Nerves of Steel (23 page)

Kind of like dealing with a rabid dog.  A rabid dog with a man's fate in his hands.

"But T-man's gone," the boy said, releasing Rankin's hair, his hand rubbing over his neck and chest as if he were having difficulty breathing.  Cassie noted that his voice had tightened.  His flushed skin gleamed in the headlights.

"I can take you to him.  I know where he is.  But you have to leave the cop here."

"You know where T-man is?  Can we raid his stash?  He's got some good shit there.  You'll share with me, right?"  The last came out a strained whisper, barely audible.

"Sure, no problem.  Just drop the knife and come with me." 

The boy's hands began to tremble.  A drop of bright red blood appeared on Rankin's neck, but the officer didn't flinch.

A look of surprise came over the boy's face.  One hand flew to his throat, and his breath came in a strangled gasp.

There was a blur of motion as Drake rushed past her and tackled the boy, forcing his knife hand away from Rankin.  Rankin rolled away, scrambling to his feet as the other officers joined Drake, swarming over the boy's prone form.

Kwon had Rankin uncuffed by the time Cassie reached him. 

"It's only a scratch," he told her as she examined his wound.  She had to agree.  "Hey doc," Rankin continued, rubbing the feeling back into his hands, "that was really something.  Thanks a lot."

"Yes, we're all so lucky the good doctor was here tonight," Kwon added in her dry tone.  "Lucky she didn't get someone killed."

Movement from the cluster of police officers surrounding the boy caught Cassie's attention.  "Get an ambulance," she told Kwon.  "Don't handcuff his arms behind him," she shouted to the other cops.  "Turn him over, he's not breathing."

The uniformed officer straddling the boy's prone body looked up at Drake.  "Do what she says," Drake told him, kneeling in the mud to help roll the boy over. 

Cassie ran to the boy's head, his face now a dusky blue.  She placed her lips over his and tilted his head back, trying to force air into his lungs.  Nothing.

"His vocal cords have clamped shut."   She felt for a pulse.  It was there but weak.  His skin was fiery hot and dry to the touch.  Blood was starting to congeal around a bullet wound in his right shoulder.  "Where's the ambulance?"

"On the way," Kwon answered.  "Should be here in five, ten minutes at most."

"He'll be dead by then."  She looked around.  "Someone give me a knife.  And I need a tube of some sort--something skinny, about quarter inch in diameter."

"Here."  Drake handed her a short-bladed folding knife.  He grabbed a flashlight from one of the uniformed officers and shone it over the boy's neck.  "Evans," he ordered, "grab the first aid gear from the back of a squad."

The uniformed officer nodded and took off at a run.  Cassie ignored the activity around her, focusing on the small area of skin below the boy's cricoid cartilage.  She had to be careful not to damage the tissue of the trachea.  She took a deep breath and with a swift, sure movement cut the skin.  After using her sweater to blot the blood away, a second cut parted the membrane of tissue that lay below.  A small gush of air rewarded her.

"I'm in.  Where's the tube?"  She didn't dare take her hand away from the tenuous opening she'd created.  Drake's hand entered her field of vision, his fingers wrapped around the hollow bore of his pen.  Cassie spread the tissue with the blunt handle of the knife and slid the pointed end of the pen into the opening.  She clamped her fingers around it, bent forward and tried to force air into it.

The air went in, but slowly.  The boy's chest barely moved.  Cassie tried again, but the boy's chest wall muscles were rigid, restricting the flow of air.

"Let me," Drake said.  She kept hold of the improvised airway as he leaned forward from his position on the opposite side of the boy's body.  She felt for a pulse once more.

"No pulse.  Get that defibrillator over here," she shouted.  An uniformed officer complied, opening the shoe box sized automatic defibrillator and attaching the pads to the boy's chest.  The lights on the command unit lit up.  "Everyone clear," she ordered as the unit charged.  At the last possible second she released the pen.  The boy's body jerked as three electric charges in rapid succession surged through him.

CHAPTER 39

"Still no pulse," the paramedic announced.

Cassie sighed.  They'd been working on the boy for over twenty minutes and even with the advanced equipment the ambulance brought, it was futile.  "All right," she said.  "Call it.  Time of death eight twenty-nine."

"It was a good try, doc," one of the medics told her as they disconnected their equipment from the boy's body.

She rocked back on her heels, spasms of pain shooting through her cramped legs.  A strong hand reached down and lifted her to her feet.  Drake.  The rest of the police had scattered, searching the warehouse for drugs and evidence, but he had remained behind.

She glanced around.  Her sight had been so focused on such a narrow area for so long that it took her a few moments to reorient.  "Rankin all right?"

"He's at Three Rivers.  I think he wants to thank you again."

Cassie grimaced and shook her head.  "I should have warned them about the Double Cross," she muttered.  "I was too excited about getting a lead on Jane Doe's identity to bother to stop and warn them."

"Kids like this--warning them about the Double Cross might have made them want to try it more."

She looked down at the body at her feet.  The boy--she didn't know his name either.  John Doe, just another disposable child like Sarah, her own Jane Doe.  Her jaw clenched in frustration, she pulled her gaze away from the boy's body to study the silhouette of the bridge, a dark, ominous form lurking in the night sky.

"I can't believe you did that," Drake continued.

"I didn't do anything but talk to the kid," she answered.  "You're the one who rushed him."

"Only when I saw he was ready to collapse anyway.  I remembered the Winston kid from the other night.  I was worried that this actor," he nodded to the body on the ground, "might jerk the wrong way and cut Rankin."

"Don't you have work to do?"  She was more than ready to end this conversation about dead and soon to-be-dead boys.  "I thought Miller wanted you to lead the search for Trautman's drug cache."

He shrugged.  "It can wait."

Cassie remembered Kwon's words about her interference with the investigation and Drake's career.  "I don't need you to babysit me." 

She spun away and started toward her car.  The bridge filled the sky behind the warehouse, towering over the landscape like some malevolent beast of the night.

"Bricks."  She stopped, her eyes fixed on the West End Bridge.

"What?" Drake asked, and Cassie startled.  She hadn't heard him following her, she'd been so preoccupied by her thoughts. 

She nodded at the bridge.  "Trautman said Jane Doe--Sarah--hit him over the head with a brick when she stole the drugs from him."

"So?"

"Old paving bricks, PennDOT must have torn them up."  She began to jog over the jumbled pavement, heading toward the foot of the bridge.  Drake caught up to her and pulled her to a stop.

"What do paving bricks have to do with anything?"

"There was a pile of broken paving bricks near where we found Jane Doe," she explained, her words tumbling over each other in her excitement.  "I remember Eddie putting the jump bag on them.  That must have been where Trautman raped her, and she hit him."

Drake frowned, then nodded with comprehension.  "Why would she go back to where she knew Trautman might be, unless--"

"Unless she knew his stash was near there, and she wanted to steal more drugs.  That's why she was there at four in the morning on a night when there wasn't a rave.  She went to look for Trautman's stash."  They scrambled across the broken pavement to the other side of the road and down the embankment where Jane Doe had been found. 

Drake paced the bank of the river, his eyes moving over possible hiding places.  Then he stopped, head tilted back, looking up at the concrete blocks that formed the foot of the bridge.  He aimed the flashlight up, illuminating a narrow shelf between the last row of concrete blocks and the steel foundation of the bridge.  Handing the light to Cassie, he began to climb the graffiti-covered slabs.

"Hold the light up higher." At the top, Drake stretched his arm out, reached behind some tumbled fragments of cement.  "Got ya!"

The wind ripped through the underpass like a Chicago bound freight train.  Cassie tried to hold the light steady, but her shivering made the beam skip.  Drake skidded down the interlocked concrete slabs, landed at her feet.

"Trautman made himself a nice cache up there."   He pulled his cell phone from his jacket.  "Cemented a big old lock box right onto the bridge supports."

Cassie stomped her chilled feet.  While Drake called for back up, she watched the black water of the Ohio lap against the edge of the gravel.  Every time she looked away the water came near as if trying to sneak up and ambush her.  She took a step toward Drake, not liking the banshee howl of the wind wailing through the bridge struts or the icy fingers of water stretching out to her.  A rumble above them came as one of the police cars pulled off the bridge.

Gravel flew down from the road surface.  She gazed out over the stretch of river heading west.  Suddenly a bright red flame came shooting over the railing of the bridge above them, twirling end over end as it spiraled through the darkness.  It splashed into the black water with a ribbon of sparks quickly devoured by the greedy river.

She froze, unable to move her eyes from the spot where the roadside flare drowned.  That could have been her.

Wrenching her eyes away, she stared up through the darkness to the railing high above.  If Drake had been slower, a second longer.  She would have dropped, spun through the air as the flare had.  Plummeted into the water.

Cassie crouched down, plunged her bare hand into the icy water.  No mercy there, a few minutes perhaps before hypothermia overwhelmed the body.

She closed her eyes, remembering Jane Doe's limp, blue body.  There but the grace of God--and Drake.

Her body shuddered as she realized just how lucky she was that he had been there.

"What the hell--"  Strong arms yanked her back before she could slump forward into the water.   Drake pulled her to her feet.  She opened her eyes and looked up into his.  Dark as midnight now in the dim light, they narrowed in concern.  "You're like ice.  C'mon, we've got to get you out of here."

"What about the lockbox?" she stammered through trembling lips.  He wrapped his jacket around her, propelling her up the slope.

"Kwon's coming to get it processed."  

Her numb feet slipped on the rocks, and she fell back against his body.  Drake's body was so solid, so warm against hers.  Definitely not the quivering mass of overwrought and exhausted nerves she had deteriorated into.  She pulled away.  She could take care of herself, she was no one's damsel in distress.

Cassie plowed up the scree slope on her own, wincing as the gravel bit into her abraded palms.  At least she could feel her hands again, she thought, cursing herself for not bringing gloves.  She tucked her hands under her armpits once she reached the pavement and headed toward her car.

"Wait.  My car's right here."  Drake steered her across the pavement to his Intrepid.

She hesitated, steeling herself to refuse his offer.  But then he was holding the door open for her, and she found herself sliding into the warm embrace of the front seat.

Drake hurried around to the driver's side, got in, started the car and turned the heat on high.He turned to her.  "Thanks to you, I think we just made major progress on the FX epidemic."

"Tell that to that homeless kid.  Or my patient.  I still don't know who Jane Doe is, and Fran's killer is still out there."  Everything she'd gone through, all for nothing more than a first name and the hazy possibility of an origin for Jane Doe.  Not much to work with, but she'd call Adeena with the information as soon as she got home.

She slumped against the seat, wishing that the heater could go higher, her body numb with exhaustion.  Maybe she'd call Adeena after she got some sleep.

"Didn't it occur to you that once Trautman knew you linked him with Jane Doe, he'd have to kill you?  That he couldn't allow you to connect him back to Three Rivers or the FX?"  He shook his head.  "Just how far would you go to help a patient?" 

The edge in his voice forced a flare of indignation from her.  "My patient, my job, my responsibility--a lot like yours, Detective."

"It's my job to risk my life, not yours.  My job to find Fran's murderer, not yours.  You could have been killed."  Now his eyes flashed with anger.

Cassie sighed.  Didn't they go through this already?  "You wouldn't understand."

"Try me.  What makes an intelligent woman fool enough to take risks to help a girl she doesn't even know?  What makes you think that Jane Doe wants to have her family back in her life?  Maybe she made herself anonymous in a strange city for a good reason."

She massaged the scar on her thumb and stared out the windshield. 
Because she was Cassie's,
was the answer that she could never articulate.  How to explain that someone had to stand for the helpless, the hopeless, that she cared for day in and day out?  What words would make that feeling of responsibility sound real and not like some grand delusion?

"I do what needs to be done," was the best explanation she could come up with.

He nodded slowly at that, and Cassie thought she saw some glimmer of understanding cross his face.

"Why were you there tonight?" she asked, trying to keep her voice level.

"Doing
my
job," he replied.  She was silent, and he continued, "I remembered you found Jane Doe here and that other overdose was brought in from down here, so I headed over, hoping to find Trautman, his stash or both."

She gave a taut laugh.  "And you got lucky."

He exhaled loudly, and his hands tightened on the steering wheel.