Stolen Prey

that: she just saw a killer coming for her, and she swung the club in a long arc. Albitis either sensed the motion or heard it, cocked her head upward, and caught the face of the Big Bertha on her forehead.
    Crunch.
    It sounded bad. It sounded like somebody had broken a board over his knee.
    Albitis stiffened, looked right at Sanderson with blank eyes, and then toppled and fell down the stairs in three stages. She went
thumpa-thump
, and stopped, then
thumpa-thumpa-thump
, and stopped a couple of steps from the bottom, then turned one last time,
thumpa-thump
, and hit the floor at the bottom.
    Sanderson cried, “Oh, my God, Edie, are you hurt?”
    She ran down the stairs and found Albitis in a heap; still breathing, her eyes still open, and blank as a sheet of paper. There was no blood, but there was a major dent where the crown of her head met her forehead.
    “Oh, my God,” Sanderson cried again. She tried to get Albitis to sit upright, but Albitis was as loose as a bag of laundry.
    Sanderson ran to the front door and looked out, and then to the back door and looked out, and then to the garage. She frantically threw the boxes of gold onto the garage floor, then half-carried, half-dragged Albitis to the car and across the backseat.
    “Are you all right?” she sobbed.
    No answer.
    She ran back into the house, got Albitis’s shoulder bag, and threw it on the other woman’s body.
    As she backed out of the garage, she saw the boxes of gold lying on the garage floor and got out and ran back up the driveway, pulled the door down, making sure it latched. She was five minutes from Regions Hospital. She didn’t dare take Albitis all the way in because there would be questions. Instead, she drove around on side streets until she found a place where she couldn’t easily be seen, dragged Albitis out of the car, and propped her against a tree.
    She got Albitis’s bag and propped it against her side: What’s a woman without her bag? Albitis was still as loose as death, but she wasn’t dead: she was now snoring. As Sanderson turned away from the body, she saw Albitis’s cell phone on the ground, where it had fallen out of a pocket. She picked it up, looked at it, and thought, Keys. She went back to Albitis’s bag and got the car keys. With the keys in her pocket, she drove out to the end of the street and called 911.
    The 911 dispatcher asked, “Is this an emergency?”
    A S T. P AUL COP called Lucas through the BCA switchboard.
    “Uh, you guys had that pickup request on an Edie Albitis?”
    “Yeah! You got her?”
    “Well, sort of…”
    A LBITIS WAS being prepped for surgery when Lucas arrived at the emergency room. He talked briefly to a neurosurgeon who said that Albitis had not regained consciousness since she’d arrived, and had a significant depressive fracture of the frontal bone.
    “The imaging shows we’ve got significant epidural bleeding under the impact site, and there appears to be some rebound bleeding on the opposite side of her head,” he said. “We need to relieve the pressure from the bleeding as quickly as we can, so we’re going in right now. She was lucky in that whatever hit her didn’t break the skin, so the wound is closed.”
    “She gonna make it?” Lucas asked.
    The surgeon shrugged. “I’d say she should, but I don’t know how bad she’s been scrambled. She took a terrific whack with something. Something smooth, no edges to rip the skin. I was almost thinking it might be something like a fender, but the radius of a fender is too large. This was a small-radius impact, and nearly symmetrical. It’s like somebody whacked her with one of those iron balls they use in the shot put.”
    “An iron ball?”
    “Just an example,” the doc said. “But like that. I’d say small radius, metal, smooth, moving fast. The frontal bone is tough. This took a lot of energy.”
    A S T . P AUL COP was in the waiting room, one of the first responders, and he described the scene where they picked her up. “Got a nine-one-one call, and we were close and went over there and found her. Her purse was there, but nothing else.”
    There was no sign of an accident, no glass in the street. She was propped up against a tree, completely out of it, when the cops arrived. “We could see something was wrong with her head, so we called for an ambulance. Talked to some of the neighbors, but nobody had seen anything. Where she was … wasn’t like concealed, or anything, she was right out in the open, but