The other one got down on the ground and put two fingers on the side of Karly Vickers’s bruised throat.

“Oh my God,” he said. “I think she might have a pulse.”

“No way.”

“Way. Get down here!”

Jane stepped back, shaking uncontrollably as she watched the two men go to work.

“What the hell?!”

She turned to see Cal Dixon, his face a mask of shock and horror as he ran to her. Somehow she managed not to faint until he was close enough to catch her.

Chapter 55

55

Mendez abandoned his car at the curb in a red zone and ran into the ER at Mercy General Hospital. An ambulance had delivered Karly Vickers ahead of him. There was a chance she might be alive.

He held his badge up to the staff, not listening to them and not speaking.

It was plain where the action was. Half a dozen people in surgical scrubs swarmed around the bloody, filthy, naked woman on the table in the first exam room. The doctor in charge was shouting orders like a field general. Hang this, push that, get labs stat. The girl had been hooked up to an array of beeping, buzzing machines. She had tubes and wires coming and going. One person stood squeezing the big blue ball of a ventilator bag, sending air into her lungs via the hole that had been cut in her throat. The floor of the room was awash with debris—bloody gauze, discarded packaging, tubing, syringes.

“She’s in V-fib!”

“Paddles! Charge! Clear!”

BAM! Her body jumped on the table.

“Charge! Clear!”

BAM!

The process was repeated again and again with the staff swearing and begging in between jolts.

“Come on, damn it!”

“Hang on, Karly!”

BAM!

“We’ve got a sinus rhythm!”

“All right, Karly, don’t die on us now!” the doctor shouted. “I’ve got money riding on you. Stats!”

Pulse. Blood pressure. Respiration. Numbers all too low.

“We need another liter of ringers, wide-open!”

Mendez turned to one of the EMTs standing at the nurses’ station, scribbling on paperwork.

“Is she going to make it?”

“I doubt it,” the guy said. “But she shouldn’t have been alive when we picked her up, either. Guess it depends on whether or not she wants to fight for it.”

Not an easy answer to that, Mendez thought. He had yet to get a close look at Karly Vickers, but if their killer had followed form, she had been blinded and her eardrums destroyed. She would have multiple stab wounds. She would have been sexually tortured and mutilated. Would she want to live? He hoped so. At least long enough to tell them who killed her.

Dixon was in the next exam room with Jane Thomas, who sat on the exam table wrapped in a blanket and shaking like a seizure victim. If she had been any paler she would have become invisible.