Tess Gerritsen - Harvest

"Katzka?"

"Mark Hodell hasn't been answering his pages."

"What?"

"His car's not in the hospital parking lot. No one seems to know where he is."

She tried to speak, but her throat felt as if it had swollen shut, and the only sound that came out was a whispered: "No."

"It's too early to draw any conclusions, Abby. His pager may be broken. We don't know anything yet."

But Abby knew. She knew with a certainty that was both immediate and shattering. Her whole body suddenly felt numb. Lifeless. She didn't realize she was crying, didn't even feel the tears sliding down until Katzka rose, tissue in hand, and gently wiped her cheek.

"I'm sorry," he murmured. He brushed her hair off her face, and just for a moment, his hand lingered there, fingers resting protectively on her forehead. He said, more softly, "I'm so sorry."

"Find him for me," she whispered. "Please. Please, find him for me."

"I will."

A moment later she heard him walk out of the room. Only then did she realize he had untied the restraints. She was free to leave

HARVEST

the bed, to walk out of the room. But she didn't.

She turned her face into the pillow and wept.

At noon a nurse came in to remove the IV and to leave a lunch tray. Abby didn't even look at the food. The tray was later removed, untouched.

At two o'clock, Dr. Wettig walked in. He stood by her bed, flipping through the pages of her chart, making clucking sounds as he reviewed the lab results. At last he closed the chart and looked down at her. "Dr. DiMatteo?"

She didn't answer him.

"Detective Katzka tells me you deny drinking any alcohol last night," he said.

She said nothing.

Wettig sighed. "The first step towards recovery is acknowledging you have a problem. Now, I should have been more aware. I should have realized what you were struggling with all this time. But now it's all out in the open. It's time to deal with the problem."

She looked up at him. "What would be the point?" she said dully. "The point is, you have some sort of future worth salvaging. A DUI is a serious setback, but you're an intelligent woman. There will be other careers open to you besides medicine."

Her response was silence. The loss of her career felt almost insignificant at that moment, compared to the greater grief she felt over Mark's vanishing.

"I've asked Dr. O" Connor to evaluate you," said Wetfig. "He'll be in sometime this evening."

"I don't need a psychiatrist."

"I think you do, Abby. I think you need a lot of help. You have to get beyond these delusions of persecution. I'm not going to approve your release until O" Connor clears it. He may decide to transfer you to the Psychiatry unit. That's his call. We can't have you hurting yourself, the way you tried to do last night. We're all very concerned about you, Abby. I'm concerned about you. That's why I'm ordering a psychiatric evaluation. It's for your own good, believe me."

She looked straight up at him. "Fuck you, General."

To her immense satisfaction, he flinched and stepped away from the bed. He slapped the chart shut. "I'll check in on you later, Dr. DiMatteo," he said, and left the room.

For a long time she stared at the ceiling. Only moments ago, before Wettig had walked in, she had felt too weary to fight. Now every muscle had tensed and her stomach was in turmoil. Her hands ached. She looked down and realized they were knotted into fists.

Fuck all of you.

She sat up. The dizziness lasted only a few seconds, then passed. She'd been lying in bed too long. It was time to get moving. To regain control of her life.

She crossed the room and opened the door a crack.

A nurse looked up from her desk and stared directly at Abby. Her nametag said WSoriano, RN. "Do you need something?"

"Uh, no," said Abby, and quickly retreated back behind her closed door.

Shit. Shit, they were keeping her a prisoner.

In bare feet she paced a circle around the room, trying to plan her next move. She couldn't think about Mark right now. If she did, she'd just curl up in bed again, crying. That's what they wanted her to do, what they expected her to do.

She went to the chair by the window and sat down to think. She considered the moves open to her, but couldn't come up with any. Last night, Mark had said Mohandas was on their side, but now Mark was missing. She wasn't going to trust Mohandas. She wasn't going to trust anyone in this hospital.

She went to the nightstand and picked up the phone. There was a dial tone. She called Vivian's number, and got a recording. Then she remembered that Vivian was still in Burlington.

She called her own home, punched in her access code, and listened to the messages from her answering machine. There had been another call from Vivian, and by the tone of her voice, the call had been urgent. She'd left a Burlington number.

Abby dialled it.

This time Vivian answered. "You barely caught me. I was just about to check out of here."

"You're coming home?"

"I've got a six o'clock flight to Logan. Listen, this trip has been nothing but a wild goose chase. There were no harvests done in Burlington."

"How do you know?"

'! checked the airport here. And every other airstrip in the area. On the nights of those transplants, there were no midnight flights logged out of here to Boston. Not a single dinky plane. BuffingtoWs just a cover for them. And Tim Nicholls provided the official paperwork."

"And now Nicholls has vanished."

"Or they got rid of him."

They both fell momentarily silent. Then Abby said, softly: "Mark's missing."

"What?"

"No one knows where he is. Detective Katzka says they can't find his car. And Mark doesn't answer his pager." She paused, her throat closing over.

"Oh, Abby. Abby…" Vivian's voice faltered.

In the brief silence, Abby heard a click on the line. She was gripping the receiver so tightly her fingers ached.

"Vivian?" she said.

There was another click. And then the line went dead.

She hung up and tried to call again, but there was no dial tone. She tried the operator, tried hanging up again and again. Still no dial tone.

The hospital had disconnected her telephone.

Katzka stood on the narrow walkway of the Tobin Bridge and stared down at the water far below. From the west ran the Mystic River, on its way to join the waters of the Chelsea River before flowing out to Boston Harbour and the sea. It was a long drop, thought Katzka, imagining the force with which a body would impact on that water. Almost certainly a fatal drop.

Turning, he gazed past the late-afternoon traffic whizzing by and focused on the downriver side of the bridge. He traced the hypothetical sequence of events that would follow a body's plunge. The corpse would be carried by the current into the harbour. At first, it would drift along below the water's surface, perhaps scraping across the bottom silt. Eventually the body's internal gases would expand. This would happen over a time span of hours to days. It depended on the water temperature and the speed with which the gas-forming bacteria multiplied in the rotting intestines. At a certain point, the corpse would float to the surface.

That's when it would be found. In a day or two. Bloated and unrecognizable.

Katzka turned to the patrolman standing beside him. He had to shout over the sound of traffic. "What time did you notice the car?"

"Around 5 a.m. It was pulled over in the northbound breakdown lane. Right over there." He pointed across the lanes of whizzing cars. "Nice green BMW.! stopped right away."

"You didn't see anyone near the BMW?"

"No, sir. It looked abandoned. I called in the licence number and confirmed it wasn't reported stolen. I figured maybe the driver had engine trouble and left to get help. It was a hazard to traffic, sitting there. So I called the tow truck."