Tess Gerritsen: Vanish

“Oh, man. If this isn’t your worst nightmare.”

Out came the oxygen mask and IV lines. They slapped on EKG leads. On the monitor, a slow sinus rhythm blipped like a lazy cartoonist’s pen. The woman had a heartbeat and she was breathing, yet she still looked dead.

Looping a tourniquet around one flaccid arm, the EMT asked: “What’s her story? How did she get here?”

“I don’t know anything about her,” said Maura. “I came down to check on another body in the cold room and I heard this one moving.”

“Does this, uh, happen very often here?”

“This is a first time for me.” And she hoped to God it was the last.

“How long has she been in your refrigerator?”

Maura glanced at the hanging clipboard, where the day’s deliveries were recorded, and saw that a Jane Doe had arrived at the morgue around noon. Eight hours ago. Eight hours zipped in a shroud. What if she’d ended up on my table? What if I had sliced into her chest? Rummaging through the receiving in-basket, she found the envelope containing the woman’s paperwork. “Weymouth Fire and Rescue brought her in,” she said. “An apparent drowning…”

“Whoa, Nelly!” The EMT had just stabbed an IV needle into a vein and the patient suddenly jerked to life, her torso bucking on the gurney. The IV site magically puffed blue as the punctured vein hemorrhaged into the skin.

“Shit, lost the site. Help me hold her down!”

“Man, this gal’s gonna get up and walk away.”

“She’s really fighting now. I can’t get the IV started.”

“Then let’s just get her on the stretcher and move her.”

“Where are you taking her?” Maura said.

“Right across the street. The ER. If you have any paperwork they’ll want a copy.”

She nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”

A long line of patients stood waiting to register at the ER window, and the triage nurse behind the desk refused to meet Maura’s attempts to catch her eye. On this busy night, it would take a severed limb and spurting blood to justify cutting to the front of the line, but Maura ignored the nasty looks of other patients and pushed straight to the window. She rapped on the glass.

“You’ll have to wait your turn,” the triage nurse said.

“I’m Dr. Isles. I have a patient’s transfer papers. The doctor will want them.”

“Which patient?”

“The woman they just brought in from across the street.”

“You mean that lady from the morgue?”

Maura paused, suddenly aware that the other patients in line could hear every word. “Yes,” was all she said.

“Come on through, then. They want to talk to you. They’re having trouble with her.”

The door lock buzzed open, and Maura pushed through, into the treatment area. She saw immediately what the triage nurse had meant by trouble. Jane Doe had not yet been moved into a treatment room, but was still lying in the hallway, her body now draped with a heating blanket. The two EMTs and a nurse struggled to control her.

“Tighten that strap!”

“Shit-her hand’s out again-”

“Forget the oxygen mask. She doesn’t need it.”

“Watch that IV! We’re going to lose it!”

Maura lunged toward the stretcher and grabbed the patient’s wrist before she could pull out the intravenous catheter. Long black hair lashed Maura’s face as the woman tried to twist free. Only twenty minutes ago, this had been a blue-lipped corpse in a body bag. Now they could barely restrain her as life came roaring back into her limbs.

“Hold on. Hold on to that arm!”

The sound started deep in the woman’s throat. It was the moan of a wounded animal. Then her head tilted back and her cry rose to an unearthly shriek. Not human, thought Maura, as the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. My god, what have I brought back from the dead?

“Listen to me. Listen! ” Maura commanded. She grasped the woman’s head in her hands and stared down at a face contorted in panic. “I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise. You have to let us help you.”

At the sound of Maura’s voice, the woman went still. Blue eyes stared back, the pupils dilated to huge black pools.

One of the nurses quietly began to loop a restraint around the woman’s hand.

No, thought Maura. Don’t do that.

As the strap brushed the patient’s wrist, she jerked as though scalded. Her arm flew and Maura stumbled backward, her cheek stinging from the blow.

“Assistance!” the nurse yelled. “Can we get Dr. Cutler out here?”

Maura backed away, face throbbing, as a doctor and another nurse emerged from one of the treatment rooms. The commotion had drawn the attention of patients in the waiting room. Maura saw them eagerly peering through the glass partition, watching a scene that was better than any TV episode of ER.

“We know if she has any allergies?” the doctor asked.

“No medical history,” said the nurse.

“What’s going on here? Why is she out of control?”

“We have no idea.”

“Okay. Okay, let’s try five milligrams of Haldol IV.”

“IV’s out!”

“Then give it IM. Just do it! And let’s get some Valium in her, too, before she hurts herself.”

The woman gave another shriek as the needle pierced her skin.

“Do we know anything about this woman? Who is she?” The doctor suddenly noticed Maura standing a few feet away. “Are you a relative?”

“I called the ambulance. I’m Dr. Isles.”

“Her physician?”

Before Maura could answer, one of the EMTs said: “She’s the medical examiner. This is the patient who woke up in the morgue.”

The doctor stared at Maura. “You’re kidding.”

“I found her moving in the cold room,” said Maura.

The doctor gave a disbelieving laugh. “Who pronounced her dead?”

“Weymouth Fire and Rescue brought her in.”

He looked at the patient. “Well, she’s definitely alive now.”

“Dr. Cutler, room two’s now empty,” a nurse called out. “We can move her in there.”

Maura followed as they wheeled the stretcher down the hallway and into a treatment room. The woman’s struggles had weakened, her strength giving way to the effects of Haldol and Valium. The nurses drew blood, reconnected EKG wires. The cardiac rhythm ticked across the monitor.

“Okay, Dr. Isles,” said the ER physician as he shone a penlight into the woman’s eyes. “Tell me more.”

Maura opened the envelope containing the photocopied paperwork that had accompanied the body. “Let me just tell you what’s in the transfer papers,” she said. “At eight A.M., Weymouth Fire and Rescue responded to a call from the Sunrise Yacht Club, where boaters found the subject floating in Hingham Bay. When she was pulled from the water, she had no pulse or respirations. And no ID. A state police investigator was called to the scene, and he thought it was most likely accidental. She was transferred to our office at noon.”

“And no one at the ME’s noticed that she was alive?”

“She arrived while we were swamped with other cases. There was that accident on I-95. And we were still backlogged from last night.”

“It’s now nearly nine. And no one checked this woman?”

“The dead don’t have emergencies.”

“So you just leave them in the refrigerator?”

“Until we can get to them.”

“What if you hadn’t heard her moving tonight?” He turned to look at her. “You mean she might have been left there until tomorrow morning?”

Maura felt her cheeks flush. “Yes,” she admitted.

“Dr. Cutler, ICU has a bed available,” a nurse said. “Is that where you want her?”