“I’ve been assigned to you? Without anyone asking me?” Charlie’s voice sharpened with welcome indignation even as the image of Holly as she had last seen her rose in her mind’s eye. Oh, God. Another girl’s life might depend on what I do next. She was suddenly bathed in cold sweat.
I’m not strong enough.
“Temporarily. Until this case is over. Technically, I guess you’re free to decline.”
“I want to help.” Even while she said it, she shook her head in dogged refusal, because she couldn’t, just could not, expose herself to that kind of life-destroying horror again. She was doing her part in the war against evil by learning all there was to know about the enemy, with the intention of sharing that knowledge with the world so it could be forewarned and, thus, forearmed. She should not be expected to go to battle in the trenches, too. Charlie had to force the next words around the lump forming in her throat. “I’ll do a profile. I’ll—”
An eruption of shouts out in the hallway was punctuated by a man’s bloodcurdling scream. Even muffled by walls and a steel door, the disturbance cut through her words, riveting the attention of everyone in the office, making Charlie’s heart jump.
“What the hell?” Bartoli straightened from the desk abruptly. Clanging metal, running footsteps, and more shouts were followed seconds later by a frenzied pounding on Charlie’s closed office door.
“Dr. Stone! Dr. Stone!” a man yelled through the panel. “Come quick!”
Such a summons was unprecedented. Alarm flooding her veins, Charlie rushed to jerk open her door. A guard—Parnell, according to his name tag—jiggled from foot to foot with nervous excitement, pointing down the hall the second he set eyes on her. Looking in the direction in which he pointed, Charlie saw that, just on the other side of the mesh double doors, a cadre of jostling guards had congregated, while more hustled a chain-linked contingent of inmates away. Obviously agitated, the remaining guards seemed to be focused on something on the ground.
“What’s hap—?” she began, only to have her question cut off as Parnell grabbed her arm and physically pulled her from her office.
“Warden says you should come now!” He was already in motion, breaking into a run, towing her down the hall with him.
“Hey, wait a minute!” It was Bartoli, yelling after her from her office, sounding alarmed on her behalf. As if he thought Parnell was kidnapping her or something.
“It’s all right,” Charlie called back to him, even as she ran with the guard.
“Dr. Stone! We’ve got a man severely injured here! You’re a medical doctor, you know something about emergency care, right?” Looking around at her as she reached the closed mesh gates, Pugh crouched beside what Charlie realized, from his orange uniform, was an inmate lying on the floor.
“Yes,” she replied, her eyes on the injured man. As one of the guards hurried to open the double doors to let her through, she was peripherally aware of Bartoli and Crane running up behind her, flashing their badges to get past the guard, negotiating the complicated procedure of passing through the clanging metal cage right along with her. Charlie stayed focused on the scene unfolding in front of her: a little distance beyond the fallen man, guards were dragging another inmate, this one apparently unconscious, toward the intersecting corridor that led to the main part of the building, where the cells, among other things, were located.
“What happened?” Breathless, she asked the question Parnell had interrupted earlier as she rushed through the last door and dropped to her knees beside Pugh. Adrenaline surged like a double shot of speed as she assessed the victim with the triage mentality of a first responder. With a sense of shock she recognized the injured man as Garland. He lay motionless, sprawled on his back on the concrete floor, blood pumping from his chest. The front of his jumpsuit was already wet, shiny, saturated scarlet. His eyes were closed. His skin was ashen.
“Mr. Garland,” Charlie called to him urgently even as she pressed two fingers to the pulse beneath his ear, while Pugh said, “One of the other inmates stabbed him. Do something.”
Charlie could feel only a faint, irregular pulse, but it at least meant Garland was still alive. Moving fast, she unzipped his jumpsuit to the chain around his waist and yanked it open to reveal the wound. A muscular, supremely fit man with an inch-long slit just above his left nipple, which was probably going to kill him, was her lightning-quick assessment. The rhythmic way the blood gushed from his chest was ominous, but it told her that his heart was still beating. Although it had been hard to tell at first glance, she saw that he was breathing on his own as well.
“It was Nash who done it. They’re taking him to the hole,” one of the guards—Johnson, she saw with an upward flick of her eyes—said to Pugh. The way he grimaced told Charlie that he thought he was in big trouble for letting the attack happen. She guessed the warden had been on this side of the gate, on his way to his office in the first of the five buildings that made up the huge prison complex, when the assault had gone down, and that the commotion had drawn him back to the scene.
“Nash was with the group we was taking to the library,” another guard added. The library was on the same side of the mesh doors as Charlie’s office and the interview rooms, so clearly the attack had happened as Garland was coming out and the library group was going in. “He jumped at Garland so fast, wasn’t nothing nobody could do. Just, boom, like that, and it was done.”
“We got the shiv,” a third guard volunteered. “About six inches long, sharp as a razor blade.”
“Goddamn it. Find out where it came from.” Pugh’s face was suffused with anger as he looked at the guards. Spotting the feds looming behind Charlie, his complexion went from dark rose to magenta in about half a second. His eyes bulged and his jaw worked. Charlie saw all this in passing even as she slapped her hand flat against Garland’s wound and laid the other one on top of it, putting her weight into it, applying as much pressure as she could in an attempt to stop the bleeding. His chest was wide, warm, firm with muscle—and slippery with blood. So much blood.
“Put the whole damned place on lockdown,” Pugh snapped, and one of the guards started barking the necessary orders into a handheld radio.
It was no wonder Pugh was upset: a violent death inside the prison meant an outside investigation, Charlie knew, and knew, too, that such an investigation was the last thing the warden wanted. Just a month before she had arrived at Wallens Ridge in June, the Bureau of Prisons had concluded an investigation into the death of an inmate who had supposedly committed suicide in his cell. The inquiry had been ugly, and the final report was still pending.
With the FBI agents observing, there would be no hiding this.
“Move back,” somebody said above her. The voice was authoritative: she thought it belonged to Bartoli, and that he was talking to the nervous guards, but she was concentrating too hard on Garland to glance up and make sure. “Give her some room to work.”
“Uhh,” Garland moaned. His head moved slightly. His wrists were shackled and fastened to the chain around his waist. His hands, resting on his abdomen, twitched. His chest heaved as he suddenly began to fight for air. He gasped and coughed and choked. Bloody froth rose to lips.
Not good. Charlie’s heart beat faster.
“It’s bad,” she told Pugh, reluctant to be more specific on the off chance Garland was still capable of understanding what she was saying. She could feel his heart beating against her palm, feel its desperate attempt to function. His skin was still warm, hot even, but she saw with a sinking feeling that his lips were starting to turn blue.