Fallen (26 page)

“I bet he was in that poly-what’s-it study,” the woman said. She showed the photo to her friend.

“Polyglycolic acid.” She explained to Sara, “Grady piloted a study on different types of absorbable sutures they were working on at
Tech. Looks like he’s one of the kids that had an allergic reaction. Poor little thing.” She went back to her typing. “I guess it was better than sticking a bunch of leeches on him.”

The other woman asked Sara, “You all right, hon?”

Sara felt as if she was going to be sick. She straightened up and left the room. She didn’t stop walking until she had bolted up two flights of stairs and was outside, breathing fresh air.

She paced in front of the closed door. Her emotions pinballed back and forth between anger and shame. He was just a child. He’d been admitted for treatment and they had experimented on him like an animal. To this day, he probably had no idea what they had done. Sara wished to God she didn’t know herself, though it served her right for prying. She should’ve never asked for his chart. But she had, and now Sara couldn’t get that picture out of her head—his beautiful mouth crudely pulled together with a suture that couldn’t meet the basic standards for government approval.

The faded Polaroid would be burned into her memory until she died. She had gotten exactly what she deserved.

“Hey, you.”

She spun around. A young woman was standing behind her. She was painfully thin. Her greasy blonde hair hung to her waist. She scratched at the fresh needle tracks on her arms. “Are you a doctor?”

Sara felt her guard go up. Junkies lurked around the hospital. Some of them could be violent. “You should go inside if you need treatment.”

“It’s not me. There’s a guy over there.” She pointed to the Dumpster in a corner behind the hospital. Even in full daylight, the area was shadowed by the looming façade of the building. “He’s been there all night. I think he’s dead.”

Sara moderated her tone. “Let’s go inside and talk about this.”

Anger flashed in the girl’s eyes. “Lookit, I’m just trying to do the right thing. You don’t gotta go all high and mighty on me.”

“I’m not—”

“I hope he gives you AIDS, bitch.” She limped off, mumbling more insults.

“Christ,” Sara breathed, wondering how her day could get any worse. How she missed the manners of good country people, when even the junkies called her “ma’am.” She started back toward the hospital, then stopped. The girl could’ve been telling the truth.

Sara walked back toward the Dumpster, not getting too close in case the girl’s accomplice was hiding inside. The trash wasn’t collected over the weekend. Boxes and plastic bags spilled out of the metal container and littered the ground. Sara took a step closer. There was someone lying underneath a blue plastic bag. She saw a hand. A deep gash splayed open the palm. Sara took another step closer, then stopped. Working at Grady had made her hyper-cautious. This could still be a trap. Instead of going to the body, she turned around and jogged toward the ambulance bay so that she could get help.

Three EMTs were standing around talking. She directed them toward the back and they followed her with a gurney. Sara pulled away the trash. The man was breathing but unconscious. His eyes were closed. His brown skin had a yellow, waxy look. His T-shirt was soaked in blood, obviously from a penetrating wound in his lower abdomen. Sara pressed her fingers to his carotid and saw a familiar tattoo on his neck: a Texas star with a rattlesnake wrapped around it.

Will’s missing Type B-negative.

“Let’s move it,” one of the EMTs said.

Sara ran beside the gurney as they rolled the man into the hospital. She listened to the medics run down vitals as she pulled back the gauze over his belly. The entrance to the wound was thin, probably from a kitchen knife. The edge was rough from the serration. There was very little fresh blood, indicating a closed bleed. The gut was distended, and the telltale odor of rotting flesh told her that there was not much that she would be able to do for him in the ER.

A tall man in a dark suit jogged alongside her. He asked, “Is he going to make it?”

Sara looked for George. The security guard was nowhere to be found. “You need to stay out of the way.”

“Doctor—” He held up his wallet. She saw the flash of gold shield. “I’m a cop. Is he going to make it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pressing the gauze back in place. Then, because the patient might hear, she said, “Maybe.”

The cop dropped back. She glanced up the hall, but he was gone.

The trauma team set up immediately, cutting off the man’s clothes, drawing blood, connecting lines to hook him up to various machines. A cut-down tray was laid out. Surgical packs were opened. The crash cart appeared.

Sara called for two large-bore IVs to force fluids. She checked the ABCs: airway clear, breathing okay, circulation as good as could be expected. She noticed the pace slow considerably as people began to realize what they were dealing with. The team thinned. Eventually, she was down to just one nurse.

“No wallet,” the nurse said. “Nothing in his pockets but lint.”

“Sir?” Sara tried, opening the man’s eyes. His pupils were fixed and dilated. She checked for a head injury, gently pressing her fingers in a clockwise pattern around his skull. At the occipital bone, she felt a fracture that splintered into the brainpan. She looked at her gloved hand. There was no fresh blood from the wound.

The nurse pulled the curtain closed to give the man some privacy. “X-ray? CT the belly?”

Sara was technically doing the regular attending’s job. She asked, “Can you get Krakauer?”

The nurse left, and Sara did a more thorough exam, though she was sure Krakauer would take one look at the man’s vitals and agree with her. There was no emergency here. The patient could not survive general anesthesia and he likely would not survive his injuries. They could only load him up with antibiotics and wait for time to decide the patient’s fate.

The privacy curtain pulled back. A young man peered in. He was
clean-shaven, wearing a black warm-up jacket and a black baseball hat pulled down low on his head.

“You can’t be back here,” she told him. “If you’re looking for—”

He punched Sara in the chest so hard that she fell back onto the floor. Her shoulder slammed against one of the trays. Metal instruments clattered around her—scalpels, hemostats, scissors. The young man pointed a gun at the patient’s head and shot him twice at pointblank range.

Sara heard screaming. It was her. The sound was coming out of her own mouth. The man pointed the gun at her head and she stopped. He moved toward her. She groped blindly for something to protect herself. Her hand wrapped around one of the scalpels.

He was closer, almost on top of her. Was he going to shoot her or was he going to leave? Sara didn’t give him time to decide. She slashed out, cutting the inside of his thigh. The man groaned, dropping the gun. The wound was deep. Blood sprayed from the femoral artery. He fell to one knee. They both saw the gun at the same time. She kicked it away. He reached for Sara instead, grabbing the hand that held the scalpel. She tried to pull back but his grip tightened around her wrists. Panic took hold as she realized what he was doing. The blade was moving toward her neck. She used both her hands, trying to push him away as he inched the blade closer and closer.

“Please … no …”

He was on top of her, pressing her into the ground with the weight of his body. She stared into his green eyes. The whites were crisscrossed with a road map of red. His mouth was a straight line. His body shook so hard that she felt it in her spine.

“Drop it!” George, the security guard, stood with his gun locked out in front of him. “Now, asshole!”

Sara felt the man’s grip tighten. Both their hands were shaking from pushing in opposite directions.

“Drop it now!”

“Please,” Sara begged. Her muscles couldn’t take much more. Her hands were starting to weaken.

Without warning, the pressure stopped. Sara watched the scalpel swing up, the blade slice into the man’s flesh. He kept his hand wrapped tightly around hers as over and over again he plunged the scalpel into his own throat.

W
ILL HAD BEEN TRAPPED IN THE CAR SO LONG WITH AMANDA
that he was worried he was going to develop Stockholm syndrome. He was already feeling himself weaken, especially after Miriam Kwon, mother of Hironobu Kwon, had spit in Amanda’s face.

In Ms. Kwon’s defense, Amanda hadn’t exactly been tender toward the woman. They had practically ambushed her on her front lawn. She’d obviously just come from arranging her son’s funeral. Pamphlets with crosses on them were clutched in her hand as she approached the house. Her street was lined with cars. She’d had to park some distance away. She looked exhausted and limp, the way any mother would look after choosing the coffin in which her only son would be buried.

After mumbling the perfunctory condolences on behalf of the GBI, Amanda had gone straight for the jugular. From Ms. Kwon’s reaction, Will gathered the woman hadn’t been expecting her dead son’s name to be sullied in such a manner, despite the nefarious circumstances surrounding his death. It was the nature of Atlanta news stations that every dead young man under the age of twenty-five was celebrated as an honor student until proven otherwise. According to his criminal record, this particular honor student had been a fan of Oxycontin. Hironobu Kwon had been arrested twice for selling the drug. Only his academic promise had saved him from serious jail time. The judge had ordered him to rehab three months ago. Apparently, that hadn’t worked out too well.

Will checked the time on his cell phone. The recent change to daylight savings time had switched the phone into military hours. He
couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to change it back to normal. Thankfully, it was half past noon, which meant he didn’t have to count on his fingers like a monkey.

Not that he didn’t have ample time to perform mathematical equations. Despite traveling almost five hundred miles this morning, they had nothing to show for it. Evelyn Mitchell was still missing. They were about to hit the twenty-four-hour mark since her abduction. The dead bodies were stacking up, and the only clue Will and Amanda had been given thus far had come from the mouth of a death row inmate who had been murdered before the state could kill him.

Their trip to Valdosta State Prison may as well have never happened. Former drug squad detectives Adam Hopkins and Ben Humphrey had stared at Amanda as if gazing through a piece of glass. Will had expected as much. Years ago, they had each refused to talk to Will when he’d shown up on their respective doorsteps. Lloyd Crittenden was dead. Demarcus Alexander and Chuck Finn were probably just as unreachable. Both ex-detectives had left Atlanta as soon as they were released from prison. Will had talked to their parole officers last night. Alexander was on the West Coast trying to rebuild his life. Finn was in Tennessee, wallowing in the misery of drug addiction.

“Heroin,” Will said.

Amanda turned to him, looking as if she’d forgotten that he was in the car. They were heading north on Interstate 85, toward another bad guy who was more than likely going to refuse to talk to them.

He told her, “Boyd Spivey said that Chuck Finn had a belly habit for heroin. According to Sara, Ricardo was packed full of heroin.”

“That’s a very tenuous connection.”

“Here’s another one: Oxy usually leads to heroin addiction.”

“These straws are mighty thin. You can’t throw a brick without hitting a heroin addict these days.” She sighed. “If only we had more bricks.”

Will tapped his fingers against his leg. He’d been holding back something all morning, hoping he’d catch Amanda off guard and get
the truth. Now seemed as good a time as any. “Hector Ortiz was Evelyn’s gentleman friend.”

The corner of her mouth turned up. “Is that so?”

“He’s Ignatio Ortiz’s brother, though I gather from your expression that this isn’t a news flash.”

“Ortiz’s cousin,” she corrected. “Are these observations courtesy of Dr. Linton?”

Will felt his teeth start to grind. “You already knew who he was.”

“Would you like to waste the next ten minutes discussing your feelings or do you want to do your job?”

He wanted to spend the next ten minutes throttling her, but Will decided to keep that to himself. “What was Evelyn doing mixed up with the cousin of the guy who runs all the coke in and out of the southeastern United States?”

“Hector was a car salesman, actually.” She glanced at him. There was something like humor in her eyes. “He sold Cadillacs.”

That explained why the man’s name hadn’t come up on Will’s vehicle search. He was driving a dealer car. “Hector had a Texicanos tattoo on his arm.”

“We all make mistakes when we’re young.”

Will tried, “What about the letter
A
that Evelyn drew under the chair?”

“I thought we were calling that an arrowhead?”

“
Almeja
rhymes with ‘Amanda.’ ”

“It kind of does, doesn’t it?”

“It’s slang for ‘cunt.’ ”

She laughed. “Why, Will, are you calling me a cunt?”

If she only knew how many times he’d been tempted.

“I suppose I should reward your good police work.” Amanda pulled a folded sheet of paper from the sun visor. She handed it to Will. “Evelyn’s phone calls from the last four weeks.”

He scanned the two pages. “She’s been calling Chattanooga a lot.”

Amanda gave him a curious look. Will glared back at her. He could
read, just not quickly and certainly not under scrutiny. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s eastern field office was in Chattanooga. He’d called them constantly to coordinate meth cases while he was working in North Georgia. The 423 area code appeared at least a dozen times in Evelyn’s phone records.

He asked, “Is there something you want to say to me?”

For once, she was silent.

Will pulled out his cell phone to call the number.

“Don’t be stupid. It’s Healing Winds, a rehab facility.”