Читать книгу To Trust a Stranger - Lynn Bulock - Страница 8

At ten that morning the deputy insisted on taking Jessie home. “I don’t care if you come back in an hour, but you need to get a shower, some different clothes and have your own car here.” His expression said he didn’t want any arguments and Jessie couldn’t think of any good ones anyway. She couldn’t remember being this tired and worn-out before.

“Will you go back to the hospital?” she asked on the ride back to the condo. It seemed longer going home, but then they paid attention to speed limits and traffic laws this time.

“Not right away,” Steve said. He sounded as tired as she felt. “I have about six cases I’m actively working right now and several need my attention. Plus I need to talk to the fire investigators and verify that this was arson. And we need to make sure there wasn’t anyone else hurt or killed in the fire. Most of the apartments in the complex were empty, it being the middle of the day, but there are always exceptions.”

Jessie shivered, thinking that some other family might be going through this the way she and Laura were. Her thoughts took her to a dark place and the deputy had to put a hand on her shoulder to let her know they had stopped in her driveway. It took a moment to come back to full alertness. It took even longer to make sure she had her key and thank the man for all he had done so far.

“I’d say I do this for all my cases, but that isn’t quite true,” he said. He was close enough to her, standing on her front porch, that she could see things about Stephen Gardner that she hadn’t noticed before. His dark eyes had little green flecks in them, and he had tiny, thin lines that could have been smile lines starting to crinkle just a bit at the corners of his warm eyes.

Right now he didn’t look as if he’d smiled in quite some time. “If you don’t give most people this kind of attention, why are you doing it now?” Jessie didn’t know why she asked the question, but suddenly the answer was important.

“Something about your sister…and you…has me deeply involved. So involved that I should probably turn the case over to somebody else, but I can’t.” He straightened his shoulders and looked back toward the car. “Right now I need to go work on this, and the other cases I’m investigating. I’ll see you soon.”

Jessie nodded. She didn’t know what to say. Stephen stood on her doorstep long enough to watch her put the key in the lock, open the door and verify that everything was all right. Then he left and she came into the condo past the front hall and sat on the sofa.

Jessie figured she would spend about half an hour at home and head back to the hospital. The rooms echoed with loneliness without Laura around. Would she ever come back here?

Looking over to the living room bookcase Jessie saw the photo album between two college textbooks on the bottom shelf. Getting up, she pulled it out and opened it to the first page and got a shock. The picture of the two of them on their picnic was right there in the album. But how could that be? Surely Laura would have told her if she had a copy made. This didn’t make sense. The print didn’t look as if it had been removed from the album and replaced any time recently, either.

She felt so tired she didn’t know whether she could trust her own senses. Maybe there really was a logical explanation for this. Jessie just couldn’t think of one now. Instead she went into her bedroom and pulled out clean clothes. After a hot shower she pushed away the temptation to crawl into the beckoning bed and went to the kitchen instead. She packed a bag full of the kind of snacks she usually took to school when she had long office hours and added a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. Now that she knew the gravity of her sister’s condition, she planned her stay at the hospital to be a longer one.

Hunting for the car charger to her cell phone, she remembered she’d given it to Laura last week. No sense in trying to find that. She made a mental note to ask Deputy Gardner about Laura’s car. Somewhere in an apartment complex parking lot there was a sporty blue compact unless it had been destroyed by the fire, as well.

Jessie checked the contents of her bag and picked up her address book. By tonight she would need to call the department chair and a few others so that she could arrange for somebody to cover her classes for a while. She drove back to the hospital on automatic pilot, thankful that no traffic cop caught sight of her on the way.

“Dr. Anderson? I don’t recognize you. Can I help you with something?” The sharp-eyed nurse’s comment almost made Cassidy drop the medical chart. Why did the woman have to show up now, in this small window of time?

“I’m doing a neuro consult for Dr. Peterson on another case and this woman caught my eye,” Cassidy said with conviction. A firm voice could get one through almost any situation.

The nurse’s eyes narrowed. “Surely you don’t think anybody’s going to ask you to do a neurological exam on my patient?”

“Not a full exam, no. But I’m working on a paper on the neuropathology of specific trauma survivors and wondered if your patient might fit as part of my study. Once I looked at her chart more closely, I could see that won’t be the case.” Cassidy handed the chart back to the nurse. “I won’t disturb her.”

The nurse’s silent glare said that no one would be disturbing her patient while she was around. Cassidy walked away quickly, the way any busy specialist in a large hospital would. No one followed. Into the stairwell and down a flight quickly, Cassidy made it onto the staff parking lot before anyone could notice. The close call had been worth it; one look showed that the patient wasn’t going to cause any problems for anyone.

Laura didn’t show any more signs of being alert. “She’s not in terrible pain,” the nurse assured Jessie. “With third-degree burns the nerve endings are numbed enough that things aren’t as painful. We’re almost glad to hear that someone’s in a fair amount of pain because it usually means they’ve got more second-degree burns than third. Pain is easier to treat than the more severe burns.”

So what sounded like good news at first didn’t look like good news at all. Jessie asked about getting her sister off the breathing tube again, but that request was turned down. “She sounds like she could be developing pneumonia. We can’t risk it” was the doctor’s terse reply. After that he whisked Jessie out of Laura’s cubicle for a while for treatment. She went back to the family waiting room, which seemed quiet for a change.

“Ms. Barker? Jessie?” She knew she needed rest when she startled awake stiffly from her position on the couchlike vinyl bench attached to the wall. Even sitting straight up with the television high on the wall droning through news headlines, she’d fallen asleep. And judging from the urgent tone in the nurse’s voice it must have been for a while. “You need to come back with us now.”

Somewhere during Jessie’s last vigil at her sister’s bedside, it got dark outside. Laura didn’t ever look her way again with any kind of understanding in her eyes or say anything even when they switched the oxygen tube for one that would have let her talk. When they asked Jessie if there was anyone they should call, at first she shook her head. Then she called the nurse back and gave her Deputy Gardner’s business card.

He was there in a very short time. He looked as if he’d dressed hurriedly when he was called, no tie and a shirt that hadn’t been pressed. “You came,” Jessie said. “Thank you. I didn’t want to be alone right now.”

“You aren’t alone. You won’t be alone,” he said simply.

“Do you want to sit down?” It seemed odd to be talking about such mundane things while her sister lay dying.

“No, I’ll stand.” He looked at the figure on the bed. “It always seems more respectful somehow.” The way he said it made Jessie wonder how many people Steve Gardner had seen die. Personally she hoped she would never have to do this again. She felt ripped apart by grief as she watched Laura.

“Do you want me to call someone else? One of the chaplains or somebody from my church?”

Jessie shook her head, watching her sister’s struggle to breathe. “I don’t want anybody else, especially not some stranger.”

“All right.” It was the last thing he said out loud for quite a while. So when the end came, Jessie wasn’t alone there by the bedside. The deputy didn’t say anything but his presence seemed to lend a strength Jessie needed. She didn’t even comment when he stood there with a firm but gentle hand on her shoulder, obviously in prayer. In Jessie’s eyes Laura was far beyond most human help, and if he thought prayer might do something he was welcome to it. Nothing could hurt Laura now anyway.

After it was all over, hospital personnel led Jessie into the family waiting room where she sat again on one of the couches feeling numb and brittle as an ice carving. After a few minutes one of the nurses asked if she wanted to have a moment with Laura now that they’d taken out all the tubes and needles. Jessie almost said no, but something made her change her mind. Maybe it would hurt less some time down the line if she had a different last memory of Laura than the one she had now.

Jessie passed the deputy, writing something on a piece of paper at the nurses’ station. She hadn’t thought about all the paperwork that must have to get done at a time like this. It pained her that her sister’s life was reduced to paperwork for a sheriff’s deputy. Saying nothing, she went in to see Laura. The form on the bed looked as peaceful as possible. It was good to think that she was done with the horrible suffering of the last three days. Jessie reached out to touch a cool leg where the sheet had slipped. Her sister’s unburned flesh looked like pale marble in contrast to the bandages higher up on her body.

In that act of reaching out, her fingers froze and her brain refused to process what she was seeing. Perhaps she was even more confused than she thought. She went to the other side of the bed and looked down at the still body. Anger and bewilderment welled up in her. “Deputy Gardner?” When he didn’t answer, she said it louder.

He came into the cubicle still holding his papers. “What is it?”

“This isn’t Laura. I don’t know who this was, but it isn’t my sister.”

His brow wrinkled and he looked as if he wanted to say all kinds of things. Instead he stood there silently for a moment before he asked a simple question. “Why do you say that?”

Jessie lifted her right pant leg, exposing her ankle and the tiny bluebird tattooed there. “Look at this. We got them on vacation two summers ago. It was one of those stupid things you regret afterward when it’s already done.” Laura hadn’t regretted hers, though. In fact she’d shown it off.

He looked at the body on the bed before saying anything more, and then, understanding growing, looked back at Jessie. “Your sister had one, too?”

“On her ankle, just like I did.” Jessie pointed to the ankle of the person on the bed. The pale skin was unmarked by fire or anything else. Who just died in this hospital room? And where was her sister, Laura?

Steve Gardner’s brain hurt. An hour after the death of the person he’d thought was Laura Barker he’d made the first round of phone calls to get crime scene investigators involved. Although the hospital itself wasn’t the scene of a crime, the fact that this death was an obvious homicide meant all the sheriff’s department’s resources needed to be called into play.

It had been difficult to explain to the medical examiner’s staff why he needed as much care taken as he did. Nothing about this case so far made any sense. At first things seemed merely confusing; a young man who appeared to have come from nowhere was missing and a woman who’d only known him a couple of days was left in his apartment near death.

The fire someone had set to destroy evidence hadn’t left many clues except the identity of the woman and now that was in question. Not just in question according to Jessie. She was firm in saying that the body didn’t belong to her sister. In some cases he’d question a distraught relative’s statement, thinking that they just wanted to believe against hope that the person they cared about couldn’t possibly be dead. But Jessie wasn’t hysterical or in denial. Instead she seemed perfectly calm.

He realized that Jessie was staring at him, waiting for him to make some kind of decision about what to do next. Here he was, with his first case like this as a lead investigator, and it was threatening to implode on him. If Jessie Barker was right, then he’d have to involve the Major Case Squad. Only the combined efforts of the best homicide experts in the five counties that made up the St. Louis area would feel qualified to deal with this. Steve groaned inwardly. The last thing he wanted to do was make an immediate call to the county sheriff, but he didn’t have any other choice. “How sure are you that this isn’t your sister?” he asked Jessie, knowing even then what her answer would be.

“I’m positive.” Her gray-blue eyes were rimmed with red and her brown hair was in disarray, but Jessie spoke with a certainty Steve wasn’t ready to question. She had radiated authority the whole time he’d known her and it had impressed him. Most of the relatives he saw in tough cases went to pieces, but not this woman.

No one else was around who could dispute her claim anyway. To do that, he’d have to talk with Laura’s coworkers at the day spa and see if there were any friends there that knew her well enough to verify that she’d had that tattoo. Even then, he’d have more of a mess on his hands. If this wasn’t Laura Barker who was it? And what happened to the real Laura, and Adrian Bando?

So far Bando hadn’t turned up alive or dead, and trying to trace him hadn’t been promising, either. It was as if he’d just shown up out of the blue less than six months ago without any history before that. No driver’s license in any state, no Social Security number in the name he went by now and no other records that matched his name or fingerprints left in the apartment. Whoever Bando had been before that, he had a clean record and hadn’t been in the military.

Steve shook his head, trying to clear the fog. “You know, one thing is pretty certain. If that isn’t your sister…”

“It isn’t. I know for sure now that it isn’t,” Jessie said firmly.

“I wasn’t arguing with you, Ms. Barker. I was just thinking out loud. And if you’ll let me finish…” Steve felt bad immediately about the tone he’d used. No one who’d just gone through what Jessie Barker had needed more grief.

He stayed silent a moment trying to compose himself, asking God to settle his troubled feelings so that he could do his job with the skill it demanded. “As I said, if that isn’t your sister there’s not much either of us can do here to figure out who it is, and where Laura might be now. I need to go back to work, and you should probably go home and get some rest.”

Tears filled Jessie’s eyes and Steve felt even worse than before. He had no way to comfort this woman on what was probably the worst day of her life. “I know you’re right, but I feel so confused. Whoever this is, she must have looked a lot like Laura before all this happened to her.” Her eyes widened and she sat down quickly.

“What is it?”

“I know it’s not Laura, but I just realized something. The one time she spoke to me, she called me by name.” Steve leaned in close as the tears started to slide down her cheeks. He just caught her last whispered words. “She said I was beautiful.”

He felt an almost overpowering urge to gather this near stranger into his arms and give her someone to lean on. “Is there anybody at all we can call to be with you?”

Jessie shook her head. She looked at him with an intensity that made him wary. There was something that she wasn’t telling him. But then she sighed and her mood shifted. “There’s no one. I told you before that we lost our parents when we were children. We spent most of our childhood in the foster care system until Laura turned eighteen and we’ve lived together ever since.”

“No boyfriend?” Why did he care about the answer suddenly?

“Nobody serious for either of us. I’m too busy and Laura, believe it or not, was a little shy around men.” Her expression brightened a little. “No, I guess I can still say Laura is a little shy.”

“That’s true,” Steve agreed, even though his practical cop’s nature felt like telling her that just because the figure on the bed wasn’t her sister didn’t mean Laura was alive. He prayed silently that when they opened the trunk of the car they’d impounded after the fire there wouldn’t be anybody in it.

Jessie hadn’t heard the change in his tone and he felt thankful about that. “Do you think you’ll be okay to drive home?”

She didn’t answer him right away. “Probably,” she said after a while. “I’m still trying to take in the fact that my sister is out there somewhere. After the last couple days, I’ve been getting myself used to thinking of her…not here.” She wasn’t the first person he’d seen who refused to say the word dead to talk about a loved one.

“How do you figure out who this person really is?” she asked, forcing him to pay attention to the process, as well.

“First we’ll call evidence techs from the county coroner’s office in to process her. We’ll take fingerprints and compare them to those on file in different databases. We’ll take blood and tissue samples to do DNA tests. And just to be sure we’ll need to take blood from you, as well, just to make the fact that this isn’t your sister official.”

Jessie nodded. He felt thankful that she wasn’t arguing with what he told her. “How long will the results of those tests take?”

“Days. Unlike the TV crime shows where they get their results in fifty-five minutes, real life works a little slower. I imagine you wish it didn’t.”

A half smile lifted one corner of her mouth slightly. “You’re right. The sooner we know who this is, or can at least prove it isn’t Laura, the sooner you might be able to find her.” The specter of whether the police might find Laura alive or not hung in the air between them as an unspoken threat. Steve decided not to pursue that for now.

The evidence technicians came into the room and Steve eased Jessie out so that the techs could do their work. Even now that they knew the figure on the bed was a stranger, he didn’t want Jessie to have to witness the things that would happen next.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me about your sister, or your own life?” The words were out of his mouth before Steve was quite sure why he’d asked them. Didn’t he already have enough to do? Still, his experience as an investigator made him value those hunches that drove him to ask a last question.

Jessie shrugged. “Not really.” Her expression said something else. There was information she kept to herself right now, but he didn’t know Jessie well enough to know how important her private information might be. Given her cryptic look it could be anything from a stash of unpaid traffic tickets to her sister being involved in criminal activity. What he’d seen of Jessie so far led him to believe that her secret might be closer to the traffic tickets, or something even more trivial. At least he hoped so; Jessie Barker intrigued him and for a change he wanted that feeling to come from something positive, not somebody’s criminal nature. Still, watching Jessie walk away gave Steve an uncanny feeling that something very serious was wrong.