Stitched Up Heart (Combat Hearts Book 1) (36 page)

Her head rose and fell with Jase’s inhale and exhale. She should probably get off her side and arm, but she was comfortable.

“Jase,” Denise hissed. “The nurses are going to lose their shit if they see you in bed with her.”

“Then guard the door. And quit yelling.”

“Why’re you in bed with her?”

“She woke up. Got upset when I told her about whack job.”

Bree opened her eyes. “Don’t call her that.”

Jase peered down his nose. “You fakin’?”

“Just woke up.”

Denise poked Jase in the ribs. “Get out. My turn.” They stared each other down for several moments. It was a pretty even match; no telling how it would go.

Jase sighed and pulled his arm from under Bree. She raised her head, and he eased to a sitting position. He swung his legs to the side and stood. Turning, he leaned down and brushed her hair back from her face. “Careful of her arm.” Bree smiled.

“No shit.” Denise pushed him out of the way and crawled up on the bed. She grasped Bree’s fingers and moved her arm onto Bree’s chest. She lay down on her side, facing Bree, her arm draped over Bree’s hip.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Weak.” Her throat was still dry.

“That’ll happen when you lose most of your blood.”

“Is there water?”

Denise looked over her shoulder, but Jase already had the cup ready. He angled the straw so she could drink. She pulled away and nodded her head. “Thank you.”

He set the cup down and walked around the bed. Shifting her knees, he sat on the end of the bed on her side.

“What’s the rule?” Denise asked.

That was a loaded question. They had a lot of rules. One for almost every occasion - except for getting cut by your crazy medical assistant. They’d never come up with a rule for that. She shook her head.

“Don’t take stupid chances.”

Oh, that one. Jase squeezed her thigh. Apparently, he agreed. “Didn’t have much of a choice. She was in my house when I got home.”

Denise touched her forehead to Bree’s. “You scared me,” she whispered. “Don’t do it again.”

“Agreed.”

“What do y’all think you’re doin’?” An older nurse stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. Her salt-and-pepper hair twisted into a bun on top of her head, and she wore scrubs with a hearts-with-wings motif. “Get off that poor girl.” She stormed forward and waved her hand at Jase, as if shooing away a fly. She smacked Denise on the leg. “Off. Bad enough someone tried to filet her like a fish, she doesn’t need y’all piling on top of her.”

Bree smiled as Denise and Jase did as they were told, grumbling the whole time.

“Nice to see you awake, dear.” Her whole demeanor changed. “I’m Mary Ann. How’re you feeling?”

She shifted onto her back and moved to the center of the bed. “Weak. Thirsty.”

“That’s to be expected with significant blood loss.” Mary Ann raised the head of the bed so Bree was half reclining. She tried resting her arm on her chest, but it aggravated her wound. Laying it next to her on the bed, palm up, relieved most of the pain.

“How much did I have transfused?”

Mary Ann glanced at her as she checked the I.V. bag. “Fifteen units.”

Bree’s eyebrows rose. Denise hadn’t been kidding when she said she’d lost most of her blood.

“I’m gonna take your vitals and change your bandage now that you’re awake.”

“Okay.” Jase stepped back from the end of the bed as Mary Ann rounded the bed, but never broke eye contact. His eyes were bloodshot, underscored by dark circles. His curly hair stood up in tufts, as if he had been pulling on sections of it.

“You look like crap,” Bree said. He grinned and winked.

“I told him to go home and take a shower,” Denise said.

“He wouldn’t leave your side,” Mary Ann added. “Called in the big guns when we tried to kick him out.” Her look was disgruntled as she wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Bree’s good arm.

“Big guns?” Bree asked.

“Gran,” Jase said.

“Where is she?”

“She’s coming back this evening,” Jase said.

“Open back up.” Mary Ann stuck a digital thermometer in her mouth. “Close.” The machine beeped twice and Bree opened her mouth.

“I’ll be right back with clean bandages.” She patted Bree’s uninjured arm.

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days,” Denise said.

“Three days?” Her head rose from the flat pillow, but dropped again immediately.

“How much do you remember?” Jase asked.

“All of it. Right up until Tim and Detective Johnson stormed in. How’s Katherine?”

“She was stabbed twice in the stomach,” Denise said. “I think the doctors had to remove a kidney, but she’s conscious. They have her a couple rooms down the hall.”

“I’d like to go see her when I can.”

Jase crossed his arms. “I’ll wheel you down when the doctor says you can move around.”

Bree glared. “My arm is cut, not my leg.”

“Did Cindy—?” Mary Ann’s arrival cut Denise’s question short.

She carried an assortment of bandages on a stainless steel tray. “The doctor’s right behind me. He’s going to take a look at your arm before I wrap it back up.”

Bree nodded. Mary Ann held her left arm in one hand while she gently unwound the gauze. The yellow-stained skin from the disinfectant… the purple-and-blue bruising around the edge of the gash… finally, the wound itself. The cut was almost straight across the fleshy part of her inner arm, the edge on the pinky side of her arm slightly higher than the edge on the thumb side. The tiny, black stitches were tight, precise, and evenly spaced. She stared at it dispassionately. As long as she didn’t pull the wound open, the scar would be thin.

“How many stitches?” She didn’t want to take the time to count them all.

“Thirty-two.” Bree looked toward the door. An average-looking man in a white lab coat stood in the threshold. “I’m Doctor Walsh. How’re you feeling?”

“Weak. How deep was the cut?”

“Quarter of an inch at the deepest.” He pulled his hands out of his lab coat pockets and joined them in the room. It was getting crowded in the small space. Mary Ann stepped back to give him access to the bed. Denise shuffled to the side and joined Jase at the end of the bed.

“Radial artery?” she asked as he picked up her arm and palpated the edges of the wound.

“They warned me you were a medic. Radial artery. Do you remember telling the police you needed a tourniquet?” He squeezed her fingernails and released them.

Bree furrowed her brow and shook her head.

“It saved your life. Without it, you would have bled out before EMS got there. Squeeze my finger.” He put his index finger under all four of her fingers. She tried to close her fingers around his, but hissed as pain shot through her arm.

“Don’t worry. It’s good you can close your fingers. I have hope there’s no permanent nerve damage. You’ll need to be assessed by a physical therapist after the stitches come out.”

She gave him a baleful stare. “Are you kidding?”

He chuckled. “No. You can’t assess yourself. Never a good idea to self-diagnose.”

She sighed. “When can I go home?”

He squeezed her hand and motioned to Mary Ann. “I want to do another CBC to make sure your platelets are good. And you need to eat some solid food. Assuming everything comes back normal, tomorrow afternoon. Saturday at the latest.”

She nodded. She wanted her own bed. Wanted her dogs. Oh, shit. Her eyes widened and the beeping of the machine next to her increased. “Charlie and Polly?”

Jase rubbed her feet. “They’re fine. They were outside. If you need Polly, Tim can go get her from my house.” She sagged into the mattress.

Knock, knock.
Everyone turned as Detective Johnson stepped into the doorway. “Can I join the party?”

“You can have my spot,” Dr. Walsh said. “Bree, I’ll be back to check on you during my normal rounds.” He maneuvered his way around everyone in the room and left.

D
etective Johnson took a few steps into the room. “How’re you feeling?”

She quirked her mouth and her eyebrow twitched. “Okay, all things considered.”

His gaze was sympathetic. He looked down at her arm, being rewrapped in clean bandages. “You up for answering some questions?”

“Sure.”

“Not too long,” Mary Ann said. “She needs to rest.” She packed up the remaining supplies on the tray and left with a pointed looked at the detective.

He nodded and took up position next to Jase. Denise sat in one of the chairs by the door, thumbs flying across the face of her phone.

“Walk me through your day on Monday.” He lifted a digital recorder and raised his eyebrows. She shrugged. Pressing a button, he set the device on the tray table next to the bed. “Start from when you realized Cindy wasn’t at work.”

“It was between seven-forty-five and eight, I guess. She’s usually in by seven-thirty.” Detective Johnson stopped her a few times as she recalled the events leading to the confrontation in her house, asking her to backtrack or clarify some part of the timeline.

“She landed on the knife?” Bree asked.

“The medical examiner determined she tried to break her fall, but didn’t let go of it. She was still clutching it in her hand.”

Her eyes and nose stung. She dropped her gaze to her lap to hide her tears. Jase lowered the bedrail and sat next to her hip. He pulled her hand into his lap, careful of the IV taped to the back. His thumb brushed her cheek, catching a tear.

She swallowed hard and looked back at Detective Johnson. “Have you been able to figure out why? She wasn’t making a lot of sense. She rambled more than anything.”

He sighed and grabbed the recorder off the tray. He turned it off and slid it into his coat pocket. “She had several scrapbooks full of news clippings about you. Most of them look like they were downloaded from the internet. Even if the content was the same, if it was from a different site, she saved it.”

“What kind of articles?” Jase asked. His thumb brushed back and forth along the meaty part of her hand.

“They start from the time Bree received her Bronze Star.”

“She mentioned that,” Bree said.

“From there, it was anything and everything she could find,” Detective Johnson said.

“How much is there?” Denise asked.

“Not a lot after the hoopla of her medal died down. A few articles here and there, mostly in conjunction with events her grandmother supported.” He turned to Bree. “There were a lot of pictures after she started working at the hospital with you. Some of them you’re looking at the camera.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “Some were of you at your house or shopping. You seem completely unaware the pictures were being taken.”

Bree suppressed a shudder. Cindy had followed her? Stalked her? Something didn’t fit. “But why did she kill those women? I don’t understand that part.”

He pointed at the vacant chair. “Do you mind?” Bree shook her head. He pulled it closer to the bed and rested one ankle over the other knee. “We have a theory about why she started killing. We found journals she kept, going back about five years.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “They were from around the time her husband left her for another woman.”

Bree’s eyebrows rose. “She was married?”

“Divorced. You didn’t know?”

“I had no idea. I feel like such a shitty person. That’s a pretty significant thing not to know about someone.”

“It doesn’t make you a shitty person,” Denise said. “You said more than once she was a little weird.”

“Still, something that should have come up in the two years I knew her.”

“Not necessarily,” Detective Johnson said. “We pulled her personnel file. She checked
Never Married
.”

“Why?” Bree asked.

“What we’ve gathered from her journals is the divorce, and her husband cheating on her, destroyed her world. We’ve got a psychologist going through them as well. His preliminary assessment is that she lost her sense of self-worth. Then, she found you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She hero-worshipped you. In her own words, you were everything she wanted to be. Strong. Independent. Self-reliant.”

“What did that have to do with Bree’s ex?” Denise asked.

He glanced over his shoulder, then turned back to Bree. “She wrote about finding out Chad cheated on you. The entries became disjointed from that point forward. She’d refer to Chad, but a few sentences later, use her ex’s name. The psychologist thinks finding out about your situation triggered a psychotic break. She was unable to distinguish between what happened to you and what happened to her. In the end, she took all her anger she felt from her divorce out on the women involved with Chad.”

Bree stared up at the white ceiling. How did this happen? Could she have prevented it? She squeezed her eyes shut, and her fingers spasmed around Jase’s. Tears streamed from her eyes. Such a waste. So many dead.

Jase jostled her as he shifted forward on the bed. Her left arm lifted, and she felt Denise crowd her on that side. They surrounded her. Comforted her. Protected her.

“Bree.” Detective Johnson’s voice was soft, laced with empathy. “Nothing you did brought this on. Cindy was very troubled.”

She peered over her human security blanket and nodded. Jase and Denise sat back.