Sigma Curse - 04

by Tim Stevens

  She hoped Ellen wouldn’t offer to join her, but the nurse simply punched her arm lightly and said, “Laters,” and headed into the ward.

  She might tell the other nurses, Sally-Jo thought. But it didn’t matter.

  *

  Sally-Jo stepped out on the fourth floor. The elevators were at the far end of the corridor, and she turned left and headed down toward the ICU.

  An orderly, one she hadn’t seen before, was pushing a gurney in her direction. He walked so slowly she thought he might be half asleep. It wasn’t always the most interesting job, she knew, especially since everybody else in the hospital tended to look straight through you if you were an orderly, as if you didn’t exist.

  As she passed the man, she glanced up at him, her lips pressing in a semi-smile of acknowledgement. She had to look up at him because he was big, around six-three, and she’d maintained the stoop she’d adopted on her way from the car. A big guy in other senses, too. Burly. Maybe just this side of forty, and not bad looking in a rough-hewn kind of way.

  His eyes held hers, just a fraction longer than was normal.

  Then a phone buzzed, and he fumbled in his pocket, and Sally-Jo moved past him and pushed open the doors of the ICU.

  Chapter 33

  “Joe,” said Teller. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  He’d used the same words the last time he’d called.

  Venn stared after the nurse, distracted. More specifically, he stared at the nurse’s butt. Then he glanced away. He wasn’t supposed to look at other women. Not now, with Beth.

  Teller said, “They found Franklin Gray’s prints at the scene.”

  “What?” Venn felt a jolt of elation. He strode down the corridor, out of earshot of anybody who might pass through the doors of the ICU. “Tell me.”

  “Guy had a cup he must’ve been using to panhandle with,” said Teller. “The techs found a couple of prints on it. Slightly smudged, but there’s no doubt. There’s a match with Gray’s. His are of course on file, since he was military.”

  “Got him,” said Venn, half to himself.

  “There’s more,” said Teller. “Those two fingerprint guys I called in. Ferris and Watson? They compared the new prints with the partials they got off Fran’s phone. And there are enough points of similarity for them to be around eighty per cent sure of a match there, too.”

  “Huh,” said Venn. He was thinking about the nurse who’d just walked past him into the ICU. Hoping the cops inside checked her out.

  “So Gray killed the crankhead, Mykels. And he killed Fran, too, or at least was in the car with her.”

  “Now all we gotta do is find him,” said Venn. “And the woman.”

  “Joe,” said Teller. “Gray is the one we’ve got the most on. We have fingerprint evidence linking him to two crimes. He’s the one we have to focus our energies on. What I’m saying is, I’m going to have to pull my guys from the hospitals. I need all the manpower I can get. I can’t afford to have them sitting around, waiting for a hypothetical woman to maybe show up at some point in the indeterminate future.”

  “No,” said Venn. “Mort, you can’t do that. The woman’s coming. She may even be here already. I can feel it. Smell it.”

  “You’ll still have the NYPD there,” said Teller. “And we’ll be available on a moment’s notice.” A steeliness cut through the fatigue in his voice. “It’s my call, Joe. The Bureau personnel are leaving, right now.”

  “Okay,” said Venn. “Whatever. You do what you need to do, Mort.”

  He hit the key to terminate the call.

  *

  Venn ducked into the short passage leading to one of the other post-op wards, off the main corridor. He punched in the number for the ICU reception desk.

  The head nurse, Amanda Wright, answered.

  “Nurse Wright, it’s Lieutenant Joe Venn here. A woman just came in. A nurse.”

  “Yeah,” said Wright, keeping her voice low. “She’s staff here. Not on ICU, but in one of the surgery wards a couple of floors down. She came to ask about a book she wants to borrow. Pissed me off, at a time like this.”

  “Okay,” said Venn. “So she’s legit. Thanks.”

  Wright sounded amused. “Jeez... you thought she might be the killer? She wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I’m a more likely murderer than her.”

  “Careful what you say,” Venn chided.

  “Cops.” He could hear her eyes rolling.

  “Listen, the FBI are pulling out. I’m going to send for a couple more uniformed officers, okay?”

  “Fine,” said Wright. “Just stop them eyeing up my nurses, okay? You’d think they were just released from a monastery.”

  “Like you said. Cops, eh?”

  Venn was about to put the phone away when he saw that a text message had arrived from Fil.

  He read it.

  Read it again.

  And lowered the phone, staring at the doors to the ward without seeing them.

  Understanding didn’t so much dawn as explode in a sunburst. A supernova.

  It made sense. The pieces scurried together, fitting themselves into place.

  The woman.

  Franklin Gray.

  Fincher.

  The other victims.

  It all made sense.

  Venn turned back toward the corridor.

  The blur of movement triggered his arms up reflexively and he dropped into a crouch.

  The next he knew, something stung him in the neck. A wasp? he thought. Here, in a hospital, in the middle of winter?

  Pain flooded his neck, cramping his jaw, burning down into his chest. He saw the face, inches from his, and brought up a hand to claw at it. He felt his flailing arm connect with somebody else’s limb, and he tried to grip it, but found he couldn’t close his fingers.

  The face rose up above him, seeming to levitate crazily, until he realized it wasn’t the face that was going up but he that was going down.

  He felt, and heard, the crash of his body on the floor. His legs moved sluggishly, like a man with a spinal injury who was just beginning to regain some movement.

  The face crowded down toward his own.

  The huge eyes.

  The closed, Cupid’s-bow mouth.

  When she’d passed him a couple of minutes ago, she’d looked plain. Unremarkable.

  Now he saw beauty there.

  “Sigma,” he tried to say, but his tongue was a swollen lump in his mouth, his breath a reedy wheeze in his throat.

  The world grayed, and then disappeared.

  Chapter 34

  Lying down, he didn’t look so much like a cop. Just like any another patient.

  At least, Sally-Jo thought so, and she hoped other people thought the same.

  She kept her head down and pushed the gurney along the corridor, glancing up every now and again to make sure he was still out cold. She’d covered him with a hospital blanket, tucked in around the edges. But she’d had to leave his face uncovered, or else the only place she could conceivably be transporting him would be the morgue.

  It was his eyes that had given him away. The gaze he’d leveled at her as she’d passed him on her way to the ICU hadn’t been the disinterested glance of one stranger encountering another, or even the mildly flirtatious look of a man appraising a woman. Instead, he’d been sizing her up, evaluating her as a potential opponent, a possible suspect.

  He was no orderly, that was for sure.

  Sally-Jo had stepped through the doors of the ICU and felt the immediate increase in tension in the atmosphere. All heads turned toward her: the nurses, the doctors bustling about, and the two uniformed cops sitting over beside the bed in the corner. Only the patients themselves, most of them unconscious, failed to regard her.

  The head nurse came round from behind her workstation. Wright, her name was, Sally-Jo knew.

  “Yes?” Wright barked. She had a fearsome reputation among the junior staff. Sally-Jo could see the woman recognized her, though she doubted sh
e recalled her name.

  “I... just wanted to ask if you had a copy of Hemostasis in Critical Care,” Sally-Jo stammered. “I’m studying for the diploma in –”

  “For God’s sake, girl,” Wright sighed. “This is an ICU, not a library. Go ask elsewhere. Better still, do so during daylight hours.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, Nurse Wright, ma’am.” Sally-Jo backed away toward the doors, all but curtseying.

  She’d seen what she needed to see. There was no way she’d get to the Jones woman in the corner bed. Not with those two cops in the way. And there’d be others, undercover, on the unit. Maybe even some of the patients were cops in disguise.

  But her fleeting encounter with the big guy in the corridor, the cop masquerading as an orderly, had given her an idea.

  She looked down the corridor in both directions. Nobody about. She held her breath, listening.

  The murmur of a man’s voice reached her ears from somewhere off to her right. A monologue, like he was talking on a phone.

  Sally-Jo slipped her hand into the pocket of her uniform. Her fingers closed round the syringe filled with propofol, the anesthetic agent. It was the last of her supply.

  Treading softly, she advanced toward the voice. It was coming from down a short passage which led to the post-surgery recovery ward.

  She risked a quick peek round the corner, jerking her head back immediately.

  The big man had his back to her, as if trying to keep his voice from being audible out in the corridor.

  She had just seconds, if that.

  Sally-Jo stepped round the corner and reached the man in two strides just as he began to turn.

  She lunged with the syringe, and her aim was true, the needle jamming into his neck.

  His arm came up against hers. She could feel the strength there, something she’d normally be no match for.

  But the propofol did its work.

  The man dropped before she could control his fall, and flailed weakly on the floor, staring up at her with eyes that were rapidly swimming out of focus.

  Sally-Jo looked up at the double doors to the ward. She saw people moving about inside, but there was nobody entering or exiting.

  Quickly, she got to work.

  Back in the main corridor stood a row of empty gurneys, one of which she wheeled into the passage. She squatted and grabbed the supine man under his arms and slung him over her shoulder in a firefighter’s lift. The strain was almost unbearable: the man must have weighed two hundred ten pounds, possibly more. But she dropped him expertly onto the gurney on his back.

  She secured his torso and legs with the straps, pulling them tighter than she usually would with a patient, then covered him in the blankets. Ideally, she’d have liked an IV set to add authenticity to the scene, but there wasn’t one to hand, and she couldn’t very well walk into the ward and ask for one.

  Sally-Jo took a deep breath and began to push the stretcher with its load down the corridor toward the elevators.

  *

  An orderly stepped aside to allow her into the elevator car. She muttered a quick thanks.

  “Whoah,” said the orderly. “You need some help with that?”

  “No, it’s okay.” She flashed him her most brilliant smile. “I’m just taking him down to ward J6.”

  “Lemme get that,” said the orderly. He was somebody she didn’t recognize, luckily. Maybe a new guy, or someone doing the occasional night shift.

  “Really,” she said. Then: “I screwed up. Sent him to the wrong ward before. My senior’s on my ass about it. I need to make amends.”

  He looked conflicted for a moment. Then, as the elevator stopped one floor down, he said: “Well, okay. Just don’t let my union see you doing that. There’ll be hell to pay.”

  He stepped out, the doors closed, and the elevator continued its descent.

  Sally-Jo tensed as the elevator reached the first floor. She watched the doors opening, convinced she’d encounter a horde of people beyond, people she knew, who’d wonder what the hell she was doing. Or, worse, there’d be cops there, or FBI personnel, and they’d glance at the face of the man on the gurney and recognize him.

  But the passage outside the elevator was empty.

  Sally-Jo pushed the stretcher toward the service elevators, located round a corner. There, she thumbed the ‘down’ button and waited an age for the digital numbers above the doors to reach the first floor.

  In the basement, she blinked, adjusting to the much lower level of light. Nobody would be down here, unless someone had come specifically on an errand, which was unlikely at this hour of the morning.

  The storeroom was toward the back of the building. Sally-Jo knew from experience that it contained stuff reserved for backup in the most extreme emergency. Flashlights, gurneys, extra linen, even chairs and side tables. Every time she’d been in there, she’d noticed a fine layer of dust.

  She found the tiny key in her pocket and opened the door and pushed the gurney inside, locking the door behind her. Through the wall, the soft rumble of the hospital’s inner engines, the generators and the incessant laundry machines, provided a gentle and familiar layer of background noise.

  For the last year, ever since she’d joined the staff of the hospital as a junior nurse, she’d come down here to be alone. To think, and take stock, and wrestle with the traumas and dilemmas of everyday. It was her oasis, her eye in the center of the storm.

  Frank joined her there, sometimes. But mostly she was on her own.

  This time she had company of a different variety.

  Sally-Jo removed the blanket from the supine man’s body. She leaned in close, studying his face. With one hand, she knuckled his breastbone.

  His mouth moved in a low moan, and his hands roved vaguely across his torso.

  He was still under, some way below the surface. Good.

  Sally-Jo removed the half-full syringe from her pocket and laid it on a shelf, easily within reach. She slipped her hands down the man’s sides.

  Inside his orderly’s overalls she felt a bulge. She reached in, touched cold metal. Drew out a gun.

  A Beretta M9A1, she noted. An interesting choice of weapon. She didn’t think it was standard police department issue. Was he FBI, then?

  She sat down on a stool, the pistol grasped lightly in her hand, and watched the man’s face.

  Waiting.

  Chapter 35

  Venn surfaced into the hangover from hell.

  His mouth felt like cotton wool, his eyes like sandpaper. His upper lids were steel shutters that he was trying to pull up with lengths of thread. When he attempted to shift his arms and legs, they groaned in protest, tightening until the effort was too much and he slumped into stillness.

  The ceiling above him was low and cobwebbed and shadowy, the only sources of illumination a few bulbs hanging from gnarled twists of flex and seemingly randomly distributed. For a moment, Venn thought he was in a dungeon of some kind. He concentrated on turning his head, his neck resisting, until with a painful twist he found himself gazing at a jumble of cabinets and shelves laden with assorted bits and pieces: lamps, boxes, plastic bottles.

  “You’re awake,” said a voice.

  Venn blinked, tried to arch his neck but failed. The voice had come from somewhere beside him.

  As if his very thoughts had summoned it, a face moved into view, a few feet from his own. An oval face, a woman’s, with a crown of spiky brown hair. Eyes wide and pale gray.

  A Cupid’s-bow mouth, the lips parted a fraction.

  Venn became aware of a soreness in the right side of his neck. Memories came rushing back: the sudden attack, the jab in his throat. Some kind of sedative.

  He’d endured surgery before. Plenty of it. And he felt now just as he had then, afterward.

  Except back then, each time, he’d awoken in a comfortable hospital bed, and had been allowed to drift off again, returning a little more each time and at his own speed.

  The woman’s lips moved again. “
What’s your name?” Her voice was a soft murmur.

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t know if he was capable yet of speech.

  Something hovered between his face and the woman’s. His vision contracted and he focussed on it.

  The steel circle of a gun barrel was poised inches from his eye.

  “What’s your name,” she said, even more quietly this time.

  Venn swallowed, wincing at the dryness in his throat. He made a sound that wasn’t a word, but more like a hoarse choking noise.

  He tried again, slowly, enunciating each syllable carefully, but still rasping. “Detective Lieutenant Joseph Venn. NYPD.”

  It didn’t all come out clearly, but he thought she got the gist.

  As the woman moved more fully into the thin light cast by the nearest bulb overhead, Venn took stock. His limbs weren’t immobile just because of the drug he’d been injected with. There were restraints, straps of some kind, across his chest and his belly and his arms and legs. Given enough time, and enough energy, he’d be able to wriggle loose. But there was a gun aimed at his head, and a bullet would move faster than he ever could, by an order of infinite magnitude.

  “The woman in ICU,” she said. “Detective Jones.”

  He watched those pallid eyes, behind the gun.

  “She never said anything, did she? Anything about who shot her?”

  Venn found even his thoughts were sluggish, crawling after one another one by one. He tried to grasp what the woman was asking, and why she was asking it.

  He remembered that Harmony had been shot. That he’d told Teller to put out the word that Harmony had identified her shooter as a man.

  This woman was here to kill Harmony.

  Testing his dry lips with the tip of his tongue first, Venn said: “No. She’s in a coma.” His words sounded slurred to him. “She never woke. We made all of that up.”

  The woman’s lips parted further in a silent aah. She gave the faintest nod, as if she understood.

  “The doctors think she isn’t going to make it,” Venn said.

  It was a gamble, but one worth taking. The woman was probably going to kill him. But if he led her to believe that Harmony wasn’t a threat to her, after all, she might leave her alone.