The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  “Why should I do this?” She gestured at Beltran. “Why do you have to stick shit up inside me to prove he raped me? Because he did. He most definitely fucking did…” She looked at Keller, dark eyes retreating in pain. “And he’s dead anyway, right?”

  Keller felt Beltran stiffen beside her. Perhaps this territory was less familiar to the nurse than she’d let on. No harm in that, really, but things had to move forward. “Oh, he’s dead all right,” Keller said.

  “Then why?” Robin sat up on the gurney and folded her arms across her chest.

  “Because you said there was another guy.”

  “There was.” Robin grimaced. “He didn’t fuck me, though.”

  Keller bit her lip and lifted a hand to forestall Beltran from venturing that Robin could not know this for a certainty.

  “Your friend Teela. If—”

  “She wasn’t exactly my friend.”

  But Keller saw tears in Robin’s eyes and persisted. “There might be something on your clothes or beneath your fingernails.” Robin looked at her nails, then met Keller’s gaze. “Or, yeah, shitty to think about, but in you. Something that connects, something to punish whoever else might’ve been involved.”

  “I did scratch the fucker once or twice.” Robin wiped at her eyes and smiled a bleak smile. “Punish, huh? You’re going to punish people now?”

  I already did my share of that. “Just maybe stop them from doing it again.”

  Robin rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. I guess we’re on Law and Order now.” She looked at Beltran, shaking her head. “Okay, you talked me into it. What’s next?”

  “There’s two of them—two nurses—trained to do this,” Keller said, and Beltran looked relieved that she had spoken up. “I figure you and I can go first. Then one of us can sit with the other two if they want.” She nodded toward Kayla and Staci.

  “That would be really good,” Beltran said, looking back and forth between them. “We’re trying to contact everyone’s next of kin, but—”

  “You won’t find any.” Robin looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers as if imagining remoulding some piece of the past. “They’re foster kids. Me too. I doubt anyone’s looking for us, or missing us too bad. No one puts out all-points bulletins if we run away, get me?”

  As if in rebuttal, Keller heard the crackle of a radio somewhere down the hallway. Hardy or some other officer, keeping watch on them.

  “We get out of here, after?” Robin asked.

  “You’re under eighteen?” Beltran looked from Robin toward the other girls’ beds. “Anyone under eighteen will be taken into Human Services’ care.”

  Robin flashed a cold smile. “Oh yeah, that super-great care we were all in when we got taken. Sounds awesome.”

  Beltran bit her lip. “I still—”

  “Got that, Nurse Rachel.” Robin looked at Keller. “You think we should do this?”

  Keller nodded, holding her breath so she didn’t cry.

  Robin saw it and rolled off her bed, standing ready to catch her. When Keller didn’t collapse, Robin have her a gentle hug. “You saved us, so I guess I’ll follow your lead, Paramedic Lady.” She turned and moved toward the other girls’ beds. “All right, listen up, bitches…”

  Beltran followed Keller back to her bed and pulled the curtain, donning exam gloves.

  “Thanks for that,” Beltran said.

  “Thanks for the ibuprofen. It still feels like there’s a drunk marching band in my head, though.”

  Got anything stronger?

  The thought died before reaching her lips. But she was getting edgy, irritable. The exotic teasing tang of wanting the narcotic, the tart anticipation of longing for a long-absent lover, was passing over into nail-biting need.

  She had done everything in her power to keep her habit as light as possible, physically. Psychologically, she was certainly an addict. Physically as well, but only marginally—or so she’d kept telling herself; like every addict, she lied to herself as well as everyone around her.

  She’d gone cold turkey once or twice before, getting through long nights of shakes and vomiting with the help of Netflix binges leavened with sleeping pills and Valium. Doggy Valium, she was pretty sure. Something called Novepam. Glasgow knew someone in the veterinary business, clearly.

  Without something similar, Keller had a hard night ahead, maybe two.

  “Hey, Rachel,” Keller said. “We’re all pretty amped up. Any chance you could get one of the docs to dish out some lorazepam… Something like that?”

  “Okay.” Beltran nodded. “You want something for the pain? T-3s?”

  “No.” The pounding in her head was a persistent torment, but it was slowly waning. And with her pain receptors reset by her steady diet of fentanyl, nothing less than eight Tylenol 3s with their dilettante doses of codeine would even begin to eat into her headache, and Beltran wasn’t about to give her that much anyway.

  “Just the loraz would be great.”

  And an order to go, please.

  Not long after, Keller had a sublingual tablet dissolving beneath her tongue, and within minutes its magic was battering against the pins and needles of her withdrawal. Like a thousand lawyers under the sea, as the old joke went, it was a good start.

  Her porter, a tall man with oversized running shoes and a lopsided smile, came to take her to radiology. He jokingly asked if she were ready for her close-up before wheeling her gurney down the hall into a sterile-looking room and helping her move onto a cold flat table for X-rays. The radiology tech thankfully kept her mouth shut, tersely directing Keller not to move as she took several shots of her skull.

  Then she was wheeled back to Beltran for a second head-to-toe examination, this one more about documenting her injuries.

  Beltran hefted a digital camera and started at Keller’s head, looking through her hair. “Two blunt force wounds,” she said, “pretty big hematomatoes. No sutures needed here.”

  “Hematomatoes… no wonder my head feels like a salad.”

  Keller held her hair back as Beltran moved around her and the camera flashed. Bruises peppered her neck, nothing too terrible but there were more pictures anyway. Beltran took pains to avoid showing Keller’s face where she could, but it wasn’t always possible and would make little difference anyway if there was a court date ahead with dozens of strangers ogling her injuries.

  “Okay,” Beltran said, “I need to photograph the cuts on your chest now.”

  Gooseflesh rose in a wave over her torso as she pulled the gown down to her waistline. The curtains surrounding her bed suddenly seemed like gossamer, as if at any moment they might be brushed apart by some stray breeze.

  “They’ll get you sutured up in a couple minutes. You’re next to be seen.”

  “Things are really looking up.” Keller studied the jagged gash just above her breasts, where the glass in the window frame had dug into her flesh. Two more were dug through her abdomen. They were no longer bleeding—well, not much—but the lips of the wounds were puckered open. “Hope he’s good, ’cause these aren’t going to look especially pretty at the beach.” Keller saw in Beltran’s face that the wiseass comments weren’t making the nurse’s job easier, and she felt a wave of shame. “Sorry. Lorazepam’s got me a little chatty.”

  Beltran bit her lip and took more pictures. “There’s a really good plastics guy, works out of here. I’ll remind the doc to set up a consult, just in case.”

  More photographs. Every square inch of her body that had any semblance of injury was exposed and documented.

  But the thrills didn’t end there. Oral, vaginal, and anal swabs awaited, then samples of her pubic hair, except that—just when she thought there were depths of embarrassment as yet unplumbed—Keller had to explain she was shaven down there. A choice she’d never shared with anyone except a lover.

  Future root canals are going to feel like a goddamned vacation after this.

  Finally it was over. Hand grasps and sorrys, then Keller
got to cover herself with the paper-thin gown again. A few minutes later, she and Robin were sitting with Kayla and Staci, helping them through the process. More tears on all sides, but the younger girls fell asleep shortly after. Lorazepam was a wonderful thing, really. Even Robin, back in her bed, crawled under her blanket and seemed to rest.

  Keller was left alone for a few minutes, still awake but the lorazepam mercifully muting any thoughts of the future. The past was very much alive, though.

  Unlike Jonas.

  Left to herself, Keller found her partner’s death playing over and over again in her memory, a looped video she couldn’t turn off. She cried as quietly as she could. Every so often a figure would stroll by the curtain surrounding her bed, and she could see shiny boots and creased black pants with the RCMP’s yellow stripe running up them. Sharks hungry for a further taste of what she and the other girls had to say.

  You’re fucking philosophizing.

  And that was true. She hadn’t always thought that way. After all, she was on the side of the police—nominally, at least—in her profession.

  At just past 8:00 a.m., at the height of some semi-hypothetical Drumheller rush hour, a semi-truck barrelling down a steep incline on Highway 9 smashed into a minivan and trailer carrying riders out to the Dorva Motocross Track just south of town. Two dead and three dancing on the edge, from what Keller overheard in the sudden commotion. The survivors spilled into the ER within minutes of each other, a mess in four dimensions that would be hours cleaning up.

  So a tall, gangly student physician named Farrow was assigned to suture Keller’s wounds. He seemed skilled enough but was young in his head and not yet gifted with the kind of bedside manner that experience would eventually convey. He seemed woefully unprepared for the challenge of attempting to suture a laceration on a female patient’s chest while simultaneously avoiding looking at her breasts.

  Keller saw opportunity. The lorazepam was wearing off now, the sweet fluffy, numb feeling receding and her nerves sharp and toothy again.

  “Any chance of a little more lorazepam, Doctor?”

  Beltran soon brought her another pill, and ten minutes after that, the numb, fluffy feeling was back and this time—with sutures in place and Farrow departed—her restless mind surrendered to it.

  When she woke, she sensed that chemicals and exhaustion had carried her some hours into the future. She sat up and winced at the dozens of small, painful tugs in her belly and chest from the sutures binding her wounds together. She groaned and reached for the cup of water by her bedside and saw Robin sitting on a chair beside her, a blanket draped over her shoulders. The girl leaned forward and helped Keller grab the cup.

  “Sleeping the day away.” Robin smiled wryly and looked toward the hallway. “Cops can’t wait to talk to you.”

  “I imagine.” Keller looked around. “Staci and Kayla…?”

  “Social Services are fluttering around.” Robin waved back and forth up the hallway, a bitter look on her face. “They took those two already. Going to foster us all out again. I pretended to be asleep when they came by, but they’ll be back sooner or later.” She looked as if she were tasting something sour.

  Keller took a long drink of water. Her hands were trembling, but not terribly badly. The lorazepam might have taken her through the worst of the initial withdrawal. Still, she found herself wondering if Farrow were still around. Maybe she could get a few pills in a doggy bag because the world felt altogether too clear and stark right now, and all the more alien for it.

  She wanted a coffee. She wanted a lot of things. “I’m sorry I missed the girls. If I could do something… If—”

  Robin shook her head, a half smile still on her face, and gave Keller a gentle punch on the shoulder. “Just ’cause you saved my life once doesn’t mean you have to keep saving it.”

  “You saved mine as well.”

  Robin shrugged, allowing the possibility. “Maybe I’ll put it on my resumé.” She looked Keller up and down. “You’ll get yourself in trouble one day, feeling sorry for someone like me.”

  “I think maybe that ship’s already sailed.” She ran fingers through her hair, found the large hematoma on her occiput and a smaller one on her temple. She knew, when and if a mirror became available, there’d be bruises all over her body.

  Robin laughed. “Guess so.” She rose and went to the curtain, parted it no more than an inch, and looked up and down the hallway. “Heard the RCs talking before. They were saying that the asshole who kidnapped us died from an overdose.”

  Keller kept her voice carefully neutral. “Is that right?”

  Robin turned back to her. Her gaze was sharp, penetrating. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Keller looked away, the memory of the night—black flashes of pain and burning plastic and liquored breath—pressing in on her from all sides.

  More nightmares for your evening menu.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost three.” Robin was peering again through the curtain.

  “Three in the afternoon?”

  A low chuckle. “Forgot you EMS people use the twenty-four-hour clock. Yes, three in the afternoon. Time for me to go. Just wanted to say goodbye.” She stepped close and squeezed Keller’s arm, and Keller thought the girl might just as well have been looking through her.

  Has she seen addicts before, seen withdrawal? What does she see when she looks at me?

  “Thanks for everything… Really.”

  “703-BLED. Can you remember that? BLED, like blood. 703-BLED.”

  Robin frowned. “That your phone number? We BFFs now?”

  Keller was confused. Had she offended her? “If you need something. If I can—”

  Robin snorted, amusement on her face. “I’m thinking you’re in a lot of trouble, Ms. Lady Paramedic.”

  “Ash.”

  The girl’s smile became more genuine. “Okay. Ash. You’re probably a criminal. Not sure Social Services would want me contacting you… not that I always play by the rules.”

  The cobwebs cleared just a little and Keller’s eyes focused. Robin had jeans on, under her gown.

  Concussion’s still making you slow.

  The jeans were not Robin’s, surely. All of Robin’s clothing would be on its way to a crime lab. But Keller knew there would be dozens of patients in the ER at any time, and now the place was crowded with car-accident victims. Lots of clothes in unguarded bedside lockers.

  “You’re not waiting for Social Services, are you?”

  Robin’s smile was one-sided now, as if she hadn’t expected Keller to be so quick on the uptake. Keller could almost read her mind: A woman who goes deeper into a house that’s on fire? Really, how intelligent could she be? “I’m eighteen in two months, so what’s the point? I’ll be on the streets then anyway.”

  “You don’t have to be on the streets.” Even as she said it, Keller knew it felt hollow and forced. She only wanted it to be true. Like if someone had said to her, You don’t have to be an addict.

  “My parents left the reserve… People who do that don’t always find it easy to go back. Then Mom died and Dad split. Country song–like, you know? Anyway, streets are safer, don’t you think?” She parted the curtains, assured herself once again that no one was watching, then looked back at Keller. “703-BLED… Thanks for saving us.” She frowned. “Don’t forget to save yourself, too, okay?”

  She ducked into the hallway and walked rapidly toward the rear exit.

  Keller didn’t try to stop her.

  Eighteen

  Timothy Kapp ran a hand through his hair and rose up from his desk, his back to the early morning glow of the iconic Calgary skyline, attenuated by a diffuse morning haze.

  The three large computer screens on his desk were filled with local newsfeed. Fire. Kidnapping. Murder. Any other day he’d have been watching political polling results or tracking the latest twist in the unfolding scandal embroiling the Liberal government.

  The Plessisville murders. The killings w
ere the juicy stuff of which elections were made and had a pleasing look in the headlines if you were Dennis Hunt, MP from Calgary-Haysborough and leader of the Conservative Action Party. In the small town of Plessisville, Quebec, two male refugees had been arrested for multiple murders. The refugees had been fast-tracked through the immigration system solely because of a family friend—the Liberal Party MP from Quebec’s St. Francis-Est riding—an MP who also happened to be the current Prime Minister of Canada.

  That’s what Kapp should have been watching—and gloating over as he made calls to corporate donors across Canada who were wiggling their arses on the proverbial fence over supporting the CAP, a party selling itself as hard against unfettered immigration, hard against Liberal socialist policy, a friend of the Church and a very good friend of big business.

  “Here’s our chance to get some things done” Kapp ought to be saying to business owners leery of Hunt’s rightward leanings. “Our chance to slam down the Liberals and do some good in this country. Get the chains off corporations and restart the economy.” Kapp had the patter down so well, he sometimes felt like a carnival barker.

  But not today. Today he was watching a reporter on live TV broadcasting from a rural property where a horror had been discovered: a farmhouse dungeon holding underage sex slaves with “several persons deceased on scene.” There were even aerial views of the farm, what the reporter was calling “the compound,” for God’s sake.

  Kapp’s cellphone began to dance on the desk, the screen illuminating the number he had been trying frantically to reach for hours.

  Hand shaking, he eased his office door shut, making every effort not to lose control and slam it. Through the windowed wall he saw that those in the outer office were too preoccupied to notice his apprehension. Just as well; the election was only four months away and they had work to do.

  He picked up the phone.

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling for hours.”

  “Thinks didn’t go as planned”—the Fixer’s tone was dry—“as you no doubt saw.”

  “No kidding.”