Killer Move

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The hospital entrance was ringed with ambulances. There were three news crews in position, too, with a reporter I recognized from WWSB standing to one side talking seriously to the camera. I swerved to avoid all this and drove into the main parking lot, finding a space on the far side. It was only after I’d turned off the engine that I processed the fact that my hands were covered in Emily’s blood. My shirt, too.

I got my shirt off and wiped as best I could. It wasn’t good enough. I wrenched myself over the seat, found a sweatshirt in the back, the one I used after the gym. I put that on and then tracked down a half bottle of old, warm mineral water under the passenger seat. Steph was always on my case about not remembering to throw the things in the trash. I was glad of it now. I got out of the car and deployed the water carefully, using the blood-stained shirt to scrub. Some blood had dried under my nails and I couldn’t get it out, but I soon decided I’d spent enough time. Only then did I realize there was blood down my trousers, too. I seemed incapable of seeing anything that wasn’t right in front of my face. And maybe not just recently, either.

I couldn’t do anything about the pants. I’d just have to hope that no one noticed. I shoved the gun into the footwell and dropped the shirt onto it, folding it so the bloodstains didn’t show. I knew I needed to get rid of the weapon, but also felt that I had to do it properly—it would now have my fingerprints on it, making it even easier for Barclay to tell bizarre lies about me.

Usually there’s a crew of die-hard smokers ganged up around the side entrance of hospitals, but either Sarasota Memorial operated a shoot-on-sight policy or they’d migrated around the front to rubberneck current events. On the way up from the house I’d tuned to local radio news but learned little I didn’t already know. One dead from gunfire, two seriously wounded, all other injuries sustained while members of the public tried to escape from danger that would never have even come their way if they’d just sat tight. The police were not yet releasing the names of the dead and wounded. I wondered who was holding the fort down there, with Hallam dead and Barclay focusing on a different business. I considered calling the news station and telling them to send someone to my house, but threw the idea away. I didn’t care what happened about all that. I cared only about the woman inside the building I was running toward.

The ground floor was in barely contained chaos. More newspeople. More paramedics. A lot of people who were presumably friends or relatives of either long-term or recent inhabitants. Raised voices, lots of people talking on cell phones. I dodged into the thickest part of the crowd, hoping the bodies would cover the state of my clothes, trying not to look like the only person with a clear mission. It was slow going, and when I finally got close to the junction near where the bank of elevators stood, I saw I had a further problem. I swore, the crack in my voice startling people nearby.

There were cops all over the corridor. They seemed to be there to limit access to the elevators—presumably to stop newspeople from getting up to the ICU. The cops looked harried and stretched. I assumed these were Sarasota cops, not directly tied to Barclay, but couldn’t be sure. It could have been my imagination, but I thought I saw one of them scanning the crowds, looking for someone in particular. Maybe me. Maybe not.

I faded back into the mass of bodies. I was buffeted by the crowd meanwhile, pushed diagonally back into the hallway I’d just come along. More in hope than expectation I got out my phone and speed-dialed Steph’s cell. I’d called her room before, but maybe . . .

No reply. I turned and started pushing back the other way, seized by an idea.

I found a stairwell back near the side entrance, with flights going up and down. Nobody was guarding it. I didn’t imagine it would be long before the cops had the sense to plug this hole, so I ran up the stairs as fast as I could.

I burst out of the doors on the third floor and ran along the corridor. I blew straight into the reception area I’d visited that morning—dropping the pace down to fast walk, but still moving fast. There were a lot of doctors and nurses, people talking in hushed tones. Presumably most of the injured were up here in the ICU.

I heard someone else say—“The shooter. Thirty seconds ago. Crash team’s coming up.”

Through the white doors on the other side of the room it was quieter, a few people standing looking through windows in various degrees of unhappy. I ran to the end and yanked open the door to Steph’s room.

The bed was empty.

It was empty and in disarray, however, and the room didn’t look like it had been cleared in preparation for a new patient. Chanting the word no under my breath over and over, I darted across and checked the cabinet by the bed. Medicines, a spare gown. And Stephanie’s purse.

So where was she?

Had someone got here before I did?

I couldn’t find any sign of her clothes, which I hoped was a good thing. I ran back into the corridor, nearly colliding with a man in a white coat. Recognition cut in and we swung back to face each other. It was the doctor I’d talked to that morning.

“Where is she?” he demanded angrily.

“You’re asking me?”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course I don’t know—or I wouldn’t be looking for her, would I? I called the hospital half an hour ago. I got put through, so she was here then.”

“I came by your wife’s room ten minutes ago but it was empty. I’ve been all over the floor looking for her.”

“Christ,” I said. “Have you seen anybody up here? Anybody who shouldn’t have been?”

“The entire hospital is full of people who shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Right now nobody has any idea who’s supposed to be here and who’s not.”

He seemed to suddenly clock my level of desperation, and took a mental step back. “But . . . what kind of person would you be talking about, anyway?”

“Never mind. I’ll find her,” I said, starting to back away up the corridor. Putting this guy on high alert wasn’t going to make anything easier. “Sure she’s just gone for a walk. She’s like that, hates being cooped up. If you find her, tell her to stay put, okay? Tell her I’m coming.”

“I will. Her condition’s improving, but there’s work to do. She needs more treatment, right away.”

“Gotcha.” I’d stopped listening by then—this guy had no idea of the real level of danger Steph was in, jeopardy that had nothing to do with the contents of a wine bottle—and hurried out into the reception area.

There was no point hurtling randomly around the hospital, however: run in the wrong direction and you’re getting farther away from where you need to be. Much though I wanted to keep myself in constant movement, to be doing something, I had to stop and think first.

Assume no one had come for her.

I had to assume this. If I started to think otherwise, then I was too late and nothing I did could make any difference. I couldn’t bear to go down that road.

So then, assume she moved herself.

This was a woman who’d been poisoned. I wasn’t sure if she’d actually been told this, or if she’d properly absorbed the fact, but half an hour ago she’d received a semihysterical (or at least throttled and intense) phone call from her husband, telling her to get dressed. Thinking, “Okay, that’s weird, but he seems serious,” she does what he asks. He takes longer to arrive than she expects (I’d driven up from the house as fast as I could, but evening traffic stopped me from hammering it all the way). So she gets twitchy. She can’t sit there in her room fully dressed, either, because a nurse could come in and read the riot act, ask what the hell she’s doing, and insist she get back into bed like a good patient. So she takes herself for a walk around the ward or the floor, to wait for me, catch me as soon as I arrive.

I liked that version. I certainly preferred it to the scenario in which someone got there before me.

I wasn’t sure what it meant I should do next, though. The doctor said he’d looked around the floor. How thoroughly? He’d presumably only been looking in the areas a patient might normally be expected to go (restrooms, the snack machines) and wouldn’t have checked every nook and cranny. A hospital would have a lot of nooks and crannies. Did I have time to check them all—when Steph might not even be on this floor?

The area around the nurse’s station was less crowded now. Someone was getting a grip on the situation, and one of the nurses gave me a hard stare as I passed, as if to check I was legitimate. I wasn’t sure what the answer was. It seemed like everyone was looking at everyone suspiciously, and for a moment I was seized by the vertiginous conviction that nobody was here legitimately, that everybody was involved in something I didn’t understand—the nurses, orderlies, supposed patients, and alleged relatives. That any single one of them could have stashed Steph’s body in a cupboard and be enjoying the spectacle of me spinning around searching for her; that any of them could have a gun in their jacket or purse or white coat and be waiting for the most apposite or entertaining moment to drop me, to general applause. Maybe it was a competition. Maybe this was all just a set, and everyone in it actors and extras. Maybe it had always been that way, everywhere in the world, and I was the only person who hadn’t known.

I did a fast tour around the floor and came up empty. Toward the end it occurred to me that she might have gone down to the exit on the ground floor and be waiting there. It occurred to me that this might even be the most likely explanation—Steph was sharp, good at cutting to what-happens-next—and that I was a total moron for not having thought of this in the first place.

I didn’t want to take the elevator down into the middle of the cop zone, so I went back to the far stairwell and clattered down that instead. I knew Steph hadn’t been at the north doors—or at least that she hadn’t been there ten minutes ago, because that’s the way I’d come in. Within a few minutes I’d established she wasn’t at the east doors, either.

Which left only the main entrance. I was going to have to go that way regardless.

I drifted quickly past the corridor that led to it. This area was less hectic now, though there remained a knot of people down at the end, including at least one person who looked like a reporter. I didn’t know whether Steph would have thought being surrounded by people was a good or a bad thing. She’d been very foggy when I saw her that morning, and I doubted the intervening time would have been enough to clear her head. I should have given her a better idea of what I’d been afraid of. I should have laid it out for her. It would have been easier to predict what she might do if I knew she understood.

I tried calling her cell again. As it rang I realized I was close to hyperventilating and tried to calm myself down.

Suddenly I heard her voice in my ear, querulous, dislocated. “Bill?”

“Steph? Where are you?”

“Cafeteria. Are . . . are you here yet?”

“Yes, I’m here at the hospital,” I said. “I’m here. It’s all good. Why . . . are you in the cafeteria?”

“I want everything to be right. And now is the time, yes? You always say that. Now is always the best time for action. Tomorrow starts now.”

“Steph—what are you talking about?” I was in movement again, searching the walls for signs, trying to find a map of the hospital. “Wanted what to be right?”

“Everything.” She sounded confused but determined, as if trying to piece complex matters together in a mind that wasn’t up to it. “He called, five minutes after you. And I thought it didn’t mean anything. It was just dumb. I was mad at you, that’s all. So sort it out.”

“Who called, honey?” I finally found a map and located the cafeteria on it—it was at the other end of the hospital. I got my bearings and started to hurry in that direction. “Who are you talking about?”

“You know,” she said reluctantly. “He said we should meet, talk. And I thought, yes, get it done. Wasn’t anything, anyway. I’m so sorry.”

And then I got it. “Nick’s here?”

Nick—a man who’d started working at her office six weeks before, around about the time this whole thing had started to be put in motion. Who’d just happened to run into my wife last night downtown. Who’d now called her to arrange a meeting, just a few minutes after I’d run from my house, and from Barclay, who doubtless had a phone and could have made a call.

“Yes.”

“Is he there with you now?”

“Getting coffees. He wanted to go somewhere else, but I said no way, my husband’s coming to see me. I’m staying right here in the hospital. I said that.”

“That’s right. That was a good thing to say. Stay there, Steph. Don’t move. Don’t drink anything he gives you. Do not go anywhere with him.”

I started to run.