“Yeah.”
“You’re live,” Susan said.
“This is Dr. David Leonard, a coroner and pathologist at Las Vegas Memorial. Also attending is Dr. Susan Wheeler. Today’s date is June twelfth; the time is two sixteen a.m. The subject is an unidentified Jane Doe who was dead upon arrival at the hospital approximately two hours ago. The patient is a female, approximate age twenty. She was admitted to the ER with zero respiration and pulse. An EKG showed no brain activity and she was pronounced dead at twelve fifty-nine by Dr. Fred Palmer.”
Susan stopped the recording. “You’re getting stuck in your introduction. Start describing what you see in the patient.”
“Can we go back and erase the rough parts?”
“We can edit it any way you wish. Now continue.”
“The subject has two striking characteristics. There’s a large quantity of blood around her nose, and her skin and musculature are unusually cold, well below room temperature. Yet the lack of pooling of blood in the lower extremities indicates she was alive when she was put in a freezer. For that reason, it would appear that the cause of death might be hypothermia.”
Dave paused and wiped the sweat from his brow and I heard another click on Susan’s end. “Boy,” he said. “This is a lot harder when you realize jurors might be listening to it one day.”
“You get used to the spotlight. You’re doing fine, by the way. But it might be time to open her up and see what we’ve got. To speed things up, I can saw open her skull and remove her brain while you remove her viscera and perform the pericardium cut. Understand, I’ll keep my mouth shut and let you describe the condition of the cranium.”
“How do we coordinate it so it looks like I’m in charge the whole time?” Dave asked.
“It’s easy. I’ll just hold the brain out for you to see. If you want to slice it, do a microscopic exam, I can do that while you keep talking.”
Dave rubbed his hands together. “Sounds like a plan.”
Stop! Oh, please God in heaven, STOP!
They couldn’t hear me. They were too busy with their toys. Susan had a handheld band saw that was powered by a tiny motor. She checked to make sure the motor was working, then reached for a scalpel.
Every medical thriller I had ever seen came back to haunt me. I knew precisely what she was about to do. Using the scalpel, she would cut an incision around the entire top of my head. She would cut down the sides of my face. Then, using her gloved hands, she would grip my skin and peel it off. Yeah, just like I was some kind of bloody doll. Next she would peel the flesh on my face all the way down to my chin and let it hang from my jaw.
Finally, she would cut open my skull and yank out my brain.
Dave was holding a pair of scissors large enough to slice open my abdomen, which is precisely what he was going to use them for. He would pull out my guts—my liver, gallbladder, spleen, large and small intestines, stomach—and toss the whole mess into a steel bowl to be weighed and examined later.
Then, using the same pair of Paul Bunyan nail clippers, he would move on to the ever-popular pericardium cut, a favorite of coroners everywhere because they get to snap open the sternum and pretend for a while they’re performing heart surgery. When in reality he was just going to cut out my heart and toss it into another bowl.
Dave pressed the tip of his blade in a place I couldn’t see.
For the first time I felt something, a dull pressure.
I think he had the blade pointed at the top of my pubic bone.
OH, GOD!
Dave frowned. “Susan, turn off the mic a sec.”
Susan did as he requested, her scalpel in hand. “What’s the problem?” she asked.
“It’s her skin. It’s so cold, it’s still partially frozen. I’m not sure how easy she’ll be to open up.”
“You won’t know until you try.”
“That’s just the thing. I think maybe we should wait another hour.”
YES! WAIT ANOTHER HOUR! GOD BLESS YOU!
Susan sounded annoyed. “I don’t have another hour. Look, if it’s too much pressure, let me handle this one. You can always do the next one.”
“But you were saying what a special case this is. I don’t want to miss out.”
“Then start cutting.”
Dave sighed. “All right. Turn the recorder back on.”
NO! WAIT! GOD DAMN YOU! NO!
A female voice spoke over the hospital intercom.
“Dr. Wheeler to emergency. Dr. Susan Wheeler to emergency, please.”
Susan tossed her scalpel down. “I wonder what that’s about.”
Dave set aside his giant scissors. “You better hurry. I heard they’re undermanned tonight. I told you before, Palmer’s never going to forget you got your start in ER.”
Susan glanced down at me before leaving. Again, I felt as if we connected. The sensation was stronger this time, the certainty. It was almost as if she were inside my head.
It must have been my imagination. Pulling off her gloves, she turned toward the door, calling over her shoulder. “Don’t do anything until I return,” she said.
“How long do you think you’ll be gone?” Dave said.
“If I have to see a patient, at least half an hour.”
A half hour is good, I thought. I can live with half an hour.
The moment Susan vanished, I heard Dave walk to the door and close it shut. He might have locked it, I thought I heard a dead bolt being thrown. I assumed that was my imagination as well, until he returned to my side and I saw his face. His pupils were twice the size of a minute before, and he was glowing. He searched me up and down, drinking in the view.
I finally understood why he was sweating so much over me.
Why he hesitated to cut me up right away.
He wanted to enjoy himself first.
Dr. Dave was into necrophilia.
He grinned as his hands reached for places I couldn’t see.
“Baby, I’ve waited a long time for one like you. So young, so sweet, so cold. My cold, cuddly baby. You and I, we’re going to make some magic together.”
He let go of me. I couldn’t see but I thought I heard him undoing his belt, pulling down his zipper. For once the curse of my frozen eyeballs was a blessing. Yet it was only then, as my absolute horror transformed itself into pure disgust, that I felt a wave of fire rush through my icy body. It was as if a trillion cells thawed in an instant and reconnected to my brain.
I suddenly sat up. Every bone in my spine popped.
I stared at him with loathing. “You goddamn pervert!” I said. “Touch me again and I’ll cut off your dick!”
Dr. Dave staggered back as I cursed him, a hairy hand flying to his chest. All the color seemed to drain from his face. He was having trouble breathing. His pale sheen changed to a sickly blue. Christ, he was having a heart attack. I watched in disbelief as he collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath, his drool leaking onto the floor of the morgue.
My burst of anger subsided and with it the wave of fire that had reanimated my body. Suddenly my limbs were stuck again and I fell back on the slab beneath the overhead light and beside the skull saw and the heart scissors. I heard a pounding at the door, Susan calling Dave’s name. I wondered how she knew he was in pain, and I wondered how she managed to open what appeared to be a locked door.
I saw her stride into the room and kneel beside Dave. I must have been able to move my eyes now. She put a hand on his chest and went very still.
“Is it very bad?” she asked softly, her voice sounding deeper than before, older.
“Pain,” he gasped. “Chest. Dying.”
“It’s true. You feel death approaching,” she replied, a weird thing to tell a patient, I thought, even one as perverted as David Leonard. Casually, Susan stood and stepped to an intercom, where she pushed a button and spoke. “This is Dr. Wheeler. I’m in the morgue. I have a code blue. I repeat, I have a code blue. Please send immediate assistance.”
Susan returned to w
here her partner lay gasping on the floor. Picking up his blue hands, she pressed them to her chest and closed her eyes. It was like she was trying to heal him, I thought, comfort him somehow.
Yet I knew I didn’t understand this woman any more than I understood what I was doing on an autopsy table in the middle of the night. Because she wore a blissful smile as she held Dave, as if his pain were giving her a rush.
A crash team arrived two minutes later and loaded Dave onto a gurney and vanished out the door. Susan didn’t follow them, not right away. She turned and walked back to where I lay helpless. For the third and last time our eyes met, and I knew for a fact that she knew I was alive.
She held my purse in her hand.
She set it down beside my bare leg and spoke.
“You were lucky this time. You managed to invoke the fire. But don’t think for a second that you’re in control.” Susan gestured behind her and to the right, to a spot where there was nothing but empty air. “Remember, you and I, we’re watching.”
With those weird words she turned and left.
She left me alone on the cold slab. But it was as if her strange remarks had explained that I had the power to get up if only I could stir the fire again. The key was to focus, I realized. The fact that they were going to cut me open had caused me to cower. But Dave’s attack had stirred my rage, which had ignited the fire. The fire was the key. Suddenly I was confident that all I had to do was ignite it again and the frost in my limbs would melt.
I’m Jessica Ralle. I’m eighteen years old, and there’s no way I’m going to die in this godforsaken dungeon. I’d rather burn first.
I repeated the lines over and over again.
Loud, inside my head, with growing intensity.
Then, suddenly, a wave of heat started in the center of my solar plexus. It was powerful. It radiated like a blazing sun. Again I felt the heat flow through my nerves, thawing out my muscles and tendons. The fire appeared to migrate upward toward my heart. Soon my blood was pumping through my veins with wild abandon. My diaphragm snapped up and down like a piston in a racing car and I drew in a series of quick sharp breaths.
Seconds later I was able to bend my arms and legs. In minutes I was able to stand and search for my clothes. They had not gone far. They were in a bag beside the autopsy table, neatly labeled.
Jane Doe. For some reason, I kind of liked the name. It was the name given to the dead, and they, in their own way, were free. At least free of the pain the living could inflict on them.
I washed the blood off my face, dressed quickly, grabbed my purse, and left the hospital.
CHAPTER EIGHT
OUTSIDE, I STRUGGLED TO GET MY BEARINGS.
I soon came to the conclusion that I was downtown, off the Strip, in an old section of town. Yet the area was not free of big hotels. I saw the Golden Nugget and felt somewhat reassured.
The people who had kidnapped me had not robbed me. My purse still held the cash I’d had left over from that morning’s shopping spree. Or from yesterday’s spree, I corrected myself. It was the middle of the night.
What a dark night it was. The sky was black as spilled ink, and the few visible stars were like hazy blobs rather than sharp points of light. It was like the earth itself had been thrust to the edge of the galaxy, where everything was dark and lonely. The air felt heavy, not polluted, but far from fresh, as if I were locked in a gigantic stuffy room. I assumed it was just me, that I was still recovering from my ordeal.
Since I didn’t see any taxis, I decided to take a bus back to the Strip. I was surprised to hear from the people waiting at the stop that bus shuttles ran free twenty-four hours a day.
Yet the bus didn’t go all the way to the MGM. It dropped me off on the edge of the Strip. The night was still warm. By now my thirst had become an ache. I searched for signposts and didn’t see any. I was in no-man’s-land. I hiked toward a medium-size hotel I didn’t recognize. To reach the entrance I had to take a dark side street and cross a relatively deserted parking lot.
It was there I ran into three drunk guys in uniform. It might have been because their uniforms were so discombobulated, but I was unable to tell if they were army, navy, air force, or whatever. They had shiny crew cuts and belligerent attitudes. They stopped me as I tried to pass, grinning as they surrounded me, three jocks on steroids. Just what I needed after all the shit I’d been through.
They didn’t scare me so much as bugged me.
I decided to go on the offensive, show I wasn’t intimidated.
“Get the hell out of my way!” I snapped.
The wolf-pack leader was directly in front, a tall blond with a red scar that ran from his right ear to a bloodshot eye. He took a step closer, he stank of booze. He nodded to my purse.
“What you got there, pretty sister? Some winnings from the tables? Or from some hot loving with your sugar daddy?”
Ordinarily—say, to keep from getting raped—I would have surrendered my purse. But there was something about the night, or my mood—I was tired of being pushed around. I stared at the guy.
“I ain’t got no sugar daddy and I ain’t got no winnings. Not that I’d share them with a creep like you.”
He chuckled, glanced at his friends, who grinned to show their support. “Why, pretty sister has a bark. Couldn’t tell by looking at ya.” He lost his smile, his tone turning serious. “You ain’t connected, are ya?”
The way he said “connected,” it was like the word had a special meaning to him. My gut told me to say yeah, I was, but my head said he’d want proof. And since I didn’t know what he was talking about, I stood my ground and continued to act unafraid.
“Screw you,” I said.
My courage caused them all to hesitate. The leader’s partner, on his right, lost his smile. “Maybe we should cook, Wing,” he said to his boss.
Wing threw him a hard look. “You want to leave right after telling pretty sister my name? Think that’s smart, Moonshine?”
Moonshine lowered his head. “She might be connected. She’s got the look. Her eyes, they’re kind of spooky. But I don’t know.”
“She’d say it if she was,” the third guy said. He was short and squat, but heavily muscled. He sounded like a moron.
Wing pointed to my purse. “Hand it over or we take it, along with a little of your honey, pretty sister. Ain’t that true, Squat?”
“Absolutely,” the third guy said.
Suddenly the phlogiston inside my solar plexus began to swell again. I meant the heat—yeah, I didn’t know why I thought of it as phlogiston, except that I knew that the word meant heat. I felt the same burning I had experienced in the morgue. Once more it swelled in strength and size until it filled my body. The tips of my fingers felt as if they were on fire. I moved fast, without fear, until I was standing in Wing’s face.
“Back off,” I swore. “Back off now or you’ll regret it the rest of your pathetic life.”
Wing’s eyes fixed on me, turned a cold blue, then flicked to the side, to his buddy, Squat. Wing gave an imperceptible nod and suddenly Squat came to life. He was fast. He started on my left but an instant later he was trying to grab me from behind. He clawed at my elbows, twisted them backward, lifted me off the ground a few inches.
At the same time Wing reached inside his pocket and brought out something silver, shiny, and sharp. Switchblade.
“Hold still, pretty sister, and it won’t hurt so much,” Squat whispered in my ear. His words, his paws, his grip—none of that scared me. It was strange, I felt no fear. I knew I could handle him and his partners.
“You should have listened to your own advice,” I replied, as I shook my right arm free and rammed my elbow backward into Squat’s ribs. The sound his ribs made as they snapped was distinct, sort of like a row of chicken bones caving in. Squat screamed and fell to the ground.
Wing gave Moonshine a sign and the guy closed in. A pity he was slower than Squat, and even more scared. Slashing out with my left foot, I struck him deep in th
e most tender part of his groin. He, too, screamed and dropped to the pavement.
“Enough!” Wing swore as his blade sliced through the air toward my exposed throat. If anything, he was faster than Squat. His blade whistled as he swung his arm, and I knew if it reached its intended target, I’d be squirting a thick red river onto the parking lot ground.
Yet my eyes seemed to switch into high-speed mode and I was able to follow his knife simply by willing it to slow down. Not that his thrust actually slowed. The newfound ability appeared to be strictly a mental trick that allowed me to study the trajectory of the blade so I had time to plan my reaction.
I reached up and grabbed Wing’s wrist. My grip was as hard as a steel vise, and I squeezed. Again I heard bones breaking and suddenly Wing was crying for me to let go. But, like I said, I was in a bad mood. He had tried to kill me and now I wanted him to suffer.
I could have forced him to drop the switchblade—it was still in his hand—but I brought the tip close to his eyeball instead. He began to pant, to beg.
“Mother, please!” he cried. “We was just playing with you! It was all in good fun. We didn’t know you was connected. You heard me ask. You heard me say . . . Oh, Lord, please don’t take my eyes! I needs my eyes to see!”
“What do you need to see?” I asked. “More victims to steal from? To rape? Give me one good reason I shouldn’t pluck them out?”
“Please, Mother! I have a wife! I have a wife and child!”
I turned to Moonshine, who was barely crawling back to his feet. “Is that true?” I asked. “Does he have a wife and child? You know I’ll know if you lie so speak the truth!”
Moonshine nodded weakly. “He has a daughter and wife. But he never talks to—”
“Enough!” Wing cried. “Mother asked the question and you answered it. Now shut up!”
I grinned at Wing, holding the blade a millimeter from his bulging eyeball. “Enough? That’s what you shouted before you tried to open my throat. Is that what you shout at your wife when she misbehaves?”
“No, Mother! I’m a good husband, I swear it!”
“Swear too much and it loses all meaning,” I said.