“Thirteen,” she sniffed and I handed her the cloth I had washed her face with earlier. “Is he really gone?”

  “He’s gone. You’re safe. How long have you been bleeding, Mari?”

  “About a week, but just like a regular period, you know? And then today it started getting worse. Charlie didn’t want to bring me to the hospital but I was hurting.” Her hands clasped across her middle. “It really, really, really hurts.”

  “We’re going to get you something for pain, I promise.” I smiled reassuringly and pushed back her hair, as I used to do with Jazzy when she was little. “Do you think you might be pregnant, Mari?” When she nodded, sliding her eyes toward the wall, I asked gently, “How many periods have you missed before this one started?”

  “Two, I think. Maybe,” she whispered.

  Lynnie Bee appeared from behind the curtain and thrust a chart into my hands. I copied the patient’s vital signs, which had changed drastically since triage, and her new ID information onto it. “Wrong name,” I said as I wrote. “It’s Mari Gabrielle Bascomb, age thirteen. Will you get with admitting and see that’s corrected? Here’s her parents’ phone number and address.” I handed the chart back to Lynnie. “Maybe a cop can go to the house and get the parents,” I suggested.

  “I’ll start paperwork to give us permission to treat her,” Lynnie Bee said, deliberately obscure. I nodded. The patient was underage and it was likely she needed surgery. Not that we would tell her that yet.

  “Surgeon?” I asked softly.

  “Ob/gyn on the way.” Lynnie raced from the room.

  Mari looked paler than just a moment ago, even with the head of the bed down at an angle and the LR bolus, and I didn’t like the way her pulse was again increasing. It was now 107. “Sweetheart, Mari, I need to draw some blood and start another IV,” I said. Lynnie darted back through the curtain when my patient—now alert, unlike when I’d started the first IV—wailed in fear.

  Almost mowing Lynnie down, Dr. MacRoper stalked in wearing wrinkled scrubs and sneakers. The man had little taste and not much personality, and I would rather see any doctor in the room than him. He jerked the chart out of Lynnie’s hands and flipped through it, looking at values. Lynnie’s eyes narrowed and she pressed her lips into a thin line, hiding a frown or a snarky retort, I couldn’t tell which.

  Diana, another nurse, moved into the room, bringing an IV pole and pump, and a second bag of fluids. She looked at Dr. Death and then at Lynnie and me, the same worried expression mirrored on both their faces. Dr. Screwup glanced up at the nurses in the room, his eyes moving from face to face. He frowned when he saw me. I raised a brow at him and he looked back at the chart.

  We all sighed with relief when Christopher stuck his head around the corner. “I got this one,” he said to MacRoper. “You wanted that stroke code. It’s here.”

  “Thanks,” Dr. Death said, flipping the chart at Christopher. He sent me one last look as he went out of the room. I couldn’t interpret the expression, but it wasn’t a jolly one. Great. It was clear the man knew I was one of the nurses who had complained about him.

  The tension in the cubicle dropped by about thirty degrees. Under her breath, Diana muttered, “Thank God.” I curled my lips under in amusement. Lynnie grinned ear to ear and slid her eyes to Christopher to see if he’d heard. His expression didn’t change, but his ears turned red.

  “What do we have here?” Christopher asked, his tone carrying that professionally cheery note they teach first-year doctors. He ran a manicured hand through his two-hundred-dollar haircut and shuffled closer in the six-hundred-dollar tasseled loafers from his last trip to Italy. Thousand-dollar reading glasses perched on his nose. In both his wardrobe and his demeanor, he made Dr. Demerol look like a slob.

  “Possible ectopic?” Christopher asked. “Let’s get an ultrasound, CBC, Beta-HCG, cath UA and BMP.” Finally the doctor looked at his patient. “Hello, young lady.” Christopher patted her leg through the sheet. Mari flinched.

  Stretching a hand between his arm and side, I pointed to the admitting diagnosis code that designated rape. Christopher pulled his hand away from her thigh, his flush spreading in consternation. He hadn’t bothered to look at the code or he’d not have touched her in such a familiar manner. He knew better.

  Lynnie looked away, probably to hide a grin. There was a time when Lynnie would have insulted the man for his faux pas without a second thought. But when she’d become the Majors supervisor, she had been forced to dredge up some restraint. I was impressed with her self-discipline.

  “Let’s get a crisis counselor and her family in here,” Christopher said. “I’ll check back for the ultrasound.” The doctor escaped and Diana took the chart from his hands as he went past.

  “You shoulda slugged him for touching her like that,” she whispered to Lynnie. “But at least he saved us from Dr. Death.” Lynnie looked away, biting her lips and I chuckled under my breath. It was hard for Lynnie not to speak her mind.

  According to hospital gossip, Dr. Christopher had been a pediatrician, but, like many doctors, the constant call time had been too much. He had found another specialty that required less dedication in terms of time, one more suited to his personality.

  Other scuttlebutt said that his wife had dumped him, which maybe said something less flattering about him. Most doctors’ wives are too comfortable to take off for less financially secure greener pastures, no matter how boorish their husbands are. But I had no problem with Christopher. He might be dull, but he was competent and capable.

  I pulled the privacy curtain closed again. Bending over Mari, I soothed her, wiping her face. She managed a small smile and I realized that she had healing yellowish bruises on her face. The kidnapper had blackened her eyes recently. The anger I had controlled until now boiled up hard, my breath stuttering for a moment.

  “You’re going to be fine, Mari. I promise. Just fine. And your mother will be here real soon. I need to start an IV and take some blood. I know, I know,” I said when she wailed again. “I’ll be gentle. Okay?” The IV needle had to be big enough to administer blood through, which meant a fairly large bore. I could have lied, but I had discovered early in my career never to lie to patents, even children. I laid out my IV kit and blood collection tubes.

  Mari stared at them with red-rimmed eyes. She didn’t want to comply but I was good with kids and when she finally let me work, Mari barely flinched when I stuck her with the IV needle. Lynnie Bee rolled the ultrasound machine in while I obtained blood and taped the IV in place. After hooking up normal saline, I sent the blood to the lab via the pneumatic system.

  In small hospitals, lab techs draw blood, radiology techs run and develop X-rays and handle ultrasounds, and nurses do only nursing. In most major trauma centers, nurses and techs do overlapping work and I was trained to handle ultrasounds. The abdominal ultrasound on Mari showed a mass above her bladder in the location of her uterus. A fetus. It looked as if it was centrally located and had no heartbeat of its own, which I verified using the fetal heart monitor. Mari’s body was trying to expel a dead fetus. The radiologist checked in, agreed with my assessment and approved the quality of the ultrasonic photographs I had taken. I printed out the pictures and documented that there was no fetal heartbeat.

  It wasn’t my job to tell Mari she had been pregnant and was losing the baby. That was a physician’s responsibility. I schooled my features so she wouldn’t read the news in my face.

  Knocking, the female cop stuck her head beyond the curtain. “Can I ask her if she knows the kidnapper’s name and address?”

  Mari turned paler than before and tears began again to run down her face. She swallowed hard. “I don’t know the address. But he said his name was Tom. Tom Smith.”

  The cop nodded. “Thanks. No answer at your parents’ home. We got a unit heading out that way. You got any other family in the area?”

  “My grandmother.” Mari gave her the phone number and address as I stripped off my gloves and the blood-streaked paper gown. The cop left at a dead run.

  “I need to take this information to the doctor, Mari. Anything you need to tell me before I go?”

  “No. Except I’m still hurting. Why?”

  I touched her hand, strapped down with tape on a board. “Because you said earlier the kidnapper’s name was Charlie. Not Tom Smith.”

  Mari jerked her hand from mine and looked away again. “You didn’t hear me right.”

  I debated arguing with her. Stockholm syndrome was one possibility, the girl coming to love and care for the kidnapper, beginning to see things his way, wanting to protect him. Another was the possibility that she had aided and abetted a kidnapper she already knew, someone she wanted to run away with and still wanted to protect. I looked at the bruises on her wrists and ankles. She had been shackled. Her abductor had tried to strangle her, had beaten her regularly and savagely, if the fresh and fading bruises were any indication.

  I checked again and Mari’s bleeding had slowed. Her blood pressure was back up enough to make me happy and her pulse was stable at ninety-eight. Much better.

  A tap sounded on the glass door behind me, and I saw through the crack in the curtain that the rape-crisis counselor was here. Fortunately it was Maggie, a woman I had worked with before. I held up a finger indicating I needed a moment.

  “Mari, I know you’re scared. And I know you were with him a long time. I know it may feel natural to protect him, even though he hurt you and frightened you. But if you hide anything now and the police discover it later, it could cause problems, both for you and for him. Think about it, okay?”

  Her face crumpled as if I had hit her, or betrayed her. And maybe I had. “I’m not hiding anything. Go away.” Fresh tears trailed down and dripped into her ears.

  “Okay. I understand. But you might remember something, anything, and I hope if you do, you’ll tell us. Please.” I stepped beyond the curtain and briefed Maggie. When I explained that Mari was hiding something, trying to protect her attacker, the counselor sighed, her massive, plaid-covered bosom moving heavily. I thought buttons might explode off her shirt and damage my eyes, but she exhaled and they stayed intact.

  “It happens,” Maggie said. “More than I would believe it, if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. These girls are so young. So afraid.”

  “Yeah, well, this one may have information wanted by the FBI. Expect to be deluged by special agents and Department of Social Services and God knows who else.”

  “No one screws around with my kids,” Maggie said. “Cops’ll see her when I say they can see her. And if DSS wants a piece of the action, they can deal with law enforcement while I help with the girl. Why FBI, anyway?”

  “Did you see the news today about the serial kidnapper in the region?”

  “The one who’s been taking girls from the city, killing them and burying them out in the country? Yeah. Why? Not—” Maggie grabbed my wrist. “Not—”

  “Mari was on the list of missing girls. That’s why the feds will be interested in her. It may be hard to keep them away. It may be wrong to keep them away.”

  Maggie swore viciously just as Emma Simmons, Jim Ramsey and Julie Schwartz blew into the ED. Great. And I’d only recently called the woman an ass. I had to learn to watch my tongue. Someday. But not today.

  12

  I pointed at Emma and got in the first volley. “This is a hospital. My patient has to go to surgery as soon as a surgeon gets here. She’s bleeding. She will not be harassed, do you understand?” Behind me, Maggie took up position between the door and Mari, her arms crossed.

  “What the hell are you doing here.” It wasn’t a question.

  “My job as a forensic nurse.”

  “Get her out of the way,” Emma ordered.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Emma turned blazing eyes to Jim Ramsey.

  He held up a hand. “You wanted her on the task force because of her skills in nursing for just this reason. In case we got a live one. Well, we got a live one.”

  “And I have HIPAA laws to deal with. Federal laws you would have to arrest me over if I broke them,” I said, my voice hard, but my eyes trying to tell them what they needed to know. “And you didn’t give me permission to take the red folder.”

  Jim caught on. Turning to Julie, he pulled a red folder out of a stack of paperwork under her arm. I took it and opened the folder to page six. The photos of all the missing girls stared out at me. His brows lifted in a question, and I didn’t know how to tell him what to do. I settled on “Ask me,” and pointed at the photos.

  Jim looked blank.

  “Is one of these girls here in the E.R.?” Julie asked.

  “No comment.”

  A sharp silence met my reply. “Is it her?” Julie pointed at the photo of Jillian.

  “No. She’s dead.”

  “Is it her?” Jim pointed to a missing girl. He had caught on.

  “No.”

  “This one?” He pointed at another photo.

  “No.”

  “This one?”

  “No comment.”

  “Mari Gabrielle Bascomb,” he said.

  “You did not hear that from me,” I said, my voice firm.

  Emma smiled at me in a way that was significantly less sharklike than before, and there was a crafty kind of consideration in her eyes. “Well, well, well. Let me guess.” She pursed her lips and walked in front of me in a little half circle. The other cops backed up to give her room as if they had seen her do this before. “You were the one who told the local cops to give us a call.”

  “No comment,” I said, watching her move. She stopped and faced me, reassessing. I hoped she was trying to forget that I had called her an ass….

  “So there is a way around this ‘stupid’—” Emma made little quotation marks in the air with two fingers of each hand “—HIPAA law. When can I talk to her?”

  “That’s not happening. She’s underage and frightened and protecting the father.”

  “The father? Not her father?”

  “No comment.”

  Emma Simmons swore with words that let me know she had a real problem with men in general and with rapists in particular. That last part we could agree on.

  A uniformed cop ran up, breathless. “He’s gone, Special Agent Simmons. But hospital security has cameras on the entrance he used and on the gate where he parked. They’re pulling the tapes now for review.”

  “I got it.” Jim turned on a heel and ran in the wake of the uniform. They disappeared around a corner.

  “DSS will be here soon,” I said, “and a surgeon’s on the way. You—” I nodded to Emma “—need to talk to the nursing supervisor, Lynnie Bee.” I looked over my shoulder at Maggie, her stout frame and dyed matte-black hair a challenge to the world. “Maggie, I know DSS isn’t here yet, but we need to let someone in to talk to her.”

  “Like a young fresh-faced FBI agent?” She was looking at Julie. “Mari’s scared. We need someone who’ll go easy on her.”

  “Make pals,” Emma said to Julie.

  “This way,” I said to Agent Simmons, glancing at my watch again. It was 7:15, and still no surgeon.

  “You handled that well,” Emma said as I led her to Lynnie Bee. “Didn’t call me an ass even once.”

  “You didn’t act like one,” I said, and nearly choked on the words. Emma laughed as if she found straight talk an appealing and positive character trait. My mother would have feigned a swoon if she could have heard me. “Don’t get used to it,” I grumbled. “If other girls weren’t missing it would never have happened.”

  “You’re a real ball-buster, aren’t you?”

  My brows went up. Me?

  “Looks like the decision to involve you in this investigation was right. As long as a member of your family isn’t implicated in any way, at any point, as a suspect, we need you on this task force.”

  “What task force?” Lynnie asked.

  “That’s need to know,” Emma said.

  “And as long as it doesn’t get in the way of our job, hurt our patients, or get us in trouble with the law, she’s willing,” Lynnie said. “Whatever it is.”

  Emma looked at Lynnie and stuck out her hand. “Emma Simmons, supervisory SAC of the Columbia Field Office of the FBI.”

  Lynnie Bee took her hand, gauging and measuring the woman in front of her. “Lynnette Beatrice Stubin, at the moment charge nurse of the CHC ED. Or God’s right-hand woman. Take your pick.”

  I figured that explained the situation well enough for even Emma Simmons to understand. Two alpha females on the same turf. It would be a catfight or a remade world.

  I left the sparring partners to visit, have tea and crumpets, agree on information to be shared about the task force or cuss one another, and went looking for Department of Social Services. I needed to head the DSS officer off and explain the custody information. Hopefully that would give Julie enough time to win the trust of a frightened little girl and get whatever information my patient would share. It was 7:25. Where was the surgeon?

  I still hadn’t opened the rape kit. I needed to obtain the evidence for police that might lead to a conviction. And Mari was going to surgery, where most of it would be lost. Yet I didn’t stop what I was doing. Not just yet. I spotted Carmella Gonzales, the DSS officer on call, before she saw me, and waved her into an empty patient room to chat. Carmella was from Puerto Rico and had married a local landscape contractor, originally from Mexico. She had two kids, both in college and a caseload longer than both my arms. She worked over sixty hours a week for way less money than I made and had more compassion than I ever thought about having.

  She also knew the system inside and out and she’d skin me alive if she discovered that I had kept her from her client while a cop chatted her up. While she took notes and filled out paperwork, I told the social services officer everything that had happened up to now, including the pertinent medical information. Everything except that a fed was with her client. It took a good twenty minutes, with questions and answers in great detail. I finished with “Mari is probably losing the baby. Surgeon is on the way. OR has been notified and a surgical team is waiting for her. You won’t have much time with her before she goes up.”