Gawain (Knights of Excalibur Book 1)

by Hanley, Donald

  The door popped open without warning, thumping the toe of her shoe and nearly jamming the fingers of her outstretched hand. A head poked through the opening, looking around to see what the problem was. The man looked at Trisha with a frown, as if wondering why she was there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize anyone else was in here.”

  “That’s why we knock first,” she told him, trying to hide her irritation. “Can I help you?”

  The man slipped into the room through the narrow gap and carefully closed the door behind him. Judging from his clothing and the lack of a Massachusetts General ID badge, he wasn’t a hospital employee. He wore a long camelhair overcoat over a neatly pressed pinstripe suit, all dotted with flecks of water from recently-melted snowflakes. He wasn’t particularly tall but he looked like he worked out. “The girl at the desk – Carol, I believe? – said you had an unidentified patient in here.” His eyes, the same gray as the wool of his suit, slid past her to John Doe.

  “Do you know him?” Trisha moved aside as the man stood at the foot of the bed, perusing the patient’s face with pursed lips. “Is he a relative of yours?” It was hard to be certain with all the bandages, but John Doe didn’t look a thing like this intruder.

  “No, I’m afraid not.” The man reached into his breast pocket and extracted an embossed gold shield with blue lettering, a Boston PD detective’s badge. “I’m investigating the circumstances of his ... situation. This is the man found on Thoreau Path, correct?”

  “I don’t know. I just started my shift.” Trisha flipped through the pages on her clipboard, but other than a terse line about the victim being found lying in the snow, there were no details about the crime scene. “Wouldn’t all that have been in the police report, Detective –?”

  “I just started my shift as well,” he said wryly. He scanned her from head to toe and his eyes crinkled in a smile, as if he liked what he saw. “My name is Lionel, Miss Macmillan.”

  Trisha blinked at him. “Have we met?” she asked suspiciously. He didn’t look familiar and he was too good-looking for her to have forgotten him easily. Lionel’s smile broadened in amusement and he tapped the center of his chest. It took her a moment to realize what that meant and she looked down at the plastic card hanging from her lanyard, proudly displaying her name and photo. She cleared her throat to mask her embarrassment. “Marcia Walker was the nurse on duty when he was brought in. You’ll have to talk to her about the patient but she just left for the day.”

  “I’ll call her later.” He slipped his hand into the outer pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a small leather-bound notepad, the sort sold in upscale book stores and stationary shops. He opened it to a page marked with a green ribbon and then patted his pockets with a frown. Trisha silently handed him one of her collection of pens. The doctors were notorious for never having pens on them and never returning the ones they borrowed. “Thanks,” he said, accepting it with a nod and making a short notation. “He’s still unconscious?”

  “Yes,” she affirmed, shooting John Doe a worried glance. “He’s been like that since they brought him in.”

  “Will he recover?”

  “You’d best talk to Dr. Adams about that.”

  “He’s the doctor who treated him?” Lionel made another note without waiting for her response.

  “Yes. He’ll be off shift soon,” she warned.

  “I’ll follow up on that later. I’m more interested in catching the person who did this to him.” He closed his notebook and tapped his long fingers on the cover as he thought. There was a symbol embossed on the front, some sort of shield with diagonal stripes. It looked old. “Are his effects here?”

  “Wouldn’t the police have them?” Trisha asked doubtfully. The Boston PD seemed to be a bit disorganized this morning.

  “They wouldn’t have taken his clothes. Do you know where they would have been put? They may give us a clue about the identity of his assailant.”

  “Well, I’m not sure.” She peered under the bed, where the orderlies often stowed a patient’s belongings during transport, but there was nothing there. She checked the cabinet in the corner and found a plastic bin containing a pair of damp boots and several articles of clothing. “This must be it.”

  She placed the bin on the counter and snagged four gloves from the dispenser on the wall, handing two of them to Lionel. He looked at them dubiously and then silently tugged them on. The blue nitrile looked completely out of place with the rest of his outfit.

  “These look like hiking boots.” She handed them to Lionel, who turned them over to examine the soles.

  “Almost new,” he observed, “and expensive.” He set them aside and held up the sweater Trisha gave him, a cable-knit pullover. There were several dark stains on the fabric and the right sleeve was shredded.

  “Marcia said he’d been bitten by a dog.” she explained. If John Doe’s arm looked anything like his sweater, he was lucky it was still attached to the rest of him.

  “Hmm.” Lionel folded the sweater neatly and laid it on top of the boots.

  “Here’s his shirt.” It was a heavy denim work shirt, almost as badly torn as the sweater. Lionel checked the front pockets, which were both empty, and read the tag before setting it aside. The victim’s jeans were just as uninteresting, as were his t-shirt, boxers, and socks. The only other thing in the bin was a black leather belt. Lionel looked it over and set it back in the bin, stacking the other items on top of it with a pensive frown. “So what does all that tell you?”

  Lionel removed his gloves with a snap and looked around for a place to discard them. Trisha took them and tossed them and hers into the proper receptacle for later disposal. “Well, our friend there wasn’t homeless.” At her frown, he explained, “These clothes are too new and expensive to come from a thrift shop or homeless shelter, especially these boots. He’s also clean-shaven. What do his fingernails look like?”

  “His fingernails?” At Lionel’s gesture, she lifted the blanket off one of his hands. Other than the scrapes, his fingers were clean and neatly manicured. “So the fact that his wallet isn’t here with the rest of his stuff means he was robbed for his money.”

  “Possibly, or maybe they wanted something else from him and just took his wallet as a bonus.”

  “Like what?”

  “His car keys are missing.”

  Trisha stared at the bin in surprise. She hadn’t noticed that at all. “Maybe he doesn’t have a car,” she argued.

  “How did he get to Thoreau Path, then?”

  “There’s a bunch of apartment buildings all around it. Maybe he lives there.”

  “Then he should have an apartment key, shouldn’t he?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Lionel told her, a hint of amusement in his voice. “It’s hard to notice things that aren’t there.”

  “You mean like his hat and gloves?” Now it was his turn to look surprised. “He couldn’t have been planning to be outside for very long if his head and hands were bare. It was pretty cold last night.”

  “Very good, Miss Macmillan,” he told her with a smile. “We’ll make a detective out of you yet. Of course, he may have just lost them during the struggle. I’ll check with the officers who found them to see if they were picked up afterwards.” Lionel gazed thoughtfully at the patient’s face, as if it could provide some clue as to what happened to him.

  “You don’t think this was a simple mugging, don’t you?” Lionel shook his head somberly. “Why not?”

  “You have the same information I do, Miss Macmillan. Why isn’t this just another case of random violence?”

  Trisha shook her head doubtfully, running through the meager evidence, and then she gasped in realization. “No mugger in his right mind would have been out in that snowstorm last night.”

  Lionel nodded, looking pleased at her conclusion. “Exactly. So either we have a crazed mugger or something else is going on here.” He looked back at John Doe wi
th a sigh. “I wish I knew what.” He gnawed at his lower lip for a moment and then shook his head. “I think that’s all I can do here, at least until he wakes up. Hopefully he’ll be able to tell us what happened.”

  “Well, he did say one thing,” Trisha said slowly, not really sure it was worth sharing, but Lionel looked at her sharply.

  “What?” Trisha hesitated and his gray eyes bored into hers. “It’s very important you tell me everything you know, Miss Macmillan.”

  “I know but it was just one word and I could barely understand him.”

  “I’ll grasp at any straw. What did he say?”

  “I think he said west.”

  “West,” Lionel repeated softly. “Are you sure? It was just that one word, not part of something longer?”

  “That’s all I heard. Do you know what it means?”

  “No,” but he said it thoughtfully, as if it did trigger some association in his mind. Trisha almost insisted that he tell her but she reminded herself it was really none of her business. It was Lionel’s job to figure out what happened and catch the man who put John Doe in the hospital. Her job was to keep him alive.

  “I’ll walk you out,” she said, setting the bin back in the cupboard and closing the door.

  “Are you so anxious to get rid of me?” Lionel asked with a wry smile. He opened the door to the hallway and gestured her out ahead of him.

  “No, but I’m sure everyone’s wondering where I disappeared to and you’re not allowed to be alone with the patients unless you’re family. Regulations,” she said apologetically.

  “I understand.” He walked beside her down the hall towards the nurse’s station, lost in thought, but his smile reappeared when they reached the desk. “Thanks for your help, Miss Macmillan. I’ll be in touch if I need anything else.”

  “I hope you catch whoever’s responsible.” Trisha couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice, but no one deserved to end up in the hospital like John Doe did.

  “I will,” Lionel promised. Trisha automatically shook his outstretched hand and watched him stride through the double doors into the waiting room. Cindy leaned over the counter and watched him as well, waiting until the doors closed until she pounced.

  “So who was he?” she demanded. “Was he really a cop like he said? You two were gone an awfully long time.”

  Trisha rolled her eyes. “Darn, you caught us. He’s actually my secret lover and we had wild, passionate sex in Mr. Doe’s room.”

  “You did?” Cindy gasped, her eyes widening.

  “No, don’t be silly. He’s trying to figure out what happened.”

  “Oh. Oh!” She brightened up considerably. “So he’ll be coming back, right?”

  “If you two are done drooling over the visitors,” said Naomi tartly, coming up behind them, “we’ve got a woman with a possible broken ankle in Exam 3,” she thrust a clipboard into Cindy’s hands, “and a man complaining of dizziness in Exam 1.” Trisha stacked her new clipboard on top of the others. “Let’s get busy, people, it’s going to be a long day.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Trisha would have saluted but her hands were full. She hurried off to Exam 1, setting the mystery of John Doe aside for the moment.

  3

  42.365 degrees north, 71.066 degrees west. The map function on his phone could place him within twenty feet of any coordinates, but he didn’t need that level of accuracy to find the spot where Lucas’s tracker stopped reporting. The circle of crime scene tape in front of him did a pretty good job of that all on its own.

  He stuffed his phone into his pocket and pulled up the collar of his jacket against the wind whipping along the sidewalk. The flurries that turned his drive up I-95 into a slippery sleigh ride had finally dwindled away but the stiff nor’wester behind them came straight from the North Pole. He huffed in irritation and the white fog of his breath was shredded immediately.

  Between the wind and the snow and the dozens of people who had trampled all over the area, there was nothing left to see other than a few patches of gritty ice stained dark red. The fact that the blowing snow hadn’t quite filled in the tracks meant that whatever happened here happened last night, or at least had been discovered then.

  He glanced up at the apartment buildings casting gray shadows over the area. This park or whatever it was had a lot of trees, but they were all bare of leaves and bowed with ice and snow. The area was open and well-maintained, which meant that it probably had a lot of pedestrians, even in the winter. A body lying on the sidewalk would have been discovered quickly. But alive or dead? That was the question.

  He set his back to the wind and walked slowly along the path, scanning the ground. Anything heavy would have been recovered by the police at the crime scene and anything light would have been blown away but maybe he’d get lucky.

  He was about to give up when something fluttering under the edge of a squat bush caught his eye. He knelt and carefully extracted it from the crusted snow holding it in place, peering at the dense lettering on the label. It was the wrapper from a commercial-grade package of gauze. That was the first bit of good news since Nim woke him up. The paramedics wouldn’t bother treating a dead man.

  He let the wind snatch the wrapper from his hand and dug out his phone again. He tried to type “nearest hospital” on the tiny keyboard, but the combination of cold, stiff fingers and autocorrect conspired against him and he finally gave up. He pressed the home button until the familiar two-tone prompt sounded. “Where’s the nearest hospital?” he growled.

  “The nearest hospital to your location is the Shriners Hospital for Children at 51 Blossom Street in Boston,” the phone informed him calmly. “Would you like directions?”

  “No,” he snapped. The ambulance wouldn’t have taken Lucas there no matter what his condition was. “Where’s the second closest hospital?” There was no response and he grumbled under his breath as he thumbed the home button again and repeated his question.

  “The second nearest hospital to your location is Massachusetts General Hospital at 55 Fruit Street in Boston. Would you like directions?”

  “No,” he said automatically, and then remembered that he did. “Yes!” he said, but it was too late. “God damn it.” He hated talking to things that weren’t real. He shoved his hands in his pocket and stalked away. Directions could wait until he was back in his car with the heater running.

  He pulled up a map as soon as his hands were warm enough and scowled at the tiny screen. Then he leaned over and looked through the passenger window at the building right across the street from the parking lot. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered and shut the car off again.

  Massachusetts General, he discovered, was actually a campus of interconnected buildings filling an entire city block. The emergency room entrance was near the northeast corner, framed by a row of ambulances from at least three different companies. He ignored them and pushed his way into the reception area, thankful to be out of the wind again.

  The room was lined with uncomfortable chairs, half of them occupied despite the early hour. The wail of a young child competed with the lung-wracking cough of an older man in the corner, but he strode past them all to the receptionist. She already looked more than ready for her shift to be over.

  “Yes, sir?” she asked with patient politeness, no doubt expecting him to launch into a whiny litany of his symptoms and the inevitable wait he had ahead of him. She looked mildly surprised when he deviated from the script.

  “Was a man brought in this morning?” he asked brusquely.

  “We get a lot of people every day, sir,” she pointed out, indicating the waiting area behind him with a tip of her head. “Could you be more specific? Do you have a name?”

  “Lucas Butler.”

  The receptionist tapped on her keyboard and inspected the results on the screen. “I’m sorry, there’s no one registered by that name.”

  “You’re sure?” She just looked at him and he ran his hand through his snow-damp hair as he considered his option
s. “Is there another hospital he might have been taken to?”

  “There’s Shriners Childrens just up the street.”

  “He’s my age.” The receptionist eyed him, but no one had mistaken him for a child in a long time.

  “Well, there’s Tufts Medical Center over on Washington.”

  “Is that far?”

  “It’s a couple of miles away.”

  “Okay, I’ll check there. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome, sir. Good luck finding your friend.”

  “Thanks.” He turned away with a dissatisfied scowl. Something about the whole exchange seemed wrong but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He recalled the dark splotches on the snow in the park and he stopped before he even took three steps. That was a lot of blood on the ground. The paramedics wouldn’t take someone with life-threatening injuries halfway across town when there was a perfectly good emergency room just down the street. He spun around and hurried back to the counter, just beating out another man with a limp. “Was anyone brought in unconscious, someone without a name listed?”

  The receptionist looked annoyed that he was still pestering her when she had a roomful of real patients to deal with, but she checked her terminal again. Her eyebrows popped up in surprise. “Yes, we have a John Doe who came in early this morning.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “I’ll have to check with the nurse’s station. Please have a seat over there, Mr. –?”

  “Hawk.”

  She looked dubious, as if she thought he just made up the name, but she dutifully noted it down on a scrap of paper. “We’ll call you when we’re ready to bring you back, okay? Just be patient, we’re very busy this morning.”

  He nodded and went to lean against a blank section of wall, scowling out through the windows at the parked ambulances. He had far too much energy to sit and he had no interest in picking up whatever diseases were percolating in the room.

  The clock on the wall ticked away with frustrating slowness as half the patients filtered through the double doors into the examination rooms beyond, only to be replaced by just as many newcomers from outside. He was toying with the idea of just following one of them through and searching for Lucas on his own when a brunette in blue scrubs came out and looked around anxiously.