Free Beyond the Pale by Mark Anthony

She could only gaze at the fist-shaped lump of metal that lay in the center of the man’s chest, exactly where his heart should have been. The monitor beeped frantically, then let out a piercing whine.
    The suspect was dead.

11.
    It was getting late.
    About an hour ago the tide in the ED had finally turned, and after that more patients were wheeled out the doors than were wheeled in. The throng of wounded dwindled to a scattering of people waiting to be seen for minor injuries, and the roar of anger and pain faded to a patient murmur. Somewhere,far down a corridor, an infant cried. It was a weak and forlorn sound, and along with it drifted the weary music of a woman’s lullaby.
    We are born to this. To life, and to hurt
. Grace sighed and gripped a chipped mug with both hands. Ripples shivered across the brown surface of the coffee within. Circles spreading to nowhere, containing nothing, vanishing when they struck the boundary that imprisoned them. Maybe that was all they were, ripples on a pond. Maybe she was foolish to try to fight.
    “Dr. Beckett …?”
    Grace jerked her head up. A police officer sat in the chair opposite her, a concerned expression on his face. “I was asking you a question about the suspect, Dr. Beckett.”
    She blinked. “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry. Please go on.”
    “Did the suspect say anything that might help us in learning his identity? Did he mention a name? Or a place he might have come from?”
    Grace concentrated, thought back to the urgent chaos in the trauma room, then shook her head. “I’m afraid not. For a minute he did mumble something, but I couldn’t understand what it was. I’m not even certain it was English. It might have been something about
sin
or
sinning.
”
    The officer nodded and scribbled on a notepad. “We’ll run his fingerprints through the system, but any additional information could help narrow down the search. Did he say anything else you could make out? Anything at all?”
    Grace shook her head again. She watched as he jotted down a few more notes. Officer John Erwin, read the tag on his blue shirt. He was middle-aged, with kind brown eyes. He and several other police officers had arrived at the hospital not long after the happenings in Trauma Three, called in by the original two officers. Erwin had explained it was standard procedure to file a report on how the suspect had died, and—he had paused here—to describe any unusual circumstances associated with that death. At first Grace had been nervous, but Erwin had sat her down, pushed a mug of coffee into her hands, and with his considerate manner had put her at ease.
    Earlier, Morty Underwood had done just the opposite.
    Not long after she had sewn up the body of the John Doeand had sent it down to the morgue, she had rounded a corner to find herself face-to-face with the Chief Resident. His comb-over flew above his head, and his expression was one of panic. He had just gotten out of a meeting with the chief of the ED. The hospital’s management had decided it was necessary to keep the
incident
with the police suspect quiet. Everyone remembered the
incident
at another hospital a few years back, when toxic fumes emitted by a woman’s blood had nearly asphyxiated a half-dozen hospital workers. Some people had gone so far as to suggest she had been an extraterrestrial alien. Denver Memorial Hospital did not want that kind of publicity. Things like that happened in tabloids, not here. A detailed autopsy would certainly reveal a more mundane explanation for the patient’s condition. Until then, no one—including Grace—was to say anything about the
incident
to anyone.
    Incident
. Grace was rapidly getting sick of that word. This hadn’t been just an
incident. Incidents
were things to be written up, filed away, and forgotten. But this had been
real
. She had seen inside the man’s chest. There had been no living, beating human heart there. Instead there had been only a metallic lump—she had