liberated from a linen closet on the third floor ward, figuring it might buy her a few seconds if she was discovered. Her intractable red-gold spiral curls were already pulled up into a tight knot at the crown of her head, to further the makeshift disguise and to avoid leaving any telltale hairs behind. She’d come to appreciate the uniqueness of both the color and curls. But tonight her distinctive hair was a nuisance.
She turned her attention to her lock picking.
It took her less than thirty seconds to get the door to the morgue open. The room was very dim, the only light coming from one fluorescent ceiling fixture in the far corner. A couple of new residents had arrived since she’d been here last, and Alex made a silent apology as she intruded.
One of the gurneys held an elderly woman who was partially uncovered, the cloth over her lined face having slipped off. Alex hesitated, then gently pulled the cover back up. She might not have bothered before, but the harsh reality of death was weighing heavily on her, and she couldn’t help thinking about the loved ones who no doubt would still grieve even though this soul’s suffering had ended.
She suppressed a shiver and began to walk toward cold storage. A separate small room in the back of the morgue, it was where bodies were kept when the paperwork was complete, before they were picked up by a mortician. Oddly, the door wasn’t secured. In fact, it stood slightly ajar, and she frowned. She could feel the cool air escaping through the gap.
A slight noise followed by a barely audible muttering came from the room. She froze in her tracks. If she’d been given to horror stories, a thousand possibilities would have raced into her mind. But she glimpsed something through the narrow gap between the door and the jamb that catapulted what she’d heard into an entirely new category. A narrow beam of light, moving.
A flashlight.
The room was pitch black. Anyone who belonged there would have turned on the overhead lights. And they wouldn’t worry about making noise. The furtive implications of that flashlight and the effort to stay quiet started the flood of adrenaline in Alex.
She crept forward, her body instantly in the high state of alert and muscle tension that allowed her to make every careful movement utterly silent. She’d come prepared, wearing soft, leather-soled shoes rather than her running shoes with soles that could squeak too easily on the polished vinyl floors.
She peeked through the gap, saw a dark figure moving in the back of the room. The beam of the flashlight was small and intense, a xenon bulb, most likely.
The angle of the beam told her the person was tall. But it didn’t reflect enough light back at its holder to enable her to see anything other than short hair and a strong build. That, coupled with something about the way he held himself, added up to her assumption of gender.
What the faint light did show her, with shocking clarity, was what the person was doing. He had opened the drawer that held Rainy’s body. The sight made her stomach roil.
She must have made a sound, although she wasn’t aware of anything but the outrage that filled her as she pushed open the door. The man whipped around. Instantly he aimed the high intensity flashlight at her face, blinding her and preventing her from getting a look at him. That single action told her the guy knew what he was doing. Instinctively she backed up into the morgue.
He came at her.
She took what little she knew—he was tall—and used it. She crouched. Leaped forward. Caught him just below the knees. Used the muscles of her legs to drive forward and up. Felt the moment when she had him. Flipped him.
He was back on his feet fast. Came at her again. She knew he’d be ready for her this time. But he might not expect the same thing twice. She had a split second to decide. She went for it. This time she didn’t get the right angle and he flew awkwardly sideways as she rushed past him.
Still in motion she reached a counter and hit it with her right hand. Used it as a platform to spin and launch a side kick at his chest. A kick that Rainy—a tae kwon do black belt and instructor—would have been proud of. Caught him dead center and sent him reeling backward.
She landed on the balls of her feet, ready to strike in any direction. Yet the man hesitated. He’d slid into the main door to the hallway in his sprawl, and it had opened behind him, offering escape. It kept him backlit, and she was still unable to see his face.
She took a step toward him.
He pulled the gurney with the old woman forward until it was between them, then darted out the door. By the time she dodged around and reached the hallway, he was gone. She looked quickly up and down the hall but there was no sign, no doors just closing, no elevator just heading upstairs.
And I never saw his face, damn it.
She had no idea who he was, what he wanted with Rainy, if he was acting alone or if someone had sent him. Had no idea what he would have done had she not come along. She knew only that he hadn’t been anyone with official authorization, from either hospital or police or family. That alone would have told her that there was more to Rainy’s death than a simple accident.
But there was another layer of weirdness to this painful situation, a layer that had driven Alex back to the morgue in the middle of this hot August Sunday night for another look at her friend’s body.
Copies of Rainy’s medical forms from Athena Academy, which Christine Evans had e-mailed to Alex that afternoon, clearly stated that an emergency appendectomy had been performed on Rainy when she was fourteen. Alex had already known this, because when she’d been stricken with appendicitis herself in her junior year, Rainy had reassured her that all would be well, citing her own experience and showing off her scar.
And that made this situation all the more impossible.
What Alex had wanted to see again, what she hadn’t been able to study and make sense of during the autopsy, were other scars that Rainy had never mentioned. Scars on her ovaries.
Because the woman on that table in the morgue had a scar in approximately the right place for an appendectomy.
And a perfectly healthy appendix.
“And you didn’t recognize him? Sometimes family members go a little crazy in times of grief.”
The hospital’s night security supervisor, a middle-age black man with kind eyes, spoke to her gently. Alex wondered if he was implying she had also gone a little crazy, but he seemed so sincere she chose not to believe it. You had to draw the line somewhere or you’d end up hating every human being in the world.
“No, I didn’t,” she repeated for at least the fifth time. He was the third person she’d told the story to in the past two hours. “It all happened very fast and he came out of a dark room, but it was no one I knew. Besides,” she pointed out, “if he had been a family member or friend, he would have recognized me.”
She hadn’t told him the whole story, didn’t want to deal with the questions that would arise if he knew she’d also been inside the room and had in fact been involved in very brief hand-to-hand combat with the man. So she’d told him she’d been unable to sleep and had come to see if there was anyone here who could let her in for a last goodbye. She’d found the door unlocked—okay, so she didn’t specify which door, but she didn’t want to have to explain how she’d gotten in—and once inside had encountered a man who seemed to be sneaking around the back room with a flashlight.
The security
