Damaged (4 page)

“Absolutely. What are the symptoms?”

“That’s just it. There are very few. At least, in the beginning. Initially there’s excruciating pain at the surgical site, which is not unusual with most of these surgeries. We’re talking multiple fractures, deep-tissue wounds with bone exposed.” He paused as several planes took off overhead, drowning out all sound. “We’re starting to move aircraft out of the path of this next hurricane.”

“I thought it’s predicted to hit farther west, maybe New Orleans.”

“Media is always looking at New Orleans,” Ganz shrugged. “Better story I guess. But some of the best in the weather business are telling us it’s coming here. Just hope we’re on the left side of it and not the right. That’s why the admiral’s nervous. That’s why I told him I needed to call you in. I told him, if Platt can’t figure this out, no one can.”

“Not sure I can live up to that.”

“Yes, you can. You will. You have to.”

“Pain at the site,” Platt prodded him to continue, wanting to keep focused before the fatigue derailed him. “What about the med packs left at the site?”

“That’s what we thought with the first cases. We removed the packs and that seemed to alleviate the pain, but only temporarily.”

“Infection?”

“Surgical sites show no swelling. Patients have no fever. Although they report feeling very hot and sometimes sweat profusely. They complain about upset stomachs. Some vomiting. Headaches. And yet all vital signs are good. Blood pressure, heart rate … all normal. Here we are.” Captain Ganz stopped as his driver pulled up to a side entrance of a brick two-story building.

The steel door was reinforced. A security keypad blinked red, its digital message flashed C CLASS I.

Ganz punched in a number then pressed his thumb on the screen. Locks clicked open: one, two, three of them. Inside was a small lobby, but Ganz took Platt down the first hallway to the right. The corridor was narrow and the two men walked shoulder to shoulder.

“The admiral wants me to evacuate these soldiers. Move them inland to the Naval Hospital instead of keeping them here right on the bay. But as you know, moving them presents all kinds of problems.”

Finally they arrived at another door, another security keypad. Ganz went through the same process again, but when the locks clicked this time he pulled the door open just a few inches and stopped, turning back to look Platt in the eyes.

“Within a week, four, five days, the blood pressure plunges. The heart starts racing. It’s like the body is struggling to get oxygen. They slip into a coma. Organs rapidly begin to shut down. There’s
been nothing we can do. I’ve lost two so far. Just yesterday. I don’t want the rest of these soldiers to see the same end.”

“I understand. Let’s see what we can do.”

Ganz nodded, opened the door, and walked into a small glass-encased room that overlooked an area as big as a gymnasium, only it was sectioned and partitioned off, each section encased in a plastic tent with sterile walls that sprouted tubes and cords, monitors and computer screens.

Platt sucked in his breath to prevent a gasp. There had to be more than a hundred hospital beds filling the space. More than a hundred beds with more than a hundred soldiers.

CHAPTER 4

PENSACOLA BEACH

Liz Bailey would have rather stayed out in the Gulf and be battered by the waves and the wind. But they were grounded for the rest of their shift and for the last five hours had been battered by the sheriff of Escambia County, the director of the Santa Rosa Island Authority, the commander of Air Station Pensacola, a federal investigator from the Department of Homeland Security, and the deputy director of DHS via speakerphone.

It was crazy and Liz couldn’t help wondering if they might have gotten off easier if they had never looked inside the cooler. If only they’d just handed it over and headed back out. Too many of the questions seemed more about containment of information rather than gathering the facts.

“Who else have you told?” the sheriff wanted to know.

“We followed proper procedure for finding human remains at sea.” Lieutenant Commander Wilson no longer bothered to hide his impatience. Keeping a cool head was a skill Wilson hadn’t learned yet.

Liz wondered if he was sorry that he’d asked Kesnick to open the cooler. Seeing him defensive and irritated by the consequences of his actions was almost worth the detainment. Almost.

Earlier, the look on Wilson’s face had convinced Liz that their pilot had never seen a severed body part before. At first she thought Wilson didn’t believe Kesnick. But she saw his eyes and glimpsed what looked like fear—maybe even shock. With his visor pushed back to get a better look at the contents inside that cooler, there was no hiding his expression. At least not from Liz, who had been in a position in the helicopter to see it, to catch it straight on. Normally it may have garnered sympathy. Instead it simply reinforced her lack of respect for the guy.

Finally dismissed for the day, the four of them wandered out into the sunlight.

“Beer’s on me,” Wilson announced. “It’s early. We can get a good seat on the Tiki Bar’s deck. Watch some bikini babes.”

Someone cleared his throat. Liz didn’t look to see who.

“Oh, come on,” Wilson said. “Bailey doesn’t mind. Not if she’s one of us.”

Always the edge, the challenge, putting it back onto Liz.

“Actually it sounds like a good idea,” she said, putting on her sunglasses, still without looking at any of them and not slowing her pace.

“Only if we can get a couple of hot dogs.” Tommy Ellis was always hungry.

“Geez, Ellis. Can you stop thinking about your stomach? We’ll get them later,” Wilson insisted.

“What if the hot-dog man isn’t there later?”

“He’ll be there,” Liz told them, now leading the way to the Tiki
Bar. “And he’ll probably talk us into going out again for another beer with him.”

“Yeah, how can you be so sure?” Ellis demanded.

“Because the hot-dog man is my dad.”

CHAPTER 5

NEWBURGH HEIGHTS, VIRGINIA

Maggie O’Dell downloaded and printed the copies Wurth forwarded to her. The photos and initial documents from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Department reminded her that she’d want to take her own photos. She’d be able to decipher only the basics from these shots.

One photo showed an assortment of odd-shaped packages wrapped in plastic and stuffed inside an oversize cooler. The close-ups displayed the individual packages lined up on a concrete floor used for staging. What she could see beyond the plastic wrap looked more like cuts of meat from a butcher shop than parts of a human body.

She asked Wurth if they could wait until her arrival before unwrapping the packages. He told her it was probably too late.

“Doubtful. You know how that goes, O’Dell. Curiosity gets the best of even law enforcement.” But then he added, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Now Maggie sat cross-legged in the middle of her living-room floor, scattered photos on one side, Harvey on the other. His sleeping
head filled her lap. She kept the TV on the Weather Channel. Initially the TV just provided background noise, but she found the weather coverage drawing her attention. She was learning about hurricanes, something that might come in handy in the following week.

Maggie found it interesting that the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, though measured by sustained winds, was also based on the level of damage those winds were capable of causing. A category-3 storm produced sustained winds of 111 to 130 miles per hour and could cause “extensive” damage; a category 4, 131 to 155 mile per hour winds and “devastating” damage; a category 5, 156 miles per hour and greater winds with “catastrophic” damage.

One hundred and forty mile per hour winds were not something Maggie could relate to. Damage, however, was something she could.

Hurricane Isaac had already killed sixty people across the Caribbean. Within several hours it had gone from 145 mile per hour winds to 150. The storm was expected to hit Grand Cayman in a few hours. One million Cubans were said to have evacuated in anticipation of the monster hitting there on Sunday. Moving at only ten miles per hour, the hurricane was expected to enter the Gulf by Monday.

On every projected path Maggie had seen in the last several hours, Pensacola, Florida, was smack-dab in the middle. Charlie Wurth hadn’t been kidding when he told her they would be driving down into the eye of a hurricane. Consequently, there were no available flights to Pensacola. Tomorrow morning she was booked to fly to Atlanta where Charlie would pick her up and they would drive five hours to the Florida Panhandle. When she asked him what he
was doing in Atlanta—his home was in New Orleans and his office in Washington, D.C.—he simply said, “Don’t ask.”

Wurth still had difficulty acting like a federal government employee. He came to the position of assistant deputy director of Homeland Security after impressing the right people with his tough but fair investigation of federal waste and corruption in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But Wurth, like Maggie, probably would never get used to the bureaucracy that came with the job.

Maggie knew she should be packing. She kept a bag with the essentials. She just needed to add to it. What did one pack for hurricane weather? Sensible shoes, no doubt. Her friend Gwen Patterson was always telling Maggie that she didn’t have the appropriate respect for shoes.

She glanced at the time. She’d need to call Gwen. She’d do that later. The foray with today’s killer was still too fresh in her mind and on her skin. Her friend the psychiatrist had a knack for reading between the lines, weighing pauses, and detecting even the slightest of cracks in Maggie’s composure. An occupational hazard, Gwen always said, and Maggie understood all too well.

The two women had met when Maggie was a forensic fellow at Quantico and Gwen a private consultant to the Behavioral Science Unit. Seventeen years Maggie’s senior, Dr. Gwen Patterson had the tendency to overlap maternal instincts into their friendship. Maggie didn’t mind. Gwen was her one constant. It was Gwen who was always there by Maggie’s side. It was Gwen propping her up during her long, drawn-out divorce; setting up vigil alongside Maggie’s hospital bed after a killer had trapped her in a freezer to die; sitting outside an isolation ward at Fort Detrick when Maggie’d been exposed to Ebola; and most recently Gwen was again by her side at
Arlington National Cemetery when Maggie paid her last respects at her mentor’s gravesite.

Yet there were days like today when Maggie didn’t want to confront her own vulnerabilities. Nor did she want her friend worrying. Maggie knew her insomnia was not just the inability to fall asleep. It was the nightmares that jolted her awake. Visions of her brother Patrick handcuffed to a suitcase bomb. The image of her mentor and boss lying in a hospital bed, his skeletal body invaded with tubes and needles. Herself trapped inside an ice coffin. A takeout container left on the counter of a truck stop, seeping blood. Rows and rows of Mason jars filled with floating body parts.

The problem was that those nightmare images were not the creation of an overactive or fatigued imagination but, rather, were memories, snapshots of very real experiences. The compartments Maggie had spent years carefully constructing in her mind—the places where she locked away the horrific snapshots—had started to leak. Just like Gwen had predicted.

“One of these days,” her wise friend had warned, “you’re going to need to deal with the things you’ve seen and done, what’s been done to you. You can’t tuck them away forever.”

The cell phone startled both Maggie and Harvey this time. She patted him as she reached across his body to retrieve the phone. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Gwen’s voice.

“Maggie O’Dell.”

“Hey.”

Close. It was Gwen’s boyfriend, R. J. Tully, who happened to be Maggie’s partner. That was before the FBI buckled down on costs. Now they found themselves working singularly and assigned to very few of the same cases. However, Tully had been one of the contingency
there today at the warehouse, one of half a dozen agents who witnessed Kunze’s kill shot.

“Thought I’d check to see if you’re okay.”