Fallen Angel Page 14

  Acme Storage Garage. He turns the key, removes the padlock, and hoists up the door and finds a slightly used Ford Escape with good rubber and just enough mud streaked on the light blue chassis to make it down-home ordinary. The car has custom Wounded Vet Wisconsin plates and a sticker for state parks on the windshield.

  Wisconsin? Always an adventure riding with Mouse.

  A set of keys lay on the driver’s seat. Around back, he lifts the hatch, peels back the security flap, and sees a wallet on top of a stack of stapled pages. Under the pages, a black briefcase sits on an Apple laptop. Three long gun cases and a go-bag lay behind the briefcase. He unzips the cases and quickly checks the actions on a Remington 11-87 entry type shotgun, a Colt shorty semiautomatic CAR-15, and a .308 scoped rifle. Boxes of ammunition and magazines for the Colt nestle on either side of the storage pocket, plus rounds for his .45-caliber pistol and custom silencers for the rifles and his pistol.

  Hmmm. Looks like things have escalated.

  Upon flipping open the wallet, he discovers he is now William Lemmer who lives on Miflen Street in Madison, Wisconsin. According to the driver’s license that bears a modified likeness, Lemmer has black curly hair and wears outsized horn-rimmed glasses that are reminiscent of Barry Goldwater. His eyes are brown. In addition to a Visa and MasterCard in Lemmer’s name, the wallet also contains a health-club membership, a library card for the Madison Public Library, and a Veteran’s Service Connected ID card. A Post-It note attached to the card explains that Lemmer has received counseling for his 50 percent PTSD disability at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veteran’s Hospital, 2005 Overlook Terrace, in Madison, Wisconsin.

  First thing, Davis unpacks and inserts brown cosmetic contact lenses from the briefcase. Then he checks the rest of the contents. There’s ten thousand dollars in twenties, fifties, and hundreds. Two sets of the clunky horn-rims snuggle in cases next to the currency. Then he shakes out the contents of the go-bag that include changes of underwear and socks, a toilet kit, a tactical web vest, and—bingo—a box of Just for Men shampoo in “Real Black” hair color.

  A basin sits on a workbench along the wall of the garage, along with a mirror, towels, and three gallons of water in plastic bottles. Davis strips off his jacket, T-shirt, and holster and starts unpacking the hair dye.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Janet George, PhD candidate, looks up from her desk in her office in the psychology department on the second floor at Ft. Snelling Veteran’s Hospital as a large presence fills her doorway.

  “Hi, Tony, what brings you down to the second floor?”

  Tony, a nurse’s aide on 4J, is a psych major at Macalester College getting some hands-on experience heading into summer break. He’s on partial scholarship along with GI Bill money. Tony did a tour with the 82nd in Afghanistan as a medic before he opted for psychology. He’s a light-skinned black man with a powerfully developed upper body. With frog-freckled skin and wisps of a beard stuck on his flat, smiling face like inky cotton candy, he comes across as a genial troll. He wears light-blue scrubs and sneakers. It’s been Janet’s experience that Tony is a careful watcher who doesn’t miss much.

  “I think I found you a live one,” Tony says.

  “Oh, really?” Janet leans back and points to the chair next to her desk.

  Tony flops into the chair. “Captain Jessica Kraig, fly girl with the North Dakota Guard. Her Hawk got splashed in the Sandbox. Came in from Reed a little while ago with a full boat—TBI, post-traumatic psychosis, amnesia, and Broca’s aphasia. They got her on 600 mg of Seroquel. You haven’t seen her because she’s just graduating from bedpans and learning to walk.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve been watching her. I caught her stealing a pen . . .”

  “Stealing a pen,” Janet repeats.

  “Uh-huh, see, in her chart from Reed, there’s a notation. She grabbed a pen from a speech therapist and threatened the lady with it. She was having these seizures at the time. So day before yesterday I was escorting her to physical rehab and saw her lift the pen and some sheets of paper off a cart as we went by.”

  “Did you report her taking the pen to the charge nurse?”

  “Ah, no; I was curious about what she’d do with it. In fact I worked a couple double shifts to keep an eye on her.”

  “So what did Captain Kraig do with the aforementioned stolen pen?”

  “She hid it under her mattress, with this.” Tony pulls a folded piece of paper from his pocket and smoothes it open on the desk.

  Janet leans forward and studies the scrawled images on the sheet. Crude five-pointed stars cover the top. Beneath the stars, the bottom of the page is filled with clumsy letters, some backward but in a sequence that sound out A, B, C, D, E, F, and so on. She looks up at Tony.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  “It looks to me like she’s trying to puzzle out a phonetic alphabet,” Janet says.

  “Yeah. I mean, with all that dope on board, this gal can barely grunt, and she’s struggling to do this?” He taps the piece of paper and then adds, “There’s more.”

  Janet opens her palms in an inquiring gesture.

  “At night when she’s supposed to be sleeping, I caught her out of bed on the floor doing sets of push-ups and sit-ups.”

  “Hmmm, so what do you think?” Janet asks.

  “I think there’s more to Kraig than her chart adds up to.”

  Janet raises an eyebrow, “Like what?”

  “Like maybe she’s figuring out her own agenda to work out of aphasia. In spite of us. Like maybe we’re the problem.”

  Janet knits her brows. “And you’re telling me this why?”

  Tony shrugs. “Most people in these offices won’t give a non-degreed former grunt like me the time of day, huh?”

  “Okay,” Janet mulls it. “Tell you what.” She leans over, digs in her purse, and withdraws a ten-dollar bill. “Do me a favor. Go down to the commissary and get a loose-leaf notebook, a felt-tip pen, and, ah, some Post-It notes. Then meet me up on 4J in thirty.”

  Janet walks down the stairs, crosses through the cafeteria, enters the mental-health suite, and taps the doorjamb on doctor Durga Prasad’s office. Durga is a real doctor, the consulting psychiatrist on Jesse Kraig’s file. His family migrated from New Delhi when he was eighteen, and his face has the acne-pitted texture of dark fudge set in a bald, bullet head. An old-fashioned shrink, he thinks many of his contemporaries are quacks who throw drugs at disorders instead of people. For Janet’s purposes, this could turn out to be a good thing.

  “Janet,” Durga waves her into his office. “What’s up?” His diction and accent have survived assimilation and sound like starch breaking on the BBC.

  “Tony and I need your permission to try out a little project on one of your patients.”

  Durga leans back in his chair and steeples his dark fingers. “Which patient, and what kind of project?”

  “Captain Jesse Kraig. I’d like to get her on my list for counseling.”

  Durga turns to his monitor, types an entry, and taps a button. “You see her chart yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  He turns the computer on its base and makes a “c’mon” gesture with this finger and points to the screen. “Check it out.”

  Janet quickly peruses the notes entered from the moment Kraig was shot down, tracking her through Balad, Landstuhl, Walter Reed, and now here. The consensus coming through the pipeline is TBI with speculation about short-term psychosis along with post-traumatic amnesia and aphasia. All the tests come back negative on brain damage. She reads of the bizarre behavior with the speech therapist at Reed that Tony had mentioned. And a real stiff regimen of antipsychotics. There’s a recent note entered by the nursing staff on 4J: Resists taking meds.

  She looks up. “I’d like to do an assess on her.”

  Durga swivels his computer monitor back around, leans forward, and pronounces with great patience, “Janet, she can’t talk.”

  Janet
nods. “Tony and I have some ideas along those lines.”

  “Tony? The nurse’s aide on 4J?” Durga clears his throat, a little testy. “Tony is a student. He can get ahead of himself.” His implication is clear; as far as he’s concerned, she’s also a student.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Janet leans her head to the side. “Before Tony got into the mind-fixing business, he was in the stop-the-bleeding-business. You know, Durga, the part of all this we get to skip. Real, real; bang, bang.”

  “What’s your point, Janet?”

  Janet withdraws the folded sheet of paper from her jacket pocket and smoothes it flat on Durga’s desk. “She’s teaching herself to write, in her room, when no one’s around.”

  “Really?” Durga taps his finger on the scribbled stars and alphabet letters. He looks up. “She did this?”

  “Tony found it hidden in her room. I guess she swiped a pen.”

  “Did he get the pen back?”

  “Sure, he’s on it.”

  “Hmmmm.” Durga scratches his chin. “Okay, this is interesting. In speech therapy she balks at the flash cards.”

  “Maybe you should try giving her something to write with?” Janet asks.

  Durga’s eyebrow goes up. “She tried to stab a therapist at Reed with a pen. It’s in the chart.”

  “And that’s why we’re giving her enough dope to kill a horse?”

  “Well, yeah. You want someone to lose an eye?”

  “What if all the drama with the pen isn’t hostile acting out?” Janet waffles a hand. “What if it’s, you know, something real simple, like she’s trying to communicate?”

  Durga knits his brows. “Just what exactly do you have in mind?”

  “Give her writing materials.” Janet shrugs. “Tony and the staff can keep an eye out. Give it a week or so. See what she does.”

  “A week.” Durga mulls it. “Okay, we’ll give it a week.”

  Jesse is doing lunges called “the dragon walk” down the length of the hall, trying to strengthen her bad knee. She’s thinking that the exercise is only about fifty times more difficult than it should be. It reminds her of an assignment in sophomore philosophy at college, The Myth of Sisyphus. Each lunge feels like pushing the freakin’ boulder up the hill. Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of frustration because he pissed off the gods. She hasn’t figured out her crime. Yet.

  Then she sees Tony, the gargoyle aide, at the nurses’ desk. He’s pointing her out to a stylish brunette who wears a laminated staff card around her neck. Now there’s a clotheshorse who packs her big chest in a spendy blouse. Cute little hip-length jacket and a fashionable short skirt to show off her legs, which are good.

  Her footware, tasteful but practical cross-trainers, is at odds with the rest of her apparel. In fact, behind the designer labels, she looks like someone who is constantly poised, listening for the starter pistol.

  She has large brown eyes, naturally wavy dark hair, and a creamy complexion. Jesse is reminded of pampered town women who had the effortless knack of looking good in clothes. She probably spends a lot of time shopping, matching drapes and carpets and furniture. No wedding ring, though. Are they talking about me?

  Then Tony walks over, carrying a shopping bag. “How’s it going, Jesse?”

  “Ha toe eee,” she responds with difficulty. He reaches in his pocket and produces the pen that went missing from under her mattress. Uh-oh. Busted.

  “I’ll trade you,” he says. “This pen for what’s in the bag.”

  Jesse cranes her neck and looks into the plastic bag Tony holds open, and an awkward smile crinkles her healing face. After a failed attempt to say “Thank you,” she signals thumbs-up.

  ***

  The next day Janet pulls Jesse’s schedule up on her monitor and confirms that she’s in physical therapy, so she goes up to polytrauma.

  “I’ll be doing the assessment on Captain Kraig, and I’d like to see her room,” she tells the nurse on the station.

  “Jesse’s a rough one,” the nurse says, leading the way to the room.

  “Any weird behavior?”

  “Last night she cocked her fist at the nurse who brought in her meds. Then there’s all the notes. The stuff Tony gave her? She’s been busy.”

  When Janet enters the room, she sees what the nurse means. The wall next to the bed is plastered with yellow Post-It notes scrawled with reminders: Mak bed. Bruss teth. Flos. Showr. Push-ups. Crunges. 2 sirkits.

  The loose-leaf notebook Tony bought sits on the bed table. Janet thumbs through it and finds a page of vocabulary words broken into syllables. Then another page of five-pointed-star doodles. More of the stars, scrawled on the yellow notes, festoon the bathroom doorway like elementary school Christmas decorations. She plucks one of them and puts it in her pocket. One note stuck on the bathroom mirror particularly catches her attention: Gota hlp Marg!!!

  Janet will admit she probably spends a little more than she can afford on clothes at Nordstrom, but that’s where Jesse’s stereotyping of her ends. Sitting in her cluttered apartment, she studies Jesse’s childish star doodle and is more than mildly curious about her prospective new patient, her Captain Star girl.

  As she prepares for bed, she pokes through the books and magazines on her night table, looking for a vial of moisturizing lotion. She opens the table drawer and moves aside a loaded, holstered .40-caliber service pistol. No lotion.

  After she graduated summa cum laude from Carleton on a full academic scholarship—and before she elected to study psychology—Janet was a cop. After three years on the streets of St. Paul, she decided she wasn’t making a difference; she was just recycling the same human refuse through the criminal-justice plumbing.

  She chose to do her internship at the VA because she knows the lousy choices that face people in front-line jobs. She knows that no amount of glib counseling fixes can redirect a bullet fired too soon or too late.

  But some of her old street habits have spilled over into her new career. Like running a trap line. She’s set up contacts with people who work the wards. Not just nurses, but the people who push the brooms and the food carts and bright aides, like Tony.

  Now the suspicious cop brain lurking behind her academic training has a hunch that Tony made a good call—Captain Kraig is more than the sum of the notations entered on her chart. Jesse is fighting against something more than residual concussion, aphasia, and post-traumatic amnesia.

  Janet falls asleep visualizing a padlock on Jesse’s head with a star-shaped keyhole.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Nine in the norning, start of business in her office, Janet holds a little ethical discussion with herself. Okay. I’m not switching hats here and playing copper. Any alert psychologist would have suspicions about this case. This disclaimer notwithstanding, she then spends the morning sifting through Jesse’s chart with renewed interest, like it’s a crime scene. She’s looking for evidence. One notation nags her through lunch. The wild episode with the speech therapist at Reed: Bit her finger and smeared blood on my desk.

  It takes hours of phone tag, but by the end of the day Janet finally gets a call back from Christine Morel, the speech therapist at Walter Reed.

  “Sure,” Morel says, “I remember Captain Kraig. Thought she was going to stab me in the throat with a Sharpie. Tough kid. She actually put a two-hundred-pound orderly back on his heels.”

  “I’ve been reviewing your notes. It doesn’t look like you got very far with her . . .”

  Morel answers quickly. “I’ve never had anybody bleed in my office before. I remember that session very clearly. With every new patient diagnosed with acute-injury speech impairment, you look for some signal—meaningful eye contact, discreet hand movements, other body language. Not that lady. I wrote her name on a tablet and handed her the pen to see what she’d do. She went from frustration to rage to violence in like two seconds.”

  “Could you give me more specifics about the incident with her finger and the blood?”

  �
�Of course. It was weird. She bit right through the tip of her right index finger and started smearing blood all over my desk.”

  “This was after the orderly took the pen away, right?”

  “And after she fought him off.”

  “Is there anything about the blood smear that stands out?”

  “I took a good look at that scribble before I reached for the 409. Sounds crazy, but I got the impression she was trying to draw a five-pointed star. I admit, I was very rattled at the time.”

  “That’s not in your notes. And it sounds like an attempt to communicate, to me.”

  “Not in the notes? I distinctly remember it reminded me of a star symbol a kindergartener would scrawl. Look, sometimes the nurses’ station here cleans up the notes, checks for misspelling and stuff like that. They could have hit the wrong key and lost the last paragraph. It happens. So does this help? I mean, how’s she doing?”

  “She’s doing better,” Janet says, “and thank you much.”

  After a conference with Jesse Kraig’s attending physician, and after a consult with a more sympathetic Dr. Durga Prasad, they agree to sign off on a complete battery of TBI diagnostics. Jesse shuffles off for her third set of X-rays, CAT scan, and MRI. The tests come back with no evidence of residual hemorrhage, hematoma, contusions, brain swelling, or tumor.

  Janet makes her case to Dr. Dennis Halme, the head of her department. “We’re in a gray area, right? All the literature warns about combat trauma evolving into a maze of comorbidity that can blur the diagnostic picture and care plan. She’s a definite candidate of psychotherapy. But for my money, she’s in a drug-induced stupor. I think she’s overmedicated.”

  “The delusional diagnosis came from somewhere, Janet,” Halme says.

  “Well, she did get out of hand at Reed. And she writes tortured notes to herself that suggest she believes her crew chief, a sergeant named Marge Bailey, is still alive,” Janet admits.

  “That’d do it for me.”