After That Night

Book 11: Will Trent

by Karin Slaughter

Genres: Police Procedurals; Suspense; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Watch Will Trent on ABC and Hulu!

Will Trent and Sara Linton are back! This is the eleventh electrifying thriller featuring GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton from New York Times bestselling author Karin Slaughter.

After that night, nothing was ever the same again.

Fifteen years ago, Sara Linton’s life changed forever when a celebratory night out ended in a violent attack that tore her world apart. Since then, Sara has remade her life. A successful doctor, engaged to a man she loves, she has finally managed to leave the past behind her.

Until one evening, on call in the ER, everything changes. Sara battles to save a broken young woman who’s been brutally attacked. But as the investigation progresses, led by GBI Special Agent Will Trent, it becomes clear that Dani Cooper’s assault is uncannily linked to Sara’s.

And it seems the past isn’t going to stay buried forever.

Release date: August 22, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 400

Sample

Prologue

Sara Linton held the phone to her ear as she watched an intern assess a patient with an open gash on the back of his right arm. The newly minted Dr. Eldin Franklin was not having his best day. He was two hours into his emergency department shift and he’d already had his life threatened by a drug-altered MMA fighter and performed a rectal exam on a homeless woman that had gone very, very wrong.

“Can you believe he said that to me?” Tessa’s outrage crackled through the phone, but Sara knew her sister didn’t require encouragement to complain about her new husband.

Instead, she kept her eye on Eldin, wincing as he pulled Lidocaine into a syringe like he was Jonas Salk testing the first polio vaccine. He was paying more attention to the vial than he was to his patient.

“I mean,” Tessa continued. “He’s unbelievable.”

Sara made conciliatory noises as she switched the phone to her other ear. She found her tablet and pulled up the chart for Eldin’s patient. The gash was a secondary concern. The triage nurse had noted the thirty-one-year-old man was tachycardic with a temperature of 101, and experiencing severe, acute agitation, confusion, and insomnia.

She looked up from her tablet. The patient kept scratching his chest and neck as if something was crawling on his skin. His left foot was shaking so hard that the bed shook along with it. To say that the man was in full-on alcohol withdrawal was to say that the sun was going to rise in the east.

Eldin was picking up on none of the signs—which was not completely unexpected. Medical school was by design a system that didn’t prepare you for the real world. You spent your first year learning how the systems of the body work. Year two was devoted to understanding how those systems could go wrong. By year three, you were allowed to see patients, but only under strict and often needlessly sadistic supervision. Your fourth year brought about the matching system, which was like the worst beauty pageant ever, where you waited to see if your residency was going to be served at a prestigious, major institution or the equivalent of a veterinary clinic in rural East Jesus.

Eldin had managed to match at Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta’s only public hospital and one of the busiest Level I trauma centers in the country. He was called an intern because he was still in the first year of his residency. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop him from believing that he had seen it all. Sara could tell his brain had already checked out as he leaned over the patient’s arm and began numbing the area. Eldin was likely thinking about dinner or a girl he was going to call or maybe compounding the interest on his many student loans, which roughly equaled the cost of a house.

Sara caught the head nurse’s eye. Johna was watching Eldin, too, but like every nurse ever, she was going to let the baby doctor learn the hard way. It didn’t take long.

The patient pitched forward and opened his mouth.

“Eldin!” Sara called, but she was too late.

Vomit blasted like a fireman’s hose down the back of Eldin’s shirt.

He staggered, experiencing a moment of shock before starting to dry heave.

Sara stayed in her chair behind the nurses’ station as the patient fell back against the bed, a momentary sense of relief washing over his face. Johna pulled Eldin to the side and began to lecture him as if he were a toddler. His mortified expression was familiar. Sara had interned at Grady. She had been on the receiving end of similar lectures. No one warned you in medical school that this was how you learned how to be a real doctor—humiliation and vomit.

“Sara?” Tessa said. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Yes. Sorry.” Sara tried to turn her focus back to her sister. “What were you saying?" 

“I was saying how hard is it for him to see the fucking trash can is full?” Tessa barely paused for a breath. “I work all day, too, but I’m the one who has to come home and clean the house and fold the laundry and cook dinner and take out the trash?”

Sara kept her mouth shut. None of Tessa’s complaints were new or unpredictable. Lemuel Ward was one of the most self-involved assholes Sara had ever met, which was saying a lot considering she had spent her adult life working in medicine.

“It’s like I got secretly signed up for The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“Was that from the show or the book?” Sara worked to keep the bite out of her tone. “I don’t remember a taking-out-the-trash scene.”

“You can’t tell me that’s not how it started.”

“Dr. Linton?” Kiki, one of the porters, rapped her fingers on the counter. “Curtain three is being brought back up from X-ray.”

Sara mouthed a thank-you as she checked her tablet for the films. The patient from curtain three was a thirty-nine-year-old schizophrenic who had signed himself in as Deacon Sledgehammer and presented with a golf-ball-sized welt on his neck, a temperature of 102 and uncontrollable chills. He’d freely admitted to a nearly lifelong heroin addiction. Subsequent to the veins in his legs, arms, feet, chest and belly collapsing, he’d resorted to injecting subcutaneously, or what was called “skin-popping.” Then he’d started injecting directly into his jugular and carotid arteries. X-rays confirmed what Sara had suspected, but she took no pleasure in being right.

“My time is just as valuable as his,” Tessa said. “It’s fucking ridiculous.”

Sara agreed, but she said nothing as she walked through the emergency department. Usually, this time of night they were covered up in gunshot wounds, stabbings, car accidents, overdoses and a fair share of heart attacks. Maybe it was the rain or the Braves playing Tampa Bay, but the department was blissfully calm. Most of the beds were empty, the whirs and beeps of machines punctuating occasional conversation. Sara was technically the attending pediatrician, but she’d offered to cover for another doctor so that he could attend his daughter’s science fair. Eight hours into a twelve-hour shift, the worst thing that Sara had seen was Eldin getting splattered.

And to be honest, that had been kind of hilarious.

“Obviously, Mom was no help,” Tessa continued. “All she said was, ‘A bad marriage is still a marriage.’ What does that even mean?”

Sara ignored the question as she punched the button to open the doors. “Tessie, you’ve been married for six months. If you’re not happy with him now—”

“I didn’t say I’m not happy,” Tessa insisted, though every word out of her mouth indicated otherwise. “I’m just frustrated.”

“Welcome to marriage.” Sara walked toward the bank of elevators. “You’ll spend

ten minutes arguing that you already told him something instead of just telling him again.”

“That’s your advice?”

“I’ve been really careful not to offer any,” Sara pointed out. “Look, this sounds like a shitty thing to say, but you either find a way to work it out or you don’t.”

“You found a way to work it out with Jeffrey.”

Reflexively, Sara pressed her hand to her heart, but time had eased the sharp pain that usually accompanied any reminder of her widowhood. “Are you forgetting I divorced him?”

“Are you forgetting I was there when it happened?” Tessa paused for a quick breath. “You worked it out. You married him again. You were happy.”

“I was,” Sara agreed, but Tessa’s problem wasn’t an affair or even an overflowing trash can. It was being married to a man who did not respect her. “I’m not holding out on you. There’s not a universal solution. Every relationship is different.”

“Sure, but—”

Tessa’s voice fell away as the elevator doors slid open. The distant beeps and whirs of machinery faded. Sara felt an electric current in the air.

Special Agent Will Trent was standing at the back of the elevator. He was looking down at his phone, which allowed Sara the luxury of silently drinking him in. Tall and lean. Broad shoulders. Will’s charcoal three-piece suit couldn’t hide his runner’s body. His sandy-blond hair was wet from the rain. A scar zig-zagged into his left eyebrow. Another scar traced up from his mouth. Sara let her mind ponder the exquisite question of what the scar would feel like if it was pressed against her own lips.

Will looked up. He smiled at Sara.

She smiled back.

“Hello?” Tessa said. “Did you hear what—”

Sara ended the call and tucked the phone into her pocket.

As Will stepped off the elevator, she silently cataloged all the ways she could’ve made more of an effort to look presentable for this chance meeting, starting with not twisting her long hair into a granny bun on the top of her head and ending with doing a better job of wiping off the ketchup that had dribbled down the front of her scrubs at dinner.

Will’s eyes zeroed in on the stain. “Looks like you’ve got some—”

“Blood,” Sara said. “It’s blood.”

“Sure it’s not ketchup?”

She shook her head. “I’m a doctor, so . . .”

“And I’m a detective, so . . .”

They were both grinning by the time Sara noticed that Faith Mitchell, Will’s partner, had not only been on the elevator with him but was standing two feet away.

Faith gave a heavy sigh before telling Will, “I’ll go start the thing with the thing.”

Will’s hands went into his pockets as Faith walked toward the patient rooms.

He glanced at the floor, then back at Sara, then down the hallway. The silence dragged out to an uncomfortable level, which was Will’s particular gift. He was incredibly awkward. It didn’t help matters that Sara found herself uncharacteristically tongue-tied around him.

She made herself speak. “It’s been a while.”

“Two months.”

Sara was ridiculously delighted that he knew how much time had passed. She waited for him to say more, but of course he didn’t.

She asked, “What brings you here? Are you working on a case?”

“Yes.” He seemed relieved to be on familiar ground. “Guy chopped off his neighbor’s fingers over a lawnmower dispute. Cops rolled up. He jumped into his car and drove straight into a telephone pole.”

“A real criminal mastermind.”

There was something about his sudden burst of laughter that made Sara’s heart do a weird flip. She tried to keep him talking. “That sounds like an Atlanta police problem, not a case for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.”

“The finger-chopper works for a drug dealer we’ve been trying to take down. We’re hoping we can persuade him to talk.”

“You can chop down his sentence in return for his testimony.”

There was no thrill of his laughter this time. The joke fell so flat that it could’ve been a piece of sandpaper.

Will shrugged. “That’s the plan.”

Sara felt a blush working its way up her neck. She desperately tried to find safer ground. “I was waiting for a patient to come up from X-ray. I don’t usually hang around elevators.”

He nodded, but that was all he offered before the awkwardness roared back in. He rubbed his jaw with his fingers, worrying the faint scar that ran along his sharp jawline and down into the collar of his shirt. The glint of his wedding ring flashed like a warning light. Will noticed her noticing the ring. His hand went back into his pocket.

“Anyway.” Sara had to end this before her cheeks burst into flames. “I’m sure Faith is waiting for you. It’s good seeing you again, Agent Trent.”

“Dr. Linton.” Will gave her a slight nod before walking away.

To keep herself from staring longingly after him, Sara took out her phone and texted an apology to her sister for hanging up so abruptly.

Two months.

Will knew how to get in touch with her, but he hadn’t gotten in touch.

Then again, Sara knew how to get in touch with Will, but she hadn’t either.

She silently went back over their brief exchange, skipping the chop joke so that her face didn’t start glowing red again. She couldn’t tell

if Will was flirting or if he was being polite or if she was being stupid and desperation had set in. What she did know was that Will Trent was married to a former Atlanta police detective with a reputation for being a raging bitch and a regular habit of disappearing for long stretches of time. And that despite this, he was still wearing his wedding ring.

As Sara’s mother would say, A bad marriage is still a marriage.

Fortunately, the elevator doors opened before Sara could spiral any farther down that rabbit hole.

“Hey, doc.” Deacon Sledgehammer was slumped in his wheelchair, but he made an effort to straighten up for Sara’s benefit. He was wearing a hospital gown and black wool socks. The left side of his neck looked painfully red and swollen. Round scars dotted his arms, legs and forehead from years of skin-popping. “Didja find out what’s wrong with me?”

“I did.” Sara took over from the orderly, pushing Deacon down the hall, fighting the urge to turn back toward Will like Lot’s wife. “You’ve got twelve needles broken off in your neck. Several of them have abscessed. That’s why your neck is swollen and you’re having such a hard time swallowing. You’ve got a very serious infection.”

“Damn.” Deacon let out a raspy breath. “That sounds like it could kill me.”

“It could.” Sara wasn’t going to lie to him. “You’re going to need surgery to remove the needles, then you’ll need to stay here at least a week for IV antibiotics. Your withdrawal will have to be managed, but none of it’s going to be easy.”

“Shit,” he mumbled. “Will you come visit me?”

“Absolutely. I’m off tomorrow, but I’m here all day Sunday.” Sara scanned her badge to open the doors. She finally allowed herself to look back at Will. He was at the far end of the hall. She watched until he turned the corner.

“He gave me his socks.”

Sara turned back to Deacon.

“Last week when I was over by the capitol.” Deacon pointed down to the pair of thick socks he was wearing. “It was cold as hell. Dude took off his socks and gave ’em to me.”

Sara’s heart did the weird little flip again. “That was kind.”

“Fuckin’ cop probably bugged ’em.” Deacon pressed his finger to his lips to shush her. “Be careful what you say.”

“Understood.” Sara wasn’t going to argue with a schizophrenic suffering from a life-threatening infection. The fact that she had auburn hair and was left-handed had already led to a lengthy discussion.

She angled the chair toward curtain three, then helped transfer Deacon into bed. His arms were skeletal, almost like kindling. He was malnourished. Grime and dirt were clumped into his hair. He was missing several teeth. He was nearly forty, but he looked sixty and moved like he was eighty. She wasn’t sure he would make it through another winter. Either the heroin or the elements or another raging infection would get him.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Deacon leaned back in the bed with an old man’s groan. “You wanna call my family.”

“Do you want me

to call your family?”

“No. And don’t be callin’ no social services neither.” Deacon scratched his arm, his fingernails digging into a round scar. “Listen, I’m a piece of shit, okay?”

“That hasn’t been my experience.”

“Yeah, well, you got me on a good day.” His voice caught on the last word. It was sinking in that he might not see tomorrow. “My mental health being what it is, and my addiction. I mean fuck, I love dope, but I don’t make it easy for people.”

“You were dealt a bad hand.” Sara kept her tone measured. “That doesn’t make you a bad person.”

“Sure, but what I put my family through—they disowned me ten years ago this June, and I don’t blame ’em. I gave ’em plenty of reasons. Lying, stealing, cheating, beating. I told you—a real piece of shit.”

Sara leaned her elbows on the bed railing. “What can I do for you?”

“If I don’t make it, will you call my mom and let her know? Not so she feels bad or nothin’. Being honest, I think it’ll be a relief.”

Sara took a pen and pad out of her pocket. “Write down her name and number.”

“Tell her I wasn’t scared.” He pressed the pen so hard into the paper that Sara could hear the scratch. Tears seeped from his eyes. “Tell her that I didn’t blame her. And that—tell her that I loved her.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that, but I promise I’ll call her if it does.”

“But not before, okay? Cause she don’t need to know I’m alive. Just if I’m . . .” His voice trailed off. His hands shook as he returned the pad and pen. “You know what I’m saying.”

“I do.” Sara briefly rested her hand on his shoulder. “Let me call up to surgery. We’ll get a central line started so I can give you something to help make you comfortable.”

“Thanks, doc.”

Sara closed the curtain behind her. She picked up the phone behind the nurses’ station and paged surgical for a consult, then tapped in the orders for the central line.

“Hey.” Eldin had showered and changed into a fresh pair of scrubs. “I front-loaded my drunk with IV diazepam. He’s waiting for a bed.”

“Add multivitamins and 500 milligrams thiamine IV to prevent—”

“Wernicke’s encephalopathy,” Eldin said. “Good idea.”

Sara thought he sounded a little too confident for someone who’d just been sprayed with projectile vomit. As his supervisor—even if it was only for the night—it was her job to set him straight so that it didn’t happen again.

She said, “Eldin, it’s not an idea, it’s a treatment protocol to prevent seizures and to calm the patient. Detox is hell on earth. Your patient is clearly

suffering. He’s not a drunk. He’s a thirty-one-year-old man who’s struggling with alcohol addiction.”

Eldin had the decency to look embarrassed. “Okay. You’re right.”

Sara wasn’t finished. “Did you read the nurse’s notes? She took a detailed social history. He self-reported four to five beers a day. Is there a rule of thumb they taught you last year?”

“Always double the number of drinks a patient reports.”

“Correct,” she said. “Your patient also reported that he was trying to quit. He stopped cold turkey three days ago. It’s right there in his chart.”

Eldin’s expression turned from embarrassed to outraged. “Why didn’t Johna tell me?”

“Why didn’t you read her notes? Why didn’t you notice your patient had acute onset super-flu, and was scratching at phantom ants crawling on his skin?” Sara watched the shame return, which was to his credit. He recognized that he was the one to blame. “Learn from this, Eldin. Serve your patient better the next time.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” Eldin took a deep breath and hushed it out. “Jesus, am I ever going to get the hang of this?”

Sara couldn’t leave him lying in the dirt. “I’ll tell you what my attending told me: I believe you’re either a damn good doctor, or you’re a psychopath who’s managed to fool the smartest person who’s ever supervised you.”

Eldin laughed. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“You did your residency here, right?” He waited for Sara to nod. “I heard you were locked in for a fellowship with Nygaard. Pediatric cardiothoracic surgery. That’s hella impressive. Why did you leave?”

Sara was trying to formulate an answer when she felt another change in the air. This wasn’t the electric current she’d felt when she’d seen Will Trent standing at the back of the elevator. This was years of her doctor’s intuition telling her that the rest of the night was about to go sideways.

The doors to the ambulance bay burst open. Johna was running down the hall. “Sara, MVA happened right outside. Mercedes versus ambulance. They’re pulling the victim from the car right now.”

Sara jogged toward the trauma bay with Eldin close behind. She could feel his anxiety ramping up, so she kept her voice calm, telling him, “Do exactly as I say. Don’t get in the way.”

She was slipping on a sterile gown when EMTs rushed in with the patient strapped to a gurney. They were all soaking wet from the rain. One of them called out the details. “Dani Cooper, nineteen-year-old female, MVA with LOC, chest pain, shortness of breath. She was going about thirty when she hit the ambulance straight-on. Abdominal wound looks superficial. BP is 80 over 40, heart rate’s 108. Breath sounds are shallow on the left, clear on the right. She’s alert and oriented. IV in the right hand with normal saline.”

Suddenly, the trauma bay was crowded with people in a well-choreographed, disarrayed ballet. Nurses, respiratory therapist, radiographer, transcriber. Every person had a purpose: running lines,

drawing blood gas, cross and typing, cutting off clothes, wrapping the blood pressure cuff, pulse ox, leads, oxygen, and someone to track every step that was taken and by whom.

Sara called out, “I need a chem twelve with differential, chest and abdomen X-rays, and a second large-bore IV for blood in case we need it. Start a foley and get routine urine and drug screen. I need a CT of her neck and head. Page CV surgery to be on standby.”

The EMTs transferred the patient onto the bed. The young woman’s face was white. Her teeth were chattering, eyes wild.

“Dani,” Sara said. “I’m Dr. Linton. I’m going to take care of you. Can you tell me what happened?”

“C-c-car . . .” Dani could barely manage a whisper. “I w-woke up in the . . .”

Her teeth were chattering too hard for her to finish.

“That’s okay. Where does it hurt? Can you show me?”

Sara watched Dani reach toward her upper left abdomen. The EMTs had already placed a piece of gauze over the superficial laceration just below her left chest. There was more than that, though. Dani’s torso was slashed dark red where something, possibly the steering wheel, had hit her with force. Sara used her stethoscope, pressing it to the belly, then listening to both lungs.

She called out, “Bowel sounds are good. Dani, can you take a deep breath for me?”

There was a wheezing of labored air.

Sara told the room, “Pneumothorax on the left. Prep for a chest tube. I need a thoracostomy tray.”

Dani’s eyes tried to follow the flurry of movement. Cabinets were opened, trays were loaded up—drapes, tubing, Betadine, sterile gloves, scalpel, Lidocaine.

“Dani, it’s all right.” Sara leaned down, trying to pull the woman’s attention away from the chaos. “Look at me. Your lung is collapsed. We’re going to put in a tube to—”

“I d-didn’t . . .” Dani labored for breath. Her voice was barely audible over the din of noise. “I had to get away . . .”

“Okay.” Sara brushed back her hair, checking for signs of head trauma. There was a reason Dani had lost consciousness at the scene. “Does your head hurt?”

“Yes . . . it . . . I keep hearing ringing and . . .”

“All right.” Sara checked her pupils. The woman was clearly concussed. “Dani, can you tell me where it hurts the most?”

“H-he hurt me,” Dani said. “I think . . . I think he raped me.”

Sara felt a jolt of shock. The sounds in the room faded so that all she could hear was Dani’s strained voice.

“He drugged my drink . . .” Dani coughed as she tried to swallow. “I woke up and

he . . . he was on top of me . . . then I was in the car, but I don’t remember how . . . and . . .”

“Who?” Sara asked. “Who raped you?”

The woman’s eyelids started to flutter.

“Dani? Stay with me.” Sara cupped her hand to the woman’s face. Her lips were losing color. “I need that chest tube now.”

“Stop him . . .” Dani said. “Please . . . stop him.”

“Stop who?” Sara asked. “Dani? Dani?”

Dani’s eyes locked onto Sara’s, silently begging her to understand.

“Dani?”

Her eyelids started to flutter again. Then they stilled. Her head fell to the side.

“Dani?” Sara pressed her stethoscope to Dani’s chest. Nothing. The nineteen-year-old’s life was slipping away. Sara put her panic in another place, telling the room, “We’ve lost the heartbeat. Starting CPR.”

The respiratory therapist grabbed the Ambu bag and mask to start forcing air into the lungs. Sara interlaced her fingers and placed her palms over Dani’s heart. CPR was a stop-gap measure intended to manually push blood into the heart and up to the brain until they could hopefully shock the heart back into a regular rhythm. Sara pressed down into Dani’s chest with her full weight. There was a sickening crack as the ribs gave way.

“Shit!” Sara felt her emotions threaten to take over. She reined herself back in. “She has a flail chest. CPR is no good. We need to shock her.”

Johna had already brought over the crash cart. Sara could hear the defibrillator reaching full charge as the paddles were pressed to Dani’s limp body.

Sara held up her hands, keeping them away from the metal bed.

“Clear!” Johna pressed the buttons on the paddles.

Dani’s body lurched from three thousand volts of electricity aimed directly into her chest. The monitor blipped. They all waited the interminable few seconds to see if the heart restarted, but the line on the monitor flattened as the alarm wailed.

“Again,” Sara said.

Johna waited for the charge. Another shock. Another blip. Another flat line.

Sara ran through the options. No CPR. No shocking her. No cracking open her chest because there was nothing to crack. A flail chest was described as two or more contiguous ribs broken in two or more places, resulting in a destabilization in the chest wall that altered the mechanics of breathing.

From what Sara could tell, Dani Cooper’s second, third and fifth ribs had sustained multiple fractures from blunt force trauma. The sharp bones were free-floating inside her chest, capable of slicing into her heart and lungs. The nineteen-year-old’s chance of survival had dropped into the single digits.

All the noises that Sara had blocked out as she worked on Dani suddenly filled her brain. The useless hiss of oxygen. The grinding groan of the blood pressure cuff. The crinkling of PPE as they all silently played the diminished odds.

Someone turned

off the alarm.

“Okay.” Sara spoke the word to herself and no one else. She had a plan. She peeled off the gauze covering the laceration on Dani’s left side. She poured Betadine into the wound, letting it spill over like a fountain. “Eldin, tell me about the costal margin.”

“Uh—” Eldin watched Sara’s hands work as she slipped on a fresh pair of sterile gloves. “The costal margin is composed of the costal cartilage anteriorly around and up to the sternum. The eleventh and twelfth ribs float.”

“In general, they terminate about the mid-axillary line and within the muscular of the lateral wall. Right?”

“Right.”

Sara picked up a scalpel from the tray. She cut into the laceration, carefully incising the fatty layer down to the abdominal muscle. Then she cut through to the diaphragm to make a hole about the size of her fist.

She looked at Johna. The nurse’s lips were parted in surprise, but she nodded. If Dani had any chance of survival, this was it.

Sara reached her hand into the hole. The diaphragm muscle sucked around her wrist. Rib bones traced along the back of her knuckles like the keys of a xylophone. The lung had flattened to an airless balloon. The stomach and spleen were slick and supple. Sara closed her eyes, concentrating on the anatomy as she reached into Dani’s chest. The tips of her fingers brushed against the blood-filled sac of the heart. Carefully, Sara wrapped her hand around the organ. She looked at the monitor and squeezed.

The flatline jumped.

She squeezed again.

Another jump.

Sara kept pumping blood through the heart, flexing her fingers and thumb, forcing the rhythm into the normal cadence of life. Her eyes closed again as she listened for a beep from the monitor. She could feel the roadmap of arteries like a topographical drawing. Right coronary artery. Posterior descending artery. Right marginal artery. Left anterior descending artery. Circumflex artery.

Of all the organs in the body, the heart was the one that inspired the most emotion. Your heart could be broken or filled with love or joy, or it could do a weird little flip when you saw your favorite crush in the elevator. You covered your heart to pledge allegiance. You patted your hand over your heart to convey fealty or honesty or respect. Someone who was cruel might be called heartless. In the South, you said bless your heart to someone

who was not particularly bright. An act of kindness does your heart good. When Sara and Tessa were little, Tessa had often crossed her heart. She would steal Sara’s clothes or a CD or a book and swear that she didn’t do it—cross my heart, hope to die.

Sara wasn’t sure whether or not Dani Cooper would die, but she made a promise on the woman’s heart that she would do everything she could to stop the man who’d raped her.

 

Three Years Later1

“Dr. Linton.” Maritza Aguilar, the attorney for Dani Cooper’s family, walked toward the witness stand. “Can you tell us what happened next?”

Sara took a breath before saying, “I rode on the gurney up to the operating room so that I could continue manually pumping Dani’s heart. I was scrubbed in to the procedure, then the surgeons took over.”

“And after that?”

“I watched the surgery.” Sara blinked, and even three years later, she could still see Dani lying on the operating table. Eyes taped closed, tube coming out of her mouth, chest splayed open, white shards of ribs scattered inside the cavity like confetti. “The surgeons did everything they could, but Dani was too far gone. She was pronounced dead at approximately two forty-five that morning.”

“Thank you.” Maritza went back to her notes at the table. She started flipping through the pages. Her associate leaned over to whisper something. “Judge, if I could have a moment?”

“Quickly,” Judge Elaina Tedeschi said.

The courtroom went quiet but for jurors shifting in their chairs and the occasional cough or sneeze from the half-filled gallery. Sara took another deep breath. She’d already been on the witness stand for three hours. They’d just come back from the lunch break, and everyone was tired. Still, she kept her back straight, her head facing forward, eyes on the clock at the back of the room.

There was a reporter in the gallery typing on her phone, but Sara was doing her best to ignore the woman. She could not look at Dani’s parents because their grief was almost as crushing as their hope that something, anything, could give them a sense of closure. Nor could she look at the jury. Sara didn’t want to make eye contact with one of them and convey the wrong thing. The courtroom was hot and stuffy. Trials never moved as quickly or were as interesting as they appeared on TV. The medical facts could be dense and confusing. Sara needed the jury to focus and listen, not wonder why she had looked at them the wrong way.

This lawsuit wasn’t about Sara. It was about keeping the promise she had made to Dani Cooper. The man who had hurt her had to be stopped.

She let her gaze glance over Thomas Michael McAllister, IV. The twenty-two-year-old was sitting between his high-priced lawyers at the defense table. His parents, Mac and Britt McAllister, were directly behind him in the gallery. Per Judge Tedeschi’s instructions, Tommy was being referred to as the respondent rather than the defendant so that the jury was clear that this was a civil case and not a criminal trial. The stakes were not prison versus freedom but rather millions of dollars for the wrongful death of Daniella Cooper. Mac and Britt could well afford to pay, but there was something else at risk that even their enormous wealth couldn’t guarantee: their son’s good reputation.

So far, they’d done everything they could to make sure Tommy was protected, from hiring a publicist to shape the media narrative to retaining Douglas Fanning, a lawyer who was known as The Shark for his ability to eviscerate witnesses on the stand.

The trial was only two days in, and Fanning had already managed to keep out some of what he termed Tommy’s “youthful indiscretions,” as if every youth had been arrested at eleven years old for torturing

a neighbor’s dog, accused of rape their junior year of high school, and caught with a party-sized supply of MDMA in his backpack an hour before graduation. That’s what $2,500 an hour bought you: a predator turned into a choirboy.

Tommy was certainly dressed for the part, trading in the bespoke suit he’d been sporting in an About Town gossip column last year for an off-the-rack black suit with a muted, light-blue tie and a not-too-crisp white Oxford shirt—all likely selected by a jury consultant who for months had focus-grouped the most advantageous keywords and strategies, then worked closely with Douglas Fanning to select the best jurors, and was now running a shadow jury somewhere close to the courthouse that was presented with the same evidence to help the defense shape their approach.

Even with all that, there was still no hiding the arrogant tilt to Tommy McAllister’s chin. He had spent a lifetime in Atlanta’s most cloistered spaces. His great-grandfather, a surgeon, had not only pioneered early joint replacement techniques but had helped start what had become one of Atlanta’s major orthopedic hospitals. Tommy’s grandfather, a retired four-star general, had overseen infectious disease research at the Centers for Disease Control. Mac was one of the most respected cardiologists in the country. Britt had trained as an obstetrician. It was no surprise that Tommy was continuing the family business. He was about to enter his first year of medical school at Emory University.

He was also the man who had drugged and raped Dani Cooper.

At least that was Sara’s belief.

Tommy had known Dani Cooper most of his life. They had both come up in the same private schools, been members at the same country club, hung out in the same social circles, and at the time of Dani’s death, they were both enrolled in pre-med courses at the same university. The night that Dani had died, Tommy was seen arguing with her at a frat party. The discussion had been heated. He’d grabbed Dani by the arm. She’d wrenched away from him. No one could say what happened next, but it was Tommy’s $150,000 Mercedes Roadster that Dani was driving when she crashed into a parked ambulance outside the hospital. It was his sperm that was found inside her during the autopsy. It was Tommy McAllister who couldn’t provide an alibi for the hours between when Dani left the party and when she’d arrived at Grady. It was also Tommy McAllister who knew the intimate details that were included in the threatening texts that Dani had received the week before she’d died.

Unfortunately, the Fulton County prosecutor could only act on evidence, not belief. A criminal trial was decided on guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Sara would freely admit that there was doubt in this case. The frat party had been filled with other young men who were close to Dani. No one could contradict Tommy’s claim that the argument had been resolved. No one could contradict Tommy’s claim that Dani had asked to borrow his Mercedes. No one could contradict his claim that his sperm was inside of Dani because they’d had consensual sex two nights before she’d died.

No one could definitively say that Tommy left the party with Dani that night. Lots of people at the party had known the intimate details of Dani’s life. More importantly, no one could locate the burner phone that had sent the threatening texts.

Fortunately, a civil trial was decided on a preponderance of evidence rather than reasonable doubt. The Coopers had a lot of circumstantial evidence on their side. The wrongful death suit they had filed against Tommy McAllister asked for damages in the amount of $20 million. It was a hell of a lot of money, but they were not in it for the cash. Unlike Mac and Britt, getting the case to trial had cost them their life savings. The Coopers had refused all settlement offers because what they wanted, what they needed in order to make sense of their daughter’s tragic death, was for someone to be held publicly accountable.

Sara had warned them that they weren’t likely to win. Maritza had told them the same thing. They both knew how the system worked, and it rarely favored the people who didn’t have money. More importantly, the entire case hinged on whether or not the jury found Sara to be a credible witness. The trauma bay had been chaotic the night that Dani Cooper had died. Sara was the only one who’d heard the young woman say that she had been drugged and raped. Because of the nature of the case, that meant Sara’s personal life would be put under a microscope. To break her testimony, they had to break her character. Everything that she had ever done, everything that had ever happened to her, was going to be dissected, analyzed and—most distressingly for Sara—criticized.

She wasn’t sure what terrified her most: having the darkest parts of her life exposed in an open courtroom or breaking her promise to Dani.

“Dr. Linton.” Maritza was finally ready to proceed. She walked back to the stand, holding a sheet of paper between her hands. She didn’t offer it to Sara. She kept it close to her chest, trying to build suspense.

The trick worked.

Sara could feel the jury’s attention coming into focus when Maritza said, “I’d like to take a step back for a second, if you don’t mind? Review something from earlier today?”

Sara nodded, then, for the court reporter’s benefit, said, “Okay.”

“Thank you.” Maritza turned, walking past the jury box. Five women, four men, a typical Fulton County mixture of white, Black, Asian, and Hispanic. Sara could see their eyes following the lawyer, some studying her face, some trying to scrutinize the sheet of paper.

Maritza took her yellow legal pad off the table and placed it on the podium. She had her pen in her hand. She slipped on her glasses and looked down at her notes.

She wasn’t Douglas Fanning, but she was damn good at her job. Maritza didn’t need a jury consultant to tell her how to dress any more than Sara did. They were both women who’d come up in male-dominated

fields and had both figured out that, for better or worse, their appearance mattered more to a jury than what came out of their mouths. Hair pulled back to show they were no-nonsense. Light make-up to show they were still making an effort. Glasses on to show intelligence. Modest skirt and matching blazer to show they were still feminine. Heels no more than two inches high to show they weren’t trying too hard.

Show, show, show.

Maritza looked up at Sara, saying, “Before the lunchbreak, you walked us through your education and credentials, but to remind the jury, you’re both a board-certified pediatrician and a board-certified medical examiner, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And the night Dani Cooper was brought into the emergency department, you were employed by the Grady Healthcare System as the attending pediatrician, but currently, today, you are employed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as a coroner, correct?”

“Technically, my title is medical examiner.” Sara allowed herself to look at the jury. They were the only people in the courtroom whose opinions mattered. “In all but four of Georgia’s counties, the office of coroner is an elected position that doesn’t require a medical license. If foul play is suspected, the county coroner will generally refer the death investigation to the GBI’s Medical Examiner’s Office. ...