The Ranchers Son (2 page)

“Officer Allens,” he replied automatically,
and flashed his ID. “I need to get to the trauma center.”

The guard indicated the large sign that
read Trauma Center along with a large red arrow. He didn’t say anything. He
didn’t need to; he probably thought Ethan was a few sandwiches short of a
picnic.

“Thank you,” Ethan said politely.

He stood there a little bit longer.
Something inside him ate away at his resolve to get into the hospital, to find
the trauma center and to see who the hell this John Doe was.

When he did move, he found the department easily
enough. Flashing his ID got Ethan behind the security doors accompanied by a
cop whose credentials read “UC Campus Security.” This was a training hospital
and there was evidence of it everywhere, with groups of young interns following
older doctors like gaggles of goslings behind their mother. Evening rounds were
in session, and he hoped that meant he could talk to some doctors to get
background on this John Doe. Because, even if it wasn’t Adam or Justin, he
would still try to get a name for the man. That was his job whether it was his
jurisdiction or not.

Ethan had contacted
Detective Manning, who stood just past
security, and he took the handover from the younger cop.

“Manning.” The detective
introduced himself.

“Allens.”

They shook hands.

“You were red-flagged
on the John Doe. Think you may know him?”

“I have no idea, to
be honest. The photos don’t give much away.”

Manning nodded.
“He was found on campus five days ago, severely beaten. An iron bar from a
railing was on the ground near him. The docs can explain better than me, but he
had injuries to his head. His ribs are damaged—hairline fractures, not cracked.
His wrist and arm are bruised from defending himself.” Manning lifted his arm over
his face to demonstrate—a graphic Ethan didn’t need. “No ID, no missing person report,
no fingerprints on file. He’s not been escalated for forensic investigation as
yet. We like to give it at least a week on John Does in the city.”

The way he said it
implied that he expected things were different back in Montana, or perhaps that
Missoula wasn’t a city in its own right. Ethan didn’t have time to get
defensive or enter into a pissing match. He knew Chicago was a different animal
from Missoula.

“Witnesses?”

“No one, someone
put in a 911 call and campus security found him just before 0400. So that is
our
window
.”

“Cameras?”

“Two, but nothing
worthwhile on the tapes. Some grainy security footage from a distance, but it
looks to me like the perp knew the location of all the cameras.” He held out an
iPad and pressed play. Ethan watched the rough footage. “The perp took a long
time focusing on our guy’s face, as if he wanted to do the most damage there.
Just as the camera pans west you can see someone else enter the
picture.”
He
paused the footage and pointed to a shadowy figure just moving into
the
shot.
Critically
the man was never shown for that long as the camera moved away
.

“You think that
other guy was part of it? Or saw something?”

“Given how much
damage there was to our guy’s face, I wonder if the assailant’s intent was to
kill. Maybe this second man stopped him? Or saw what was happening and spooked
our perp?” Manning said
.

“This second
person was the one to call 911?” Ethan asked.

“We don’t know. The
recording of the call is muffled, a man’s voice. I’ll send it on to you.”

“Makes more sense
that it is two men and not just one we are looking for. Our perp could have
been going for the kill shot before the second one arrived,” Ethan mused, aware
of the clinical detachment with which he was talking.

“Yeah, you’re
probably right,” Manning said.

“And there’s
nothing on the iron bar?”

“No fingerprints,
no DNA of any sort. Just your regular iron bar from the railings, rusty in
places, it was clean except for that and John Doe’s blood.”

They reached a security door.
Manning passed a card over the panel and
pushed straight through. “We’ve got UC Medical security keeping an eye on him
24/7, in case this wasn’t random.”

Ethan glanced around.
He could see a hundred ways that someone could get past here without making
security look twice, and he couldn’t see anyone in a uniform aside from nurses,
orderlies, and a couple of doctors.

Owen stopped and
so did Ethan before he walked into the detective.

“The room is 217, last
room before the Fire Exit sign. I have to warn you, this guy’s face is a mess,
but since they sewed some of the splits up, his features are more visible out
of the hamburger they made of him.”

Ethan began to
move again, but Manning laid a hand on his arm. “It’s not pretty.”

“Noted,” Ethan
said. He’d seen death, he’d seen abuse, he’d been to house fires and gang violence.
He wasn’t some fainting newbie without the stomach for those things.

“I told him you
were coming; he refused his meds until twenty minutes ago, so you may get him
awake now.”

With a nod, Manning
continued walking and they finally reached 217, the last of seven doors on the
left. Ethan was completely disoriented in this place, a maze of corridors and
doors. He reached for the handle and pushed it down slowly, opening the door
and stepping inside the sterile white room.

A man stood at the
window looking out into the darkness beyond, deep in thought, half turned to
Ethan. He was broad, muscled. A gown hung to his knees; his lower legs were
bare, and his feet were shoeless on the tiled floor.

He turned as Ethan
came in, and for the first time Ethan got a good look at the man. Scars and
stitches bisected his face, what looked like burns merged in with bruises and
his dark hair was a scruffy mess around his face. His lip was split in three
places. His left eye was swollen shut, with two pieces of tape across it, and
the extensive swelling and bruising was enough to distort the shape of the tape.
He stood like an old man, stooped and evidently in pain.

“Detective Manning?”
The guy looked momentarily hopeful, his gaze moving past Ethan to Manning behind
him.

“Nothing yet,
son,” Manning said.

The injured man
slumped, any posture he had leaving him in a rush. He stumbled back to the bed
and sat on the edge.

Ethan stared.
Under the pain inflicted on this face, under the scars and swelling, he knew
who this was. The face was dear to him, but over a decade had marked the boy he
once knew.

Ethan’s breath
left his body, a mix of shock and overwhelming disappointment, and he felt
blindly for the edge of the table next to the door, anything to hold him up.

Not his brother…. The grief at that was
intense, like a punch to the gut.

His brother’s friend. Ethan’s friend—the
boy he’d begun to love.

That boy who’d disappeared twelve years ago
was sitting on the edge of a hospital bed with hope leaving his expression. This
was Adam Strachan.

He was a link to Justin, and this was real.

Ethan’s energy drained from him in an
instant. He wanted to cry, he wanted to shout, he wanted to ask a million
questions. But all he could say, with emotion cracking his voice, was one word.

“Adam.”

“You know me?” Adam asked with a little
hope in his voice.

“Adam Strachan, born May 12, 1988.”

Adam stared at him. He did a calculation in
his head, which seemed slow and difficult as he must be tired and his brain
muddled from injury and medication. “So that’s what? Means I’m twenty-eight,
then?”

“Yes.”

A long pause, and Ethan only stared; he
couldn’t take his eyes off the man Adam had become. So much older, taller,
different
to
how he and Justin used to be.

Adam opened his mouth wordlessly and shook
his head, a hand going to his temple and pressing there. “I don’t know you. I
don’t recognize the name Adam Strachan.”

My name is Adam?

That didn’t sound
right. The hospital had been calling him John, short for John Doe. One of the
nurses affectionately called him Mickey—for what reason he didn’t know—but it
was nicer in his head than Adam.

The name Adam didn’t
feel right. It grated and made him close his good eye. Once blind to the room,
he could make sense of what he’d been told: Adam, twenty-eight. He didn’t feel as
young as that. He felt old and broken and exhausted. Surely at twenty-eight a
man would heal fast, and wouldn’t forget an entire lifetime.

“You know me?” he
whispered, eyes still closed, to the guy who’d told him the name.

He heard the sigh
in the sterile room, and then the shift of the bed as someone sat next to him.

“I do.”

Adam let the words
sink in. He had so many questions that this man could maybe answer. Was he, Adam,
from Chicago? What had he been doing on UC Campus at some ungodly hour of the
morning? Was he a visiting student, maybe? At twenty-eight, that couldn’t be
right. Maybe he was a mature student then or a visiting lecturer in something?
But then people would know him. Why hadn’t anyone reported him missing?

The last was the
most important to him. They’d abandoned him in this place, with no memories, no
family, just a nameless person in the system. Only this morning had he
remembered anything. A name, Ethan, and a place, Crooked Tree. Was that what
had brought the man here?

“Who are you?” he
asked but still didn’t open his eyes; to do that would be to admit that a
stranger stood in his room knowing more about him than he did himself.

“My name is Ethan
Allens. I’m a detective in Missoula.”

There went the
last of his hope. This wasn’t a family member; this was a cop. The cops here,
the ones that looked at him with pity, probably called every Ethan until they
found someone who knew him.

“How do you know
me, then?” He opened his good eye and looked sideways at the cop.

Ethan took a deep
breath and exhaled. His hand raised as if he was going to touch Adam’s leg, but
Adam shied away. Ethan got the message; he dropped his hand back to the bed.

“I knew you as a
baby, Adam. I’m two years older than you, and you were always part of my life.”

“So why the hell
has it taken this long for you to find me?” he snapped. Temper was his friend
at the moment, a strong, grasping need for someone to blame about why he was in
this damn place with no memories.

“We didn’t know
you were here,” Ethan explained.

“In the hospital?”

“In Chicago.”

“At all?”

“No. We haven’t
known where you were for a very long time.”

What did he mean
by that? And why did he sound like the world was falling down around him, so
damn sad and despairing? “How much time?”

Had it been weeks?
Had he come here for some reason without telling anyone and it had been longer
than a week? Was he the kind of person to disappear for long periods—a salesperson,
maybe?

He looked down at
his hands, at the roughness of them, the calluses. He couldn’t be a salesperson,
he definitely worked with his hands, and the itch of wanting to be outside was
like a siren’s call.

“Adam….” Ethan
paused and swallowed, then looked over at the other cop. In fact he did
everything except tell him what he wanted to hear.

“Tell me.”

Ethan looked right
at him, his hazel eyes tinged with green and his face a mask. Adam couldn’t
tell what the man was thinking until they began to fill with tears.

What? What’s
wrong?

“Twelve years, Adam,” Ethan whispered. “You’ve
been missing for twelve years.”

Adam stared right
into those eyes and waited for more. Explanation, reasons, he didn’t care what.
When Ethan said nothing, Adam pressed his fingers against his temple; headaches
were his constant companion. “Why?” he asked finally.

“You went missing
in ’04 along with another boy. My brother, Justin. We haven’t been able to find
you in all that time.”

Anger poked at
Adam. “Were you even looking? How hard is it to find someone?” Even as he said
the words, he wanted to take them back. Not only did sorrow pinch Ethan’s
features, but regret, or maybe it was shame, crossed his expression. Adam
couldn’t tell. Maybe he wasn’t one of those men who could read expressions and
he was thinking all the wrong things.

And Adam knew if
someone wanted to hide, they could. The US was one hell of a big place, full of
towns and cities where you could lose yourself.

“I tried every
day,” Ethan said.

He wasn’t lying.
Ethan was looking at Adam steadily, and there was no guile in his expression.

“You said
something about your brother. Justin, you called him.”

“He vanished at
the same time. Do you remember him?”

Adam searched what
little memory he had. He could picture a horse, white with gray patches, and he
remembered how to work the TV remote. He could even recall which news stations
were his preferred ones to watch. But the names Justin or Adam? Neither meant a
thing to him. Apparently the knowledge would mean something to this Ethan guy,
so he pushed aside his frustration, searched for his compassion to someone
else’s need, and shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he
apologized. “I don’t know the name. Fuck, I don’t even know my own name.”

The throbbing in
his head was getting worse, and the meds they’d given him were kicking in with
a vengeance. His thoughts were turning wooly and unconnected. Damn it, he
wanted to know more about Adam.

The door opened. Another
man came in—Doctor Armitage, with a clipboard, several interns, and a nurse
right behind him. He shook hands with Ethan and joined the little huddle around
Adam’s bed. In response, Adam scooted up the bed as best as he could and sat cross-legged.
This was getting too much. As he moved, he became entangled with the blanket
and cursed under his breath.

And now he had
Doctor Asshole in his room. Great.

Ethan helped him, tugging
at the blanket and holding up a hand to forestall whatever the doc was about to
say while Adam got comfortable.

Finally, the
doctor began to talk in the detached way Adam was so familiar with. He’d been
doing it all week, discussing his case as if Adam
weren’t
in the room. Hence Adam naming him Dr.
Asshole. The name fit his complete lack of bedside manner well.

“John Doe
presented with trauma to his face, chest, and left wrist—”

“Yeah,” Adam
snapped to interrupt the description of all his injuries. “But my head is
pretty hard. Designed to take a lot of punishment, it seems.”

One of the interns
smiled at him encouragingly, but Dr. Armitage was scowling. His expression
didn’t deter Adam and he waved his good hand to indicate his face.

“Cuts all over,”
he continued. “
They
told me the cuts bled out of proportion to their
seriousness. None of them will scar, or
they
don’t think so. I had a
concussion, or at least
they
say I did. I don’t actually know that for a
fact because I was unconscious for a long time. I was in a coma apparently, but
only a little one.” He indicated the students in the room, assuming his most
doctory type voice, mimicking Dr. Armitage. “Now, can anyone tell me what the
AVPU scale is?”

Dr.
Armitage
opened his mouth to
stop Adam’s diatribe, but one of the interns spoke. She had a faint smile,
which only encouraged Adam more.

“Alert, Vocal stimuli, Painful stimuli, Unresponsive.
A scale to assess coma,” the intern said. She immediately subsided when the doctor
sent her a withering glance.

“As I was going to say—”

“
They
said they were worried about brain damage,”
Adam
interrupted. “
But it’s okay, I
didn’t
have any skull fractures or bruising or bleeding on the brain.
They
also
pointed out I have bruising on my left wrist and arm, which my helpful police
friend suggested was my way of protecting myself from hits connecting with my
face.”

Adam lifted his
bad arm and winced as he held it up in front of his face. It was, he knew,
quite evident to see how the trauma on his wrist lined up with the injury on
his eye.

A couple of the
interns muttered between themselves. Adam knew he’d said everything he needed
to say.

Dr. Armitage interjected
and took back control of the assessment. “John Doe has been under my care for
six days and is suffering from what is called psychogenic amnesia.”

Adam tensed. He
hated all this retelling of the whys and the wherefores; he wanted to know when
he could get out of here. He didn’t like the Doctor. Just because the man was
the foremost whatever-it-was in brains and memory didn’t make his bedside
manner any better.

“I don’t need to
know the medical details here,” Ethan said. Adam looked at him in surprise. “No
one does unless it pertains to the case, and I assume the medical files will be
appended to all evidence gathered at the hospital.”

“I’m sorry?”
Doctor Armitage looked perplexed; being stopped in mid flow was something that apparently
didn’t happen to him.

Behind him, the
nurse lowered her gaze to the floor, but not before Adam had seen her smile. The
two interns who had been muttering before exchanged pointed looks. The nurse
was a pretty, young woman, all blonde hair and wide blue eyes; the kind of
nurse you wanted at your bedside—if you weren’t gay, that was, which Adam was
pretty convinced he was.

Ethan frowned. “You
can do all your teaching later. All I need to know is when can I take Adam
home?”

Doctor Armitage looked
at Detective Manning and back to Ethan. “I, uh, you can’t, we don’t know who
you are….”

“I have full
family support, photos, proof, and papers to vouch for me as Adam’s
representative, from his brother.”

“I have a brother?”
Adam asked.
Of course I have a family; most people have a family.
He
sounded like an idiot. But a brother seemed a small thing with no mention of
parents.

“I haven’t told
Cole yet, naturally.” Ethan indicated the room. “He’s a lieutenant in the US
Navy and not easy to get hold of by anything except official channels. I have
his full authority to locate and return Adam home, should we find him.”

“This isn’t right,”
Doctor Armitage said. “I have interns keen to learn about John’s condition, and
we need more time with John here.”

“Adam.” Ethan
snapped.

“Yeah, Doc,” Adam
added. “My name is Adam. I’m not a John Doe anymore.”

The doctor ignored
him. “This case is fascinating and one we’d like to study.”

“Fucking hell, I’m
in the room,” Adam said as exhaustion pulled at him. He leaned back on the
white pillows, their softness calling him to sleep. “And if my brother said it
was okay….”

“Adam is not a
guinea pig,” Ethan snapped. “He’s going home.”

Home? I wonder
where home is? I have a brother. Did I know that?

“His scans show everything
is clear,” the nurse said, reading from the notes. The doctor scowled at her,
which looked odd to Adam given he was now laying on his side and everything was
slanted. She glanced at him, and there was a definite wink. “If there is no
medical reason why he needs to stay, and Doctor McGuire signs off on it, then
there is no reason he needs to stay.

“Against medical
advice,” Adam slurred. He shut his eyes. He could get out of here against
medical advice anyway; he wasn’t a prisoner if someone knew who he was. And
Doctor McGuire… the other doc, the nice one who told him everything was going
to be okay. “McGuire,” he added.

Or at least he
thought he did. Sleep was a mist in his head, and he had no pain.

He slept.