His partner, named Miller, was back with a gray blanket which they wrapped around her. “EMS is on its way,” Miller said low.
“Look at this,” Holt said, reaching for his flashlight. With his fingers hooding the beam, he ran it over the girl’s face and neck and shoulders.
Miller stared in astonishment. “God,” he murmured.
Holt said, “She looked like she’d been beaten, but where are the bruises? Except for this gash on her brow she looked just swollen…until this. And that there. See? Spreading?”
Both men watched, grim, as whitish hives appeared, grew, and merged across the girl’s skin like pancake batter too crowded in the pan. Her lips and tongue were puffing up too, and her breathing, in the minutes since their arrival, had changed to wheezing. Holt held her as her shoulders heaved from air hunger and she wailed in fear.
Miller shook his head. “The gash came from something.”
“She may have fallen.”
The girl’s wheezing became rapid gasps. In terror she threw her head back and thrashed as both men held her, wishing there were something they could do. An approaching siren sounded, and looking up, they saw the ambulance swerve into the street.
“Fast.” Miller stood. “Let’s hope she stays lucky.”
Holt grimly held the writhing girl. He was older, more experienced; had never seen anything like this.
The ambulance stopped behind their car, its lights blending with theirs to send a crazed unpleasant glow across the faces of gawking bystanders.
Miller went to them, spreading his arms. “Come on, move along, please?”
Holt stepped aside as two EMTs checked the girl’s vital signs and wrapped her in a different, darker blanket. The willowy body in the silver, glinting dress disappeared into blackness, and for an instant, sensing that his fatigue was tricking him, he had the disorienting feeling that they were burying her.
He blinked away the image, bent, and spoke to one of the EMTs.
“Fever,” he said. “Trouble breathing.”
She had just taken off her stethoscope. “I’ll say. Dave, bring the oxygen!” Her chubby face took in the long, lanky grace of the form under the blanket. “She a model or something? An actress?”
Someone shouted from the knot of bystanders, and they turned. A man’s arm held something aloft; in the spinning lights of the emergency vehicles it glinted red and then blue. “Purse!” the man said; and a woman’s voice called, “…must have dropped it. We found it back there.”
The alert-faced couple handed it to Miller, who brought it to Holt. Together they inspected the small evening bag made of the same silvery fabric as the girl’s dress. In the wallet was the identification they needed. The girl’s name was Jody Merrill, and there were four in case of emergency numbers: Jill Raney and David Levine (“my doctors and dear friends,”) said a girlish scrawl, and Reid and Deborah Wylie (“my entertainment lawyers”).
Holt stared at the names. “Raney and Levine,” he said. “Heard of them?”
“Who hasn’t? Cop friends, the ones with that baby. They help in sex crimes.”
“That’s them. They’re at Madison Memorial.” Holt turned and walked to the back of the ambulance where the EMTs were hoisting their laden stretcher. One of them was shining his penlight on the girl’s face. Her color had turned to faint blue. Despite the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, her chest was heaving frantically, struggling to inhale.
The man with the penlight gave Holt a not good look.
Holt gave back the same look and said, “Get her to Madison Memorial. Drive fast. Break laws.”
Then went to rejoin Miller. When the ambulance surged away they peeled after it, never guessing their role in the storm to come.
2
Jesse The Climber, Learner, Babble-Your-Ear-Off was finally asleep. It was almost ten and their eighteen-month-old Duracell Kid was finally down in his crib, in happy baby dreamland under his favorite blue blanket, clutching his favorite toy, Fawzie.
His parents let out the huge, relieved breaths of any baby’s parents.
“They let him nap,” David griped in a whisper, leaning over exhausted Jill at the crib. “How did that happen? I’ve told them and told them, yes! He really is ready to give up naps.”
“They got busy. Someone forgot.”
“Well, someone’s gonna get another earful. Do not let him nap, I beg you.”
“Mmm…”
Jill drooped, closing her eyes, resting her brow on her folded arms on the crib’s rail. Oh, that felt good. She thought she could fall asleep like that. If David weren’t here the night nurses would find her draped like a noodle over the crib. “More kids than usual,” she murmured. “Guess they got distracted.”
They weren’t on call tonight. Had planned for Jesse to spend the night in Staff Childcare while they caught up on last night’s lost sleep in their apartment a block away. Serious sleep, they’d promised each other, yippee. Until the alarm went off at 6:15 to get them back on the OB floor at seven.
“Feel like a gerbil in a wheel?” Jill mumbled again, straightening with her eyes still closed, melting back into David. He dropped his face to the warm crook of her neck and hugged her. His arms and white-jacketed chest warmed her in her thin scrub top.
“Yup, two gerbils, that’s us,” he said, one hand reaching to pull Jill’s long dark hair out of its ponytail. Her hair spilled over her shoulders. “Actually, gerbils have it easy. All they do is play on their little wheels, and get fed and have their water changed and fresh litter put down, and no one expects anything from them ‘cause they’re just gerbils.”
“So you want to be a gerbil?”
“I’m just saying. Even puppies. They get total love and huge praise if they even poop in the right place. Puppies and gerbils.”
“And hamsters.”
“Right. Hamsters and puppies get to play and sleep when they want to. Imagine life so easy where someone just fills your bowl and spreads newspapers, as opposed to people who push themselves blotto with fatigue, and that’s not even counting having a baby on top of it-”
“Ha!” came a soft voice. “That’s what we keep saying.”
They turned in the dimly lit room to Ted Lowry, an orthopedic resident leaning over his sleeping daughter two cribs away. They smiled tiredly at him.
David said, “Wouldn’t be without ‘em, though, would you?”
“God, no.” Lowry was reaching down, arranging soft toys by his daughter’s head. Really playing with them, it looked like. Therapeutic timeout for the chronically stressed and sleepless. “Annie here,” he said feelingly, gesturing with a chewed-ear bunny. “Five years together and we’ve never felt so anchored before her.”
Smiles of agreement and Jill turned back, reached down to smooth Jesse’s hair. It was light brown and silky. “A little sweaty,” she whispered, adjusting his blanket.
David bent, felt Jesse’s brow and stroked his back, his baby-warm, glowing moons-and-stars jammies that Jesse loved so much they’d had to buy extras. The first were a gift from their cop friend Alex Brand, who thought glowing moons and stars were perfect for this “miracle baby,” darling of the media who’d spent his entire gestation in a man-made womb, a silicon cylinder created by a crazed researcher genius now deceased. Thrown off a roof, actually. DESIGNER BABY, EMBRYO FARM, and BRAVE NEW WORLD still trilled an occasional headline, but with happy, updated photos of Jesse now growing like any kid: grinning, playing with other toddlers, continuously curious and…okay, really smart. Advanced for his age. The press couldn’t get enough of him. Laughed and snapped him mugging, grabbing for their cameras as Jill and David carried him from their apartment.
Quite a contrast to the first, creepy-blurry photos of him, floating in his cylinder at six months’ gestation, snapped by gaping staff rushing in to the nearly dark attic lab where Jill had found him. That day had involved terror. Jill and David had nearly been killed.
The irony was, that day and finding Jesse had launched
their relationship with the police. Changed their lives. Made them realize that cops needed more help than they got from hospitals in cases of assault, child molestation and sex crimes. They internalized deeply the pain of victims, and helped however they could - from plain evidence collection to skirting the law. No warrant? No problem. We’ll take a look.
Serious terror to the hospital had happened twice in the past eighteen months. Since the first crisis, David had worn his Glock 9mm. permanently strapped to his ankle. He was a crack shot.
“Dayee?”
Jesse must have felt David’s hand on his back, because he stirred and raised his head. Peered up sweetly through his squinched little brown eyes.
“Back to sleep, slugger,” David whispered. “Sleepy time.”
Jesse put his head back down, hugged Fawzie and popped his thumb in his mouth.
“He’s fine, just a little warm.” David watched Jill fuss with Jesse’s blanket. His finger stroked her soft arm. “Let’s get home and B-E-D-”
In that instant his phone chirped softly.
They traded looks: What? We’re not on call.
They stepped past more cribs for better light. “Oh boy,” David groaned, showing Jill the phone’s readout.
Their tired, warm blur vanished. Adrenalin pricked.
It was Kerri Blasco, Alex Brand’s partner and one of the detectives Jill and David helped in assault cases.
David listened, turning the phone up a little, angling it so Jill could hear.
“Jody?” he said, and stiffened, listening again. “What happened?”
Kerri sounded grim. “EMTs say it’s a galloping anaphylactic reaction. They got to her late. Gave her epin, uh-”
“Epinephrine?”
Jill felt her heart drop. In the dim light, her face went slack with horror.
In a rush Kerri said, “Yes, and they’ve got her intubated. It’s barely helping.”
“My God, this shouldn’t happen.” David hunched to his phone. “She knew how to avoid it.”
“Ambulance is on its way.”
“Okay, see you in Emergency.”
Jill grabbed David’s arm. “Jody anaphylactic? Not possible.” It came out too high-voiced. She saw Ted Lowry look at his daughter, who stirred.
But the toddlers slept. All three residents rushed out to the elevators. Lowry fretted that he’d stayed too long; he was on call.
“This is nuts.” David pounded the elevator button. “Jody was obsessively careful.”
“Jody Merrill?” Lowry asked. “The TV star?”
They told him yes. Jill, breathing suddenly fast, saw their reflections on the closed steel doors: her large, soulful eyes round with dread, David’s dark-haired, quarterback-like figure bent, hands on his hips with his head down.
“That cop show.” Lowry’s expression mirrored theirs. “She plays a funny rookie…”
His voice dimmed. Blurred sounds of him saying his wife loved the show, thought Jody was so I Love Lucy; David muttering how Jody’s goofy humor had turned a standard cop show into a hit. He banged the elevator button again and swore.
Seconds later they were plunging, no stops in the overhead line of lights. Jill’s clammy hands pulled her hair into a ponytail, pulled it out again, pulled it back into its elastic band again.
It was a nervous habit of hers.
3
It seemed safe to come out now.
A shadow separated from the darkness, and a cat with a streetlamp-shadow stuck to its paws padded around the wisteria trunk. It sat still for a moment, tabby-colored in the faint light, perking its ears and listening. In front, man-cars moved down the street; behind, on the brick path to the garden, even the smallest sounds were coming back.
Only the blood-smell remained. It seemed swollen, spreading in the chill air. The cat crouched and watched, waiting.
A tiny shadow skittered. The cat darted through the wrought-iron gate and down the bricks after it, losing the chase, stopping again by a reclining stone deer. Here it sat, licking its paws and looking around. The dark was darker here. On one side the stone deer lay in tangled ivy. On the other, across the brick walk and against the building, garbage bags rose in a bulging, plastic wall. Sometimes feasts of good things could be pawed forth. Or mice would come, chew through the bags and be there when the cat pounced. The line of bags was usually a busy place at night, but now the cat was too tense to approach. Even the mice and occasional rat stayed away, as if they too had seen and heard, and been frightened.
For minutes the cat sat, licking and licking, once blinking up at the single lit window. Then it crouched, hearing tiny threshing sounds from the garden. Quivering, squeezing close to the ground, it began to creep forward.
Then stopped again, still uncomfortable, and crossed to a dryer place where it sat washing more blood from its paws, its chest, and tail. That took a while. When the stickiness was gone the cat crept again, into the garden so full of promise. Here it sat beneath a bare-twigged lilac, and looked around, listening.
Cubicle fourteen in the ER was at the end of a nylon-curtained aisle. Tricia Donovan, Jill’s best friend since college, stood tearfully outside it with a uniformed cop and Detectives Alex Brand and Kerri Blasco. Kerri was in jeans and a blazer with her blond hair half out of its ponytail. Alex, good-looking but intense, scribbled in his notebook.
The group moved apart to let chaotic ER traffic pass. Kerri and Alex continued listening to the gesturing officer, while Tricia looked up and hurried to them.
“How…is she?” Jill whispered.
Tricia’s slightly plump features were stricken. Fluorescents above glinted off her smeared wire rims. She’d been crying.
“Jody…just died.” She hugged Jill, and her mournful eyes went to David. “She tried to hang on. We did everything.”
Jill stopped breathing. She turned from Tricia and saw that David’s dark blue eyes looked stunned, angry, like someone who’d just been told that the world was flat and he was supposed to believe it.
“Can’t be,” he said. “Her penicillin allergy?”
“What else?” Tricia almost wailed. She moved shakily aside for bloodied sheets in a passing laundry bin. “But she was so careful. Terrified of it. Wore the damn bracelet, for God’s sake.”
Kerri Blasco came up to them, her expression different from how she looked in other assault cases. She knew Jody had been a friend.
“Could she have done this on purpose?” Kerri asked. “Suicide?”
“No.” Jill was crying. “She had sleeping pills.”
“Why would she choose such a horrible way?” David groaned.
“Exactly,” Tricia wept, her expression mixing with fury like David’s. “And lately she’d come out of her funk. Heard we had cutbacks and gave another hundred thousand to the OB and pediatric clinics each. Said giving made her happy.” Tricia’s two hands flew up. “She was happy as a kid in the restaurant we all went to last week. No sign whatsoever she was despondent. Jody would have told you if she’d had a bad day. To us she could ventilate.”
Jill was using the bottom of her scrub top to wipe her cheeks. Her heartbroken dark eyes met Kerri’s. “She loved Jesse, said she wanted us to adopt her too. She was excited about…more life.”
Someone called Tricia and she turned away. Spoke briefly with a rumpled intern and came back, grim-faced, to say a brutal rape had just been brought in. Jill and David gaped helplessly at her, their expressions identical with emotional overload.
David raised a hand and Tricia grasped it. “I’m just telling you. I’ll handle it.”
“The patient conscious? Other cops here yet?”
“Yes and no.”
“Question her. Before the rape kit or while it’s getting done.”
“I know the drill. We all know the drill. You taught us well.”
“Make sure enough photos are taken.”
“Yes, yes. Ditto Jody’s evidence. The interns and Woody got her dress, shoes, hair, nail scrapings, everything we u
sually collect even though she wasn’t raped and there’s no certainty she was even assaulted. They just wanted to collect the evidence. They loved her.”
Tricia switched her mournful gaze to Kerri. Hugged her, wept more, then ran off.
And David moved past Kerri to cubicle fourteen. He stopped before the closed curtain; looked mournfully back to Jill.
“Brace yourself,” he told her. Then just stared stupidly at the curtain, gently touching it.
Alex Brand came up, tight-faced, pulling at his gray shirt collar under his sports jacket. “Double brace yourself,” he warned. “She fought the docs, was terrified and thrashing. Fell to the floor and is still where they tried to save her.”
He looked at David, who nodded.
Alex hesitated a second, then raised his hand and yanked the curtain aside.
“There’s no way to prepare for this,” he said feelingly. “Especially if she was your friend.”
About the Author
J.A. (Joyce Anne) Schneider is a former staffer at Newsweek Magazine, 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 4: Catch Me
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
CATCH ME (EMBRYO: A Raney & Levine Thriller, Book 4) Page 20