Point Blank

“Don’t worry about it. Maybe you’ve got something in your jeans pockets. They can check at the hospital. I don’t want to move you around. Tomorrow I’ll check the woods for a purse.”
    “This is nuts,” she said, and he saw her wiggling beneath the afghans. She was obviously searching her jeans herself. Then she lifted her hand and checked the jacket herself. “I can’t find anything. That doesn’t make any sense. Where’s my cell phone? Did I have a purse? No, that’s not likely. I never take a purse.
    ”
    He waited patiently.
    “Never.”
    “But you know you had a cell phone?”
    “Yes. Oh dear, I think so.” She started humming.
    Rob said, “Why are you humming?”
    “I don’t like to curse so I hum when I’m unhappy about something.”
    “That’s cool,” said Rafe, who was standing behind the sofa, looking down at her.
    “That’s my other son, Rafer. Okay, things are coming back. Don’t push it. There’s always an explanation for everything.”
    “What you just said—that sounded really familiar, like I say that to people.”
    The paramedics followed Rob into the living room. Ten minutes later, Dix and the woman were in the ambulance headed to Loudoun County Community Hospital, some twelve miles away. It was snowing really hard, so it took a good thirty minutes to get there. She was pale and her eyes looked glassy. He held her hand. She wasn’t wearing any rings, only a no-nonsense multifunctional black watch. The emergency room wasn’t a zoo yet, but everyone was preparing for the worst. Dix sat himself in the nearly empty waiting room after they had wheeled her away, and prepared to read his way through a National Geographic magazine dated 1997.
    He heard her cry out. He rose automatically, took a step toward the curtained-off cubicle.
    “Sheriff, we need to do some paperwork here.”
    He did his best, but since he had no clue who she was or what her medical history was, there were mostly blank lines left on the forms after her name, Jane Doe.
    Dix pulled out his cell and called Emory Cox for a status report. “This is weird, Sheriff, we’ve only had one call. It was a wrong number if you can believe that.”
    “No, I don’t believe that. It was probably an abuse call, and chances are the wife will show up tomorrow with a broken nose and bruises everywhere. We’ll see.”
    “So far everyone seems to be staying in tonight, not being stupid.”
    “Let’s hope our luck holds up, Emory. I’m at the hospital. I do have something of a situation here.” He detailed to Emory how he’d found the woman, knowing of course that Amalee had probably already told half the people in town all about it. “I want you to send two of our disaster deputies—Claus and B.B. Claus can drive his four-wheeler out to my property. They need to find the woman’s car—No, I don’t know what kind of car she was driving because, as I said, she can’t seem to remember anything right now. I want you to check around the county for any reports of missing young women. If she can’t tell us who she is by tomorrow morning, we’ll run her fingerprints through IAFIS; maybe we’ll get lucky. Tomorrow, if necessary, you can take a photo of her, and we’ll send it out. Check all the local B-and-Bs, hotels, and motels within a fifteen-mile radius of Maestro. All I can say is that she’s in her mid-thirties, dark hair, light complexion, really green eyes. She’s on the lean side, a runner maybe. Her arms and legs felt strong when I checked her for broken bones. She’s tall, maybe five-foot-nine, -ten. Of course, the car would tell us everything we need to know. Her ID’s probably in there, or we can identify her from the plates, so emphasize to Claus and B.B. that the car’s the priority.”
    Thirty minutes later, Dr. Mason Crocker came over to him in the waiting room. “She seems to be all right, Sheriff, at least physically. The CT scan was clear. There is no evidence of any anatomic injury other than that head wound. She may have suffered a concussion, but I think she’s also got some drugs on board. Her eyes don’t seem right to me; they’re dilated and glassy. She’s restless and her heart rate is up. I can’t quite place it—it’s not one of the usual drug effects we see. We’ve sent off a toxicology screen on her.”
    “Do you think she was drugged? Poisoned?”
    Dr. Crocker shrugged. “I wouldn’t discount it. She seems to be coming out of it. We’ll need to keep her for a