He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at a windowed alcove.
"There you go."
Jack fairly leaped toward it and slid back the glass.
"A woman and a little girl! Just brought in by ambulance! Where are they?"
The mocha-skinned clerk behind the desk took her time looking up from her computer screen. Her name tag read MARIA.
"What are their names, sir?"
"DiLauro and Westphalen."
He spelled both for her and watched as she did some tapping on her keyboard. He couldn't keep still. His fingers kept up a chaotic tattoo on the counter, his feet shuffled back and forth.
She shook her head. "No… no one by that name. But we did have two Jane Does brought in, an adult and a child. MVA."
Jack looked around. "Where are they? How are they?" He had to force out the next question. "Are they alive?"
"I can't say."
He felt his fingers stop fidgeting and ball into fists.
"Why the hell not?"
A look of alarm flashed across her face—maybe she'd heard something in his tone.
"Because I don't have that information. They were taken directly to the trauma unit."
He pushed away from the counter.
"Where's that?"
"You can't go there, sir."
"Why the hell not? I'm their husband and father!"
He prayed they wouldn't ask him to prove that.
"You still can't go. Not until they've been worked up and stabilized. No non-staff can be present during resuscitation. You can't—"
"Resuscitation?"
She checked her screen again.
"CPR was under way when they were brought in."
The room did a quick spin. He folded his arms on the counter and pressed his head against them while he quelled a surge of nausea.
He felt a hand on his wrist and when he glanced up he found the clerk looking at him with sympathetic eyes.
"Have faith, Mr. Westphalen. They're in good hands."
Westphalen? Oh, right—he'd said he was the child's father and her name was Westphalen. Gia had dropped her ex's name.
"We have a level-one trauma center here," she was saying. "Trust that everything possible that can be done for your wife and child is being done."
"I've got to see them. Just once. Just for a second."
She shook her head. "I'm sorry. Please have faith."
Faith? Faith was why they were getting CPR. Men with faith who thought they were doing the right thing because they believed some supposedly unimpeachable source had put Gia and Vicky here.
No more faith. He had to see them. He had to know that a mistake hadn't been made. Two Jane Does? Could be anyone. He had to stick his fingers in their wounds—figuratively, anyway—before he could accept this nightmare as real.
Maria frowned at him. "Don't even think about it."
What was she—a mind reader?
"What?"
"Don't try to sneak up. Security is tight there. And if you cause a ruckus you'll be arrested. And then where will you be?"
If she only knew. Arrest would involve a lot more than a fine and a warning. Once the cops learned he didn't exist, he'd be spending his time in a jail cell instead of the waiting room.
Shit.
"Here's what I can do," she said. "I'll call the trauma unit and let them know you're down here. Once your wife and daughter are stabilized, one of the doctors will come down and talk to you."
He nodded, silently thanking her for not saying if they're stabilized.
He realized he had no option but to wait.
With limbs of lead, he did a slow turn and looked for a waiting area. He saw three, but only one—the nearest—was unenclosed. He shuffled toward that. He felt a hundred years old.
Not many seats left, but that didn't matter much. Doubted he could sit anyway. The only thing a chair would be good for right now was tossing through a window.
25
Numb with shock, Cal turned in a slow circle amid the carnage.
They'd entered as they'd been trained, pepper-potting in alternating pairs. Not until they were sure the main floor was secure did they risk a good look at what had been done to their fellow yenigeri.
Ybarra and the other three who'd been on first-floor duty had all suffered similar fates: necks and backs broken—in how many places Cal could only guess—and their bodies arranged in positions that made them look like spineless rag dolls. Each had a gaping hole in the center of his chest, right where the heart would be. Except the cavities were empty.
Where were the hearts?
Cal wandered around like a dazed bomb survivor. He found their pistols—main carries and backups—spooned together in a line in the center of the floor. But where were their hearts?
Four well-armed men had been slaughtered in broad daylight. How does that happen? He could see if it had been night and a well-trained team with night-vision goggles cut the power and broke in. But the lights were on. How could anyone get close enough—
He heard a faint sob and recognized the voice.
"Diana!"
He whirled. Not here. Couldn't be here. Upstairs—
He wasn't alone as he raced to the stairway. The rest of them had come out of their horrified trances and remembered their primary purpose for being here.
The Oculus.
He heard Diana sob again as he took the steps two at a time. He skidded to a stop in the Oculus's doorway. The others collided with him from behind, crowding him into the office.
Cal choked back a surge of bile. The carnage downstairs had been only a prelude to this.
Except for the blood spattered everywhere, the office was in perfect order, as if the 0 had stepped out for a cup of coffee. Only he hadn't stepped out. He was still here, nailed upside down to the wall behind the desk.
In pieces.
His limbs had been torn from their sockets and rearranged so that his arms jutted from his hip sockets, his legs from his shoulders, in a spread-eagle fashion. Like the yenigeri downstairs, his chest had been ripped open. His head rested on his bloody crotch with his penis jutting from his mouth. Cal noticed that his wide, staring eyes were blue now, the color they must have been before he became an Oculus.
But that wasn't the worst of it. As a finishing touch, his killer—and Cal had little doubt who that was—had used the O's intestines to create a circular border in a hideously grotesque inversion of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
When Cal could drag his gaze from the obscene tableau, he noticed an array of crimson objects on the desk. He took a wobbly step closer and realized they were hearts, eight of them—seven arranged in a perfect circle around the eighth. Looked like some sort of grisly parody of Stonehenge.
He closed his eyes. It confirmed what he'd already guessed: The three yenigeri upstairs had suffered the same fate as those below.
And then a sob… to his right… from behind the door to the private quarters.
Diana—still alive. Why? Why would he do that to her father and spare her? It didn't make sense.
Here was one more item to add to Cal's lengthening list of things that didn't make sense.
He rushed to the door but found it locked. No. More than locked. Jammed.
"Diana?" he called. "It's Davis. You're safe now. Stay away from the door. I'm coming in."
He looked back at Miller and the others, all slack-faced with awe and horror.
"Hey! Cover me."
They snapped out of it and stacked up around the door while Cal threw his shoulder against it once, twice, and then broke through on the third. As he stumbled in he found Diana crouched on the floor, head down, face buried in her hands, her body shaking with sobs.
Cal's first reaction was to grab her and drag her to safety, but he wanted to protect her from the charnel house in the outside room. So he broke procedure and made a quick one-man search of the room.
When he was sure it was secure, he knelt beside her, wanting to put a comforting arm around her, but she was only thirteen and he didn't know how she'd react.