by Tami Hoag
“Come on. Get out of there.”
I offered my hand and she took it. Her fingers were like icicles. She started to cry as I pulled her from the closet. Wrapped in a long terry robe, she was trembling so hard she could hardly stand and, in fact, crumpled to the floor, curled into a ball, and started coughing—a hard, deep, rattling cough.
I knelt beside her.
“Lisbeth, have you been raped?” I asked bluntly.
She shook her head but cried harder; the sounds from her throat were raw and hoarse.
“Tell me the truth.”
She shook her head again and mouthed the word no.
I didn’t believe her. She’d been strangled. I could see the ligature mark on her neck where her hair had fallen out of the way. She’d been strangled so hard the blood vessels in her eyes had burst.
“I’m going to call an ambulance,” I said.
She grabbed hold of my arm. “No. Please,” she croaked, touching off another fit of coughing.
“Then I’m taking you myself. You need to go to the hospital.”
She squeezed my arm so hard, I imagined there would be bruises later.
I pulled the coverlet from the bed and put it around her. I didn’t know what had happened to her, but I recognized what she was feeling now—fear, shame, disbelief. She wanted to wake up and realize she’d been in the middle of a terrible nightmare.
I reached down and stroked a hand over her hair. Lisbeth tried to push herself up into a sitting position.
“… so… scared…” she whispered.
She fell against me, shaking and sobbing, and I put my arms around her and just held her for I don’t know how long, thinking how many times in my younger life I wished someone had done that for me. How nice it would have been just to have someone there, offering support and a safe place to fall.
“You’re safe,” I said quietly. “You’re safe now, Lisbeth. No one is going to hurt you again.”
As we sat there on Jim Brody’s property, I hoped to God what I said would prove true.
“Who did this to you?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“You have to tell me, Lisbeth. He can’t hurt you now.”
“… don’t know…” she said, and started coughing again.
“You didn’t see him?”
She didn’t answer me but pulled away, falling onto her hands and knees and coughing until she choked and gagged. I rested my hand on her back and waited for the fit to pass.
When she quieted, I said, “I’ll be right back, and then we’re going to the hospital.”
I grabbed her purse off the dresser, then went into the bathroom and dug her wet clothing out of the garbage in the bathroom and stuffed it into a laundry bag that hung on the back of the door. I took the stuff downstairs, went and got my car, and pulled it around the side of the barn, parking at the base of the stairs.
A couple of stable hands watched me. One dropped what he vas doing and walked toward the other end of the barn.
I took the keys, grabbed my gun out of the box in the door, and ran back upstairs.
Someone had attacked this girl, brutally, viciously. And the odds of this being a random act, all things considered, were long. She had been involved with Brody’s club, friends with Irina; she had been seen talking to me, and I was not to be trusted.
Brody had tried to give me the bum’s rush, had tried to tell me Lisbeth was gone even while we stood beside her car. I had to get her out of there. Certainly Brody hadn’t attacked Lisbeth himself, he wouldn’t be that careless, but there was no reason not to think he might have paid one of the barn hands to do it.
For all I knew, whoever had done this to her might have believed he had left her for dead. God knew she looked like she shouldn’t have survived.
When I got back to her room, Lisbeth was curled up, chin on her knees, leaning against the foot of the bed.
“Come on, Lisbeth.”
She didn’t respond, just stared at the floor.
“Come on!”
She shook her head slowly. “No,” she whispered. “Leave me alone.”
“That’s not happening, Lisbeth. You can get up and come with me, or I can drag you out of here by your hair. Get up.”
She said something so softly, I couldn’t make it out. She said it again, and again.
I should die? I should have died? I could die? I wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I told her. “But it’s not happening on my watch.”
I grabbed her by the upper arm and started toward the door, dragging her.
“Goddammit, Lisbeth. Get up!” I shouted. A strong sense of urgency began to fill me, like a balloon growing larger and larger.
She started to cry again and pulled against me.
“Stop it!” I snapped.
I could hear voices outside. Two men speaking Spanish. I glanced out the window and caught a glimpse of two men down by my car.
As threatened, I wrapped a hand in Lisbeth’s thick wet hair, my fingernails biting into her scalp, and yanked her toward the door.
She cried out but stumbled along beside me. Tears streamed down her swollen face as I marched her down the stairs.
The men looked up at me.
“Hey! What you doin‘ with her?” one shouted at me. He was stocky, neatly dressed in pressed jeans and a Western shirt. He wore a cowboy hat and a Fu Manchu. The barn manager, I assumed.
“I’m taking her to a hospital,” I said.
“She don‘ wanna go with you.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “I’m not going to let her die. Are you?”
“I think you better let her go,” he said, bringing up some attitude, trying to block the passenger door of my car.
“I think you better get the hell out of my way.”
“I’m callin‘ Mr. Brody,” he said, pulling out his cell phone.
“Yeah? You call Mr. Brody. You do that. How about I call the sheriff’s office? And they can call the INS. How about that?”
The other guy got nervous at that.
“How about I tell the detectives you did this to her?” I said.
“I didn’t‘ do nothin’ to her!” he shouted.
“Yeah,? Who do you think the cops will believe? You or me?”
The nervous one had taken a couple of steps to my left, to Lisbeth’s left. He took a couple more, angling over but edging in toward the girl. The boss took a step in the other direction.
I reached behind my back, curved my hand around the butt of my gun.
“Back off!” I shouted at the one closest to Lisbeth, drawing my weapon and pointing it at his face. His eyes went wide.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the boss make his move toward me. Without letting go of Lisbeth, I swung my arm around and backhanded him across the face with the gun. He dropped to his knees, putting his hand to his cheekbone, where the gun’s sight had cut him.
The nervous one ran as I swung back toward him. Off to get reinforcements.
I yanked the car door open and shoved Lisbeth into the passenger seat, then ran around to the driver’s side, got in, dropped the gun, started the engine.
Dust flying, gravel spewing, the BMW fishtailed around the end of the barn. A horse being hand-walked toward me reared and bolted sideways, kicking out at the groom. The horse got away. The groom shouted obscenities at me as I roared past.
Rubber squealed and burned as I swung out of the driveway onto the road and put the pedal down. I was past the white Escalade coming from the other direction so fast, Jim Brody’s face didn’t register until a half mile later.
Chapter 41
I hate hospitals. I especially hate emergency rooms.
No one working there ever believes what is wrong with you is an emergency. They never believe your story of how you came to be there. They never believe you might actually be dying, unless you have an obvious gunshot wound, arterial bleeding, or exposed brain matter.
I’d had two o
ut of three when I was rushed in by ambulance the day meth dealer Billy Golam’s 4X4 dragged me down the pavement. It was the only time in my life I had gone to an ER and hadn’t been stuck in a room and abandoned for hours on end, only to later be treated like an annoying hypochondriac.
Lisbeth had none of the Big Three. They stuck her in what seemed to be a utility closet with a bed wedged into it along with a lot of surplus equipment. She sat in a little ball, still wrapped in her bathrobe. I paced, chewing at a ragged thumbnail.
“Why don’t you lie down, Lisbeth?” I suggested. “Try to rest a little. When the detective gets here, he’ll want to ask you a lot of questions. You’ll need to answer them.”
I had managed to get her to tell me at least part of the story as we waited. Someone—she didn’t know who—had put a bag over her head, choked her, hauled her out into the wilderness, and held her head under swamp water until she nearly drowned.
I was willing to bet that didn’t happen to people back in Buttcrack, Michigan. The kid was as traumatized as anyone I’d ever seen.
A girl in scrubs stepped into the room, looked at me like I was a bad piece of cheese, went to Lisbeth, and took her pulse without so much as saying hello.
“Excuse me. Who are you?” I asked.
She gave me a dirty look.
“A nurse? A doctor?” I said. “A twelve-year-old playing dress-up?”
“I’m Dr. Westral,” she snapped.
“Of course. I should have known that through mental telepathy. I’m off my game. Are you a real doctor,” I asked, “or are you still saving your Lucky Charms box tops until you’re old enough to cross the street to the mailbox all by yourself?”
“I’m a first-year resident,” she said, as if that elevated her above the great unwashed like myself.
“So the answer is B: not a real doctor.”
She tipped Lisbeth’s head back, and blasted her light into one of Lisbeth’s bloody eyes.
“This is Lisbeth Perkins,” I said. “She’s a human being.”
Snake eyes. “Please be quiet.”
She listened to Lisbeth’s chest with her stethoscope while Lisbeth coughed and wheezed.
“Someone tried to drown her,” I said.
The look again. “Can she speak?”
“Why don’t you ask her? She has a brain and a tongue and everything.”
“Who are you?” the child doctor demanded. “Her mother?”
“I’m a friend,” I said. “That’s a person who is kind and has concern for another’s well-being. I only explain this because I’m sure you don’t have any friends, you snotty little bitch.”
Landry stepped in and looked at me. “Making friends?” he asked.
“Detective Landry,” I said. “This person claims to be a doctor. I suspect her name is Brittany, or Tiffany, or another of the popular -ny names.”
Westral abandoned Lisbeth, turned, and introduced herself to Landry, who flashed his badge. She shook his hand, smiling politely, the perfect professional. I rolled my eyes.
She turned to me. “Ma’am, you need to leave now.”
“You think so?” I said. “I think you need to kiss my ass.”
Landry intervened. “Dr. Westral, I need to ask you to step out now. You can complete Miss Perkins’s examination after Special Agent Estes and I have finished questioning her.”
I narrowed my eyes at her as she passed me on the way to the door.
I turned to Landry. “Special Agent? I’m moving up in the world.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“You’re not going to ask me to step outside?”
“No,” he said.
“Good for you.”
He stepped close to me, his back blocking Lisbeth. “We recovered Irina’s car,” he said quietly.
“Where?”
“In the parking lot of the Wellington Green mall. It’s being processed. We have a pretty good partial footprint on the floor mat. I’ve got a rush on getting a comparison to the footprint at the dump site.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Not when I left.” He tipped his head in Lisbeth’s direction. “Has she told you anything?”
I filled him in on what I knew.
“So, whoever killed Irina did this to Lisbeth to shut her up,” Landry said.
“And so far, it’s working.”
“Weiss is checking into getting access to the video from the guard shacks at the Polo Club for Saturday and Sunday. If we can get our hands on the tapes for last night, maybe we can get a look at Walker coming home that night, what he was driving. If it was him.”
Lisbeth had started coughing again. I went to her, sat on the gurney, and put my hand on her back. “Lisbeth, Detective Landry needs you to tell him everything you can about last night. I’m going to go find you a real doctor. If I don’t get thrown out of the hospital, I’ll be back in a little while.”
She was trembling as if she was freezing to death. “Don’t l-leave me a-a-alone. Please.”
“You won’t be alone,” I promised. “Detective Landry will be right here or right outside the door until I get back, okay?
“He’s a good guy,” I said, glancing over at him. “He can be a real butthead, but he’s a good guy.”
Landry followed me into the hall. I stayed close to the door. Landry stayed near me so we could keep our voices down.
“Taking in another stray?” he asked, his expression softer than I would have liked. God forbid someone should accuse me of being kind.
“I feel sorry for the kid. Shoot me.”
“You think they’ll keep her here?”
I shrugged. “It’s the age of managed care. These places usually manage not to care one second longer than they have to.”
“And if they don’t keep her?”
“I’ll take her home with me,” I said without hesitation. “She can’t go back to Brody’s.”
He frowned. “I don’t like you taking her with you. Someone tried to kill her, Elena.”
“No. Someone tried to scare her,” I corrected him. “If they had wanted her dead, she would be dead.”
“Semantics,” he said. “Someone nearly killed her. She’s in danger, you’re in danger.”
“Well, guess what? It’s not your problem.”
He jammed his hands at his waist and blew out a sigh. “Elena—”
“Don’t. It’s a dead horse. Leave it alone.”
He opened his mouth to try to say something, stopped himself, looked away, tried again, couldn’t.
“Unless you have something germane to the case,” I said, “I have to go find that girl an actual doctor past the age of puberty.”
“They all lawyered up,” he said. “Brody’s crowd.”
“I know. I ran into Brody this morning.”
“Then you know who his lawyer is.”
“Yes.”
“How is that going to be for you?”
“Shitty,” I said, irritated with him for bringing it up. “I get to relive one of the worst times of my life, have the press dig it all up like a compost heap. And my esteemed father—who is more of a bastard in practice than I am by definition—will get to knock me around and tell the world that I’m mentally unstable, a pathetic, bitter woman who might do anything to wreak havoc on the life of the man who betrayed her twenty years ago.
“How would you feel?”
There was nothing he could say to that. Landry had grown up in a normal middle-class blue-collar family. He didn’t know what it was to have to feel like a stranger, out of place in the only home he had ever known, betrayed by the only people he should have been able to count on unconditionally.
How would you feel? How did I feel? Upset that those memories still had so much power over me.
Landry’s pager went off. He checked the number and frowned.
“You’d better go outside to answer that,” I said, glad for the exercise to get rid of him. “Before you have every pacemaker in the building going ha
ywire.”
He clipped the thing back onto his belt.
“I’ll call you when I know something,” he said.
The olive branch, I thought. Or bait. Or a thin thread to keep connected.