Angel Face (13 page)

The side windows of the truck were broken out, and warm, wet air flooded through, pasting ribbons of dark hair against her cheeks. It carried the steamy fragrances of freshly drenched soil and rampant vegetation. Angela peered out at the dark tangle of trees and vines that enclosed the road in another kind of tunnel. The entire world was a deep emerald green, except for the occasional exotic bird or animal that appeared on a low-hanging branch.

Angela could smell flowers, too, cloyingly sweet. Jasmine or wild orchids, perhaps, but she couldn’t see them. The jungle hid far more than it revealed, she knew, and the thought of what might be lurking in its wild, rank interior made her chilly all over again.

She pulled the blanket around her, wondering if she was getting sick. She’d given herself a tetanus shot at Silver’s, but had she taken the antibiotic? She couldn’t remember now. Besides that, the tunnel was probably a breeding ground for poisonous insects and snakes. If she
was having a reaction to the shot itself, then it was just a question of waiting it out. But if she’d developed an infection at the shot site or was coming down with some tropical disease, she would need medical help.

The muscles of her arms and legs ached feverishly, and she was too fuzzy-headed to know how long they’d been driving, but it felt like days. The trip from
San Luis
to the Gulf of Mexico was probably around ten hours by road, and that seemed to be the direction they were heading.

When she closed her eyes, it was with the solemn promise that it would only be for a moment. A quick nap would restore her strength and her ability to think. She would be able to deal with this once she’d had some rest, but the exhaustion was profound, and darkness was folding over her like a wave.

T
HE
child tried to hide the doll under her pillow, but her father saw it and ripped the pillow away. “What have we here?” he said. “This is the one you don’t want me to break? This one is special?” She stared at him, terrified and knowing. Eloise was the doll with the crooked smile that she held in her arms at night and told secrets to. It was the only thing in her life that made her feel safe.

“Do you know what you did wrong?” he asked. She didn’t know. She never knew. He snapped off the doll’s head and dropped it in the child’s lap. Then he broke off the arms and the legs. “You make me do these things,” he said in a tone of cold, crawling disgust. “You make me hurt things. . . .”

B
RAKES
locked and shrieked, propelling Angela forward. She fell against the dash and rocked back, tossed by the shuddering pickup truck.

They’d hit something, she realized groggily, but she couldn’t see what. There weren’t any other vehicles, and it didn’t appear to be an injured animal, so it must have been something on the road. The driver was already out of the truck and walking around the front. He disappeared from sight as he knelt to inspect the damage, but she could hear him muttering.

“Christ,” he said under his breath, “the tire’s blown.”

He was up again, striding around to the bed of the truck. Angela closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep, but she was shaking from nerves that had nothing to do with the accident. Apparently there were tools in the back, because he was making a great deal of noise. A metal box scraped across the bed and clanged against the side. A short time later, she felt the pickup rise and tilt, which meant he was occupied with the blowout.

Fighting dizziness, she let herself out and crept around the back of the truck. There were rusty gardening tools in the bed. She spotted a pick and a large shovel. She chose the shovel, gripping it in both hands as she approached the driver from behind. He shifted his weight, and an impulse came over her that she could hardly control. The dizziness was gone. The lethargy was gone, replaced by a powerful surge of energy. She swung the heavy shovel up and brought it down on his head with a strength she didn’t understand.

His head snapped back, but his body slumped forward. Other than a faint moan, he fell soundlessly. She tossed away the shovel and stared at his sprawled form for some time, studying his breathing. When she was certain he was really unconscious, she knelt next to him. She checked the pulse in his neck first to make sure he was still alive, and then she pulled down the hood of his robe.

The steel gray hair and handsome face told her she’d been right. Blown-out tires wouldn’t normally inspire an Hispanic monk to speak in perfect English. Her driver was Dr. Jordan Carpenter.

J
ORDAN’S
head felt like a grenade had discharged inside it. There was nothing left but throbbing, smoking nerve endings. As headaches went, this one was a grand mal. A groan forced out of him as he tried to sit up. He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t even move, but it wasn’t because of the headache. His problems were bigger than that, he realized.

He was tied up, blindfolded, and lying on the floor of what seemed to be a grass hut. He could smell the straw and bamboo. He was practically facedown in it. Someone had trussed him up like a steer in a rodeo event, and the last person he was with was—
Christ
—Angela Lowe. She couldn’t have done this. Even if she’d knocked him out and tied him up, she wasn’t physically capable of carrying him here by herself. It seemed more likely that she’d been knocked out, too. Maybe they were both being held hostage.

High levels of stress, the kind that interfered with most people’s thought processes, had always honed Jordan’s. It was a skill he’d discovered in medical school and
perfected as a surgical resident. Now he used it to scan his surroundings and detect anything that would help him identify his location. In the past he’d volunteered time to Doctors Without Borders, which had brought him down this way and given him some familiarity with the area. He could hear the rumble of ocean waves and smell the rank, steamy air, which probably meant they were somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico, where he’d been heading with Angela.

It sounded like they were on the beach, but the constant chatter of birds and monkeys told him they weren’t out of the jungle, either. They could be almost anywhere on the gulf, even the southern border near Belize. The dead air was moist and slightly cooler than the jungle, but still ungodly hot. Jordan’s cargo shorts and cotton T-shirt clung to his body in patches, and the blindfold was making him sweat, but the robe he’d worn to disguise himself was gone, as were his shoes.

A floral fragrance saturated every breath he took. It was rich and intoxicating, as heavy as a mist. But one marker stood out in Jordan’s mind above all the others—the deep, throaty calls of mourning doves. The man he’d rented the truck from had said they were actually howler monkeys, and at night their forlorn cries could be piercing.

Jordan moved and felt the iron strength of his bonds. Whoever tied him up knew what they were doing. The ropes were looped repeatedly around his wrists and ankles, and they were tight enough to cut off his circulation. It felt like his shoulders were being reamed with a hot drill bit. He moved again, but there was no give at all.

He still didn’t think it could be Angela Lowe who’d done this. He didn’t know too many women who were experts at knot-tying, but then he didn’t know
any
female serial killers.

“Oh . . . you’re awake.”

That was a woman’s voice, close to him, whispering in
his ear from behind him. He could feel her breath, the softness of her body, the warmth. She exuded incredible warmth.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Nobody’s going to get hurt.” Her whispers lilted almost tauntingly. “I just want to ask you some questions.”

The voice was familiar, but it didn’t sound like Angela. Or was it the words that were familiar? Hadn’t he said them once? Still, he sensed it was her, and that she wasn’t bound like he was.

“Untie me.” His own voice was so raw he had to whisper, too.

“I can’t do that.”

“The ropes, they’re too tight.”

“Turn so I can get at your arms,” she urged softly.

She nudged him forward, and he tried to do what she wanted. Either he was delirious or she smelled like the lilacs on his porch at home. Wild lilacs. The kind that made him dizzy, and he was dizzy now.

Jordan waited for her to loosen the ties. If he could get some play in the ropes, he might be able to twist his way out of them, but he couldn’t figure out what she was doing back there. His hands were tied behind him, but it didn’t feel like she was loosening anything.

The answer arched his body like a bow. She tugged on his bound wrists, pulling them up by the tails of the rope. The pressure was wrenching. It forced a moan out of him and fire burned up and down his arms.

Next he felt something press against his butt. Her shoe? It had the tread of a boot, and that made for an extraordinary image in his mind—her getting leverage by prop-ping a foot against his backside. But leverage for what? The ropes yanked again, harder this time, harder,
harder
, lifting his arms in the air.

He got out a question. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Just making sure you’re comfortable,
Doctor.”

A massive grunt brought Jordan up off the floor. She wasn’t loosening the goddam ropes. She was pulling them tighter.

T
ERI
Benson was on a roll. Two coronary artery bypass grafts in a row without a hitch. Judy Monahan’s bypass had gone off beautifully. The affected arteries were now clean as a whistle, and Judy had all but danced on her hospital bed in Recovery. Just now Teri and Steve Lloyd had finished a beating heart surgery, a procedure in which the operation is performed directly on a beating heart through a small incision in the chest.

It was cutting edge stuff, but Steve Lloyd had relinquished the blade and let her handle most of it, and she’d done them both proud. He was so pleased he’d suggested a celebratory dinner before they were out of the operating room, although she suspected he would have seized on any reason.

“Who needs Jordan Carpenter,” he said now, winking at her as they discarded their gowns and gloves. “We have the dream team right here.”

Exactly Teri’s thoughts. She wondered if he had any idea how much she wanted to shout that very sentiment to the heavens. She’d long felt that Carpenter was vastly overrated, but the glare of the spotlight on him seemed to have blinded everyone except her.

“Only two solo flights,” she said, appropriately modest, “but it’s a start.”

“Could be the
start
of something big.”

He actually winked at her.
How corny
. Teri smiled at his obvious interest and pretended to be flustered, although if she was glowing from anything, it was from the thrill of victory. Steve was nice enough, but he didn’t compare to the pure adrenaline high of open heart surgery. Nothing could.

A moment later, they were standing side by side at the SICU sink, washing up. Teri had known for some time that he was attracted to her; however, there was one annoying little complication. He was married. Unhappily, of course, but Teri didn’t think it wise to get involved for many reasons. She’d put him off while being careful not to discourage him too much. It was a delicate balancing act for an ambitious woman in her profession, but she was learning to play that game nearly as adeptly as she was learning to excel at intricate surgical procedures. Soon she might invent a new procedure of her own and become as famous as Carpenter.

Teri reached for a towel. “I hear Jordan had some kind of emergency,” she said, hoping Steve would fill her in on the details. She’d heard from the charge desk that Jordan would be out for a couple of days on urgent personal business, but no one seemed to know what the urgency was all about. Teri had noticed that he was distracted lately, which wasn’t like Jordan at all, and she’d been doing some investigating on her own. Nothing would have pleased her more than a Jordan Carpenter screwup, the bigger the better.

“I talked to him briefly.” Steve splashed water on his face, then grabbed a towel and began to dry off. “He was on his way to the airport, and he assured me there was nothing to worry about, but that’s all he would say. Jordan and I don’t discuss personal stuff, so I wasn’t surprised. He asked me to take his calls and the valve repair that’s scheduled this week, and he recommended you highly for any CABGs that couldn’t be rescheduled.”

The glaring lights gave Steve’s mahogany crew cut a spiky halo and his smile a slightly fiendish cast. “He didn’t limit it to bypass procedures, Teri. He wants you on the valve team as well.”

“Really?” Teri was pleased, although she didn’t understand Jordan’s recent change of attitude regarding her, nor
did she trust it. He’d never had confidence in her abilities, despite her efforts to be at the top of her game at all times. He clearly didn’t see her as fellowship material, and she’d been overlooked at the awards dinner every year, snubs she could never forget.

It didn’t matter that he hadn’t thrown roadblocks in her way. His humiliating lack of support had been the main obstacle to her ascendance. He didn’t see her as his worthy successor, and for no good reason that she could tell, other than the typical ego problems that too many male doctors still harbored, especially surgeons. Most of them were arrogant bastards who didn’t think women belonged in the OR, except as support staff.

“So,” Steve said, taking her wet towel and lobbing it along with his into a laundry bin. “How about that dinner?”

“Tonight?”
Why not,
she thought. Who knew what could come of an alliance with the second most powerful doctor in the hospital. It wasn’t part of her grand plan, it just made everything so much easier, as did Carpenter’s odd behavior and his disappearance. The key was being ready, and now that opportunities were finally coming her way, she was more than ready.

This morning, she’d had an early appointment to get her hair cut, but not at just any salon. She’d gone to the one where Jordan’s little sister had her goldilocks shorn. Teri had been doing reconnaissance on Jordan for some time, and as it turned out, his sis was quite a talker. Teri hadn’t learned the details of Jordan’s mystery trip, but she had picked up several bits of information that should come in handy as things unfolded.

If Jordan Carpenter had finally seen the light with regard to her, he’d seen it too late, she vowed. And he would be sorry. It was cold and dark where he was going. Some people might call it a fall from grace. Others would call it a descent into hell.

* * *

P
ENNY
had a key to the place only because she’d refused to give it back to Jordan. A man who couldn’t remember to pay his light bills didn’t deserve privacy, in her opinion. Besides, somebody had to take care of the bird.

Speaking of which, she gave the cockatiel a stern look.

“You have had your last sunflower seed, my fine feathered friend.”

Birdy answered with a sharp little squawk as her favorite treat was whisked out from under her beak.

“I’ll be right back with some delicious Cockatiel Total Diet Seed,” Penny said in a cajoling tone. She got tail feathers for her trouble. When Birdy was miffed, she scolded. When she was
really
miffed, she did a one eighty on her perch, and you got the rear view.

But Penny didn’t relent. She’d been meaning to talk with Jordan about nutrition anyway, his
and
Birdy’s, so she might as well start with the bird. Jordan fed Birdy nothing but sunflower seeds, arguing that she liked them, which was just wrong. You couldn’t let a kid live on candy because he liked it, although Jordan had made frequent attempts to subsist on malted milk balls when he was in grade school.

Penny could have the cockatiel clean, sober, and firmly established on a balanced diet before Jordan got back from Mexico City, where he’d dashed off on some urgent business, according to his mysterious phone message. Then she would go to work on Jordan, a
much
bigger project. But Penny had never lacked for confidence when it came to knowing what was best for people. And it didn’t bother her that she might be interfering, because the interfered-with one was inevitably better off for it. A lost art, interference. She’d often thought there should be some way to make a living at it.

“I’m going to spank you!”

“Over my dead body,” Penny informed the bird.

“Over my dead body, my dead body—”

She left the cockatiel chattering and headed for the kitchen with the sunflower seeds. On the way, she stopped and scooped up some dirty dishes from the coffee table. He’d also deposited a half-drunk cup of coffee on the corner hutch, and only by the grace of God had it not left a ring on their mother’s prized golden maple furniture. The matching console was decorated with a still-moist banana peel. She made a face as she collected the refuse. At least he was getting some nutrition.

“This place needs a good spring cleaning,” she announced loudly from the kitchen, putting her absent brother
and
Birdy on notice that things were going to be different around the old homestead in more ways than one. Maybe she would dig in and surprise Jordan when he got back. She loved doing stuff behind his back for the simple reason that he couldn’t stop her.