Fear

FORTY-EIGHT

Groote started calling as soon as his cell phone got a signal.

He first called Amanda’s hospital in Orange, considering carefully what he would say if Amanda was truly gone, sweating, thinking, Please let her be there, for all my sins, God, don’t punish her, let her be there.

The conversation took five minutes. Doctor Warner was not available, but the kind-voiced woman in administration told him the transfer had gone without a hitch, and she hoped Amanda enjoyed the new hospital in Phoenix.

‘Gosh, I left the hospital’s number at my hotel. Do you have it?’ Groote said.

Of course she did.

‘Phoenix,’ Nathan said when Groote told them what the woman had said. ‘Dodd found me at a hospital in Phoenix.’

It lifted Groote’s hopes, and his hand shook as he dialed. Miles took the phone from him, dialed the number, handed the phone back to him.

Man, Groote thought, don’t be nice to me, it’s gonna make it harder if I have to kill you. He thought he had been clever in pulling them in with him, but now – the shock of battle fading – he knew they outnumbered him and he didn’t like the idea that he could lose control of the group.

The Phoenix hospital had no record of an Amanda Groote, or of any new juvenile patient being transferred to them in the last two weeks.

‘Please check again. Please.’ Groote waited and the woman checked again.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

He clicked the phone off. ‘She’s not there. Dodd lied to her hospital, falsified the records.’

‘You could call every psychiatric hospital in the country,’ Celeste said. ‘We can download a list, work the phones.’

‘You’d help me, Mrs. Brent?’ Groote said.

‘Not you. I’d help your kid.’

‘If Dodd normally lurks in a back corner of the Pentagon,’ Miles said, ‘he doesn’t have to rely on public hospitals. He could have a secret clinic or a safe house to hide Amanda. She’s not even necessarily in a hospital.’

‘She’s not,’ Nathan said. ‘Dodd couldn’t risk putting her in a hospital where she might give incriminating details to another patient.’

‘Give me Dodd’s phone,’ Miles said. ‘Let me check the call log. Might help us reach someone who works for Dodd.’

Groote handed him the phone.

Miles clicked, checked, swore under his breath. ‘No calls. The phone’s been programmed not to record the numbers.’

Groote pounded his fist against the driver’s wheel.

‘Take it easy,’ Miles said. ‘You’re no good to Amanda too rattled to think.’

‘I’ll take you all to Orange County, like Mrs. Brent wanted,’ Groote said. ‘Then I’m getting on a flight to Austin. We’re square. I get Frost, I’ll call you and let you know I have it. But getting it, I don’t need your help.’

‘Actually, you might,’ Celeste said. ‘I know someone who can help us find Sorenson and Amanda. A friend of mine.’ She laughed, a brittle, nervous sound. ‘I told him I was too afraid to go on Oprah with him – wait till he hears what I’ve been doing the past two days.’