Jeff Abbott - Fear

He smelled a raw, metallic odor. Familiar. The smell of blood. He leaned back from her, searching her face, running fingers along the bed. ‘Amanda!’

She folded her gaze back into herself.

He yanked the covers off her. She lay in soft pants and shirt and he groped along her limbs and her torso for injury. Nothing. He pulled her cheek up from the pillow; her skin lay smooth and unbroken. His hands hurried at the back of her head and stickiness gummed his fingers.

She began to scream, thrashing against him, screaming for him please to take her face off.

‘I don’t understand,’ Groote said, ‘why she hurts herself.’

‘The reasons are many.’ Doctor Warner was a heavyset man, florid face under carrot-red hair starting to gray. ‘She blames herself for the accident.’

‘She shouldn’t. It wasn’t remotely her fault.’

‘She still blames herself.’

‘Well, I blame you for her state of mind,’ Groote said in a voice of icy calm. ‘My daughter is cutting her scalp open, for God’s sakes. Your staff let her get hold of a safety pin.’ And that had been her shrieked explanation as he summoned help: Taking my face off has to be done from the back, Dad, it’s easier.

‘It won’t happen again.’

‘I want you,’ Groote said, keeping his control but nearly hissing through his teeth, ‘to help her.’

‘We’ve tried art therapy, medications, group therapy. All the standard treatments to process unintegrated, traumatic memory. Amanda is simply not improving.’ Warner tented his hands under his jaw. ‘The mental damage she suffered, trapped with her dead mother for so long, it may not be reparable.’

‘If it’s broken, it can be fixed,’ Groote said.

‘Amanda is not a dish to be glued back together,’ Warner said.

Patience, he reminded himself. Deep breath. ‘When I say fix, I mean… give her enough health to have her life back. To want to live again.’ Groote thought, I’ll find out if you have a family, Doctor, because if you don’t help my daughter you won’t be able to help your own. You can get a real sense of what pain is.

‘Amanda had problems before the accident. Her biological father abused her.’

‘Yes.’ Groote didn’t care to be reminded of the sad details, and he felt Warner was saying, Sorry, buddy, your daughter was damaged goods before you brought her here. But Groote had taken care of the rotten, no-good deadbeat father as a secret favor to his new wife and daughter. He never experienced hate when he killed, except when he’d put ten bullets into that worthless scum. He had not known he could love Cathy and Amanda so much; the idea of love had seemed like a rumor, never real until he found them.

And now Cathy was gone, and Amanda needed him. She only had him to protect her.

‘Obviously the loss of her mother is devastating to her. But the conditions in which she lost her mom, they’re much more damaging than her mother dying in a hospital bed of cancer, or even dying instantly in an accident. In a way, Amanda experienced her own death when she experienced her mother’s. Think of it as a compound fracture against her mental health. It took her straight over into complex post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘You’re not helping her,’ Groote said in a low tone. ‘She’s trying to take her face off. If she hurts herself again I will hold you personally responsible and you’ll learn an entirely new meaning of the word consequences.’

Warner smiled. He was a smart man, Groote thought, who knew very little. ‘Threatening me doesn’t help your daughter, Mr. Groote.’

‘I’m sorry. But I need you to fix her. To make her right again. Please. Please.’ And then salvation came, in the form of his cell phone ringing. Only the hospital and his clients had this number. He opened the phone; he didn’t use voice mail, it carried too much risk. ‘I’ll have to call you back,’ he said instead of hello.

‘Please do,’ a smooth voice answered. ‘This is Quantrill. I have the perfect job for you. It could even help your daughter.’

Groote drove over the speed limit all the way to Santa Monica. Oliver Quantrill’s house, a fusion of steel and glass, stood in a wealthy neighborhood. Quantrill sat on his expansive tiered deck, drinking mineral water, tapping on a laptop. He was tall, gym-club and protein-diet gaunt, in his early forties. He closed the laptop as Groote approached him.

‘How did you know about my daughter?’ Groote cooled his rage – No, be honest, it’s not rage, it’s fear – down to a simmer.

‘Calm down, Dennis. I had you checked when I first hired you. It would have been foolish not to, given your past. I mean Amanda no harm.’

‘Talk. What job could I do for you that helps my kid?’

‘Do you know exactly what I do, Dennis?’

‘You sell information. I don’t know specifics.’

‘Here’s a specific. I’ve acquired medical research designed to help people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. People such as Amanda.’

Groote’s legs went weak. He sat down. ‘Research.’

‘Abandoned research. It didn’t work the first time. I’ve had my team make improvements. Now it works.’

‘Works how?’

‘It’s a drug that makes PTSD controllable. Possibly curable.’ Quantrill sipped at his orange juice. ‘Would you like your daughter back, Dennis? What would that be worth to you?’

Groote opened his mouth, then closed it.

‘Everything, wouldn’t it?’

‘Sure,’ Groote said. ‘I would want it for my daughter.’

‘You and many, many other people. Experts estimate that up to ten percent of the American population, ten percent of the European population, suffers from a form of PTSD. That’s many millions of potential patients. And then we have all the soldiers coming back from the Middle East fresh from war, with as many as forty percent with traumatic memories. Huge cost, right there. And the civilian populations in the war zones. Add in all the other horrors of life that can haunt us: hurricanes, assaults, rapes, car crashes, accidents, terrorist attacks… well, you can see fighting trauma is a growth market.’ Quantrill took another sip of his juice, poured a glass from the carafe for Groote, handed it to him.

‘I haven’t heard of any drug research along these lines, and I follow anything that could help my girl.’

‘The research and testing has been done, well, under the table. So I can sell the research to a pharmaceutical and they can claim it’s a product of their own development. I get an ongoing percentage. Sooner that’s done, sooner Amanda and everyone who needs the drug gets it.’

Groote’s mouth went dry. ‘Why’s the research got to be secret?’

‘Not your worry. But I do need you to worry about a woman in Santa Fe. Her name is Doctor Allison Vance. She’s been working with the patients who’ve tested the drug in a psych hospital I own there. My research director’s worried that she might blow a whistle on me to the FDA. She does that, no miracle drug for anybody. Including Amanda.’

‘I already dislike Doctor Vance intensely,’ Groote said. ‘I’m sure she’s a truly awful person.’

Quantrill grinned. ‘I knew you were the right guy for this job. Go to New Mexico on the next available flight. Bring back the research materials to me. I know they’ll be safe with you. And if Doctor Vance becomes a problem, then I need you to introduce her to a very serious accident.’

Pull yourself together, Miles told himself. Andy quit following him as he ran along Paseo de Peralta and turned the corner onto Canyon Road. He’s fighting you because he’s afraid you really will make him go away.

Miles stopped running, stuck a hand in his pocket, closed his fingers around the pills Allison had given him. No, he wouldn’t take one yet; he wanted his mind sharp at work. As sharp as it could be. If Andy reappeared… then down the pill. But Andy didn’t seem to enjoy the gallery much and Miles walked on surer footing inside its walls.