A Heartbeat Away (19 page)

27

The next morning, Tori enjoyed the delicious rarity of sleeping in. She awoke, stretched, and in her first moments of consciousness, thought back over the events of the night before. She looked at the Bible on the bedside table and breathed deeply, collecting her thoughts.
Yes
, she thought with a smile,
peace is here
.

She rose and decided that an extended stay at the Jefferson Hotel would be perfect. She stopped at the desk and requested to keep her room for a week.

In that time, she would do three things: find out about God, find out as much as she could about Dakota Jones, and try to discover who was threatening her.

She started her day by walking to a downtown bookshop. The Asian man behind the counter said, “May I help you?”

“I'm looking for a Bible,” she said quietly.

He led her to a section marked “Religion.” She looked through the options and selected something called a parallel Bible, with the New International Version on one side and a contemporary version called
The Message
on the other. It was real leather and smelled like an expensive handbag. The salesman explained that the NIV was a translation and that
The Message
was a modern paraphrase that might help her understand a bit easier.

She hurried back to the hotel, holding her purchase in her hand like a treasure.

“Okay, God,” she whispered in her room, “show me who you are.”

She began paging forward, yellow highlighter in hand, anxious to color the verses that meant something special to her. She wanted to personalize her Bible as Phin and Charlotte had theirs.

She scanned from book to book, trying to understand the big picture. Along the way, she thrilled to read metaphorical language in
The Message
, particularly when the words used were ones she could relate to as a surgeon. In Romans 8 she read, “God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son.” In Hebrews 12 she read, “When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through.
That
will shoot adrenaline into your souls!”

After two hours, she took her immunosuppressive meds and lay down for a nap.

In the afternoon, she called Phin MacGrath. He answered after two rings.

“Hi,” she said.

Slight hesitation. “Tori.”

“You sound surprised to hear from me.”

“Honestly, I am. I didn't think I'd be on your list of favorite people just now.”

“I didn't say you were on my favorite-people list, Phin.” She paused and weighed her words. “I didn't call to ask you out. I need a favor.”

“What's up?”

“You mentioned that you had a friend, an ex-cop who had a heart transplant. You had him look into a few things for me. I'd like his contact information.”

“Okay,” he said.

She listened to noises of paper shuffling.

“Say,” Phin said, “did you ever talk to that psychiatrist?”

“Yeah. Let's just say I must have spilled some information, but her allegiance is to the Baltimore PD. She says she needs to process the data before she talks to me.” Tori sighed. “So I'd like to do a little more digging on my own. That's why I need this contact.”

“Sure. Here it is. Gus Peterson.” He read off the phone number. “He'll remember.”

“Okay. Got it. Thanks, Phin. Bye.”

She had deliberately avoided letting things get too personal in the call. It was so much easier to retreat to a professional level, rather than deal with how hurt she'd been by the way they'd left things after their dinner.

She imagined Phin's confusion.
Let him stew. I've got little patience for a man willing to send me such mixed-up signals.

She dialed Gus Peterson.

“Hello.” His voice was baritone and cheerful.

“Mr. Peterson, my name is Tori Taylor.”

“Yes, Dr. Taylor, I know of you.”

“I'm calling to see if I can get you to do a little snooping for me.”

“Well, well. I understand you're looking for your heart donor.”

“Not exactly. But I should thank you for the work you did for Phin MacGrath. I've identified my donor, but I think she died under suspicious circumstances.”

“Phin told me about that.”

“He told me you had a heart transplant. Did you experience any changes afterward?”

He laughed. Tori smiled—he sounded like Santa Claus. “My wife and I joke about it. Didn't even know anyone else was experiencing stuff like this. Two things. Ever since my transplant, I've become a hugger. I never used to be like that.”

“And the other?”

“I never liked beer before. Turns out my donor was Irish. When I mentioned a new taste for Guinness, my donor's wife just burst out crying. She said her husband never missed an evening without a pint.”

“Wow.”

“So what's on your mind?”

“My donor's name was Dakota Jones. Probably about thirty years old. Lived in a project downtown. The newspaper says she jumped from the fifth floor to avoid a fire. She was with a man, Christian Mitchell, a doctor I think she met at a free clinic downtown. He jumped with her.”

“And you think there's something fishy about the way she died?”

“Exactly. It started with vivid new memories. Fire. A man screaming. Falling.”

“But you said your donor jumped to escape a fire. You might expect that sort of thing.”

“But there's more. Most of what I remember is images. The face of a man who has bad teeth. I remember pain in my ankle, my foot facing in the wrong direction. I distinctly remember a woman with green eyes and a little tattoo of hearts, and the number three one six. In the memory, the woman gave me the number and told me to remember because she wanted to make—” she held up her fingers and made quotation marks in the air—“that bastard pay.”

“Okay, that's pretty weird. This is beyond anything I've read on transplanted memories.”

“I researched and found one other case of memory transplantation that resulted in solving a murder. I think mine will be number two.”

“Wow.” Gus Peterson had stopped laughing.

“There's more, something that makes this a bit more tense. Since I've been looking into this, I've been getting threatening phone calls warning me to back off. Someone's unhappy about this.”

“I'll poke around, see what I can find.” Then Gus cleared his throat and paused, but seemed on the verge of saying something.

Silence hung between them for a moment before Tori asked, “What is it?”

“I'm not well off, Doc. I can barely pay my monthly prescription costs.”

“I can pay for your services.”

“Did you call me from the phone that received the threats?”

“Yes.”

“Were you able to see what number the caller used?”

“No. It was some sort of unrecognized caller.”

“Let me do some snooping. I'll find out something.”

“Thanks, Gus. Call me soon.”

Her phone rang just as she ended the call. “Hello.”

“Ms. Taylor?”

“Yes.”

“I'm calling from Home Security Systems. Are you at home?”

“No, I'm out.”

“We've just received input from your alarm system. There is a possible break-in in progress. The police have been called.”

“Break-in?”

“Someone just unlocked your front door.”

Mary Jaworski spent the morning in her office sipping spiced African chai and studying Tori Taylor's interview tape.

The more she watched, the more concerned she became. Something was amiss about the death of Dakota Jones. But extracting information across transplanted memories was new territory for her. Several things were clear, yet several other things remained cloudy.

In the early afternoon, she managed to get Captain Ellis on his private line. His greeting was gruff and straightforward, spoken with a voice that betrayed years of cigarette abuse. “Ellis.”

“Captain, this is Dr. Jaworski.”

“Yes, yes, glad you called. Have you been in touch with our little witness in the Dakota Jones case?”

“Indeed I have.”

“What can you tell me?”

“This is a very complicated case. Not only are Tori Taylor's memories vivid and revealing, but the way she relays them may be mixed up with her own personal life.”

“What do you mean?”

Mary sipped tea and formulated a careful response. “Tori is a remarkable woman. Very smart. But in some ways, she's just so closed emotionally. At least she used to be.”

“Used to be?”

“Before her transplant.” Mary looked at her unpolished nails. Cut short and without glamour, they reflected Mary's personal approach to hygiene and life in general: less is better, practical rules over beauty. “Tori is or was a scientist. Even as a child, she was very calculating and detached.”

“So?”

“So it gives me an anchor to distinguish the donor's memories. The donor was evidently quite passionate.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Get to the point. Do you think this girl was murdered?”

“Hold your horses, Captain. I'll show you the tape. But be aware, there are some real oddities. Tori's memories from Dakota Jones are all third person. It's as if she sees things from outside her own body. The only thing I can figure is that somehow Tori's inner psyche has dealt with these transplanted memories as if they are indeed foreign. It's as if Dakota speaks to her from the outside. She doesn't always experience Dakota from the first person. It's like she sees her in action from someone else's eyes.”

“I'm not sure I'm following. Do we have evidence of a crime?”

“Oh, yes. But it's not the kind of thing I want to discuss over the phone. I need to show you this stuff in private.”

“Give me a clue. Why the secrecy?”

“You'll understand when I show you the tape. My report could be damaging.”

“To who?”

“To Dakota Jones, among others.” She hesitated, wondering how much to say. “Maybe the police.”

“Bring me the video.”

Mary sighed. “Look, I'm not sure who this Dakota woman really was. There are memories of abuses from people in authority over her, a father or an employer perhaps. I want to study this a bit more before I point my fingers at anyone who may have wanted to harm Dakota.”

“Can you say who?”

“Dakota wanted to hurt someone.”

“What?” The captain's tone suggested his growing frustration at the conversation.

“I'll bring you the tape and let you see.” She paused. “Let's just say that I think Dakota Jones started that fire.”

28

By the time Tori arrived at her suburban Richmond home, a Richmond PD vehicle sat in her driveway. She recognized the officer duo who had investigated her complaint from the evening before. She parked her Mazda on the street and walked up to the older officer.

He held out his hand. “Officer Campbell. We met last evening.”

“What's going on? Did someone break in?”

He tilted his head toward her front door. “Punched a hole in the window in the entrance, then reached in and unlocked the door.”

“Robbery?”

“Not sure. Need to go through the house with you.”

The younger cop sat in the passenger seat of the patrol car, talking on the radio. “What's he doing?” Tori asked.

“We're calling for a technician. We want to dust for prints, photograph anything inside that may be in disarray.”

She nodded. “Let's go.”

“Don't touch the doorknob.”

The door was ajar. She pushed it open with the back of her hand. Other than glass on the hardwood floor, the entryway was normal. She scanned the front room, looking at photographs and books. “I don't notice anything missing or out of place.”

“Do you keep valuables in the house?”

“I have a small safe, but only for important documents, my passport, that type of thing. It's in the bedroom closet.”

“Jewelry? Cash?”

“Nothing much. My tastes are pretty simple.”

They did a room-by-room inventory. In each room, she tried to imagine the impact of losing the contents. A vase that had been a gift from her mother. A seascape picture painted by a patient. A trophy from a high school track meet.

In her office, she looked at her ego wall, where her diplomas and awards were on display. This was the personal shrine she'd built.
What kind of life have I built? Would I miss anything I own if it all were taken away?

In her bedroom, she opened the top drawer of her dresser and slipped a small wad of cash from the inside of a sock. She checked her small jewelry box and then knelt over the safe in her closet. Peering inside, she said, “Everything is here. I can't tell that anything has been bothered. Maybe it wasn't robbery. Maybe it was meant to scare me into stopping my search into my heart donor's death.”

“And maybe your alarm scared off a potential burglar who didn't have a chance to take anything.”

“That doesn't feel right. There has to be a connection with the threats. I've never been a target of burglary before. The timing of this break-in is too close to the phone calls to be coincidence.”

The officer made a note.

“Could you at least talk to Captain Ellis of the Baltimore PD? He's in charge of the investigation into my donor's death.”

The officer rubbed at a small stain on the front of his uniform. It looked like powdered sugar. “Sure.”

When they walked back out to the foyer, a technician was dusting the doorknob for fingerprints. “Hey, George,” the man said, “this has been wiped clean. Nothing here.”

“No surprise.”

Tori stayed quiet, watched, and paced around the front room.

After a few minutes, Officer Campbell took a step toward her. “Are you okay?”

She offered a smile. “I was just thinking about all this stuff. None of it really means that much to me beyond a few photographs.”

“That's pretty typical, isn't it? It takes a crisis to let us know that family and friends are the only things that matter.”

Tori nodded silently and felt alone. She hadn't invested much in friendships, and without family, she was acutely aware of her isolation. She looked at him. “Can I fix you some coffee?”

He nodded. “Sure.”

The menial task brought her some sense of comfort in the presence of yet another stressor. It seemed somehow the right thing to do to care for someone else. And when it came to life outside the operating rooms, she'd never been very good at that sort of thing. Sure, she could take out pancreatic cancer, but could she do the minor things? Could she offer a cup of cold water on a hot day? The thought nailed her conscience. She'd spent the majority of her adult life being cared for by others in orbit around her.

When she handed the officer a mug of steaming black coffee, she said, “Someone's trying to scare me, aren't they?”

“Appears so.” He shrugged. “Can you think of anyone who might want to scare you? A mad family member of a patient with a bad outcome?”

She thought back over the last few months. As a cancer surgeon, she often dealt with patient deaths, but she didn't recall any unbalanced or angry family members. “No.”

“Boyfriend? Jilted lover? A married man?”

“No, no!”

“Just askin', ma'am. It's part of the job.”

“I can assure you, until my heart transplant, my life was appropriately boring.” She gripped her coffee mug as if it might escape. “What about you, Officer Campbell? You have family and friends to make your life meaningful?”

“Just my wife at home now. My son is deployed in Afghanistan.”

The technician called from the foyer. “All finished here, George.”

The officer took another swig of the coffee and set the mug on the island. “Thanks. You should try and get that glass fixed or at least put up some temporary barrier.”

“Sure.”

The officers left, and Tori swept up the fragments of glass. Being in the house alone was giving her a creepy feeling. She packed a few additional clothing items in a suitcase and put duct tape over the window.

She took a Coke Zero from the fridge and stopped to pull the 316 note from under a magnet on the door. She shoved it in her pocket.
This will make the perfect bookmark in my new Bible. I'll put it right at John 3:16.

On the way to her car, she stopped at the mailbox where she found two Kohl's flyers and a package. It was a brown package about six by eight inches, postmarked in downtown Richmond the day before.

She studied it a moment. No return address. Must weigh two or three pounds.
I don't remember ordering anything.
There was no Amazon symbol.

She took it back into the house where she loosened the paper wrapping with a knife. Inside, at first, she saw only Styrofoam packing peanuts. She brushed them aside to find a plastic Ziploc bag. She lifted it from the container and screamed.

Stepping back, she let the bag and its contents fall to the floor.

Inside, the red-brown flesh was easily recognizable to the surgeon.

She stared at it in disbelief, fighting back a wave of nausea.

A human heart!