Mysterious Circumstances

by Rita Herron

  A doctor?

  The gurney hit a bump, a sea of blinding white drifting past as he rolled her into the hall. Dizziness swept her into a blur, and she decided he must be taking her to her room.

  Maybe Craig Horn would come and visit.

  Craig—he’d carried her to the ambulance. And he hadn’t been cold. He’d held her hand on the way to the hospital. His voice had been so soothing.

  She closed her eyes, allowing the memory to float with her and alleviate her panic as she drifted into unconsciousness again.

  But a few minutes later, she roused, dizzy and slightly nauseated. Where was she?

  She struggled to make out the room, but colors and lights swirled around her in a blinding fog. And she couldn’t move.

  A jolt of panic shot through her. She was paralyzed. She tried to open her eyes, to cry out for help, but her vocal cords had shut down. The room was ice-cold. Pitch-black.

  A man’s voice broke the quiet, “Goodbye, Miss Thornbird.”

  The throaty voice reverberated with evil, stirring a memory from the past. The threatening phone calls…

  A strangled sound erupted from her as realization dawned.

  The man wasn’t a doctor.

  He slowly dragged a sheet over her legs, her torso, then draped it over her face, shutting out the light. She gasped for air, but she couldn’t breathe.

  Footsteps clicked on the hard floor. Hushed voices echoed in the background. Something about paperwork. Being processed.

  “The Savannah Funeral Home will be over to pick up her body soon.”

  The words rang in her ears, sending horror through her. She was in the morgue. The drug the man had given her was going to kill her….

  Then the voices faded and the door slammed shut, leaving her all alone. The darkness swallowed her, an odd tingling traveling down her spine and legs until numbness replaced the needle-like sensations.

  Seconds later, the sensation that she was floating from her body followed.

  She was going to die.

  Craig’s face materialized in her mind, sorrow filling her. She’d never get to see him again, never get to touch him or tell him goodbye….

  Chapter Seven

  Craig’s cell phone trilled as he and Detective Black drove away from Catcall Island, the heart of CIRP’s main facility. “Special Agent Horn.”

  “Agent Horn,” the man stammered in a decidedly worried voice, “it’s Officer O’Malley.”

  Craig’s hand tightened around the handset. “What’s wrong?”

  “Listen…I hate to tell you this, but Miss Thornbird…well—”

  “Spit it out, O’Malley.”

  “She’s missing.”

  Craig ground his molars. “What do you mean, missing?”

  “Well, the doctors and nurses, they’ve been in and out, and one of ’em said he was taking her to her room—” he paused, wheezing as if he’d been running, then continued “—so I stopped in the john, but when I came out and went to find her, she wasn’t there.”

  An expletive tore from his mouth. “Black, step on it. Your damn officer lost Olivia.”

  Detective Black’s expression turned ominous as he cut into traffic, hit the siren and raced toward Savannah.

  “Listen, O’Malley,” Craig snapped, “get security to block all exits from the hospital. Issue a hospital alert for anyone who might be trying to kidnap Olivia, and do it now! We’ll be there in five!”

  “What the hell happened?” Detective Black asked when Craig disconnected.

  Craig explained, then exploded, his imagination taking a wild ride. He’d been in law enforcement a damn long time, had seen gruesome things, almost as gruesome as in the military. “What kind of incompetent officers do you have working for you?”

  Black maneuvered around a garbage truck. “Officer O’Malley’s a good guy. Has three kids. If he lost this woman, he didn’t do it intentionally.”

  “I told him to stay with her.” Craig clenched the console with a white-knuckled grip. “If she dies, it’s my fault.”

  Black steered around a Mustang and then cut across a sidestreet, the car bouncing as it hit a pothole. “It sounds like you really care about this woman.”

  If anything else happened to Olivia, he’d never forgive himself. “I just feel responsible,” he said through gritted teeth. “If it wasn’t for me, her father wouldn’t have been investigating this virus.”

  “And his death dragged Olivia into it?”

  Craig nodded.

  “She’s a reporter, Horn. She would have come after the story anyway.”

  He was right. But that did nothing to alleviate the guilt prickling Craig’s conscience.

  The rest of the ride was silent, fraught with apprehension, and when Black finally parked in front of the hospital, Craig jumped out. Straightening his suit coat, he ordered himself to bottle his emotions as he jogged into the hospital. Olivia Thornbird meant nothing to him. He was simply doing his job. But the image of her at the hands of a ruthless killer hacked at more than his conscience.

  Officer O’Malley met him near the recovery room, the surgeon and head nurse beside him, both looking frantic.

  “Did you find her?” Craig asked.

  The nurse threw up her hands, her cheeks ballooning out. “I…don’t understand what happened. I only left for a second to check on another patient.”

  “She was fine after surgery,” Dr. Elgin said, his own pallor off. “We’re checking all floors to see if she might have been moved to another room by mistake, and I have a guard checking the security tapes.”

  All of which would take time. Precious time that might cost Olivia her life.

  Craig tried desperately to silence his internal panic button and set to work, issuing commands and coordinating the search for best efficiency. Mass confusion reigned for the next half hour. Craig, Black and O’Malley searched the hospital, coordinating with the security guard and another police team that had arrived after O’Malley’s call. O’Malley had practically fallen all over himself apologizing, but Craig told him to save it for Olivia.

  If they found her. He couldn’t say it aloud.

  Finally, the men gathered in the lobby to regroup. “We’ve checked all the exits and radioed all the ambulance drivers,” one of the security guards said.

  “So far, we haven’t found any misplaced patients,” another guard added.

  Detective Black shuffled, a strained look on his face. “She couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air.”

  “If you wanted to hide a body in a hospital, where would you do it?” Craig asked, struggling to remain rational when his own mind raced with the sickening possibilities.

  “O.R.?” a nurse suggested.

  “A storage room? Lab?” others offered.

  “Get on it.” Craig’s stomach knotted as he considered another daunting possibility. If the kidnapper had already killed Olivia, the most logical place to stash her would be with the other deceased patients. “I’m going to check the morgue. Where is it?”

  The guard pointed to the hall. “Cold room’s in the basement.”

  O’Malley rushed to check the operating rooms, the guards took the labs, Detective Black hurried to make sure the nurses on each floor had verified patients’ identities in case someone had switched charts and ID bracelets, and another guard reviewed the security tapes. Craig sprinted toward the elevator, jumped inside and punched the button for the basement.

  The minute the elevator dinged and he stepped off, the atmosphere changed. The hall was dark, chilly, reeked of fetid odors. The scents of death wafted around him, the sound of metal clinking against steel echoing in the distance

  His pulse quickened as he read the signs and found the cold room.

  A heavyset young man with square glasses held up a hand. “Are you from the funeral home or coroner’s office?”

  Craig flipped open his identification. “Neither. Special Agent Craig Horn. I’m looking for a missing patient.”

 
Cammy, an African-American woman wearing a nurse’s uniform, frowned. “Name please?”

  “Olivia Thornbird.” He exhaled to control his agitation. “But I need to check all the patients. It’s possible someone switched her ID bracelet.”

  The orderly and nurse traded skeptical looks, then gestured for him to follow Cammy into the refrigerated room. A chill slid down his spine at the sight of the sheet-draped bodies. One of them might be Olivia.

  Hell, what was wrong with him? He’d seen dead bodies over the years, but never felt the mind-boggling fear that gripped him as he imagined Olivia under one of those sheets.

  Cammy stopped by the first steel table and read the toe tag, then checked it against her chart. His breath caught as she lifted the sheet, then gushed out when he saw an Asian woman’s battered naked body on the gurney.

  “It’s not her.” Regret for the woman mingled with relief that it hadn’t been Olivia. Then they quickly moved on to the next gurney and the next, each time, his breathing growing more difficult, the sweat pouring down his neck and back.

  By the time they reached the third row, the scent of death, body odors and chemicals had made him nauseous, and his hands shook violently as he reached for the sheet.

  He muttered a silent prayer as he lifted it, his lungs fighting for oxygen.

  Her blond hair lay in tangles, her cheeks pale and bloodless. “Olivia.”

  He gasped her name, then touched her hand. It was limp. And she lay so still, as in death. His pulse accelerated as he reached for her wrist to check her pulse.

  But he couldn’t find one.

  “DID YOU TAKE CARE OF the Thornbird woman?”

  The streetlights nearly blinded him as he exited the hospital parking lot. He gripped the phone, steered his sedan onto the street and grinned. Apparently the two men in charge had disagreed on how to handle Miss Thornbird. Milaski wanted the woman to print the story. But the master thought it was a dicey move, one that would draw too much attention. “Yeah. She shouldn’t give you any more problems.”

  The man on the other end of the line wheezed in relief. “I wish it hadn’t come to this.”

  Although it was hot as Hades outside, he imagined his boss leaning back in his expensive leather chair, pressing a hand over the silk lining of his smoking jacket, lighting up a Cuban cigar, looking cool as a cucumber in his air-conditioned office with its plush furniture, imported oriental rugs and crystal decanters of bourbon and scotch.

  His grin broadened. The man acted tough, but he was of his own shadow, afraid of exposing himself. Thought his own hands and those manicured nails too precious and important to dirty.

  But those hands had done dirty things before, things that to him were unimaginable.

  “You covered your tracks?” his boss finally said.

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course. Now you can get on with business.”

  “But her death may draw out all those maggots at the newspaper, as well as the cops.”

  “The Savannah Suicides story wasn’t the only one she was working on.”

  “Yeah, but her father just died. People will assume—”

  He chuckled. “You know what they say about people who assume—they’re as—”

  “This isn’t funny.” In spite of his polish, his boss’s voice echoed with anxiety. “There are things the feds can’t know.”

  “Don’t sweat it. When they look at Olivia Thornbird’s files, they’ll see that she had enemies.”

  A sigh of relief echoed back. “Good plan.”

  He gritted his teeth. He had a brain, he wasn’t just muscle like his boss thought. One day, maybe he’d figure that out.

  A police car cruised by, and he checked his speed, not wanting to draw attention to himself. The freaking hospital had been swarming with cops. And that federal officer. Horn.

  He was a problem.

  But he could be taken care of, too. Although killing cops and FBI agents was chancy. But he’d do what had to be done. What he’d been trained to do.

  Because he was a born killer.

  OLIVIA HAD THE ODDEST sensation of leaving her body. There was a bright light. A light so strong she felt compelled to drift toward it. A hazy white encircled her like a cloud of soft angel wings, the air tingling with a peaceful feeling that left her weightless and calm.

  Through the haze, a face appeared. A smile. The whisper of a voice.

  Her mother’s. So soft. Warm. Loving.

  She reached out, almost touched her hand. But her fingers slipped.

  Her mother shook her head. “Go back, Livvy. It’s not your time.”

  A gut-wrenching sadness engulfed her. “No…please don’t leave me again, Mom…”

  “Later…” Her mother’s voice faded, then she sailed farther away.

  “OLIVIA, COME BACK to me,” a male voice said. “Come on, you can do it.”mething hard pressed against Olivia’s chest. Intense pressure. Voices bobbed through the fog, growing louder. Closer.

  An electric jolt shot through her. Her body jerked.

  “Again,” a female voice ordered. “One-two-three.” Another jolt. Her body bounced upward. A beeping sound intruded in the quiet.

  “We’ve got a pulse!” someone shouted.

  “She’s alive!”

  “Thank God!” another voice murmured.

  A man’s. One she recognized. Craig Horn’s.

  The bright light faded completely. Reality returned as she struggled to open her eyes. More bright lights, but this time they blinded her.

  “Olivia, it’s Craig. You’re going to be all right.”

  Her memory rushed back. The man moving her. The fatal injection. The morgue.

  Craig Horn had saved her life.

  CRAIG REFUSED TO LEAVE Olivia’s side the rest of the night. If it had taken him five minutes longer to find her, Olivia would have been dead.

  Detective Black tapped on the door and stepped into the room. “How’s she doing?”

  Craig balled his hands into fists. She was still too damn pale. Had barely managed to open her eyes twice. And she looked as weak as a kitten. “She’s alive. No thanks to the Savannah Police Department.”

  Black shook his head, obviously frustrated as well. “O’Malley worked with a sketch artist, but the man who moved Olivia was disguised in scrubs, complete with mask and cap, so there’s not much to go on.”

  Craig nodded. “She was injected with a potassium solution which causes heart failure.”

  “So it’s possible our perp has some kind of medical background, at least a minimal knowledge.”

  “With the Internet, all it takes these days is a little surfing. As long as he can read, any moron with access to a computer can commit murder.”

  “We’ve questioned the staff,” Detective Black said. “But so far, no one seems suspicious.”

  “Could have been a doctor from CIRP.”

  Black nodded. “Listen, my wife’s expecting. I’m going home for the night. Call me if there are any new developments.”

  Craig mumbled agreement. Agitated over the lack of progress in the investigation, he checked his cell phone messages but had nothing from Agent Devlin. A message from his father surprised him.

  “What in the hell is the FBI doing to solve this Savannah suicide streak, Craig?” his father bellowed into the phone. “Word is that the deaths may be related to terrorism. Is that true? With the senatorial election next year and germ warfare a hot topic on the political agenda, I need you to make this thing go away quietly. Call me ASA

  Craig shook his head, furious. As usual, his father was more concerned about his political position than about Craig or the lives of citizens.

  Olivia stirred, and he scooted closer to her bed, disturbed over his feelings. For the Iceman, this woman was certainly getting to him. Melting his defenses.

  Hell, he might disagree with her about printing the truth about the virus, but at least her intentions were motivated by a will to help the public. Even Oberman, the head of the DPS, wante
d to keep things quiet, not only to stem panic, but to guard his own reputation.

  A low moan reverberated from Olivia, then her eyes fluttered open. They appeared glassy, her pupils slightly dilated, a confused look pulling at her mouth. “Craig?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  She blinked as if he was out of focus. “You…you saved my life.”

  His jaw tightened. Hell, he’d almost let her get killed. Those long agonizing minutes in the morgue rushed back. The smells, the feel of her stiff, cold hands… He shuddered. “You’re going to be all right.”

  She licked her lips, so he held a cup of water to her mouth and let her sip slowly.

  “Thank…you.” She clenched the sheet between her fingers. “What happened?”

  “A man disguised as a doctor slipped into the recovery room, injected you with a drug to cause a heart attack, then hid you downstairs.”

  “Oh, God, yes.” Fear darkened her eyes. “I…remember. He took me there and left me.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  She shook her head, her eyes flaring with terror.

  “Did he say anything, Olivia?”

  “Just good…goodbye.”

  His jaw tightened. “We’ll find him.”

  She forced a small smile, although she winced immediately as if even that small movement hurt.

  He cleared his throat, forcing himself to regain control, to think like an FBI agent. “What happened earlier today, before you were shot?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Went…went to CIRP. Tried to look at my father’s files.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Got caught.” Her breath rattled out. “Guards took me to Dr. Hall.”

  He leaned his elbows on his knees. “Let me guess, he wasn’t very happy to see you.”

  “Threatened to arrest me if I came back,” she said in a strained voice.

  He grimaced. Hall knew Olivia well enough to realize she wouldn’t give up.

  Had he sent someone after her to frighten her from looking further into her father’s death? Or had someone else at CIRP found out she’d been snooping around? Someone with secrets to hSomeone who would kill to protect his work?