Free Angel Face by Suzanne Forster

shove aside a supply cart to avoid them. The woman was gone before he could get himself free. But just before she disappeared from sight, she turned her head and looked at him. Looked straight at him with her hauntingly tender gaze.
    Jordan felt as if he’d been shaken by a cosmic hand. She might have been a quick-change artist, but he would have known her anywhere. The details of her face were so sharp he could have reached out and touched her.
    He searched the hallway, opening doors and interrupting examinations. He checked the stairs and the elevators. What the hell was going on? She had been in the hospital. She’d been right in front of him . . . unless he was losing his mind.
    Jordan was getting some curious stares, but he didn’t stop to explain. He wasn’t sure he could have. He hadn’t imagined the woman, but maybe he’d been burning holes in a picture for so long that anyone with dark hair and big eyes would have looked like her, even Teri Benson, who had both. He’d obviously overreacted, and meanwhile, he still didn’t know where the hell Benson was.
    By the time he got back to the cardiac unit he’d let go of the incident and resumed his search. As it turned out,Exam Three had a Closed For Repairs sign and the resident was nowhere to be found. This seemed to be Jordan’s day for losing women. The only thing going in his favor was the supply room across the hall. Someone had lifted his prized stethoscope that morning, the one his parents gave him in medical school. He was deeply superstitious about the relic and never used anything else for rounds.
    He didn’t really believe it had been stolen. No one in the cardiac unit pulled brainless stunts like that.
    Jordan was certain the stethoscope would turn up eventually, and meanwhile he could either rip one off someone’s neck or root through the hospital’s stores. The supply room door turned out to be unlocked, which struck him as odd, but he had too many other concerns weighing on his mind to think of it as anything more than a stroke of luck.
    He could barely get into the room it was so jammed with medical equipment. It looked as if they’d moved most of the monitors from the leaking exam room in here while the plumbing was being fixed. He made his way around an EKG machine and pushed aside a ventilator. There were several boxes on a back corner shelf that looked promising. He could see the name of the medical supply company on them, but a bedside tray table and a defibrillator unit blocked his way.
    He was clearing a path when his foot caught on something heavy.
    Jordan plunged forward. There was nothing to grab but air, and he found himself down on one knee, hugging the tray table. It wasn’t until he was clear of the debris that he saw what he’d tripped over. “Jesus—”
    A man’s body was wedged between the defibrillator and the EKG machine. Jordan couldn’t see his face. It was hidden by the equipment, but he was wearing the long white coat of a doctor and clutching a defibrillator paddle in one hand, almost as if he’d been using it on himself.
    Jordan felt a moment of cold shock, but there wasn’t time to try and make sense of what a body was doing in the storeroom. The man’s other arm was caught beneath his trunk. Jordan lifted him enough to free his hand, but there was no pulse, not even a faint one.
    The defibrillator unit was plugged into the wall, Jordan realized as he tried to move it. He yanked the cord and heaved himself against the machine, displacing it enough to see who he was dealing with. The young male doctor was a visiting surgeon from Tokyo University Hospital. Jordan had met Dr. Kensuke Inada for the first time briefly during rounds that morning.
    Inada had come to California General to observe and learn about some of Jordan’s latest advances in valve repair, just as Jordan had visited the famous Tokyo hospital a few years back to pick up their innovations.
    Jordan had no idea how long Inada had been on the