Devil Wind (Sammy Greene Mysteries)

by Linda Reid

  Ana caught the reflection in the mirror and gasped. Sylvie’s computer was smashed into tiny pieces on her desk. Ana spun around and stared at the damage, shocked by the violence of the destruction. This was not the work of a common burglar. Whoever had done this must have felt incredible rage.

  A wave of dizziness overwhelmed her. She knew she couldn’t stay in the apartment another minute. Forcing herself to calm down and breathe more slowly, she quickly dressed in a clean T-shirt and jeans, and exchanged her designer heels for clean socks and tennis shoes. Money. She needed money. Ana remembered that Sylvie had kept a few dollars of “just-in-case” funds in a special location somewhere in her closet. But where?

  Sylvie’s words came back to her. Payless, remember? Of course. The Payless box. Sylvie’d always kept that in the middle of the closet as a joke. Grabbing a sturdy kitchen knife, Ana pushed the box aside to pry up the wooden slats. Slowly, they creaked loose to reveal a small hole where a wad of twenty dollar bills lay wrapped around a thick disk. Ana pocketed the money and frowned as she examined the disk. It was thicker than a typical 3 1/2 inch floppy and had only the label Jazz etched into the plastic. Sylvie had dated a musician recently, so maybe the disk contained her boyfriend’s music. But then why not keep it with her CDs near the stereo? This had to be Sylvie’s Plan B.

  The faint sound of a siren far in the distance jarred Ana into action. The police might be on their way to the apartment. They had her ID and address inside the charred purse on Sylvie’s gurney. Ana opened Sylvie’s pristine purse and fished out her roommate’s cell phone and her thin wallet with its license and money. No point in leaving something else for visitors to steal.

  She threw Sylvie’s purse on the closet floor, stuffed the wallet, the money, and the disk in one pocket, the phone in another, then ran back to the kitchen to replace the large knife with a smaller one that slid into the waistband of her jeans. The answering machine by the kitchen counter was blinking. Estimating the sirens to still be a few blocks away, Ana pushed the play button. The first two calls were hang ups, followed by a message from Kaye: “Ana, where are you? Call me as soon as you get in. We have to talk.”

  Ana erased the voice mail. She was in no mood to talk to anyone just yet. Not Kaye and certainly not the police. It would be daylight in a few hours. She had to get away while she could. Right now she needed to find a safe place to hide and to rest.

  As the sirens grew louder, Ana rushed out the door and down the back stairs to the alley behind the building. Through the yards of the houses she passed, she could see the flashing red lights of police cars speeding toward her address. By the time the black-and-whites had arrived at the apartment, Ana was at least ten blocks away, at the neighborhood play area and park. Filled with mothers, nannies, and young children during the day, the playground was deserted after dark, except for a few of Ana’s old homeless friends who sought shelter among the trees. Tonight she would join them.

  Only hours before, she and Sylvie had been mingling with the glitterati. And now, as her luck would have it, the glitter had burned away to ashes.

  Reed was writing orders for Prescott’s admission to the CCU, enjoying the silence of the doctors’ lounge, when the door squeaked open. He smiled broadly as Michelle shuffled in and parked her five foot nine frame down in a chair beside him. She was one visitor he welcomed. In fact, he’d been struck by her California-blonde beauty at the hospital orientation months ago, but had only found time to ask her out weeks later. Between his schedule as a cardiac fellow and hers as a new resident, most of their dates were casual encounters over coffee in the hospital cafeteria or under the sheets in the doctors’ call room.

  Their conversations were brief, stolen time away from patients and responsibilities. Still, he’d learned enough to know they shared much in common. Michelle’s father was a successful Santa Barbara stockbroker, her privileged background mirroring his as the son of a rich New England banker. Though the physical attraction was genuine, he knew something was missing. Michelle hadn’t made his heart do somersaults the way Sammy Greene had that night they’d met.

  But he was older now, and somersaults were a little harder to handle. He had come to the conclusion that relationship success for him was more likely with the familiar rather than the unpredictable. After the pain of his affair with Sammy, Reed was less inclined to seek challenges again.

  Now Michelle’s exaggerated sigh made him ask, “Bad night?”

  “First the crazy cannibal.” She pointed to the fresh bandage on her right ear where she’d been bitten. “Then the burn victim.”

  Reed knew she’d had no rest for the past twenty hours. Thirty-six hour shifts were routine for first years. But her wide hazel eyes reflected sadness more than fatigue.

  “Didn’t make it?”

  Michelle just shook her head.

  Reed patted her arm. “With the extent of her burns, the odds were against her.”

  “I know.” Michelle pulled the rubber band from her ponytail and let her long blonde tresses fall loosely around her face. “But that doesn’t make it easier.” She choked on the last word and looked away.

  “No,” he whispered, “no, it doesn’t.” He reached an arm over to her, pulling her close. “The best we can is all we can do.” He brushed a few strands of hair from her face and leaned over to meet her lips with his.

  “Where? I’ve been looking all over this ferdemta place.” From the other side of the door, the New York accent was unmistakable. The Yiddish curse nailed it.

  “In here? Thanks.” The door opened, admitting the voice that had once belonged to a mischievous pixie. It now belonged to a mature young woman whose red hair fell softly across strong shoulders, and whose bright green eyes quickly focused on his. Her left hand held a rather bruised banana.

  “Hey, Reed,” she said, without batting a long lash, “Hungry?”

  Blushing, Reed disentangled himself and eased a few inches away from a frowning Michelle. “Sammy? What are you doing here?”

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt your work,” Sammy said, “I just thought you might like to share breakfast, seeing as we were both doing graveyard.”

  “Night shift is what she means,” Reed explained to Michelle.

  “Yup, radio talk.” Smiling, Sammy extended her right hand. “Sammy Greene on the L.A. Scene. KPCF. And you are?”

  “Michelle Hunt.” Though Michelle shook Sammy’s hand, her tone was decidedly cold. “I take it you and Reed are friends.”

  “Well, uh,” Reed stammered.

  The lounge door opened again and the uniformed guard stuck his head in the room. “There you are, Dr. Reed. Dr. Bishop asked me to find you. He’s in the heart suite with the big cheese.” The guard nodded at Sammy. “Your fiancée can wait here.”

  Reed struggled to compose himself as he hurried to the ER’s cardiovascular suite. Amazing how after all these years, Sammy could just appear and throw him off kilter. The hurt look on Michelle’s face was sure to set their nascent relationship back to the word go. Or stop.

  Entering the suite, Reed was surprised to find his chief already at Prescott’s side, examining the congressman. Bishop was a lean man with razor-cut gray hair and military bearing fostered by his years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and as an Army MASH unit commander in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. According to the hospital buzz, after Bishop made colonel during the Gulf War, he’d been on his way to a couple of stars and an influential billet at the Pentagon. But in ninety-three, he’d inexplicably decided to retire into the private sector and academia. LAU Med was quick to snap up one of the nation’s leading cardiovascular experts. For Reed it was a chance to train with the best.

  Normally dressed in sharp, tailored suits, tonight Bishop wore an open-necked polo shirt and khakis, evidence that he’d rushed to get to the hospital for his VIP patient. Seeing Reed, Bishop pulled the stethoscope from his ears and cracked a trace of a smile.

  “Nicely done, Reed.” Not given to effusive praise, Bishop
added that he’d already reviewed the videos of the procedure in the cath lab and had been impressed with both the technique and the result. “Dr. Wyndham here saved Neil’s life, Julia,” he told the attractive fifty-something brunette hovering anxiously just behind them.

  Hiding confusion, Reed smiled at the dignified woman who reached over and clasped her husband’s hand. Hadn’t Lou said Prescott’s wife was very young and blonde?

  “Thank you, Dr. Wyndham, from the bottom of my heart.”

  Prescott’s intense stare telegraphed an unspoken message.

  Nodding at the congressman, Reed understood what was expected of him. Something he’d learned as an adolescent dealing with his father’s same penchant for attractive young mistresses. Smile, and keep up pretenses at all cost. “You’re very welcome, Mrs. Prescott. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of your husband.”

  Prescott visibly relaxed, and, closing his eyes, rested back on his pillow. Though Reed smiled politely, he had a strong urge to take a long, cleansing bath.

  Left alone in the break room, Sammy and Michelle studied each other like opponents before a tennis match, wondering whether one possessed a killer serve or a trick drop-shot. To Sammy, it was no contest. Her heart-shaped freckled face gave her a perpetual elfin look that her copper colored hair and green eyes only amplified. Michelle, on the other hand, was a goddess. California-style.

  Sammy would have liked to dismiss the tall, lanky blonde as mere eye candy, but Michelle clearly had brains too. After all she was a doctor, like Reed. Toughen up, kid, You’re the one who broke up with Reed. Can’t play the jealous girlfriend now.

  Exhaling, Sammy broke the strained silence. “No. I’m not his fiancée. Never was, in fact. We are just old friends.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “But you wanted to.”

  Michelle returned a faint smile. “Reed doesn’t like bananas.”

  “Neither do I,” Sammy admitted, tossing the fruit squarely into an open wastebasket by the door. “What happened to your ear?”

  “One of my patients was a little, uh—?”

  “Crazy Courtney?” Sammy probed.

  “I really can’t say.” The quiver in the set of Michelle’s jaw said it all.

  “Detox, psych ward, or both?”

  “Really.” Avoiding Sammy’s gaze, Michelle picked up several charts. “So you can gossip on your talk show? You media people are so nosy.”

  Sammy countered, “I am authorized as press—”

  “No one’s supposed to know about Prescott! How’d you find out?”

  Sammy stopped in mid-sentence. Prescott? Congressman Prescott? Head of the House Armed Services Committee? So Courtney wasn’t the big cheese. “I’m an investigative reporter,” she said. Or at least I used to be.

  Shaking her head, Michelle strode by Sammy, her charts tucked under one arm. “Well, you’re not finding out anything from me,” she said at the door.

  Sammy kept her expression blank, hoping to hide the fact that she could read the patient names on the files, though their significance only struck her after Michelle had disappeared down the hall. One, Courtney Phillips, was no surprise. But the other—

  Sammy could never forget the name of the man who’d saved her life back at Ellsford University. Pappajohn. Campus police chief Gus Pappajohn. How often had he told her she reminded him of his daughter, Ana, who’d run off years before to L.A.? Anastasia Pappajohn. Could Michelle’s patient be that Ana?

  An abandoned lanyard with a doctor’s ID lying on top of a pile of charts at the back of the lounge gave Sammy an idea. She quickly slipped it around her neck and, fingers crossed, checked the photo. Ajit Subramanian, MD, had black hair, dark skin, a full mustache, and no freckles. With no other option, Sammy flipped the card over and hoped for the best.

  Stepping into an empty hallway, she took a deep breath and adopted a confident stride toward the ER nurse’s station, her goal to locate the rooms assigned to Courtney Phillips and Anastasia Pappajohn.

  The whiteboard listing emergency patients was mounted for maximum visibility from all corners of the central area. Sammy leaned casually against the counter beside an anemic desktop Christmas tree and watched the clerk erase Courtney Phillips’s name. Turning, he said, “And may she rest in peace.”

  “Courtney died?”

  The clerk laughed. His ID badge read “Lou Costanza” and with his pudgy boyish face, wire frames, and thinning hair, he could easily have been a doppelganger for his namesake on Seinfeld. Sammy decided not to make the obvious comment.

  “Not this time. I meant she needs to rest. And the rest of us need some peace,” Lou said, chuckling. “Psych ward.” He spun his index finger next to his temple in the familiar gesture.

  Nodding politely, Sammy scanned the board for the name “Pappajohn.” It wasn’t there.

  “Who you looking for?”

  “Pappajohn. Anastasia.”

  Lou sobered up quickly. “They’ve already taken her to Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “You know,” he said, lowering his voice, “in the Arnold Schwarzenegger Hospital next door. The morgue.”

  Morgue? Oh, my God. I hope it isn’t Pappajohn’s daught—

  “Such a shame, young woman like that. ’Bout your age.”

  Just like the ex-cop’s Ana. Oh, my God.

  A pair of nondescript automatic doors several labyrinthine hallways past the nurses’ station connected LAU Med’s ER to the newly inaugurated Arnold Schwarzenegger Hospital. Maintaining her adopted air of confidence and avoiding eye contact, Sammy dodged and weaved past patients and staff until she reached the adjacent hospital tower. Assuming the morgue would be located somewhere in the basement, she entered an open elevator car and punched the buttons for all three B levels.

  While one and two lit up, Sammy noticed the B3 button had a lock beside it that failed to activate. When the doors slid back to reveal a darkened radiology center on B1, she decided to wait for B2. This time the elevator opened on a dimly lit hallway. A sign pointing straight ahead read DECEDENT AFFAIRS. That has to be it. Sammy stepped out before the doors slammed shut.

  Her footsteps echoed loudly down the deserted corridor. More than once she stopped to stare nervously back into the shadows, but saw nothing there. She was totally alone. After passing several closed and unlit offices, Sammy reached a set of large metal double doors under a small tarnished bronze sign that read MORGUE. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the automatic opener.

  The morgue resembled a large bank vault rather than the dissecting room she expected from watching TV crime shows. Fortunately no bodies lay on the half dozen metal tables. Sammy guessed the dead were all resting inside the drawers stacked like large lockers on both sides of the sterile space. Though several of these compartments had nametags, none were marked PAPPAJOHN. Dreading the idea of checking them all, Sammy glanced around the room until she spotted one unlabeled drawer, slightly ajar. Edging closer, she tried to suppress the tension filling her chest as she slowly drew it open.

  A naked body lay inside a translucent bag, like a developing butterfly in a protective cocoon. Reluctantly, Sammy pulled down the zipper. No stranger to death; the memory of her mother lying in her cold coffin still haunted her more than two decades later.

  Gazing at this corpse, she couldn’t contain the wave of revulsion that passed through her. Afraid she might scream, Sammy covered her mouth with her hands. It was too horrible. She could only guess that the victim was female by the few long strands of blonde hair surrounding a blackened face, its features melted like a candle.

  About to turn away, Sammy noticed a charred handbag at the bottom of the drawer. On impulse, she reached down for it. Inside she found a pair of diamond earrings, a single key, a singed driver’s license, some condoms, a warped cell phone, and a few twenty dollar bills.

  Sammy flipped the license over to check the photo and the name. The young woman pictured there was—had been—beautiful, w
ith brown eyes and soft blonde hair, framed by the faintest row of dark roots. That Costanza guy was right. They were close to the same age. Only twenty-six. Sammy’s eyes welled up. Poor Gus. The name on the license was the only part of his daughter that had survived the fire: Anastasia Pappajohn.

  The vibration grew stronger and stronger, the shaking more and more violent. Alarm bells rang insistently, intrusively, louder and louder.

  Fahim shot up in his bed, bathed in sweat. Earthquake?

  Disoriented and half-awake, he turned on the night table lamp and looked around. The room itself was still. Only his mobile phone jangling on the pillow. Relieved, he reached for it and flipped it open.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re one lucky bastard.”

  Fahim recognized Miller’s voice and his anxiety returned.

  “Your little inconvenience. She died at the hospital before regaining consciousness.”

  “I told you—”

  “You told me she was already dead. Lucky for you she never woke up. But there is a problem.”

  “Oh?” Fahim fought to keep his voice steady.

  “You were right. About her spying.”

  “And that is a problem? Why? You just said she was dead.”

  “She wasn’t dead when she text messaged information from your PDA to her roommate’s phone. Let’s see, the rommate’s a Sylvie . . . uh, Pauzé.”

  Fahim swallowed a string of curse words. He hadn’t been quick enough. “But I do not even know this Sylvie!”

  “Fortunately, we plugged the dam before it leaked out of black ops. I don’t expect Ms. Sylvie to give us much trouble once we track her down. But, thanks to you, I’ve had to allocate precious resources to that task. That doesn’t make me happy.”

  Miller’s menacing tone raised the caution flag higher.

  “So my friend, you’re going to help me implement a Christmas Day surprise. Sort of a trial run for your ultimate target.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll explain everything when we meet at the Montagne Olympus. If you leave in half an hour, you’ll be there by seven.”