The Surgeon: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel: With Bonus Content

and sending them through the Internet. Our words appear onscreen, where we can all see them.”
    “PTSD? I take it that stands for—”
    “Post-traumatic stress disorder. A nice clinical term for what the women in that room are suffering.”
    “What trauma are we talking about?”
    She raised her head and looked straight at him. “Rape.”
    The word seemed to hang between them for a moment, the very sound of it charging the air. One brutal syllable with the impact of a physical blow.
    “And you go there because of Andrew Capra,” he said gently. “What he did to you.”
    Her gaze faltered, dropped away. “Yes,” she whispered. Once again she was looking at her hands. Moore watched her, his anger building over what had happened to Catherine. What Capra had ripped from her soul. He wondered what she was like before the attack. Warmer, friendlier? Or had she always been so insulated from human contact, like a bloom encased in frost?
    She drew herself straighter and forged ahead. “So that’s where I met Elena Ortiz. I didn’t know her real name, of course. I saw only her screen name, Posey Five.”
    “How many women are in this chat room?”
    “It varies from week to week. Some of them drop out. A few new names appear. On any night, there can be anywhere from three to a dozen of us.”
    “How did you learn about it?”
    “From a brochure for rape victims. It’s given out at women’s clinics and hospitals around the city.”
    “So these women in the chat room, they’re all from the Boston area?”
    “Yes.”
    “And Posey Five, was she a regular visitor?”
    “She was there, off and on, over the last two months. She didn’t say much, but I’d see her name on the screen and I knew she was there.”
    “Did she talk about her rape?”
    “No. She just listened. We’d type hellos to her. And she’d acknowledge the greetings. But she wouldn’t talk about herself. It’s as if she was afraid to. Or just too ashamed to say anything.”
    “So you don’t know that she
was
raped.”
    “I know she was.”
    “How?”
    “Because Elena Ortiz was treated in this emergency room.”
    He stared at her. “You found her record?”
    She nodded. “It occurred to me that she might have needed medical treatment after the attack. This is the closest hospital to her address. I checked our hospital computer. It has the name of every patient seen in this E.R. Her name was there.” She stood up. “I’ll show you her record.”
    He followed her out of the call room and back into the E.R. It was a Friday evening, and the casualties were rolling in the door. The TGIF-er, clumsy with booze, clutching an ice bag to his battered face. The impatient teenager who’d lost his race with a yellow light. The Friday night army of the bruised and bloodied, stumbling in from the night. Pilgrim Medical Center was one of the busiest E.R.’s in Boston, and Moore felt as though he was walking through the heart of chaos as he dodged nurses and gurneys and stepped over a fresh splash of blood.
    Catherine led him into the E.R. records room, a closet-sized space with wall-to-wall shelves containing three-ring binders.
    “This is where they temporarily store the enounter forms,” said Catherine. She pulled down the binder labeled:
May 7–May 14
. “Every time a patient is seen in the E.R., a form is generated. It’s usually only a page long, and it contains the doctor’s note, and the treatment instructions.”
    “There’s no chart made up for each patient?”
    “If it’s just a single E.R. visit, then no hospital chart is ever put together. The only record is the encounter form. These eventually get moved to the hospital’s medical records room, where they’re scanned and stored on disk.” She opened the May 7–May 14 binder. “Here it is.”
    He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. The scent of her hair momentarily distracted him, and he had to force himself to focus on the page. The visit was dated May 9, 1:00 A.M. The patient’s name, address, and billing information were typed at the top; the rest of the form was handwritten in ink. Medical shorthand, he thought, as he struggled to decipher the words and could make out only the first paragraph, which had been written by the nurse:
     
    22-year-old Hispanic female, sexually assaulted two hours ago. No allergies, no meds. BP 105/70, P 100, T. 99.
     
    The rest of the page was indecipherable.
    “You’ll have to translate for me,” he said.
    She glanced