Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-one
Fluorescent lights blast onto my face. I blink, groggily opening my eyes wider. The world is bright and spinning….
I focus. I’m alive. I raise my hand. Weird white bracelets on my wrist. I’m in a fabric gown. There’s a crinkling sensation beneath me as I move.
I struggle to sit up but my ribs feel like they’re pressing into my organs. The pain takes my breath away.
A chair scrapes against the floor. Someone squeezes my hand. “You are okay,” Khala whispers. “You are okay.”
The hospital door swings open. A man in a doctor’s coat walks inside. “Glad to see you’re up.”
“Where am I?”
Khala’s eyes stay on me. “You are at Decatur Medical, beta.”
“How…how long have I been out? Gertie,” I gasp.
“Don’t worry about Gertie. Darcy is taking care of her,” Khala says. “Right now, you need to rest.”
“What happened?” My head throbs like a thousand nails are pressing through my skull.
“You were in a car accident,” says the doctor. “All things considered, you’re fine. You have a few bruises and a cracked rib. A mild concussion. It could have been much worse.”
The wedding. Logan. The spoofed email. The million different emotions that had been running through me come flooding back.
“I was leaving early from a wedding,” I tell them. “My car started going haywire.” I explain how the wiper fluid sprayed. The music on full blast. My brakes, suddenly useless. “It was like my car got…hacked? There was nothing I could do. I swerved to avoid an oncoming car. Hit a fence. The rest is a complete blank.”
The doctor jots something down on his tablet.
“The car is totaled, isn’t it?” I murmur.
“Don’t worry about your vehicle. You are okay, that is what matters,” Khala says. “But…” She looks at the doctor.
My heart skitters. “Just say it.”
“Your toxicology report came back,” he says. “They found high levels of oxycodone in your system.”
“The painkiller?” I’ve never taken prescription painkillers in my life. “I didn’t take any oxycodone.”
“Any ideas how it showed up in your system?” the doctor asks.
“I don’t know!” A stab of irritation passes through me. Are they looking at me this somberly because they think they’ve stumbled onto an addiction?
Before I can say more, the hospital door swings open. Azar sweeps inside. His hair is sticking out every which way. He’s breathing heavily. Perspiration dots his forehead. He rushes to my bedside.
“Azar,” the doctor says. “You’re not on call this weekend.”
“Your khala’s messages,” he says breathlessly. “They all came in at once when I got to the…There was no signal. Shit. Nura. What happened? Are you okay?”
“Your colleague here is asking if I have an opioid addiction. Apparently my blood work shows that my body was full of drugs.”
“Drugs?” Azar looks at the doctor. “How did you find drugs in her system?”
“Shannon ran the report,” the doctor says. “I’ll have her bring over the full breakdown.”
“Maybe I was roofied.” I think of Logan. It seems impossible, but this entire situation makes no sense.
“The labs came back negative for Rohypnol,” the doctor says.
“What about gamma hydroxybutyrate?” Azar asks. “We don’t routinely test for it, but it’s a growing threat.”
“GHB? You think?”
“It would have the same effect as Rohypnol. We need to test ASAP, though. It leaves the system quickly.”
“I’ll put an order in.” The doctor makes a note on his tablet. “The more we can rule out, the better.”
“Rule it all out,” I say. “I didn’t take anything!”
“Ms. Khan, they had to treat you for an overdose,” the doctor says. “Your injuries aren’t too bad, but the levels of drugs in your system…had a Good Samaritan not pulled over and called an ambulance, you would not have survived.”
An overdose? I lean back on the raised bed trying to make sense of the doctor’s words. Did I take a sip of anything while Logan was at my table? I can’t recall, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But I didn’t feel drugged while driving. Did I? Tears prick my eyes. What else happened? Why can’t I remember?
The doctor chats with Azar briefly before he excuses himself. The door closes behind him. I try to still my breathing. Both Khala and Azar watch me worriedly.
Azar.
The memory returns in a sudden burst. We had an argument. A horrible fight before the crash.
“Your trip…”
“I’m so sorry, Nur.” His voice breaks. “I shouldn’t have left.”
“Was the car behaving strangely earlier?” Khala asks. “When you were driving to the wedding, was it acting up?”
“It was working completely fine,” I say as a nurse comes in. She draws blood from my left arm.
I try to remember the last bits of the evening. Logan showed me the spoofed email. Someone was posing as me. It’s connected to whatever happened. It has to be. I need to reach out to Logan. I need to see that email. When the nurse leaves, I turn to Khala.
“Where’s my phone?” I ask her. “Did they get it out of the car?”
Khala hands me my purse from the counter. I retrieve my device. The screen is cracked, but it works. I type in my passcode. There’s a sharp rapping at the hospital room door.
“It better not be the police again,” Khala says.
Azar’s expression darkens as he goes to answer the door. I hear a muffled conversation. Stilted. Angry. He steps back. Two police officers enter the room. Officer Kirkpatrick, I read on his lapel. The other officer is a woman, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Officer Delray.
“Glad to see you’re better,” Officer Kirkpatrick says.
“This is not a good time,” Azar says.
“It’s fine, Azar,” I tell him. I understand his protectiveness. I am tired—the ache in my ribs is growing sharper. But the sooner I answer their questions, the sooner they can figure out what is going on. Who is behind this.
“We understand you’ve had quite an ordeal,” Delray says.
“I was drugged. Can’t figure out how quite yet.” I wonder if Logan poisoned an appetizer. I have no idea how drugging someone works, but it doesn’t sound outside the realm of possibilities. “And someone did something to my car, which caused it to crash.”
The officers exchange glances. “We understand you had a high amount of oxy in your system,” Kirkpatrick says.
“I don’t take any pain medicine other than the occasional Advil, much less oxycodone.”
“There are street names for oxy as well,” he says. “Roxy? Perc? OC?” He rattles off a few more. “Do any of those sound familiar?”
I look at them, unable to speak. I thought they were here to get answers. To help me. Their questions and demeanor imply otherwise. “I did not ingest any illegal substance.”
They do not reply.
“Not sure if you’ve had a chance to check out my car,” I continue. It appears I have to do their work for them. “There must be some evidence that it was tampered with. Someone did this to me. The drugging. The crash. All of it.”
They still don’t speak. It’s a tactic I’m familiar with. I do the same during my intake sessions with clients when I need them to tell me things they’d prefer not to share, like sensitive family information or indiscretions they’re not proud of. The longer I let the awkward silence linger, the more likely they’ll rush to fill the void with the information I need. That’s what they’re doing to me.
Fine. I don’t need them. I’m not a damsel in distress. I have my own team. We’ll get to the bottom of this one way or another.
“Ms. Khan,” says Kirkpatrick. “We are looking into your accident, but we’re here for a slightly different query. It’s about Lena Kamdar and Tanvir Bashir. We were hoping you could tell us where you were the afternoon of June thirteenth.”
“Hold up,” Azar interjects. “As I told you at the door, she’s been in a traumatic accident. She is still recovering. The last thing she needs is you interrogating her.”
“Why are you interrogating me?” I ask slowly.
Kirkpatrick pulls out his notepad. “We’re trying to piece together the day they went missing so we can have the most comprehensive portrait we can. You worked directly with Lena and Tanvir, didn’t you?”
“I set them up through my matchmaking agency,” I tell him. “But I wasn’t with them the day they went missing. If I’d known anything useful, I’d have reported it.”
“You were following along quite closely, though,” he says. “We heard you were listening on a police scanner.”
“I have private investigators on staff. We were concerned about the disappearance and wanted to help.”
“I understand,” Delray says. “That’s what we’re trying to do. Get a full timeline of the day.”
I suppress an eye roll, but if they need this information to move along, there’s no harm in telling them where I was. “I was probably at home getting ready for the event.” I check my agenda on my phone. “And then around six o’clock I was at my aunt’s home, getting jewelry for the evening.”
“Do you have any way for us to verify that?”
“I can verify it,” Khala says sharply.
“My phone would also confirm where I was.”
“Can we see it?” Kirkpatrick asks quickly. Too quickly.
“And the oxycodone,” Delray asks. “Where did you procure it?”
“I told you already.” I grit my teeth. “I don’t take oxy. What conclusion are you trying to reach here?”
Delray glances at Kirkpatrick. “The reason we are inquiring is that the couple was forced into the back of their own vehicle at gunpoint. They were ordered to take oxycodone.”
Blood rushes to my head. They had the same drugs in their system as I did?
“But…Farhan did it…. He kidnapped them.”
“We are trying to determine if he was a solo actor or if he had assistance.”
The way they look at me…
“Wait. Are you implying I assisted him?”
They do not reply.
“Do you hear yourselves?” Azar glares at the officers. “She’s going to overtake two people? She doesn’t even own a gun.”
“We didn’t say she did anything.”
“That’s enough now. Time for you to go,” Azar tells them.
“Before we leave, we had one last question,” Delray says.
She reaches into a bag and draws out a silver bracelet etched with flowers.
My bracelet.
“Does this look familiar to you?” Delray asks.
“Wh-where did you get that?” I feel woozy. I move to reach for it, but Delray takes a step back and shakes her head. “We’re holding on to this. It’s evidence.”
“Evidence of what ?” Panic bubbles inside of me. That’s my mother’s bracelet. They can’t just have it.
“Ms. Khan, we discovered this not far from where Lena and Tanvir were held. Lena’s mother recognized it as yours,” says Delray. “We simply want to clear things up.”
I know our relationship is a business one. But for her mother to have cast suspicion my way is gutting.
“This doesn’t make sense.” My voice breaks. “What is going on?”
I try to sit up. The purse falls from my lap and tumbles to the checkerboard floor. My keys, stray receipts, everything falls out. Including a pill bottle. White tablets tinged with blue fan out on the vinyl floor.
“How did those get in there?” Kirkpatrick says wryly.
“They’re not mine.” I want my voice to come out strong, authoritative, but it’s a whisper. A whimper.
“You wouldn’t mind if we checked—” Kirkpatrick kneels down, but Khala juts in front of them.
“She would certainly mind.”
“Now, hold up one second,” he begins.
“Absolutely not,” she snaps. “Your accusations are outright defamatory, and they end right now.”
“We’re just trying to get to the bottom of whatever is going on. We’re on the same side,” Kirkpatrick says.
“Does she have to answer any more questions from you?”
He sighs. “She does not.”
“You are on a fishing expedition, and I suggest you cast your lures elsewhere.”
“Ma’am,” Officer Kirkpatrick begins. “I could just—”
“My name is Shameem Mirza,” she says firmly. The way she looks at those officers. Her back straight. Her eyes shining. Tears spring to my eyes. That’s her. The woman I knew so well all those years, there she is.
“You both are invited to leave.” She points to the door. “She will not be speaking to either of you again without a lawyer present.”
I wait until they’re gone before I sink into the bed.
“Oh, my sweet Nura.” Khala grips my hand. “Don’t worry. You will be just fine in no time…”
She keeps talking, but it’s hard to focus on her words. I want to thank Khala. To talk to both her and Azar in order to make sense of this madness. But the two officers have taken all my energy. As they exit the room, the doctor reenters. Words float in and out. GHB…three times the prescribed levels… I can’t hold on to any of this as exhaustion roots within me and sleep takes over.