Angel Face

by Suzanne Forster

  CHAPTER 23

  EMPTY beer bottles littered the concrete sidewalk that spanned the boat docks. Jordan picked one up and lobbed it into a nearby trash can, shattering the hush the fog had created. He’d been waiting too long. The agent was over an hour late, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Jordan had already left three messages. He would give the man five more minutes, and then he was gone. His intuition had been right. This was a bad move. He should have set the terms for the meeting, picked the time and place.

  It was more than the tide that stank in Long Beach harbor.

  At least his pager hadn’t gone off. That meant Angela was okay, unless something had happened that she couldn’t call. That thought chilled him to the bone. He wasn’t going to let himself go there.

  A shrill ring brought him out of his festering thoughts. He’d parked the car on a side street, and he was on his way back there when the cell phone rang. Jordan had barely hit the Talk button before a voice was hissing at him through the receiver.

  “There’s one born every minute! You should have killed her, Carpenter. She suckered you good, you fool.”

  It was Firestarter. Jordan wanted to snap the man’s neck with his bare hands, but a high-pitched tone alerted him. His pager was going off. He dug the thing out of his pocket and saw by the digital display that it was his answering service. Not Angela, but he had to take it anyway.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he told Firestarter, disconnecting the agent with savage pleasure.

  He sprinted back to the dock to use the pay phone. He was reasonably sure that Firestarter could trace him on the cell phone and possibly even listen to his calls, and he wasn’t taking any more chances. It wasn’t clear why the answering service hadn’t contacted either Steve Lloyd or Teri Benson, who were supposed to take Jordan’s calls, but it was probably just a glitch. Somebody didn’t read a notation.

  The service answered immediately. There was an emergency, he was told. A new patient, on his waiting list for scheduling, was having chest pain. The patient was minutes away from Jordan’s Belmont Shores office, so the service had arranged for the man to meet Jordan there.

  He arrived just moments after Jordan did, an older man, who’d managed to drive himself there without any help, but he was obviously in great pain. Jordan started him on 325 milligrams of crushed aspirin and checked his vital signs. His symptoms were classic. He was suffering chest pains, radiating arm pain, cold sweats, weakness, and dizziness. His pulse was erratic, and his face had a bluish tinge.

  In all his years of practice, Jordan had never lost a patient to bad judgment, but tonight could mar that record, and he knew it. It wasn’t just that his focus was off, his whole attitude had changed dramatically in the last few days. It was only beginning to dawn on him how dramatically. There was now something more important to him than his quest to save lives. One life. One woman.

  He was so obsessed with protecting her it was hard to muster the right doctorly concern for a stranger, even for this patient who was suffering in his office. That had never happened before. He’d always been able to subjugate his needs to the patient’s, and he’d always believed a dedicated doctor should do that.

  “Let’s get your shirt off,” Jordan said. “I’m going to take some blood and get you hooked up to an electrocardiogram. Then we’ll see what’s going on.”

  Jordan took a quick medical history while he helped the man undress, and was surprised to discover that his patient was a semiretired surgeon. Doctors were often the worst patients. They knew what could go wrong, but this one was in too much pain to care.

  Unfortunately, Jordan didn’t have the man’s records available. These days his private practice was limited to pre- and postop surgical care. He generally did his intake evaluations at the hospital and had duplicate files sent here to the office, but that hadn’t been done in this instance. In fact, he didn’t recall having done the intake, but considering the last couple of days, that wasn’t surprising. If he called the hospital now for the information, he might as well hold a press conference and announce that he’d returned. He couldn’t risk it. He needed anonymity until he’d dealt with Firestarter.

  Jordan hadn’t hooked up an EKG in awhile. That was done by trained technicians, but within moments he had all the electrodes in place. He was adjusting the settings when the man suddenly doubled over in a choking fit. He clutched himself and slid off the examining table, coughing and gagging.

  “Help me!” he rasped. “Help me, it’s my heart!”

  He collapsed on the floor, and Jordan dropped down next to him. The man appeared to be unconscious. His pulse was thready, and Jordan immediately began chest compressions. Lean and release, lean and release, twenty-five pounds of pressure. But as he rocked up and down, forcing life back into the failing heart, he was gripped with foreboding.

  Fear? That had never happened before, either.

  Fear and doubt didn’t enter into his thinking when he was working on patients. There was a computer-like feedback loop that took over. He processed facts and made decisions accordingly, maybe too coldly. He’d been criticized for his machinelike efficiency, but Jordan didn’t lack for compassion. Losing a patient was devastating, but there was no room for fear when you were trying to save one.

  An AED unit sat next to the EKG. Jordan had come to loathe the sight of defibrillator paddles, but they were his only option now. The chest compressions weren’t working. Fortunately, this particular unit came equipped with a voice activation option so that Jordan could operate it by himself.

  He got the machine going, applied the conductive gel pads to the patient’s chest, and positioned the paddles, one near the sternum, the other outside the nipple.

  “Two hundred joules! Execute!” he shouted. The unit responded instantly. At the first jolt, the man’s body jumped off the floor, but there was no change in the pattern.

  “Three hundred joules! Execute!” Jordan sent another charge through him, and the heart hesitated its mad flight. It had been stunned into submission. If it fell back into its normal pattern, the patient would make it. Otherwise—

  Jordan tried another jolt and another, but the frozen organ wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t bring it back. His patient had gone into massive cardiac arrest. The man was gone, and the EKG was a screaming red line. Jordan didn’t even have to look at it. It pierced his brain like a bullet, leaving him as frozen and unresponsive as the heart.

  He couldn’t move. The paddles were gripped in his hands as if they were attached to him. It was only as he shook them off that he saw it. Something was wrong. A red warning light flashed on the AED unit and the number of joules displayed was nearly twice what Jordan had ordered.

  It may not have been heart failure, he realized. The paddles may have killed him. Jordan was thunderstruck.

  Call an ambulance, he told himself. Get him to a trauma unit. There’s nothing more you can do here. Call now!

  As he reached for the phone, he saw that the message light was blinking. He held off answering it long enough to call 911, even though the thought hammering in his head, the hope, was that it might be a message from Angela. A moment later, he was faced with the truth of that premonition. It was her.

  “It’s not so difficult to kill, is it?” she whispered over the line. “You might even get as good as me. Still love me?”

  Fooled you, fooled you!

  The words echoed in his head, and her laughter made him physically ill. The phone receiver crashed into the cradle. Fluorescent lights flared brightly, rendering the room shock white as he turned around. The tightness in his chest made him feel as if he were having a heart attack.

  She suckered you good, you fool.

  Firestarter’s snakelike hiss came back to Jordan. It cut into his thoughts and forced him to face the unthinkable—that Angela had something to do with this. That she was Angel Face. The sound that caught in his throat didn’t even resemble laughter. It was cold, burning cold. That was unthinkable. He couldn’t go there any
more than he could imagine her hurt, dying, unable to answer the phone.

  He needed to move, walk, think, but there wasn’t time. He had to continue the compressions, keep the oxygen flowing until the paramedics arrived. Where the hell were they? He had a Code Blue on the floor of his office! And whose voice had he heard? Not Angela’s. It could not have been her. He had to find a way to make his brain work. He had to cling to the only thing sanity would allow him to believe. There weren’t any other options now. Someone, that bastard agent, was trying to plant suspicions that were beyond comprehension.

  What the hell did Firestarter want him to think? That Angela had rigged the equipment and set him up to execute the next victim on her list? Was that what the agent was implying?

  Beyond unthinkable. That was impossible.

  A shadow fell over Jordan’s splayed hands, and he looked up to see a woman standing in the doorway of the exam room. His breath nearly scalded him, and it was all he could do not to lose the rhythm of the compressions. The dark hair, the dark eyes, completely threw him for a moment. She could have been—

  No, she looked nothing like Angela Lowe.

  “What are you doing here?” Jordan’s voice rose over the EKG’s signal. It was Teri Benson in his doorway, and her hesitation confused him. She looked like a spectator at an accident scene. Her expression was a strange mix of excitement and repulsion, and it gave him the creeps, but whatever else was going on, she was still a doctor. Why wasn’t she down here helping?

  “The service called me,” she explained. “They said there was an emergency. What happened?”

  Jordan didn’t mince words. “Either the defib unit malfunctioned, or I did. He got too much juice and his heart gave out.”

  “Malfunction? What do you mean?”

  “Never mind that now. The paramedics are on their way. Take over for me until they get here, will you? There’s something I have to do.”

  She was acting so oddly, he expected her to protest, but she replaced him on the compressions without missing a beat, and she asked all the right questions about the patient’s condition. He had to believe she was going to be okay, but maybe the pressure was getting to her.

  “Teri? Can you handle this?”

  “Yes, go!”

  He reached for his jacket and realized the gun was still there, hidden inside. As he slipped the jacket on, a thought flashed into his consciousness, one terrible unbidden thought. He should have killed her when he had the chance.

  There wasn’t time to analyze where it had come from. His nerves were firing like machine guns, and his brain was dangerously overtaxed. There was only time to heave the thought violently out of his mind and go in search of her.

  IT was a sobering moment of déjà vu for Jordan. His house was ablaze with light when he drove up, exactly like the night he found the dead bird on the floor. He’d driven back to the hotel after the tragedy in his office, but Angela was gone, and when he searched his mind, trying to imagine where she might be, he had a sudden flash of insight.

  It would end where it had started: his house.

  How could he have forgotten that on the same day she collapsed, sobbing over a bird, she had also pulled a flare from her coat and blinded him? Maybe he was a fool. And maybe it had to end here so that this time he could see her for exactly who she was. He wanted her to be innocent, his innocent, and he wanted to save her, possibly so that he could save himself. Maybe that was all that had mattered to him, who he wanted her to be.

  The truth was, he had no idea who she was. And he was beginning to wonder who he was. One thing he did know. He had won the battle with his hero complex. It was dead on the floor of his office, along with the patient he’d lost and any illusions he may have had that he was capable of saving anyone. It felt like there was nothing left to save at this point, nothing worth saving. Everything he believed was in question. His mind and heart were fatigued to the point that any more pressure would snap them. And it hadn’t taken an act of God or nature to bring it about. It had taken only one woman.

  She was standing in the living room, her back to the door when he came in. Her eyes narrowed with shock as she turned around, and her pale face flinched tight. You could almost see tendons pulling like drawstrings. He had thought once that it hurt to look at her she was so beautiful. It hurt now, although no one would have called her beautiful.

  She looked as if she were about to rip apart. This was the woman he’d surprised on the porch of his house. Her features were as stark and as bloodless as that creature’s. She’d scrubbed herself raw and exchanged the sundress for a pair of Levi’s and a man’s T-shirt. The backpack she’d dragged through the jungle was slung over one arm. He didn’t know why she’d gone to such lengths, but he could guess. She didn’t want to be Angela Lowe.

  She hated who she was. Or what she’d done. She hated something.

  Jordan’s heart was twisting at the sight of her, but he knew what emotion could do to him. Any kind of sympathy right now would be suicidal. He had to wall it off. The only thing that mattered was the truth, whatever it took to get there, but he lived in holy fear that it would be brutal.

  “Stay where you are,” he said as she started toward him.

  She hesitated, confused. Even to talk seemed difficult for her.

  “Jordan? There’s s-something I have to tell you.”

  “Stay there!”

  She halted, but the shock of it seemed to uncork her. Suddenly she was babbling, and he wouldn’t have been able to make sense of it, except that he’d heard it before. She was going on about the experiment, telling him it was flawed and that he shouldn’t drink something.

  “Angela, we’ve been through this already—”

  “No, you don’t understand. Something’s gone wrong.”

  “I’m not part of any experiment. I never have been.”

  “Jordan, listen to me! Your brain is being tapped right this moment. I just saw the scans, and they’re abnormal.”

  “Abnormal scans? Of my brain?” What was she talking about? This was as crazy as he’d ever heard her, even when she was delirious in the jungle.

  “It is! I swear, Jordan, right now as I’m standing here.” Her hand flew up and she whipped at hair that wasn’t there.

  “I just came from SmartTech,” she rushed to explain. “They have supercomputers and multiple imaging technology that scans brain activity. It’s all done remotely. I told you about it, remember, the brain-tapping experiment? Subjects can be studied without their even knowing, but that’s not the point. There’s something wrong.”

  He would play along for now, he told himself, humor her. “And what is wrong?”

  “Your brain scan has all the signs of a firestorm: high cingulate excitation, abnormal temporal lobe activity, and a depressed prefrontal cortex. That triad of symptoms are precursors to violence, Jordan. Deadly violence.”

  He wanted to tell her that one of them was nuts, and it wasn’t him. He almost wished it was shock this time. He wasn’t a psychiatrist, but he’d already diagnosed her as delusional and dangerously agitated. It would do him no good to remind her that he hadn’t been drinking any kind of cocktail, that he’d been in the jungle with her for three days. He had the feeling she would ramble on about experiments until dawn if he let her.

  “It’s not clear what the problem is—toxicity from the chemicals, overstimulation of the sites.” She peered at him from haunted eyes. “Jordan? What’s wrong?”

  Jordan had been gripped with an electrifying thought. It had just occurred to him that she might not be crazy at all. This could be another way to distract him, and he’d had plenty of experience with how she worked and how lethally distracting she could be.

  “You believe me, don’t you? Don’t you?” She implored him with her voice and her clutched hands. “Come with me to SmartTech. I’ll show you what’s happening. The experiment has to be stopped!”

  She had to be stopped. She had started toward him, but Jordan didn’t want her withi
n arm’s length. His memories of bondage in the jungle, of knives and snarling beasts, were too vivid.

  “Angela, a patient died in my office tonight. He was a doctor.”

  She hesitated, stunned, and he had a vision of her stumbling into the bird perch again. Where was Birdy? Maybe Penny had taken her home. Jordan’s temples had begun to throb, and his mind was fuzzing at the edges, but he wanted to know where the damn bird was. He couldn’t lose everything all at once. He was losing his mind. Wasn’t that enough?

  Angela couldn’t seem to find words, so Jordan kept talking. He had to do this. He had to rip her apart so he could see who she was. What eight-year-old kid didn’t know that? If you didn’t take things apart, there was no way to know how they were put together. How many hearts had he taken apart and put back together? How many lives had he saved? How many had he lost?

  One. Tonight.

  “I said a patient died in my office, and when I called nine one one, there was a message from you on my machine.”

  She was wary now, shaking her head. “I didn’t leave you a message.”

  His voice went cold. There was nothing he could do to re-create her sickly soft tone as he repeated what she’d said. “ ‘It’s not so hard to kill, is it? Pretty soon you’ll be as good as me.’”

  “I didn’t say that! I didn’t call! Someone must have patched that together. They have my voice on tape. Jordan, I’m being framed. They want me dead! You know that.”

  “You and I both know that makes no sense. Think about it, Angela. Think. Why would the CIA bother to frame you for serial murders if their goal was to kill you? Not very efficient, even for them.”

  “It’s not the CIA! It’s SmartTech. Oh, my God,” she whispered. “You don’t believe it, do you?”