Angel Face (8 page)

No wonder Teri Benson saw him as an obstacle. If anyone had a reason to want him out of the way, it was her. Steven Lloyd, the other valve specialist on his team, would also benefit if Jordan were to share the wealth. And so would a few other surgeons he could think of. There would be rejoicing in the halls of California General if he stepped aside, Jordan thought ironically.

He let himself out of the car. Freshly mowed wet grass clung to the soles of his shoes as he crossed the lawn to the front porch. It smelled green and fertile, like new growth. Tomorrow he was going to start reassigning as many of his cases as made sense. He would focus on the high-risk valve repairs and replacements and the experimental procedures, instead of trying to do everything. The
rest he would delegate. Good word,
delegate
.

His house was ablaze with light as he approached the front porch. Jordan stopped, instantly wary. The other night it had been totally dark. Now this? He never left that many lights on. Something was wrong.

He slipped up on the porch to look through the living room window—and froze at what he saw. The birdcage had fallen off its wrought-iron stand. It was lying on the floor, and Birdy had been caught underneath it.

It looked as if the bird was dead.

Jordan nearly broke down the door getting into the house.

J
ORDAN
carefully lifted the heavy wrought-iron birdcage and set it upright. It was four feet high and weighed thirty pounds, easy. More than heavy enough to crush the life from a five-ounce cockatiel.

He dropped to his knees next to the limp form and told himself to stop shaking. He never shook in the OR. He was precise and machinelike. But it wasn’t personal then. It was plumbing, and he was a very skilled plumber. It had never been personal like this.
And he’d never wanted to save anything as badly as he did this goddam bird
.

“I told Penny I didn’t want a house pet—” He got out that much before his voice cracked.

He couldn’t feel a heartbeat in the cockatiel’s chest, and he couldn’t get enough control of his hands to compress the tiny area with any precision, but he had to try. Something inside him would crack wide open if he didn’t have this pest of a bird to ferry around on his shoulder.

Sprawled on his belly, he dug his thumb into the puffed chest cavity and swore under his breath. Christ, how were you supposed to do CPR on a bird? The sudden anguish
he felt made him want to laugh, but there was a blade ripping through him, one of his own scalpels, and the breathtaking pain of it gave him no choice. He had to do whatever he could.

What the hell did vets do?

And why hadn’t he ever watched that animal channel?

He began the compressions, although faster than he would have on a human. Surely somewhere along the way he must have learned what a bird’s normal heart rate was.

“Come on, dammit. Work with me—”

He growled at the lifeless bird, pleading and threatening the way you would with a loved one. It was ridiculous and futile, but he did it because he couldn’t stand to hear the silence . . . or imagine the loss of her public service announcements on the state of his being—“Hey, stupid, wise up!”—some of them as sage as they were goofy. He did it long after he knew it was hopeless. She was gone, but he couldn’t let go.

And then finally he stopped pressing, stopped talking, and just lay there, staring but not seeing, as unfocused and emptied of purpose as he could ever remember being. When he closed his eyes, he felt a void beyond his ability to describe. He felt the hole in his heart that had always been there, but that he’d never allowed himself to acknowledge. Maybe that was why he saved lives. Why he worked so hard. . . because of the innocent people he wasn’t able to save . . . because of the girl who loved him . . . and this silly bird.

A wipeout. The awareness came to him some time later that this was a wipeout, the worst of his life, the kind you didn’t walk away from.

“Bad bird! Get in your cage!”

Jordan lay there, wondering if he was hearing things. It sounded exactly like the cockatiel, but it couldn’t be. She was still on the floor next to him.

“Hey, I’m talking to you!”

This time he felt a convulsive tremor. He might never have made it off the floor if the sensation hadn’t rocked him to his feet. He’d either heard a bird or he’d gone completely crazy. Jordan turned in circles, looking for the source of the noise. It took him awhile to figure out where she was, but finally he spotted her on the top shelf of the bookcase, teetering on the trim and peeping at him as if she couldn’t imagine why he was acting so strangely.

“Birdy?”

“Fooled you,” she croaked. “Fooled you, fooled you.”

Now he understood what it meant to see a ghost. He stared at the bird for ten solid seconds with absolutely no idea what to do. There was a dead bird on his carpet and another one who looked exactly like Birdy, clinging to the bookcase trim. Someone had to have put her up there. She couldn’t fly. But regardless, it just didn’t compute. It was surreal.

It hit Jordan that he had to do something, and his reaction was automatic. He went over to the cockatiel and held out his finger as he’d done so many times before. She eagerly hopped on, then scuttled up his arm to his shoulder and began having her way with his hair, blissfully nuzzling and pecking.

Relief nearly buckled Jordan’s knees. This was Birdy. She wasn’t dead, and maybe he wasn’t going to rupture like an artery under pressure. There was still the question of where the bird on the floor had come from, however.

Jordan felt a whoosh of cold air behind him. Laughter rang in his ears and a woman’s voice whispered, “Fooled you, fooled you!”

He’d left the front door open, and it closed with a bang before he could get himself turned around. He had to move slowly with the bird on his shoulder, but if anyone had been there, they were gone. There was no one in the living room but him and Birdy.

Jordan had begun to think he was dealing with another
ghost when he saw the note on the floor. It was lying next to the dead bird and scrawled in black marker pen on butcher block paper were the words, “You’re next!”

J
O R D O N
made two urgent calls in the middle of the night. The first was to the Cardiac Surgery Unit, telling them there’d been an emergency. His six
A
.
M
. bypass would have to be rescheduled, and there would be a change in the surgical team. With the patient’s consent, Jordan intended to have Teri Benson perform certain key aspects of the surgery, with Steven Lloyd supervising.

Teri routinely opened and closed on Jordan’s surgeries, and he’d passed the scalpel during procedures as well, including having her do the vein grafting for bypass operations. She’d shown extraordinary precision and control, and Lloyd was a brilliant surgeon and teacher. The patient would be fine in their hands, Jordan knew. But it was still one of the toughest calls he’d ever made. He was at war with his own overarching sense of personal responsibility and maybe his own ego. He’d never been a big believer in fate, but in situations like this, it helped to think that things happened for a reason. Maybe circumstances were forcing him to let go, and maybe that was for the best.

His second call was easy. It was to the CIA agent.

Jordan glanced at his long-lost pocket pager as he tapped out the agent’s phone number. The pager was sitting on the couch next to him, and the last message that showed in its display was from Angel Face, telling him that she wished he had taken her seriously.
She
wished? He’d found the pager tucked under one of the living room rugs, along with his electricity bill and a remote that had been missing for weeks.

“I’m ready,” Jordan said as soon as Firestarter came on the line. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

Jordan wasn’t expecting the audible sigh of relief he heard.

“What changed your mind?” the agent asked.

Jordan was sitting on the couch, tilted over his knees, staring at the red, white, and blue hook rug beneath his bare feet. The entire house was still decorated in the early American furniture he’d grown up with. Even the smell of his mother’s lemon oil lingered, although Penny might have had a hand in that. She’d threatened to hire him a housekeeper, but that wasn’t Jordan’s style, so she sneaked over and cleaned up every once in a while.

Birdy was on the coffee table, making confetti out of a saucer of sunflower seeds.

“Angel Face,” Jordan said. “She’s fucking with me. I want to fuck back.”

“What do you mean? She made an attempt on you? I need to know what happened, Doctor.”

But Jordan was in no mood to share. “Someone broke into my house. I think it was her. Just tell me what the plan is.”

“If you knew what the plan was, you would do things differently, and I want you to go about your normal life. You’ll be paged and told what to do when the time comes. Meanwhile, you’re on call. You understand that concept.”

“For how long?”

“Indefinitely.”

Whatever vulnerability Jordan had sensed in the agent was gone, and apparently he was tossing out orders to make up for it. “I can’t be on call indefinitely. I’m a surgeon. You don’t open a chest and then excuse yourself to go catch a serial killer. There are lives—”

“You still don’t get it, do you? This is
your
life we’re talking about. She’s going to kill you.”

“She’s going to
try.”
He didn’t like being pushed, but he wasn’t reckless. He fully intended to free up his schedule, although he hadn’t figured out how to explain that to
his coworkers at the hospital, and he knew there would be questions. Perhaps he could say Dr. Inada’s death had been a wake-up call, as it had.

Firestarter broke into his thoughts. “If you want to be around to open more chests, be sure you have someone ready to replace you at a moment’s notice.”

“I’ll be ready.”

“Good, and so will we. You’ll have protection around the clock, starting now.”

“I want protection for my bird, too.”

“Your what?”

Birdy’s yellow head popped up and swiveled around to peer at Jordan. She seemed to know she was being discussed.

“My cockatiel.” Jordan wasn’t happy about having to declare himself in front of her. She might get the idea that she mattered. Nevertheless, he intoned, “If anything happens to the bird, I come after you.”

Jordan zeroed in on the disconnect button and cut the agent loose. Now it was Birdy’s turn. He offered the cockatiel her usual boarding platform, his fingers. He had returned her cage to its place when he cleaned up the living room, but now he chauffeured her over to her perch. He didn’t want her anywhere near that wrought-iron death trap.

“Don’t go thinking anything has changed,” he informed her as he deposited her on one of the branches. “I still don’t like birds.”

He wasn’t sure she bought it, but that couldn’t be helped. He left her there, blinking at him, and went about his business. He had a female serial killer to catch.

A
NGELA
opened her eyes to a sound unlike anything she’d ever heard. Her throat was raw and her jaw was painfully clenched. Who was making that terrible
sound? It was all around her, the rattles and gasps of death. Someone was choking, clawing at the air, and she was on the floor of her bedroom, stumbling around on her hands and knees. She groped in the darkness, unable to see where she was or what she was looking for.

Where was he, the man who was screaming? She had to get to him before anyone else did, her and
only
her. There was no one else who could save him
. No one else who could silence him.

Another wail ripped through her, but nothing came out of her mouth. It was all inside, all locked up inside. Her whole body spasmed, trying to keep the screams from erupting. If they got out, it would all be over. Everything would be destroyed.

She rocked back and forth, unable to do anything else. Her spine would break before it would let her move. Her fists were icy, bloodless knots.

Something terrible had just happened, but she had no idea what it was.

The words didn’t work anymore. Dr. Fremont had taken them away.

The words didn’t work!

“S
HE ’S
highly selective in her choice of victim, and her strikes are meticulously planned rather than random. The modus operandi and crime scene are consistent from strike to strike, in this case, a medical setting.”

Thank God she doesn’t kill just
anybody, Jordan thought, aware that his humor had gone from irony to gallows. Literally. It was the little things that counted when you were making up a death list.

He used a yellow marker to highlight the next sentence in the profile he was reading. “She is highly organized, highly intelligent, obsessively ritualistic, and therefore, extremely dangerous.”

He kept reading, looking for the lust murderer part. The packet the agent had left made one thing abundantly clear. They weren’t dealing with an amateur in Angel Face. Jordan had also gone to the medical school library and checked out everything they had on serial killers. He wasn’t comfortable relying solely on the information he’d been given and wanted to weigh it against the scientific literature, but he hadn’t found any discrepancies in her profile so far.

According to the research, she was a mission-type killer, and in that regard, she was as rational and laser-focused as he was. His mission was to fix hearts, and hers was to rid the world of certain heart surgeons, it seemed. But why this one? He still didn’t understand that.