It was a hectic night in the emergency room of Mercy Hospital. Two auto accidents, a robbery victim, a domestic assault and the collapse of a temporary grandstand at a softball game had the ward brimming and the staff stretched thin. Emergency room nurse Susan Hitchcock was helping one of the ER doctors stabilize one of the auto accident victims when she heard the entrance doors open. She glanced over and saw it was the trauma case they had been warned was coming. Susan allowed herself a tired sigh, then straightened up.
"I'll do the triage on the new one," she said to the doctor, not waiting for his confirmation. She knew she wasn't needed as much with the accident victim and that there was no one else left to help.
Susan hurried over to the gurney that was being wheeled in by two city fire department paramedics. As she neared them, one of the paramedics slipped on some stray blood on the floor and tumbled to the floor. His partner turned to him as they all heard the large, booming groan come from the fallen medic, followed by a sharp curse.
"You all right, twinkletoes?" the partner asked.
"Damn it, I think I hurt my knee!" the medic yelped.
"Can he stand?" Susan asked. "He's kind of in the way down there."
She looked down at the patient on the gurney. Susan's training allowed her to remain outwardly unfazed, but her first thought was "Lord, this guy is a mess!" He was a youngish man, early thirties, with black hair and dark, dangerous, outlaw features that romance heroines always fell in perilous love with. Susan could see he had taken at least four gunshots to the chest and abdomen.
"If your partner's not seriously hurt," Susan said to the medic, "I need you to get that crash cart over there."
"Please..." gasped the patient softly.
"Don't worry," Susan replied. "I won't let you die."
"In my pocket..." he gasped desperately. "Disk...important...important."
She couldn't dissuade him from trying to reach for it, so Susan finally fished it out herself. It was a CD-ROM in a jewel case without any markings on it. Seeing it in her hand seemed to calm him.
"Hide it..." he rasped. "Destroy it...dangerous...too dangerous."
"I've got multiple gunshots here!" Susan shouted as she stuffed the CD into her pocket. "He goes to the head of the line!"
"Dangerous..." he gasped as the medic arrived with the crash cart, then lapsed into unconsciousness and erratic breathing.
"CODE BLUE!" Susan shouted. Three of the other staffers detached themselves from their patients and raced over. The fallen medic pushed himself to his feet and hobbled over to help out as the group tried to revive the quickly failing patient.
"Cause of death?" asked the police officer filling out the gunshot report.
"Well," sighed Susan as she leaned against the wall near the nurse's station, "you'd have to ask pathology for an exact cause of death. Preliminary cause is cardiac arrest brought on by at least four chest and thoracic gunshot wounds and shock."
"Did he say who shot him?" asked the cop.
"No," she replied.
"Any ideas?"
"No, he came in, I tried to stabilize him and he died."
"OK. Rough shift?"
"Rough shift."
"You have to come in tomorrow?"
"No," she smiled. "I'm looking at seventy-two hours of freedom."
"Well, I won't keep you from them," the officer smiled.
Down in pathology, a man and a woman approached the morgue attendant's desk. At the desk, Betty Freeman was finishing up the paperwork on their latest case. Betty was young, blonde and cute in a cuddly, bubbly sort of manner, the one person you would least expect to work in the morgue. She was the type you would expect to work as a professional cheerleader. But she chose this work and seemed to enjoy it.
Betty looked up from her paperwork at the pair standing before her. The man was tall and handsome, with penetrating eyes, a granite jaw and a disarming smile. His gray-flecked black hair betrayed his age, which was nearing fifty. However, Betty couldn't take her eyes off of that mouth. For a moment, she had a flash fantasy of this man seducing her in a dark corner of a French restaurant.
His companion was a squat, compared to him, voluptuous woman, her robust, womanly figure accented by her very tight blouse and short skirt. Her face was made up with dark, sultry features and was framed by short black hair cut boyish and plastered to her skull with gel. Gaudy earrings dangled from her lobes, her full lips curled into a playful smile, but Betty saw no mirth in her dark eyes.
"Can I help you?" she asked the gentleman, preferring to ignore the lady.
"Yes, thank you," the man said pleasantly, with a thick French accent that made Betty fall even more in lust with him. "My brother died tonight. I was told that he and his affects were brought down here."
"Oh, I'm sorry," Betty said. "We did have a John Doe brought down here tonight. I'll get his things, and then we'll need you to identify the body."
Betty minced off to the storage closet where personal effects were locked up. She realized she was giving the debonair Frenchman a little extra wiggle, was momentarily embarrassed by it, then convinced herself that it might just make him notice her. As she searched for the envelope, Betty marveled at how attracted she was to this older, yet still handsome man. It was a reaction she'd never experienced before, such open, naked lust for another human being. It was disconcerting.
It also was distracting. Betty didn't notice anyone behind her until a hand clamped a cloth over her nose and mouth and another closed around her throat. Startled, Betty inhaled a lung full of the overpowering vapors clinging to the cloth. Immediately her head began to swim. She tried to jerk away from the cloth, but couldn't find the coordination. Besides the hands holding her were strong. A few feeble struggles were all she could muster before she sank into oblivion, her last conscious thought the realization that the sinister woman was her attacker.
Susan sat in the locker room, parked on a bench. She was still in her ER scrubs and was suddenly unable to move due to fatigue. It wasn't always this bad in ER, but when it was it made her question, even momentarily, whether this job was worth it. Her head creaked up and she stared at her reflection in the mirror across from her. Susan was only twenty-seven. She was tall, fit, shapely, a woman with thick brown hair drawn back in a loose ponytail. She had an easy, natural beauty that didn't need adornment. Susan didn't have to do this. She could be the trophy wife of just about any millionaire who was single.
"Right, Suzie," she smiled to herself and pried her body off the bench. "You actually think you could leave all this for winters on the Riviera, sipping champagne in a gold lame bikini."
As Susan stripped off her pants, she felt the CD case in her pocket. Seeing it revived her memory concerning it and the urgency in which it was given to her.
"'Important' he said," thought Susan. "'Hide it...or destroy it.' I wonder what's so important? Maybe it'll have a clue to who shot him."
Changing quickly into old jeans and a burgundy tank top, Susan went into the ER doctor's office and sat down at the computer. She inserted the CD into the drive and brought up the menu. The file names surprised and intrigued her, and she opened the top one.
"{It's not here, Marie}," Armand said in French as he sifted through the envelope containing the John Doe's effects.
"Are you comfortable, Cherie?" Marie asked Betty, drawing the last strip of adhesive tape tight across the woman's chest. Betty was bound, gagged, blindfolded and shoved into a corner of the storage closet. "I can fix that."
Betty whimpered. She had been rendered helpless when her wrists and ankles were bound and her eyes and mouth were taped. However Marie continued to criss-cross the poor woman's body with tape while Armand searched. She seemed to enjoy binding Betty and grew more excited the tighter Betty was bound.
"Marie!" Armand admonished. "{That's enough. The disk is not here}."
"{Spoil sport}," Marie replied petulantly. "{Perhaps the police have it}."
"{It is a possibility, but let us hope not. Perhaps he passed it on before he died}."
"{To the medics}," Marie said, continuing his line of thought, whisking up a copy of the pathology report, "{or to this Susan Hitchcock}?"
"{We must check both. You find this nurse. I will check the medics}."
Armand turned to leave. Marie knelt down and stroked Betty's chin.
"I must go now, Cherie. Do not miss me too much. Perhaps we can play again sometime."
Betty shivered at the thought.
A dark figure stood in shadows against an administration building opposite the hospital emergency room. Beyond the fact that the figure was female, no other facts were discernible. After a few moments more, she stepped forward. Faint light from the parking lot caught her face, revealing the finely braided black hair, the elegant African cheekbones, regal African nose and lips, the deep brown complexion and the black dots that floated in white, making her eyes look so very penetrating.
"Where is she?" the woman wondered to herself. "The others from that shift have all gone home."
The woman stared a few more minutes, clearly dissatisfied by the way events were turning out.
"I guess I'll have to go in and confront her," she thought reluctantly.
Reaching back to feel her short skirt in order to make sure her thigh holster was in place and the gun still there, the woman strode forward with determination.
Susan glanced at her watch. An hour had passed. She shook her head, then glanced back at the screen to the files that so fascinated her. Most of it was over her head, but she could recognize enough to know this was important. The CD ejected and Susan put it back in the case.
"Whoever shot that John Doe must have wanted this pretty badly," she thought. "I'd better get this to the police."
She started to slip the disk case into her purse, then stopped. After a moment's inspiration, she got a blank disk from the doctor's pile and switched it with the disk in the case. Then she dug out her disc player and put the CD ROM disk in the CD player. Jamming everything back into her purse, Susan started to leave, only to find a stranger in the doorway.
She was a black woman easily six feet tall. She had shoulders like a linebacker and a lean, hard aura that communicated physical prowess, but was also incredibly feminine, from the African braids flowing down the back of her head to the round, voluptuous curves poured into the pale green blouse and the dark green short skirt. She had long, elegant legs and a regal elegance to her face. She was a big woman, but there was no mistaking she was a woman.
"Susan Hitchcock?" the woman asked. Susan nodded. "I'm agent Shondra Lockwood with the FBI. I'd like to ask you a few questions about the shooting victim you treated earlier."
"I already filed a police report," sighed Susan. "Can't you read that?"
"I could," Shondra replied, "but it's easier to ask you in person. Besides, the local cops might not have asked everything I need to know."
Something about this was bothering Susan.
"Do you have some sort of ID?" she asked.
"Yeah, of course," Shondra replied quickly and began fishing through her purse. "I know it's in here somewhere. Anyway, did the victim say anything to you while he was alive?"
"No," Susan lied warily.
"No, huh? There were no indications as to who shot him?"
"None."
"Any sort of outward evidence?" Shondra asked, continuing to fish through her purse. "Was there something on his clothes? Was he holding something? Was anything in his pockets?"
"I didn't go through his pockets," Susan replied.
"They'd probably have that down in the morgue, huh? Thing is, we think the John Doe might have had a computer disk with him." She glanced at Susan to gauge her reaction. "You didn't see anything like that, did you?"
"No."
"OK, that's what I wanted to know. Sorry I kept you from your work."
Susan nodded. She also watched the strange black woman until she was completely out of sight. Clearly she wanted the disk, but why? Was she really an FBI agent? She didn't seem like it to her, though she had a government aura to her. So what did it mean?
Susan walked to her car and got in. If this Shondra person wasn't government, she was after the disk for her own reasons. She may have even shot the John Doe. However, if she was government, but lied about which branch, that meant some agency was trying to hide this information, possibly for their own purposes. Could she trust the police enough to turn it over if they were just going to hand it to this unknown agency? But if not the police, whom could she turn to?
It was all making her head swim. Susan decided to go home, sleep on it and decide in the morning. She turned out of the parking lot and down Fifth Street, headed home. Silently another car pulled out of concealment and began following her.
Chapter Two