Marcus Bell hated hospitals. The smell of disinfectant, the cold, sterile light, the expectant silence broken only by the occasional beep of a machine… Everything reminded him of the fragility of life, the constant proximity of illness and death. And he preferred to deal with concrete facts, with the brutality of crime on the streets, not with the ethereal uncertainty of hospital corridors.
But he was there, at Mercy Hospital, because the case of Lisa Kramer, the missing girl, had brought him there. And although his partner, Elara Vance, had delved into the mind of a comatose killer with technology he still considered little more than New Age quackery, he believed in good old-fashioned police work. In tangible clues, in testimony, in traces in the real world.
He stopped in front of room 412, the number the front desk nurse had given him. "Unidentified coma patient," the label on the door read. Carl Stargher. The man Elara had been trying to "visit" in her virtual dreams. Marcus sighed. He had to admit that, though skeptical, he was gnawingly curious about the results of Elara's experimental therapy. If it really worked—if they could glean useful information from the mind of a comatose psychopath—it would be revolutionary. Or a complete waste of time. They'd see.
He entered the room. The atmosphere was even more oppressive than in the hallway. The patient, Carl Stargher, lay motionless in the bed, connected to a maze of tubes and wires. Pale, gaunt, his breathing barely audible.
An empty shell, Marcus thought with a shudder. Was there really a mind, a consciousness, trapped inside?
She approached the bed and looked at Stargher's lifeless face. She saw nothing that revealed the darkness Elara claimed to have found within him. Only a sick man, on the verge of death.
On a nightstand next to the bed, he saw a small, plain, silver handheld mirror. He took it in his hand and examined it. Nothing special. Just an ordinary mirror. But something about it caught his eye. On the edge of the frame, almost imperceptible, he saw a small, dark stain. He held it up to the light and examined it more carefully. It was blood. Dried, blackened blood.
Marcus felt a lurch in his stomach. Blood on the mirror of a coma patient. Why? How had it gotten there?
He took an evidence bag out of his pocket and carefully stored the mirror. It could be a clue, something tangible, amid all the uncertainty of the case. Something he could analyze in the lab, something real, not a dream.
He left the room, with the mirror in the evidence bag and a new determination.
While Elara delved into the mindscapes of a killer, he was going to keep working in the real world, searching for concrete answers, following the trail of blood, hoping to find the truth in the distorted reflection of a smudged mirror. He had to find Lisa Kramer, and he wasn't going to rely on dreams and visions to do it. He needed facts. And he would start with that mirror.
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