The horror had come to them, this hospital.
“Ma,” Jesse said, raising his arms.
Jill lifted him and hugged him tight. Then Tricia reached for him. “Hey, slugger, wanna play with Auntie Trish?” He went to her, the truck forgotten, happy to tug at her glasses. With her free hand she struggled them back up her nose, biting her lip.
“Need me?”
“No.” Jill’s heart thudded as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “You’re on call anyway. Hope you get some sleep tonight.” Shakily, she checked her phone’s simultaneous picture of Trish holding Jesse. She and David had downloaded a baby monitor app.
“Working?” Trish leaned with Jesse squirming to peer at the picture.
“Yeah. Um, David’s delivery’s having complications and I don’t know how long I’ll be with the cops…”
“Sleep in the hospital. David and Jesse too. I’ve got a bad feeling.”
Jill gave a helpless shrug. She’d so looked forward to being off tonight and bringing Jesse home, putting him to bed with his favorite toys…
“We’ll see.” She kissed Jesse again, hugged Tricia, and hurried out. Banged frantically on the elevator button to make it come faster, left David a voicemail and spoke briefly to Sam MacIntyre. She was a building away, a half mile of halls to run through.
“We’re already in the ER”, Sam said. “Ambulance just arrived.”
3
A nurse charging from the cubicle almost collided. “Sorry,” she huffed. “Sam ordered type and cross match, hemoglobin and hematocrit.” She held two reddened, rubber-stopped tubes.
“Whole blood?” Jill was breathing hard.
“Four units. She’s lost a lot of blood.”
The nurse ran, and Jill opened the thin curtain to gowned scrubs working furiously on a bloodied woman on bloodied sheets. She was unconscious, with an oxygen mask over her face and an IV running to the inside of her elbow. At the rear two monitors beeped, one for the mother and one for the fetus.
The fetal monitor was beeping too fast. The tiny heart was struggling to live.
A wrenching sight.
Sam MacIntyre glanced up at Jill from the two electrodes he’d placed on either side of the patient’s belly. “Not good,” he said, his voice muffled by his mask, his athlete’s broad shoulders hunched. “Fetal distress.”
“Fetal heart rate’s up to 180!” cried Woody Greenberg, holding gauze pads to the bullet entry wound on the patient’s belly. A second nurse took his place with the gauze as he checked the patient’s vital signs and kept nervously eyeing the two monitors.
“Jill,” he said mournfully, looking up for a second. “She’s an Iraq War vet.”
“I know.” Aching, Jill moved in closer. Just a couple walking in the park. What kind of monster had done this? Gently, she touched the patient’s leg under the top sheet. It covered from her pubic area down, and another sheet stretched from her navel up to her chin. Her short, curling dark hair was matted. The sheets over and under her right side only were blood-soaked.
Jill breathed in. “No exit wound?”
“No,” Woody said, stumbling over his words, looking thinner and more wiry than usual. “Bullet traveled superficially, entered the left anterior abdomen and passed through the anterior-most portion of the uterus.”
Sam said in a rush, “The ultrasound found the bullet wedged against the pelvic brim.” His eyes swept the portable ultrasound box with its knobs, controls, and an oscilloscope for viewing. They’d glided its paddle over the abdomen to find the bullet.
Then Sam glanced up and pulled a huge breath. “Dammit, patient’s BP’s down to 95 over 60, pulse rate’s up to 130. Where the hell’s that whole blood?”
The first nurse ran in with it. “Four units! Sorry, sorry, they’re swamped. Two stabbing victims, a gunshot and a car crash.”
She hung the first bag of blood on the IV pole and switched the tubing from saline and dextrose to the whole blood drip. The other nurse went to a chair near the front of the cubicle.
“Got your evidence.” She handed Jill bulging paper bags. “Clothes, shoes, everything collected. The cops are waiting, they were here for a sec. Jeez, why had we only been doing this for rapes? Any kind of assault…”
“Tell that to the other hospitals.” It was hard, turning away from the patient to gather up the bags.
“They’re still resisting?”
“Yeah. Hollering that it diverts from care, which is ridiculous. Something like this takes just seconds, isn’t expensive like rape kits.”
Jill looked back to Sam and Woody. “Save the bullet.”
“We know,” Sam said; and Woody said, “Gotta stabilize her first, we’ll call you when we get it in surgery.”
Then he cried, “Oh Christ. The fetal heartbeat’s dropping, it’s down to 60 - no, now 55…”
The fetus had struggled frantically to live, and now was giving up. Jill took her evidence bags and left, tears stinging.
Well lookee there…
He saw her, running through the wide ER waiting area. Jill Raney! Twitter on fire said they were bringing the survivor here. He had rushed over hoping to see some of the show he’d created. Reporters maybe, not expecting this luck.
Tall and thin and beautiful she was, dark ponytail flying. He’d seen them both on TV, Jill crying and struggling not to fall off that steep old roof, David Levine trying to save her, shooting that bad guy right between the eyes. Just too damn impressive. News chopper footage was now on YouTube, zillions of hits.
Seeing her was such a thrill. It made him grin, but just slightly. Mustn’t stand out from the ER bedlam, the milling outpatients and their relatives, the line of ugly plastic chairs. He’d been lucky to get a seat on one of them, just another shabby guy with a fake, messy goatee. His hoody pulled low shadowed his face from the fluorescents, from security cameras too. And his seat gave a good view of the TV over the harried nurses’ desk.
Anderson Cooper droning about hundreds lost in a plane crash, but crawling beneath him the streamer with the real news, the wonderful report of his work. This third attack had the city, the whole country, out of their minds with fear. Huge coverage online, and he was controlling all of it. He felt so important!
The streamer passed, and while he waited for it to snake under Anderson again, he glanced in boredom at the ER arch Raney had run under, disappearing down that wide, busy corridor. Doctors, nurses, EMTs…they all rushed and whisked back and forth. Such heroes they thought they were. So goddamned self-important.
Fools.
He licked his lip, tasting blood. He hated the taste of blood. A branch had smacked his face as he approached this third pair. He tried to stop chewing his lip, but he couldn’t. Admit it, he thought. I’m worried.
The kid saw me.
It made him nervous, but was that rational? What kid that small could describe anyone when adult eyewitness accounts were so flawed? Besides, in the park he’d been just another jogger, the usual self-important clone clean-shaven and wearing sunglasses under a baseball cap.
Ah! Breaking news interrupting Anderson! A round-eyed gal holding a mike, with yellow police tape and cops and floodlit brush behind her.
“The fearful news is that the Couples Killer has struck again,” she said tremulously. “Another man and woman have been shot, for the first time not at night but just minutes past sunset in this well lit part of Central Park. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, and the female victim has been taken to famed Madison Memorial Hospital. Their names have been withheld pending notification of kin, but this third attack has thrown the city into further panic.”
She held up a paper and read from it, her hand shaking. “The police have issued a statement that they will hold a briefing at nine o’clock, in the meantime urging extreme caution, especially at night, as they step up their manhunt.” She let the paper drop and blinked wide-eyed back at the camera. “Meanwhile our thoughts and prayers go out to these latest victims and their families.
Back to you, Anderson.”
Anderson Live was taped, ha, and the break caught him droning mid-sentence about ocean depth. It was all so phony, thought the man in the fake goatee. He wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t.
He was fretting about that damn kid. It suddenly hit that he must be here too, getting checked out. Maybe he really could describe…
Would the cop briefing say they had a witness?
The man rose, shuffled with a fake limp out of the ER to the street. He limped two blocks and peered back at the hospital. A glowing star ship, it looked like, immense white cubes and rectangles with every window lit. Cop cars down in front of it, TV trucks unwinding their cables and upturning their floodlights.
No cab would stop for him. Hell, he wanted to see the cop briefing at home on his big screen. He lost his limp, started a fast jog, and then suddenly stopped.
He had a better idea.
About the Author
J.A. (Joyce Anne) Schneider is a former staffer at Newsweek Magazine, a wife, mom, and book lover. Words and story ideas are always teeming in her head – “a colorful place!” she says. She loves thrillers…which may seem odd, since she was once a major in French Literature - wonderful but sometimes heavy stuff. Now, for years, she has become increasingly fascinated with medicine and forensic science. Decades of being married to a physician who loves explaining medical concepts and reliving his experiences means that there’ll be medical angles even in “regular” thrillers that she writes. She lives with her family in Connecticut.
EMBRYO 3:
Raney & Levine
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Author's Note
An excerpt from EMBRYO 4
About the Author
Raney & Levine Page 23