CATCH ME (EMBRYO: A Raney & Levine Thriller, Book 4) Read online

  “They may have both seen something. Mom’s gonna make it.” Alex held up an evidence bag holding the crinkled paper. “We got another message.” He watched Kerri’s lips tighten, then turned for their unmarked car. “See you at Madison.”

  She carried the little boy into the first ambulance, sat him on a side bench, and wrapped him in a blanket. He seemed about four, but well developed like a child who was normally very active. He breathed hard and fast, pulled his knees to his stomach, sucked harder on his thumb.

  “What’s your name, honey?” she tried again feelingly, offering him one of the ambulance’s emergency teddy bears. He turned away from it into her hug, squeezed his eyes shut, and his body shook.

  Until the clatter of cops helping to upload the gurney and two EMTs piled in, one holding up an IV and the other radioing in the patient’s vital signs.

  The child emitted a dull, aching cry and jerked away from Kerri. The EMT pocketing her phone reached to control him as Kerri let him go.

  He crawled to his mother, crying. Her eyes were closed, her dark hair clammy on her brow, and her pretty face was pale under the oxygen mask. Her child’s right hand touched her cheek, and his left hand moved to her blanketed chest, wanting to hug her. The female EMT restrained him gently, telling him how important those wires and tubes going into Mommy were.

  “Here,” she told him, indicating a place further down the blanket. “You can hug Mommy here.”

  He did. As the ambulance pulled out and swayed into traffic, he hugged his mother’s knees and lay his head down on them, wailing softly.

  The siren outside shrilled. Over the sound Kerri heard the second EMT call to her.

  “What?”

  His face was tight. “You gotta see who she is.”

  Kerri pulled on latex gloves and took the wallet from the purse they’d found. ID papers were inside, along with photos of a happy mom with her grinning little boy.

  Kerri read the ID info. It hit hard. She’d been holding her breath and her hurting heart until this moment; now a surge of fury shot through her.

  “Son of a bitch!” she whispered.

  With shaking hands she got out her phone and punched her speed dial.

  2

  “Where’d the sun go?” Jill Raney looked out gloomily.

  “Days are getting shorter,” muttered Tricia Donovan, Jill’s best friend since med school. They’d survived internship together, and been first-year residents since last July first. Were amazed it was early October already.

  Now they lay, sprawled in their scrubs and thin white jackets, on the rug of the hospital staff’s 24/7 childcare suite, surrounded by baby babble, bright noisy toys, and a few other parents. Tricia squirmed her slightly plump body and scowled through her wire-rimmed glasses to the window at the end of the room. Only six o’clock; twilight already out there.

  She looked back and groaned. “I haven’t looked out this whole stressful, crappy day. Was it nice out?”

  “Yeah.” Jill was up on an elbow squeaking a yellow duck. “Great sunset too. Saw it from the cafeteria. Ouch. Not on Mommy’s ribs, honey. David had to remind me to look out.”

  She was taking a break, playing with Jesse. Times like this were usually her happy times. David’s too. Friends of theirs often joined them, enjoyed stretching out like this and goofing around with Jesse.

  Marveling at him, too, although now he was goofing around on his own, chortling and clambering over Jill, pulling at her long dark hair she’d just loosened from a ponytail, tumbling down from her hip (“ooo!” he squealed), climbing back up again like a little buckaroo. One night, in David’s and Jill’s apartment, she had discovered that no matter how exhausted she was, just sprawling on the rug, closing her eyes and letting Jesse climb on her was immensely entertaining to their rambunctious almost-one-year-old.

  Almost.

  Jill was fretting about that, getting angst-ridden again. After a blessed long lull, the media was starting up again. Running sensational stories about “the miracle baby, almost a year old and normal by all accounts.”

  There were also smaller articles about a symposium the hospital had scheduled for researchers to hear about Jesse’s progress. Four days from now, dammit! Six days before Jesse’s birthday. Doctors and researchers were coming from all over the world to see him.

  Put him on bleeping display, is how Jill saw it.

  So she’d been fretting on two fronts: about the mounting media harassment and the coming symposium, arguing with hospital big wigs who’d argued and pleaded back. Jesse had made Madison Memorial Hospital more famous than ever. David, in his more rationalizing moments, said the symposium would at least be a chance to show that Jesse was just a sweet little kid. Smart, yes. Advancing somewhat faster than most little ones, yes - but that happened with kids born through regular pregnancies, too.

  Jill screwed up her lovely features and smirked. “Maybe he’ll sock Simpson in the nose.” Willard Simpson, M.D., was Chief of Madison’s Genetic Counseling Committee, and a world expert in embryonic epidemiology and high risk obstetrics.

  “Nah,” Tricia said, her pudgy fingers squishing a squeaky blue whale she’d been toying with. “Jesse likes Simpson. Likes to tweak his pointy little nose and pull his fat pink jowls and smear his glasses.”

  The subject of the damned symposium had become obsessive in the last few days.

  “Practice your speech?” Jill sighed.

  “What’s to practice? We’re all just gonna march up to the podium like five school kids and tell how we ‘interacted’ – love Simpson’s word – with Jesse for the three months before his birth. We’ll blow ‘em away! We interacted with an unborn fetus! Before this nobody’s ever seen the unborn except through murky dark sonograms. We hugged his cylinder, made smiley goofy faces, and he responded.”

  “Made him grin.” Jill allowed herself a crooked smile, ruffling Jesse’s wisp of light brown hair. He was tired now, cuddling against her.

  “Played music. Bogeyed like idiots for him. Kept him company at every chance… Please stop obsessing,” Tricia said emotionally. “Try to relax for half a minute.”

  Jill fell silent, briefly. “Is half a minute up?”

  Tricia barked laughter, then paused for a thoughtful moment. “Sure doesn’t seem like a year,” she said.

  “Time flies when you’re frantic.”

  “C’mon, it hasn’t all been frantic,” Tricia deadpanned. “Except for two killers three months apart and the hospital swarming with cops and bomb sniffing dogs. Lately it’s been calm for months.”

  Jill’s large, soulful green eyes grew more troubled. “I still get nightmares.”

  Tricia knew that; exhaled. Couldn’t think of anything else comforting to say. They’d talked about it a lot - Tricia, Jill and her David. The good news was that Jill’s nightmares and night sweats had eased off…mostly. David was her rock. Still, it was incredible to think that so much, miraculous and terrifying, had been crammed into the last fifteen months.

  They grew silent, remembering...

  Almost a year ago, in a delivery room during a lull, Tricia, Jill, David Levine and two other close friends had lifted Jesse, wet with amniotic-like fluid, from the silicone cylinder a crazed genius doctor named Clifford Arnett had created for him to serve as a man-made uterus. The stunned hospital didn’t announce his arrival right away. Monitored him in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for over two weeks while the media gnashed their teeth, dug furiously for leaks, ran creepy blurry pictures of him floating in his glass cylinder at just six months’ gestation when Jill – then staff running in - first discovered him in a hidden lab. When the hospital finally announced that Jesse was fine, normal and here, headlines exploded: ARTIFICIAL WOMB, DESIGNER BABY, EMBRYO FARM and BRAVE NEW WORLD.

  Now the media was at it again. Some of it beyond stupid.

  “BIRTHDAY APPROACHES!... ABLE TO LEAP TALL BUILDINGS?”

  There were more photos, too. Shots of Jill and David carrying Jesse to their apart
ment a block away; Jesse squealing with delight at a nurse making a goofy face; Jesse giving another baby his toy monkey. Photos were taken or leaked. Jill and David had had to relax about it, couldn’t even think of trying to stop it.

  “…just like any little kid!” David had told reporters as he carried Jesse home. That was last summer, Jesse at nine months. Click! Click!

  Now Jesse, at almost a year, was ahead in language development and several other things in the baby development schedule. He was also hugely loveable.

  “Mammy ‘scope!” chortled little Mr. Miracle, yanking at the tubing of Jill’s stethoscope. His two front bottom teeth were in, and when he grinned he looked like a happy imp.

  “Honey, don’t chew on that.” Jill gently pulled her stethoscope away, distracting him easily with a plastic toy truck.

  A surgical resident – and fellow mom in the room – leaned to them from her son and a nurse playing with her little girl.

  “He said ‘scope?” The resident watched bug-eyed as Jesse flopped his truck over and inspected a wheel. “Amazing.”

  “We talk to him a lot,” Jill said absently, frowning down into her cell phone; and the nurse exclaimed, “He repeats everything. It may sound like babble but he’s trying…”

  Tricia agreed, turned back to Jill and saw her glaring into her phone’s window. “Hey, stop reading headlines.”

  Jill edged closer, and in the softest voice, a little high, she read: “…more accessible to visitors and hospital staff since the couple adopted him…unusually sociable for a child not yet one-”

  “So people are fascinated. You gotta accept-”

  Jill’s phone chirped in her hand. She gave Trish a confused look; recognized the number of Kerri Blasco, her good friend and a cop. Leaned closer and held the phone so Tricia could hear.

  “I’m in an ambulance headed to you,” Kerri said tightly. “A third couple’s been shot. One survivor, female, pregnant.”

  “Oh no…” Jill’s heart dropped. Third couple in a week. The first two attacks already held the city in terror. One couple - tourists - making out near Times Square, a second couple in Soho. Both attacks at night in crowds, faulty eyewitness accounts of the shooter.

  “Three means a serial,” Jill breathed.

  Tricia felt her body go cold: the Couples Killer, ohmygod. Three couples made it six victims: four dead, one survivor in another hospital, now a second survivor coming here. She and some of the others helped Jill and David help the cops with rapes, assaults, statutory rapes and child molestation, but...

  This was a nightmare for the whole city, the country.

  The other resident, dealing with her suddenly howling daughter who wanted Jesse’s truck, leaned in to Tricia. “Thought Jill was off tonight.”

  “She is.” Tricia’s lips were dry. “Hardly slept last night.”

  The howling made it hard to hear. Jill gripped the phone tighter.

  “…about three months along,” Kerri was saying. “And she’s…” Her seasoned cop voice sounded uncharacteristically bitter. “An Iraq war vet.”

  “Oh God…” Jill felt tears well, met Tricia’s stricken gaze.

  “David available?”

  “In a delivery. MacIntyre and Greenberg are free.” Sam MacIntyre and Woody Greenberg, the two other close friends who’d helped “deliver” Jesse.

  “Okay,” Kerri said. “You’ll get us evidence? We need help.”

  Jill said of course, told Kerri to meet her in the usual place, and hung up.

  “Iraq war vet,” Tricia whimpered, getting to her feet with Jill. She saw Jill looking haunted again, a look she’d seen so many times, and realized she felt the same.

  The horror had come to them, this hospital.

  “Ma,” Jesse said, raising his arms.

  Jill lifted him and hugged him tight. Then Tricia reached for him. “Hey, slugger, wanna play with Auntie Trish?” He went to her, the truck forgotten, happy to tug at her glasses. With her free hand she struggled them back up her nose, biting her lip.

  “Need me?”

  “No.” Jill’s heart thudded as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “You’re on call anyway. Hope you get some sleep tonight.” Shakily, she checked her phone’s simultaneous picture of Trish holding Jesse. She and David had downloaded a baby monitor app.

  “Working?” Trish leaned with Jesse squirming to peer at the picture.

  “Yeah. Um, David’s delivery’s having complications and I don’t know how long I’ll be with the cops…”

  “Sleep in the hospital. David and Jesse too. I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  Jill gave a helpless shrug. She’d so looked forward to being off tonight and bringing Jesse home, putting him to bed with his favorite toys…

  “We’ll see.” She kissed Jesse again, hugged Tricia, and hurried out. Banged frantically on the elevator button to make it come faster, left David a voicemail and spoke briefly to Sam MacIntyre. She was a building away, a half mile of halls to run through.

  “We’re already in the ER”, Sam said. “Ambulance just arrived.”

  3

  A nurse charging from the cubicle almost collided. “Sorry,” she huffed. “Sam ordered type and cross match, hemoglobin and hematocrit.” She held two reddened, rubber-stopped tubes.

  “Whole blood?” Jill was breathing hard.

  “Four units. She’s lost a lot of blood.”

  The nurse ran, and Jill opened the thin curtain to gowned scrubs working furiously on a bloodied woman on bloodied sheets. She was unconscious, with an oxygen mask over her face and an IV running to the inside of her elbow. At the rear two monitors beeped, one for the mother and one for the fetus.

  The fetal monitor was beeping too fast. The tiny heart was struggling to live.

  A wrenching sight.

  Sam MacIntyre glanced up at Jill from the two electrodes he’d placed on either side of the patient’s belly. “Not good,” he said, his voice muffled by his mask, his athlete’s broad shoulders hunched. “Fetal distress.”

  “Fetal heart rate’s up to 180!” cried Woody Greenberg, holding gauze pads to the bullet entry wound on the patient’s belly. A second nurse took his place with the gauze as he checked the patient’s vital signs and kept nervously eyeing the two monitors.

  “Jill,” he said mournfully, looking up for a second. “She’s an Iraq War vet.”

  “I know.” Aching, Jill moved in closer. Just a couple walking in the park. What kind of monster had done this? Gently, she touched the patient’s leg under the top sheet. It covered from her pubic area down, and another sheet stretched from her navel up to her chin. Her short, curling dark hair was matted. The sheets over and under her right side only were blood-soaked.

  Jill breathed in. “No exit wound?”

  “No,” Woody said, stumbling over his words, looking thinner and more wiry than usual. “Bullet traveled superficially, entered the left anterior abdomen and passed through the anterior-most portion of the uterus.”

  Sam said in a rush, “The ultrasound found the bullet wedged against the pelvic brim.” His eyes swept the portable ultrasound box with its knobs, controls, and an oscilloscope for viewing. They’d glided its paddle over the abdomen to find the bullet.

  Then Sam glanced up and pulled a huge breath. “Dammit, patient’s BP’s down to 95 over 60, pulse rate’s up to 130. Where the hell’s that whole blood?”

  The first nurse ran in with it. “Four units! Sorry, sorry, they’re swamped. Two stabbing victims, a gunshot and a car crash.”

  She hung the first bag of blood on the IV pole and switched the tubing from saline and dextrose to the whole blood drip. The other nurse went to a chair near the front of the cubicle.

  “Got your evidence.” She handed Jill bulging paper bags. “Clothes, shoes, everything collected. The cops are waiting, they were here for a sec. Jeez, why had we only been doing this for rapes? Any kind of assault…”

  “Tell that to the other hospitals.” It was hard, turning away from
the patient to gather up the bags.

  “They’re still resisting?”

  “Yeah. Hollering that it diverts from care, which is ridiculous. Something like this takes just seconds, isn’t expensive like rape kits.”

  Jill looked back to Sam and Woody. “Save the bullet.”

  “We know,” Sam said; and Woody said, “Gotta stabilize her first, we’ll call you when we get it in surgery.”

  Then he cried, “Oh Christ. The fetal heartbeat’s dropping, it’s down to 60 - no, now 55…”

  The fetus had struggled frantically to live, and now was giving up. Jill took her evidence bags and left, tears stinging.

  Well lookee there…

  He saw her, running through the wide ER waiting area. Jill Raney! Twitter on fire said they were bringing the survivor here. He had rushed over hoping to see some of the show he’d created. Reporters maybe, not expecting this luck.

  Tall and thin and beautiful she was, dark ponytail flying. He’d seen them both on TV, Jill crying and struggling not to fall off that steep old roof, David Levine trying to save her, shooting that bad guy right between the eyes. Just too damn impressive. News chopper footage was now on YouTube, zillions of hits.

  Seeing her was such a thrill. It made him grin, but just slightly. Mustn’t stand out from the ER bedlam, the milling outpatients and their relatives, the line of ugly plastic chairs. He’d been lucky to get a seat on one of them, just another shabby guy with a fake, messy goatee. His hoody pulled low shadowed his face from the fluorescents, from security cameras too. And his seat gave a good view of the TV over the harried nurses’ desk.

  Anderson Cooper droning about hundreds lost in a plane crash, but crawling beneath him the streamer with the real news, the wonderful report of his work. This third attack had the city, the whole country, out of their minds with fear. Huge coverage online, and he was controlling all of it. He felt so important!

  The streamer passed, and while he waited for it to snake under Anderson again, he glanced in boredom at the ER arch Raney had run under, disappearing down that wide, busy corridor. Doctors, nurses, EMTs…they all rushed and whisked back and forth. Such heroes they thought they were. So goddamned self-important.