Tess Gerritsen - The Surgeon

Her gaze turned, once again, to Elena Ortiz’s apartment building.

Only then did she focus on the car, parked in the alley. On the license plate mounted on its rear bumper.

POSEY5.

In an instant she was fumbling through her purse for the detective’s business card. With shaking hands she dialed his number on her car phone.

He answered with a businesslike, “Detective Moore.”

“This is Catherine Cordell,” she said. “You came to see me a few days ago.”

“Yes, Dr. Cordell?”

“Did Elena Ortiz drive a green Honda?”

“Excuse me?”

“I need to know her license number.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

“Just tell me !” Her sharp command startled him. There was a long silence on the line.

“Let me check,” he said. In the background she heard men talking, phones ringing. He came back on the line.

“It’s a vanity plate,” he said. “I believe it refers to the family’s flower business.”

“POSEY FIVE,” she whispered.

A pause. “Yes,” he said, his voice strangely quiet. Alert.

“When you spoke to me, the other day, you asked if I knew Elena Ortiz.”

“And you said you didn’t.”

Catherine released a shuddering breath. “I was wrong.”

She was pacing inside the E.R., her face pale and tense, her coppery hair a tangled mane about her shoulders. She looked at Moore as he stepped into the waiting area.

“Was I right?” she said.

He nodded. “Posey Five was her Internet screen name. We checked her computer. Now tell me how you knew this.”

She glanced around the bustling E.R. and said: “Let’s go into one of the call rooms.”

The room she took him to was a dark little cave, windowless, furnished with only a bed, a chair, and a desk. For an exhausted doctor whose single goal is sleep, the room would be perfectly sufficient. But as the door swung shut, Moore was acutely aware of how small the space was, and he wondered if the forced intimacy made her as uncomfortable as it did him. They both glanced around for places to sit. At last she settled on the bed, and he took the chair.

“I never actually met Elena,” said Catherine. “I didn’t even know that was her name. We belonged to the same Internet chat room. You know what a chat room is?”

“It’s a way to have a live conversation on the computer.”

“Yes. A group of people who are online at the same time can meet over the Internet. This is a private room, only for women. You have to know all the right keywords to get into it. And all you see on the computer are screen names. No real names or faces, so we can all stay anonymous. It lets us feel safe enough to share our secrets.” She paused. “You’ve never used one?”

“Talking to faceless strangers doesn’t much appeal to me, I’m afraid.”

“Sometimes,” she said softly, “a faceless stranger is the only person you can talk to.”

He heard the depth of pain in that statement and could think of nothing to say.

After a moment, she took a deep breath and focused not on him but on her hands, folded in her lap. “We meet once a week, on Wednesday nights at nine o’clock. I enter by going on-line, clicking the chat-room icon, and typing in first PTSD , and then: womanhelp . And I’m in. I communicate with other women by typing messages and sending them through the Internet. Our words appear onscreen, where we can all see them.”

“PTSD? I take it that stands for—”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder. A nice clinical term for what the women in that room are suffering.”

“What trauma are we talking about?”

She raised her head and looked straight at him. “Rape.”

The word seemed to hang between them for a moment, the very sound of it charging the air. One brutal syllable with the impact of a physical blow.

“And you go there because of Andrew Capra,” he said gently. “What he did to you.”

Her gaze faltered, dropped away. “Yes,” she whispered. Once again she was looking at her hands. Moore watched her, his anger building over what had happened to Catherine. What Capra had ripped from her soul. He wondered what she was like before the attack. Warmer, friendlier? Or had she always been so insulated from human contact, like a bloom encased in frost?

She drew herself straighter and forged ahead. “So that’s where I met Elena Ortiz. I didn’t know her real name, of course. I saw only her screen name, Posey Five.”

“How many women are in this chat room?”

“It varies from week to week. Some of them drop out. A few new names appear. On any night, there can be anywhere from three to a dozen of us.”

“How did you learn about it?”

“From a brochure for rape victims. It’s given out at women’s clinics and hospitals around the city.”

“So these women in the chat room, they’re all from the Boston area?”

“Yes.”

“And Posey Five, was she a regular visitor?”

“She was there, off and on, over the last two months. She didn’t say much, but I’d see her name on the screen and I knew she was there.”

“Did she talk about her rape?”

“No. She just listened. We’d type hellos to her. And she’d acknowledge the greetings. But she wouldn’t talk about herself. It’s as if she was afraid to. Or just too ashamed to say anything.”

“So you don’t know that she was raped.”

“I know she was.”

“How?”

“Because Elena Ortiz was treated in this emergency room.”

He stared at her. “You found her record?”

She nodded. “It occurred to me that she might have needed medical treatment after the attack. This is the closest hospital to her address. I checked our hospital computer. It has the name of every patient seen in this E.R. Her name was there.” She stood up. “I’ll show you her record.”

He followed her out of the call room and back into the E.R. It was a Friday evening, and the casualties were rolling in the door. The TGIF-er, clumsy with booze, clutching an ice bag to his battered face. The impatient teenager who’d lost his race with a yellow light. The Friday night army of the bruised and bloodied, stumbling in from the night. Pilgrim Medical Center was one of the busiest E.R.’s in Boston, and Moore felt as though he was walking through the heart of chaos as he dodged nurses and gurneys and stepped over a fresh splash of blood.

Catherine led him into the E.R. records room, a closet-sized space with wall-to-wall shelves containing three-ring binders.

“This is where they temporarily store the enounter forms,” said Catherine. She pulled down the binder labeled: May 7–May 14 . “Every time a patient is seen in the E.R., a form is generated. It’s usually only a page long, and it contains the doctor’s note, and the treatment instructions.”

“There’s no chart made up for each patient?”

“If it’s just a single E.R. visit, then no hospital chart is ever put together. The only record is the encounter form. These eventually get moved to the hospital’s medical records room, where they’re scanned and stored on disk.” She opened the May 7–May 14 binder. “Here it is.”

He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. The scent of her hair momentarily distracted him, and he had to force himself to focus on the page. The visit was dated May 9, 1:00 A.M. The patient’s name, address, and billing information were typed at the top; the rest of the form was handwritten in ink. Medical shorthand, he thought, as he struggled to decipher the words and could make out only the first paragraph, which had been written by the nurse:

22-year-old Hispanic female, sexually assaulted two hours ago. No allergies, no meds. BP 105/70, P 100, T. 99.