She waves a hand. “That’s an entirely different thing.”
“It is.”
“The detectives in the novels always find the clues and follow a clear path to the killer. You spend far too much time dithering about, talking to the wrong people, chasing subpar leads, waiting for some vital piece of information to land in your lap. You could learn something from those books, Casey.”
“Right…”
“I’m not saying you’re a poor detective. You’re actually quite adept. But there is always room for improvement.”
“Oh, look,” I say, raising my voice. “We’ve reached the patient. Finally.”
Dalton takes the cue and strides over, guiding April to the injured woman, as if she could somehow miss her. Not that she’d ever snap at him for providing the obvious. To April, Dalton is competency incarnate, and there is no greater compliment she could give.
I’m heading off to speak to Felicity when April’s sharp voice cuts through the quiet. “Casey?”
I turn, slowly, trying not to cringe.
“I am about to examine the victim. Don’t you need to be here, taking notes?”
“Victim?” Dalton mouths.
I shake my head, telling him not to ask, and I make my way back to my sister as she lowers herself beside the injured woman.
* * *
It’s well past midnight. We’re still on the ice, the two fires lighting our makeshift emergency room. Baptiste and Sidra have left with the baby, and they’re camped nearby with Felicity.
The mystery woman is indeed in septic shock, as my sister grudgingly admits, while issuing another warning against me practicing medicine without a license. I say nothing about her detecting without a badge.
The woman is asleep now. At first, April had been reluctant to administer the sedative—the woman had been resting, if fitfully, and as April said, we can’t question her about her injuries if she’s unconscious. I could point out the “can’t communicate with her even when she is talking” language issue, but April would probably just suggest I wasn’t trying hard enough.
Fortunately, we never reached that point. As soon as April tried to look at her patient’s stomach, the woman demonstrated why we needed the sedative. We wrestled her down while my sister administered it, and once that took effect, we were finally able to examine that horrific wound.
“Horrific” is no exaggeration. The flesh surrounding the wound was rotting and putrid, and April had to excise dead tissue to get a look at what lay beneath. Even then, there wasn’t any sign of what caused the injury. No tree splinters. No bullet burns, either. Yes, April’s wild theories amused me, but that didn’t mean I was set on a diagnosis of accidental injury. It was just more dangerous to leap to the conclusion that she’d been attacked, only to have her wake up later and say “Oh, no, I just fell on a branch” after we’d spent days combing the woods for her attacker.
Crime fighting in Rockton often feels like being transported back to the world of Sherlock Holmes. April can complain about me “dithering about,” but most of that is Holmesian thinking and working through the case by making endless notes.
When it comes to actual crime-scene equipment, I’m back in the Victorian age, with my fingerprint dust and rudimentary ballistics. If I need DNA testing, I can send a sample to a lab down south, but so far I haven’t had a case that a modern crime-scene test would break faster than old-fashioned sleuthing.
Medicine faces similar constraints. Being off-grid means we do have power from generators and solar panels, but that goes to essentials, mostly cooking and food preservation. If April had an emergency case requiring our entire power supply, though, we’d all be eating fire-cooked food for a few days, because medical care is our priority. Yet mostly she’s had to wean herself off technology the same way I have.
She works into the night using the combined light of bonfires and strong flashlights. We hold the latter as she abrades the infected wound and then assesses damage. An ultrasound may help here, and she has a portable one in Rockton, but it appears that the injury hasn’t done more than nick the woman’s intestines. That’s what I already suspected. This woman has been alive with this wound for a few days now, which means it didn’t puncture a vital organ.
The short version is that, had she gotten medical care immediately, she’d be in a hospital bed, probably arguing with the doctors to let her out of it. The issue isn’t the wound as much as what happened after—days of stumbling through the Yukon wilderness, each step aggravating the injury, while infection set in.
Her feet and calves are a mess, testifying to the sheer hell of the journey that brought her to us. Two toes are frostbitten and will probably need amputation.
Besides cuts, scratches, and dehydration, there are no other obvious wounds. Or that’s what April concludes. She’s wrong, though, and I take no pleasure in pointing that out. Whatever our issues, proving April wrong is uncomfortable for me and always has been, even when we were children. Perhaps even then I’d realized, deep down, that she didn’t point out my own flaws and mistakes to be cruel.
I glance at Anders, who’s assisting April. “Can you grab me a pop? I’m getting a little dehydrated myself.”
April turns a hard look on me. “If you’ve allowed yourself to get into that state, then I believe you can remain there a little longer, Casey.”
“She’s not actually asking for a soda, April,” Anders says. “She’s asking me to step away.”
“Then she should say so.”
“I was trying to be discreet,” I say.