At the hospital, Caleb waited patiently for the orderly who had first seen Renee to get a minute to talk to him. Luckily he didn’t have to wait long, since nothing much was going on in the emergency room. Someone was waiting with a sprained ankle, someone else had gotten cut up on a coquina shell and a girl sat in one corner, sneezing.
The orderly was a young man named Rick Diehl, and he seemed happy to talk to Caleb once he had seen his credentials. “I told the cops everything I could think of, which isn’t much,” he admitted.
“You found her—just outside the emergency doors?” Caleb asked.
Rick nodded. “She was just over there,” he said, pointing. “I saw her lying there all crumpled up, and I went running out there. Two of the nurses and the doctor on duty followed me, so we got her inside real quick. There was a lot of blood on her forehead—looked like she’d been whacked with something.”
“Did you hear a car out there before you saw her?” Caleb asked him.
“No, sorry.”
“Are there security cameras out there?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah—but it’s a funny thing. The camera covers the area up to that trash can there. She was left just on the other side of it. Anyway, if there really is a serial killer out there and that’s who attacked her, she’s lucky as hell to be alive.”
Caleb thanked him, and managed to talk to the doctor who had treated Renee, a harried man in his forties named Martin Thayer. Since he was just getting off work, he gave Caleb a few minutes as they walked to his car.
“Lucky girl,” Thayer said, casting a glance Caleb’s way. “What with everything that’s going on around here.” He shook his head. “I saw Winona Hart in the E.R. just a few days before she went missing. Nice girl. Cute. A real flirt, but nice.”
“What was wrong with her?” Caleb asked.
“She had a burn on her hand. She told me it was from incense. But she was with a friend, and they both kept giggling and whispering and looking through this book they had. I think she was playing around with some kind of spell book.”
“You saw the book?” Caleb asked, suddenly excited. “What did it look like? Was it old?”
“No, no, just a paperback. I wasn’t really looking. I just took care of her hand and told her to quit playing with fire. She was silly—she was young. But she was a sweet kid.”
“What about Renee Otten? What was up with her?”
“We checked her alcohol level, that was for damned sure. She came to pretty fast. She was dazed, kind of panicky. Tim Jamison was here in seconds—I swear, it really was just seconds—after we called, and he was pretty brisk with her, mad as all hell that she’d been out running around alone.”
“Do you know if she was on drugs? Maybe opiates, or strange herbs?” Caleb asked.
“We didn’t do extensive drug testing, We were more interested in getting an X-ray of her skull. The cops didn’t ask me for anything else.”
“Jamison was here, and he didn’t ask you to do any drug testing?” Caleb said.
“We still have the blood.” The doctor looked at him. “But I’ll need authorization to do anything with it,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Caleb told him. “I’ll put in a phone call. Your superiors won’t give you an argument.”
“Me? Nope, not me. I’m on my way home,” Doctor Thayer said. But he was already wearing a sinking expression, as if he’d just been dragged off the beach. “All right, I’ll go back in and get things started. I won’t wait for the results, though. They’ll call me, and I’ll call you.”
“Fair enough,” Caleb said.
He left Thayer and put through a call to Adam, bringing him up-to-date and asking him to pull strings and get the tests authorized. He warned Adam that Jamison was behaving strangely, and that he wasn’t Jamison’s favorite person at the moment.
Adam assured him that he would make sure that Caleb didn’t have any trouble with the authorities. “How’s Sarah doing?” Adam asked.
“She’s fine. She’s great,” Caleb said. “That’s right—you two know each other.”
“Whatever you do, let her talk…draw her out. I think that young woman has capabilities we haven’t seen yet,” Adam said. “And to think—I sent you down there on behalf of the Lawsons, and you’ve discovered your past.”
“Yeah, great. There’s supposedly a ghost running around town looking just like me.”
“And you’ve seen this ghost?” Adam asked, amused.
“I’ve…had a dream,” Caleb said stubbornly.
“Dreams are the mind’s way of accessing the levels we don’t use when we’re awake, maybe even a means of communication. Don’t close your mind to anything, Caleb.”
“Trust me, Adam, I never have. Now, hang up on me and get hold of the powers that be—I need to know if that girl was drugged last night or not.”