Cut and Run(28)

“No, I’ve got this. See you in the suite in thirty minutes.”

After she changed and quickly leafed through the reports and messages, Faith met Nancy in the autopsy suite. Neither spoke as they performed the grim but necessary task of conducting the autopsy.

After she closed up his chest and pulled the sheet back over his face, she spoke to the bereaved family, answering their questions and listening as they cried and struggled to wrap their brains around the tragedy.

By the time Faith moved behind her desk, she was bone weary. Rolling her head from side to side, she released the tension in her neck. She wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting there like that when she heard the knock on her door.

Mitchell Hayden stood in her doorway. “You all right?”

“Sure. Always. This is a surprise.” Faith rose.

He entered her office and carefully shut the door. “I need to talk to you.”

She remained behind the desk. “Now I’m getting worried. First you call last night, and then you show up to talk?”

He walked up to the other side of her desk. “Remember the hit-and-run last night?”

She leaned on the desk, knowing she might have been tempted to lean into him had it not been there. “Did the victim die?” Her breath caught in her throat, and she thought if a heart could actually pause, hers did. “Are you sending her to me?”

“She’s still alive. She just got out of surgery an hour ago, but she’s in rough shape.”

An odd stillness settled around her, and her voice seemed to echo from far away. “Why’re you telling me this?”

He fished his phone from his back pocket and selected a picture. “I snapped a picture of her identification badge, as well as of her driver’s license. I’d like you to have a look.”

“All right.” She accepted the phone, studying his face as if somehow this mystery, which was now really scaring her, could be solved with one of his weighted glances or frowns.

When she could get no read from his expression, she studied the picture. She enlarged the image with her fingers and studied the eyes, nose, and quirky half smile that were all familiar. The hair was different, and she was wearing a necklace Faith had never seen. It was her, and yet it wasn’t.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Neither do I. When I saw her identification, I thought someone had figured out we were sleeping together and was playing a sick joke on me.”

Faith could do nothing but shake her head.

“But it wasn’t you,” he said. “Her badge says her name is Macy Crow.”

“Macy Crow. I received a voicemail from her. This is Jack Crow’s daughter?”

“The same.”

She swiped to the next picture, which was of a Commonwealth of Virginia driver’s license. The black-and-white image was no less unsettling than the color version.

“Are you adopted?” he asked.

She traced the shape of the face that was hers. “I am.”

“How long have you known?” he asked.

“Always. But it’s not the kind of thing that comes up in everyday conversation. My parents didn’t like to talk about it.”

Hayden shifted slightly and gripped the brim of his hat tighter. “Do you have any details about your adoption?”

“No. I contacted PJ Slater recently about it. I thought he might find something in the files. As a matter of fact, he called me just this morning and gave me the name Josie Jones as a possible birth mother.”

“Do you have any adoption records? An original birth certificate?”

“None.” Her head was spinning, and she was just trying to keep calm and find a rational explanation. “Do you think I have a twin?”

“A DNA test will confirm it.”

Somewhere deep inside her, missing puzzle pieces snapped into place. “Where is Macy Crow?”

“ICU at Midtown.”

She removed her purse from her bottom drawer, took off her lab coat, and didn’t bother to change out of scrubs. “I want to see her, now.”

“I’ll take you.”

“That’s not necessary. I can drive myself.” That was a lie. Her head was whirling, and she could barely focus as she fumbled through the keys on her ring.

“No, Faith. I’ll drive. No arguing.”

It was too hard to fight common sense right now. “Let me tell my office I’m leaving.”

“Sure.”

Later, she would think back on this moment, and she wouldn’t remember speaking to Nancy about clearing her schedule, getting into Hayden’s car, or driving to the hospital. Her first memories would begin with the hospital’s fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the rattle of a cart in critical care in the neuroscience unit as she and Hayden stepped off the elevator. Hayden showed his badge to the nurse, and they learned Macy Crow was in room 212.

Down another hallway, he punched the button for the ICU doors, and they entered another section, where patients had larger rooms to accommodate more equipment and staff.

The beep of a monitor had her pausing at the curtain drawn in front of one of the doors.

“Ready?” Hayden asked.

She wasn’t ready for any of this. “Yes.”

He pushed aside the curtain into Macy Crow’s room. Her bed was positioned in the center and surrounded by machines. Her right leg was in traction, and there were pins in her thigh. Her arm was set in a cast, and her head was heavily wrapped in white gauze. Bruises and swelling made her face unrecognizable.