Fallen (18 page)

“So what, it’s vanished from her body?” Oliver asks. He sounds a little disbelieving, like he’s been waiting for it to be Sarin or something really nasty. Something we can all get good and worried about. Dr. Bochowitz exhales impatiently.

“No. I’m saying I haven’t found it yet. It’s something highly sophisticated. Something that’s going to take longer than three hours to detect, Dr. Massey.”

“So we can open up the hospital again, then?”

“We can, but Chief Allison won’t. Not until I can figure out exactly what this is. Apparently it would be bad for relations if we were seen to be releasing patients without ascertaining the exact cause of Nanette’s death.” Most pathologists would refer to a patient as Ms. Richards, or something a little more formal, anyway, but not Bochowitz. She’s been Nannette to him ever since she was wheeled into his morgue. The way he talks to deceased patients used to freak me out just like it freaks everyone else in the hospital out, but I quickly realized that he doesn’t do it because he’s crazy. He does it as a kindness, so that when the bodies of the dead undergo their final, most invasive medical examination, they aren’t left alone with a stranger. They’re left to go through it with a friend. That was the first thing that made me love the man.

“The EMT is recovering,” Bochowitz continues, “so she obviously only came into contact with a negligible amount of the toxin, and that was through direct contact. Those of you who did touch the patient should have a blood test just to be sure, but I’m assuming you would have fallen sick and died by now if you were going to.”

Oliver shoves his hands into his pockets, raising his eyebrows at the mortician. “You’re a ray of sunshine, Bochowitz. Thank you for brightening my day.” He hurries off down the hallway toward the canteen, trying not to look like a man who is terrified of needles and is running from the prospect. Which is exactly what he is.

“I’ll take your blood for you if you like?” Dr. Bochowitz offers.

“Sure.” I follow him into an examination room, my body relaxing now that the threat of imminent death is off the table. Though I tense up pretty quickly when I see the look of concern on Bochwitz’s face. His expression, usually serene and unaffected by much, is drawn into a contemplative frown. He folds his arms across his chest as soon as I’ve sat down.

“What? What is it?”

“Did you get a good look at the girl’s abdomen?”

“What do you mean? I saw the blisters on her ribcage and I raised the alarm.”

“Nannette had something written on her side. I found it when I carried out the autopsy.”

A sinking feeling of dread twists through me. This
something
that he’s found written on her can’t possibly be good if he’s this stern about it. Dr. Bochowitz retrieves his cell phone from his pocket and tampers with the buttons until he finds what he’s looking for. He holds out the device for me to see and suddenly it feels like my whole stomach is trying to escape my body via my mouth.

Property of Dr. Sloane Romera
.

The letters are drawn in a slanting, messy scrawl across pale skin in what looks like sharpie. How the fuck did I miss this? And why? Why would anyone have done that?
My
name? On
my
patient? In
my
hospital? Oh my god.

“It’s relatively fresh,” Bochowitz tells me. “Usually sweat or natural sloughing of the dermis means that things like this fade fairly quickly, but the ink on Nannette is still prominent, which means it happened very recently.”

“Was there…” I swallow, feeling bile rise at the back of my throat. “Was there anything else?”

Bochowitz’s mouth pulls to the side; he scratches at a tuft of hair on the side of his head. “Aside from the remarkably personal tag marking the victim as your personal property? No. No, so far I haven’t located any other clue as to why Nannette was targeted for this attack. Or anything to really confirm that it
was
an attack. I just saw the ink and thought I’d better tell you first, before I showed anyone else.”

I close my eyes, trying to get my head around this. A woman. A random woman off the street, dying. My head pounds as I consider the life of this woman. Her fiancé in Florida who still doesn’t know she’s dead; the children they might have had together; the career Nannette worked so hard for; whether she has parents who will be grief stricken by her death. I’m hit with each new thought like a succession of bombs going off inside my head. I know it with a sickening surety: her death is linked to my relationship with Zeth. It has to be. I never had any bodies addressed to me before I started spending time with him, that’s for sure. I draw as much air into my lungs as possible. “Have you passed this onto the cops yet?” I ask.

“Our systems are linked. I’ll have to go down and submit my findings now. There’s a lot of people waiting on this information, Sloane. I doubt it will be long before they come looking for you.”

I nod, eyes still closed.

“They’re going to want to question you, you realize?”

“I know.” I take in another deep breath. Open my eyes. Bochowitz’s face has softened with worry now. He reaches out and places his hand on my shoulder.

“It’s amazing what goings-on can be gleaned from my lowly basement vantage point,” he says softly. “I may be out of sight, Sloane, but I tend to see a lot of things. And I tend to hear a lot of things, too. You’ve been absent, but you’ve also been troubled. I have no idea what complications may be affecting your life, dear girl, but there are further complications on the horizon. I hope…” He sighs, sounding faintly regretful. As though everything is already lost. “I hope that you’re ready. And I hope that you are safe.”

Poor Bochowitz. I want to tell him I am, that everything is okay, but honestly, at this point, the last thing I’m feeling is safe.

“I don’t think I want to see Dr. Newan anymore.”

Lacey is sitting on the sofa, teasing a piece of thread between her fingers in a cat’s cradle. She’s insisted on having the television on all morning, even though she’s not watching it, while I’ve been pacing the warehouse, trying and failing to prevent myself from feeling like an increasingly stressed animal trapped in a motherfucking cage. A cage that’s my own admittedly very comfortable home, but still. I want out.

“I thought you liked Newan?” I scratch at the stubble on my jaw, carefully stretching out my body. I’m sore—not only my fucking stomach where I was stabbed, but everywhere else, too. Moping around in bed sounds mighty appealing right now, but I know my body and I know what it needs: it needs to be challenged in order to heal. I’ve been still for too long. I’m used to working out every day. To pushing my body to the limits. Being wracked with a fever and on my back for four days has royally fucked me over.

Lacey holds up her cat’s cradle to me, the thread manipulated around her fingers and thumbs, and looks at me expectantly. I pull my eyebrows together, glaring down at the thing. “Seriously?”

“Seriously,” she replies. She has that look on her face; the stubborn one that lets me know I can either acquiesce to her demand, or I can deal with the consequences. And I can’t be fucked dealing with a Lacey that’s been pushed over the edge this morning. I huff, pinching the taut lines and folding them around and under, pushing up so that the thread transfers to my hands in a new pattern.

A childlike surprise takes over her features. “How do you know how to do that?” she asks, laughing.

I consider telling her to mind her own damn business, but then I figure what’s the point. “My mother liked to do it with me,” I tell her. Her smile fades.

“You remember her?”

“I remember her,” I confirm. “Imperfectly. I remember small bits and pieces of her. Like this.” I offer out the cat’s cradle to her so she can take her turn at manipulating the pattern. “But those bits and pieces don’t make up a whole person.”

Lacey takes her turn. She stares down at the game we’re playing, now looped and twisted around her fingers once more, and looks…impossibly sad. “Was she beautiful?” she asks. “Your mom. Was she really beautiful?”

I clear my throat, reining in the desire to clam up and avoid the question altogether. “Yes. Yeah, she was.”

“Do you…” She hesitates, as though she’s unsure whether she should continue on her train of thought. “Do you have any pictures of her? I’d like to see her.”

Her interest is understandable given that I’ve never mentioned my mother before and here I am suddenly talking about her. Lacey’s probably intrigued about the sly remark Newan made about her, too—
And then of course there’s the history with your mother.
A history I have no intention of ever openly talking about. I’d show Lace a picture, but I only have one photo of the woman who sometimes visits me when I sleep. I’ve kept it secreted away for years, and even though I haven’t looked at it, the knowledge of its presence here within this warehouse is fucking torture enough. I haven’t been able to look upon her face without experiencing a dark rage that consumes me for days, so I think of my fucking self instead of Lacey’s curiosity. “I don’t. I wish I did.”

Lacey just nods. She curls her hands into fists, loosening the threads and signalling that my duties are now over. I go back to pacing.

I need to get my head back in the fucking game. There’s so much I have to do, and being injured is just not part of the plan. I need to figure out where Charlie is right now. I’ve been fuming ever since I learned about him setting me up and sending me to Chino, and I’ve wanted him to pay. And in order to keep Sloane safe, I thought the best way to make him pay was to kill the motherfucker. Then there’s no chance he can ever put her in danger again, but while that solution appeals to my more pragmatic side, the vicious side of me wants Charlie to suffer.

Chino was
not
a walk in the park for me. Neither was Charlie killing one of my closest friends—the same murder that put
me
in prison. The lies, the deceit, the surveillance, the colossal sense of complete betrayal. None of these offenses are going to be resolved by Charlie’s quick and bloody demise. No, he deserves something a little more…appropriate.

He deserves to find out what Chino’s like first hand. He deserves to lose all he holds dear. He’s already lost the Duchess, and in all honesty there’s only one other thing I know of that Charlie genuinely cares about in this life: his money.

It’s a serious fucking shame that Rick’s dead. It would have been great to know more about what those bikers were doing, scamming information about Charlie’s businesses and their locations out of Rick. There is one other way of finding out, I guess. I could just ask the Wreckers. They might tell me, considering how much they clearly seem to dislike Charlie, but then again they might bury me up to my neck in sand, pour honey over my head and leave me to be eaten alive by fucking fire ants. The Wreckers don’t usually deal in drugs or guns—Charlie’s preferred method of paying his bills. They’re fences and thieves. They’ll steal and sell anything that’s not nailed down, and if they didn’t steal it, whoever
did
steal it can take it to them, knowing the gang will have no qualms about selling items in one of their many seedy pawn shops. For a healthy fee, of course. Their base is up on Aurora Lane, north of the city.

If I can just get them to—

“Zee?”

—tell me straight what they want with Charlie’s operation, then maybe I—

“
Zeth!
”

I stop pacing, snapping my head up. Lacey’s holding out the television remote, pointing it at the screen. “Are you listening to this?” she asks. She’s frozen still, a bowl of dry Lucky Charms balanced on top of her knees.

“…say that there is no risk of a contagion affecting any of the hospital’s patients at this stage, although no less than three nurses inside St. Peter’s have confirmed a worrying detail. One of the paramedics who answered the emergency nine-one-one request for urgent medical care at the gas station in Burien where the unknown woman mysteriously fell ill, is also displaying the same symptoms. Doctors have no idea what caused the woman’s death, or whether the staff and other patients inside are now at any sort of risk, but hospital administration have placed the building on lockdown, refusing to let anyone in or out. Our sources claim that—”

My heart is a jackhammer in my chest. “What the hell?” My voice is steady, but with every passing second the news reporter asks or answers more questions, I can feel a very unpleasant, sick feeling forming in the pit of my stomach. “That’s St. Peter’s?”

“Yeah,” Lacey answers. “There are so many cop cars out there. They think this is some sort of attack. And Sloane’s in there, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah she fucking is.” Lacey’s right about the cop cars; there are four cruisers parked up outside the hospital, visible over the shoulder of the female news reporter. But it’s not the cruisers that have me on edge. It’s the Aston Martin one-77 parked by the emergency entrance.

Charlie Fucking Holsan.

This is another message. Except this one isn’t written on paper. I know him. I know him all too fucking well. This message is going to be written in blood.