Blind Spot. Nancy Bush

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СКАЧАТЬ screamed up the long lane to Halo Valley hospital and medical offices.

      She shook the memory free, fighting its grip. No amount of dwelling and soul-searching was going to help now. She needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward, learning to forget.

      A sharp wind whipped up as Claire headed for the hospital, yanking her hair from its restraining clip at her nape. Dark brown strands snapped in front of her eyes and she bent her head and trudged on, seeing the toes of her brown pumps march rapidly toward the sliding glass doors of the main entrance. She heard the sound of an approaching engine and glanced around to see a news van turn into the lot. “Vultures,” she muttered aloud, aware that soon this particular patient’s story would be blasted across the airwaves. Claire had had her fill of newspeople types. She’d been the object of their bristling mics and pointed questions enough times to become disillusioned with the lot of them.

      The hospital’s main entrance doors slid open and she was inside, moving rapidly toward the elevators that led to the upper floors. Laurelton General was positioned on a sharp incline resulting in the two west-side floors being on the lower hillside and therefore below the main entrance. This explained why the main floor sign declared in big block letters: FLOOR THREE.

      Claire finger-combed her hair, smoothing it behind her ears. She chafed at the delay of the elevator and practically slammed into a doctor hurrying into the elevator as she tried to exit on floor five.

      He made a disgruntled sound, which she ignored. Departing elevator riders had priority and she was clearly in the right. He could just bite it.

      “Well, there you are!” Leesha called when she saw her. At five feet four and a hundred and sixty-five pounds, Leesha was a solid wall of a woman, built like a square, by her own admission. Her skin was a warm coffee color and her black hair was lined in cornrows that looked tight enough to cause a migraine. Leesha was as cranky as she was empathetic—cranky to imbeciles who got in her way and whined; empathetic toward her patients. She couldn’t bear indecision and finger-pointing and she knew enough about Melody Stone’s death and Claire’s recent problems to be thoroughly pissed off at all the people trying to scuttle away and leave Claire standing alone to take the heat.

      But today there was underlying panic on Leesha’s face. The horror of the attack on the Jane Doe was inescapable.

      “C’mon this way.” She motioned for Claire to follow her, then moved quickly to the end of the hall and into a room already occupied by at least one other doctor and a nurse.

      “Been like that since she was brought in this morning, poor child,” Leesha said in an aside as Claire gazed down at the woman in the bed who was attached to an IV and a heart rate monitor for both her and the baby. Her hair was a soft yellow shade, her skin smooth and unlined. She appeared to be sleeping but there was something deeper in her manner.

      “No head injury,” Leesha added, reading Claire’s thoughts. “Coma, maybe emotionally induced? If she doesn’t come to, she’ll be heading your way for sure.”

      “I’ll try to make her my patient,” Claire said.

      “You better. My girl here needs the best.”

      “Just know it might not happen.”

      Claire’s success rate in treating patients with psychological disorders was the best at Halo Valley; Heyward Marsdon the notable exception, although she’d warned everyone from the hospital administrator on down that he was a danger to himself and to others. But Heyward Marsdon III’s family didn’t agree and threatened to cut off their hospital funding, and so she’d been ignored. When the incident happened, she was in the process of finalizing her recommendation letter concerning Heyward and suggesting he be held on a seventy-two-hour watch, but it became a moot point. She’d been removed as his psychiatrist, and though she did try to defend herself, explaining about her recommended course of treatment, no one cared. It was too late. The damage too severe. No one was about to throw Claire a life raft when they were all scrambling to keep from drowning.

      “Excuse me, who are you?” The doctor who had tried to ignore them now gazed at Claire authoritatively. His bushy gray brows were all over the place, one side looking as if it were trying to crawl to the other. He wore the requisite white jacket and had a habit of dropping his chin and looking through the tops of his eyes, a disciplinarian’s unconscious body language. His name tag read Dr. Franco Blount.

      “This is Dr. Claire Norris from Halo Valley,” Leesha answered. “I called her.”

      “This woman is our patient,” he said frostily to the nurse.

      Leesha pointed to the blond girl in the bed. “This woman was attacked by someone trying to take her baby. When she comes to, y’think she might need psych?”

      Blount glared darkly at her but Leesha held his gaze. She didn’t scare easily, if at all, and she knew what she knew. The other nurse in the room, however, must have decided it was high time to get out as she muttered some excuse and scurried from the room.

      “When did the patient arrive?” Claire asked.

      “A trucker found her around six A.M. She was brought in about seven thirty,” Leesha answered.

      “Closer to eight,” Blount corrected her.

      “Unconscious the whole time?” Claire asked.

      Blount opened his mouth but Leesha beat him to a response. “ER said her eyes were open when she arrived but she never spoke. She didn’t respond to their questions.”

      “And the baby?”

      “So far, so good.” She raised crossed fingers.

      “Considering this.” Blount pulled back the covers and lifted the hospital gown. The woman’s protruding abdomen was scored with knife wounds that crisscrossed both above and below her navel. Dried blood could be seen, and the yellowish orange swab of antiseptic. The cuts hadn’t been bandaged yet.

      “Those wounds as superficial as they look?” Claire asked neutrally, but it took an effort. Her throat felt completely void of liquid.

      “They are,” Leesha said, but before she could go on, Blount tried to wrest back control.

      “The police have been here,” he said. “It appears someone sliced at her wildly. No method. They never got close to actually taking the baby.”

      “There are some wounds on her shoulders,” Leesha said. “Like she was attacked there first and then overtaken.”

      “That’s what the police said?” Claire asked.

      “More or less.”

      “Did they say anything else?”

      “Are you planning to investigate, too?” Dr. Blount broke in scathingly. He twitched the hospital gown back into place, then lightly tossed the blankets back over the unconscious girl.

      “There was a second victim. A man. DOA,” Leesha said.

      “From knife wounds?”

      “Uh-huh.” Leesha nodded.

      “So they were both attacked by the same person.”

      “Looks СКАЧАТЬ