Angel Face

by Suzanne Forster

  I have to get out of here, he thought. He could hear the clerk calling him as he turned and headed for the escalator, but he didn’t respond. This wasn’t one of his better ideas. Barbara wouldn’t have been expecting lingerie, anyway. He would take her to one of her favorite restaurants and the theater for her birthday, maybe pick up a Limoges piece to go with her collection.

  Once he’d reached the parking lot and was safely inside his car, life quickly improved for Peter Brandt. Here he knew where everything went, what it was for, and most important, how it was supposed to make him feel. He was in the driver’s seat, literally. Strange how he hated being out of his element, which was probably why he preferred spending time at the lab to all the traveling he was doing.

  Still, someone had to sell the snake oil. His partner, Ron Laird, was the brains of the operation, so the day-to-day management and marketing had fallen to Peter. He consoled himself with the knowledge that if everything went well, SmartTech would soon be a Wall Street tsunami, and they would all be rich.

  That elicited his first smile of the day.

  The familiar hum of the Ford SUV’s engine brought peace to his soul as well. It was unusually bright outside for June, so Peter popped on the BluBlocker sunglasses he kept on the dash. He’d already dialed his office voice mail by the time he pulled out of the parking lot. Like most Southland business commuters, he used driving time to catch up on his messages. Fortunately, the caller ID function stored the incoming numbers, so he could select the messages he wanted. He went straight to one from Dr. Fremont, Angela Lowe’s psychiatrist. She’d left it at ten that morning, and it was now two in the afternoon.

  “Mr. Brandt,” the doctor said in her low, measured tones, “I saw Angela this morning, and I’m sorry to say I have some concerns. She’s reporting anxiety, as well as violent impulses, so we did a free association exercise. Her responses were deeply hostile and directed at doctors, and when I questioned her, she justified her responses. If I had to put a label on her state of mind, I’d call it volatile. I don’t consider her dangerous at this point, but I couldn’t rule it out.”

  She went on to say that she would be doing evaluations at the hospital the rest of the week and could be reached there. She also assured him that she would work Angela into her schedule ASAP. And then she apologized again.

  The shaking started somewhere below Peter’s rib cage. He’d dreaded this moment yet known it was coming. He hit the Flash button, then speed-dialed the lab and got Sammy Tran on the phone.

  “Sammy, put Angela on, would you?”

  “Is this Peter? She didn’t come in today. She’s out in the field, doing interviews for that genius study.”

  “Who told her to do that, for Christ’s sake?”

  “She said you did. She told me you sent her an E-mail.”

  “I’m on my way there, Sammy. If Angela calls in, tell her to terminate the interviewing and report to the lab. I want to see her as soon as possible.”

  He flipped the phone shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat. He had not told Angela to interview the experimental subjects. He wondered who the hell had. He wondered if anybody had.

  BIRDY was taking a nap in her cage when the pager went off next. She opened one eye, but only reluctantly, and then she was snoozing again. Apparently, the bright, shiny toy had lost its appeal for her, which meant that no one was going to see the incoming message, at least not in time to do anything about it.

  I DON'T LIKE BEING STOOD UP, DR. CARPENTER. I WISH YOU HAD TAKEN ME SERIOUSLY. PERHAPS NOW YOU WILL.

  There was no way for the sender to know that her implicit threat wasn’t being read, that in fact, none of her messages had been read. Maybe that was why she typed out her name in full, as if she wanted no confusion about who the offended party was:

  ANGEL FACE

  “HOT sex this afternoon? Anybody?”

  Jordan posed the question in a purely conversational tone. He’d stopped at the nurses’ station in the Cardiac Care Unit, and he knew what his odds were of getting anyone’s attention if he asked for what he really needed. Not that he didn’t need hot sex. But his first order of business that afternoon was tracking down Teri Benson, the senior surgical resident.

  “Only if you say please, Dr. Carpenter.” One of the male orderlies batted his eyelashes.

  The charge nurse stepped forward, a rope-thin woman with wisps of gray in her auburn hair and an uncanny resemblance to Nurse Ratched. “I have genital warts and a set of brass knuckles. They’re sewn into my bra.”

  “Would you stop!” The male orderly shot her an outraged glare. “Shameless vixen would stoop to anything to lure a man. Don’t listen to her, Dr. Carpenter. Cover your ears.”

  “I’m holding myself back,” Jordan assured him.

  “I have prostrate trouble,” the orderly said hopefully.

  Jordan pretended to be torn between the two of them. “You’re making it tough, but I’m going to need a rain check.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m organizing a little search party for Dr. Benson. Anybody seen her?”

  “I wouldn’t be counting on her for hot sex,” the charge nurse replied. “Unless you like working against a stopwatch.”

  That got a big laugh and a few scathing comments about Benson’s “anality,” which Jordan doubted was a word. He already knew Teri wouldn’t win any popularity contests with the staff. She put everyone to shame with her work ethic, him included, which might not have been a problem if she hadn’t been so intolerant of her “underachieving” coworkers. She expected them to be as dedicated as she was, but what she saw as self-sacrifice they saw as naked ambition.

  Still, she was the standout among the residents in surgical rotation, and she had more experience because she wasn’t shy about volunteering her skills. Benson was the one you could count on when another resident got sick or scared, which had made her the object of both awe and fear among her peers. And some of the surgeons, Jordan thought ironically.

  Not that he couldn’t relate. He’d been a target himself. His surgical advances had put him in the spotlight, and medical hierarchies, by tradition, weren’t fond of the nonconformist thinking that Jordan was always being accused of. He’d made himself some enemies along the way. He hated hospital politics because it never had anything to do with patient care or doctoring. It was about egos and/or money, and he hadn’t always been the most diplomatic soul in making his feelings known.

  “Last time I saw her, she was coming out of Exam Three,” Ratched said.

  “I thought that room was closed because of a plumbing leak.”

  “It’s one big mud puddle, but you know Benson. She probably snaked the pipes herself.”

  “She snakes pipes?” The orderly was hopeful again.

  Ratched gave him a quelling stare.

  Jordan was already on his way down the hall. “I’ll check it out,” he called back. “Meanwhile, if you see her, tell her I’m looking for her—and her stopwatch.”

  Jordan slowed down long enough to look through the windows of the surgeons’ lounge, thinking he might spot Benson there. As he scanned the room, he saw something that brought him to a full stop. A woman’s face was reflected in the glass pane. It was mirrored in such detail, he knew instantly who it was. And it was not Teri Benson. Jordan couldn’t have mistaken the dark hair and porcelain skin. He knew those eyes, round and searching.

  This was the woman in the CIA dossier. It was her . . . behind him.

  Her image was still framed in his mind as he turned. But she wasn’t there. There was only the normal hospital bustle. Jordan searched up and down the corridor. He saw a woman in silhouette, turning down a hallway. She was headed in the opposite direction of Exam Three, but he started after her.

  “Wait!” he called out.

  A team of paramedics blocked his way. They were rushing at him with a gurney, and he had to shove aside a supply cart to avoid them. The woman was gone before he could get himself free. But just before she disappeared from sight, she turn
ed her head and looked at him. Looked straight at him with her hauntingly tender gaze.

  Jordan felt as if he’d been shaken by a cosmic hand. She might have been a quick-change artist, but he would have known her anywhere. The details of her face were so sharp he could have reached out and touched her.

  He searched the hallway, opening doors and interrupting examinations. He checked the stairs and the elevators. What the hell was going on? She had been in the hospital. She’d been right in front of him . . . unless he was losing his mind.

  Jordan was getting some curious stares, but he didn’t stop to explain. He wasn’t sure he could have. He hadn’t imagined the woman, but maybe he’d been burning holes in a picture for so long that anyone with dark hair and big eyes would have looked like her, even Teri Benson, who had both. He’d obviously overreacted, and meanwhile, he still didn’t know where the hell Benson was.

  By the time he got back to the cardiac unit he’d let go of the incident and resumed his search. As it turned out, Exam Three had a Closed For Repairs sign and the resident was nowhere to be found. This seemed to be Jordan’s day for losing women. The only thing going in his favor was the supply room across the hall. Someone had lifted his prized stethoscope that morning, the one his parents gave him in medical school. He was deeply superstitious about the relic and never used anything else for rounds.

  He didn’t really believe it had been stolen. No one in the cardiac unit pulled brainless stunts like that.

  Jordan was certain the stethoscope would turn up eventually, and meanwhile he could either rip one off someone’s neck or root through the hospital’s stores. The supply room door turned out to be unlocked, which struck him as odd, but he had too many other concerns weighing on his mind to think of it as anything more than a stroke of luck.

  He could barely get into the room it was so jammed with medical equipment. It looked as if they’d moved most of the monitors from the leaking exam room in here while the plumbing was being fixed. He made his way around an EKG machine and pushed aside a ventilator. There were several boxes on a back corner shelf that looked promising. He could see the name of the medical supply company on them, but a bedside tray table and a defibrillator unit blocked his way.

  He was clearing a path when his foot caught on something heavy.

  Jordan plunged forward. There was nothing to grab but air, and he found himself down on one knee, hugging the tray table. It wasn’t until he was clear of the debris that he saw what he’d tripped over. “Jesus—”

  A man’s body was wedged between the defibrillator and the EKG machine. Jordan couldn’t see his face. It was hidden by the equipment, but he was wearing the long white coat of a doctor and clutching a defibrillator paddle in one hand, almost as if he’d been using it on himself.

  Jordan felt a moment of cold shock, but there wasn’t time to try and make sense of what a body was doing in the storeroom. The man’s other arm was caught beneath his trunk. Jordan lifted him enough to free his hand, but there was no pulse, not even a faint one.

  The defibrillator unit was plugged into the wall, Jordan realized as he tried to move it. He yanked the cord and heaved himself against the machine, displacing it enough to see who he was dealing with. The young male doctor was a visiting surgeon from Tokyo University Hospital. Jordan had met Dr. Kensuke Inada for the first time briefly during rounds that morning.

  Inada had come to California General to observe and learn about some of Jordan’s latest advances in valve repair, just as Jordan had visited the famous Tokyo hospital a few years back to pick up their innovations.

  Jordan had no idea how long Inada had been on the floor, but every second counted now. He checked his eyes with a penlight, but didn’t find the dilation associated with concussion. The man didn’t appear to be breathing, so Jordan probed his airway for blockage, then performed CPR, but got no response. It was possible he’d suffered a heart attack and reached for the paddles instinctively. Sadly, they were probably the only thing that could save him now. But Jordan had to get him to the cardiac ER first, before the lack of oxygen caused irreversible brain damage.

  The supply room had no intercom. Jordan shouted for help, then ran outside and called again, but the hallway was deserted except for one ambulatory patient. He gave the startled elderly woman a reassuring nod as he sprinted past her, but that was all he could do. An abandoned gurney sat in the adjoining corridor. Jordan grabbed it, and this time his shouts were heard.

  Two interns, who probably hadn’t slept more than four hours in as many days, were huddled over foam cups of coffee just down the hall from him. Jordan yelled at one of them to alert the trauma unit and the other to follow him back to the storage room.

  The dread that had gripped Jordan was now an icy trickle at the base of his skull, whispering constantly that something was wrong, that what he’d seen was no accident. If the defibrillator unit was wet from Exam Three, it could have shorted out, but that didn’t explain why it was plugged in. Or what a visiting doctor was doing with the equipment in a normally locked storage room.

  Jordan thought of the woman in the hallway who’d disappeared. Could she have been the one in the dossier? A videotaped image screened through his mind like a clip from Psycho. Jordan had refused to believe she could harm anyone. It didn’t matter that he’d watched her stop her father’s heart or that the CIA called her Angel Face. He couldn’t conceive of it.

  Now he was frozen with that realization. It stuck in his mind the way ice adheres to anything warm and human. He could still see her hauntingly beautiful face when he burst back into the storeroom. The breathless intern piled in after him, but both of them came to an abrupt halt.

  “What the hell?” Jordan whispered.

  There was no body on the floor. No sign of a body anywhere.

  The visiting surgeon had vanished, and the defib unit had been unplugged.

  CHAPTER 6

  JORDAN ’S office was quiet, but his head was a brass band. He hadn’t been able to sit down at his desk or concentrate on anything but what the hell had just happened. What had happened? A body had disappeared, and there was currently a search going on for Dr. Inada. It was possible the doctor had spontaneously regained consciousness and left the storage room without anyone having seen him. But Jordan had other suspicions. There’d been no heartbeat, no respiration. He was either a miracle of science, or Jordan was in worse shape than he realized.

  He stared at the phone, paralyzed by the resistance he felt. His gut told him to call 911, but there was another number in his head, and what if that was the one he should be calling first? There were questions that had to be asked, but he didn’t want to hear the answers. He didn’t even want to dial the number, because that meant he was involved, to use Penny’s word, and he didn’t like being involved in anything he couldn’t see, touch, feel, taste, or control.

  Especially control. He’d always believed that was the mark of a good surgeon. They assumed total control of their environment, and he was now mentally circling an environment that was not only outside his experience, it felt totally outside his control.

  He’d been a snow skier in his younger days, and he would never forget the feeling on a vertical slope when your center of gravity reversed, and your head became your feet. “Wipeout!” his friends had shouted while his body flipped end over end, tumbling like a rag doll’s. There was no greater loss of control, and that was the sensation in his gut now. He was looking down the precipice, and he could see a body tumbling endlessly.

  If you change your mind, call this number and ask for—

  Jordan picked up the phone. The number was local, and it began to ring immediately. A woman answered.

  “How can I help you?” she asked in a pleasant voice.

  “I was told to ask for Firestarter.”

  Jordan was instantly put on hold. He wasn’t sitting at his desk now. He was standing beside it, counting intermittent beeps that pinged like sonar and were equally as ominous.

  “Dr
. Carpenter? What can I do for you?”

  God, he sounded exactly like an insurance agent. Jordan felt a little foolish. The man seemed so accessible, Jordan couldn’t help but wonder about the brick wall that Mitch Ryder had run into. “Am I speaking to Edwin Truitt?”

  “You are. Go ahead and speak freely. It’s safe.”

  Easy for you to say, Jordan thought. It didn’t feel safe at this end. It felt like someone’s idea of a sick practical joke. There was nothing he liked about the situation he found himself in, but he’d already gone this far.

  “I’m calling from California General,” Jordan said. “Something just happened here that I thought you should know about. A visiting surgeon was found in a storage room with no pulse and no respiration. There was a defib unit next to his body, and he was holding one of the paddles. I tried to revive him, but he didn’t respond.”

  “You found him, right? And you were alone?”

  “Yes, but there’s more. I went for help and when I got back—”

  “I know what happened, Doctor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The body was gone. It wasn’t there when you got back.”

  Jordan hesitated. He put people on medication when their hearts were beating this fast. “You already know about this?”

  No answer. It was so quiet, Jordan could hear the beep again, and among other things it reminded him that he still hadn’t found his pager.

  “You could say we knew about it, Dr. Carpenter. You could even say we did it.”

  “You did what?”

  “Cleaned up the scene. There was no choice.”