“You don’t have to come in,” Caxton said, which she had meant as a kindness but it made Clara squint as if she’d been struck. Caxton searched deep inside herself to find the humanity to know what to say. “I mean, it would really help me if you did, but you don’t have to.”
“I’ve come this far,” Clara said, almost aggressively, but there was a little smile on her face.
Caxton would have done anything for things to be comfortable between the two of them. But she guessed her life was just going to be complicated for a while.
Together they made their way back to the hospital, a big modern monolith of a building that looked across the river at the ruins of the Walnut Street Bridge. Caxton had never gone in through the main entrance—they had brought Deanna in through the emergency room—so it took her a while to get her bearings. Eventually she took Clara up an elevator and down a long hallway full of equipment carts and bad, but colorful, paintings. “Listen. It’s a semi-private room and her roommate doesn’t approve of women like us,” she told Clara. “Just so you know.”
“I’ll try not to stick my tongue down your throat while we’re standing over the hospital bed of your horribly injured domestic partner,” Clara told her, deadpan.
A laugh bubbled up inside Caxton’s chest and she snorted out all her frustration and leaned hard against the wall and closed her eyes for a second. God, she had needed that release. “Thanks,” she said, and Clara just shrugged. Caxton knocked and pushed open the door, which sighed a little. The two of them passed silently by the bathroom and into the main room, which was lit only by the flickering glow of the television set. The obese woman in the left-hand bed was asleep, her face turned to the wall, and Caxton tried to be quiet so as not to wake her. Clara waited by the door.
Caxton stepped over to Deanna’s bed and nearly screamed. It was empty.
She clapped a hand over her mouth and ran back out into the hall. Clara grabbed her arm and stroked her bicep. “They just moved her. Really,” she said. “It’s okay.
They just moved her.”
Caxton headed down to the nurse’s station and scowled at the woman there who was filling out a form on her computer. “Deanna Purfleet,” she shouted, when the nurse wouldn’t look up. “Deanna Purfleet.”
The nurse turned slowly and nodded. “I’ll call the doctor. It’ll just be a second.”
“Just tell me where they moved her to and I’ll go there. I’m Laura Caxton. I’m her partner.”
The nurse nodded again. “I know who you are.” She put on a pair of reading glasses and looked down at a phone directory. “Please sit down and wait for the doctor. You want to talk to him. That’s all I can tell you right now.”
Caxton didn’t sit down. She paced back and forth around the nurse’s station, studied the awards and plaques on the walls, took a cup of water when Clara brought it to her but she couldn’t sit down, not if she ever wanted to get up again.
The doctor came out of an elevator down the hall and she ran to him. It wasn’t the doctor she’d seen before. “Deanna Purfleet,” she said.
“You’re Ms. Caxton, I think?” he asked. He was a small Indian man with perfectly combed hair and very soulful eyes. He looked like he’d never smiled in his entire life. “I’m Dr. Prabinder, if you’d like to sit down—”
“Jesus, just tell me where she is! Won’t anyone tell me where she is?”
“There was a complication,” the doctor said, and everything turned rubbery and soft. The floor started to rise toward her face. Caxton looked around—she had plenty of time—and found a chair to slump into.
47.
Caxton sat in the morgue next to Deanna’s body on a gurney. Dr. Prabinder and Clara were nowhere to be seen. She was all alone in the semi-darkened room, surrounded on every side by rolling partitions. How she’d gotten there she couldn’t say. It was like she had blacked out, except she hadn’t, at all. The trip from the fourth floor down to the basement was all there in her memory. It was just so immaterial she hadn’t bothered to review the information.
There had been a complication, she remembered. She got up and walked around the gurney. She touched Deanna here and there. Twitched back the sheet that covered her. Deanna’s face was calm, at least. Her eyes closed, her red hair clean.
Her lips were pale but otherwise she didn’t look so bad. Caxton moved the sheet back a little more, though, and wished she hadn’t. Deanna’s breasts pointed in the wrong directions. Her chest was open like a ravenous mouth, her ribs like teeth reaching for a piece of meat. Her lungs and her heart lay collapsed at the bottom of that wound like a lolling tongue.
There had been a complication. Deanna had lost so much blood when she broke the kitchen window that she had required five new units of blood, most of it in the form of plasma. They had given her some whole blood because she had started to show the signs of acute anemia—coldness in the extremities even while her trunk was warm, a lasting and dangerous shortness of breath.
There had been a complication. A blood clot had formed, perhaps from one of her wounds, possibly from a bad reaction to the transfused blood. Dr. Prabinder had refused to speculate. The clot had entered Deanna’s blood stream and probably roamed around her body several times before it reached her left lung.
There had been a complication. A pulmonary embolus, Dr. Prabinder had called it. When it was detected they had rushed her immediately into surgery, of course.
They had tried to cut it out. And that was one complication too many.
“I really must insist, Ms. Caxton,” the doctor said, pulling one of the partitions back. “You’re not supposed to be here at all, and truly, it’s not appropriate for the morgue technicians to let you see her in this condition—”
“That’s Trooper Caxton,” Clara announced. She held up her badge.
“Oh, I... I didn’t know,” Doctor Prabinder said.
“This is a homicide investigation, Doctor.” Clara put her badge away. What she was doing was highly illegal. She was well outside of her jurisdiction. So was Caxton. Lying about a criminal investigation could get them put away for years.
Caxton wouldn’t tell, if Clara didn’t. She pulled the sheet back up over Deanna’s chest. Blood soaked through it almost instantly.
“When?” Caxton asked. She couldn’t get any more of the sentence out.
“What was the official time of death?” Clara asked.
The doctor checked his PDA. “Last night, about four fifteen.”
“Before dawn,” Caxton said. While she had been fighting vampires in abandoned steel mills Deanna had been slowly dying and nobody had known. There would have been nobody with her. Perhaps if there had been it could have been avoided.
Perhaps if Caxton had been there, listening to Deanna’s ragged breathing, she might have noticed some change. She could have summoned the doctor. They could have gotten Deanna into surgery that much quicker.
At the very least she could have held her hand. “I wasn’t here,” she said.
“No, no, come on,” Clara said.
“Ah, ladies, I know it is not my place to ask, but is it acceptable for this woman to investigate the death of someone so close? Is there not a conflict of interest?”
“She was alone,” Caxton said, ignoring him.
“Was there anyone in her room last night? Any visitors at all?”
The doctor shook his head in incomprehension. “No, of course not. We don’t let visitors in after seven and anyway she had posted a guard on the room.” He pointed at Caxton with his PDA. “Did you not know about the guard?”
Clara glanced at her, then back at the doctor. “I was just brought in on this case.
I’m still catching up.”
“I... see.” Doctor Prabinder straightened up and squared his shoulders. “Now let’s get one thing clear. I wish to assist the police in any manner possible, of course.
But this is my hospital, and—”
“Doctor,” Caxton said, turning to face him for the first time. She gave him her best fisheye look. Caxton wasn’t wearing her uniform, she didn’t have a badge, and her weapon was still in the trunk of Clara’s Volkswagen. It didn’t matter. The look was what made you a cop. That perfectly uncaring, potentially violent look that could freeze most people in their tracks. “I need to know if anything unusual happened here last night. I need to know if
