Elizabeth drove at full speed along the streets. Her destination was the Hospital East Boston, and she had already seen some miracles performed by doctors there.
At the intensive care unit entrance, the detective approached a charge nurse.
"Can I help you?"
"We'll find out." Elizabeth took her badge from her belt. "I'm Detective Elizabeth Rizzoli, BPD. You have a patient here named Samantha Conway."
"Oh, yes, Detective Rizzoli. Hi. I'm Nurse Lydia," said the sandy-haired woman, who immediately became more polite. "You've already been announced to us. Sergeant Torres called us."
Elizabeth nodded slowly and wearily. "He was the one who had informed me of Samantha Conway's whereabouts. Who identified Samantha Conway?"
"One of his officers, as far as I know." Nurse Lydia looked at a note. "Officer Browning. He also found her on the highway and then called the ambulance. But one of our colleagues also recognized Mrs. Conway when she washed her hair."
"Do you still have any of the clothes she wore when she was found?" asked Elizabeth with an intense frown. "Or a hairbrush?" Seeing the puzzled look on her nurse's face, she explained the facts. "Then we can match the DNA and have one hundred percent certainty that it is indeed Samantha Conway."
"Can you use this?" Lydia handed the detective a comb.
Elizabeth took a deep breath and nodded. "This should work!" She put the comb in an evidence bag.
"What did she do?" the nurse asked, tugging at her nurse's coat.
"Samantha Conway? Nothing, and we assume she has a victim role in a serious crime." Elizabeth looked past the nurse to the ICU. "How is Samantha doing?"
"Right now, she's asleep, and that's fortunate." Nurse Lydia turned to the room where Samantha was presumably lying. "She was severely dehydrated, and we're rehydrating her right now through a central venous catheter with IV fluids."
A central venous catheter, the detective thought. "Have you been able to talk to the woman yet? The officers don't seem to have gotten anything out of her yet."
The nurse shook her head. "Neither have we. And it's not like we're talking about getting anything out of her." The nurse's look became energetic. "The patient needs a lot of rest right now, for starters. She's had a circulatory collapse and is severely dehydrated. She may be suffering from trauma on top of that, but we won't be able to find out until later."
"I understand all that," Elizabeth replied with furrowed brows. "I realize this woman needs rest. But she's a material witness in a very explosive case involving multiple murders."
"Multiple murders?" asked nurse Lydia, looking at the detective in bewilderment. "There was nothing about that on the BPD website. It just said the usual ... Missing for some time -- any police station will accept useful tips --"
"There are several murders involved, and more may follow," Elizabeth continued, unperturbed. "It may be that Samantha Conway has been in the killer's grip so she can tell us some things about him." She paused artfully, letting the words sink in for Sister Lydia. "The sooner we talk to Mrs. Conway, the more likely we'll save lives. Innocent people."
The nurse squirmed for a moment. Then she glanced back and opened the door to Samantha Conway's room. "All right," she said in a barely more than a whisper voice. "But no more than five minutes. We're assuming Samantha Conway is severely traumatized. So be careful."
Samantha Conway lay motionless in her bed amid tubes, wires, and apparatus. Her face was gaunt and haggard, her eyes deep in their sockets. Elizabeth saw that the woman was awake, and her gaze was frantic and restless, as if she expected something terrible to appear in the room at any moment.
Behind her, a surveillance monitor flashed. ECG electrodes were attached to her torso and arms. The heart rate was repeated with a regular beep, and a monitor showed the heartbeats in a green graph on a black background. Pulse oximetry, which used a light method to measure the oxygen level in the blood on the index finger, glowed red on her index finger. Various IV needles hung from her central venous catheter, through which she was supplied with fluids and electrolytes.
"Please remember to be careful. We don't want any retraumatization to occur," the nurse whispered.
"Of course," Elizabeth said with a curt nod and sat down in a chair by the patient's bedside, watching her a little anxiously. "My name is Rizzoli, Elizabeth Rizzoli," she introduced herself. "I'm with the Boston Police Department, Homicide, and I've come to help you."
Samantha Conway nodded imperceptibly.
When Nurse Lydia had left, Elizabeth pulled out the photo of Burns. "I know this is all hard for you, and I won't bother you any longer than necessary, either." The detective leaned forward. "I know it hasn't been pretty what you've been through." She deliberately avoided using words like 'traumatic,' 'horrible,' or 'gruesome.' What was heard could quickly become a reality again in the imagination, and the patient would be retraumatized on the spot. If, on the other hand, she said 'all hard', usually only the word 'hard' stuck. "The man you were dealing with --" she showed Samantha the picture of Kevin Burns, "is it this one?"
Samantha Conway opened her mouth a few times. "No ... no," she finally stammered. It sounded like her throat had gone completely dry. "No, it wasn't him. Completely out of the question. The one with me ... Was younger."
"Younger?"
"Much younger," Samantha whispered. "And this one, he looks like a bum."
Elizabeth furrowed her brows and nodded slowly. "He was a welfare recipient and an alcoholic for a long time."
"Exactly," Samantha said in a brittle voice. "The stature is very different, too. And he certainly speaks differently, too."
"Well, how did he --" began Elizabeth. "How did the man with you speak?" She didn't want to use words like 'kidnapper' or anything like that, lest she upset the woman even more.
"His vocabulary was very select ... With metaphors and examples and foreign words ... very different from how someone like that," she pointed to the picture with a trembling hand, "might express himself."
"And you noticed that?"
"That's what they teach you in psychiatry."
"I see."
Samantha replied nothing. Both women were silent for a while.
"Did you hear his real voice?", Elizabeth wanted to know after some time.
"No. I think he had a voice distorter, and I'm not sure I would recognize his real voice." Samantha sat up straight. "Do you have his voice?"
Elizabeth pressed her lips together and shook her head. "I'm afraid not." She considered for a moment. According to the DNA sample, Samantha Conway had been there when her son was murdered. Elizabeth had a bad feeling about the question but had to broach the subject while the woman's memory was still reasonably fresh. Maybe she could find out if Samantha couldn't somehow place the killer by doing so. "The last time you saw your son," she said, "there was --" The effect of those words was resounding. The detective saw the woman's face slip away as if her features were wax approaching a blazing flame. She snapped her eyes open and let out a long, shrill scream.
"My son! Where is he? Where is he?" She sat up jerkily, tugging at the cables. "He was there! He was there! Not in the picture! Special, the one who took him from me! The one who murdered my son! And I had to watch it happen!" Elizabeth realized that she had just awakened a memory in Samantha Conway that she would have been better off leaving under the blanket of oblivion. But Samantha Conway was already clutching Elizabeth's wrist like a vice. The detective couldn't believe how much strength was in that emaciated body. "I had to watch everything! Everything. How my son died! The blood! All that blood!"
Behind Samantha, the equipment started beeping loudly. The ECG made crazy jumps as if it wasn't a heartbeat but the stock price of some dubious Internet company.
But even if the memory of Conway's son had been better left untouched, the information Elizabeth had just received was still helpful. So it's true, the detective thought, she had been there.
Samantha Conway had witnessed her son's murder. Not only did the perpetrator plant the woman's DNA at the crime scene, but she had also been there.
But that wasn't the problem that was bothering Elizabeth at the moment. Again, Samantha Conway emitted a shrill scream. Furthermore, she yanked on the ECG probes and the central venous catheter in her vein. "I have to get him," she shrieked, "I ... have to ... him ... get him! He's got my son. My son!" Her chin trembled, saliva flew from her mouth as she screamed, while her eyes alternately looked impassive, then widened in terror. "My son!" she screamed at the top of her lungs. "My son!" Tears streamed down her cheeks. She lay there like a ravenous animal. Or just like a mother who had lost her child.
Elizabeth felt the pain as if it were her own. If she were in Sarah Conway's place, with no shackles of foot and hand holding her to a bed, she would bite through them with her bare teeth and go hunting for the monster who would have done such a bestial thing to her daughters. But she was not in the place of the poor woman in bed.
If this poor woman kept screaming like that, she would never know who the murderer was...
The detective felt the rigid grip on her hand from someone used to gripping hard.
The nurse.
"That's enough!" hissed Nurse Lydia. "I told you to go easy on Mrs. Conway! And what are you doing?"
"My son is dead!" screamed Samantha Conway, clawing her fingers into her skin.
"I have a murder to solve, and this is an ongoing investigation," Elizabeth defended herself, eyes wide.
"The hell you do. Get out of this room now!"
Elizabeth allowed the nurse to push her out of the hospital room slowly while an intern rushed to the bed and gave Samantha an injection. Seconds later, she was silent.
When the door was closed, Elizabeth turned to the nurse. "Listen to me; we're investigating a homicide here. And it's not just one victim; it's at least three. We can't afford to have more people die. This woman may have seen the killer or can lead us to him."
"Now you listen to me," Sister Lydia hissed. All friendliness had fallen from her. "This woman is our patient, and we are responsible for her healing. If you put this woman in a condition like you just did, you will endanger her life. Then we will forbid you from even talking to her again, I promise you. Unless she gets much better. I'll repeat it: we are responsible for her healing!"
"And I'm in charge of law and order. We're looking for a killer," Elizabeth replied but was already inwardly admitting defeat."
"I don't care." Nurse Lydia folded her arms in front of her chest. "We have house rules here. Patients come first. If you keep causing us trouble, I'll have you thrown out of this hospital." Then her voice softened. "Or do you want Samantha Conway to have a heart attack possibly and die?"
Elizabeth slumped her shoulders. There was nothing to be done here. The nurse did indeed have house privileges, as did the doctors, and not she, Elizabeth Rizzoli - BPD or not. And if Samantha Conway died of a heart attack - and there didn't seem to be much of a chance - she wouldn't hear from her only witness unless they had a necromancer.
Elizabeth's cell phone buzzed. A text from Katherine:
The autopsy on Burns is in progress. Are you coming?
Depressed, the detective left the hospital, got into the unmarked car, and drove toward BPD. She took the DNA sample from Samantha Conway that the nurse had given her, of course.