by JA Schneider
He frowned and went back up to her.
Her lips were parted. She was breathing shallowly. “I…first noticed it when we were coming down the stairs. Now I can’t…look down. I can’t go down.”
Clinging to the rail she tried one step; in a nauseating swoop saw instead the rain gutter give way and her plunging to her death. She felt faint and her knees buckled.
He caught her up. “Jill, what…?”
But he knew. Right away he knew. Fear of heights. Omigod, it made sense. He saw himself again on the roof, inching down to her on his belly. She was barely four feet away. He heard her scream, saw one bloodied hand let go. Convulsively he’d pulled himself closer, hearing the cracking noise as the gutter began to pull free. He shouted her name, leaning out over the edge, trying not to look down as his left arm hooked under her shoulder. Somehow he’d heaved her over the top to safety.
But she had looked down, knowing she was about to plunge. Even after he’d gotten her back up, she’d lain face down and sobbing on the roof slates a yard from the edge. He remembered the hideous, crashing noise as the gutter collapsed and fell away. He’d lifted her to him and cradled her, hearing wailing police sirens coming, helicopters overhead.
Now, Jill straightened and pulled away a little. “It’s better,” she said, inhaling. And then: “Oh damn.”
She too realized what had happened.
Fear of heights. Temporary? Or would it last longer…
“Oh damn oh damn oh damn…” With her arm tightly in his, she moved shakily down with him to the sidewalk.
David raised his free hand to his still-painful laceration; felt again the blinding crack to his head from the roof slate that SOB had thrown at him.
The nice guy research genius everyone had trusted… God help us, it’s over, isn’t it? All of it?
They walked the few blocks to First Avenue. Across the street, mobbing the hospital entrance, they saw a crowd of people, placards and TV vans.
David groaned.
Thudding helicopter rotors could be heard as the shot caught a broad, white-coated man high on a steep roof throw something down at another man, younger-looking in white pants and jacket. A voiceover cried, “He’s down. No…he’s up! Looks dazed but he’s moving, climbing back up to his assailant-“
“Oh jeez, turn it up!”
Someone in the surgical doctors’ lounge did, and someone else turned off the whirring microwave. Three residents came closer to the TV. They’d been up all night operating; this stopped their bitching. They watched, dry-lipped, as the screen filled with Jill Raney crawling to safety, then David Levine clambering up to his attacker and punching him hard in the face. “Oh God! He’s…” The emotional voiceover stopped, wordless, as the force of Levine’s blow drove the other man hard against the old chimney, which crumbled, sending bricks in an avalanche down the roof.
An intern came out of the shower, a towel around his middle. “I missed it!” he complained.
“You’ve only seen it umpteen times,” one of the three said. “They’ll show it again.”
“They show the second guy yet? The one Levine shot?”
“No. That’s coming.”
The TV was also on in the fifth floor Pathology docs’ lounge. Activity stopped, again, as the research genius-turned-madman lost his footing and skidded down twenty feet. The voiceover was back, describing “the assailant” grasping a low roof slate that had stopped his fall. “He seems to be calling to the man he attacked to come save him!” said the voice incredulously.
“Let him go, David!” cried a female resident who was in tears.
Each time they saw this, they relived it. To think that this had happened here, at Madison Hospital…to one of us.
David had begun to pick his way back down the roof. “He’s doing it!” the voiceover cried over the thumping chopper rotors. “He’s trying to help his attacker! This is incredible!” A jerky close-up showed blood spreading on David’s white jacket shoulder, and his hand, reaching down to the other man. Then, a shout from a different voice in the chopper, and the shot swung dizzyingly to a higher, fast-approaching second assailant, thin and seedy-looking, his upraised arms carrying a cinder block.
David spun away as the block crashed down. He raised his gun and shot. The second attacker fell on his back on the roof grade, and lay with a bloody hole between his eyes. “Horrible! Just horrible!” the winded voiceover cried, describing the scene and…seconds later, the first attacker screaming and plunging to his death. The camera again swung wildly; barely caught that shot.
A stupid cat food ad came on. The Pathology residents stood, stunned, as they had each time they’d seen this tape, shown obsessively on every network and cable station. It dominated the Internet and was trending on Twitter, for God’s sake.
One resident named Peter Gregson said softly, “I know Jill.”
Others knew David, and one added gravely, “They’re coming back today.”
It didn’t need saying. Everyone knew that Jill and David were scheduled to “return to their Ob/Gyn duties” today. The hospital PR machine had announced it to the world.
Peter said. “I’d need more time. A lot more.”
“Me too,” said the resident who had cried. “This is awful. It’s too soon…”
“Breaking News!” said a female TV anchor interrupting a broadcast. “We’ve just received word that doctors Jill Raney and David Levine have approached Madison Hospital Medical Center, and are trying to get in despite the crowd that’s converged on them. We’ll go now to Suki Hayashi, live at the scene.”
It had started to rain lightly. A pretty reporter holding a mike described the crowd: “Mixed, it seems, between fans, the curious, and over there” – she pointed – “protesters.” The camera panned over hands holding up cell phones and videocams to placards reading IVF IMMORAL! and WE OWE OUR FAMILY TO IVF and ADOPT AN EMBRYO. The people carrying the placards seemed mostly peaceful.
One woman carrying a sign told the reporter, “Oh, they’re wonderful, we just want to call attention to our cause;” and a man next to her said “A life is a life! Adopt an embryo!”
Another couple, young, said excitedly, “We just came to see them!” Then the camera caught a man handing Jill a bouquet. She took it. In close-up her lovely, pallid face thanked him. David gave him a hard look, and with his arm around her moved them both forward. The rain grew heavier and wind gusted. The camera showed his face, stony-handsome with his dark hair blowing over his brow.
“David! Daaavid!” wailed a young woman.
“Jill, look this way!”
“Over here! Over here!”
“You do abortions?” yelled a man who’d gotten too close to Jill.
She looked painfully at him. “No! I just want to deliver healthy babies!”
David tightened his grip on her and pulled her away. “Ambulance bay,” he said low.
They pushed that way through more cameras and people asking for…autographs? Yards to go, as cops and hospital security guards coming to them spread their arms and kept people back. “Sorry!” they said. “Move back, please. Emergency only!”
They were in. Headed to the E.R. loading dock as a small group of other scrubs ran out jubilantly to greet them.
But cameras kept taping.
One man in particular adjusted his telephoto lens.
2
Buck Loki taped them until the last instant, when the sliding E.R. doors closed behind them. Then he wiped his lens and bent, just in time, to put his camera back in his black bag. A cop walked by and he froze; faked nervous busyness in the bag. Cops always had that effect on him, even though he had changed his appearance.
And so I begin, he thought giddily. I shall have my revenge on those two. They stole my life!
His heart exploded with fury as he looked around at the adoring, admiring crowd, the still-craning, excited faces, strangers yakking with strangers. “I got a close-up!” trilled one stupid female to another. “His eyes are dark
blue! He looked right at me!”
What morons they all were. No one had noticed anything odd about him, dressed for the occasion in a shabby janitor’s outfit but using such an expensive camera. No one ever really observed anything, wasn’t that wonderful?
He edged his way out, adjusting his sunglasses and baseball cap low over his wig with the thinning gray hair. A precaution: there was still the danger of cops filming the crowd as they often did.
Quickly, he walked six blocks, then checked his watch. 8:35, a perfect time. Working people had left, and the crappy apartment building he had cased on this crappy block had no security. From across the street he walked slowly, arthritically, and watched.
A first female came out of the building, anxiously checked her watch, and hurried off. No good. That one was just late.
Buck Loki waited, pretending to study the menu of a little Italian restaurant, watching the reflection of the building across on its glass.
There! A cute young female came out and stopped, her face happily turned up to the now brightening sky. Unemployed or part timer. They were easy to spot.
Plus she had long, dark hair like Jill Raney! Oh, this was too good! It made him more excited! She would fit – like that! – into his revenge plan.
She walked a few doors down and turned into Tanaka’s grocery. He crossed the street, head down, to admire the array of fresh vegetables. Took a basket and started to poke through some mushrooms until she came out, carrying a paper bag.
He put back the basket and mushrooms, waited a moment, then followed her to her building’s entrance, huffing theatrically, making his bag seem heavier than it was.
“Hi Meredith,” he smiled as she stood uncertainly at the door.
“It’s Lainey,” she smiled back, leaving the door open for him.
“Oh, sorry, you two look a little alike,” he said affably, following her in. The thinning gray hair and scraggly gray mustache must have helped.
He’d worried he’d have to follow her up to her apartment - which still ran the risk of being seen - but instead she turned right and started down cement stairs. What luck! He guessed where she was headed. Where else in this kind of building?
The laundry room, yes! Empty, abandoned, all the wage slaves off to wherever!
He walked in, passing her to the rear of the room where he dropped his black bag with the clunk of tools inside. She had her back turned; had placed her groceries on a washer and was bending to empty her laundry from one of the dryers. Her short cotton skirt rode up. Nice legs.
She must have felt his eyes on her, because she turned and smiled self-consciously.
He looked quickly away as he knelt, pulling on work gloves and adjusting a wrench. She turned back and resumed what she was doing.
Fast, he got out his favorite items and did what his plan against them dictated. This was the second one. His first rape was outside in an alley at night. In a building there was greater risk, so he plunged and plunged in fast fury.
He finished, put his important things away, and looked down at her, bleeding. Lainie, was it? She’d seemed sweet.
Pity she and the other one were only instruments, poor things…but was that his fault? No, he raged, it was THEIR fault - those new media darlings who’d taken everything from him. He’d get them, make them pay, oh yes.
About the Author
J.A. (Joyce Anne) Schneider is a former staffer at Newsweek Magazine, and 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
Title Page
01 Crisis on Third Avenue
02 Fight in a Linen Closet
03 Obstetrical Tragedy
04 FUO: Fever of Unknown Origin
05 Mystified House Staff
06 The Planet was Violet…
07 Another OB Tragedy
08 Talk About It
09 Researching Strange Cases
10 The Fertility and Genetic Counseling Committee
11 Patient Mary Jo Sayers’ Strange Story
12 Fight with a Superior
13 Required DNA Lecture
14 To the Psych Ward, then the Morgue
15 “Cell Autopsies” of Dead People
16 Threatened
17 Despair
18 The Infant School
19 A Bizarre Murder
20 Dead People’s Cells Growing, Alive
21 To the Anthropology Museum
22 Bleeding, Ten Sutures and the Police
23 Investigating in Secret
24 Chinatown
25 Police Open Hospital Investigation
26 Obsessed
27 To the Old Hospital Tunnels
28 Lost
29 The Search
30 A Very Strange Lab
31 Angel’s Gun
32 The Attic
33 Game Over
34 On the Roof
35 Stunned
Author's Note
An excerpt from EMBRYO 2
About the Author