The Alibi Man

Chapter 41

I hate hospitals. I especially hate emergency rooms.

No one working there ever believes what is wrong with you is an emergency. They never believe your story of how you came to be there. They never believe you might actually be dying, unless you have an obvious gunshot wound, arterial bleeding, or exposed brain matter.

I’d had two out of three when I was rushed in by ambulance the day meth dealer Billy Golam’s 4X4 dragged me down the pavement. It was the only time in my life I had gone to an ER and hadn’t been stuck in a room and abandoned for hours on end, only to later be treated like an annoying hypochondriac.

Lisbeth had none of the Big Three. They stuck her in what seemed to be a utility closet with a bed wedged into it along with a lot of surplus equipment. She sat in a little ball, still wrapped in her bathrobe. I paced, chewing at a ragged thumbnail.

“Why don’t you lie down, Lisbeth?” I suggested. “Try to rest a little. When the detective gets here, he’ll want to ask you a lot of questions. You’ll need to answer them.”

I had managed to get her to tell me at least part of the story as we waited. Someone-she didn’t know who-had put a bag over her head, choked her, hauled her out into the wilderness, and held her head under swamp water until she nearly drowned.

I was willing to bet that didn’t happen to people back in Buttcrack, Michigan. The kid was as traumatized as anyone I’d ever seen.

A girl in scrubs stepped into the room, looked at me like I was a bad piece of cheese, went to Lisbeth, and took her pulse without so much as saying hello.

“Excuse me. Who are you?” I asked.

She gave me a dirty look.

“A nurse? A doctor?” I said. “A twelve-year-old playing dress-up?”

“I’m Dr. Westral,” she snapped.

“Of course. I should have known that through mental telepathy. I’m off my game. Are you a real doctor,” I asked, “or are you still saving your Lucky Charms box tops until you’re old enough to cross the street to the mailbox all by yourself?”

“I’m a first-year resident,” she said, as if that elevated her above the great unwashed like myself.

“So the answer is B: not a real doctor.”

She tipped Lisbeth’s head back, and blasted her light into one of Lisbeth’s bloody eyes.

“This is Lisbeth Perkins,” I said. “She’s a human being.”

Snake eyes. “Please be quiet.”

She listened to Lisbeth’s chest with her stethoscope while Lisbeth coughed and wheezed.

“Someone tried to drown her,” I said.

The look again. “Can she speak?”

“Why don’t you ask her? She has a brain and a tongue and everything.”

“Who are you?” the child doctor demanded. “Her mother?”

“I’m a friend,” I said. “That’s a person who is kind and has concern for another’s well-being. I only explain this because I’m sure you don’t have any friends, you snotty little bitch.”

Landry stepped in and looked at me. “Making friends?” he asked.

“Detective Landry,” I said. “This person claims to be a doctor. I suspect her name is Brittany, or Tiffany, or another of the popular -ny names.”

Westral abandoned Lisbeth, turned, and introduced herself to Landry, who flashed his badge. She shook his hand, smiling politely, the perfect professional. I rolled my eyes.

She turned to me. “Ma’am, you need to leave now.”

“You think so?” I said. “I think you need to kiss my ass.”

Landry intervened. “Dr. Westral, I need to ask you to step out now. You can complete Miss Perkins’s examination after Special Agent Estes and I have finished questioning her.”

I narrowed my eyes at her as she passed me on the way to the door.

I turned to Landry. “Special Agent? I’m moving up in the world.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“You’re not going to ask me to step outside?”

“No,” he said.

“Good for you.”

He stepped close to me, his back blocking Lisbeth. “We recovered Irina’s car,” he said quietly.

“Where?”

“In the parking lot of the Wellington Green mall. It’s being processed. We have a pretty good partial footprint on the floor mat. I’ve got a rush on getting a comparison to the footprint at the dump site.”

“Fingerprints?”

“Not when I left.” He tipped his head in Lisbeth’s direction. “Has she told you anything?”

I filled him in on what I knew.

“So, whoever killed Irina did this to Lisbeth to shut her up,” Landry said.

“And so far, it’s working.”

“Weiss is checking into getting access to the video from the guard shacks at the Polo Club for Saturday and Sunday. If we can get our hands on the tapes for last night, maybe we can get a look at Walker coming home that night, what he was driving. If it was him.”

Lisbeth had started coughing again. I went to her, sat on the gurney, and put my hand on her back. “Lisbeth, Detective Landry needs you to tell him everything you can about last night. I’m going to go find you a real doctor. If I don’t get thrown out of the hospital, I’ll be back in a little while.”

She was trembling as if she was freezing to death. “Don’t l-leave me a-a-alone. Please.”

“You won’t be alone,” I promised. “Detective Landry will be right here or right outside the door until I get back, okay?

“He’s a good guy,” I said, glancing over at him. “He can be a real butthead, but he’s a good guy.”

Landry followed me into the hall. I stayed close to the door. Landry stayed near me so we could keep our voices down.

“Taking in another stray?” he asked, his expression softer than I would have liked. God forbid someone should accuse me of being kind.

“I feel sorry for the kid. Shoot me.”

“You think they’ll keep her here?”

I shrugged. “It’s the age of managed care. These places usually manage not to care one second longer than they have to.”

“And if they don’t keep her?”

“I’ll take her home with me,” I said without hesitation. “She can’t go back to Brody’s.”

He frowned. “I don’t like you taking her with you. Someone tried to kill her, Elena.”

“No. Someone tried to scare her,” I corrected him. “If they had wanted her dead, she would be dead.”

“Semantics,” he said. “Someone nearly killed her. She’s in danger, you’re in danger.”

“Well, guess what? It’s not your problem.”

He jammed his hands at his waist and blew out a sigh. “Elena-”

“Don’t. It’s a dead horse. Leave it alone.”

He opened his mouth to try to say something, stopped himself, looked away, tried again, couldn’t.

“Unless you have something germane to the case,” I said, “I have to go find that girl an actual doctor past the age of puberty.”

“They all lawyered up,” he said. “Brody’s crowd.”

“I know. I ran into Brody this morning.”

“Then you know who his lawyer is.”

“Yes.”

“How is that going to be for you?”

“Shitty,” I said, irritated with him for bringing it up. “I get to relive one of the worst times of my life, have the press dig it all up like a compost heap. And my esteemed father-who is more of a bastard in practice than I am by definition-will get to knock me around and tell the world that I’m mentally unstable, a pathetic, bitter woman who might do anything to wreak havoc on the life of the man who betrayed her twenty years ago.

“How would you feel?”

There was nothing he could say to that. Landry had grown up in a normal middle-class blue-collar family. He didn’t know what it was to have to feel like a stranger, out of place in the only home he had ever known, betrayed by the only people he should have been able to count on unconditionally.

How would you feel? How did I feel? Upset that those memories still had so much power over me.

Landry’s pager went off. He checked the number and frowned.

“You’d better go outside to answer that,” I said, glad for the exercise to get rid of him. “Before you have every pacemaker in the building going haywire.”

He clipped the thing back onto his belt.

“I’ll call you when I know something,” he said.

The olive branch, I thought. Or bait. Or a thin thread to keep connected.

“All right,” I said softly. “Thank you.”

He started to walk away, then turned back, cupped his hand around the back of my head, and kissed me with restrained frustration.

“Please don’t get yourself killed,” he said.

Surprised, I stood flat-footed and watched him leave the ER, wondering if I was pushing away one of the few people in my life ho might have stood behind me in what was to come.