under it, but then why was she up here in the dark and alone? If she’d been with someone and it had been an accident, that person would have been yelling, calling 911, raising a ruckus, something. Unless he, or she, but I was betting a he, given what she looked like, had deliberately pushed her in. Of course, there were other possibilities. She could have come up here to meet someone, been stood up and then stumbled in the dark as she went by the shaft. Then it could have been accidental and he didn’t know. ‘He’ again. Yes, I was jumping to conclusions based on what she looked like. But that kind of knee-jerk reaction can really throw off an investigation. She could be bisexual and have thrown over the fat doc for a female lover. Then they’d quarreled and . . . .
Stammos spoke sharply to me, interrupting my train of thought. I needed to quit this speculating and concentrate on what was happening right in front of me. Stammos wanted me to explain how I’d gotten to her.
I talked about seeing the rope and using it to rappel down into the elevator shaft. Gwynne looked up and broke out with a ‘No way!’ Stammos quelled him with a glance. I ignored him and described as efficiently as I could how Tom had worked the rope and I’d gotten her arm lassoed.
“That’s Dr. Grayson over there, right?” Stammos asked, his large head tilting in Tom’s direction. I nodded and all of us turned and looked at him, and the paramedics. Two more paramedics had arrived with a stretcher and it was clear they were preparing to move her. Since the hospital emergency room was literally across the street, the only tricky part was getting her down the stairs. She was moved to the stretcher, one of them holding an IV bag above her, the other steadying what looked like an oxygen tank, and they strapped her in. They departed rapidly, accompanied by Mel and the other campus cops. Tom’s eyes followed them to the stairs and then looked for me.
I walked over to him, the cops and Stammos coming along. Tom’s black tux jacket was torn around the waist and his tie was missing. No. I glanced down. He’d wrapped the tie around one of his hands. His hands! A wave of guilt washed over me. If my hands were sore from contact with the rope, what must all that pulling have done to Tom’s surgeon hands? He saw where I was looking and he grimaced.
“Yeah. They’re pretty bad. I’m going over to the ER and see this through and get my hands treated as well. You coming? You could use some patching up too. As usual,” he finished, looking at the state I was in.
Tom hadn’t even registered Stammos and the two city cops. Stammos was so close to me on my left I actually felt him stiffen. He certainly didn’t like being ignored.
I hastily made introductions and the city cops dutifully flipped to new pages in their notebooks.
Tom nodded briefly but just took my arm and turned. He said over his shoulder, politely but firmly, “I want to be there when they examine her. You’ll just have to follow I’m afraid.”
And then we were walking at Tom’s race-walking pace toward the stairs. When he gets going, he walks faster than anyone I’ve ever known. He doesn’t actually exercise that I’ve ever been able to discern, but he’s very trim. I have concluded that’s because he race-walks the miles of hospital corridor, loping up and down the stairs, disdaining the elevators as too slow. We were actually at the stairs before Stammos and the city cops got moving. I heard a deep voice say, “Now just a minute, Doctor,” but Tom just kept going. I doubted he’d even heard. Well, Tom was somebody Stammos didn’t intimidate. Thank God my feet felt numb as we hurried down the wooden stairs and across the street.
# # # #
When Stammos and the city cops had finally caught up with Tom in the Emergency Room, he had paused, impatient, but had identified the surgeon who had been with the victim at the reception. The guy’s name was Dr. Russell Wagner.
The city cops would get his name and contact information from the hospital operator.
I waited my turn to check in and get treated. I was still waiting when Stammos came back to the ER waiting room to tell me he was leaving. He’d grimly recounted that when the city cops had reached the doctor at home, Dr. Wagner had been offhand about not knowing much about a young woman he had identified as a ‘date’ he’d met at a party earlier in the week. Her name, he’d said, was Courtney Carlyle and he ‘didn’t really know anything about her.’ The city cops had left immediately to question Dr. Wagner at home. They were likely there now, politely but firmly interrogating him about his apparently casual willingness to misplace his date.
They’d also told Stammos they’d found no ‘Courtney Carlyle’ in their first, citywide records search.
It was 2 a.m. before I’d been able to get Tom to leave the hospital. Courtney was likely not going to benefit from his further attention. In fact, Tom said, a neurologist would be coming to examine her and determine if any brain function could be detected or whether she was brain dead.
I’d already had my superficial cuts and abrasions treated in the ER while Tom had gone with the paramedics. Since the triage nurse had seen me come in with a surgeon, I’d actually been treated relatively quickly. That made a nice change from a previous time I’d had to come to the ER when I’d been made to sit for hours in a freezing white-on-white cubicle. This time when I was ushered into a treatment room, I’d gotten a warm blanket wrapped around me right away, and my cuts had been cleaned and bandaged efficiently.
After I’d been treated, I returned to the waiting room. Earlier, I’d called Carol and Giles to let them know a guest at the reception had been injured and I’d accompanied Tom to the hospital. They (and my boys) worried about me a lot, especially after what had happened this past fall, so I made no mention of my own injuries. I told them to make up a bed for Kelly in the den as we’d be very late.
After a while, I checked my email on my cell phone. The corner was a little dented from having been dropped, along with my tiny purse, when Tom and I had been rushing around trying to save Courtney, but it still seemed to work okay. Nothing to interest me there, and the current news was so ghastly I decided to avoid browsing the Internet. The TV hung on the wall in one corner was either broken or turned off. I left it alone.
Instead, I read the pamphlets on safe sex, which rightly should be called ‘safer sex,’ drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and preventing pregnancy that were displayed on racks over the chairs. I’d had a cup of coffee, at least I think it was coffee, from the vending machine down the hall.
I was horrified at what had happened and bored out of my mind at the same time. And I was incredibly uncomfortable. The orange molded plastic chairs ranged around the florescent-lit waiting area had not been designed for long-term occupancy. In fact, since I had so much time to think about it, I realized they were designed to discourage occupancy.
My entire torso was starting to take on the same molded shape as the chairs before Tom returned. He’d come out earlier to tell me about the clinical diagnosis. The skin of his face was almost translucent with fatigue and drawn so tight over his cheekbones it looked like it might tear.
I knew. We hadn’t saved her life. We’d just saved her body.
We left the ER and walked slowly across the shadowed campus, the stone shapes of the buildings rising stone upon stone, lit by the blue moonlight and the halogen floodlights installed to deter crime, though crime still regularly occurred. Gargoyles regarded us passively from the edges of the turrets above, not caring one way or the other if we were mugged.
But we walked safely on. My feet still hurt, but I was not wearing my badly scuffed spangled heels. I carried them in one hand, the remaining sequins hanging by barely a thread. I thought they were probably damaged beyond repair. Instead I was wearing the soft hospital socks and slippers they’d given
