by Nic Joseph
“What about the knife?” I asked. “Did you see that?”
“Not at first,” he said. “I ran over to her to see if she was okay, and that’s when I saw it in her hands.”
“Had you ever seen the knife before?”
“No,” he said firmly, shaking his head. “It’s not ours. Someone must have broken in with it.”
“Mr. Lindsey, is that your wife’s purse?” I asked, pointing to the handbag that was still in his hands.
He nodded. “I grabbed it on the way out the door because I knew I would need her ID and insurance information,” he said. “Do you need it—”
He stopped as Emily suddenly stopped moaning.
We all turned back to the room, and Dan reached up to pull the curtain back. One of the nurses was taking off her gloves, and she walked out of the room, moving quickly past us. We all stepped forward, peeking in as Dr. Suda and the other nurse leaned over Emily.
She was calmer now, staring straight ahead, using her hand to cradle her bandaged palm. Her chest still rose and fell with every breath, but she was silent.
Dr. Suda looked up and saw us watching them. She said something to the remaining nurse before walking over to us.
“We gave her a sedative, so she should fall asleep soon. But I think the interview is done for the day,” she said.
Gayla and I both nodded.
“What happened?” Dan asked her.
The doctor began to describe Emily’s heightened blood pressure and racing heartbeat in hushed tones.
As she spoke, my eyes went back to Emily, who stared past us all, lost in her own thoughts.
What happened to you?
Whose blood was that, and where did you get the knife?
Emily?
What did you do?
And then suddenly, as if she could hear my questions, she moved.
It wasn’t much, just the quick, slight dart of her eyes toward mine, and in a second, the foggy expression cleared. She stared at me, and in that moment, it seemed that she was incredibly lucid, perfectly aware, and that even if she couldn’t hear us, she could see us.
She could see me.
“Did you see that?” I interrupted the doctor, stepping forward past the curtain. The nurse by the bedside looked up. I took a couple of steps closer to the bed, Emily’s eyes never leaving mine. “Can you hear me?” I asked her. “Emily, can you hear me?”
“Detective Paul!” Dr. Suda said, joining me, and Gayla and Dan followed behind her. “I said the interview is over!”
“I know you can hear me, Emily,” I said, stepping closer. “Please, you have to tell us what happened.”
She continued to stare at me, but her gaze suddenly became less focused. And then, as if the moment of clarity never happened, she stared right through me again.
“Out, Detective,” Dr. Suda said sternly.
I watched Emily carefully for a few beats before straightening and backing out of the room.
We all stepped behind the curtain, and Gayla raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
The other nurse followed us out and turned to Dr. Suda. “I finished checking her vitals, and she’s stable for now,” he said. He turned to the small computer station and began typing. After a few keystrokes, he looked up and saw me watching him. The nurse reached out and wheeled the screen around slightly, shielding it from my view.
“Seriously, come back tomorrow, Detectives,” Dr. Suda said, looking at me pointedly.
“We will,” Gayla said, throwing me a look.
I nodded.
Dr. Suda turned and walked down the hall.
Dan Lindsey stared at his wife through the slit in the curtain. “I really think it would be best if I take my wife home,” he said. “She doesn’t seem like she’s getting better with all these people around.”
“That’s not going to happen, not until they check her out,” I said. “Mr. Lindsey, what do you think happened tonight? Do you have any idea why your wife might have had my name in her pocket?”
He looked surprised. “Your name? You mean you’re…”
“Yes, I’m Detective Steven Paul, and I work for the Douglas County Police Department. They called us in because of what they found on the Post-it.”
Dan opened his mouth and then closed it, staring at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “I have no idea, Detective. I guess she wanted to talk to you about something, but I don’t know what.” He shook his head and looked back at the curtain. “Someone must have broken in,” he said. “There’s no other explanation.”
I nodded. “Okay, sure. But problem is, with that amount of blood—”
“Yes, I know,” he said, cutting me off. “I know what you’re going to ask, and I don’t know. I get it—with that amount of blood loss, where did this mystery intruder go? I don’t know. I’m just glad she’s okay.”
“Mr. Lindsey, do you know if your wife might have been making any stops on her way home from Madison?” Gayla asked.
“Not that I know of,” he said.
“Was it her first trip there?” I asked.
He blinked. “Her second,” he said. “She went a few weeks ago. Maybe for the same story, maybe not. She doesn’t tell me those things. Although…” He trailed off and grimaced, looking back at his wife through the curtains.
“Although what?” I asked.
He looked back at us and blinked again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Hey, do I have to tell you this stuff? I mean, just because you’re cops? I don’t want to if I don’t have to. I don’t want to say anything that gets Emily in any trouble. She didn’t do anything bad. Everyone keeps looking at her like she did, I guess because of the knife, but I know my wife. Something bad happened to her. I really just want to take her home.”
“We’re just trying to find out what happened,” I said. “This isn’t an interrogation, but everything you tell us can help us figure that out. That’s the only way we can help her.”
He seemed to think about it for a moment and finally nodded.
“I think she might have still been investigating that one case,” he said quietly. “The Griggs one.”
“Ryan Griggs?” Gayla asked, her eyes widening. “The pharma guy? But he went insane when she ran the first article on him. Said he was going to get a restraining order against her and Carmen Street.”
“I know,” Dan said. “And she’d backed off a bit, or at least that’s what she wanted him to think. But I heard her mention his name on the phone about a week ago. I asked her about it, but she closed up.”
“Who is Griggs?” I asked.
“A couple of months ago, Emily posted an open letter on her blog to Ryan Griggs, president of Kelium Pharmaceutical Company,” Gayla said. “They make Zoanet, a cancer drug that hit the market maybe seven years ago or so. Apparently, Emily came across a few sources—some patients, some family members of patients—who were convinced that the drug had made them sick.”
“As in progressed their cancer?”
“No,” Gayla said. “A totally unrelated illness. The patients she described all exhibited signs of blood poisoning after taking Zoanet. Extremely high levels of a chemical called benzene.”
“Wow,” I said. “Did she have proof? I mean, before she published the story on her blog?”
“No, and that’s why she wrote the letter,” Gayla said. “After the fourth source came forward, Emily reached out to Kelium to find out more about what was going on. Apparently, she had the door slammed in her face at every turn. The letter asked Griggs to answer her questions and do what he could to figure out why those people were getting sick. She made a point to say that nothing definitive could be said about the safety of Zoanet.”
“I’m sure that didn’t do much to appease Griggs,” I said.
“Of course not,” Dan said, stepping clos
er. “A letter like that would piss anybody off, let alone someone with a temper like Griggs. He left a comment on the blog post about how Emily was scum, her blog was trash, and that his company was only obligated to respond to requests from real journalists. He tried to delete the comment a few hours later, but by then, Emily had already taken a screenshot. She posted that story the next day. That’s what really set him off.” Dan shook his head. “That story had the most hits on Emily’s blog,” he said with a sad smile. “She was so proud of it.”
“But you weren’t?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of Emily. She’s an amazing woman, and she does amazing work,” he said. “She’s not scared of anything. That’s one of the things that impressed me the most when we first met. But don’t think I didn’t realize that what she did was dangerous. Hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. She thought that meant you could say anything, about anyone. I always told her to be careful.”
There was something about the way he said that last sentence that bothered me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
“So what happened to Griggs?” I asked.
“He’s managed to stay out of the limelight for a few weeks. I think his board of directors gave him a firm talking to,” said Gayla. “And if they were responsible in some way for what happened to those people, there’s no doubt that, by now, they’ve buttoned up anything that was left hanging out. But Griggs did post that he’d take action against slander. That seemed to quiet things down on Carmen Street.” She turned to Dan. “You say you heard her talking about him recently?”
“Yeah, she was whispering on the phone,” he said. “Couldn’t have been more than a week ago. I don’t know who she was talking to, might have been her webmaster. When I came in, she hung up.”
“Who is her webmaster?”
“I forgot his name,” he said hesitantly. “You can contact him through the site, I think.”
The nurse finished up on the computer and walked over to us. “Dr. Suda has asked me to give you a call tomorrow to let you know when you should come back,” he said sternly to Gayla and me, and I could tell he was looking for us to challenge him. “If you give me your number, I’ll give you a call.”
“Sure, no problem,” Gayla said.
The man patted his chest pocket and then spun around, looking at the small table next to the computer. “Where’s my pen?” he asked.
A full breath passed before anyone reacted. Gayla moved first, ripping back the curtain to Emily’s room. When she did, we all froze in shock.
Emily sat in the same place, perfectly still, but she was looking down at her hands.
In them, she held the nurse’s black, ballpoint pen.
“How the hell did she get that!” the nurse exclaimed, racing back toward the bed.
He was reaching to grab the pen from her hand when I stopped him.
“Wait,” I said.
I stared at Emily as she sat there quietly in the bed, the pen dangling from the fingers on her bandaged hand. She wasn’t smiling exactly, but the corners of her mouth were lifted slightly, and she stared through us as we moved farther into the room.
As I surveyed the scene in front of me, my heart skipped a beat, and I suddenly felt light-headed as I saw what she’d done with the pen.
In the few minutes that she’d been left alone, Emily hadn’t been hurting herself—she’d been drawing.
Little scribbles on every inch of blank space that surrounded her.
The bandage on her hand.
The fresh white sheet the nurse had placed on her lap.
Even her own pale skin.
Not random scribbles but perfectly uniform drawings of the same shape.
A symbol.
I swallowed, the blood rushing to my face, and I tried to force myself to calm down.
To look around the room.
To remember my questions.
One: Can anyone else see it?
I turned to look at Gayla, Dan, and the nurse as they all took another step forward.
“What the hell is that?” Gayla asked.
I blinked, certain I hadn’t heard her right.
They could all see it?
The minute I’d seen the symbol, I’d actually hoped it was one of the visions. I’d felt the small room begin to close around me, tasted the rotting air in my mouth, felt the steel bars just inches from my face.
Emily had drawn the tornado. Thirty of them or so, to be more precise.
Each wound tightly around a small cross.
The exact symbol I’d seen in my nightmares for years.
And they could all see it.
Chapter Six
“Steve?”
I think I’m screaming.
“Steve?” Gayla asked. “Are you okay?”
What is that noise? Am I screaming?
I reached up to touch my mouth and breathed a small sigh of relief when I realized that my lips were pressed together.
If it was me that was screaming, it wasn’t out loud.
“Steve, what’s wrong?”
You need to respond to her.
“Steve!”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”
I blinked and looked over at Gayla. She was standing by the curtain, holding it open, and watching me with a curious expression. It took me a moment to realize that she was waiting for me to follow her.
“You coming?” she asked.
I looked back at Emily. A team of nurses had surrounded her again, one quickly grabbing the pen from her hand. Emily was still staring off into the distance with a slight smile on her face.
“Yeah,” I said again and turned to follow Gayla out of the room.
“You all right?” Gayla asked me.
I swallowed, feeling light-headed and hot. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.
She didn’t seem convinced. “Were you having a blackout—”
“No!” I said, and I took a deep breath and shook my head. “Sorry. No, I’m fine. I just don’t know how we missed the pen. That could’ve been dangerous.”
My voice sounded choppy and robotic, and I was sweating profusely, but Gayla seemed to accept it, at least for the moment.
“Yeah, it definitely could have been. I’m glad she was just using it to draw. What the hell do you think that drawing was? Some kind of code?”
Game face, Steve.
Do not blink.
Did you just blink?
Shit.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Could’ve been nothing. Maybe she was just doodling?”
“I got a pretty good look at it. We should get it down.” Gayla walked quickly over to the nurse’s station and asked for a piece of paper and a pen. I watched over her shoulder as she began to sketch the symbol. It was a decent rendition, and she turned the paper toward me, holding it up.
“Pretty close?” she asked.
It was close, but not quite right. The top of the tornado was too wide, the proportions off on the cross.
But all I said was, “Yes, that’s it.”
Gayla turned toward Emily’s room as if she wanted to go back for another look, and I reached out for the paper.
“We should probably head toward the house,” I said, taking it from her. “Let the medical team take care of that and come back later.”
Gayla seemed to think it over for a moment. “You’re right. That’ll do for now,” she said, gesturing to the paper in my hands. “Let’s go.”
Before we left the area, I took one final look back at Emily’s room, where the curtain was still slightly parted. But the nurses were crowded around the bed, and I couldn’t make out her face.
I turned and followed Gayla back out into the waiting room.
• • •
A few minutes later, we w
ere in Gayla’s car, heading toward the Lindseys’ home. With one hand on the wheel, Gayla gestured fervently with the other as she laid out her concerns about the case. I sat there silently, staring out the passenger window, trying to remind myself to contribute to the conversation every now and then. Gayla gets offended by too much silence.
“Why would two people be in a confined space and not speak to each other?” she once asked after being ignored by a woman in a mall elevator. I overheard her telling the story about the “elevator bitch” to three different people that day. “I asked her how her day was going, and she just smiled and looked down at her phone. I watched her. She wasn’t texting or checking her calendar or anything! Just staring at the home screen for the whole elevator ride so she wouldn’t have to answer me. Who does that? If you’re going to use your phone to ignore somebody, at least have the decency to swipe to the right a few times.”
As we sped through the street toward the Lindsey home, I let Gayla carry the conversation, adding an occasional “ummhmm” or other sound of agreement so that I wouldn’t become the subject of her story about the “car bitch.”
It was times like these that I was thankful to have a talkative partner, since I could barely focus after what had happened at the hospital.
“There’s something about him that I don’t like,” Gayla said, making a turn onto a busy street. “I don’t know what it is, but something doesn’t sit right.”
It took me a minute to realize that she’d stopped talking.
“Who, the husband?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking over at me as she braked at a stop sign. “You didn’t get a weird vibe? Like he was pissed at us for trying to help her, but trying to cover it up by being helpful?”
“Not really,” I muttered, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The symbol that Emily had drawn on her sheets was dancing in front of my eyes, clouding my vision, and I still struggled to take full breaths. It hadn’t been a hallucination, I was fully convinced, and yet there was no other explanation for it. The moment I’d seen it, I’d felt as if I were being dragged back into the dream against my will—in front of an entire room of onlookers.