at their edges, from squinting them in either laughter or against the sun. “Where am I?”
“Laurelton General Hospital. You’ve been admitted as a Jane Doe. Could you tell us your name?”
He was steely polite. Alarm bells rang. What had she done? It took her a long moment to come up with her name. “Gemma LaPorte.” She hesitated, almost afraid to ask. “Are you here to see me?”
“We don’t know how you got here, Ms. LaPorte. You walked into the ER and collapsed.”
Her hand fluttered to her head once again. “Oh…?”
“Did someone bring you? Did you drive yourself?”
Gemma moved her head slowly from side to side and she felt a twinge of pain. “I don’t remember.”
Will paused, regarding her with dark, liquid eyes. She could sense his strength and knew he was good at his job. A tracker. Someone who never gave up. Someone dogged and relentless. She shivered involuntarily as he said, “You don’t remember the circumstances that brought you here?”
“No.”
“What’s your last memory?”
Gemma thought about it a minute. “I was making myself breakfast at home. Oatmeal and cinnamon. I was looking out the window and thinking we were drowning in rain. It was a downpour. The dirt was like concrete and the water was pouring over it in sheets.”
The deputy was silent for so long that Gemma felt her anxiety rise. She sensed that he was deliberating on an answer.
“What?” she asked.
“It hasn’t rained for three days.”
Will Tanninger regarded the woman with the scared green eye and stark white bandage with a healthy sense of skepticism. Her skin had paled at his words. He understood about trauma-induced amnesia. More often than not, serious accident victims couldn’t remember the events that led to their hospital stay. But they usually lost a few hours, not days. In Gemma LaPorte’s case, he couldn’t tell if this was a ploy or the truth. The half of her face he could see was swollen and bruised, blue and purple shadings of color already traveling from her injured side to the other. Even so, he could tell she was rather extraordinary looking. Smooth, prominent cheekbones and a finely sculpted nose beneath a hazel-colored eye that glinted green when hit by the hard morning light coming through a twelve-inch gap in the hospital drapes.
According to the staff, her injuries weren’t as severe as they looked. Concussion. Bruising. Her face had run into something—something that could very likely be a steering wheel. Was she the woman who had purposely run down Edward Letton yesterday morning? Had she sustained those injuries in the crash? She didn’t really look much like the woman described by Carol Pellter, the young soccer player who’d narrowly missed being mowed down by the hit-and-run driver (that was Pellter with two l’s, Carol had informed him seriously when she saw him writing her name down incorrectly). She also said it “scared the shit out of me, to quote my father,” and said Father looked decidedly uncomfortable when those words shot from his daughter’s young mouth. Carol, however, was decidedly happy to be able to use the language. Her description of the driver was fairly generic: older woman, wearing a baseball cap. Upon questioning both Carol and her parents, Carol’s father made it clear that “older” to Carol meant anyone over sixteen. Will had taken Carol to the sheriff’s offices to meet their one and only sketch artist, a talented amateur not on the county payroll. The artist had tried to draw a picture based on Carol’s description. In the end Will had put the woman anywhere from her mid-twenties to her late thirties.
But the reason Will was here now, with this mystery woman, was that she’d shown up at the hospital with a head injury consistent with one caused by an automobile accident—a ramming automobile accident. She fell loosely inside the right age bracket, and she had the right length of brown hair, and timing-wise, her injuries could have occurred yesterday morning.
But Will was reluctant to ask her directly about the hit-and-run. He didn’t want to feed her information until he was ready. He was hoping she’d trip up and tell him something herself. Maybe something she wanted him to know. Was desperate for him to know. Such as that Edward Letton, who was languishing in this same hospital with multiple fractures—the most serious a crushing head injury that had required emergency surgery to stop the bleeding in his brain—had been driving a van equipped with ropes, chains, handcuffs, and items of well…torture. Dog-eared pages of crude child pornography were tucked inside the vehicle’s pockets. The workshop of a predator about to strike.
Carol Pellter was damn lucky Gemma LaPorte, or whoever, had thwarted Letton from his sadistic purpose. If the man had grabbed the girl…Will’s mind clamped shut. No need to go there.
But was the driver Gemma LaPorte? If so, he would have no choice but to charge her with attempted murder at the worst, reckless driving at the least. According to Carol she’d run down Letton intentionally, but though the deed must have been in full view of the fields, with all the noise and attention diverting the players and bystanders, no one saw much of anything except a silver car driving a little faster than it should, the tires squealing a bit. That silver car had not been found.
So, was it intentional? Will was inclined to believe so. Carol was pretty sure of herself. And her parents, scared that Carol had nearly been run down, had been all about finding that driver and throwing the book at her. Until they’d looked through the open door of the van and seen what Will saw. Before that viewing they’d been instrumental in dialing 911 and getting an ambulance for Letton; they’d probably helped save him from dying at the site. It wasn’t until Will and another deputy were on the scene that anyone really looked inside Letton’s van. Then the Pellters stood silent and sober, possibly regretting their good Samaritan actions. When Carol wanted to see what was inside, they’d pulled her away, Carol all the while protesting that it was unfair, and that she heard her mom say, “oh, God,” and her dad say, “shit,” like they were both really, really scared, so she, Carol Pellter, deserved to know what was in that van!
Mom and Dad Pellter ignored her, staring at Will hollow-eyed, holding onto the whirling dervish that was their daughter in a protective grip that finally seemed to penetrate the spirited girl’s annoyance and she stopped fighting them and grew quiet.
Letton’s van had been impounded.
Now Gemma LaPorte was looking at him, her eye more hazel than green as the line of exterior light had shifted to illuminate the bruises on her forehead. “What’s the date today?” she asked.
“October seventh.”
“Three days,” she repeated.
A heavyset nurse entered the room, caught Gemma’s expression and turned officiously to Will. Before she could berate him for upsetting her patient, he nodded at her. “I’ll check back with you later,” he told Gemma, then headed into the hallway.
The nurse said to Gemma, “You look like you could use some more pain medication.”
Gemma was staring after Will. She felt like she could use some more pain medication, but she didn’t dare. She needed to keep her wits about her.
“Administration will be calling for your billing information,” the nurse added with a slight grimace. The duties and functions of a hospital were well-known.
Hospitals…pain…she had experienced a terrible moment when she saw a plastic mask descending over her face and smelled the scent of some
