I glanced down the hallway, reviewing the rooms we’d passed on the way to the morgue.
“The PT room,” I mumbled and began to wheel the woman down the hallway as fast as I could.
“What is it?” Cheyenne caught up with me.
“Physical therapy, we passed it on the way here. They’ll have a whirlpool.”
Cheyenne hurried ahead of me and held open the door. I eased the gurney inside. “We’re going to help you,” I told the woman. “It’s all right.”
Gently, I took her in my arms.
He locked her in the morgue.
The killer tried to freeze her to death.
The sadistic, merciless nature of his crimes stunned me, nauseated me.
No one else was present, but I saw Cheyenne motion toward me from the far side of the room. “The whirlpool’s over here.”
The pool had been built into the floor, and as I descended the steps and entered the warm water, I saw Cheyenne reach for the control panel. “Leave the jets off,” I said. “It might be too much of a shock to her system.”
“Right.”
Supporting her weight, I carefully lowered the woman into the water, but she began to shake, weak quivers running through her body. I lifted her a little, then lowered her again, more slowly, while Cheyenne spoke to her, comforting her, reassuring her from beside the pool.
A few moments later the woman coughed and blinked her eyes rapidly. The color was returning to her face.
“He…” She was speaking softly, but at least she was speaking. “He left me in…”
“I know,” I said. “Who was it? Who did this to you?” She shook her head. She didn’t know. “What’s your name?”
She gasped. Took a breath. “Kelsey.”
“We’re going to get you warmed up, Kelsey. You’ll be OK.”
She gave a small nod.
Moments passed. Curls of warm steam rose from the water and meandered around us.
Kelsey’s breathing began to grow more normal, more steady. Then I heard running in the hall.
“It’s the doctor,” I called to Cheyenne, but she was already heading for the door. A moment later a man in doctor’s scrubs, a nurse, and Lance Rietlin came hurrying into the room. “Over here!” I yelled as I lifted Kelsey from the water and carefully stepped out of the whirlpool.
“Let’s get her on the gurney,” Lance said, then helped me lay her down. He touched her hand lightly. “What’s your name?”
“Her name’s Kelsey,” Cheyenne said, then brushed some wet hair out of Kelsey’s eyes.
“We need to get you out of these clothes,” the nurse said to Kelsey. “Is that all right?”
Kelsey nodded, and Cheyenne and the nurse removed her wet clothes while Lance retrieved some towels and blankets from the linen closet. Then he handed them to the nurse, who quickly and thoroughly dried her off and laid the blankets over her.
The doctor, a balding man in his fifties with a look of permanent worry etched on his face, checked Kelsey’s eyes with a penlight. “Whose idea was it to warm her in the pool?”
“Mine,” I said. “There was no other way to heat her up. No doctors here, no elevators. She was going into shock. We needed to do something.”
“We came down the elevators,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.
“They were out of service when I brought them down here,” Lance explained.
After a moment of reflection, the doctor seemed to accept that. “All right. Well, let’s get her out of here.” Then Cheyenne told me she’d reconnect with me in a few minutes, there was a rush and swirl of bodies, she left with the medical crew and I was alone in the room.
I grabbed a towel and wiped it across my face and arms. Right now Kelsey had plenty of people helping her, so I decided to return to the morgue and have a look around, especially now that it was a crime scene for attempted murder.
I threw the towel on the pile. Turned toward the hall.
A man stood in the doorway. “Hey, Pat. Good to see you.”
The profiler, Special Agent Jake Vanderveld, had arrived.
27
“Hello, Jake,” I said.
He stepped into the room. Four years younger than I am. Handsome. Smart. On his way up. Jake had tousled blond hair, intensely blue eyes, and he wore his neatly trimmed mustache like a badge. Even a decade after graduating with his master’s degree in abnormal psychology, he still had the honed physique of the Division I swimmer that he’d been at Cornell.
“So, Assistant Director Wellington tells me you can use a little help on this case.” He was staring at my dripping clothes. “I’m glad I was available.” He was smirking.
“I thought you weren’t arriving until this afternoon?”
“Shifted my schedule around. I figured you’d be glad to have an extra set of eyes on this thing. So that woman they were taking down the hall, what happened?”
As I summarized, I noticed that in the haste to get Kelsey to a room, her clothes had been left on the floor. Jake watched me pick them up, and the gears seemed to be turning in his head. “You took her into the whirlpool?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I could have been here to help.”
Immediately, I sensed that his words could be taken two ways: either as an expression of genuine concern or as a lame and completely inappropriate joke. His tone of voice made me think it was the latter of the two, but before I could respond to him, my phone rang. I was amazed the water hadn’t shorted it out.
Tessa’s face came up on my caller ID and I told Jake to hang on a second, then answered the cell. “I’m in the middle of something, Tessa. This isn’t the best time to talk.”
“Um, Agent Jiang called, like, half an hour ago. She left a message on my cell. Said she’d tried you first.”
She must have called before you turned on your cell.
“She must really be trying to get a hold of you,” Tessa went on. “You’re supposed to give her a shout.”
It’d been bad enough talking to Lien-hua with Cheyenne nearby; I definitely did not want to do it in front of Jake Vanderveld. I laid the phone against my chest to muffle the sound. “Hey, could you give me a couple minutes? Call dispatch, get a CSU team over here to process the morgue.”
A small grin from him. “I’ll see you soon, Pat.”
“All right, Jake.”
Then he left and I told Tessa, “I talked with Agent Jiang about twenty minutes ago.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Is it official?”
This girl was more observant than most of the agents I work with.
“It’s been that evident, huh?”
“That would be a yes.”
“Well, I guess, you could say that, yes; it’s official. Listen, about lunch-”
“Your decision or hers?”
“Not so much a decision as a mutual acknowledgment.” I headed for the hall. “I have to take care of a few things, maybe I can call you later.”
“I’m sorry, Patrick.” It sounded like she really meant it. “Breaking up sucks.”
“I’m a big boy, Raven. I can handle it.”
“Doesn’t matter how big you are.” She paused. I heard her take a sip of something. “It still sucks.”
Here I was, getting relationship counseling from a teenage girl.
I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well, thanks.”
Since my clothes were soaked, after I’d had a chance to have a look around the morgue, I would need to get changed, and that meant swinging home. “Are we still on for lunch?”
“Yeah. I was thinking that new vegan place-Fruition. You know all those signs, ‘Come to Fruition,’ ‘Have you tasted Fruition?’”
How exciting. Bean curd, spinach, and chickpeas.
“Are you still at Pandora’s house?”
“She dropped me off at home.”
“OK.” I was almost to the morgue. “I can probably be there in about half an hour. You can pack until I arrive.”
“Well, actually, though, I’m pretty busy.”
“Oh, really? On a Saturday morning? What are you doing?”
“Dora gave me this Rubik’s Cube that I’m trying to figure out. And, oh yeah, I’m finishing up this iced triple grande three pump dolce breve with whip, pumpkin pie spice latte before you get here.” She rattled off the name of her drink in one breath.