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Angels of Mercy, Book #3ISBN: 978-0515147056 Finalist, Daphne Du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense
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An ER charge nurse must face her deepest fears when the man who sexually assaulted her returns…only now he’s killing his victims. CJ Lyons’ novels give readers “a powerful and dramatic look into the frenzied world of emergency medicine…Lyons’ characters are dynamic and genuine.” ~Suspense Magazine
A “gripping narrative full of suspense, complex relationships and real, honest human emotion.” ~ Pittsburgh Magazine
“Adrenalin pumping.” ~The Mystery Gazette
URGENT CARE
CHAPTER 1
Thursday, 6:42 a.m.
Nora Halloran hurried through the hospital’s parking garage, shoulders back, pepper spray clenched in shaking hands. She struggled to control her fear, lock it away, but the more she denied it, the worse it got.
Every morning for two years, she’d fought her panic, battling fear to work her shift as a charge nurse in the ER. It was her daily, dreaded ritual. A battle she never lost.
She couldn’t lose. Her patients depended on her—and she needed them as much as they needed her.
On high alert, Nora scanned the shadows. No one. Not many cars in the employee garage this early. Fewer places someone could hide.
She entered the stairwell, heart stuttering in time with her steps. Twelve down, three steps around the landing, twelve more. She counted the familiar cadence, holding her breath as long as possible as she sprinted for the door.
One of the lights on the final landing was burned out. Can’t stop. She raced through the darkness. Slamming through the exit, gulping in the frigid December air, she propelled herself outside.
Her feet hit the sidewalk. Inhaling deeply, she straightened her posture, mastering her stride and with it, her emotions.
Tomorrow she’d do better. Tomorrow would be different.
The sun streaking the eastern horizon surprised her, a slit of gold-rimmed crimson, blinding in intensity as it reflected from the pavement slick with melted frost. She’d sat in her car, psyching herself up for the walk, long enough for the morning light to edge through the indigo darkness.
Despite the fact that it meant she was running late, Nora welcomed the light. As she walked beside the wrought-iron fence surrounding the cemetery across from Angels of Mercy Medical Center, a splash of unnatural color caught her eye.
It was inside the cemetery fence, filtered through a snaggle of barren forsythia. Too large to be trash blown in through the fence, too gaudy to be a memorial. Nora stopped, grabbed the fence post, and stepped up onto the lowest rung, trying to make sense of the bright splashes crowding the shadows.
Pushing aside the forsythia branches, she could finally see where the color originated. The marble statue of a weeping angel had been defiled by vile, hateful curses streaked across it in neon spray paint.
Face down in the frost-speckled grass below the angel lay a naked woman, more graffiti scrawled across her body.
Primal instincts screamed at Nora to run. To hide. Save herself.
Shoving her fear aside, she grabbed her cell phone and sprinted toward the cemetery entrance, wishing for longer legs as she ran. She didn’t bother calling 911, not with Pittsburgh’s busiest trauma center right across the street.
“Angels of Mercy, Emergency Department,” came the clerk’s chipper voice.
“Jason, it’s Nora. There’s a woman down in the cemetery. Get me a trauma team over here, fast.”
“Hang on, here’s Dr. Fiore.”
Nora raced into the cemetery, crossing over graves, the slick grass threatening to send her sprawling. Her bag smacked against her hip as she dodged headstones. Her breath came in short bursts, fogging the air.
No other sounds disturbed the cemetery’s peace. Long shadows stretched across the grass, but they couldn’t obscure the freshly painted graffiti that stood out sharply from the somber grays and whites surrounding the woman’s body.
Nora reached her just as Lydia Fiore, the ER attending, came on the line. “What’s up?”
“There’s a woman down. In the cemetery. Unconscious.” Nora’s voice sounded surprisingly normal, but after all, she was a charge nurse and this was what she did best—taking control of chaos, including the chaos of her own emotions.
She knelt in the grass, snow melting into her jeans. Yanking her gloves off, she felt the woman’s pulse. Not all of the color came from spray paint, she realized. “Bleeding—looks like she was stabbed. She’s breathing on her own, but her pulse is fast, poor capillary refill.”
“Hang on. Help’s coming.”
Through the fence, Nora saw the ER’s doors open across the street, releasing two figures pushing a gurney laden with equipment. A man dressed in surgical scrubs sprinted past them, a blue blur as he bolted across Mathilda Street, almost getting hit by a car. Seth Cochran. Lord, couldn’t it have been anyone else?
“You’d better call the police,” Nora told Lydia, wrapping her free hand around the woman’s wrist—the only comfort she could offer until help arrived.
“Already on it. We’ll have Trauma One ready and waiting for you.”
Nora squeezed her cell phone so hard it almost slipped away. Before hanging up, she added, “Lydia. She’s going to need a rape kit.”
“Nora!” Seth called from five graves away, startling a solitary bird from the holly bushes. He was too loud for this place. That was Seth, always somehow larger than life—too alive, too vibrant, too . . . much. “Are you all right?”
Of course she was all right. She was always all right. Even as she knelt in wet grass, hands covered in sticky neon paint and another woman’s blood, her insides churning, bile clawing its way up her throat, Nora was all right. She had to be. It was her job.
“Multiple stab wounds, she’s shocky, blunt trauma.” Nora reported as she concentrated on the woman’s pulse fluttering beneath her fingertips.
“What the hell?” He skidded to a stop beside her, kneeling at the woman’s head. “Help me turn her over. Watch her c-spine.”
Elise Avery, one of the flight nurses, ran to join them, bringing with her a paramedic, a stretcher, and a backboard. Seth cradled the woman’s head in his large hands, supporting her cervical spine as they rolled her onto the backboard. The woman now lay face up, the extent of her injuries revealed.
“My God,” Elise said as she fastened the c-collar. “It’s Karen Chisholm.”
Seth’s face blanched the same chalky white as the tombstone beside him. Karen was a nurse anesthetist at Angels.
She was also the reason Nora and Seth had split up five months ago, after Nora discovered Karen and Seth naked together in a hospital call room.
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