Page 74 of Thorn

“She’s asleep?” Lynx asked

“She’s not responding to me. It doesn’t look like sleep. It looks like a cage fight.” Thorn’s computer was open and resting on the counter. He spun the monitor, so Lynx could see.

Blankets had been duck taped to the safety bars of Juliette’s bed, and the blankets and top sheet removed as she fought against whatever demons were chasing her.

It was hard to watch.

He spun the computer back to talk to his support team.

“We’re in a better place than we were just a few hours ago.” Lynx’s voice was pitched to soothe. “We have a better handle on what’s going on.”

Thorn wasn’t really in the mood to be mollified. He wanted to know what was happening to Juliette’s body. With all this thrashing, they’d even taken the IV away.

When Thorn had asked about something to help her rest, the doctor said that if she was in detox, adding something to her system might just be the worst thing he could do. He said let her ride it out.

“Ride it out” sounded like balancing a surf board on a beautiful wave.

What he saw, she was riding a bucking bronco, ready to be thrown.

One of his buddies from back in his SEAL days got on pain meds after an explosion took part of his foot. For the sake of his brand-new baby girl, his buddy decided he had to get away from the pills. He’d become addicted. His fellow operators went deep out into the middle of nowhere, hid the keys to the truck, and watched him go through hell. Tremors, sweating, nausea, delirium, and depression. A deep, dark void of depression. They kept him there for three weeks.

It was one thing to watch a SEAL fight his demons. It was a whole other ballgame to watch Juliette face this down alone.

Thorn rubbed a hand over his face. “Good. Let’s do this fast. This case seems to be dynamic. I have no idea how long I’ll have a lull.” If he could call this a lull. He remembered back to the dream where he’d been doing the fancy footwork to stay upright on the quickly rotating Earth. And he couldn’t say that had been far off. “Start with the X-rays and blood work.”

Nutsbe did a split screen. Now, Lynx took up the right-hand side, and Nutsbe’s image was talking from the left, though both of his teammates were sitting in the Panther Force war room back at Iniquus Headquarters. “Gage and Thorn met with Polla and Habiba. They both said they had a sister with whom they’d had no contact in years,” Nutsbe said.

Thorn’s gut tightened. “Name?”

“Arya Khouri.” Lynx typed it onto the screen, so he could see the spelling. “Dr. Arya Khouri.”

“Her specialty was audiology?” Thorn asked.

“In a way,” Lynx said. “Arya was studying subsonic vibrations to understand large mammal communications.”

“So elephants and whales?” Thorn leaned his hips into the wall.

“Exactly. So the why of the X-ray − the pictures that Polla and Habiba had of their sister don’t match Juliette’s photographs. The computer analysis gives us only a moderate chance that these are the same women. Juliette has the same coloring as Arya. We speculated that perhaps she’d changed her appearance with plastic surgery.”

“Perhaps with the accident, she needed facial reconstruction,” Thorn speculated.

“That had been exactly my thought,” Lynx said. “This woman’s nose is different than Arya’s − straighter and more slender, her cheekbones are more prominent, her teeth shaped differently. We gave the X-rays to a plastic surgeon to evaluate for us. He said that the work was not indicative of a trauma event or reconstructive in nature, but that these were voluntary procedures.”

Thorn walked over and looked down at Juliette’s face. “Do you think Juliette wanted to change her looks for aesthetics’ sake, or do you think she was trying to disguise her identity?”

Lynx’s voice was behind him. “Again, I don’t know enough right now to answer that. I can also tell you that the scar on her head is just that – a scar on her head. The plastic surgeon said that it looks like it was created on purpose as if cut with a scalpel then sewn up again. There is no skeletal damage to her skull. She didn’t have brain surgery.”

“So who’s lying here?” Thorn turned and walked back to his place against the wall. “She could well be Arya,” Thorn said, “but we’re not sure?”

“Not a hundred percent,” Nutsbe confirmed. “Now, Honey telephoned his wife. Since she works with animal migration in the Ngorongoro region, he thought that she might know something about another female scientist interested in elephants.”

“Yeah.” Thorn crossed his arms over his chest and leaned his hips back against the wall. “I’d imagine that was a close-knit group of scientists. Did Meg know Arya?”

“Yes,” Nutsbe said. “They’d been quite friendly. But Meg hasn’t heard from Arya in years.”

“Because?”

“Meg is frequently out in the bush, so she’s not always in contact,” Lynx said. “Meg speculated that probably Arya had lost funding, so she had to stop her field research and was teaching at a university somewhere. More interestingly, Meg said that the last she heard about Arya Khouri was when she was supposed to go to court to testify against the U.S. Navy. She remembered enough of the details that I was able to find it on the docket. Arya Khouri’s documents were admitted into court. She was slated as an expert witness, but she was never called to the stand. It’s on my list for tomorrow to get in touch with the lawyers and find out why.”

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