Dangerous Attachments (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 1) (4 page)

"Ummm, a white van with red writing on the side. Is there a problem, miss?"

"No, sorry to bother you." There was a definite problem, but nothing the florist shop could solve.

The roses were still wrapped in their paper, stem tips trapped in plastic vials. Sylvia forced herself to pick them up, and a sharp thorn cut through the paper and stabbed her finger. She sucked at the wound.

Standing in the brightly lit kitchen, she fought the nervous edge in her stomach, then snapped off the overhead light. She slid her hand along the smooth wall, and felt the switch that controlled the outdoor flood. Everything flashed into view—the salt cedar lurched and lashed at the wind, tarantella shadows danced against the coyote fence—but all she saw was the unbidden image of a tattoo of the Virgin.

CHAPTER THREE

"Y
OU'RE MISSING A
goddamn finger?" Rosie Sánchez sat up in bed and hit her head on the walnut headboard.
"¡Qué pendejo!"
she murmured, not quite free of the receiver's audio range. "Is Main under lockdown? I'll be right there."

She hung up the phone and slid her short legs off the bed. Her husband, Ray, had already donned his plaid bathrobe, and he was searching for his slippers. His wife had held the job of penitentiary investigator for more than seven years. The stress had done in her predecessors, but she seemed to thrive under pressure. Ray had never met anyone who loved her job as much.

In the kitchen he made instant coffee while Rosie, hastily dressed in a beige suit, nylons, and heels, sat impatiently at the table tracing the red-check design on the tablecloth.

"Would you believe this?" she mumbled. "Somebody stole a finger—chopped it off a hand!" She gazed
wide-eyed at her husband as if she didn't believe it herself.

Ray raised his eyebrows, "I believe it." He poured boiling water into two mugs of coffee and added sugar to one, milk to the other. By now, he was used to his wife's middle-of-the-night crises. There was never any doubt that Ray would always calmly stand beside her. He stirred both cups and handed Rosie the mug that said,
I'M THE BOSS!

"I don't need this." Rosie brought the edge of her hand against the table in a karate chop. "I do not need Angel Tapia being cut up alive like fresh meat."

"Who's fresh meat?" a new voice asked.

Rosie looked up and saw their sixteen-year-old son, Tomás, standing in the doorway. His dark hair stood out from his head, his eyelids drooped heavily from interrupted sleep.

"Look who's sleepwalking," Ray smiled.

Rosie clucked her tongue, "Ay,
hijito
, I'm sorry we woke you. Go back to bed."

"I want to know who's fresh meat."

"I was just talking about work, Tomás. It's a gang-related thing, a knifing."

"Harsh," came the sleepy reply before Tomás padded on bare feet back to his bedroom.

Ray pulled two pieces of raisin toast from the toaster oven and set them on a blue flowered saucer. He selected marmalade from several jars of jam on the refrigerator shelf, put out a butter knife, and waited for his wife to eat.

She took a small bite, pushed the plate away, and kept her voice low. "The 1980 riot—when I started in 1987, they were still talking about it like it was yesterday. Not
so much the murders, or the rapes, but the missing bodies, the missing parts." She brushed crumbs from her lips before continuing. "An arm here, a foot there. If it starts all over again . . ." She curled a strand of frosted hair around her thumb. She looked up at Ray with her dark, glamorous eyes.

"Most people choose a normal occupation, Rosita." Ray felt his muscles contract, caught himself, and shrugged. She was tough. Every day she did a job most people wouldn't touch. Bloody shanks, syringes, and faded balloons filled with contraband—they were all part of a day's work. She had Polaroid snapshots of the carnage. Somehow, she was able to tolerate and process daily encounters with the worst side of human nature. Ray had long since given up trying to understand that side of Rosie. He just loved her. Ray clutched his hands together, unconscious of the gesture.

T
HE
PNM I
NVESTIGATIONS
office was overheated and smelled musty. Rosie sighed; it was only 9
A.M.
and already she'd been at work for six hours. She took off her reading glasses and stared at the tape recorder. Inmate injuries were commonplace; but this unauthorized "amputation" had occurred in the penitentiary hospital where Angel Tapia had been quarantined for measles. Definitely not routine. She pressed rewind on the tape and let it run for fifteen seconds. The interview with penitentiary nurse LaRue had gone reasonably well considering the woman had been on duty for more than thirty hours. When she let up on the rewind button, her own recorded voice filled the office.

"How strong would someone have to be to cut off a finger?"

LaRue coughed on tape. "Scissors are sharp. You could do it."

There was a long pause and the faint inner workings of the worn recorder were audible before LaRue continued. "He used a rubber ring as a tourniquet. He left it on the stump and injected a digital block before cutting. That's what was in the hypo in the trash. You saw the shears, wiped clean."

"We're talking about someone with medical expertise," Rose said.

"Anyone who's worked outside as an E.M.T. could handle it."

There was a light tap on the door, and then a young woman entered, her tanned arms stacked with folders and logs. "Here's the stuff you asked for," she said as she let herself out again.

Rosie pulled a list off the top and scanned names—inmates who had worked in the hospital during the past six months—at least a dozen.

The tape was still running. Sánchez: "Can you account for the missing dosage?"

She found the date she wanted in the stack of log books and thumbed slowly through the pages.

LaRue: "Not absolutely."

The tension roller gear on the tape cassette was tight, and the machine whined rhythmically under Rosie's voice. "So the drugs could easily have been collected over time?"

She stopped the tape. She had just come upon a second list, the last group of patients seen at the pen hospital before Angel Tapia's pinkie was severed from his right hand. One name had appeared on both lists: Lucas Watson. Just this morning, she'd seen an incident
report . . . She found it again tucked under a thick notebook.

It had been filed by C.O. Jeff Anderson. Yesterday.

Inmate Lucas Watson cut his wrist during the course of a meeting with a psychologist. I did not witness the incident with Dr. Strange, but I took the inmate to the penitentiary hospital where he was given five stitches
.

Dr. Sylvia Strange. Rosie chewed on the corner of her lower lip. Her friendship with Sylvia dated back to that scorching summer's day when the thirteen-year-old
gringa
tried to talk her way out of a fight with a
pachuca
. The
pachuca
happened to be Rosie's younger sister. Sylvia had ended up with a nasty shiner and a bloody nose. She still had a way of getting in the middle of trouble.

Rosie fingered C.O. Anderson's incident report, then she picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. She needed to talk to someone who specialized in
crazies
: her longtime
gringa
friend.

"I was just walking out the door." Sylvia sounded tired.

"I need a favor. Can you meet with me this afternoon?"

"After three-thirty. What's this about?"

Rosie paused. The guard tower was visible through thick, dusty windows. The smell of sewage from the prison's wastewater treatment plant wafted through the seams of plaster and glass. Someone whistled from the courtyard below. "You evaluated Lucas Watson?"

"Sure." After a very brief pause Sylvia sighed. "Don't try to be coy, Rosie. What's going on?"

"A delicate investigation," Rosie said, screwing up her face as she spoke.

"The evaluation—"

"I know," Rosie interrupted. "It's privileged information."

"I'll see you in your office at four."

Before leaving for the meeting with the deputy warden, Rosie fast-forwarded the tape for several minutes until she found the last of the interview.

"What about the stitches?" Rosie didn't like the brittle pitch of her voice on tape.

"He's no plastic surgeon, but he did the job. He had to pull the skin back, gouge the bone, pull the flap back over, and then stitch."

Rustling sounds of paper and fabric; LaRue sneezed.

"Who do you think did this?" Rosie had asked.

LaRue had stared at the overexposed shot of Angel Tapia's right hand with thumb, three fingers, and a bloody stump where his pinkie should have been.

Rosie Sánchez pressed stop on the tape recorder. Silence filled the room until the distant sounds of conversation and ringing phones intruded from beyond the barred windows and the closed door. She sifted through the file folder again, found an eight-by-ten color photograph—the second photo that LaRue had seen.

She pressed play, and her voice asked another question of the room.

"There's no way this is the work of the same person who severed Angel's finger?" Rosie knew the logical answer but needed to hear someone else say it.

LaRue had glanced away from the image. She'd read the attorney general's Riot Report, and she'd seen some photos of the aftermath. She was a nurse; still, she had
to force herself to stare at the picture of a human torso, naked, charred, and severed. "I wouldn't think so. This guy was cut in half with a blowtorch, wasn't he?"

I
T WAS
12:40
WHEN
Sylvia walked into the large courtyard of the Santacafé. A mosaic of yellow leaves peeked through snow patches. The branches of the great cottonwood tree were bare and gnarled. Inside, the elegant hostess led the way to a table in the back room next to the fireplace. Sylvia slid out of her coat and warmed her palms against the cast-iron grate. Her hands were too sturdy for her slender wrists, fingernails squared off close to the fingertips, palms roughened by callouses: working hands. At the moment they were busy, muscles tense. During the drive over, she had rehearsed her questions for Herb. He could be a pain in the ass, but he wasn't stupid; he'd known that Lucas Watson was a psychological disaster area when he asked her to do the evaluation.

"Good news, Sylvia! Thanks to you and me, we got that acquittal on Allmoy."

"Hello, Herb." Sylvia selected the chair that faced the center of the room and sat. She'd evaluated Herb's client, Joseph Allmoy, a man accused of murder. It had been clear that post-traumatic stress disorder factored into the equation—four months before the murder Allmoy had himself been brutally assaulted and held hostage during a robbery. His rage had been internalized until it erupted during an argument with a neighbor. The day after Malcolm's funeral, Sylvia had appeared in court as expert witness for the defense.

She looked up to see Herb offering her a big smile
and a red rose. She drew back when he brushed the bud along her cheek.

"Enough with the roses." Sylvia raised both palms to Herb impatiently and shook her head; the man just didn't get it. She turned to the waiter, who was hovering at their elbows. "Coffee, please. Black."

"Something from the bar, Mr. Burnett?" The waiter spoke clearly, occasionally remembering his British accent. Like most waiters at Santa Fe's trendiest restaurants, he was young, beautiful, androgynous.

"Why not?" Herb flashed Sylvia a boyish smile. "Absolut with a twist and a splash of soda. Oh, and give this rose to the hostess with my compliments."

When they were alone, Sylvia leaned back in her chair and said, "I'm glad to hear about Allmoy's acquittal."

"Me, too. I didn't have the old smoking gun, but I did have a sensational expert witness. Keep this up and you're a shoo-in with Kove and Casias."

How the hell did Herb know about the job offer? Sylvia had just completed a laborious interview process with the firm whose psychologists held the state's forensic contract. She was in the first stages of contractual negotiation with the firm; an offer would be a definite notch in Sylvia's professional belt.

"It's still a small town," Herb said with a grin. "And you're still the best thing in it."

Sylvia shrugged off the clumsy compliment, crossed her arms, and looked expectantly at Herb.

For a moment, his expression settled into seriousness, longing, and his eyes searched Sylvia's face. Beneath their deep mahogany surface, her irises were flecked with warm gold. The small scar near her left eye
was a shade lighter than her skin. Her lips were parted just enough to reveal teeth a little bit crooked. He had a sudden urge to kiss her.

Instead, he said, "You always look terrific." But he read her impatience and switched gears with a question. "What's eating you?"

"Tell me about Lucas Watson."

"What's to tell? You're the shrink."

"How long has he been your client?"

When he frowned, Herb's forehead creased like linen and he peered out from under a mono-brow. "Duke Watson is my client, has been for years. The governor just appointed him chairman of the Interim Tax Committee." Herb's voice softened, and he eyed Sylvia thoughtfully. "Are you aware of that?"

Sylvia absorbed the information: Duke Watson now held a position of influence over every commercial enterprise in the state. Perfect for a man who had a reputation as a rabid control freak. Even better if the governor wanted to pass the torch on to him in the next election.

Herb bit into a bread stick and crumbs fluttered into his water glass. "I took Lucas as a client with the manslaughter trial, three years ago, as a favor to the old man."

"I read Malcolm's evaluation."

"Yeah, but the judge wouldn't admit the expert testimony." Herb grinned. "Judge Mahoney. The honorable fartbag thinks you guys are nuts."

"Has Lucas had a full psych battery since the trial?"

Herb eyed Sylvia silently while a busboy delivered vodka and coffee. When he was gone, Herb said, "Are you going to tell me what's going on?"