The Sins of Lincoln
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Authors: Alyssa Nightly
THE SINS OF LINCOLN
Alyssa Nightly
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, incidents, characters, and all contents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any relation or resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, businesses, agencies, government entities, or locales is purely coincidental.
HARVEST MOON PRESS
United States of Americ
a
Copyright © 2014 by Harvest Moon Press
Cover illustrations by Le Femme Couture Agency. Cover art copyright © 2014 Harvest Moon Press
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations used in articles and reviews.
First Harvest Moon Press printing November 2014
The Flickering of Firelight
He picked her up in his powerful arms and carried her into the bedroom, then laid her on the bed. In the flickering light of the lantern hanging on the wall, everything was yellow and dark. When he unbuttoned his shirt, the light cast shadows formed by his bulging muscles, and he looked like a dream. Mav let her eyes run across his body as he unzipped his jeans and let them fall. The intensity of the tingling between her legs and the sensuality of the moment was enough to cause Mav to clench her thighs together, and Mav knew, this was going to be something that would last into the dawn.
Six Months Earlier
“Dammit! Where’s my blood type? She’s going to bleed out,” said Dr. Ken Brantley, the attending E.R. physician to a team of frantic medical personnel. “Tell the lab to expedite. Let’s do a CVC, chem panel, and tox screen to tell if she’s on anything. Where the hell did she come from anyway? If she didn’t get here by ambulance, how did we get her?” But there was no answer.
“Doctor, her face. My God, look at her face.” The young nurse wrung her hands and backed away in horror.
“Animals,” was his reply. “The damage to her facial structure is the least of her problems right now. We’ve got to get her stable. Kelly, get back over here. She’s not going to hurt you.” But the nurse had never seen such a sight. The physician quieted his tone, and retried. “Kelly, she’s a person. She’s a human being, and she needs your help. Now get over here.” The nurse complied.
“Doctor,” yelled a lab technician, “she’s type O-positive. The chem panel and tox screen will be out momentarily.”
“Alright, lets start her on two liters of O positive with lactated ringers. I don’t like the looks of this,” he said. ”Her blood pressure is dropping. She’s loosing blood somewhere.” Then, staring at the heart monitor which was painting a rocky line across the screen, “She’s tacky. Shit, she’s going into B-fib! Kelly, get the crash cart. Charge, three hundred.” The fledgling nurse stared at him, frozen. “Kelly!”
His thunderous voice awakened her from her state of mental vapor-lock as she spun around, grabbed the defibrillator cart and wheeled it into position. “Charging three hundred.” Her voice was shaky.
The doctor took the paddles, applied them to the young female patient’s chest and yelled, “Clear!”
The body rocked upwards as everyone studied the heart monitor. “Thank God. Alright, that was close. Normal sinus rhythm.”
“Doctor, chem panel toxicology results are back, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Well what is it?”
“No barbiturates or other illegal narcotics, but she drew a positive test for Rohypnol.”
“Roofies. Son of a bitch, the date rape drug. Somebody ought to find the thug that did this to her and kick his ass.”
“Looks like someone’s way ahead of you, doc,” said the lab tech. “Just saw the cops come in escorting the medics with four guys, pretty banged up from the looks of them. Ambulance driver said that he doesn’t know anything about this female patient, but all the others are from a biker bar.”
“Well maybe there is a little justice in the world,” said the physician who had not looked up from his work on the female patient. He took up an ultrasound wand in his hand and was rotated it from one side of the patient’s abdomen to the next. “Alright, call surgery. Tell them we’re sending one up.”
“What is it?” said Kelly.
“Here, learn something. See this?” pointing at the ultrasound monitor. “That’s her spleen. See the cloudy area here, on the edge? That’s a rupture. Tell the O.R. we’ve got to expedite on this one. This young lady is going to be lucky if she survives the night.”
As the staff wheeled the patient from the room, the physician turned and said, “Now, lets go take a look at the thugs.”
The Mysterious Drop Off
“Well I don’t know where she came from,” said the hospital insurance administrator.
“So at this point, we don’t even have an ID on her?” said her supervisor.
“No, nothing. She apparently had no ID on her person when she arrived. And, no one seems to know how she got into the hospital in the first place. It says on this report that the patient is in critical condition. I hardly believe she walked in here under her own power.”
“Great, another Jane Doe. Like this hospital can withstand another patient we can’t collect a dime from. This is ridiculous. Call hospital security. Ask them to find out how she got here. Somebody has to know.”
An hour later, hospital security reported back to the administration as to the odd circumstances surrounding the arrival of the latest Jane Doe.
“Strangest patient arrival I’ve ever seen,” said one.
“It’s like this, Dr. Cook. We’ve got security officers patrolling the hospital on regular intervals. But we also have officers monitoring security cameras at all times. That being said, with so many cameras and so few officers, it’s hard to catch everything.”
“So what happened?” said the administrator.
“Well, at 11:32 p.m. we get an alarm on port 266. That’s just a service entrance door over on the west side of the hospital. You know, it’s a door leading to the outside, down the alley? Anyway, the alarm on that door sounded so we dispatch an officer to check it out.”
“And?”
“Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. The officer radios back to us that he’s got a dead body laying in the hallway just inside the doorway.”
“A dead body? What?”
“He just
thought
the person was dead. But, it was your Jane Doe, barely alive. He responded to the door alarm and finds this woman lying there, all bloodied up. Scared the shit out of him, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, I bet. So what are you telling me? That she walked in that door and collapsed? In her condition?”
“No sir. There’s no way.”
The physician administrator, Dr. Cook, was becoming impatient. “And why not?”
“Like you said. She was in no condition to open any door. Hell, she wasn’t even conscious. And, that door is sealed. There’s no way to open it from the outside.”
“Why, because she didn’t have a key?”
“No, because there’s no keyhole on the outside of that door anyway. It doesn’t even have a door handle on the outside of the door. There’s no way to open it from the outside. But somehow, someone did. Someone else got in that door.”
“How do you know someone on the inside didn’t open it?”
“Motion sensors on the hallway security camera covering that door would have tripped. The camera is way up the hallway from the door. If anyone inside the hospital walked down that hall towards the door, the camera would have recorded it. But there’s nothing.” The security supervisor held up his hands. “I know, I know. It’s not making any sense to me either. Here’s what I do know. Somehow, someone opened that door from the outside, a door that has no keylock and no door handle, and dumped her in there without being detected. Hold on a second, we’re pulling up security video from the camera pointed at that alleyway. You got it yet, Charlie?” he said to a uniformed man with a beer gut and a mustard stain on his name badge.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t show much. See here? There’s definitely somebody in that alleyway, carrying something heavy over his shoulder. But you can’t see nothin’. It’s just his silhouette.”
The doctor was incredulous. “So some guy somehow pops open an un-openable door and drops a critically wounded patient inside our building, what, so the alarm would sound and we’d find her?”
“Sure would have been easier to use the emergency room entrance,” said the supervisor.
“Unless you didn’t want anyone to notice you doin’ it,” said the overweight guard.
The three men stared at the security monitors and pondered that one for a moment.
Medical condition of the bikers
“Alright, let’s do some triage here people,” said Dr. Brantley, the E.R.’s attending physician. “The most critical go first. We have four victims?”
“I don’t think you’d want to call these members of a biker gang ‘victims’ doc,” said a police detective standing against the wall. “These are the attackers.”
“Whatever. Okay so what have we got?” he said to a team of nurses and residents. “Come on, call them out.”
“Multiple contusions on this one. His face looks crushed on this side. From the way he’s wheezing, I’d say he’s got a collapsed lung.”
“This one’s unconscious. His left leg is a compound fracture at the knee, which is totally inverted, by the way.”
“Same here. This one is unconscious as well, but both the left knee and right elbow are compound fractured and totally inverted.”
“What about that last one?”
“Not a priority,” said a resident. “He’s DOA.”
“Start with number one. Let’s get in a chest tube and get that lung re-inflated. You know the drill. Move people.” The doctor sat back and watched his team closely. This was a perfect scenario to train them on.
The detective stepped forward. “Doc, I don’t think I have to tell you, but I’m investigating an attack on a female that occurred at a biker bar on the west end of town. These look like our perps. I want them swabbed. I mean it, as soon as they’re stable, I want their genital regions swabbed for DNA. Their bodies are a crime scene. Got it?”
“No problem. The female that came in just before these bikers; she’s been sexually assaulted? As soon as she’s out of surgery, they’ll run the rape kit on her.”
“Witnesses at the bar say definitely. How is the victim, by the way? I need to talk to her.”
“You can talk to her if she survives.”
“It’s that bad?”
The doctor’s answer came in the form of a stern gaze.
“Hey doc,” said the detective. “The witnesses at the bar said another individual, a male subject got in a fight with these guys and saved the girl. Apparently, he’s the one that caused all this damage. There’s no way he fought off all of these guys without getting injured. You got anybody else in here within the last forty five minutes that might be our guy?”
“No, but you might want to talk to hospital security. The hospital administrator was down here a while ago and told me an unidentified male broke into a side entrance off the alley and dropped your female victim off, just inside the door.”
“You’re kidding. Thanks doc. And doc, here’s my card. Call me if our hero shows up here.”
The card read ‘Lt. Dan T. Riggs, Detective. Special Victims Unit.’
Loyalty to Women
Detective Dan Riggs watched the video surveillance tape of the male subject who walked down the alley, entered the locked door, then dropped the female victim inside the doorway. Now, she was officially known as ‘Jane Doe’ at the hospital.
He headed back to
Chopper Town
, Bellville, Texas’ most notorious biker bar. When he arrived, police cruisers were everywhere. Throngs of the bar’s patrons were divided into small groups, each being interviewed by a uniformed officer or detective. Inside, crime scene tape separated the back room of the club from the smoke-filled pool table area in the front.
“So what do we have, Bill?” said Lt. Riggs.
“The security tape sucks, Dan, but you won’t believe what you see on it.”