I hold freedom in the palm of my hand. It comes in the shape of a tiny white pentagon with MSD 97 stamped on one side. Decadron, four milligrams. Such a pretty shape for a pill, not just another boring disk or torpedo-shaped caplet like so many other medicines. This design took a leap of imagination, a spark of whimsy. I picture the marketing folks at Merck Pharmaceuticals, sitting around a conference table, asking each other: “How can we make this tablet instantly recognizable?” And the result is this five-sided pill, which rests like a tiny jewel in my hand. I have been saving it, hiding it away in a small tear in my mattress, waiting for just the right time to use its magic.
Waiting for a sign.
I sit curled up on the cot in my cell, a book propped up on my knees. The surveillance camera sees only a studious prisoner reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It cannot see through the cover of the book. It cannot see what I hold in my hand.
Downstairs, in the well of the dayroom, a commercial blares on the TV and a Ping-Pong ball clacks back and forth on the table. Yet another exciting evening in Cell Block C. In an hour, the intercom will announce lights-out, and the men will climb the stairs to their cells, shoes clanging on metal steps. They will each walk into their cages, obedient rats minding their master in the squawk box. In the guard booth, the command will be typed into the computer, and all cell doors will simultaneously close, locking the rats in for the night.
I curl forward, bending my head to the page, as though the print is too small. I stare with fierce concentration at “Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene Three: A street. Antonio and Sebastian approach…”
Nothing to watch here, my friends. Just a man on his cot, reading. A man who suddenly coughs and reflexively puts his hand to his mouth. The camera is blind to the small tablet in my palm. It does not see the flick of my tongue, or the pill clinging to it like a bitter wafer as it’s drawn into my mouth. I swallow the tablet dry, needing no water. It is small enough to go down easily.
Even before it dissolves in my stomach, I imagine I can feel its power swirling through my bloodstream. Decadron is the brand name for dexamethasone, an adrenocortical steroid with profound effects on every organ in the human body. Glucocorticoids such as Decadron affect everything from blood sugar, to fluid retention, to DNA synthesis. Without them, the body collapses. They help us maintain our blood pressure and stave off the shock of injury and infection. They affect our bone growth and fertility, muscle development and immunity.
They alter the composition of our blood.
When at last the cage doors slide shut and the lights go out, I lie on my cot, feeling my blood pulse through me. Imagining the cells as they tumble through my veins and arteries.
I have seen blood cells numerous times through the microscope. I know the shape and function of each one, and with just a glance through the lens I can tell you if a blood smear is normal. I can scan a field and immediately estimate the percentages of different leukocytes- the white blood cells that defend us from infection. The test is called a white blood cell differential, and I have performed it countless times as a medical technician.
I think of my own leukocytes circulating in my veins. At this very moment, my differential white count is changing. The tablet of Decadron, which I swallowed two hours ago, has by now dissolved in my stomach and the hormone is swirling through my system, performing its magic. A blood sample, drawn from my vein, will reveal a startling abnormality: an overwhelming host of white blood cells with multilobed nuclei and granular stippling. These are neutrophils, which automatically swarm into action when faced with the threat of overwhelming infection.
When one hears hoofbeats, medical students are taught, one must think of horses, not zebras. But the doctor who sees my blood count will surely think of horses. He will arrive at a perfectly logical conclusion. It will not occur to him that, this time, it is truly a zebra galloping by.
Rizzoli suited up in the autopsy suite’s changing room, donning gown and shoe covers, gloves, and a paper cap. She’d had no time to shower since tramping around Stony Brook Reservation, and in this overcooled room sweat chilled like rime on her skin. Nor had she eaten dinner, and she was light-headed with hunger. For the first time in her career, she considered using a dab of Vicks under her nose to block out the smells of the autopsy, but she resisted the temptation. Never before had she resorted to its use, because she’d thought it a sign of weakness. A homicide cop should be able to deal with every aspect of the job, however unpleasant, and while her colleagues might retreat behind a menthol shield, she had stubbornly endured the undisguised odors of the autopsy suite.
She took a deep breath, inhaling a last gulp of unfouled air, and pushed through the door into the next room.
She had expected to find Dr. Isles and Korsak waiting for her; what she had not expected was to find Gabriel Dean in the room as well. He stood across the table from her, a surgical gown covering his shirt and tie. While exhaustion showed plainly on Korsak’s face and in the weary slump of his shoulders, Agent Dean looked neither tired nor bowed by the day’s events. Only the five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw marred his crisp good looks. He regarded her with the unabashed gaze of one who knows he has every right to be there.
Under the bright exam lights, the body looked in far worse shape than when she had seen it, just hours ago. Purge fluid had continued to leak from the nose and mouth, trailing bloody streaks on the face. The abdomen was so bloated, it appeared to be in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Fluid-filled blisters ballooned beneath the skin, lifting it from the dermis in papery sheets. Skin was peeling away entirely from areas of the torso and had bunched like wrinkled parchment under the breasts.
Rizzoli noted that the fingerpads had been inked. “You’ve already taken prints.”
“Just before you got here,” said Dr. Isles, her attention focused on the tray of instruments that Yoshima had just wheeled to the table. The dead interested Isles more than the living did, and she was oblivious, as usual, to the emotional tensions vibrating in the room.
“What about the hands? Before you inked them?”
Agent Dean said, “We’ve completed the external exam. The skin’s been sticky-taped for fibers, and the nail clippings have been collected.”
“And when did you get here, Agent Dean?”
“He was here before me, too,” said Korsak. “I guess some of us rate higher on the food chain.”
If Korsak’s comment was meant to feed her irritation, it worked. A victim’s fingernails may harbor bits of skin clawed from the attacker. Hair or fibers may be clutched in a closed fist. The examination of the victim’s hands was a crucial step in the autopsy, and she had missed it.
But Dean had not.
“We already have a positive I.D.,” said Isles. “Gail Yeager’s dental X-rays are up on the light box.”
Rizzoli crossed to the light box and studied the series of small films clipped there. Teeth glowed like a row of ghostly headstones on the film’s black background.
“Mrs. Yeager’s dentist did some crown work on her last year. You can see it there. The gold crown is number twenty on the periapical series. Also, she had silver amalgam fillings in numbers three, fourteen, and twenty-nine.”
“It’s a match?”
Dr. Isles nodded. “I have no doubt these are the remains of Gail Yeager.”
Rizzoli turned back to the body on the table, her gaze falling on the ring of bruises around the throat. “Did you X-ray the neck?”
“Yes. There are bilateral thyroid horn fractures. Consistent with manual strangulation.” Isles turned to Yoshima, whose silent and ghostly efficiency sometimes made one forget he was even in the room. “Let’s get her into position for the vaginal swabs.”
What followed next struck Rizzoli as the worst indignity that could befall a woman’s mortal remains. It was worse than the gutting open of the belly, worse than the resection of heart and lungs. Yoshima maneuvered the flaccid legs into a froglike position, spreading the thighs wide for the pelvic exam.
“Excuse me, Detective?” Yoshima said to Korsak, who was standing closest to Gail Yeager’s left thigh. “Could you hold that leg in position?”
Korsak stared at him in horror. “Me?”
“Just keep the knee flexed like that, so we can collect the swabs.”
Reluctantly Korsak reached for the corpse’s thigh, then jerked back as a layer of skin peeled off in his gloved hand. “Christ. Aw, Christ.”
“The skin’s going to slip, no matter what you do. If you could just hold the leg open, okay?”
Korsak let out a sharp breath. Through the stench of the room, Rizzoli caught a whiff of Vicks menthol. Korsak, at least, had not been too proud to dab it on his upper lip. Grimacing, he grabbed the thigh and rotated it sideways, exposing Gail Yeager’s genitalia. “Like this is gonna make sex real appealing from now on,” he muttered.
Dr. Isles directed the exam light onto the perineum. Gently she spread apart the swollen labia to reveal the introitus. Rizzoli, stoic as she was, could not bear to watch this grotesque invasion, and she turned away.
Her gaze met Gabriel Dean’s.
Up till that moment, he had been observing the proceedings with quiet detachment. But at that instant, she saw anger in his eyes. It was the same rage she now felt toward the man who had brought Gail Yeager to this ultimate degradation. Staring at each other in shared outrage, their rivalry was temporarily forgotten.
Dr. Isles inserted a cotton swab into the vagina, smeared it across a microscope slide, and set the slide on a tray. Next she took a rectal swab, which would also be analyzed for the presence of sperm. When she’d completed the collection and Gail Yeager’s legs were once again lying straight on the table, Rizzoli felt as though the worst was over. Even as Isles started the Y incision, cutting diagonally from the right shoulder down to the lower end of the sternum, Rizzoli thought that nothing could surpass the indignity of what had already been done to this victim.
Isles was just about to cut a matching incision from the left shoulder when Dean said, “What about the vaginal smear?”
“The slides will go to the crime lab,” said Dr. Isles.
“Aren’t you going to do a wet prep?”
“The lab can identify sperm perfectly well on a dry slide.”
“This is your only chance to examine the fresh specimen.”
Dr. Isles paused, scalpel tip poised over the skin, and gave Dean a puzzled look. Then she said to Yoshima, “Put a few drops of saline on that slide and slip it under the microscope. I’ll take a look in just a second.”
The abdominal incision came next, Dr. Isles’s scalpel slicing into the bloated belly. The stench of decomposing organs was suddenly more than Rizzoli could bear. She lurched away and stood gagging over the sink, regretting that she had so foolishly tried to prove her own fortitude. She wondered if Agent Dean was watching her now and feeling any sense of superiority. She had not seen Vicks glistening on his upper lip. She kept her back turned to the table and listened, rather than watched, as the autopsy proceeded behind her. She heard the air blowing steadily through the ventilation system and water gurgling and the clang of metal instruments.
Then she heard Yoshima call out, in a startled voice, “Dr. Isles?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got the slide under the scope, and…”
“Is there sperm?”
“You really need to see this for yourself.”
Her nausea fading, Rizzoli turned to watch as Isles peeled off her gloves and sat down at the microscope. Yoshima hovered over her as she gazed into the eyepiece.
“Do you see them?” he asked.
“Yes,” she murmured. She sat back, looking stunned. She turned to Rizzoli. “The body was found around two P.M.?”
“About then.”
“And it’s now nine P.M.-”
“Well, is there sperm or not?” cut in Korsak.
“Yes, there’s sperm,” said Isles. “And it’s motile.”
Korsak frowned. “Meaning what? Like it’s moving?”
“Yes. It’s moving.”
A silence dropped over the room. The significance of this finding had startled them all.
“How long does sperm stay motile?” asked Rizzoli.
“It depends on the environment.”
“How long?”
“After ejaculation, they can remain motile for one or two days. At least half of the sperm under that microscope are moving. This is fresh ejaculate. Probably no more than a day old.”
“And how long has the victim been dead?” asked Dean.
“Based on her vitreous potassium levels, which I drew about five hours ago, she’s been dead at least sixty hours.”
Another silence passed. Rizzoli saw the same conclusion register on everyone’s faces. She looked at Gail Yeager, who now lay with torso split open, organs bared. Hand clapped to her mouth, Rizzoli spun toward the sink. For the first time in her career as a cop, Jane Rizzoli was sick.
“He knew,” said Korsak. “That son of a bitch knew.”
They stood together in the parking lot behind the M.E.‘s building, the tip of Korsak’s cigarette glowing orange. After the chill air of the autopsy room, it almost felt good to be bathed in the steam of a summer night, to escape the harsh procedure lights and retreat into this cloak of darkness. She had been humiliated by her display of weakness, humiliated most of all that Agent Dean was there to see it. At least he’d been considerate enough to make no comment and had regarded her with neither sympathy nor ridicule, merely indifference.
“Dean’s the one who asked for that test on the sperm,” said Korsak. “Whatever he called it-”
“The wet prep.”
“Yeah, the wet prep thing. Isles wasn’t even gonna look at it fresh. She was gonna let it dry out first. So here’s this fibbie guy telling the doc what to do. Like he knows exactly what he’s looking for, exactly what we’ll find. How did he know? And what the hell’s the FBI doing on this case, anyway?”
“You did the background on the Yeagers. What’s there to attract the FBI?”
“Not a thing.”
“Were they into something they shouldn’t have been?”
“You make it sound like the Yeagers got themselves killed.”
“He was a doctor. Are we talking about drug deals here? A federal witness?”
“He was clean. His wife was clean.”
“That coup de grâce-like an execution. Maybe that’s the symbolism. A slice across the throat, to silence him.”
“Jesus, Rizzoli. You’ve made a hundred-eighty-degree turn here. First we’re thinking sex perp who kills for the thrill of it. Now you’re into conspiracies.”
“I’m trying to understand why Dean’s involved. The FBI never gives a shit about what we’re doing. They stay out of our way, we stay out of theirs, and that’s how everybody likes it. We didn’t ask for their help with the Surgeon. We handled it all in-house, used our own profiler. Their behavioral unit’s too busy kissing up to Hollywood to give us the time of day. So what’s different about this case? What makes the Yeagers special?”
“We didn’t find a thing on them,” said Korsak. “No debts, no financial red flags. No pending court cases. No one who’d say boo about either one of them.”
“Then why the FBI interest?”
Korsak thought it over. “Maybe the Yeagers had friends in high places. Someone who’s now screaming for justice.”
“Wouldn’t Dean just come out and tell us that?”
“Fibbies never like to tell you anything,” said Korsak.
She looked back at the building. It was nearly midnight, and they had not yet seen Maura Isles leave. When Rizzoli had walked out of the autopsy suite, Isles had been dictating her report and had scarcely even waved good night. The Queen of the Dead paid scant attention to the living.
Am I any different? When I lie in bed at night, it’s the faces of the murdered I see.
“This case is bigger than just the Yeagers,” said Korsak. “Now we’ve got that second set of remains.”
“I think this may let Joey Valentine off the hook,” said Rizzoli. “It explains how our unsub picked up that corpse hair-from an earlier victim.”
“I’m not done with Joey yet. One more twist of the screw.”
“You got anything on him?”
“I’m looking; I’m looking.”
“You’ll need more than an old charge of voyeurism.”
“But that Joey, he’s weird. You gotta be weird to enjoy putting lipstick on dead ladies.”
“Weirdness isn’t enough.” She stared at the building, thinking of Maura Isles. “In some ways, we’re all weird.”
“Yeah, but we’re normal weird. Joey’s got, like, no normal in his weirdness.”
She laughed. This conversation had meandered into the absurd, and she was too tired to make sense of it any longer.
“What the hell’d I say?” Korsak asked.
She turned to her car. “I’m getting punchy. I need to go home and get some sleep.”
“You gonna be here for the bone doctor?”
“I’ll be here.”
Tomorrow afternoon, a forensic anthropologist would be joining Isles to examine the skeletal remains of the second woman. Though she was not looking forward to another visit to this house of horrors, it was a duty Rizzoli could not avoid. She crossed to her car and unlocked the door.
“Hey, Rizzoli?” Korsak called out.
“Yeah?”
“Did you get dinner? Wanna go out for a burger or something?”
It was the sort of invitation any cop might extend to another. A hamburger, a beer, a few hours to unwind after a stressful day. Nothing unusual or untoward about it, yet it made her uncomfortable because she sensed the loneliness, the desperation, behind it. And she did not want to be entangled in this man’s sticky web of need.
“Maybe another time,” she said.
“Yeah. Okay,” he said. “Another time.” And with a quick wave, he turned and walked to his own car.
When she got home, she found a message from her brother Frankie on the answering machine. While she flipped through her mail, she listened to his voice boom out and could picture his swaggering stance, his bullying face.
“Hey, Janie? You there?” A long pause. “Aw, shit. Look, I forgot all ‘bout Mom’s birthday tomorrow. How ’bout us going in together on a present? Put my name on it, too. I’ll mail you a check. Just tell me how much I owe ya, okay? Bye. Oh, and hey, how ya doing?”
She threw her mail down on the table and muttered, “Yeah, Frankie. Like you paid me for the last gift.” It was too late, anyway. The gift had already been delivered-a box of peach bath towels, monogrammed with Angela’s initials. This year, Janie gets full credit. For all the difference it makes. Frankie was the man of a thousand excuses, all of them solid gold as far as Mom was concerned. He was a drill sergeant at Camp Pendleton, and Angela worried about him, obsessed over his safety, as though he faced enemy fire every day in that dangerous California scrub brush. She’d even wondered aloud if Frankie was getting enough to eat. Yeah, sure, Ma. The U.S. Marine Corps is gonna let your 220-pound baby starve to death. It was Jane who had not, in fact, eaten anything since noon. That embarrassing upchuck into the autopsy lab sink had emptied whatever was left in her stomach, and now she was ravenous.
She raided her cupboard and found the lazy woman’s treasure: Starkist Tuna, which she ate straight out of the can, along with a handful of saltine crackers. Still hungry, she returned to the cupboard for sliced peaches and polished those off as well, licking the syrup from her fork as she stared at the map of Boston tacked to her wall.
Stony Brook Reservation was a broad swath of green surrounded by suburbia-West Roxbury and Clarendon Hills to the north, Dedham and Readville to the south. On any summer day, the reservation would draw large numbers of families and joggers and picnickers. Who would notice a lone man in a car, driving along Enneking Parkway? Who would bother to watch as he pulled into one of the service parking areas and stared into the woods? A suburban park is irresistible to those weary of concrete and asphalt, jackhammers and blaring horns. Along with those seeking refuge in the coolness of woods and grass was one who came with an entirely different purpose in mind. A predator seeking a place to discard his prey. She saw it through his eyes: the dense trees, the carpet of dead leaves. A world where insects and forest animals would happily collaborate in the act of disposal.
She set down her fork, and its clatter against the table was startlingly loud.
From the bookshelf she picked up the packet of color-coded pushpins. She pressed a red one on the street where Gail Yeager had lived in Newton and pressed another red one in Stony Brook Reservation where Gail’s body was found. She added a second pin in Stony Brook-this one blue-to represent the remains of the unknown woman. Then she sat down and considered the geography of the unsub’s world.
During the Surgeon killings, she had learned to study a city map the way a predator studies his hunting grounds. She was, after all, a hunter as well, and to catch her prey she had to understand the universe in which he lived, the streets he walked, the neighborhoods he roamed. She knew that human predators most often hunted in areas that were familiar to them. Like everyone else, they had their comfort zones, their daily routines. So when she looked at the pins on the map, she knew that she was seeing more than just the location of crime scenes and body dumps; she was seeing his sphere of activity.
The town of Newton was upscale and expensive, a suburb of professionals. Stony Brook Reservation was three miles southeast, in a neighborhood not nearly as tony as Newton. Was the unsub a resident of one of these neighborhoods, stalking prey that crossed his path as he moved between home and work? He would have to be someone who fit in, someone who did not rouse suspicion as an outsider. If he lived in Newton, he’d have to be a white-collar man with white-collar tastes.
And white-collar victims.
The grid of Boston streets blurred before her tired eyes, yet she did not give up and go to bed; she sat in a daze beyond exhaustion, a hundred details swimming in her head. She thought of fresh sperm in a decomposing corpse. She thought of skeletal remains with no name. Navy-blue carpet fibers. A killer who sheds the hair of his past victims. A stun gun, a hunter’s knife, and folded nightclothes.
And Gabriel Dean. What was the FBI’s role in all this? She dropped her head in her hands, feeling as though if would explode with so much information. She had wanted to be lead detective, had even demanded it, and now the weight of this investigation was crushing her. She was too tired to think and too wound up to sleep. She wondered if this was what a breakdown felt like and ruthlessly suppressed the thought. Jane Rizzoli would never allow herself to be so spineless as to suffer a nervous breakdown. In the course of her career she had chased a perp across a rooftop, had kicked down doors, had confronted her own death in a dark cellar. She had killed a man.
But until this moment, she had never felt so close to crumbling.
The prison nurse is not gentle as she ties the tourniquet around my right arm, snapping the latex like a rubber band. It pinches my skin and tears at my hairs, but she does not care; to her, I am just another malingerer who has roused her from her cot and interrupted her normally uneventful shift in the prison clinic. She is middle-aged, or at least she looks it, with puffy eyes and overplucked brows, and her breath smells like sleep and cigarettes. But she is a woman, and I stare at her neck, loose and wattled, as she bends over my arm to locate a good vein. I think of what lies beneath her crepey white skin. The carotid artery, pulsing with bright blood, and beside it, the jugular vein, swollen with its darker river of venous blood. I am intimately familiar with the anatomy of a woman’s neck, and I study hers, unattractive as it is.
My antecubital vein has plumped up, and she grunts in satisfaction. She opens an alcohol swab and wipes it across my skin. It is a careless and slovenly gesture, not what one expects from a medical professional, done out of habit and nothing more.
“You’ll feel a poke,” she announces.
I register the prick of the needle without flinching. She has hit the vein cleanly, and blood streams into the red-topped Vacutainer tube. I have worked with the blood of countless others, but never my own, so I stare at it with interest, noting that it is rich and dark, the color of black cherries.
The tube is nearly full. She pulls it from the Vacutainer needle and pops a second tube onto the needle. This tube is a purple-top, for a complete blood count. When this one, too, is filled, she pulls the needle from my vein, snaps the tourniquet loose, and jams a wad of cotton against the puncture site.
“Hold it,” she commands.
Helplessly I rattle the handcuff on my left wrist, which is fastened to the frame of the clinic cot. “I can’t,” I say in a defeated voice.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she sighs. No sympathy, just irritation. There are some who despise the weak, and she is one of them. Given absolute power, and a vulnerable subject, she could easily transform into the same sort of monsters who tortured jews in concentration camps. Cruelty is there beneath the surface, disguised by the white uniform and the name tag with R.N.
She glances at the guard. “Hold it,” she says.
He hesitates, then clamps his fingers against the cotton, pressing it to my skin. His reluctance to touch me is not because he’s afraid of any violence on my part; I have always been well behaved and polite, a model prisoner, and none of the guards fear me. No, it is my blood that makes him nervous. He sees red oozing into the cotton and imagines all sorts of microbial horrors swarming toward his fingers. He looks relieved when the nurse tears open a bandage and tapes the cotton wad in place. At once he goes to the sink and washes his hands with soap and water. I want to laugh at his terror of something as elemental as blood. Instead I lie motionless on the cot, my knees drawn up, my eyes closed, as I release an occasional whimper of distress.
The nurse leaves the room with the tubes of my blood, and the guard, his hands thoroughly washed, sits down in a chair to wait.
And wait.
What feels like hours goes by in that cold and sterile room. We hear nothing from the nurse; it’s as if she has abandoned us, forgotten us. The guard shifts in his chair, wondering what could be taking her so long.
I already know.
By now, the machine has completed its analysis of my blood, and she holds the results in her hand. The numbers alarm her. All concerns about a prisoner’s malingering have fled; she sees the evidence, there in the printout, that a dangerous infection rages in my body. That my complaint of abdominal pain is surely genuine. Although she has examined my belly, felt my muscles flinch, and heard me groan at her touch, she did not quite believe my symptoms. She has been a prison nurse too long, and experience has made her skeptical of inmates’ physical complaints. In her eyes we are all manipulators and con men, and our every symptom is just another pitch for drugs.
But a lab test is objective. The blood goes into the machine and a number comes out. She cannot ignore an alarming white blood cell count. And so she is surely on the telephone, consulting with the medical officer: “I have a prisoner here with severe abdominal pain. He does have bowel sounds, but his belly’s tender in the right lower quadrant. What really worries me is his white count…”
The door opens, and I hear the squeak of the nurse’s shoes on the linoleum. When she addresses me, there is none of that sneering tone she’d used earlier. Now she is civil, even respectful. She knows she is dealing with a seriously ill man and if anything should happen to me she will be held responsible. Suddenly I am not an object of contempt but a time bomb that could destroy her career. And she has already delayed too long.
“We’re going to transfer you to the hospital,” she says, and looks at the guard. “He needs to be moved immediately. ”
“Shattuck?” he asks, referring to the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital Correctional Unit in Boston.
“No, that’s too far away. He can’t wait that long. I’ve arranged a transfer to Fitchburg Hospital.” There is urgency in her voice, and the guard now glances at me with concern.
“So what’s wrong with him?” he asks.
“It could be a ruptured appendix. I’ve got the paperwork all ready, and I’ve called the Fitchburg E.R. He’ll have to go by ambulance.”
“Aw, shit. Then I gotta ride with him. How long’s this gonna take?”
“He’ll probably be admitted. I think he needs surgery. ”
The guard glances at his watch. He is thinking about the end of his shift and whether someone will show up in time to relieve him at the hospital. He is not thinking about me but about the details of his own schedule, his own life. I am merely a complication.
The nurse folds a bundle of papers and slips them into an envelope. She hands this to the guard. “This is for the Fitchburg E.R. Be sure the doctor gets it.”
“It’s gotta be by ambulance?”‘
“Yes.”
“Makes security a problem.”
She glances at me. My wrist is still handcuffed to the cot. I lie perfectly still, with my knees bent-the classic position of a patient suffering from excruciating peritonitis. “I wouldn’t worry too much about security. This one’s way too sick to put up a fight.”