Unknown Means (11 page)

Evelyn turned to the older woman. “I’m going to sit with her for a few minutes. Why don’t you go home and get some dinner?”

“Sí, I was about to. The boys will be hungry.” No matter that the boys, Marissa’s brothers, were in their twenties. Mrs. Gonzalez pulled herself up by the metal pole of the monitor that recorded her daughter’s pulse and blood pressure. A glowing green line showed the reassuring jagged activity of a heartbeat. “Have you found the man yet?”

She had no good way to put it. “No.”

The portly mother regarded Evelyn for a moment, wrinkles etching deeper into her face by the minute. “Are you going to?”

“Yes,” Evelyn lied. “I’m sure of it.”

Another long moment. Then Mrs. Gonzalez turned and left without another word.

Evelyn took her friend’s hand, watching her breathe, the crisp white sheet over her chest rising and falling, shallow but steady, wondering why, except for her mother and daughter, she noticed other human beings in her life only when they were about to leave her. “Don’t think you’re going to die on me. Who am I going to talk to, without you?” she said. After a moment, she added: “And I’ll be one of your bridesmaids if you want me to.”

The sheet continued to rise and fall.

“Seriously. I’ll wear the poufy dress and everything.” Evelyn’s voice caught in her throat. “Just don’t freakin’ die on me.”

Still no response, of course. Evelyn hooked a chair’s leg with her foot, dragged it closer, and sat down without letting go of Marissa’s hand.

Ten minutes, she told herself.

She woke after what felt like thirty seconds to the clear voice of a male: “X-ray coming through.” But the voice and the machine

rumbled right past Marissa’s door and kept going, toward other voices discussing arterial blood and a second carotid line. A patient down the hall must have been in distress, the staff rushing to respond. Evelyn didn’t move—best to stay out of their way.

It’s cold in here. How do they expect people to get well inside a refrigerator? Her eyes opened, sighting along her left arm, now serving as a pillow. The room had grown dark—how long had it been?—and no one had turned on Marissa’s light. Even the green glow of the monitors had died. Oddly, Marissa no longer seemed to be in her own bed.

But I’m still holding her fingers. In fact she’s squeezing mine a bit, so she has to be here.

Her body is, but her face seems to have disappeared, replaced by one large hand.

And we’re not alone.

Evelyn’s head flew up, her subconscious cottoning on to current events long before her conscious mind. A man stood over Marissa, one hand covering the end of the breathing tube, the other balancing a pillow over the unconscious woman’s head.

Evelyn shot to her feet, but instead of the attacker’s face she saw only his approaching fist. The knuckles of an oversize hand caught her jaw before her brain could register the sight. The force knocked her onto her back, with her head caught against the wall at a painful angle. For a moment she saw only heavy black work boots thudding out of the room.

Evelyn pulled herself up on the bed rails and bent over Marissa.

She did not seem to be breathing.

Evelyn didn’t bother with the call button, assuming “Help!” at the top of her lungs might get more immediate action. Marissa’s neck remained bandaged, so Evelyn laid her head on the patient’s chest, listening for a heartbeat, which she could feel, and a breath, which she could not.

Evelyn was looking about frantically, about a hairsbreadth from

total panic, when a rasping sound came from Marissa’s breathing tube and a young, stolid nurse appeared at the foot of the bed.

“Help her!” Evelyn pointed, as if the nurse might not be sure who “her” referred to. “Someone just tried to smother her. Did you see him?”

“See who?”

Evelyn sprinted from the room. This guy had attacked Marissa once and gotten away. He wouldn’t do so again.

The hallway stood deserted, stretching a hundred feet in either direction, but only ten paces away a door slowly closed. Evelyn thrust the metal door open, hitting the wall with a bone-jarring clang. The stairwell. She looked up, then down, saw no one, and stopped to listen for footsteps.

Nothing. Not even the sound of a door closing.

She moved, tripping down the steps so quickly that only one hand on the banister kept her from falling, and even that couldn’t last. After two more landings, she slipped on the edge of the bottom step and knocked her left kneecap so hard she thought she’d dislocated it. With her footsteps temporarily quieted, she heard the small-est sound of movement, like the footstep of a cat or the brush of a shirtsleeve against a doorjamb. He had slipped through a door, away from the stairs.

Then she was up and moving again. On the second floor, she checked the hallway for her assailant, nearly flinging the stairwell door into a man in scrubs with a cart full of medications.

“Watch where you’re going!”

“Sorry.”

She flew down another flight, rails slapping against her right hip, and entered the lobby next to the emergency room. A nurse sat behind the counter, listening to a rail-thin and obviously inebriated woman talk about stomach pains. She looked only slightly more interested when Evelyn ran up, panting. “Did a man just run through here?”

“That’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened tonight. Nobody’s been here but me and Miss Wilson for the past half hour.”

“Yeah,” confirmed Miss Wilson. “When’m I goin’ to see a doctor?”

Evelyn returned to the stairwell. Another flight took her to the basement. She plunged through the final door and knocked her shins into the front fender of a cherry red BMW.

Both hands on the hood steadied her enough to look around. A parking garage. Considering the average sticker price represented here, a parking area for doctors.

You would have thought doctors would have demanded better lighting. Weak fluorescents hung over the main driving aisles, and the corners of the garage disappeared into shadows. It smelled like stale exhaust and leather upholstery. And it was silent. And she was unarmed.

She heard a noise from behind the door, the perfect spot for a predator to sit and wait—the slight swish of cloth on cloth, like a man’s legs when he walked, or two arms skimming the body as they raised a strap overhead.

Too late, she began to turn, her hands instinctively coming up. He slipped the noose over her, dropping it around her neck, and tightened. She felt his body pressed up against her back, his breath in her hair. He smelled of oil and stale Doritos.

Her right hand and two of her left fingers were caught in the strap, and she used them to push it away from her neck. The mesh fabric bit into her palms. She wouldn’t make it—her windpipe still sucked air, but eventually her arms would tire, and then her fingers would simply be crushed along with her throat.

A piece of advice came back to her. When throttled, she had read somewhere, breathe through your nose. You will always get enough air through your nose, no matter what happens to your throat. It hadn’t made sense to her at the time, and it didn’t now, and in any case she lacked the discipline to try it. Her mouth struggled to bring in air, no matter what her brain said. She needed to breathe! Now!

She kicked at his shins, to no effect. Her foot glanced off its target and hit the BMW’s passenger door. The car’s alarm began to peal, a deafening sound in the enclosed space.

She braced her elbows against his chest, using his own body as leverage to hold the strap away from her throat. A flash of light appeared to her right. Her brain had begun to shut down, to let unconsciousness seize the moment. Her view narrowed until she saw nothing but weakly shooting stars.

C H A P T E R

9

AS IF FROM A DISTANCE, SHE HEARD A VOICE: “DAMN

car alarms! Hey! What are you—”

The strap slid from her neck so quickly it burned her palm. She slumped to the ground, her face protected from the beeping car only by her still-raised arms. The attacker’s footsteps receded into the distance.

Hands eased her onto her back, holding an eyelid open to receive a bright light. Fingers felt her neck for a pulse. She looked up at a handsome young man in a white coat. An angel, she decided.

“What the crap happened here?” the angel demanded, shouting over the pealing alarm. “Was he trying to strangle you? I’ve been telling them we need more security down here. Did he take your purse?”

“I can breathe.”

“I see you’re breathing. Open your mouth, let me see. Doesn’t look too swollen. Did you get a look at the guy? I just saw a dark jacket.”

She listened to him for another moment or two, because doing so meant she could keep her head in his lap, but then wondered if Marissa had come through her near-smothering. “I think I’m okay.

I’m going to get up.”

“Do you have any other injuries? Did he hit you? No, don’t—” he

added, as she reached for the door handle of the Lexus in the next space to pull herself up on. Its alarm joined the first’s, a cacophony of chaos. “Aw, man! I hate those things.”

She located the elevator, unwilling to take the stairs in her present condition. Her breathing remained unencumbered, but her heart raced at a stroke-risking speed. On top of that, her hip ached and her knee had begun to stiffen. She pushed the button for ICU and motioned for her rescuer to follow. The killer might have run out of the garage; he might have had a car there and driven out—impossible to hear an engine over the alarms; he might still be there. She was in no condition to give chase, and she didn’t want this excitable but handy young man left alone with him. When the closed doors had muffled the car alarms, she told him, “Thanks for your help.”

“Any time. I don’t get to ride to the rescue too often. You’d better get some ice on that throat.”

“The cops will be here soon,” Evelyn said, hoping the ICU nurse had called them. “I’m sure they’ll need to get your statement.”

The eager flush faded from his cheeks. “Okay, but I don’t have all night. I’m meeting some nurses at John Q’s.”

She found the ICU floor as quiet as she’d left it, the silence falling hard on her numbed ears. The stolid nurse emerged from Marissa’s room just as she reached it, with the young doctor in tow.

“How is she?”

“Someone unplugged her monitor, and now it’s giving me these.” The nurse waved a printout under Evelyn’s nose, then absently thrust it upon the doctor. “Her pulse spiked and O-two satu-ration dropped. What happened?”

Behind her, the clock on the wall read nearly six. Evelyn had slept for an hour. “Call the police.”

“ONE HOUR. I try to leave for one hour, and what happens? Again, he almost kills my Mareesa.” In the hallway outside her daughter’s

room, Mama Gonzalez stood in front of Evelyn with hands on hips, smelling of fried tortillas and fury. “And then he almost kills you.

You, who are supposed to be so smart. What are you people doing?”

“I’m sorry, Mama Gonzalez.”

“Don’t be sorry. She’s still alive because of you. But this is a bad man, and he’s going to get you both if you don’t be more careful!

Running all over the city with who knows who and—” From there she broke into a tirade of Spanish, only a few words of which Evelyn could translate. Family and reasonable cropped up more than once.

David dropped to the bench beside her, his face chalky and lined.

Marissa’s mother briefly focused on him. “You, another one.

Why these girls have no sense in who they—” Her words trailed off into Spanish again as she returned to her daughter’s side in the ICU

room.

“You okay?” David’s tone belied the simplicity of the question.

“Yeah.”

“Six p.m. is meal break time for half of the nurses on the floor.

The other half were down the hall losing a patient to cardiac arrest.

I have to wonder if he watched for a while, waited until no one was at the desk to notice the alarm when he switched off the monitors.

He may not have known that you’d be there, but either way he couldn’t count on getting another opportunity. He must have decided to risk it.”

Evelyn removed the ice bag from her throat and added it to the one on her left knee, holding them with one hand. “If I hadn’t woken up, it would have been even better. Who would suspect murder when I was sitting next to her the whole time?”

“But you did wake up.” He reached out an arm, and she leaned against his shoulder, feeling muscles like steel belts under her cheek.

“Then he knocked you down and ran out?”

“Yes.”

He picked up her right palm to examine the burn from the strap. “Why did you chase him?”

“Because I wanted to see who he was, where he went. What should I have done?”

“Not chased him.” He pressed the injured palm to his lips, and the fear in his eyes prodded her with guilt. “Don’t chase bad men, Evelyn. He could have killed you. He could so easily have killed you.”

“I know.” Only by the sheerest luck had she gotten her hands under the ligature; otherwise she would have stopped breathing by the time the doctor appeared. If he had lingered over a patient’s chart a moment longer, chatted up a student nurse, stopped in the men’s room, she would have died. “Believe me, I know.”

“I don’t know how I’d do without you, but I know it wouldn’t be good.”

Guiltily averting her eyes from his pain, she asked, “Why did he end up in the doctors’ parking lot? Did he just follow the stairwell to the end, assuming I’d get out at the lobby? Did the parking attendant see him leave the garage?”

“The doctors all have magnetic cards to get in and out of the lot.

No attendant, and the machine does not record activation times. But three nurses having a smoke around the corner did not see a car go by, and he probably would have been driving noticeably fast, his adrenaline pumping.”