“But you could venture a guess.”
Cruz shrugged. “My guess is no—the trauma just doesn’t appear to me to be that severe.”
“Even though it rendered her unconscious?”
“People get knocked out all the time and they don’t lose their memory,” Cruz pointed out. “Amnesia is very rare.”
Joe tried hard not to let his frustration show in his tone, but it wasn’t easy. He wanted answers—needed them in order to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but they just weren’t there.
“Serious now,” Joe said, himself serious. “What do you think has caused it?”
Cruz’s expression changed, all signs of humor gone now. “It’s really hard to say,” he confessed. “But the fact that the woman has not only forgotten what happened to her, she’s forgotten everything else—her name, where she comes from—makes me think whatever it was that happened was so traumatic to her, she’s blocked everything out.”
“So you think she doesn’t want to remember?”
“Not that she doesn’t want to remember. More like she can’t bring herself to,” he explained. “I think whatever happened—whether it was actually something that happened to her or something she witnessed, something she participated in—it was so distressing, so disturbing her mind simply won’t let her remember it.” Cruz sat up, leaning his elbows on the cluttered desktop. “Now you tell me. What would you think happened to the lady?”
Joe flipped his tablet closed and tossed it down on to the desk atop the medical chart. Joe and Cruz had been friends a long time, long enough that Joe felt comfortable sharing ideas and knowing they would go no further.
“Honestly? It beats the hell out of me.” Slipping his pencil into the pocket of his shirt, he walked to a chair in front of Cruz’s desk and slowly lowered himself into it. “I’m just guessing at this point, trying not to overlook anything—no matter how off the wall it may sound.”
“Sort of going on the theory that if you don’t have anything to go on,” Cruz concluded, “then anything’s possible?”
“Something like that,” Joe admitted. “At this point I don’t know if she’s the victim or the perpetrator, if I should be checking out the missing persons lists or the wanted posters, if a crime has been committed or if an accident has happened. Maybe she just ran out of gasoline, or lost control of her car and something snapped, making her forget everything.” He rolled his shoulders back, easing hard, tense muscles. “Maybe she fell, or slid down a mountain—hell! She could’ve dropped from the sky—from a UFO for all the evidence there is,” he said, stifling a yawn and giving his scratchy eyes a rub. “There isn’t a lot out there to go on to point me in any one direction, so I’m running around in circles. When I was out there this morning—”
“This morning?” Cruz exclaimed, cutting him off. “Geez, man, it isn’t even noon yet. You’ve been out there and back already?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Joe said, not wanting to think of the long hours he’d spent twisting and turning before striking out on the highway just before dawn. “Besides, I wanted to catch first light, but I could have slept in for all the good it did. I drove a five-mile circle from where I found her—I even walked a good mile of it on foot and came up with nothing.” He leaned forward, pointing his finger to emphasize the point. “Zilch, zip, nada! Not a tire track, a skid mark or a footprint. There was no sign of wreckage, no nothing.”
Frustrated, he sank back in the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him and tilting his cowboy hat back on his forehead with the tip of his thumb. “Granted, that was one hell of a rainstorm last night and it’s not like I went out there expecting to find a big sign pointing me in the right direction, but damn, if there’d been an accident or she’d broken down or had a flat tire, there was no sign of it—and no car.”
“Maybe she just had a fight with her boyfriend?” Cruz said, snapping his fingers as the idea came to him. “She got out of the car and he drove off, left her there and by the time he got back, she was gone!”
“Possibly,” Joe nodded, arching a brow. “But it doesn’t explain the head injury.”
Cruz sank back. “Oh, yeah.”
“And it’s not likely she gave herself a club on the head.”
“Not very.”
“Besides, why hasn’t the guy reported her missing then?”
“Good point,” Cruz acquiesced good-naturedly. “What about a robbery then? She could have been accosted, robbed—that would explain her injury, maybe even the memory loss.”
“I thought of that—or a carjacking,” Joe said, yawning again. “At least, that would be my bet at this point. But we’re trying not to overlook anything—grand theft auto, kidnapping, missing persons but as of about thirty minutes ago, there have been no stolen vehicles reported and no one has reported her missing. So until that happens, or we find a car or some other piece of evidence, we wait.”
“Well one thing’s for certain,” Cruz pointed out. “She sure as hell didn’t walk out there—at least not in the shoes she was wearing. They may have been water soaked, but they were practically new.”
“So that means somebody had to have taken her out there and purposely left her,” Joe concluded, folding his arms across his chest. The thought had his frown deepening.
“Left her for dead,” Cruz added quietly.
The sober thought rendered them both quiet for a moment. Joe remembered the terror he had seen in her eyes. It took more than an accident to put that kind of fear in a person’s eyes.
“I guess that means you’re looking at an attempted murder,” Cruz stated.
Joe glanced up. Having someone trying to kill you would have you looking pretty damn scared. “Sorta looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Signs seem to be there,” Cruz continued. “And it would explain the head injury, the lack of any evidence, any clues.”
“Somebody took her out there,” Joe said in a quiet voice, closing his eyes and seeing her panicked face in the darkness. “Somebody who wanted her dead.”
“Have you been thoroughly poked and prodded?”
Rain looked up at the sound of Carrie’s voice and smiled. The portly nurse had been nowhere in sight when she’d returned to her room earlier after an exhausting series of tests and an examination by the doctor.
“Thoroughly,” she said, pushing away her empty lunch tray. She wasn’t sure about the rest of her, but her appetite certainly appeared to be healthy.
“Good,” Carrie said, pushing her solid frame through the open doorway and floating quietly across the worn linoleum floor. “We don’t feel people are doing their jobs around here unless they make our patients feel like pincushions.”
Rain held out her arm, looking down at the row of bandages left from the various blood samples that had been drawn. “Then I think it’s safe to say you’ve got hardworking people on your staff.”
“And your examination with Dr. Martinez? That went okay?”
Rain thought of the tall, good-looking doctor and his kind, compassionate nature. “Yeah, it went all right. He took a lot of time, explained a lot of the things to me about my head injury and the memory loss. And he talked about possible prognosis and told me not to try to force myself to remember, that if things were going to come back, they’d come back in their own time.”
“That’s true. You can’t push these kinds of things.”
“But