by M. P. Cooley
He handed us paper scrubs, shoe guards, and a cap. “Go on. Put these on.”
A nurse in her mid-fifties rushed out of one of the rooms. She too wore the white scrubs of the rest of the nurses on the floor, and her crocs squeaked with every step.
“Here about our mystery patient?” she asked.
I reached under my scrubs to pull out my badge.
“Like I couldn’t tell you were cops from down the hall,” she said. “How can we help you?”
“The burn victim’s in a lot of pain. We know that,” I said. “But we need to ask her a few questions.”
“We’ve barely gotten her stabilized. Her blood pressure’s still all over the place—”
“One question,” Dave said. “Her name.”
“She’s unconscious,” Gayle said. “Has been since she got here.”
“Compromising her health is the last thing we want,” I said. “But could you maybe roll back some of the meds? We need to wake her up for one minute, get her name, maybe who to contact.”
A light went on over one of the patient’s doors, followed by a low ping.
“Dan, can you answer that call?” Gayle said.
The young man agreed, pulling on a cap and tying on a face mask as he hurried to the patient.
“Look,” Gayle says, “this isn’t some sort of medically induced coma. Yes, she’s on pain meds, but the deal is, her body decided to shut down all nonessential functions. Burn shock. All of her skin, including the surface of her lungs, is struggling to heal right now, and we’re pumping her with fluids without swamping her lungs and drowning her. She might wake up—”
“A picture,” I say. “Can we take a picture of her in case we get any missing persons reports?”
Gayle considered. “That’d be OK, I guess.”
The victim lay on the single bed, her lips pale under the ventilator, her hair gone. The visible skin glistened, slathered in lotion meant to replace some of the moisture she was losing. She lay naked under a tent, a gauzy fabric draped a foot off her body. That said, she looked surprisingly good, the injuries no worse than a bad sunburn, blisters streaking across her face.
“You get them out of crisis and clean off soot and ash, they start looking a little healthier. Systemically, though . . . skin’s one of our biggest organs, and burns like this, it’s like she got stabbed in the kidneys,” Gayle said.
Dave pulled out a camera. “OK?” Gayle agreed.
“So what’s her prognosis?” I asked.
Gayle explained how the woman had burns of different severity over parts of her body. A few areas remained untouched, or the burns were first degree—“Her feet, oddly enough”—but most of her body had second-degree burns, where the top layer of skin burned away.
“Gasoline burns fast,” she said. “Her clothes, slower, which is where we see the third-degree burns.”
I tried to figure out where the woman was severely burned. “How much of this is third degree?”
“Twenty percent. Around her shoulders, and across her lower torso. Thank God for natural fibers, which burn faster than synthetic or, God forbid, plastic.” A grim look passed over her face. “Plastic can be a mess.”
“So twenty percent,” Dave said, putting his camera away. “That’s not too bad, right?”
“Oh, it’s bad. Especially for a person her age.”
“Her age?” I asked. “Do you know how old she is?”
“Well, based on the osteoporosis we detected when we did X-rays, I’d put her in her mid-fifties, possibly her mid-sixties. While it’s not hard and fast, a rule of thumb is that if you add a person’s age to the amount of their body burned to the third degree, you get the percent chance someone might die: If she’s in her fifties, it might be a seventy-five percent chance of death, and if she’s in her sixties, closer to eight-five.” Dave’s face fell. Gayle plowed on. “And any comorbidities—diabetes, heart disease, asthma—might mean worse odds.”
The woman’s breathing got heavy. I didn’t see any blips on the monitors, but Gayle picked up her catheter bag and examined the urine critically.
“We’re over-hydrating her,” she said. “We might be drowning her right now. You need to go. I’ll be sure to call you if she wakes up, even for a second, I promise I’ll get a name.” Gayle adjusted the woman’s IV, lowering her fluid. “We want to find out who our friend is as much as you do.”
About the Author
M.P. COOLEY’s crime novel Ice Shear was named one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of Summer 2014 and was called “an excellent debut” by Publishers Weekly in their starred review. A native of upstate New York, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her second novel Flame Out will publish in May 2015.
@MP_Cooley
www.mpcooley.com
www.witnessimpulse.com
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Also by M.P. Cooley
Ice Shear
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from Flame Out copyright © 2015 by Martha Cooley
FAINT TRACE. Copyright © 2015 by Martha Cooley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition APRIL 2015 ISBN: 9780062414694
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