The fear on their faces as they saw the car bearing down on them made her gasp as she swerved again. If a lamppost hadn’t suddenly materialized in front of her, she could have gotten away. But she plowed into it and came to a rocking stop.
The old Honda she was driving didn’t have an air bag. The seat belt kept her from hitting the windshield, but she was stunned as she sat behind the wheel.
She knew she had to escape on foot, but she was moving slowly now. Before she could get out of the car, one of the men from the Camaro appeared at her window.
“Got ya, bitch.”
Yanking open the car door, he dragged her out, hitting her head on the car frame as he hurled her to the sidewalk. The blow stunned her, and then everything went black.
* * *
DR. MATTHEW DELANO’S first stop on his morning rounds was the computer at the nurses’ station, where he scanned for urgent cases and noted which patients had been discharged—or had passed away—since his last visit to the internal-medicine floor.
No deaths. He always counted that as a good sign. This morning most of the patients on the general-medicine floor were in for routine problems—except for one woman whom the cops had named Jane Doe because she didn’t remember who she was.
As he read the notes from the E.R., he gathered that the whole situation with her was odd. For starters, she hadn’t been carrying any identification. And she’d been driving an old car registered to a Susan Swinton.
But when a patrol officer had knocked on Swinton’s door late in the afternoon yesterday, nobody had been home, and the neighbors had said the woman was on an extended trip out of the country. Which left the authorities with no clue as to the identity of the mystery woman in room twenty-two.
Matt noted the irony of the room number. As in Catch-22, the novel by Joseph Heller. The term had come to mean a paradoxical situation in which a person is trapped by conflicting circumstances beyond his control.
Dr. Delano skimmed the chart. The woman, who was apparently in her late twenties, had no physical injuries, except for a bump on the head. The MRI showed she’d had a mild concussion, but that was resolving itself. The main problem was her missing memory—leading to her unknown identity.
Her trouble intrigued him. But although he was curious to see what she looked like, he made his way methodically down the hall, checking on patients on a first-come-first-served basis. A woman with COPD. A man with a bladder infection he couldn’t shake. Another man with advanced Parkinson’s disease.
They were all routine cases for Dr. Delano since spending time in a dangerous African war zone a couple months ago and taking this interim job in Baltimore, where at least he could feel useful.
He hadn’t really wanted to return to the States—he was more comfortable in a foreign country than at home. Here he had to do normal stuff when he wasn’t working, and normal stuff was never his first choice.
He liked the rough-and-tumble life of doctoring in a war zone and the chance to help people in desperate need of medical attention. But now the rebels were systematically shooting any outsiders who were dumb enough to stay in their country and try to help the people. Since Matt wasn’t suicidal, he was back in Baltimore, working at Memorial Hospital while he figured out the best way to serve humanity.
He made a soft snorting sound as he walked down the hall, thinking that was a lofty way to put it, especially for a man who felt disconnected from people. But he’d become an expert at faking it. In fact, he was often praised for his excellent bedside manner.
He stopped at the door to room twenty-two, feeling a sense of anticipation and at the same time reluctance. Shaking that off, he raised his hand and knocked.
“Come in,” a feminine voice called.
When he stepped into the room, the woman in the bed zeroed in on him, her face anxious. He stopped short, studying her from where he stood eight feet away.
She wore no makeup and the standard hospital gown. Her short dark hair was tousled, and she had a nasty bruise on her forehead, but despite her disarray, he found her very appealing, from her large blue eyes to her well-shaped lips and the small, slightly upturned nose.
She looked to be in her late twenties as her chart had estimated. About his own age, he judged. She sat forward, fixing her gaze on him with a kind of unnerving desperation.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Dr. Delano.”
“I’d say pleased to meet you, if I knew how to introduce myself,” she answered.
“I take it you’re still having memory problems?”
“Unfortunately. I don’t know who I am or what happened to me.”
“It says in your chart that you were in a one-car accident.”
“They told me that part. Apparently I hit a light pole. It’s the rest of it that’s a mystery.” She gave her arm a little flap of exasperation. “I don’t know why I didn’t have a purse. The cops said there was a crowd around me, and a man had pulled me out of the car. The best I can figure is that he took the purse and disappeared.” She dragged in a breath and let it out. “I don’t even know if the man is somebody I know—or just a random thief taking advantage of a woman who had an accident. Either way, I don’t like it. He left me in a heck of a fix.”
“I understand,” Matt answered, keying in on her fears. Some pretty scary things had happened to him in his overseas travels. In one African country, he’d been threatened with having his arms cut off—or worse—until he’d volunteered to remove some bullets from a bunch of rebels.
He’d been shot at too many times to count. And he’d been on a plane that had made an almost-crash landing on a dirt runway of a little airport out in the middle of nowhere. Taking all that into consideration, he still wouldn’t like to be in this woman’s shoes. She had no money. No memory. Nowhere to stay when she got out of the hospital.
She must have seen his reaction.
“Sorry to be such a bother.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.”
“Then what?”
“I was feeling sorry for you, if you must know.”
“Right. I’m trying to keep from having a panic attack.”
He tipped his head to the side. “You know what that means—panic attack?”
“Yes. You get shaky. Your heart starts to pound.” She laughed. “And you feel like you’re going to die.”
“You remember details like that but not who you are?”
“I guess that must be true.”
“Have you ever had one?”
That stopped her. “Either I have or I’ve read about it.”
“Is the picture of the syndrome vivid in your mind?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s probably more than just reading about the subject. Either you had one or you know someone who has.”
Her gaze turned inward, and he knew she was trying to remember which it was.
“Your chart says you’re doing okay physically. Let’s have a look at you.”
She sighed. “Okay.”
“Does anything hurt?”
“The lump on my head is still painful—but tolerable.”
“Good.”
“And I’m kind of stiff—from the impact.”
“Understandable. Let’s check