Vanish

taste of chilled flesh. She delivered three deep breaths, and pressed her fingers to the neck to check for a carotid pulse.

Am I imagining it? Is that my own pulse I feel, throbbing in my fingers?

She grabbed the wall phone and dialed 911.

“Emergency operator.”

“This is Dr. Isles in the medical examiner’s office. I need an ambulance. There’s a woman here, in respiratory arrest-”

“Excuse me, did you say the medical examiner’s office?”

“Yes! I’m at the rear of the building, just inside the loading bay. We’re on Albany Street, right across from the medical center!”

“I’m dispatching an ambulance now.”

Maura hung up. Once again, she quelled her disgust as she pressed her lips to the woman’s. Three more quick breaths, then her fingers were back on the carotid.

A pulse. There was definitely a pulse!

Suddenly she heard a wheeze, a cough. The woman was moving air now, mucus rattling in her throat.

Stay with me. Breathe, lady. Breathe!

A loud whoop announced the arrival of the ambulance. She shoved open the rear doors and stood squinting against flashing lights as the vehicle backed up to the dock. Two EMTs jumped out, hauling their kits.

“She’s in here!” Maura called.

“Still in respiratory arrest?”

“No, she’s breathing now. And I can feel a pulse.”

The two men trotted into the building and halted, staring at the woman on the gurney. “Jesus,” one of them murmured. “Is that a body bag?”

“I found her in the cold room,” said Maura. “By now, she’s probably hypothermic.”

“Oh, man. If this isn’t your worst nightmare.”

Out came the oxygen mask and IV lines. They slapped on EKG leads. On the monitor, a slow sinus rhythm blipped like a lazy cartoonist’s pen. The woman had a heartbeat and she was breathing, yet she still looked dead.

Looping a tourniquet around one flaccid arm, the EMT asked: “What’s her story? How did she get here?”

“I don’t know anything about her,” said Maura. “I came down to check on another body in the cold room and I heard this one moving.”

“Does this, uh, happen very often here?”

“This is a first time for me.” And she hoped to God it was the last.

“How long has she been in your refrigerator?”

Maura glanced at the hanging clipboard, where the day’s deliveries were recorded, and saw that a Jane Doe had arrived at the morgue around noon. Eight hours ago. Eight hours zipped in a shroud. What if she’d ended up on my table? What if I had sliced into her chest? Rummaging through the receiving in-basket, she found the envelope containing the woman’s paperwork. “Weymouth Fire and Rescue brought her in,” she said. “An apparent drowning…”

“Whoa, Nelly!” The EMT had just stabbed an IV needle into a vein and the patient suddenly jerked to life, her torso bucking on the gurney. The IV site magically puffed blue as the punctured vein hemorrhaged into the skin.

“Shit, lost the site. Help me hold her down!”

“Man, this gal’s gonna get up and walk away.”

“She’s really fighting now. I can’t get the IV started.”

“Then let’s just get her on the stretcher and move her.”

“Where are you taking her?” Maura said.

“Right across the street. The ER. If you have any paperwork they’ll want a copy.”

She nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”

A long line of patients stood waiting to register at the ER window, and the triage nurse behind the desk refused to meet Maura’s attempts to catch her eye. On this busy night, it would take a severed limb and spurting blood to justify cutting to the front of the line, but Maura ignored the nasty looks of other patients and pushed straight to the window. She rapped on the glass.

“You’ll have to wait your turn,” the triage nurse said.

“I’m Dr. Isles. I have a patient’s transfer papers. The doctor will want them.”

“Which patient?”

“The woman they just brought in from across the street.”

“You mean that lady from the morgue?”

Maura paused, suddenly aware that the other patients in line could hear every word. “Yes,” was all she said.

“Come on through, then. They want to talk to you. They’re having trouble with her.”

The door lock buzzed open, and Maura pushed through, into the treatment area. She saw immediately what the triage nurse had meant by trouble. Jane Doe had not yet been moved into a treatment room, but was still lying in the hallway, her body now draped with a heating blanket. The two EMTs and a nurse struggled to control her.

“Tighten that strap!”

“Shit-her hand’s out again-”

“Forget the oxygen mask. She doesn’t need it.”

“Watch that IV! We’re going to lose it!”

Maura lunged toward the stretcher and grabbed the patient’s wrist before she could pull out the intravenous catheter. Long black hair lashed Maura’s face as the woman tried to twist free. Only twenty minutes ago, this had been a blue-lipped corpse in a body bag. Now they could barely restrain her as life came roaring back into her limbs.

“Hold on. Hold on to that arm!”

The sound started deep in the woman’s throat. It was the moan of a wounded animal. Then her head tilted back and her cry rose to an unearthly shriek. Not human, thought Maura, as the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. My god, what have I brought back from the dead?

“Listen to me. Listen!” Maura commanded. She grasped the woman’s head in her hands and stared down at a face contorted in panic. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise. You have to let us help you.”

At the sound of Maura’s voice, the woman went still. Blue eyes stared back, the pupils dilated to huge black pools.

One of the nurses quietly began to loop a restraint around the woman’s hand.

No, thought Maura. Don’t do that.

As the strap brushed the patient’s wrist, she jerked as though scalded. Her arm flew and Maura stumbled backward, her cheek stinging from the blow.