“I’d better not leave you alone with the files,” the administrator said in a supercilious tone, and Laura was glad she hadn’t been making eye contact at the time. The woman might have seen something ugly cross Laura’s face in response.
She was an FBI agent. If the administrator wasn’t going to trust her, then who was she ever going to trust?
It didn’t matter. Laura refocused, reading through the files again. This time with an even finer-toothed comb, given that she didn’t know all of the details already. The heart attack had happened when Stephanie was at work, according to the EMT report. It looked as though they were called out to the scene, where…
Where her heart had stopped, and she had to be resuscitated.
Laura sat up a little straighter in her chair. Of course. A heart attack, and a near-fatal car accident. Both women had to be revived. That was a link. The first one she’d really seen so far, other than the hospital. Without a vision to help her out, the hospital was too vagu
e of a connection to build on. But this seemed like it would take her one level deeper. This…
Laura reached for the first few pages that had been printed from Lincoln Ware’s file. She had no idea what kind of accident he’d suffered, only the tests that he’d had done for it. She flipped to the EMT report and started to read…
He’d been swimming, at a friend’s house in their own pool. He’d been drinking, too. They all had. Things had gotten out of control, apparently, and the ambulance had been called after he’d slipped under the water and not come back up.
When the EMTs arrived, they’d found him unresponsive, his lips blue. They’d had to resuscitate him. He’d been clinically dead for at least a minute or so.
His heart had needed to be restarted.
Laura felt her own pound in her chest again, as if in response to the idea of a heart failing. All three of the victims had already died once before, and not too long ago. All over the span of the past two years, all in Atlanta, and all were brought here afterwards to recover.
Their lives had been saved. They’d been given extra time. Time, which seemed to be so important to the killer.
Was this it?
Laura studied the text of all three reports again, trying to get something else to jump out at her. She scanned the lines all the way to the bottom, where they were signed off by the responding EMT. The first one was a guy named Paul Payne. He’d been the one to resuscitate Veronica. And the one who responded to Stephanie Marchall was…
Was Paul Payne.
Laura heard herself gasp out loud, a sharp intake of breath as she saw the link. She hurriedly grabbed Lincoln Ware’s report and read through it, but – the name at the bottom was different. A Holly Randall had been the one to respond on that occasion.
But this was something very important. Laura could feel it. The same man had been present at two out of three of these near-death experiences.
“The EMT who signs off on these reports,” Laura said. “They don’t work alone, do they?”
“No, ma’am,” the administrator said, in a kind of stern tone. “They work in pairs, always, if not in groups when responding to larger accidents. Why do you ask?”
“The names on these reports,” Laura said. “There’s only one.”
“That would be the person who had seniority at the time and therefore had the responsibility to write the report,” the administrator said.
Laura saw what this meant. There was someone else at the scene when Lincoln Ware nearly drowned. That someone else could have been Paul Payne.
She didn’t have evidence yet, but surely it would be easy to find.
“I want to speak to one of these EMTs,” Laura said, looking up at the administrator decisively. “Where can I find him?”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Laura studied him from a distance for a moment before moving closer. Paul Payne was dressed in the standard gray shirt of his profession, a radio hooked up on his shoulder, ready and waiting to call him in for any new emergency. He was talking casually with a colleague, a young woman sitting in the back of the ambulance beside him.
It was lucky that he happened to be on shift, right here at the hospital, exactly when Laura needed to speak with him.
He was young enough himself, no more than forty years old. No, Laura would have guessed even younger, actually. Maybe around the same age as the women who had died, or around her own age. No younger than thirty, given the fine lines he wore around his eyes and across his forehead. He was handsome enough, too, with straight, dark hair worn swept to one side and cut slightly longer across his temple and pale blue eyes. Laura remembered reading somewhere that having dark hair and blue eyes was actually extremely rare in genuine genetics, and that was why such a large percentage of actors and actresses seemed to have them. It was viewed as rare and exotic.
A kind of natural advantage, giving someone a charm that could override a nasty reputation. Laura took that into account as she approached him. In her experience, the handsome ones were the ones you had to watch out for. They got away with so much just by being admired.
“Excuse me,” she said, as she reached the back of the ambulance where the two EMTs were sitting. “You’re Paul Payne, is that correct?”