Steven James - The Knight

“We need to get you out of these clothes,” the nurse said to Kelsey. “Is that all right?”

Kelsey nodded, and Cheyenne and the nurse removed her wet clothes while Lance retrieved some towels and blankets from the linen closet. Then he handed them to the nurse, who quickly and thoroughly dried her off and laid the blankets over her.

The doctor, a balding man in his fifties with a look of permanent worry etched on his face, checked Kelsey’s eyes with a penlight. “Whose idea was it to warm her in the pool?”

“Mine,” I said. “There was no other way to heat her up. No doctors here, no elevators. She was going into shock. We needed to do something.”

“We came down the elevators,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.

“They were out of service when I brought them down here,” Lance explained.

After a moment of reflection, the doctor seemed to accept that. “All right. Well, let’s get her out of here.” Then Cheyenne told me she’d reconnect with me in a few minutes, there was a rush and swirl of bodies, she left with the medical crew and I was alone in the room.

I grabbed a towel and wiped it across my face and arms. Right now Kelsey had plenty of people helping her, so I decided to return to the morgue and have a look around, especially now that it was a crime scene for attempted murder.

I threw the towel on the pile. Turned toward the hall.

A man stood in the doorway. “Hey, Pat. Good to see you.”

The profiler, Special Agent Jake Vanderveld, had arrived.

“Hello, Jake,” I said.

He stepped into the room. Four years younger than I am. Handsome. Smart. On his way up. Jake had tousled blond hair, intensely blue eyes, and he wore his neatly trimmed mustache like a badge. Even a decade after graduating with his master’s degree in abnormal psychology, he still had the honed physique of the Division I swimmer that he’d been at Cornell.

“So, Assistant Director Wellington tells me you can use a little help on this case.” He was staring at my dripping clothes. “I’m glad I was available.” He was smirking.

“I thought you weren’t arriving until this afternoon?”

“Shifted my schedule around. I figured you’d be glad to have an extra set of eyes on this thing. So that woman they were taking down the hall, what happened?”

As I summarized, I noticed that in the haste to get Kelsey to a room, her clothes had been left on the floor. Jake watched me pick them up, and the gears seemed to be turning in his head. “You took her into the whirlpool?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I could have been here to help.”

Immediately, I sensed that his words could be taken two ways: either as an expression of genuine concern or as a lame and completely inappropriate joke. His tone of voice made me think it was the latter of the two, but before I could respond to him, my phone rang. I was amazed the water hadn’t shorted it out.

Tessa’s face came up on my caller ID and I told Jake to hang on a second, then answered the cell. “I’m in the middle of something, Tessa. This isn’t the best time to talk.”

“Um, Agent Jiang called, like, half an hour ago. She left a message on my cell. Said she’d tried you first.”

She must have called before you turned on your cell.

“She must really be trying to get a hold of you,” Tessa went on. “You’re supposed to give her a shout.”

It’d been bad enough talking to Lien-hua with Cheyenne nearby; I definitely did not want to do it in front of Jake Vanderveld. I laid the phone against my chest to muffle the sound. “Hey, could you give me a couple minutes? Call dispatch, get a CSU team over here to process the morgue.”

A small grin from him. “I’ll see you soon, Pat.”

“All right, Jake.”

Then he left and I told Tessa, “I talked with Agent Jiang about twenty minutes ago.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Is it official?”

This girl was more observant than most of the agents I work with.

“It’s been that evident, huh?”

“That would be a yes.”

“Well, I guess, you could say that, yes; it’s official. Listen, about lunch-”

“Your decision or hers?”

“Not so much a decision as a mutual acknowledgment.” I headed for the hall. “I have to take care of a few things, maybe I can call you later.”

“I’m sorry, Patrick.” It sounded like she really meant it. “Breaking up sucks.”

“I’m a big boy, Raven. I can handle it.”

“Doesn’t matter how big you are.” She paused. I heard her take a sip of something. “It still sucks.”

Here I was, getting relationship counseling from a teenage girl.

I wasn’t sure what to say. “Well, thanks.”

Since my clothes were soaked, after I’d had a chance to have a look around the morgue, I would need to get changed, and that meant swinging home. “Are we still on for lunch?”

“Yeah. I was thinking that new vegan place-Fruition. You know all those signs, ‘Come to Fruition,’ ‘Have you tasted Fruition?’”

How exciting. Bean curd, spinach, and chickpeas.

“Are you still at Pandora’s house?”

“She dropped me off at home.”

“OK.” I was almost to the morgue. “I can probably be there in about half an hour. You can pack until I arrive.”

“Well, actually, though, I’m pretty busy.”

“Oh, really? On a Saturday morning? What are you doing?”

“Dora gave me this Rubik’s Cube that I’m trying to figure out. And, oh yeah, I’m finishing up this iced triple grande three pump dolce breve with whip, pumpkin pie spice latte before you get here.” She rattled off the name of her drink in one breath.

I stopped walking and stared blankly at the wall. “You’re kidding me. Please tell me you’re kidding me.”

“It’s Dora’s favorite. I decided to try one. It’s good. Should I save some for you?”

This was very troubling. “Admit it. You bought that just to annoy me.”

I heard her take a sip. “If I did, you deserve it. You’re a coffee snob.”

“Not snob, connoisseur-wait a minute. Pumpkin pie spice is seasonal. They only serve that in the fall.”

“They had some in the back.”

“Oh, please tell me you didn’t.”

“I did.”

“You’re drinking mass-produced, factory-packaged coffee that was roasted and ground more than six months ago?”

I heard her sip again, a big hearty slurp. “Ahh. Yummy. Maybe I’ll go buy you one.”

“I’ll see you in half an hour for lunch. Get packing. And put that thing down before someone arrests me for child abuse.”

One more noisy sip. “See you.”

I arrived at the morgue and found Dr. Eric Bender inside, rolling the as-of-yet unidentified headless corpse out of the freezer.

After a quick greeting, I filled him in about the woman we’d just rescued. He listened intently, occasionally shaking his head, and when I was done he said, “You mentioned that her name is Kelsey?”

“Yes.”

“Then this was her husband.” Eric gestured toward the corpse in front of us. “Travis Nash. He was brought in yesterday morning, myocardial infarction. There was no autopsy ordered, everything pointed to natural causes.” He pulled out a file folder and showed me a picture of Travis before he’d been beheaded.

“We need to find out what this man really died of,” I said. “But this exam room is now a crime scene-attempted murder. You’ll need to either move him or wait for CSU to get in here.”

Eric didn’t look happy with that, but he didn’t argue with me. “OK,” he said.

“Can I have a look at Taylor?”

Eric nodded and I followed him into the freezer.