Flashbyte (Byte Series - Ellie Conway Book 4)

by Cat Connor

  Lying bastard.

  Lesson: Trust no one. I swished another image, time flashed forward, about seven years. An image of a coffee bar froze on the screen. In a booth sat a dark-haired man with a map. Mac. He looked up and smiled at me. The mirror trembled and the picture dissolved.

  Time to leave the bathroom before more weird shit happens.

  Kurt had destroyed the bed and by the look of it, had fun doing so. Sheets and covers crumpled in a heap, trailing onto the ground at the end of the bed.

  “Have fun?”

  “They expect a certain amount of crumple,” he replied and threw a pillow at me. I threw it back; he ducked, and the bedside lamp went flying and smashed onto the floor. Kurt fell off the bed laughing like a mad man. “How to destroy hotel room 101. Did you learn that from your rock star boyfriend?”

  I laughed. “You signed the register and booked the room. This comes out of your pocket.”

  A pillow hit me on the side of the head.

  Lesson: Don’t start something you can’t finish.

  I scrambled onto the bed and snatched another pillow before Kurt could. He tried to sneak around the end of the bed, but I smacked him over the head. Thump. Kurt hit the ground. Laughter rose from under the pillow and then moved. Standing on the bed, ready with another pillow to pound him, I watched him trying to be stealthy. His head poked up. I hit him again. Moments later he waved the white sheet of surrender. He crawled up onto the bed and flopped down. I felt his hand tighten around my ankle but it was too late – unbalanced, I fell, and was again pinned under Kurt.

  “This is getting to be a habit,” I muttered, pushing him off.

  “Objective achieved,” Kurt replied, flat on his back next to me.

  Of course. We were way too quiet for a honeymoon couple.

  “Who knew you could be fun?” I said, rolling over him and off the bed. “I need to be armed today. How are we going to explain that?”

  “Can you carry fully concealed?”

  I gave it some thought. I could, if it was winter and I was wearing a jacket. But it was summer; my Glock 17 wasn’t exactly invisible in its holster. Even wearing it in the small of my back wasn’t going to make a difference under a tee shirt.

  “I might have to carry it in my shoulder bag.” The bag in question was hanging on the back of a chair across the room. My Glock was on the dresser, next to Kurt’s. I slipped the bag strap over my head and put the Glock in it, complete with holster. The holster was not going to work. I dropped it on the dresser and put the gun into a smaller zipped compartment, leaving the zip open. This had to be short term. It was no way to treat the tool I needed to help me do my job. I could grab the gun easily enough from the compartment. Pulling it free of the actual bag wasn’t as smooth as I’d hoped. If it came down to it, I’d shoot through the bag.

  Problem solved.

  “You’re meeting Grant when?”

  “At eleven. You’re coming; I’m not leaving you alone.”

  “I’m fine here; bored, but fine.”

  “You’re coming.”

  I was going and not unhappy about it. At least I’d be doing something. I hoped it would lead to something tangible in the hospital killings.

  Sixteen

  I Gotta Woman

  Grant was waiting in his office when we arrived. Last night’s newspaper folded on the corner of his desk, and the morning paper open in front of him. My heart sank. I had a feeling I was about to find out how observant Doctor Neal was.

  He waved us in and pointed to chairs.

  “It’s not the world’s biggest office, but we should have enough room.” He folded up the newspaper and placed it upon the other paper. “I have the files here.” His hand tapped a pile of folders. I could see color-coordinated tabs running down the open edges. Grant looked at me then addressed me, “Feeling better I see. Do you want to sit in on this or go shopping?”

  Bless him for thinking I’d like to go shopping and not be troubled by the menfolk and work.

  I smiled. “Much better, thank you. If you don’t mind, I’ll stay.”

  “We never did get around to talking properly. What is it you do?”

  Kurt stood up and closed the door. He knew what was coming too.

  “I’m in law enforcement,” I said. No sense lying about that and being snapped. Law enforcement was such a broad term. I could be in a communications center somewhere, or a laboratory. Sure enough Grant’s eyes drifted to the newspapers. He thought he recognized me from the pictures, I saw the look on his face.

  “How long have you been married?”

  Kurt answered, “Can we get on with this?”

  “You’re not, are you? You’re the woman dating Rowan Grange?”

  “Question or statement?” I parried.

  Kurt leaned closer to Grant. “For our sake and the sake of this investigation, we are married and she is Rylee Henderson. No one is to know otherwise. End of story.”

  “You could’ve told me.”

  “No, I couldn’t – you suck at acting.” Kurt smiled. It disarmed Grant and all his doctor cool went out the window. Fascinating.

  “Files?” I interrupted the bonding moment. “Walk me through the deaths.”

  Without warning Kurt grabbed my arm and excused us.

  In the corridor outside Grant’s office he pushed me against the wall. He leaned into me, one arm resting on the wall over my head. His mouth close to my ear.

  “It was a failed rendition, wasn’t it?”

  I had nowhere to go and felt sudden panic and I couldn’t breathe. Air would not fill my lungs no matter how hard I tried.

  “Rylee – Ellie – it was, wasn’t it? That’s what went wrong in New Zealand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How the hell did you end up on a CIA rendition team?”

  “O’Hare had me seconded to a special joint operation. After some twisty turns I ended up ‘deep cover’ within the CIA and part of the operation.”

  That’s enough now. No more.

  He pulled back a little. I met with his most intense life-dissecting stare and it was uncomfortable as hell.

  “Who knows?”

  Very few people.

  “You. O’Hare. My former handler Jonathon Tierney.”

  Footsteps approached us. Kurt lowered his mouth to mine. As the footsteps faded so did the kiss. “We’re here to find a killer, not make out in the hallway,” I whispered. “Now you know about me, let’s get this case closed.”

  “If it is a case.”

  “You know it is,” I said.

  Kurt apologized to Grant for our leaving.

  I picked up a file and fast realized I wasn’t going to be a lot of help with the initial phase. So I settled back to listen to the two doctors discuss how patient A was due for discharge and died during the night. By the time they got to patient E, even a non-medical moron like me could see the pattern. Grant handed Kurt the file for patient F.

  My phone rang, followed by Kurt’s.

  I answered my call. It was Sam and he wasn’t happy.

  “The medical examiner says the boxes of meat – five in total now, three left for you, one for Gracey, and one for a lady called Sarah Jane Franken – contain pieces of at least fifteen different people. We’re trying to get somewhere with the first box and the tattoos, and the lab is working on DNA. There are no reports of so many people disappearing, or bodies turning up missing chunks of ass and thigh.”

  Fifteen. That is a lot of dead bodies. A lot of people to go missing at once. There have to be reports filed somewhere.

  “They were all delivered the same way?”

  “Yeah, someone is paid to deliver them. Regular courier companies. The lone oddball was the tweaker who delivered the second box to you.”

  “How are you getting on tracing them back to the courier companies?”

  “Slow, Ellie. We do know they’re not coming from overseas. Despite the customs declarations and stamps.”

  “Recipients. Ther
e has to be a link between us all. Something that is triggering this response.”

  “So far nothing.”

  “Dig deep. We’ve all got something in common: You need to find it. This is not random.”

  “I feel like I’m snooping on you.”

  “Sam, it’s me. We’ve worked together for a few years now. We know each other pretty well. It’s not snooping; it’s doing your job.”

  “Why’d you get three boxes?”

  “That, Sam, is something that may hold the key … you’ll figure it out.”

  “Take care out there, Ellie.”

  “You too.”

  I hung up. Kurt was still talking. I could tell by the tone of his voice it was Caine on the other end of the call.

  I slipped the file for patient F off Kurt’s lap and opened it up. Maybe what it needed was the eyes of a non-medical person. I read the file. It didn’t make much sense. I skimmed all the others while Kurt talked to Caine.

  “And by the way, Grant, I get how absorbing the medical aspects must be for two doctors, but there is a pattern here with these deaths. These people all died between two and six in the morning.”

  “That means they all died on the same shift,” Grant replied. He tapped at his keyboard for a moment. “It’s not that unusual. Look at this.”

  Grant showed me a study conducted in Brazil on hospital deaths, both ICU and non-ICU, where the objective was to demonstrate cardiovascular mortality follows a certain circadian rhythm. I looked at the percentages.

  “They’re saying thirty-eight percent of people not in the ICU die between six in the morning and noon, but the second highest percentage – twenty-five percent – die between midnight and six in the morning.”

  Grant nodded. “Our death times in these cases aren’t so unusual.”

  “I think your percentages are higher. This study involved seven hundred deaths over four years. We’re talking about a spike in deaths over a much shorter time frame. At the outside I’d say a twelve-month period. Do you have figures for the deaths that occurred in this hospital between six a.m. and say, noon, over the last year?”

  He shook his head.

  “We have a record of every death, but that sort of information has never been extrapolated.”

  “I’m picking the only increase is in the sudden deaths between two and six.” I looked at Grant. “You’ve been a doctor for a number of years, what is your opinion regarding most frequent time of death?”

  He tapped a finger on his desk. “In my experience it is between three and four in the morning.”

  “Interesting isn’t it, this time of death thing?”

  He nodded.

  “See? I knew you were needed down here,” Kurt said to me with a smile.

  “How many beds do you have?” I said to Grant.

  “Eighty.”

  Small hospital.

  “Staff?”

  “Approximately two hundred.”

  “Nurses on wards?”

  “Sixty-two”

  “How can I get information on who works what shifts? Do you have access to that?”

  “The nurse manager does.”

  “I don’t want to involve anyone else. Is there a roster anywhere?”

  He nodded. Seconds later he pulled up the rosters for the previous four weeks.

  Kurt attracted my attention. “Can I have a word outside?”

  “Sure.”

  We excused ourselves. Kurt checked the corridor for lurkers. There was no one around.

  I leaned on the wall and listened as he spoke.

  “Regarding the three strangling cases earlier in the week. Another woman was killed early this morning. This time in Roanoke, and she was tortured.”

  “Same name?”

  “She was a Conway.”

  That wasn’t good.

  “Christian name?”

  “Gillian.”

  I moved on. Really: What else could I do? I’d never had a connection to Roanoke – the guy was now swinging blind.

  “Thanks for the update.”

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, reaching past me and swinging Grant’s office door open. “Back into it then.”

  Grant greeted us with a nod. I sat down and hoped there would be no more interruptions.

  “Where were we?” I asked Kurt.

  “Rosters.”

  Yeah, rosters. I focused on Grant.

  “Grant, can you print the rosters and anything else relevant, we’ll take them with us. Oh, anyone due for discharge tomorrow?”

  The printer on his desk clunked, whirred, and buzzed, before firing out pages of information into the tray. He typed for a few minutes.

  “No one’s updated patient records since rounds this morning. Won’t know until later who is being flagged for discharge. We have fifty-one patients at the moment. Five of those are in pediatrics and four are obstetrics.”

  “I would keep an eye on them all, but I don’t know how you can do that – you can’t tell staff to look out for someone killing patients, when it could well be a staff member. But you need to think about how.” As an afterthought I added, “I suppose cameras in the rooms are a violation of privacy?”

  “Yes.”

  Seventeen

  Live Before You Die

  It was pleasant in our hotel room. We had fresh coffee and peace. I could relax. No chance of recognition or sudden death.

  Caine called me to let me know he was briefing NCIS Agent Noel Gerrard on the Roanoke murder, as his murder case was pertinent to the FBI investigation and vice versa. That in turn reminded me I never did tell Noel anything regarding Arbab.

  “I want in,” I said.

  Kurt stared at me, his coffee cup frozen mid sip.

  “That would be monumentally stupid,” Caine replied. “Monumentally.”

  “Yeah, you said that already. Now we have two cases, both of which have something to do with me. The one that concerns me is someone murdering people with my name.”

  “Boxes of body parts don’t concern you?”

  “Nope. I’m sorry people are dying, but I don’t feel like I’m about to be hacked up and stuffed into a box by whoever the hell is doing that.”

  The ass killer is not an imminent threat to my welfare, or Carla’s.

  “What about the investigation into the hospital deaths?”

  “I don’t think it’s going to take that much investigating. Someone is killing people. Everyone is dying between two and six in the morning. People don’t visit between two and six a.m. I think it’s someone on the staff. That would make sense. I’m just not sure how the hospital can safeguard other patients until we find the culprit.”

  “Guess they can’t use security cameras,” Caine said. I heard the amusement in his voice. “No doubt you already went there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right, wrap up this hospital thing – then you can both join the investigation into the deaths of Conway women.”

  “Ballpark, how many statewide?”

  “Ninety or so.”

  “Not good.”

  “This is anything but good.”

  “Killing fields spring to mind. You sure about this case? I reckon Kurt would be fine by himself,” I ventured.

  Kurt coughed. It was unnecessary, I knew he was there.

  “Ellie—” Caine used a snarl to good effect.

  “I’ll stay and help. Just don’t let anyone else die.”

  “We’ve got police all over the state chatting with anyone whose name is Conway, but more especially watching women between the ages of twenty-five and forty. We can’t afford to panic the population, so we’re asking about unusual phone calls and vehicles new to the areas,” he said.

  “You’ll have to canvas immediate neighbors; otherwise the Conways are going to smell a big, fat, panicky rat.”

  “We’re stretching the local police pretty thin, but they’re doing their best.”

  “What about media? How much has been released?” I said.


  “Nothing has been released. But that won’t stop them,” Caine said.

  He was right. “Unleashing hell doesn’t do much to silence those bastards.”

  “Names are being withheld, as are descriptions of the victims. We don’t need some dickhead of a journalist piecing things together.”

  “If someone let slip they were suicides and not murder, they’d back off? Don’t they have some kind of code about reporting on suicides?” I was grasping at straws and I knew it.

  “There is some sort of journalistic code when reporting suicide. But in this case we’d be opening ourselves up to accusations of a cover-up.”

  “Suppose that’s a bad thing?”

  “I can’t see the director going for it,” Caine said. “Our saving grace at the moment is that the deaths are spread out.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk soon.”

  I dropped my phone onto the sofa. “People are dying all over,” I muttered, picking up the cup of coffee from the end table. “If I was Arbab, and I knew who I was looking for, but didn’t know where the person was … I’d start killing and I’d keep killing until I drew the person out.”

  “You scare me.”

  I tapped my booted foot on the floor.

  “He’s going to create a pattern in the deaths, or a trail if you like, something that leads to him.”

  If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain. Now he’s found a way of moving the fuc’n mountain.

  “You scare me.”

  “I scare myself.”

  “Let’s go over this paperwork,” Kurt replied, bringing over the stack of printouts. He dropped them on the sofa with two packets of highlighters. “The sooner we get this killer caught, the sooner we can join the manhunt.”

  We each took a sheet and highlighters. Matching deaths to nurses to corresponding wards didn’t seem too difficult. It was a small hospital; I couldn’t imagine it taking long to find the overlap. Except it did.

  The deaths were spread throughout the hospital, not confined to particular wards. The common denominator was the patients all went through the emergency room prior to admittance. No surprise there.

  “So is this the trigger? The emergency room?” I could understand it; hospitals weren’t my favorite places by any means. Even so, it seemed a bit extreme to be killing. I spread files over the floor and started picking them up one by one, reading the notes from the emergency room.