Blind Spot. Nancy Bush

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      He was just about back to his rig when he heard something. Something like a groan. He glanced around. There was a beat-up Chevy pickup in the lot and he realized its passenger door was ajar.

      “Hey,” he called.

      No answer.

      Squinting at his watch, he went to the opened door and pulled it wider. No one there.

      The groan was louder. Coming from beyond the pickup. Circling the vehicle, he checked the field opposite. Something there. Movement of sorts.

      “Hey,” he called again as he walked cautiously toward it. Wouldn’t do to run into some kind of wild animal searching for food scraps. He could do without that encounter.

      Something on the ground.

      Something with clothes on…

      And then it rose to its feet, a bloodied figure, towering over the prone body still lying on the wet grass.

      Denny’s heart nearly exploded from his chest. “Holy shit!”

      “The baby,” it said, clutching its chest.

      Denny stepped back—he couldn’t help himself—as the figure before him staggered toward him, then fell to its knees. A man. Twisting to bend over the limp mound on the ground.

      “Hey. Hey, man,” Denny said, reaching out a hand.

      The mound on the muddy grass turned out to be human. A woman, pregnant, her belly exposed like a white mound with black marks across its crest. Bloody marks. From knife wounds scored across her taut skin.

      “Oh, Jesus.” Denny pushed the bending man away, not sure what he intended. He fell over without resistance, his eyes staring at the sky, blood dampening his chest.

      Horrified, Denny dragged his gaze back to the woman. She was breathing shallowly. Alive. Barely.

      And the baby? Whoever had tried to cut the poor little thing out had not succeeded.

      Sending a prayer to the man upstairs, he ran for his truck and cell phone.

      Chapter 1

      “Get over here,” Leesha said. “You need to meet our new patient. Someone tried to cut her baby out!”

      Dr. Claire Norris wheeled into Laurelton General’s parking lot and peremptorily nosed her car into another doctor’s designated spot. She wasn’t affiliated with Laurelton General. She was a psychiatrist at Halo Valley Security Hospital, a facility located some fifty miles south of Laurelton for patients with mental problems. But today, on her day off, she’d gotten the call from Leesha, a friend and associate, who believed this patient would be transferred to Halo Valley as soon as her physical ailments were addressed.

      Damn near catatonic. Knifed across her shoulders and abdomen. Not deep enough to cut to the baby, but Jesus, Joseph, and Mary…

      Claire drew a steadying breath. She’d seen the damage a knife could do to human flesh. In her office. Directly in front of her. A knife slashing through a woman’s throat, the last awful sounds as the victim lost her life and the murderer turned his attention on Claire…

      As she had since the beginning, she pushed the memory aside with an almost physical effort as she switched off the ignition. But, like always, it nagged at her. Wouldn’t let her go. The killer had been one of her patients. Heyward Marsdon III. A paranoid schizophrenic who suffered from hallucinations and delusions. He hadn’t meant to kill his girlfriend, Melody Stone. He hadn’t known what he was doing. He’d dragged Melody to see Claire and then been overrun with visions of ghoulish zombielike creatures who he believed were trying to attack Claire. He’d grabbed Melody, no longer his girlfriend but an evil being out for blood, and threatened to kill her. Claire begged him to stop. Begged him. Cajoled and reasoned and expected results. Heyward hesitated briefly, just long enough for Melody to whisper “Do it!” to him, as if she were under the spell of some rapture, and then he slit her throat. Just like that. Slaying the woman he believed to be a soulless monster in one stroke.

      Claire screamed. Shock ran through her like an electric current. But then Heyward was on her, the knife to Claire’s throat, determined to kill her—or, more accurately, the evil being Claire had become. He pressed the knife’s edge to her throat, his hand quivering. Claire told him over and over that she was his doctor, that she meant him no harm. She asked quietly if she could get help for Melody and somehow her words finally penetrated his brain and he allowed her to call in Wade, one of the hospital guards. But Melody Stone was long gone before help arrived. Only Claire survived.

      Six months ago. As real a nightmare now as it had been then. Claire had been in her own kind of therapy ever since it had happened. A memory that wouldn’t go away. Ever. She could only hope she could put it aside a bit with time.

      Now, glancing through the windshield and spotting rain, her gaze extended to the sprawling gray concrete-and-stone hospital that was Laurelton General. She probably shouldn’t be here. Was doubtlessly overstepping her limits. By all rights she should leave this to the higher-ups at Halo Valley who had so uncaringly thrown her to the wolves after the incident with Heyward Marsdon. That’s what they’d reduced Melody Stone’s death to: the incident. And though Claire’s life had been threatened, too, they let her take the fall alone.

      In the time since the incident Claire had been seen by a barrage of other psychologists and psychiatrists and varying concerned hospital administrators and investors who’d rubbed their chins and offered antidepressants, which she’d refused, and then tentatively, finally pronounced her mentally good to go. Everyone professed great relief for her well-being, but all they really wanted was to dust their hands of her: the sole witness to a murder on hospital grounds.

      Ironically, after Heyward Marsdon, delusional and hallucinating, was pulled away from Claire, wrestled to the ground, and taken away, he was eventually incarcerated at Halo Valley Security Hospital himself, on the side of the hospital reserved for the criminally insane.

      Claire had dutifully followed through with her own therapy, but it had yet to make so much as a dent in her lingering feelings of horror and inadequacy. She had someone else for that. Another friend who understood human emotions and treated Claire with compassion. Dinah Smythe lived at the coast and was Claire’s closest neighbor. Dinah was the only person who seemed to truly understand the long road Claire was traveling for her own mental health.

      Thank God for her, Claire thought passionately.

      Now, climbing out of her black Passat, she hit the remote lock and listened for the beep. Fall guy or not, today she’d answered Leesha Franklin’s call and was going to meet the comatose, pregnant patient on her own time. Before the tragedy Claire had been considered top in her field. She still was in the larger world, but within the inner circles at Halo Valley there was a definite cover-your-ass mentality overriding common sense, and Claire had lost value because of it. No one wanted the taint of the consequences to stick to them. Let Claire Norris take the hit. She’s the one who witnessed the murder. She’s the one who couldn’t stop it. It was her fault. Yes, her fault! No one else’s.

      Claire felt a simmering anger as she thought of it, followed by a sense of inadequacy that she couldn’t help Melody. She could recall every moment, every syllable, everything: the bright yellow tulips in a bouquet on her desk splashed with equally bright red blood; the soft cadence of Melody Stone’s voice as she goaded Heyward to do it; the rustle of СКАЧАТЬ