Atonement (The Protectors #6)(53)

I nodded and followed Ronan up the stairs of a small, remote house that was located on several acres about thirty miles east of Seattle. The house itself was a run-down piece of shit, but the property was appealing since you could see anyone coming from a ways off and there weren't any immediate neighbors.

The early February air was chilly and damp around us as we each examined our surroundings. There were no vehicles except ours and all the curtains on the house were drawn. I didn't ask what we were doing there because Ronan would tell me when he was good and ready.

Ronan's knock on the front door went unanswered. Since I'd doubted he'd brought me all the way out here just to visit with whoever lived in the dump, I was about to go back to my truck to get my tools to pick the lock when Ronan reached down and turned the knob. I stiffened when it turned. I automatically reached for my gun at the same time Ronan did. He gave me a slight nod and then pushed the door open.

To say the place was a mess was an understatement. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness as I carefully stepped over an overturned side table near the door. Ronan motioned to me and I quickly followed his silent order to clear the house. Debris littered the floor of each room so it took longer than I would have liked to sweep the two rooms near the back of the house while Ronan checked the main living spaces. By the time I met him back in the living room, he was drawing a curtain back to let in some light since the power didn't appear to be working.



       
         
       
        

Even if the place hadn't been trashed, calling it a dump would have been kind. The furniture was decades old, the thick carpet beneath my feet actually turned out to be a shag carpet that was a disgusting shade of yellow and the paneled wood walls made the already dreary space darker and even more uninviting, which I wouldn't have thought was even possible. Junk was all over the floor, but it didn't look like actual garbage. More like a mix of clothes, papers and the remnants of some of the cheap wood furniture that had probably once served as a coffee table or set of end tables. The couch was shredded as was the single armchair in the room. The small eating area outside the kitchen had an overturned table and three broken chairs strewn all over the floor. It looked a lot like someone had broken the chairs over the table. I also saw dents in the wall and guessed whoever had been smashing the chairs on the table also had taken their aggression out on the walls. There were a few cheap motel style pictures on the floor, their glass overlays shattered.

Ronan and I moved to the kitchen to examine the damage there. Unlike the living room, the stained linoleum floor was covered in garbage and food that had been removed from the open refrigerator. The freezer was open and its contents empty, but I could see a layer of ice still encasing the small space.

Whoever had trashed the place had done it recently  –  within the last 24 hours at the most, more likely twelve.

"Ronan," I said as I motioned to the edge of one of the countertops.

Blood.

The light in the kitchen was poor so we each pulled our phones out and used the flashlights to take a closer look. There was more blood splattered on the backsplash above the sink and several droplets in the sink itself.

I followed Ronan to the two bedrooms. One actually looked untouched, but there was nothing interesting about the room itself. A twin bed with a basic blanket and single pillow and a three drawer dresser that looked like it was at least thirty years old. Nothing more. No pictures on the walls, no clothes in the closet. The second bedroom was the exact opposite. Whoever had destroyed it had been in a rage. The mattress from the full bed was overturned and shredded on both sides. An endless assortment of clothes covered much of the floor, ripped to pieces along with what looked like the remnants of a torn duffle bag.

Men's clothes.

Ronan leaned down and picked up a light blue piece of fabric that I realized had once been a shirt. But not an ordinary shirt  –  it was the top from a set of scrubs.

Ronan let out a deep breath.

We continued our examination of the room and found more sprays of blood near the door along with a larger pool of blood by the closet. Blood was also smeared on the side of the dresser in the room.

The clear evidence of a violent encounter had my insides drawing up tight. How many times had I seen this same scene? How many times had I stood just like I was now  –  completely and utterly helpless to do anything about it. 

"Ronan," I murmured as my eyes fell on something near the bed. I ignored the blood stains on the mattress and stepped through the debris and grabbed a piece of clothing to pick up the frying pan that had caught my eye. Except it was no ordinary frying pan … it was a heavy cast iron skillet and there was dried blood along one edge of it.

Ronan studied it for a moment and frowned. "Let's talk outside," he said. I put the pan back down as we left the room. Ronan stopped in the living room long enough to close the curtain. We needed to leave the place exactly as we'd found it. On the way out the door, he used the edge of his jacket to wipe his prints from the doorknob.

Ronan's phone rang before he could say anything as we started walking towards our cars. He listened for a few moments before saying, "Send the location to Cain's phone."

I tensed even as a flurry of excitement went through me. It had been a while since I'd seen any kind of real action on the job. The last time had been when I'd gone with Memphis to rough up some guys who'd threatened one of his lovers. But it had been Memphis's show, so watching was pretty much all I'd gotten to do.

Ronan hung up the phone and tucked it into his pocket. His eyes settled on me. "You know I started back at the hospital a couple weeks ago, right?"

I nodded. I'd met Ronan Grisham a few years earlier when he'd offered me a role in his underground vigilante organization. He'd been heading the group at that time, but his recent marriage to a young man he'd known for years had had him rethinking his position as leader and he'd ultimately decided to return to his roots as a trauma surgeon. The newly minted family man who, along with his husband, had taken in three foster kids two months earlier had gone legit, though he still continued to finance the group. He'd handed the reins of the day to day operations over to Memphis.

"I was doing a shift in the ER night before last," Ronan began. "There'd been a fifteen car pile-up on the freeway that night and we were jammed. All hands on deck kind of thing. One of the interns sent a patient to radiology for a scan without doing a proper exam. The patient ended up going into respiratory failure before they could even get him on the elevator."

"Okay," I said, though I had no clue why he was telling me all of this.

"The guy transporting him called a code and got him back to the ER. The intern who'd seen the patient panicked when he couldn't tube the guy."

At what I suspected was my confused look, Ronan clarified, "He couldn't get a tube down the guy's throat to help him breathe."

I nodded.

"He needed to do a tracheostomy. That's where you cut an incision into the windpipe and insert the tube that way."

"Okay."

"The intern froze. The nurse who was with him went to find another doctor, but we had three other codes going on at the time. There wasn't anyone to do it." Ronan paused. "By the time I got there after getting my own patient stabilized, the tracheostomy had been done and they'd gotten the guy's vitals stable again. Problem was, it wasn't the intern who performed the procedure." Ronan held my gaze for a moment. "The nurse told me it was the transporter who did it."

It took me a moment to understand what Ronan was saying. A transporter's job was to move patients back and forth between departments - no way in hell that person would have been qualified to perform that kind of medical procedure.

"The transporter  –  his name was Allen  –  took off after they got the patient back. I found him in the locker room getting his stuff out of his locker. He tried to deny what he'd done...then he started apologizing. He began jamming his stuff into his bag and then he was gone. I couldn't leave the ER to follow him … "



       
         
       
        

I nodded. "This is where he lives," I said as I motioned to the house.

Ronan nodded. "I got his address from the hospital's employment records."

I knew what that meant and I was certain he hadn't just waltzed into that department and simply asked for them.

"My plan was just to talk to him yesterday when he was scheduled to work again, but he didn't show up for that shift or this morning's. So I figured I'd come here to check it out. Only a qualified medical professional can do that kind of procedure, and from the way he did it, I could tell it wasn't the first time he'd done it."

"So why would someone like that be masquerading as a transporter," I observed.

"I thought maybe he'd had a pulled medical license or something, but there's no record of him having had a medical license in any state under the name he gave HR."

"You think he used a fake name?" I asked.