“You know, I don’t think I need a hospital. They’re only insect bites.”
“Let’s just see if we can find out where you left your memory, okay?”
“Okay. You look nice. Are you an Indian?”
“Yes. You?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”
Her response was so solemn Jerry laughed. He’d never seen anyone who looked less Indian.
In the ER, a young man behind the counter handed him a clipboard with a form on it.
“We’re not going to be able to answer any of these questions,” Jerry said. “Young lady’s got no ID and no memory.”
The young man didn’t blink, as if amnesia cases walked in every night. “Just fill it out for Jane Doe, and approximate the rest of the stuff. The triage nurse will be with you shortly.”
The girl sat humming tunelessly while they waited. Jerry filled out the form, writing “unknown” over and over again. The room started to get busier. John Cardinal came in with a middle-aged man who looked like an assault victim. He nodded to Jerry. It was not unusual to bump into another cop in emerg; on a Friday night, you pretty much expected it. The triage nurse came over and talked to them for about three minutes, just long enough to order up a chem screen and put the girl on priority. Eventually, Dr. Michael Fortis came out of an examining room and conferred with the nurse. Jerry went over; he’d worked with Fortis a lot.
“Pretty slow for a Friday,” Jerry said. “You sending them all to St. Francis?”
“You should have seen us an hour ago. We had two separate MVAs, cars got in arguments with moose up on Highway 11. The one in the four-by-four wasn’t bad, but the guy in the Miata will be lucky if he ever walks again. Always happens this time of year. Blackflies drive the moose out of the woods, and bam!”
“I got something a little more unusual for you.”
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Fortis came out of an examining room, shutting the door behind him.
“This young woman is completely disoriented in time and space. She’s also showing flattened affect and a dramatic level of amnesia. She could be a schizophrenic or bipolar off her meds. Do we know anything at all about her?”
“Nothing,” Jerry said. “She may be local, but I doubt it. She says she woke up in the woods.”
“Yes, I saw the bites.”
An attendant handed the doctor a clipboard. He flipped a page once, twice. “Her chem screen. Negative for intoxicants. First thing I want to do is call the psychiatric hospital and see if any of their patients are AWOL. If everyone’s accounted for, I’ll call for a psych consult, but that won’t happen till morning. In the meantime, we’ll take a skull X-ray. Frankly, I don’t know what else to do.”
He opened the examining room door and brought the girl out.
“Who are you?” she said to Jerry.
“Do you remember who I am?” Dr. Fortis said.
“Not really.”
“I’m Dr. Fortis. The kind of trouble you’re having with your memory just now is usually a symptom of trauma. I’m going to take you down the hall and take a picture.”
Jerry went back to the waiting area. It was filling up now with the usual cursing drunks, and infants wailing from colic or fly bites. He called the city station to see if there was a missing persons report on the redhead. The duty sergeant joked around with him; Jerry was with the Ontario Provincial Police now, but he’d worked for the city before that, and the sergeant was an old friend. No missing redheads on file.
Jerry thought about what would need to be done for her. It would be a city problem, not his, but if the hospital didn’t admit the girl, they’d have to find her a place to stay, maybe the Crisis Centre. And if it turned out she was the victim of an assault, it would mean going back to the bar and finding out if anybody knew her, trying to backtrack to when she came in and where she was before that. He wondered how she came to be in the woods. She wasn’t dressed for camping.
He found John Cardinal signing forms, talking to the young man behind the counter. The guy was listening, nodding attentively. Cardinal had always had the knack of making people feel that what they did was important, that how they handled the details mattered. It was a knack that could mean the difference between making a case and blowing it. Jerry waited for him to finish.
“I think I got a case for you,” he said. “I know you don’t have enough to do.”
“I told you never to call me here, Jerry.”
“I know. But without you, I’m only half a cop. My life is a stony, barren place.”
“Haven’t seen you around lately. I suppose you’ve been snorkelling down in Florida or somewhere.”
“I wish. Been stuck in Reed’s Falls working surveillance. Came across something in town tonight, though. Bit of an anomaly.” Jerry told him about the redhead.
“No drugs? Sounds like she took a knock on the head.”
“Yeah. No ID, no keys, no nothing.”
Dr. Fortis came back from radiology, a worried expression on his face.
“Something unexpected,” he said to Jerry. “Come and take a look.”
“John should probably be in on it. She’ll be a city case. You know Detective Cardinal?”
“Of course. Come this way.”
Cardinal followed them down the hall to an office where darkened X-rays were clamped to light boards. Dr. Fortis snapped on the light, and the gracile cranium and neck bones of the young woman glowed before them, front and side views.
“I think we’ve found why our red-headed friend is in such a placid mood. In fact, we’re going to be sending her down to Toronto for surgery,” Dr. Fortis said. “You see here?” He pointed to a bright spot in the middle of the lateral view.
“Is that what I think it is?” Cardinal said.
“I can tell you I’m feeling pretty incompetent right about now. Totally missed it on physical examination. I can only plead the thickness and colour of her hair.”
“Looks like a .32,” Jerry said.
“Entered through the right parietal region and partially severed the frontal lobes,” Dr. Fortis said. “Hence the flattened affect.”
“Will that be permanent?” Jerry said.
“I’m no expert, but people do make amazing recoveries from these sorts of things. This is really one for the medical journals, though: self-inflicted lobotomy.”
“Maybe not self-inflicted,” Cardinal said. “Women who want to commit suicide almost never shoot themselves. They take an overdose, they use the car exhaust. We’ll get ident to do a gunshot-residue on her hand.”
“Might not have to,” Jerry said.
The girl was in a wheelchair at the door, still smiling, an orderly behind her.
“We’ve got the EEG results,” the orderly said.
Dr. Fortis examined the printout.
Jerry turned to him. “You said the entry wound is on the right?”
“That’s correct. The right temple.”
“Hey, Red.” Jerry took a pen from his pocket. “Catch.”
He tossed the pen over her head. A pale hand shot up and snagged it out of the air. Her left hand.
“Well,” Cardinal said, “so much for suicide.”
2
ALGONQUIN BAY, WITH A POPULATION of 58,000 and only two small hospitals, cannot lay claim to any neurosurgeons of its own, which was why, forty-five minutes later, Cardinal was barrelling down Highway 11 toward Toronto, four hours south.
After Dr. Fortis had scanned the EEG results, he had ordered the redhead put into a neck brace and shot her full of antibiotics and anti-seizure medication. Then he ordered an ambulance. “She appears stable,” he said, “but I’m seeing some seizure activity on her readout. They’ll want to operate on her right away.”