She didn’t know it was coming. Whatever this stuff is, not one of the victims appeared to realize they were in trouble until it was too late.”

“Something just hits them hard enough to crash them,” Bruce agreed. She had never felt fragile to him before or this close to being lost to him. It was haunting, the fact she simply wasn’t waking up.

“Walking her isn’t working.” Nathan reached again for one of the cold towels. “Come on, Rae. Fight this thing.” He wiped at the sweat on her face.

“Get her down. Hurry! Get her down. She stopped breathing.”

Nathan shoved back the bed to give them more room.

Bruce struggled to start mouth to mouth. “Come on, Rae. Come on,” he pleaded between breaths.

Paramedics streamed in through the door.

“What took you so long?” Nathan demanded, letting them past him to get to Rae.

“Someone tried to plow a backhoe into a truck; the fire department was cutting people out.”

The lead paramedic took over for Bruce. “I’ve got a thready pulse.”

“What did she take?”

“The same bloody unknown thing that killed the last three ladies,” Bruce replied, wiping his mouth, his hand trembling. “Seizure, heart attack, something abrupt just shuts their system down.”

“Let’s get a strip running and set up to handle a cardiac crash and then get her out of here. Pushing her onto life support may be the only way to manage it if the toxin is building in her system like it appears to be doing.”

“What about airlifting her out of here? Should she be heading to a trauma unit?” Nathan asked.

“Being near the right equipment is going to matter more than the number of doctors around. We get her through the respiratory collapse, then the doctors can caucus.”

The paramedic set aside the air bag. “I’m getting some shallow breaths on her own. The way she’s laboring even for the shallow breaths makes me suspect it’s got a paralyzing agent in the mix.”

Bruce looked at Nathan. “Find the coroner. He’s got the most experience with whatever this is as any doctor at the hospital. Something has got to transfer for how to treat it in the living.” It was the only hope Bruce could find, the fact this wasn’t the first case the man would have seen. Nathan nodded.

“Let’s get moving. I don’t want to be treating a seizure while we’re on the elevator.” They shifted her to the stretcher.

Nathan pulled out his keys. “I’m giving you an escort.”

The paramedics got the gurney through the door.

“I need to call her next of kin,” Bruce said grimly.

“It’s not going to go that far. We found her in time.”

“Four hours, Nathan. At a minimum we were four hours too late.”

* * *

Bruce felt a rush of warm air as they crossed the threshold of the ER. The paramedics were moving fast. The coroner and the hospital’s top two doctors were waiting for her. “Take her to area four.”

The lead paramedic called out vital signs even as she was moved and lifted into a new bed. Leads clipped on and monitors flipped on around the bed, reading out oxygen and heartbeats and blood pressure.

“Let’s get this stuff out of her system as best we can. Lungs, blood, bowels. Tell toxicology I want blood panels run against every poison, chemical, and prescription they’ve got on file; keep those blood vials flowing until they say they’ve got enough. I also want a white-blood-cell count as fast as they can give it.” The chief looked at the coroner. “If we transfuse two pints?”

“Make it three.” He was studying her pupils. “We keep the lungs and heart from crashing, it has time to become a stage-two poison and no one has lived long enough to show those symptoms. I’m guessing kidney and liver get a huge poison-load factor.”

“Transfuse and then straight on dialysis overnight?”

“Yes. And get me a good eye doctor down here. I don’t like the look of this.”

The head nurse blocked their view. “She’s in good hands, Nathan. Let them work.”

“We’re staying, Crystal.”

“Not here, the waiting room is twenty feet away.”

Bruce lifted her hand from Nathan’s arm. “We’re staying within sight, so point out where we will be the least in the way. It’s not negotiable, Crystal. And while he may have the badge and gun, I’ve got the emotion. So where do you want us?”

She took a half step back, lips pursed, then nodded and pointed. “Station three, until we need it. You can leave the curtain pushed back.”

“Thank you.”

Bruce watched the doctors work and the sickness inside him turned into a tight fist. “Someone got to her. Somehow, someone got to her.”

“We’ll find out who,” Nathan said quietly.

Bruce glanced over at him. He wasn’t sure what to make of Nathan’s expression, but he got enough of the gist to understand the impact this was having on his friend. He’d never seen Nathan look this way before.

“I’m going to go find the hospital chapel. It’s that, or put my fist into a wall,” Bruce muttered, not able to watch another tube get stuck into Rae. She was alive, and God was likely the only one who could keep her alive right now. The doctors could do their best, but they were working in the dark for what to treat.

“Pray for Rae. Pray for yourself. And pray for me. Right now I’d murder the guy who did this if I had a name.”

“I know the feeling. I’ll get Rae’s family on the way here.”

“Thanks.”

Bruce squeezed Nathan’s shoulder and left the sheriff there.

Bruce knew Nathan would find him if there was a change—good or bad. And he knew Rae would understand why he had to step away right now. Nothing hit harder on a cop than standing in the emergency room waiting to find out if a friend lived or died. He wasn’t having this be his last memory of his friend. He wasn’t going to do that to the two of them.

31

Nathan watched Rae through the ICU glass Sunday afternoon. She was holding her own, had been for the three hours since they had moved her here. He watched her breathe and would be content to watch that steady rise and fall of her chest for a long time to come. He forced himself to turn his attention to the coroner. “Why is she alive and the others dead?”

“The dose she got is the most likely reason. She got a borderline lethal dose, not enough to trigger a heart attack or seizure. She got hot, and heat is one of the body’s defense mechanisms. It’s possible her body was able to sweat some of it out of her system before it got hold. Fast transfusions, hydration, help for her lungs—we got lucky with something, enough to help her body win.”

Nathan looked back at her and at the awful stillness as she lay there, monitored, but on her own now to fight this off. He worried about how much of that fight she had already lost in the last hours. “How long before we know the damage?”

“She’ll be stirring by morning; there’s no indication of coma. It’s fast acting which gives us some help on the recovery side—it’s fast to decay out of her system too. We’ll know a lot more in forty-eight hours.” Franklin rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, Nathan. I didn’t see this coming.”

“You’ve been giving me 100 percent and then some on this mystery. At this point we’ve just got to find it.”

“I’ve got blood work going to every expert I can think to ask for help.”

“Rae may give us the best clues for where to look. We need to talk with her just as soon as she begins to stir. If she can talk to us.”

“MRI and CAT scans were both promising. We’re hoping for the best. Don’t fear the worst until we know something. The staff can find you some relatively comfortable chairs for the room. There’s no reason you and Bruce can’t stay with her even through this ICU stretch. All the signs are she’s returning to a normal sleep.”

“I appreciate it.”

* * *

Nathan flipped through the photos Gray Sillman had brought him. The officer had walked through Rae’s hotel room taking detailed pictures of everything in the room to start giving them something to work with for the search. “You’ve bagged everything.”

“Tried to. We know it’s a drug, Nathan. We know it’s something they breathe in or eat or by some means get into their system. But you and Bruce are walking around, so it’s got to be something that she encountered between when you left and the early hours of Sunday morning.”

“You said she left her hotel room.”

“Three times. Twice briefly for about two minutes each time: we walked it; that suggests a trip to the ice machine and vending area on her floor. I’ve closed both vending and the ice machines for that floor as a precaution.”

“We used the last of the ice trying to cool her off, so if it was something in that ice she used with her drink, we destroyed what evidence might be left.”

“I bagged the towels you used; all may not be lost there. The third time she left the room was for about eighteen minutes. I think she went downstairs to use the business-center copy machine—we found photocopies for ten curled notebook pages and I don’t think she made those while you and Bruce were there. Rae had jotted notes on the copies, deciphering faint phone numbers.”

“She hadn’t made them before Bruce and I left her. So she was downstairs in the hotel. That widens the scope of this considerably.”

“Management is cooperating. I’ve got guys trying to photograph and bag anything from the business center that she could have touched or anything she might have eaten—the complimentary welcome table is in the hall between the elevator and the business center. Coffee, cookies, nuts, chocolate squares—it’s all being removed to be tested.”

Bruce joined them. “Her family is here.”

Nathan nodded at Bruce’s quiet words. “Tina told me. We’ll give them some privacy for a while. What do you think?” he offered the stack of photos.

Bruce looked through the stack, flipping several to the top. “All the obvious things to check, the drinking glass she used, the empty soda can, the food—but we’re looking for something not obvious at this point. I don’t know.”

He turned one of the photos. “The pillow she was using as she stretched out on the bed. Was it something on the pillowcase that she breathed in? It’s something that hits at night. Every lady so far—they’ve been pillow people.”

“Yes,” Nathan agreed. “It’s that kind of thinking we need more of. Gray, when the next batch of photographs come in from the business center and what’s between her room and that center, get some of the clerical staff to just brainstorm what-ifs. We need a list of those pillowcase-type ideas. We’ve got to check everything.”

“I’ll get it to happen.” He slid the photos back into his folder. “Will wants to know if you want to call in the state guys.”

“Are your guys tripping over themselves at the hotel?”

“Pretty much.”

“You can handle the evidence collection. Franklin has already brought in drug experts to help him with the toxicology on the blood. The strike is another matter—we may need to borrow Brentwood guys if the negotiations collapse.” Nathan looked at his watch. “Give me an update every two hours for how it’s going at the hotel. I’d like to just get us through tonight if possible and see where we are at in the morning before we go for outside help.”

“Will do.”

* * *

“Nathan.”

Nathan opened his eyes and raised his head to turn and see his chief deputy in the doorway. “It’s okay, Will.” A day of no change wore on a man in ways nothing else ever could. He glanced at the wall clock and realized it was after midnight. Nathan stepped out of the ICU room to join his deputy.

“The negotiators have a draft contract in place.”