The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  Otherwise, parkades full to bursting, ambulances and taxis crawling in and out of the ER roundabout, and pedestrians—patients, doctors, nurses, allied health, students, janitors, and visitors—criss-crossing back and forth at all hours.

  Into this mass, Decker maneuvered his car—siren extinguished but flashers still blazing—around people and vehicles until he found a space reserved for cops outside the ambulance bay. There were three ambulances parked outside the bay, which meant the garage itself was choked and full. Across the way, Keller saw the distinctive red of the STARS air ambulance resting on the helipad.

  She was sliding out of Decker’s car almost before it halted, striding fast across the tarmac, her heart hammering.

  She had heard of mythical days in the ’80s when almost any patient coming in by ambulance was immediately processed to an ER bed. Now, only the worst of the worst got such service. The rest went to the waiting room or languished in hallways on stretchers in EMS Park, attended by the paramedics who’d picked them up until a bed was eventually found for them hours or days later.

  Atchison had texted her two updates on the way over:

  Alive…

  and

  Trauma bay. Intubated.

  So Lang, among the worst of the worst, was in the trauma bay.

  Keller walked up to the ambulance bay doors and peered through. A medic she knew was restocking a unit on the other side of the glass. She slammed her hand on the door and he turned, frowning. But she saw recognition flood through him—thank god she was in uniform—and his face sagged in empathy as he jumped out of the unit and threw open the pass door for her.

  “Ash. God, I’m sorry.”

  “What?” She whirled on him, knowing how wild her eyes must look. “Is she…?”

  His look of sorrow turned to horror. “No, no—she’s alive. She’s still in the trauma bay. She’s—”

  She turned away before he could finish, darting through sliding doors into the ER and jockeying around stretchers lined up in front of the triage desk, flotsam and jetsam from the constant flood inundating the hospital. Pale faces in uniform exchanged terse glances with her. The usual atmosphere of humour and camaraderie among the waiting medics was gone.

  One of them touched her arm as she passed. “Tell her I said hi, Ash.” Before Keller could answer, she added, “You will get to tell her.”

  Keller tried to smile, knowing it looked broken, as she pulled away and moved on past EMS Park, past abdo pains and headaches and old folks with the flu, those not sick enough to get an ER bed just yet. Medics stood beside the stretchers, chatting, re-dosing medications, helping with bedpans, continuing care during their patients’ long wait for a ticket to the real show.

  John Dell, a Primary Care medic transplanted from England, clapped her on the shoulder as she passed. The smile that never seemed absent from his face was gone now. “It’s gonna be okay, kid. Hang in, right?”

  Others murmured greetings or encouragement as Keller passed, then she was in the corridor leading to the trauma bay, passing curtained patient beds, groans of pain to the left, the sound of retching to the right. She caught the distinctive smell of copremesis and knew that behind the curtain a patient with a bowel obstruction was vomiting feces.

  A wizened Asian man from housekeeping was mopping up a splatter of blood on the floor halfway down the hallway. In a far corner of the ward, she heard the kind of screams typical of restrained meth addicts, running hot and fast toward a hyperthermic death.

  Among this feast for the senses, nurses, respiratory therapists, docs, and lab and X-ray technicians moved back and forth like wraiths, untouched and unaffected by the sharp ebb and flow of life around them. On the outside, anyway.

  Keller moved through them, too, patients and caregivers alike, her uniform an ephemeral immunity against inquiry or inference, despite how pale and drawn she knew she must look. There wasn’t anyone working the ER who hadn’t seen some particularly ugly trauma pierce the otherworldly separation between patient and caregiver.

  She half stumbled into the trauma bay, a wide room with four beds, all with plenty of space around them and each equipped with X-ray capability and med, trauma, and airway carts.

  A crowd of physicians and nurses was ringed around the middle trauma bay, along with a red-headed paramedic Keller didn’t know, who was continuing to offer information when asked.

  Unconscious and laid out on the gurney, Lang was almost unrecognizable with an endotracheal tube arcing out of her mouth and cardiac monitor wires and IV lines snaking over her. But Keller saw the distinctive black widow spider tattoo on her left bicep and—beneath the thin sheet—the ridge of her belly-button ring.

  She gulped down a deep breath of anguish at the way Lang had been laid bare, like an insect prepped for dissection. By its nature, the trauma bay revealed all secrets. No Casanova in history had ever stripped their lover bare with the speed an ER trauma team could muster, of dignity as well as clothes. But of course you had to survive in the first place to survive a loss of dignity.

  Focus.

  She took in Lang’s chest rising and falling with each breath and held on to that.

  Still alive.

  But hard on the heels of that was the thought she’d been holding back with both hands, like a door braced against an unwanted intruder.

  This is your fault.

  The recording nurse—Massey, by her namestrip—was a young blonde with a pageboy haircut who looked Keller up and down and nodded collegially, thinking perhaps that she was just another medic eager to watch the show—a toxic ingestion resus being a rare enough thing.

  Now the ER physician—an excellent doc named Vince Waters—called out to Massey. “How long since the last bicarb?” He stood at the foot of the bed, his arms folded, his restless gaze taking in every aspect of the ongoing patient care.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “All right.” He turned to two nurses standing by the med cart. “Let’s give another fifty millequivalents of bicarb IV. And let’s prep five milligrams of midaz and an interlipid drip, please.” A Respiratory Therapist was ventilating Lang, and now Waters turned to him. “Let’s get a blood gas.”

  Keller’s eyes found the ECG monitor. Even from twenty feet away, she could see that Lang’s QRS complexes—her heart’s intrinsic electrical signal—were widened. Lang had likely overdosed on antidepressants, which could be ruthless and effective killing machines if too high a dose were taken, poisoning sodium channels in the heart’s electrical system.

  At the med cart, a nurse assembled a preloaded syringe with practised efficiency, flicked an alcohol swab against the med port of Lang’s IV line, and injected the bicarb.

  “How much fluid do we have on board now?” Waters called it out to the room.

  Across the way, the red-haired medic levered herself away from the wall and spoke up. “We gave her two litres on the way in, along with a hundred millequivalents of bicarb.”

  Massey tagged on, “And another litre from us.”

  Keller followed Waters’s gaze to the NIBP wrapped around Lang’s right arm. It was showing a blood pressure of 68/36.

  He frowned. “Let’s give her another litre, and let’s get a norepi drip started, 0.1 mics per kilo. And get her cathed, please.”

  The interlipid would bind some of the drug and the norepi would hopefully bring her pressure up. Lang was in serious danger. Keller grimaced. How long could she watch this?

  You did this to her, you made this happen. You stay and watch.

  A hand fell on her shoulder and she turned to see Atchison beside her, his face flushed red and streaked with tears. She clamped down on her own mix of guilt and anguish and gave him a half hug, drawing him in close to whisper in his ear. “Hold on to your shit. Waters has her stable. She’ll be okay.”

  What a fucking lie. And if she was okay, this would never have happened in the first place.

  The red-headed medic must’ve recognized Keller, or maybe Atchison, because she e
dged toward them, weaving around nurses and med lab techs to stand with them. Her eyes seemed to spear Keller, perhaps judging whether all she’d heard about her was credibly true.

  “Kris Lukather.” She looked toward Lang, stretched out on the stretcher. “Wanted you to know we did our best for her.”

  Between the two of them, Lukather and Atchison spilled the story out for her in whispers. Atchison’s drive to Lang’s acreage after multiple calls went unanswered, finding her on the couch, unconscious with the empty bottle of pills beside her on the coffee table.

  Lukather talked about ventilation and saline boluses and bicarb infusions and widened heart rhythms, and Keller heard almost none of it, but through it all she realized Lukather was a fine medic and probably the only reason Lang was still alive.

  “Thank you.”

  Lukather clasped her hand and leaned toward her. “Take care of yourself.”

  After Lukather moved off, Atchison sidled closer to her. “She’d left the dogs in the back barn with about five days’ worth of food.” He sobbed softly, halfway a fractured laugh. “Those fucking dogs. It was in her note, the very first thing… ‘Check on the dogs.’” He focused on Keller. “She was messed up, Ash. She wrote… she wanted you to know it wasn’t you, not to blame yourself. She was just… She was having a really hard time.” He brought a hand up to his tear-streaked face. “I… I thought she was getting better.”

  “I know,” Keller said. She drew him in and hugged him again.

  But no matter what the note says, I’m the one who pushed her over the edge.

  Massey was moving toward them, looking over her shoulder. When she spoke her voice was low. “I’m sorry, but you have to skedaddle, okay? We’re going to be working with her for a while. You know that. We can’t have a bunch of you crying in the background. You can visit her in a few hours in the ICU, once they get her settled.”

  Keller felt emptiness in the pit of her stomach. I can’t leave her like this. But she wasn’t going to start an argument that might distract from Lang’s care, which was obviously Massey’s worry anyway. She mumbled a thanks and led Atchison back through the ER.

  “I better call her parents,” Atchison said, the worried look on his face telling Keller that this was how he was going to get introduced to the family. “Hey, you don’t know me, but I’m your daughter’s much-younger boyfriend and she’s in the hospital because…”

  “You want me to…?”

  Atchison shook his head and flashed a weak smile before heading off to one of the ER’s designated quiet rooms.

  Keller reached the corridor leading to the ambulance bays and saw Decker leaning against the wall at the far end, checking his phone. He looked hopelessly out of place as blue-uniformed medics trooped back and forth in front of him, yet he was oblivious to it. But then homicide cops were always out of place, weren’t they?

  More guilt. She’d said hardly a word to him on the ride, while he remained respectfully silent. She was grateful he hadn’t tried to reassure her, hadn’t voiced the useless and familiar platitudes many would have. “These docs are the best.” “It’s a wake-up call.” “It’s a bump in the road.” And instead of simply dropping her off and vanishing—Keller assumed homicide cops were pretty busy people—he was gamely waiting for her to reappear.

  ’Cause he thinks you can help him find a killer. Don’t kid yourself.

  She didn’t really believe that, though, did she?

  Decker had caught her attention to such an extent that at first she didn’t notice the figure striding toward her, just another man in blue in a busy hallway. But this one halted right in her path, suddenly so close that she almost started back.

  Grainger glowered up at her.

  Sixty-Two

  1245 hrs

  Sweating and shaking, Arcand tossed the gun and bolt cutters back in their Amazon box and tucked it under one arm, along with Kapp’s laptop. He eased the apartment door closed, looked both ways down the hallway, and walked briskly to the exit stairway.

  He was flushed and heated from his exertions, and fear was warring with exhilaration in his brain. He resisted the temptation to fling off the hat and heavy jacket he’d worn to protect him from cameras. He’d disabled the security system throughout Kapp’s apartment complex before ringing the bell, but one could never be too careful.

  Nothing had gone as planned.

  Herzog had been different. He was older for one thing, slower to respond. Rich, for another. When Arcand had shown up at Herzog’s door, he’d assumed he was being robbed. Kapp, though, had guessed immediately who Arcand was and began struggling.

  Herzog, he had shot right away. Herzog’s body was the message—he needed no information from the man. Kapp, he’d intended to wrest information from through torture—Hunt’s agenda for the next few days, his security procedures. The torture would have been satisfying in its own right, though, a gift to all those Kapp had helped Hunt victimize, a gift to his sister and to Ash Keller. He’d planned to scrawl another message to Keller before he left.

  But Arcand was unprepared when Kapp began to scream and so he shot him reflexively, then panicked and fled. At least he’d had the presence of mind to seize Kapp’s laptop on the way out. He just hoped the information he needed was there.

  Breezing past the elevators, he carried on until he reached the exit stairway and pushed open the door with his shoulder. He was almost into the stairwell when he heard the soft chime of the elevator down the hallway. Habit made him glance back at it, curious who would be coming home after lunch on a weekday. A retiree, perhaps?

  But the man exiting the elevator was built like a wrestler. Fear spiked in Arcand and he slowed his forward motion to enter silently into the stairway.

  The hulking man moved down the hallway in the direction of Kapp’s apartment.

  In the stairwell now, Arcand kept an elbow against the door, easing it closed against the hydraulic arm so it wouldn’t make a sound, but the man in the hallway stiffened, and then he whirled with a speed at odds with his size, eyes spearing Arcand with a dark look. He glanced once over his shoulder at Kapp’s apartment door, then back at Arcand, scrutinizing him.

  Arcand bolted for the stairs, the door slamming at his back. By the time he reached the first turn, he was taking them two at a time. He tripped on the fourth landing and the cardboard box flew down the next set of stairs, spewing out both pistol and bolt cutters as the door above crashed open and heavy feet began descending the stairs after him.

  He clawed his way to the gun and rolled onto his back with it, firing up the stairwell without so much as a target. The shots pinged against metal and concrete.

  Then he was up and running again, the bolt cutters forgotten. Two more floors and he was out into a back alley and running hard toward his car, panting like a racehorse all the way.

  He did not see the big man again.

  Sixty-Three

  1250 hrs

  Grainger leaned into Keller’s personal space with arms akimbo, the onion smell of his breath undisguised by the spearmint gum he was chewing. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Was he insane? Did he not know? “Kate…” She couldn’t find the words and instead looked behind her, toward the trauma room.

  “I know why she’s here.” He reached out and tapped Keller on the chest. “What I don’t know is why you’re here.”

  She had been feeling numb. Not the good kind, not the sweet lassitude fentanyl wove through her neurons, but the kind that came when your soul was wrung out and empty. But when Grainger touched her—touched her—the numbness vanished and she felt an immediate, incandescent anger.

  “Back off, you asshole, right now,” she hissed, every muscle in her body tensing.

  “Or what?” He stepped closer, almost bumping against her.

  The ebb and flow of EMS personnel around them slowed to a crawl. Deer caught in the mesmerizing headlight glare of a colleague in a career-ending fight with a supervisor.

  She f
elt her fists clenching and took a deep breath. Don’t do this. Don’t d—

  “Or what, Keller?” Grainger repeated, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “Feeling a little guilty? Maybe if your partner lives, you—”

  She swung at him, at the incipient smile blooming on his face, but John Dell was suddenly in front of her, taking the punch on his shoulder while enveloping her in a hug and drawing her back from Grainger, making his embrace into what might have appeared as a comforting hug. “I’m so sorry about, Kate,” he whispered, his Manchester accent thick in her ear. “Don’t make it worse. He’s not worth it.”

  “Assault, is that what you were about to do, Keller?” Grainger was edging around Dell, trying to make eye contact with her, disappointed maybe that her punch hadn’t connected.

  “Hey, hey.” Decker’s voice. “Let’s everybody calm down.”

  Dell hugged her hard, patted her back, then released her. Decker was standing at Grainger’s side, examining him as if he were some sort of bug that had crawled out of the woodwork, his blue eyes unblinking.

  “I’m Detective Decker, Calgary Police.” He nodded from Grainger toward a side corridor. “Can we speak in private?” He didn’t wait for an answer but moved forward into Grainger’s path, much as Grainger had done with Keller, so that the man had no choice but to back up, which he did.

  Keller followed, a few steps behind, until they were away from the crowded patient-care area.

  “My apologies, sir,” Decker said in a dry voice, “if I’ve broken any rules.” He looked at Keller. “Ms. Keller was assisting me with further information regarding that awful call she attended the other day. It’s my fault she’s here, too. When I heard something had happened to Ms. Lang, I had to make sure it did not relate to that incident and so I escorted her here. It appears the two events are unrelated, but either way I’m the one that requested she depart from work and then attend here.”