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“We know about the deaths here at UMC. And Tulane. And the other hospitals.”
She grew still. “And?”
“And we want answers.” Cassie lowered her hands slowly. “We spoke with your mother. We know what happened with your sister.”
Silence hung in the air.
“Did you know some coma patients feel pain just like the rest of us?” Heather’s eyes were wild. “She was suffering. And my parents would’ve kept her alive for years if they could. Until all the money ran out. No one deserves to live that way.”
Cassie’s mind split in two, exploring each possibility simultaneously. On the one hand, she could see Heather as she always had. Devastated by the loss of her sister. Frustrated that she had no one to blame but a faulty machine. A mere glitch that took her sister away. Angry and upset, she knew Daisy wasn’t the only one to have suffered like that. She began volunteering to get closer to the patients. She figured out this was happening at more than one hospital, so she created different personas to gather more data. All she had to do was put it together, and she’d be able to prove liability. It would shock the nation to hear what had gone on in New Orleans, right under everyone’s noses.
But there was a second path, one that hadn’t previously occurred to Cassie. The loss of her sister had devastated Heather, but the idea of her sister suffering for years, unable to express her discomfort, was even more traumatizing. Frustrated, she broke the machine, feeling as though she had done her sister a favor. She left home, knowing her parents would never understand. Heather didn’t want anyone else to suffer like that, so she began volunteering to get closer to the patients. She created different personas so she wouldn’t bring attention to herself. Thanks to her parents’ money, she even got a separate apartment, so if anyone came looking for her, they’d never know her true identity. She could do anything she wanted, right under everyone’s noses.
The true irony here was the Ghost Doctor had been an unwitting accomplice. Cassie had yet to solve that mystery, but Dr. Cohen had pointed her toward the true culprit. She had shown Cassie who Heather really was. They had spent so much time looking into the doctor that it had allowed Heather to claim another victim.
They had wondered if Dr. Cohen was an angel of death when they should’ve asked the same of Heather. All the pieces slid into place and Cassie remembered stories of people like Donald Harvey, who had spent years killing patients, claiming he was euthanizing them for their own good. Did Heather know anything about him? Had she studied his methods?
“It was you.” Cassie didn’t bother asking it as a question. She couldn’t deny the truth now. “You killed all those people. Why?”
“No one deserves to live that way,” Heather repeated. She didn’t bother trying to get away. She stood tall. She believed in her cause. “They were in pain. I was helping them.”
Whether Jason had come to the same conclusion as Cassie or if he understood what she was implying, Cassie didn’t know. But he was standing right beside her, his voice deadly quiet. “Do you even know who they were? Did you know anything about them?”
“I remember all of them.” She was defiant. “I knew everything about them.”
“Jasmine Broussard. Did you kill her?”
Heather looked away. But not before they saw the recognition in her eyes. And the fear.
Jason stepped closer. “She was my baby cousin.” His voice broke. He recovered. It hardened into steel, and Cassie’s heart shattered. “She would’ve survived that surgery if it weren’t for you. She would’ve had years left to live.”
“Years full of suffering.” Heather didn’t meet his eyes. “She didn’t deserve that.”
“You don’t get to make that call.” Jason’s voice was steady, and that scared Cassie even more. She wanted him to yell, to be angry, to explode the way she wanted to explode. Somehow, this was worse. It was like he was turning in on himself, shutting everything down. And something deep inside her feared he’d never open up again. “You took her choice away. How could you ever think that was right?”
Cassie had been in this position before, wanting to understand the mind of a killer. Jason had said he understood evil, but this was something else. In her own twisted mind, Heather thought she was doing the right thing. Her sister’s comatose state broke something inside of her, and when she put herself back together, she did it all wrong.
“You know what it feels like to lose someone,” Jason continued. “You know how a piece of you dies with them. You know that, and yet you’ve done that to dozens of families. How could you?”
For the first time since they’d confronted her, Heather didn’t have an answer. She opened her mouth to respond, but before they could hear whatever excuse came next, the door at the top of the stairs opened.
“—heard voices down here.”
Two figures stopped at the top and looked down at them. One was a nurse, her face pallid and weary. The other was a security guard, his face rich brown and startled.
“That’s her.” The woman extended a finger to point at Heather. “That’s the volunteer I kept seeing outside the room. And I’ve seen her other times, too. Last month, they asked her about another patient who died. She’d been the last one to see him alive, too.”
Heather didn’t hesitate. She threw an elbow at Cassie’s face with the intention of either breaking her nose or, at the very least, knocking her off her feet. What she didn’t expect was Cassie’s quick reaction time. Years of finding herself in these kinds of situations and a few self-defense classes had paid off.
Instead of enduring a bloody nose, Cassie blocked the elbow with her palm. She pushed back at the same time she put a leg behind the other woman. The momentum threw Heather off-balance, sending her sprawling back into the wall instead of down the stairs. Jason was there in an instant, making sure Heather couldn’t escape. The security guard already had his cuffs out by the time he hit the bottom step.
Cassie looked down at the woman huddled in the corner. She pitied her for everything she had been through with her sister, even understood the way her own mind had twisted her drive to make sure no one had suffered the way her sister had. But none of that made it okay.
Jason, Cassie, and the nurse followed them back up the stairs to the sixth floor. The security guard led Heather to the elevator. He would call the authorities as soon as they hit the first floor. Cassie and Jason would have to stick around to tell them what she had confessed, but now that they caught her, it wouldn’t take too much digging to find the paper trail. She had thrived on living just under the radar, but now that the spotlight was on her, she had nowhere to go.
“I feel bad for her parents,” Jason said.
“I can’t imagine how Lily will feel once she learns what Heather did.”
