Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) (36 page)

My stomach growled.

Oh, no. I really needed to crash. I was beyond exhaustion.
But sometimes I had eat first, or I’d wake up feeling sick from the void in my
stomach. A piece of cheese or bowl of cereal would do.

I kicked off my sandals and walked to the kitchen.
I didn't
bother to turn on the light as I stepped through the kitchen doorway. I could
make out the bulk of the fridge from the street light spilling in from the
window above the sink on my left. I swiveled to face the fridge and yanked open
the door, letting the cool, humid air bathe my face. Hmm, I'd forgotten about
that jar of pickles. I reached for it and a foreign sound caught my ear.
Someone's intake of breath.

But I'd already locked the door behind Tucker.

My skin prickled.

I slammed the fridge door.

A woman stepped out of the wedge of space behind the open kitchen
door, where she'd been hiding. Almost casually, she knocked the kitchen door
shut, trapping us together.

I screamed.

Her wig was so dark, it nearly matched her black T-shirt and chiffon
skirt. It was the Goth girl I'd vaguely noticed at the cafe earlier tonight,
but she
threw her shoulders back and I recognized her face and her
movement.

It was Jodi Green.

"Nice place you got here," she said in a high, child-like
voice, as if she wasn't breaking and entering. As if she weren't wearing black
leather gloves on a summer night.

Her smile scared me the most. Her perfectly even white teeth
looked so sincere, so unconcerned.

I lunged for the only door.

Her right hand shifted. She showed me an open switchblade. The blade
was at least six inches long.

I caught myself and hung back, my breath rasping in my throat. I had
no doubt she would kill me, given a sixteenth of a chance. The trick was not to
give her the chance.

I screamed again.

She tsked and advanced on me. "Is this how you usually treat your
guests? I don't think so. Anyway, your neighbour's out and I don't think anyone
else gives a shit. Do you?"

Instead of answering, I gauged my chances of getting to a phone. My
cell was in my backpack by the front door, but for my landline, I kept a cradle
hung on the wall just behind her right shoulder, on the other side of the door.

She laughed. "Just try it."

There was only one way out from the kitchen: the door she was
blocking. No, wait. She'd moved my table away from its usual place beside the
wall.

The fire escape!

I remembered the cyclist I'd seen with Ryan. In my mind's eye, I saw
Jodi coast into the garage, and then casually climb the indoor fire escape
stairs straight into the kitchen of my otherwise-fortified apartment.

She followed my gaze. "Yeah, that's how I got in. I like the bars
on the windows, though. When I see Ryan, I'll tell him, nice try. Good for
keeping you in instead of me out."

I tried not to react to the fact that she knew his name. Oh, Ryan. So
smart, so thorough, so careful—but neither of us suburban creatures were
accustomed to apartment buildings equipped with fire escapes.

"And I'll thank Tucker, too, for dropping you off at the
door." She shook her head. "You're a real ho, you know that?"

I started. I've never been called a ho in my life. But I knew she was
trying to provoke me. I said nothing.

"Good silent treatment, though. Aren't you going to ask me how I
did it?"

Great. Now that I'd wasted my time on Reena, Jodi wanted to confess. I
nodded. At least it would distract her, while I calculated how to escape a
galley kitchen with only about two feet between us, and her blocking the main
exit.

She'd shifted the table to the far wall. I could try and knock the
table at her while I went for the fire escape stairs, buying enough time to run
to the basement.

"You could try it," she said, reading my mind again.
"But I barricaded the door on the other side. I do love girls backed into
corners."

I tried not to think about how it would feel to be trapped in the
kitchen corner between the wall, the table, the flimsy metal shelving unit, and
Jodi with a knife.

She grinned at me, running the blade along her finger. "I'm good
with this. Borderlines are famous for slashing themselves, right?
 
I just think it's more efficient to practice
on someone else."

My heart thumped twice in my chest. I'd better distract her. "Is
that how Reena got those cuts on her arms?"

She made a face. "No, she did that herself. That girl was just
born to get stomped on."

"And you had the right size combat boots to do the
stomping?"

She grinned. "Pretty much. So did you figure it out,
finally?"

"I figured out you got Mike to steal the car for you. Though why
you didn't get him to do the hitting and running, too, I wasn't sure."

"'Cause there was only so far I could push that pussy on the
stat-rape charge. Car theft was as far as he'd go, no matter how much I tried
to convince him." She tested the blade along her thumb. It was eerie,
talking to her in the shadows of my kitchen. I listened for footsteps overhead,
toilets being flushed, or other signs of life in the building.

Nothing.

Either no one was home, no one was awake, or they were all minding
their own business.

I took psych in undergrad. I'd heard about Kitty Genovese, murdered in
a New York City apartment courtyard while a hundred neighbours watched. They
never even called the police afterward.

I could not rely on the kindness of strangers. I had to get myself
out. Now.

"So you leaned on your girlfriend instead," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, Reena practically wears a dog collar
anyway. But she's so unpredictable, you know? I had to go along to make sure
she'd get the job done." She grinned and stabbed the knife in the air
toward me.

So Reena did the running over and Jodi played the passenger. I leaned
back and pretended to be casual while I added, "And because you wanted to
watch."

She smiled. "You're smarter than you look."

"Thanks," I said, even though it was hardly a compliment.

What if I headed away from the doors, into the heart of the galley
kitchen?

There was only one reason I'd do that. I tried not to look, since I
seemed to be telegraphing my every thought, but I kept a knife block beside my
sink, behind the appliances, where the kitchen counters ended. Jodi needn't be
the only one with a knife.

The problem was, despite my dissection experience, I hardly ever
deboned a chicken, let alone used a knife as a weapon. And I did not
particularly want to hoist myself on to the counter, scramble into the sink and
try and smash my way through a second-story window.

But I would if I had to. It was very clear to me, as my blood hummed
through my veins, that I wanted to live.

The kitchen wasn't big enough for the two of us. It was so narrow I
that I could touch the fridge and the gas stove at the same time. I could hear
her breathing.

"I'm sure you're sick of hearing this, but you do look like her.
At least, like her when she was alive. Not so much when she was a broken piece
of meat, but we'll see about that, right?"

Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it back down. Her. She wouldn't
even call Laura by name. "What are you doing here, anyway? You're always
getting people to do your dirty work. Make Mike steal the car. Make Reena run
her down. Make Wendy give Reena the pills."

She beamed under her white Goth makeup. "Oh, you noticed that
too? I see why you're a doctor. Yeah, I'm a bit of a control freak that way.
But it's so hard to get good help these days."

It was eerie. The jokes, the digs. It was all a game to her. In her
eyes, I didn't matter. I wasn't a person, I was just an obstacle. For the first
time, I truly understood the lack of empathy at the heart of a psychopath.
"They took care of Laura, didn't they?"

"Yes, but so much drama, I decided it was easier to do it
myself." She smiled. "And, as you say, I like to watch."

I could not suppress a shudder.

"I think there's this saying in medical school, see one, do one,
teach one?"

We did say that. It bothered me that she knew it. She knew a little
too much about everything. "Why did you kill Laura Lee?"

"Oh, so you're still behind the times on that one?"

"I just want to know."

She shrugged. "I thought you already did. It was silly. I went to
St. Joseph's with a broken arm, and somehow, after the X-ray, she figured out I
wasn't Jodi Green."

The ortho paper on growth plates. That's why Laura had filed it under
psych. I almost wanted to laugh. "Jodi" was smart, but even she
couldn't figure out how to make her growth plates look like the woman's who
rightfully owned that ID.

"She started asking a lot of questions. I mean, crazy bullshit
stuff, like where I was born and if I'd had my tonsils out. She asked for a
blood test, supposedly in case I needed a transfusion after the fracture, but
c'mon, I broke my arm, not my brain, okay? She was onto me."

True enough. Laura must have pulled the real Jodi Green's chart and
tried to cross-reference all the details. I bet that the real Jodi was a few
years older and her growth plates had closed already on previous X-ray. Since
your growth plates don't open up again, she figured out that "Jodi"
was an imposter.

Laura's straight-A attention to detail had gotten her into med school
and into the morgue.

"So I killed her," said Jodi, almost cheerfully, "just
like I'm going to kill you."

Before the last words were out of her mouth, she leapt at me with the
switchblade.

I screamed one more time and flung the fridge door open like a shield.
I braced it with my hands and planted my legs to shove it forward and knock her
off-balance.

She spun to take the brunt on her shoulder, but I used the momentum to
push her back toward the door.

She recovered fast, pushing the door back against me.

I grunted. She was stronger than I was.

I released it abruptly. She stumbled toward my feet as the fridge door
fell closed.

I dove next to the sink, grabbed a pan from the drying rack and
smashed it on her head, hard enough to ring like a gong. The force of impact
zinged up my forearm to my elbow.

She howled and stabbed at me with her knife.

I managed to deflect part of it with my left arm, but the tip slashed
across my thigh. Everyone says adrenaline blocks out pain, but it burned me
like an SOB, drawing a mangled shriek from my lips.

I smashed her head again, this time so hard that the pot turned
sideways on its handle, and my arm ached only second to my thigh. A slow but
steady stream of blood soaked my pants and pooled under my foot, but I ignored
it as I transferred the pot to my left hand and grabbed another, more solid pot
from the rack.

Jodi grunted, holding her head for a second. Then she said, in a tone
more frightening in its quietness, "That's it. I'm going to kill you,
bitch."

Like you
weren't already
, I thought, but saved my breath.

She followed. She was cornering me into the sink and the window above
it. I was either going to have to fight my way past her or smash my way through
the second story glass. Neither was particularly appealing, especially since,
as a good Chinese girl, I'd slipped off my sandals at the front door while Jodi
was still in combat boots.

So I charged her. She screeched and slashed at my eye. I jerked my
head back, but she managed to catch my ear.

"My ear!" I screamed, and slammed the pot against her right
arm. I clipped the counter on the way, so it wasn't as hard as I would have
liked. She grunted and held on to the knife.

I smashed the other pot into her nose.

She choked on the blood fountaining out of her nostrils, and in that
split-second of her blind pain, I shoved her aside.

She tripped me.

Not too difficult, as I slipped in my own blood, and maybe
hers—no universal precautions here. I tried not to imagine what kind of
infectious diseases a murderer might carry. I dropped my pots to catch myself
before my face slammed into the floor.

I heard Jodi hiss with delight a second before her knees hit the
ground behind me. Instinctively, I rolled on my back, but she was on top of me
with the knife, her mouth stretched in a bloody rictus of victory.

I only had one chance.

I yelled, "FIRE!" I grabbed the edge of the oven door and
swung it down on her. I managed to bash it against her left shoulder—not
hard, and not hitting her knife hand, but enough to make her duck.

Then I bucked my hips upward. She clamped on to me with her knees and
slashed the knife.