The Fifth Justice (Michael Gresham Legal Thrillers Book 10) Page 3

“Amazing,” I whispered to the yellow pad on which I was making notes. “Doctor Ingram, since Justin was out to protect her, and since Maddy seems out to destroy her, was there warfare between them? I would think her alters would fight for control. It must have been crazy-making for Chloe.”

  “They fought. And yes, Michael, it was crazy-making. She would call me in tears, begging me for medicine to turn off the voices. I had to tell her there is no such medicine. Certain medications help—Risperdal is one she uses. But nothing works one-hundred percent of the time. So she was forced to fight on her own. Which is why she’s missing now. Maddy must have won one of those wars and run off with Chloe. God only knows where she is now, what she did with her. But if it were me? I’d start with the hospitals in and around Chicago and work my way out from there. Investigate hospitals located alongside highways. There’s always the chance she could be at one of those following a car crash. Look for her on psych units. But look for her on neurology units, too, head-injury units. There’s no end to this.”

  “What about suicide?” I asked. “Was she—”

  “Suicidal? I don’t think so, not in her own right. Maddy might be happy to see her take her life, but I don’t believe Chloe herself ever had any such inclinations. It could all change in the blink of an eye. She may have given up and drowned herself in the Mississippi River, we don’t know.”

  We were studying Andrew out the corner of our eyes as Dr. Ingram said these things. Poor Andrew, I thought. It must be unbearable.

  We took a breather. Andrew went to use the restroom. We sat in silence for several minutes.

  Finally, Marcel asked, “While Andrew’s out, Doc, do you think Chloe’s still alive?”

  “Hard to say. I wonder sometimes. It’s been what, going on two months now? Chloe is a responsible human being. It’s out of character for her to just go gallivanting off without a word to anyone. I’m guessing that damn Maddy has a lot to do with it.”

  She sat back and drew a deep breath. It was taking its toll on more than just Andrew. I busied myself with my notepad. Marcel studied the screen on his smartphone. He was swiping through messages. We were giving her space; she cared about Chloe; this mess was hard on everyone who knew her.

  “Well?” Marcel said.

  “I think we look for the name of Chloe and the name of Maddy. Might as well hit Justin too, as long as we’re grabbing records with a subpoena.”

  “Agree,” he said.

  Andrew returned and took his seat in the easy chair. He looked neither left nor right, keeping his focus on the floor ten feet away. I didn’t blame him. It was very awkward, and there were no words to soothe him. He was a smart, street-savvy man. Anytime a person goes missing, the first forty-eight hours are critical. Those two days were burned through a long time ago. My heart went out to him, though, one human to another. I didn’t know what I’d do if I went home that night and Verona was gone and no one knew where. How terrifying. Plus, no telling how much the kids’ upset was adding to their dad’s burden. Lots, I was sure.

  “Speaking of names,” Dr. Ingram began. “I would add that goddam Reno Rivera’s name in there. Chloe might be held somewhere under his name. Anything is possible. Search that sicko’s name too.”

  I realized everyone in the room had a dog in the hunt. That included me: I might get lucky and get payback for Dania, my wife who died. That was a whole other story.

  We concluded our meeting when the timer dinged. I needed to get the lawsuit filed in the court yet that afternoon, so I left the parking lot with Marcel driving his Ram truck.

  “What’re you thinking, Boss?” he asked as we swept onto the eastbound Kennedy.

  I shook my head. “I was just going to ask you the same thing. For now, I‘ll work up a subpoena and serve it on twenty or thirty hospitals. It’s time for me to cover a few possibilities with paper. What about you, calling Interpol?”

  “You might laugh, Michael. But the truth of the matter is, yes, I called Interpol. And guess what?”

  “What’s that?”

  “They gave me Reno Rivera’s street address in Alton, Illinois.”

  “I need to check-in with Verona’s nurses. But I’m thinking we need to go, now.”

  “Agree.”

  “How soon can you be ready to leave?” I asked

  “Just as soon as you park your butt in my truck.”

  “We’ll take the Mercedes. Your truck is way cool, but Chicago to Alton in this thing is above and beyond.”

  “Mercedes it is, then.”

  “Bring your gun.”

  Chapter 4: Chloe Constance

  MONTHS EARLIER

  The hospital was cheery. It was a stencil world: roses on the wall, trellises of what must have been bougainvillea, sunny blue skies, children dancing across freshly mown grass—what wasn’t to like here? They’d made her feel peaceful and cozy.

  She regained consciousness and spoke with nurses and doctors. Two detectives came calling. They worked out of the Alton, Illinois police department. The reason for their visit was they got the call that Chloe was awake and communicating. They told her she’d been pried out of a wrecked car at the bottom of a ravine. She tried to recount for the detectives the events leading up to the car crash. But it was difficult. The two cops shared with Chloe what they had observed at the accident site and Detective Joe Davidson’s theories about the case.

  For one, he said, the old VW Chloe was driving didn’t have side airbags, and that made all the difference. But it had a full tank of gas, and it journeyed all the way from Chicago down to Alton, a trip of five hours.

  They had studied skid marks on the roadway and footprints around the VW where it came to rest. Davidson said there were tire tracks showing a car had come up behind the VW, maybe as if passing. He theorized the following car tailgated with its bright lights in Chloe’s rearview mirror. Chloe, frightened, had tried to move all the way to the right to allow it to pass. Tire tracks indicated this was true. When it stayed on her bumper, she’d jerked the wheel hard to the left. She wasn’t able to recover from the sudden swerve and angled to the wrong side of the road. The car snapped through the guardrail like it was pasta and rolled over and over down the hill. On the first overturn, Chloe’s head slammed against the driver’s window. This head-to-window impact repeated three times as the car tumbled down the ravine. Had there been side airbags, the concussive force of her head hitting the window might have been avoided altogether. But as the VW rolled and crashed, rolled and crashed, there was no cushion, and the impact caused her brain to swell with the first blow.

  Three-hundred feet on down the road black tire tracks showed a high-speed U-turn. Davidson believed the tailgating driver had turned around and come back. He pulled onto the shoulder in the one place there was room. He leaped out and ran to the guardrail where Chloe’s little car had gone through. He peered down into the ravine. At the bottom, the VW lay on its side, its front wheel still spinning.

  Detective Davidson was called in because the state trooper who found the wreck had considered the possibility that someone had run someone off the road. Davidson did his sleuthing before conjecturing that the other driver returned, parked, and made his way to the hole in the guardrail. From the marks the crime scene techs photographed, someone had, in fact, pulled over. Except for the minuscule space where the other driver had pulled over, there just was no shoulder left on either side of the road.

  Davidson conjectured that someone had climbed down to the VW as it lay on its side, making popping and moaning noises like a beast dying from a fatal lung shot. It was just afternoon and sunny. Even though it was winter, and the Midwest was rarely sunny in the winter, that day had been glorious.

  Davidson imagined that the man leaned forward and peered into the driver’s window. His belt buckle scratched the door—Davidson believed one of many scratches on the door to be recent—as he stood on tiptoe and peered into the bug. Chloe had been wearing a seatbelt. It held her in a bundle as if she were a climber who had
slipped from a sheer rock face. She was dangling. It smashed her face to the extent that her features were unidentifiable. It contorted her right leg beyond the physically possible. It would be months before she would ever walk without help again—if she even survived.

  David theorized that the other driver looked beyond her to the passenger side. There, pasted against the shattered glass, was what he was after—her purse. This explained, to Davidson, why there was no purse, no wallet, and no ID found in the VW.

  The vehicle was registered to an old man who lived out in the country. Davidson found it impossible to describe the driver to the old man. There wasn’t enough of her face still in place to make a description. But the bottom line was that the old man hadn’t loaned his car to anyone except his granddaughter, and she was present when the detectives spoke with her grandfather. She confirmed someone had taken the vehicle while she was away at college and that she hadn’t loaned it to anyone.

  “So we believe someone stole the car,” Davidson told Chloe before pausing, giving her room to comment.

  When she didn’t, he continued on with his analysis.

  Davidson said there was evidence showing the other driver had laid across the driver’s door and reached inside. Then he let himself inch downward until he could touch the purse with his fingertips. He seized the purse, then rocked back and up and out of the cab. Then he was standing beside the VW, checking his wrists and arms and chest for blood. There was plenty since she was pumping blood from her face and chest. It wedged Chloe’s right arm behind her back; her right shoulder separated; her head bled profusely. With the unchecked blood loss, she would be dead in an hour. The police would find the missing guardrail within the hour. But by then the thief would be far down the road.

  The crime lab took blood samples. Only Chloe’s blood was found anyplace on the VW.

  So the other driver climbed back up the bluff. With a long stretch, he could circle an arm around a guardrail post and pull himself up and out of the ravine the rest of the way. It was steep and slippery there. He climbed back into his car and sped away, her purse on the seat beside him.

  Chloe remembered—as the detectives interviewed her in the hospital—the pain and not much else.

  Caught up in her harness, Chloe opened her eyes. This moment of coming-to was her one memory after the car rolled down the hill. Her legs wouldn’t move. Her mouth was full of blood; her eyes filmy as if oiled. Few thoughts came except to register her pain. She had no memory of Maddy stealing the VW. She had no memory of Maddy running them through the guardrail. She didn’t know Maddy existed only inside of her. She knew only pain.

  She dangled from her seatbelt and heard a voice.

  “Uh-uh-uh.”

  Was that her voice? Where was she? Had she been thrown from the car—she could not tell if the moans were made by her or someone else. In fact, there wasn’t any someone else. There was only pain that forced her to pass out.

  “It may have been Maddy driving,” Chloe told Detective Davidson. “She would do something like steal a car.”

  “How do we get hold of this Maddy?”

  Chloe’s face fell. “You can’t. Maddy lives inside me.”

  Detective Davidson looked at his partner, Irwin Rabinowitz, standing off to Chloe’s side. Rabinowitz rolled his eyes. Chloe couldn’t see this.

  “Do you have any memory of a man leaning inside your car?” Detective Davison asked her.

  “No.”

  “I have to ask: had you taken any prescribed or illicit drugs that day?”

  “No.”

  “Had you ingested alcohol?”

  “I don’t remember. So there’s that.”

  “Did you steal the VW?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t feel like I’m a person who would steal anyone’s car.”

  “Have you ever been in trouble with the law?”

  Chloe scooched lower in her bed and shivered. “I have no memory. But right now I don’t consider myself someone who would trouble the law with any problems.”

  “You feel that now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about before the wreck?”

  “I have no memory. I have to blame it on Maddy.”

  “Maddy who lives inside you. Will she talk to me?”

  “No. She’s shy.”

  “So you might have been an ax murderer and wouldn’t remember?”

  Chloe studied the two men. “Are you being serious right now?”

  “I’m sorry,” Davidson said, embarrassed by his own sarcasm. “Let me retract that question. That’s not fair at all, and there’s no basis for me even to ask that. But let me ask this. The state trooper found you still buckled in the driver’s seatbelt. Do you have any memory of driving that vehicle?”

  “I do not.”

  “And you don’t know where you got the vehicle.”

  “I do not. But I know I didn’t steal it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m not a thief.”

  “But maybe Maddy did?”

  “She’s stolen things before.”

  “Do you know when she steals things?”

  “I’m exhausted. It’s all a blur.”

  “Do you have any memory of life before the accident?”

  “None.”

  “Do you know your name?”

  “No.”

  “What have you told the hospital about your identity?”

  “Nothing. I have no identity inside my head.”

  “Has anyone else come to visit you?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Please,” said Chloe, scooching even further down beneath the covers. “I remember nothing. I’m tired now. Please go away.”

  “Thank you, Jane Doe,” said Davidson. “Can we come back later?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Goodbye, then.”

  Chloe was already asleep. She didn’t say goodbye. The men left, and she slept for twelve hours before the nursing shift change and they took vitals.

  Then she slept once again.

  Chapter 5: Chloe Constance

  MONTHS EARLIER

  The nurses made bets on houseplants like Chloe Constance. Everybody had kicked in twenty dollars to determine the date she would wake up from her coma. Trauma put $400 in the sweepstakes, Med-Surg bet $600, Psychiatry refused to play, Neurology laid down $120, and the staff bet $80.

  Turned out they all predicted way too far down the road. Chloe came out of her coma on day eight following the accident. She opened her eyes at two a.m., and the nurses heard her say, “Damn you, Reno!” She passed out from the pain and slept another twelve hours. By then, her pain meds were onboard, and she could bear to be awake.

  Injuries: maxillofacial. Plastic surgery so a crushed nose could transmit air; reconstruction to eye sockets so light could find optic nerves. The doctors said that her voice would never sound like it did before the car left the roadway. But worst of all, the closed head injury. They could do nothing for that except wait and let the brain heal itself. Time would tell.

  It had wiped her memory banks. She remembered nothing from before.

  “Anything yet, Jane?” asked Nurse Carrie. All unidentified admittances, female, were Jane Doe. Chloe came into the ER without a purse and with no other ID in the car or in her clothes. Someone stole the vehicle, said the owner when contacted. No, the owner had no idea who had taken her car.

  “No,” Chloe replied. “I have no memories of anything yet.”

  The police and deputies and authorities had come here, again and again, trying to identify her. They brought with them a book full of Jane Does reported missing by family and friends. The trouble with it all was that Chloe’s face had been rebuilt after it was shattered in the crash. No one knew the face she had now and so the police photos never matched Chloe’s face. It was impossible to tell whether the police had a picture of Chloe in the missing persons book.

  Nurse Carrie as
ked if Chloe had seen any clues in the day’s reading material. Chloe shook her head. She was sitting up in bed, People magazines and local newspapers strewn about the sheets, searching for a trigger, a clue to her identity. Rehab suggested she looked over news stories and see what resonated.

  “Don’t worry, Jane,” nurse Carrie said in her chirpy voice. “It will happen. I’ve seen it a dozen times, I’ll bet. At least a dozen times.”

  “What happens?” Chloe asked.

  “What happens? Well, a whole new world opens. Families get reunited, tears get shed, memories trickle in—at least at first. Then it’s like someone opens the floodgates, and the memories come pouring in.”

  “And they get to go home?”

  “Sure enough. Just like you will at some point. You were wearing a wedding ring, so there’s a husband out there somewhere. He doesn’t know where to look for you. But he’ll find you. They always seem to.”

  A chill traveled up her back, and she shivered. A husband? What could that be like? What if she didn’t even like him anymore, much less love him? Would she be allowed to leave and go some place to start over? These questions troubled her, so she turned her attention back to the newest People magazine. Not that she expected to find herself in People; it was more about an article, picture, story, or even advertisement that would jiggle her mind and return a memory to her.

  Returning a memory. That’s what the doctors called it. “Something will return a memory, often at the most unexpected time,” Dr. Gorski had told her. “It will be an image or a few words, or maybe the sound of a voice. Who knows? But your job is to keep looking for that clue that brings something back for you.”

  “Will I ever leave here?” Jane asked Dr. Gorski.

  “You will,” she said in her sweet fashion. “Even without full restoration of memory, you will reach a point where you will start your life all over.”

  Space opened between them. Both knew she was lying. She had no idea whether Jane would leave there. At that stage of things, Jane Doe could still lapse back into a comatose, vegetative state.