Chapter 3 - What the Police FoundBy sunrise, half the county seemed to know something was happening at Greg Dalton’s property.
He fought them hard enough that Officer Torres later told me it took three men to get his arms behind his back.
When I heard the shouting from the hallway, Leo covered his ears.
“Is he coming back?”
“No,” I said.
It was the first promise I made him.
I intended to keep it.
Within minutes, our quiet emergency department changed completely.
Hospital security locked the rear entrance.
Maya called social services.
I requested pediatric surgery, infectious disease, and radiology.
And because Leo had made a statement suggesting someone might have deliberately harmed him, our administrator contacted police.
Detective Rosa Martinez arrived twenty-three minutes later.
She was forty-something, calm, sharp-eyed, and had the controlled manner of someone who understood that frightened children noticed everything.
She didn’t question Leo immediately.
That mattered to me.
Instead, she stood beside the nurses’ station while I explained what I had found.
“You actually felt movement?” she asked.
“Twice.”
“Could it have been vascular?”
“No.”
“Muscle spasm?”
“No.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m trying not to think until imaging tells me something.”
She studied my face.
“That means you’re thinking something bad.”
“It means there are possibilities I don’t want to say in front of a nine-year-old.”
She accepted that.
Greg had been placed in a security room at the opposite end of the department.
He had stopped demanding antibiotics.
Now he wanted a lawyer.
That alone proved nothing.
But what bothered Martinez was how quickly he had tried to flee.
What bothered me was Leo’s sentence.
Greg said I wasn’t supposed to wake up.
I returned to Room Four.
Maya had found Leo a hospital blanket and a carton of apple juice.
He hadn’t touched the juice.
“You hungry?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“When did you eat last?”
A shrug.
“Dinner?”
Another shrug.
“Breakfast?”
“I had cereal.”
“Yesterday?”
He nodded.
Maya and I exchanged a glance.
I sat beside him.
“Leo, we’re going to take pictures of the inside of your face. It won’t hurt. I need you to stay very still.”
“Are you cutting them out?”
“Not yet.”
His expression told me more than his words had.
“You know something is inside?”
He nodded.
“How?”
“I saw one.”
Maya stopped writing.
I kept my voice even.
“Where?”
“On my pillow.”
“When?”
“Two days ago.”
“What did it look like?”
Leo swallowed.
“White. Small.”
“How small?”
He held his fingers about half an inch apart.
“It moved like a worm.”
Maya looked away for a second.
I felt cold despite the warm room.
There are medical conditions most people never think about until they see them.
Parasitic infestations.
Foreign-body reactions.
Larval infections.
Some are rare in the United States but not impossible, especially after exposure to animals, contaminated tissue, or untreated wounds.
But none of that explained Greg’s terror.
“Did you tell your stepfather?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
Leo’s fingers tightened around the blanket.
“He said I was lying.”
“And then?”
“He made me sleep in the shed.”
“For seeing something on your pillow?”
Leo didn’t answer.
“Why did he make you sleep there?”
“Because I opened the freezer.”
Something shifted in my chest.
“What freezer?”
“The one in his shed.”
I heard Detective Martinez enter behind me.
She stayed near the wall.
I didn’t turn around.
“What was inside?”
Leo looked toward her.
Martinez crouched low enough that she wasn’t towering over him.
“You’re not in trouble,” she said.
Leo looked at me again.
“Bags.”
“What kind of bags?”
“Black ones.”
“Did you open one?”
“No.”
“What did you see?”
“There was a hole in one.”
His lower lip trembled.
“And something inside was moving.”
The CT technician arrived before we could go further.
Leo grabbed my sleeve.
“You’re coming?”
“Yes.”
I accompanied him to radiology.
The scan took less than ten minutes.
The images appeared on the monitor section by section.
Bone.
Soft tissue.
Sinuses.
Then the radiologist, Dr. Hannah Price, leaned closer to the screen.
“What the hell?”
My stomach tightened.
“What?”
She enlarged the image.
Along Leo’s cheek, beneath inflamed tissue, were several narrow irregular channels.
Tracks.
And inside one of them was a small elongated structure.
Price stared at it.
“That’s not a spider bite.”
“No.”
She switched views.
There were more.
At least four distinct foreign bodies.
Maybe five.
One near the cheek.
Two along the jaw.
Another close enough to the lower eyelid that my pulse jumped.
Price turned toward me.
“Claire…”
“I know.”
“If those are what they look like, we need surgery.”
“I’ve already called.”
She pulled up another section.
Then stopped.
“Wait.”
“What?”
“There’s something else.”
A tiny metallic-looking density sat near Leo’s jawline.
Unlike the others, it was straight.
Manufactured.
“What is that?” I asked.
Price magnified it.
“Could be debris.”
“From what?”
“No idea.”
The pediatric surgeon arrived soon after.
Dr. Ethan Cole had operated on everything from appendicitis to gunshot wounds during his fifteen years at St. Catherine’s.
He examined the images in silence.
“We take him upstairs,” he said. “Remove what we safely can, culture everything, biopsy the tissue.”
“What do you think they are?”
“Larvae.”
Even though I expected the answer, hearing it made the room colder.
“Can they get near his eye?”
“Yes.”
“Brain?”
“Not from what I’m seeing.”
That was the first good news of the night.
Then Martinez appeared at the door.
Her expression told me it wouldn’t last.
“We just ran Greg Dalton.”
“And?”
“He’s not supposed to be living with Leo.”
“Why?”
“Because he has a prior child-endangerment order from another state.”
I stared at her.
“His wife knew?”
“We’re trying to locate Leo’s mother.”
“Where is she?”
“That’s the problem.”
Martinez lowered her voice.
“According to Greg, she’s visiting her sister.”
“And according to the sister?”
“She hasn’t seen her in eight months.”
I looked through the glass at Leo lying quietly on the stretcher.
A nine-year-old with something alive beneath his skin.
A stepfather trying to flee.
A missing mother.
And a locked freezer in a shed full of bags.
“What’s in that shed?” I whispered.
May you like
Martinez looked directly at me.
“We’re about to find out.”
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