Tess Gerritsen - Harvest

The door swung open, but no one emerged. It was waiting for someone to board.

Yakov crept forward so that he was gazing through the gap between two steps, straight at the helicopter. Lucky Aleksei, he thought. Aleksei must be leaving tonight.

He heard the clang of a door shutting and a figure appeared at the edge of the lit circle. It was Nadiya. She crossed the deck, her body bent forward at the waist, her ass sticking in the air. She was scared those rotors would chop off her stupid head. She leaned inside the helicopter door, her ass still poking out as she spoke to the pilot. Then she backed out and retreated to the edge of the lights.

A moment later, the helicopter lifted off.

The lights shut off, plunging the deck into darkness.

Yakov eased around the stairway to watch as the helicopter rose. He saw the tail swing away like a giant pendulum on a string. Then the craft thundered away, swooping low over the water, and vanished into the night.

A hand grabbed Yakov's arm. He gave a cry as he was yanked backwards and spun around.

'what the fuck are you doing up here?" said Gregor. "Nothing!"

"What did you see?"

"Just the helicopter-' 'what did you see?"

Yakov only stared at him, too terrified to answer.

Nadiya had heard their voices. Now she crossed the deck towards them. 'what is it?"

"The boy's been watching again. I thought you locked the cabin."

"I did. He must have slipped out earlier." She looked at Yakov. "It's always him. I can't watch him every second."

"I've had enough of this one anyway." Gregor gaveYakov's arm a jerk, pulling him towards the stairway hatch. "He can't go back with the others." He turned to open the hatch. Yakov kicked him in the back of the knee. Gregor shrieked, releasing his grip.

Yakov ran. He heard Nadiya's shouts, heard footsteps pounding after him. Then more footsteps, clanging down the bridge stairway. He darted forward, towards the bow. Too late, he realized he had run straight onto the landing deck.

There was a loud clank, and the deck lights flared on.

Yakov was trapped in the very centre of their brilliance. Shielding his eyes, he stumbled blindly away from the sounds of pursuit. But they were all around him now, moving in. Grabbing his shirt. He flailed.

Someone slapped him across the face. The blow sent Yakov sprawling. He tried to crawl away, but his legs were kicked out from under him.

"That's enough!" said Nadiya. "You don't want to kill him!"

"Little motherfucker," Gregor grunted.

Yakov was yanked up by the hair. Gregor shoved him forward across the deck, towards the stairwell hatch. Yakov kept stumbling, only to be dragged back up again by the hair. He couldn't see where they were going. He knew only that they were going down some steps, moving along a corridor. Gregor was cursing the whole way. He was also limping a little, which gave Yakov some small measure of satisfaction.

A door swung open andYakov was tossed over the threshold.

"You can rot in there for a while," said Gregor. And he slammed the door shut.

Yakov heard the latch close. Heard footsteps fade away. He was alone in the darkness.

He drew his knees to his chest and lay hugging himself. A strange trembling seized his body, and he tried to stop it but couldn't. He could hear his own teeth chattering, not from the cold, but from some quaking deep in his soul. He closed his eyes and was confronted with the images of what he'd seen tonight. Nadiya crossing the deck, gliding, floating through an unearthly field of light. The helicopter door open and waiting. Now Nadiya bending over, reaching out as she hands something to the pilot.

A box.

Yakov drew his legs more tightly to his chest, but the trembling didn't ease.

Whimpering, he put his thumb in his mouth and began to suck.

For Abby, mornings were the worst. She would awaken feeling that first sleepy flush of anticipation for the day ahead. Then suddenly she'd remember: I have nowhere to go. That realization would strike as cruelly as any physical blow. She would lie in bed, listening to Mark getting dressed. She'd hear him moving around in the still-dark bedroom, and she would feel so engulfed by depression she could not say a word to him. They shared a house and a bed, yet they'd scarcely spoken to each other in days. This is how love dies, thought Abby, hearing him walk out the front door. Not with angry words, but with silence.

WhenAbby was twelve years old, her father was laid off from his job at the tannery. For weeks afterwards, he'd drive away each morning, as though heading for work as usual. Abby never found out where he went, or what he did. Till the day he died, he never told her. All Abby knew was that her father was terrified of staying home and confronting his own failure. So he'd continued the charade, fleeing the house every morning.

Just as Abby was doing today.

She left the car at home and walked instead, blocks and blocks, not really caring where she went. Last night the weather had turned cold, and by the time she finally stopped in at a bagel shop, her face was numb. She bought coffee and a sesame seed bagel and slid into one of the booths. She'd taken only two bites when she happened to glance at the man at the next table. He was reading a Boston Herald.

Abby's photo was on the front page.

She felt like crawling out the door. Furtively she glanced around the care, half expecting everyone to be looking at her, but no one was.

She bolted out of the booth, tossed her bagel in the trash, and walked out. Her appetite was gone. At a newsstand a block away, she purchased a copy of the Herald and huddled, shivering in a doorway while she scanned the article.

RIGORS OF SURGICAL TRAINING MAY HAVE LED

TO TRAGEDY

By all accounts, Dr. Abigail DiMatteo was an outstanding resident — one of the best at Bayside Medical Centre, according to Department Chairman Dr. Colin Wettig. But sometime in the last few months, soon after Dr. DiMatteo entered her second year in the programme, things began to go terribly wrong…

Abby had to stop reading; her breaths were coming too hard and fast. It took her a few moments to calm down enough to finish the article. When she finally did, she felt truly sick.

The reporter had included everything. The lawsuits. Mary Allen's death. The shouting match with Brenda. None of it was deniable. All the elements, taken together, painted the picture of an unstable, even dangerous personality. It fed right into the public's secret horror of being at the mercy of a deranged physician.

I can't believe it's me they're writing about.

Even if she managed to retain her medical licence, even if she finished a residency, an article like this would follow her forever. So would the doubts. No patient in his right mind would go under the knife of a psychopath.

She didn't know how long she walked around with that newspaper clutched in her hand. When she finally came to a halt, she was standing on the Harvard University Common, and her ears were aching from the cold. She realized it was already well past lunchtime. She'd been walking around all morning, and now half the day was gone. She didn't know where to go next. Everyone else on the Common — students in backpacks, shaggy professors in tweeds — seemed to have a destination. But not her.

She looked down again, at the newspaper. The photograph they'd used of her was from the residency directory, a shot taken when she was an intern. She'd smiled straight at the camera, her face fresh and eager, the look of a young woman ready and willing to work for her dream.

She threw the newspaper into the nearest trash receptacle and walked home, thinking: Fight back. I have to fight back.

But she and Vivian had run out of leads. Yesterday, Vivian had flown to Burlington. When she'd called Abby last night, it had been with bad news: Tim Nicholls's practice had closed down, and no one knew where he was. Dead end. Also, Wilcox Memorial had no records of any harvests on those four dates. Another dead end. Finally, Vivian had checked with the local police and had found no records of missing persons or unidentified bodies with their hearts cut out. Final dead end.