by Toby Neal
“He threw me into the pit?” Sophie’s stomach lurched at the thought of that deep, twenty-foot round gash in the earth, already the grave of three women.
Dunn’s voice was flat, his jaw tight. “I got over that fence as fast as I could. I thought you were dead, but I climbed down into the pit to check. My helmet’s electronics had been fried by cutting the wire, but I was able to call Hilo PD on the radio by using your helmet. They were on their way by the time the noise from our exchange of fire brought the floodlights up and the cult people came running out to investigate.” Dunn blew out a breath. “We ended up flying out on the Security Solutions’ helicopter, because it was faster than an ambulance or any of the first responders that Hilo PD could get to come to that remote location. I flew with you…” Dunn looked down, opening and shutting his big hands. “I carried you.”
Clearly that had been traumatic for brash Jake Dunn. She tried to picture him climbing out of the pit with her in his arms, the helicopter landing inside the compound, the police breaching the exterior gate, him climbing aboard and taking off, flying all the way to Queen’s Hospital with her in his arms. “I bet I ruined your clothes,” she said with an attempt at a smile. “I hear head wounds bleed a lot.”
“You have no idea.” He shut his eyes. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”
Guilt made Sophie move restlessly. “So what happened with Dougal Sloane? And the case?”
“Hilo PD came in at my call, like I said. They tried to find Sloane, but he’s gone to ground. They scooped up Sandoval Jackson and took him in for questioning. They sent in the cadaver dogs. They found evidence of bodies in spite of a lot of the dirt being dumped in Hilo Bay. A judge is reviewing the case to make a judgment on whether or not the evidence was illegally gained and will be excluded from any court proceedings.”
Sophie’s dry throat tightened further. “I thought they’d be able to get a search warrant.”
“The Society of Light has excellent representation. Jackson lawyered up right away when they took him in, and they’ve challenged any basis for you and me to be inside the compound. That could make the forensic evidence gained from the dirt pile inadmissible, the bone you found, everything—depending on what the judge decides. Jackson has been charged with the murders, but he claims to have no knowledge of the women’s whereabouts—that this whole thing was Sloane, acting independently.”
“Sloane’s a convenient scapegoat for Jackson.” Sophie shut her eyes, overwhelmed by pain and tiredness all of a sudden. “Jackson knew what Sloane was doing.” She remembered overhearing their conversation over her inert body back at the compound. “He knew, but he didn’t want to know.”
Francis Smithson’s resonant voice woke Sophie with a start. “Time for my daughter’s surgery prep, Mr. Dunn. You’ll have to check in tomorrow and see how she did.”
Sophie opened her eyes. Warmth departed when Jake Dunn let go of her hand and stood up in a blur of motion. She hadn’t known he was holding it, or even that she’d fallen asleep so abruptly.
“Be well.” Dunn leaned over to kiss her forehead. “You’ll be fine, and good as new in no time. I’ll check in tomorrow.” His over-hearty tone told her that he was afraid for her, and she couldn’t muster a response as he left.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sophie came around slowly, blinded by a light in her eyes as a hand held open one eyelid.
“Response is good.”
Sophie recognized the voice of her plastic surgeon, Dr. Littleton. Littleton had come to work on her from Washington, D.C., and she’d met him yesterday during surgery prep. A friend of her father’s, he worked on combat vets, politicians, and people with enough money to build their own hospitals.
Littleton let go of her eyelid. “Sophie, can you hear me? Blink if you can.”
Sophie blinked. Speaking or moving was impossible—her head was immobilized in some sort of frame.
“Good. Now, I want you to just rest, while I talk to you and your father about the operation. You can listen in if you feel up to it, and ask any questions you might have.”
Sophie blinked again. Her head felt unwieldy as a bowling ball, and her face was too tightly strapped to move her jaw. She couldn’t imagine trying to speak.
“To begin, I rebuilt your cheekbone with a prosthetic device. We will have to see if the material takes, but so far, I’ve never had a reject on my hands.”
Never had a reject on my hands. It sounded like something said about a defective factory part.
“Secondly, I repaired the skin over the wound area. That was the reason the surgery took so long.” Sophie opened her eyes to make an effort to show that she was paying attention. She really did want to know what had been done to her face. “Sophie, I was at it for eight hours. Your injury is much like that of many of our troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, so I’ve had a good deal of practice working on this kind of damage to the face.” He paused, looking down at notes on a clipboard. “The exit wound area was rather extensive. I had to do a graft.”
“How—how will she look?” Francis Smithson’s voice was tight with anxiety. He seemed more worried about her appearance than Sophie felt herself. Maybe he didn’t know how little that mattered to her. How could they have had such a miscommunication?
“We will need to do several surgeries to minimize the scar. The bullet entered your mouth, broke the cheekbone, and continued up the side of your head, creasing your skull. You are very lucky that your skull wasn’t damaged further, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. You’d be planning a funeral, Frank.” Littleton’s voice was definite, leaving no room for argument. It appeared he needed to convince her father that Sophie had bigger things to worry about than the plastic surgery to her face. “When the round exited, it tore off a large flap of skin at the cheekbone area, leaving an open wound. After I put in the prosthetic cheekbone, I took a patch of skin off of Sophie’s hip and sewed it over the wound. It’s a little…” Littleton cleared his throat. “It’s a little rough, but we’ll get it to where you can live with it.”
Sophie opened her eyes again with an effort. She hadn’t realized they’d closed. “I’m sure you did all you could.”
“Indeed I did, young lady.” Littleton patted Sophie’s hand through the bedclothes. “I hope you’ll be as beautiful as ever in time—with a few scars to add character.”
“I’m just happy to be alive.” Sophie closed her eyes and sank back into sleep.
A week later, Sophie finished a very quiet, gentle yoga practice in the corner of her father’s penthouse suite. He wouldn’t hear of her going anywhere but “home” to recover, and she’d been at their familiar, luxurious apartment for three days after discharge from the hospital.
It was finally time to remove the surgery bandages, though she hadn’t told her father that. She wanted only the company of one friend to support her during a moment she’d been dreading. The thought of seeing the mutilated side of her face and head was giving her more anxiety than she had anticipated.
Ginger, in her cozy dog bed, lifted her head and rose at the sound of the doorbell. Sophie stood up and unwound from a stretch that opened up the vertebrae of her lower back. It still hurt to move, and she was often dizzy when standing up. The doctors had assured her that these side effects from the head injury would eventually fade.
Sophie opened the door. “Hey.”
Marcella embraced Sophie without hesitation as she stepped inside. Her friend’s arms felt strong, warm, and life-giving. Sophie had fended off multiple attempted visits from Dunn, Connor Remarkian, and even Ben Waxman. She’d had a long phone conversation with Lei Texeira on Maui, and a post-shoot debrief meeting with Dr. Kinoshita, but other than them, she just wasn’t ready to see anyone besides her father and Marcella until she had assessed the extent of her injury.
“There’s just something about getting shot in the face,” Sophie said, gazing into Marcella’s warm brown eyes. “Just something really demoralizing a
bout it.”
“I can’t even imagine.” Marcella cupped Sophie’s good cheek. “But you know that you’re beautiful regardless. Are you sure you want to do this now?”
“Dr. Littleton said I can remove the bandages today, and that’s what I want to do. Let’s just get it over with.” Sophie could hear the steel in her own voice.
The two women walked into the bathroom, where the mirror Sophie had been avoiding was lit with a strong neon glare.
Marcella seated her on the toilet, and began to tug and lift at the bandages covering the right side of her face as Sophie watched Marcella’s face closely. Marcella gave nothing away. Her brown eyes were intent, her full mouth relaxed, holding the same expression she’d had when beginning to lift the bandages off. “Not bad,” Marcella said, looking over the area in question. “Seems like the skin graft took, thank the good Lord.”
Sophie stood up and walked to the sink. She turned her face to be able to see the surgery area. Her cheek on the injured side was twice as big. Her eye was sunk in a pouch of black and blue swelling. The skin graft was clearly visible, beginning in the middle of her cheekbone and extending up the side of her face into her hairline and around into her scalp. She’d already known the size of graft area, because she had a matching wound on her hip. “Where your bikini will hide it,” Littleton had said, with his gift for optimism.
A row of black stitches surrounded the graft, giving the area the look of a crude patchwork quilt. When Sophie looked closer, she could see how tiny the stitches were. They were almost too small to have been done by human hands.
Littleton was one of the best in his field, her father had said. There was no reconstructive surgery on the face that he hadn’t had extensive experience practicing. When the stitches were out, the wound’s distorted, horrible outline would be much less obvious—but the fact remained that the area was dented and dimpled, too.
“I look like a pirate,” Sophie said. “I look like…” She couldn’t find words.
“You look like a beautiful, brave woman who’s been shot in the face and surgically repaired by the best,” Marcella said. She burst into tears, covering her face with her hands.
“That doesn’t reassure me.” Sophie hugged her friend as Marcella pulled toilet paper off of the roll, dabbing her eyes and blowing her nose noisily. “I’m a freak.”
“You are not. I’m just so glad you’re alive. We all have to remember that, going forward. And that’s why I’m crying,” Marcella said. “Because I’m happy you’re still here, and you’re going to be good as new in no time.”
“People keep saying that to me.” Sophie turned back to her disturbing image in the mirror. She traced the outline of the skin graft’s stitching with a fingertip. “I won’t have hair here. I guess I’ll have to grow my hair out and find a way to cover up the bald spot.”
“You can’t get discouraged by this. Dr. Littleton said this was only the beginning of the repairs.”
Sophie shrugged. She couldn’t take her eyes off of the wasteland of her face. “Good thing I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“This won’t make a bit of difference to anyone who really cares about you,” Marcella snapped.
“You know who has been missing from this whole thing? Alika. It’s really over with him. If he cared about me at all, he would have visited me. He would have called.”
Marcella set a hand on her shoulder. “I did call him to tell him the news. He said he’d be praying for you.”
Tears prickled Sophie’s eyes for the first time.
Some part of her had still been hoping that with this crisis in her life, Alika would come, like she’d come for him when he was in need. But he hadn’t. At least Connor Remarkian had tried to see her. And Dunn would have moved right into the apartment if her father had let him. And even the Ghost… She had some memory of his voice, a sense that he had come to her when she was in that gray place, but no real memory of it.
The Ghost. She thought of their exchange of photos. What would he want with her now? Would their online game of attraction survive her mutilation? Maybe, since it seemed to be about a lot more than the physical. She couldn’t help a persistent feeling that somehow, the Ghost had something to do with waking her from the coma.
But right now the last thing she needed to worry about was some man’s opinion of her face.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dunn was next to see Sophie’s scars besides her father a day later. Shock showed in the widening of his gunmetal eyes and the flare of his nostrils before he schooled his expression into an impassive mask. “Looking good, Sophie.”
She rolled her eyes “That’s the best you can do, Jake?”
“I don’t know what to say, damn it.” Dunn ducked his head, pushed a hand through hair still damp from a shower. Wearing a teal-colored polo shirt and chinos, he looked like someone her father would play golf with on the weekend. “I’m sure it’s going to get better.”
“I’m not that concerned about it, actually.” She opened the door further to let him in. “What did you come for?”
“I came to see you. And to tell you there have been some new developments in the case. Hello, Ambassador.” Francis Smithson, seated at the couch with the Wall Street Journal open, shook out his paper and stood.
“Nice to see you outside the hospital, Jake.” Her father had been the best possible company—warm and supportive, but leaving her alone whenever she wanted to retreat into her computer world or stare out the windows. Sophie wasn’t ready to go out in public and be seen, still hoping the lurid color and swelling of her face would go down. “I’ll give you two some privacy.”
The apartment was set up in such a way that each of their bedrooms had an office/work area, and her father disappeared into his large, formal bedroom, closing the door. Dunn sat on the couch across from her. His gaze flicked to her face, then back down to a file he had brought in.
Was this always going to be the way people looked at her in the future? Glances, side looks, not wanting to make eye contact or seem to stare, but also not wanting to look at her face, either?
After another week, she was getting a little more used to it. The stitches would be coming out in another day or so, and they would begin a round of laser treatments to reduce the raised, red ridging around the edges of the scar. She kept her hopes small, though—it was better to get used to being what she was now than to hope for more.
Dunn cleared his throat and opened the file on the coffee table. “Big breaking news. Sloane was spotted here on Oahu.”
Sophie’s eyes widened. “Where?”
“Airport. Preliminary identification points to Dougal Sloane.” Dunn pulled a grainy surveillance photo out of the folder. “Check this out.”
Sophie picked up the printout of a dark silhouetted face. “I can’t make out anything about this photo.”
“See this?” Dunn’s thick finger pointed to the ridge of light at the top of the head. “That’s a light reflecting off of a scalp. Height and build are also consistent with Sloane.”
“So how close is Hilo PD to picking him up?”
“That’s why I’m here.” Dunn gazed at her squarely at last—it was as if he’d had to work up to it, and the thought hollowed her belly. “I think we need you and your DAVID program to find him. Hilo PD has put an all-island warrant out on him, and his photo is circulating, but no one has seen him since he arrived, likely traveling under an alias. He seems to have a hideout here. Probably a Society of Light connection of some kind. Wish we were in on that investigation.”
Sophie settled deep into the love seat, curling her legs up onto the couch. “I can’t officially use DAVID while its possession is in contention with the FBI. And even if I found any information, how could I give it to the police? It would open the door for an appeal from Sloane later, if he were prosecuted. As it is, we can’t even make a case for those murdered women without the evidence being compromised.”
“You were using DAVID before. And, on an encou
raging note, the judge ruled the evidence admissible in the case against Jackson. The ruling was based on your work as a private contractor working for a client, with no directive from law enforcement. I brought your laptop back.” Dunn opened the case at his feet and lifted out Sophie’s familiar laptop. “You have more security on this laptop than I’ve run into in years.”
“You tried to get into my computer?”
Dunn shrugged, the dimple in his cheek flashing, his teeth white. “Of course.”
She took the laptop from him. “I don’t use wireless with this. I had security issues working from home last year, part of why I left the FBI. I don’t feel comfortable using this apartment as a base of operations for DAVID, especially with my father here. He is a diplomat, and has his own security concerns.”
Dunn nodded agreement. “Would never expect you to compromise your safety,” he said. It seemed like it was getting easier for him to look at her, and now he was staring.
She frowned. “Like what you see?”
“Sophie, you will always be a beautiful woman. Even if this is as good as they could do, you’d still be beautiful. The scars add character. They make you look even more interesting.” Dunn’s voice was pitched low and sincere. “Kind of badass, actually.”
Sophie stood, agitated. She rubbed her hands up and down her yoga pants and walked over to the tall glass windows framing the beautiful skyline view of downtown Honolulu. “I kind of liked being Mary Watson. I got to disappear as her whenever I wanted to. I’m not sure I know who Sophie Ang is anymore, and now I don’t even recognize her face.”
Dunn stood up and walked over to where she stood. He squeezed her shoulder gently. “I’ve always thought work was the best antidote to almost anything, and I think you need to get back to work, sooner rather than later. You’ll get more closure by finding Sloane than any therapy.”