Samuel cracks a grin.
“Will you turn on those sirens again?”
I grin back. “Roger that.”
Next up is Christine in the Kitchen with the Ice Pack.
We’re not playing “Clue.” She’s administering first aid to her neck wounds.
A pair of purple bruises-what Ceepak would call ligature marks-have blossomed where Mrs. Oppenheimer’s two hands used to be.
“Do you mind if I take a photo?” I say, gesturing toward her neck.
“No.”
I pull out a small digital camera.
“Can you hold your chin up a little?” I say.
Christine does.
I snap some very unflattering photos of her bloated and bruised neck.
“So, what happened?”
“We had … a disagreement.” Her voice sounds like she spent the night screaming at a Bon Jovi concert.
“About what?”
“Some issues. So, I tried to defuse the situation by walking out of the room. That’s when she attacked me.”
I don’t react to that. “So, you live here? Take care of Samuel?”
“Yes. Part-time. He needs help with his G-I tube. And seizures. I’m basically on call all night long. Sleep in the guest room closest to Samuel’s bedroom with a baby monitor. On weekends I clean the house and do the laundry. Stuff like that.”
“You still do weekdays at Mainland Medical?”
Mainland Medical is the hospital on the far side of the causeway that operates our Regional Trauma Center. It’s where the Medevac helicopter took Katie Landry when a sniper who was gunning for me shot her instead. Christine was one of Katie’s emergency room nurses.
“No,” says Christine, kind of softly. “I left Mainland a while ago.”
“Really? What happened?”