The Absence of Mercy (14 page)

“Okay, Chief,” the young deputy said with a nod, then headed off to intercept them.

Sam walked around to the back of his car. He retrieved a rain jacket from the trunk and donned it against the midday drizzle, which would steadily work its way to a respectable downpour before the afternoon was through. He crossed the street to join a small cluster of officers standing in a loose-knit circle in the wet grass. “Hey, Chief,” one of them said in greeting as he approached. The others turned.

Sam nodded. “Hello, Mike.” He regarded the yellow
DO NOT CROSS
police tape stretched along the edge of the woods for about a hundred yards. At the far ends, it turned a right angle perpendicular to the roadway and headed straight back into the forest. “Where's Detective Schroeder?” he asked.

“Right here, Chief,” Carl announced from thirty yards away, walking toward them. He'd been canvassing the road slightly to the north, covering the area from where the police tape ended to a small cluster of houses just over the rise of the next hill. As he approached, he held up a Ziploc bag containing the tattered remains of a few small white cylinders. “Cigarettes,” he said. “Four of them, lying in the grass just on the other side of the hill. Pretty soggy and mashed to hell from the rain last night, but definitely worth a look.”

“Good,” Sam commented. He nodded at one of the officers. “I want that area cordoned off as well—and have the forensic guys examine the ground for shoe prints and anything else they can come up with.”

“Sure thing,” the deputy said, grabbing the police tape and a few stakes from the back of his car and heading off in that direction.

Sam turned to Carl. “What've you got so far?”

Carl pointed to a spot where the road's asphalt met the shoulder. “She was discovered here.”

The grass in this area was matted down, and in a few places tufts had been pulled from the wet earth. The rain was doing its best to wash the area clean, but Sam could see what he presumed to be bloodstains in several areas. It didn't take much of an imagination for him to picture the girl lying there weak and exhausted, having pulled herself hand over hand from the dark recesses of the woods. “Where was she attacked?” he asked.

“It looks like most of the struggle occurred at a spot about two hundred and fifty yards in,” Carl said. “Lots of broken branches and a fair amount of blood.”

“We need to get a canopy up in that area,” Sam said. “And one here, too. Get these areas protected from the rain as much as possible while there's still any evidence left worth collecting.”

Carl motioned to one of the deputies standing behind them, who nodded and went to his vehicle.

“Who found her?” Sam asked, studying the woods.

“A motorist on her way to work came across the victim at 6:45
A.M.
We got the 911 call at 6:48.”

“You've interviewed her?”

“Yeah. The lady's a nurse at Trinity Medical Center, and was heading in for a 7
A.M.
shift. She says she assessed the victim's injuries and rendered what aid she could before placing the call to 911. Said the girl was unconscious, and that her breathing was so slow and shallow that at first the nurse thought she was dead. Fortunately, she checked for a pulse.”

Sam nodded. “Where's the victim now?”

“They took her to Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.”

“Why not take her to Trinity? It can't be more than a ten-minute drive from here.”

Carl shook his head. “Trinity's not a trauma center. The girl's injuries were . . . severe.”

Sam's eyes met the detective's. “How severe?”

At first, Carl didn't answer. The precipitation falling from the sky was really beginning to pick up now, and large drops of water congregated on the edge of his hood before cascading the remaining several feet toward the pavement. He looked down at the grass in front them, imagining what it must've been like for the girl as she crawled all that distance through these woods after the attack, as she lay here in the darkness staring up at the rain. “I don't know,” he said finally. “She might not survive.”

The chief considered this for a moment. Behind him, the forensics van arrived and pulled to a stop on the opposite side of the street. Sam glanced over his shoulder as the two technicians emerged from the vehicle, then he turned back to Detective Schroeder. “Let them know what we've found so far,” he ordered. “Then come with me.”

“Where are we going?” the detective asked.

“Pittsburgh,” Sam called back, making his way toward the car. “I want to go see her.”

Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood lies along the southeast bank of the Allegheny River. When approached from the Fortieth Street Bridge in the late afternoon, the sun, low in the west, deepens the redbrick exterior of the neighborhood's buildings to the color of bloodred clay, as if the river's soil were giving birth to the edifices themselves. Behind them rises the massive structure of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, serving the area's youngest, most vulnerable citizens.

“Wow. It's huge, Dad,” Joel Stevenson exclaimed from the front passenger seat, his freckled face squinting upward as the Honda turned left on Forty-Fourth Street and came to a momentary halt in front of the hospital.

Ben smiled at his son's awed exuberance.
It doesn't take much to impress an eight-year-old,
he thought. Joel had complained of being bored for most of the hour-long ride from Wintersville, and Ben had been second-guessing his decision to bring him along. Now he was glad to have him here. He'd needed the company, and the boy's incessant chatter had kept Ben's mind from lingering on the horridness of what he'd been summoned here to witness.

He turned right at the next intersection and entered the mid-campus garage. They wound their way up several tiers and Ben nosed the Honda into an available spot. He'd received the call from Sam Garston at about 3:30
P.M.
this afternoon. The girl had been in surgery for most of the morning and early afternoon. She'd sustained multiple life-threatening injuries, had briefly gone into cardiac arrest twice in the OR, but had managed to make it out of the operating room alive and was now listed in critical condition in the hospital's pediatric ICU.
Could Ben come up and speak with the trauma surgeons?
Sam had asked.
Maybe take a look at some of the wounds to compare them with those from the first victim?

Ben and Joel descended the garage's stairwell, then took the enclosed walkway to the hospital's first-floor information desk. After a brief consultation with the volunteer at the desk, they received visitor ID badges and were directed to the pediatric ICU waiting room, where they found Chief Garston and two detectives conversing quietly with a man and woman whom Sam introduced as the girl's parents.

“This is Paul and Vera Dressler,” he informed Ben. He turned to the couple. “Dr. Stevenson has been assisting us with the investigation.”

Ben recognized Paul Dressler from a golf tournament they'd played in together a few years back. The man's arm was wrapped protectively around the shoulder of his wife, who stood among them but looked at no one. Her right hand was clapped tightly across her mouth, as if ready to stifle a scream that threatened to erupt at any moment. Her gaze fixed itself on the front of Ben's jacket as he stepped forward, offering his hand. “I'm so sorry this happened,” Ben heard himself saying. “If there's anything I can do . . .”

The woman made a small, indecipherable sound. Her husband nodded his head slightly in appreciation of Ben's condolences.

Sam gestured toward the man standing to his left. “You know Detective Schroeder.”

“Yes,” Ben said, shaking hands.

“And I don't believe you've met Detective Danny Hunt,” Sam continued. “I've assigned him to assist us on the case.”

Ben shook the young man's outstretched hand, as well. “Detective.”

Danny nodded. Compared to the rest of the men, he appeared young and baby-faced, as if daily shaving had not yet become a necessary component of his morning ritual. With his button-down brown shirt and beige sport jacket, he looked relaxed and almost casual. But beneath the parted cascade of his light blond hair his eyes were sharp and intelligent, flitting from one face to the next and missing nothing in between.

They were silent for a moment before Sam turned to Ben. “The Dresslers would like to return to their daughter as soon as possible. I told them it might help our investigation if you had a chance to look at some of the injuries. They've kindly agreed to give us a few minutes to do that, and have consented for some photographs to be taken.”

Ben nodded. He looked down at Joel. “I'd like for you to wait out here for us, son. We shouldn't be more than about fifteen minutes.”

“We'll keep an eye on him,” Paul assured him.

“I appreciate that,” Ben said, and he headed through the large double doors with Sam and the two detectives.

The pediatric ICU, Ben noted as they stepped inside, was more tranquil than he recalled. His time as a medical student and resident in such settings had been one of frenzied data gathering, countless procedures, extensive documentation, and protracted bedside discussions. It had been a whirlwind of endotracheal tubes and central lines, of ventilators and IV pumps—a seamless blur of medical histories and physical exam findings amid weeks of sleepless nights, as the pager attached to his belt beeped endlessly with its voracious, intractable demands. By comparison, the unit this afternoon seemed hushed, almost silent, as if the patients around them struggled to live or die on their own private battlegrounds, far removed from this physical place in which they lay.

Sam led them toward a room in the far corner. Its sliding glass door stood open, and as they approached a technician maneuvered a large portable motor-driven X-ray machine from the room with surprising grace. He smiled politely at the four of them before steering the contraption down an adjacent hallway. Ben and the officers exchanged glances and then proceeded into the room.

Inside, a young girl lay supine on a gurney. A thin blue hospital gown covered her chest, shoulders, and abdomen, her long black hair disappearing beneath the upper ridge of her torso. The remainder of her small frame was obscured beneath the crisp white linen. She lay motionless, except for the slight rise and fall of her chest in step with the measured mechanical pace of the ventilator. A plastic breathing tube protruded from between her pale, cracked lips, and numerous medication lines hung from an assortment of IV pumps attached to two metal poles at the head of her bed. From beneath the gown, an additional two large plastic tubes emerged, one on each side of her body, and descended into multichambered canisters, which bubbled softly. A bulky dressing covered her right ear.

Sam and the two detectives stood near the wall at the foot of the bed. None of them spoke, and the officers now seemed hesitant, as if waiting for something to happen. It took Ben a moment to recognize that they were waiting for him. To these men, this was a foreign place about which they had little understanding, and the young woman lying unconscious in the bed in front of them—held together by a bewildering assortment of tubes and instruments that doggedly sustained her tenuous existence—was an inexplicable enigma. He could sense their tension, their careful restraint, as if the slightest action might inadvertently tip the scales of recovery against her, as if her broken body might suddenly disintegrate and scatter like ash in the wind. This was
his
world, he realized, or at least it had been at one time in his training. They had asked him to come here to examine her injuries, yes—but they also needed him as a liaison to orient them to what they were seeing and its significance, to broker this space between those who would live and those who would die, and to tell them in which direction to go from here.

He was about to speak when a female voice behind them interrupted the silence.

“Hard to believe she made it.”

They simultaneously turned to encounter a woman in her mid-thirties dressed in blue scrubs and a white lab coat. Her dark hair was slightly disheveled, as if she'd been wearing a cap for most of the day. A stethoscope had been tucked into a side pocket of her lab coat, its earpieces peeking curiously out at them. The clogs she wore on her feet were enveloped by thin blue shoe covers, and there was a large orange stain—Betadine, Ben presumed—on the front of her left pant leg. A single black pen poked out from the front pocket of her lab coat above a hospital ID badge that dangled from a small metal clasp. She thrust out a hand in Ben's direction.

“Karen Elliot,” she announced. “I've been in the OR with Ms. Dressler for a good part of the morning.”

Ben shook hands with the surgeon. Her skin was cool and dry, her grip firm and assertive. He introduced himself, Sam, and the two detectives. “The case is being investigated as an attempted homicide,” he explained. “We've received the parents' consent to examine her injuries . . . if it's okay with you, that is.”

“If her parents are fine with it, then so am I,” the physician replied. She stepped to the bedside, retrieved the stethoscope from the pocket of her lab coat, and listened to the girl's chest for a moment. She wound the stethoscope into a loose circle, returned it to her pocket, then pulled an otoscope light from its resting place on the wall. As they watched, she pulled back the girl's upper eyelids to shine the light into first one pupil and then the other, noting the response. The otoscope was returned to its wall mount, and the surgeon bent down on one knee to examine the plastic chambered canister to which each of the tubes exiting the girl's chest was attached.

“Could you tell us about her injuries?” Ben inquired.

Dr. Elliot lifted the girl's hospital gown to expose her abdomen. The skin along a midline surgical incision site had been left open, the wound packed with gauze. Ben spotted three Jackson-Pratt drains exiting the skin from other areas of the abdomen, their small chambers partially filled with a thin reddish fluid.