During her pediatric rotations, she’d quickly learned that the ward clerks were the all-seeing, all-knowing eyes of the floor. Reversing her path, she headed out to the nurses’ station.
“Monica, have you seen Narolie Maxeke?”
“Hey, Amanda,” Monica said, typing and juggling the phone as she smiled a greeting. “Thought you were in the PICU this month.”
“Following up on a patient. Room three-twelve?”
Monica shook her head. “Sorry, no. But I just put in a few orders for her, so she can’t be far. Did you try the teen lounge?”
The teen lounge was a locked area on the opposite end of the floor from the younger kids’ playroom. Only staff and teens with lounge privileges were given the code. “Good idea. Thanks.”
Waving at a few of the day-shift nurses, Amanda made her way down to the teen lounge. She entered the code—a not-so-hard-to-remember 4-3-2-1—and walked in. An emaciated boy in a wheelchair equipped with an oxygen tank was bobbing his head to technofunk while watching one of the X-Men movies and playing a handheld video game.
Otherwise the room was empty. “Have you seen a black girl?” she asked. “Tall, skinny, her name’s Narolie?”
The boy shook his head without looking up from his game. Amanda turned the boom box off and stood in front of him, blocking his view of the TV. Deprived of two-thirds of his sensory overstimulation, he glanced up in annoyance. “What?”
“I’m looking for two kids. A girl named Narolie and a boy called Tank.”
“Oh, them. They left. Pair of emos, didn’t like my tunes. I told ’em to get a room—way they talked you’d think the world was ending or something.”
“Do you know where they went?”
He shook his head. “Nope. They spent all their time looking out the window. Said something about watching the storm.”
“Thanks.” She turned his music back on, but at a slightly less deafening volume, and looked past him, out the windows. The lounge faced out onto the visitors’ parking garage—not a very romantic or colorful view. A few drops of rain streaked the window; thick, heavy like it had started as snow but melted as it fell.
The lounge door opened. Lucas Stone stood there, his gaze sweeping the room before coming to rest on her. “Heard my consult might be down here.”
Amanda smiled. Dr. Frantz couldn’t discharge Narolie now—not while he was waiting for Lucas’s consult. She led him from the room.
“How did you get Frantz to change his mind?” he asked.
“His PICU patient went missing. He said he’d schedule a neuro consult for Narolie if I found Tank.”
“Very Machiavellian. Of course, now we have two patients missing. Coincidence?”
She shook her head. “Doubt it. Anyway, sorry to waste your time. I’ll call you as soon as I find Narolie.”
Instead of leaving, he kept pace with her as she entered the stairwell and headed downstairs. “I’ll help.”
“Lucas. You’re busy. I can clean up my own mistakes.”
“Two lonely, sick kids who found something in each other. Doesn’t sound like a mistake to me.”
“Try explaining that to Tank’s mom or Dr. Frantz.”
“Anyway, I have ulterior motives. This consult is keeping me out of a very tedious IRB meeting. And besides”—he slipped his hand into hers—“I haven’t had much of a chance to see you this month.”
She paused on the landing to turn and look at him for a long moment. No kiss, no words, just look. Those old-soul blue-gray eyes, the strong jaw that spoke of a stubbornness as irritating as it was charming, the shadow of a smile hovering at his lips.
A lot of people saw Lucas as aloof, even arrogant, because of his superintelligence, disregard for social niceties, and obsessive-compulsiveness. They didn’t know the man she knew. The man who had spent a lifetime as an outsider and who’d paid a high price for his talents.
Lucas hadn’t changed because of her—thank God, because she loved him as he was—but he had lowered his defenses, invited her inside the barriers he had built around his true self. And that was a gift both unexpected and precious.
“What?” he asked, breaking contact and looking back when she didn’t continue down the steps with him. “Did I say something wrong?”
She skipped down three steps to join him. “No. You said something right.”
GINA AND THE PARAMEDICS RAN THE STRETCHER with the wounded cop into Trauma One. Waiting for them was an array of nurses, residents, and the surgical attending on duty, Diana DeFalco.
“What have we got?” DeFalco asked, staking her claim to the position at the foot of the gurney where she could see everything and bark out commands.
Gina hadn’t worked much with the new trauma surgeon, but she had seen her in action. DeFalco didn’t trust the emergency medicine residents yet. She always took over as command doc when no other attendings were around. Normally Gina would argue the point; after all, how was she supposed to learn how to run a trauma if no one gave her the chance? But not today, not with a cop without a pulse on the table.
Instead, Gina let the medics give DeFalco the bullet points while she quickly assessed the ABCs: airway secured; breathing—no breath sounds on the right, trachea deviated. Which meant no time for C, circulation, until she got a chest tube in place.
“Tension pneumo on the right, give me a thirty-six French chest tube,” she ordered as she poured Betadine over the right chest and grabbed a scalpel. The nurses, as always, were a step ahead of her; as soon as she said the magic words
tension pneumo
they were there with an open instrument tray, one handing her a chest tube as the other grabbed the pleurovac.
Gina palpated the space over the fifth rib, sliced the skin and muscle, and used the large curved hemostat to push her way into the pleural cavity. Immediately a
whoosh
of air greeted her. As she threaded the chest tube through the hole she’d created, the paramedic doing CPR stopped.
“We have a pulse,” DeFalco announced.
Gina confirmed the rhythm on the monitor. A familiar flush of pride flowed through her—she’d literally just brought Officer Boyle back from the dead. “Let’s get labs, four units of O neg, and place a Foley and NG while I start the FAST exam.”
She reached for the ultrasound, but DeFalco blocked her way. “No need for that.”
“What are you talking about? I need to find where he’s bleeding from.”
“Check out his head. There’s no exit wound. Both pupils are blown.”
Gina frowned at the attending. No exit wound meant the bullet had remained inside, ricocheting within the skull, tearing through brain tissue.
“Let me see,” she said, jostling past the respiratory tech bagging air into the cop’s lungs to check the pupils herself. Both were dilated, unresponsive to light. She checked the nostrils. “CSF leaking.”
“Positive Babinsky, his toes are upgoing,” DeFalco said from the foot of the bed.
“Let’s see what the CT shows,” Gina pleaded. Damn it, she hadn’t saved the man just to declare him brain dead.
The monitor alarmed. “Lost his pulse,” a nurse called out as she began CPR.
The team scrambled to run the code. In between pushing drugs and trying to shock the cop’s heart back to life again, Gina checked for other injuries—anything she could fix.
It seemed like only a few seconds later that she felt DeFalco’s hand on her arm, gently tugging her away from the frenzy of activity surrounding Officer Boyle. “It’s time to call it.”
“No, we can’t call it! Not yet.”
“We’ve done everything possible.”
“We can’t stop yet. Give him more time.”
“Gina, no amount of time is bringing him back. Call it.”
“He’s a cop, we need to try.”
“You’re taking this personally. I’m sorry, did you know him?”
Gina stared down at the naked body of Officer Boyle. “No. No, I never met him.”
“Anyone else with objections? No? Then call it.”
Gina opened her mouth, tried to form the words, but Jerry—
her
Jerry Boyle—kept staring back at her from the gurney. It could have been him. What if someday it was him?
Shaking her head, she tore her mask off and backed away from the lifeless body.
“Time of death, eight thirty-six.”
LYDIA RETRIEVED HER NINE-MILLIMETER AND AMMUNITION and waited with Nora in the foyer of the shooting range while Boyle called his partner. Nora was going to show him the building where she’d been abandoned. Even though it had been over two years and there was no hope of any usable evidence, Boyle said he wanted to see it, get a feel for this “actor”—the word he used for the killer.
Lydia bounced back and forth on her toes, wishing she could stay here and shoot. But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—abandon Nora. She just wished she had the right words of comfort to offer. It seemed to only make things worse when she did say anything.
So, here she was, Nora gripping her hand like a lifeline, getting ready to drive to an East Liberty crack house and see firsthand the place where her friend had been beaten, raped, and left for dead.
She’d always admired Nora for the way the charge nurse could handle even the craziest of emergencies, the most chaotic shifts, for the way she fought to protect her patients . . . but now it seemed there was more to Nora’s strength than Lydia had ever imagined.
Nora needed her help, and Lydia felt shamed by her own inadequacy. She didn’t know how to do this. Should she act strong, say nothing, wait for Nora to say something? Or ask questions, help Nora let it all out and talk about the nightmare she’d kept bottled up for two long years?
She liked it better when she had no friends. No, that wasn’t true, but
mierda
, did it have to be so hard?
“We’re set,” Boyle said, stepping out of Sandy’s office as he snapped his phone shut. “Janet is going to run down Matt Zersky and cover the PM.”
He was in high-energy mode, but after glancing at Nora, he toned it down. Even Lydia flinched a bit at the thought that Janet Kwon was on her way to watch poor Karen’s already mutilated body be cut apart even more during the post mortem.
The air outside felt dark and heavy with the added weight of moisture. Cold, sticky, slushy. Although she’d lived her whole life until now in L.A., Lydia had visited winter climates—hiking in the Grand Tetons, skiing at Tahoe. That air had been brisk and clean, a pleasure to inhale. Full of light and energy.
Pittsburgh winter seemed a far cry from that. Pittsburgh winter was coal-dust skies and Scrooge-like shivering that wore her out no matter how many layers she put on.
“You okay following me?” Boyle asked Lydia as he helped Nora into the passenger seat of his Subaru Impreza.
Lydia shot him a glare.
She
wasn’t the one he needed to worry about.
She walked past him to her Escape.
The morning traffic had died down, and it seemed no one was in a rush to be out and about on a gray day hazy with thunderstorms alternating between rain and sleet. Lydia had no trouble following Boyle’s silver Impreza as he led her through Highland Park and into East Liberty.
When they finally turned onto Alhambra Way, she realized that the medical center was only a few blocks away. They were near the church where the riots had started last summer. Alhambra hadn’t been spared.
The buildings surrounding the yellow-brick three-story tenement Boyle parked in front of were partially burned. Up and down the block it seemed there wasn’t a window intact, many boarded up with plywood serving as blank canvas for graffiti artists, the rest left with jagged glass knifing through empty air.
Boyle got out of the Subaru, talking on his cell phone as he walked around to open Nora’s door. By the time Nora had stepped out of the car, Lydia had joined them on the soot-stained sidewalk, carrying a flashlight, her nine-millimeter close at hand in her parka pocket.
Boyle’s jacket was unbuttoned, pushed back to reveal his gun and badge to any prying eyes. He need not have bothered. The block felt deserted. It was the house itself that radiated malevolence.
Below the slant of a narrow porch roof missing a support beam, the front door gaped open like a lopsided leer. Darkness inside beckoned; there were no signs of life.
Thunder pealed. The rusted tin roof shook as if laughing. Rain began to pelt them. Nora’s teeth were chattering.
“You sure about this?” Lydia asked Nora.
“Yes.”
Impervious to the rain, Boyle hung up his cell phone and led the way, his hand on his gun. Nora hugged her chest as she climbed the porch steps. She almost lost her balance, but Lydia steadied her.
Boyle stepped through the door’s opening. A loud pop sounded. Nora jumped, hugged herself tighter.
“Stepped on a crack pipe,” he called back. The only sign of life was his flashlight beam. Then that vanished into the darkness.
“Place is empty; there’s no one here,” he called out a few minutes later.
Once Boyle sounded the all clear, Nora stepped over the threshold and Lydia followed, one hand holding her Mag-Lite. She didn’t even realize she had drawn her gun until she felt its grip sliding against her sweat-slicked palm. Right now she wasn’t sure whether the adrenaline jazzing her nerves was from fear or the thrill of danger. Nora clutched at her wrist and Lydia reluctantly put her gun away, allowing Nora to hold her free hand instead.
The smell became overwhelming after a mere two steps away from the open door. The rancid stench of decay, human waste, alcohol, stale sex, marijuana, and mold was enough to make Lydia gag. She wrinkled her nose, wishing she had a hand free to cover it, and breathed shallowly through her mouth.
Other than a pile of half-burned, broken furniture, the front room was empty. The whole house felt empty, the only signs of life the brightly colored graffiti that glared in the beam of her and Boyle’s flashlights.
She remembered the words painted onto Karen’s skin and wondered if it was the same artist. Then shuddered as she tried not to imagine Nora going through that same hell on earth.