SWNOVELS Chapter Twenty-one
Pushing away from the wall when the elevator finally came to a stop on the tenth floor, he walked off of the elevator and stepped into hell. Eyes widening as he stared around him, spying janitors cleaning up a mess farther on down the hall and men removing the doors on the cage. On the other side, he watched as patients ran in one direction and the next, jumping around as if they had completely lost their minds. No pun intended. The tenth floor was in total chaos and the staff was doing their best to get everyone calmed down and in their rooms, but didn't look to be doing too good of a job in that regard.
He approached the cage. "What happened here?"
A guard whipped around on him. "Who are you?"
"It's okay," Scott was quick to assure the man, holding up a hand in a show of surrender, noticing the guard seemed to be extra jumpy this evening. It didn't bode too well. Reaching a hand underneath his jacket, nice and slow so he didn't spook a response out of him, he grabbed his wallet and flipped out his badge. "I'm a detective with the department. Dr. Wenchell called me."
He stepped inside. "Go on in."
Walking through the door once the man had given him permission, his brows furrowed as he saw the guard on the other side, sporting a bandage. Continuing on through the other side, a sense of trepidation settled in the pit of his stomach, having a bad feeling about what was going on. It was apparent by the damage to the place something had happened prior to his arrival and Scott couldn't shake the feeling it had something to do with his presence there. Whatever had put the clinic in the dire straights it'd been placed in tonight, it was why he'd been called out on urgent matters, because he had to do with his Jane Doe.
Several minutes later, weaving through the chaotic patients running amuck in the halls, he approached the counter of the nurse's desk. Scott smiled down at the frazzled nurse. "Dr. Wenchell called me." "He's in the conference room," she said.
Silently thanking the woman for her helpful assistance, waving her back when she thought to show him, knowing precisely where he needed to go. Having been there quite frequently during his visits to the hospital, no less than twice a week to talk to her, Scott started moving in that direction. On this side of the hospital, it was a lot calmer, most of the patients inside their rooms for the night, but the upheaval was still plenty obvious.
Stepping through the doors of the conference room a couple of minutes later, doors immediately swinging closed behind him, he headed to the table. Coming to a stop at one end, Scott glanced around the table, spying Dr. Wenchell on the opposite side, then his nurse sat off to the side. "Does anyone mind telling me what I'm doing here?"
"Your Jane Doe," Wenchell hissed.
He groaned. "What did she do?"
"She escaped."
Scott's head snapped up at that. "What do you mean she escaped? How is that even possible? I thought you told me this was the most secure hospital and that no one could escape."
"And no one can," the doctor was quick to defend his word, rubbing at the side of his head, obviously finding the situation just as stressful and nerve-wracking as him. "The floor is on complete lockdown. All entrances have magnetic locks, heavily guarded by security and need a key card and code to get through. We're on the tenth floor and even if a patient happens to get to the main floor, you need an ID check before you're even allowed to get out the front door. No one has escaped this hospital in ninety years."
Until her.
Ranking hands
Dropping down in an available chair at the table and raking his fingers through his hair in frustration, just as distressed as the doctor was. Leaning forward in his seat, Scott looked directly at the doctor, needing to get down to the bottom of what had happened that lead to this. "Do you mind telling me what happened? How is it a patient placed on twenty-four-hour guard managed to escape a level nine facility?"
Taking a drink on the water his nurse had placed before him, gulping down half the bottle, Dr. Wenchell suddenly leaned forward in his seat. "As surprising as her escaping this facility is, that isn't what you should be concentrating your attention on right now."
"Then what?" he challenged.
"The fact she died before doing it."
He sat straighter in his chair. "What are you talking about?"
Climbing up to his feet, obviously too anxious to be sitting down right now, the doctor paced the floor to the windows of the conference room. When the silence had stretched on for several long minutes, Dr. Wenchell turned back around, facing the perplexed detective at the table. "When all forms of therapy failed to have the desired effect, her coming to terms with her affliction, we took the only step left to us. Greenwood's board of directors approved electroshock therapy, hoping that it would help her come to terms with her illness."
"And?" he prompted.
Wenchell took a deep breath; apparently this was hard on him. "You have to understand, I've performed this same therapy on hundreds of different patients, but never had the outcome as we did with her."
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"What happened?" Scott growled, fast losing his patience with the doctors drawing it out, knowing that whatever had happened wasn't something he was keen on.
"The machine was set to five hundred volts," Dr. Wenchell finally admitted to him, understanding that his silence was only succeeding at gaining the man's anger. "The lowest setting possible. A jolt that should've lasted five seconds, then be over, her none the worse for wear. The second that she was shocked, she lurched forward, then collapsed. I assumed she'd blacked out. It's not uncommon for first-time patients. When she flatlined I personally performed CPR. I got her heart back, only for her to defibrillate. When I used the defibrillator on her, she......."
"She what?" he snapped.
"Maybe it'd be easier if you see it for yourself," he said after a moment, apparently coming to a realization that he couldn't properly explain what had happened when he'd used the defibrillator. Then stalking across the conference room, Wenchell pulled out the television and pushing a tape in the VCR he pressed play.
His curiosity of what he'd been hinting at immediately turned to shock as he watched the television, to see the recording of what had happened. Scott immediately came flying out of his seat as he watched bolts of electricity shoot off the chest of the teenage girl, knocking the chair on the floor. "What the fuck was that?"
Dr. Wenchell pushed stop on the VCR once the man had seen what had transpired, knowing there was no further need to show him the rest of the tape. "Honestly, I don't know. This never happened before with any of my patients. Nor in any electroshock therapy in history. It was almost like there was a charge of electrical currents in her, that had adverse effects to the ones we were sending into her. Whatever the case, that's the outcome."
"She survived that," he mused.
"No," the good doctor immediately shot him down, vehemently shaking his head in rejection. "Jane Doe was pronounced dead at seven-fourteen. I checked her pulse myself. There was nothing. And aware that there would be nothing to survive after such a large pulse of electricity inside of her, I didn't attempt to perform CPR. But yet somehow at seven thirty-one, almost twenty minutes later, a dead girl got up off that table and escaped this facility."
His mind reeling in shock at what he'd just informed had happened, Scott immediately stalked across the room and removed the tape from the VCR. "I'll need to take this as evidence," Scott explained, tucking the tape on the inside of his pocket, suspecting at some point he would need to come back to the tape later. "Thank you for this update."
"It would be wise to appraise the Y'Fell family of this," Dr. Wenchell suggested after a brief pause, needing to tell him this before the man had the opportunity to leave. "She's still living in the fantasy she's the real Niyota and I fear what she will do to the girl, in the name of protecting the father."
He nodded. "I'll let them know."
"Detective Gerald!"
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Making it almost to the front entrance of the chaotic hospital ward, hands riffling through pockets for his cell phone, he pulled up short at somebody calling his name. Immediately turning around at realizing it had come from behind him, watching as Wenchell's nurse Pam ran towards him, Scott frowned. "Is something wrong?"
She held out a paper. "Give this to, Mr. Y'Fell."
"Why?" he asked.
"It's from her," Pam admitted. "When she came back to life, Jane Doe dispatched the rest of the men, but she made me lead her out of the hospital. We didn't get far before the alarms went off. She told me where I could find this and asked that I give it to her father, right before she did a pressure point."
Hands closed around the corner of the piece of paper that the nurse had brought to him, strange that the girl would trust her with this mission. Scott stared at her. "You do understand that Mr. Y'Fell really isn't her father. It's just a fantasy she's created to escape whatever trauma she suffered."
"I know that," she murmured softly, wiping at the moisture that misted in the corner of her eyes. "But neither can I deny that there is something else going on. Jane Doe has woven a fantasy so convincingly, to depths that have never been experienced before. She knows personal, intimate details. Details only the family themselves know. Every test, every therapy, it all leads to the same results, she's not lying."
"She is," he inserted.
When he climbed into his silver Cadillac in one of the private spots in the parking lot downstairs, Scott was forced to admit the woman was right. No matter what people kept saying about the mysterious Jane Doe, deep down he'd always suspected there was more to this story than met the eye. One of the reasons why he'd kept in close contact this last month, when both his captain and partner had given up all hope of getting down to the bottom of it. Because just like Pam, he found it a little harder each day to deny that Jane Doe spoke the truth. How could he not?
In the last month the department, with the aid of Greenwood medical staff, had taken every route possible to disclaim the girl's story. None of it had succeeded. DNA and fingerprints had been a perfect match to that of Niyota Y'Fell, both taken four years ago, when the schools were doing a kidnap prevention program. Had even gone a step further to compare her face to that of a picture, bone structure was an identical match. When she'd answered every question he'd thrown at her concerning the life of Niyota Y'Fell for the first fifteen years of her life, knowing things only Niyota could know, they'd moved on to different forms of therapy. First one-on-one. Hypno-therapy hadn't been any better. All of it led to one undeniable fact: Jane Doe was Niyota Y'Fell.
Yet, that couldn't be possible. He had stared the real Niyota Y'Fell in the face as she'd clung to the waist of her father, terrified of the claims stacked up against her. And as Charles had assured him on that first night, there was no way a father couldn't be able to recognize his own daughter. Especially not one as loyal and devoted to his child, as Charles Y'Fell was to his. Which left him with one question. Who was the real Niyota Y'Fell?