“Hold on, I’ll get her,” the voice said. And momentarily, another female voice was on, saying, “Yup?”
“I need to speak to Wanda Chinkle,” he said. “This is-”
“Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup. . no need to gimme your name,” Leyla told him. “You the troublemaker?”
“Yeah,” Justin said. “That’s me.”
“I ain’t seen Wanda lately.”
“But you know how to get in touch with her.”
“Not so much. Not for the last forty-eight hours or so.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause she ain’t where she said she’d be. And I don’t know where else she’d be goin’.”
Justin didn’t say anything for quite a while, started to hang up, remembered that this woman Leyla was still holding on at the other end, so he just said, “Thanks,” very softly and clicked the red off button on the phone.
She ain’t where she said she’d be.
Wanda was missing.
He took a deep breath, felt a sharp pain rattle his chest-realized it was pain that stemmed from fear-and exhaled, hoping the pain would go away. It didn’t. But he decided to ignore it. Decided to ignore the news about Wanda, too, because it was the only thing he could do right now. And thirty minutes after that he was at St. Joseph’s Hospital, which is where he knew he had to be, Wanda or no Wanda, because the news had reported that this was where the girl was being cared for.
At the front desk, Justin asked for the doctor who was in charge of Hannah Cooke. The nurse at the reception desk looked him over carefully, then lifted a phone and spoke into the receiver. It only took a few minutes after that for a youngish doctor to approach him, introduce himself as Dr. Graham, and say that he was looking after Hannah. Justin asked if there was a place where they might have a couple of minutes of privacy, and Dr. Graham took him into a nearby office.
Justin didn’t bother to sit down, he just said, “I want to make sure the girl gets the best care possible, and I’ll pay for it.”
“Are you a relative?” Dr. Graham asked.
“No.”
“A family friend?”
“I’ve met her,” Justin told him. “It doesn’t matter what my relationship is, does it, as long as I’m willing to pay?”
“I suppose not. But Hannah was badly injured. Parts of her body were badly burned and there’s some disfigurement-”
“Is she going to survive?”
“I don’t know yet. Not for certain. But I believe so.”
“I want her to have whatever reconstructive surgery is necessary. When this is over, if she lives, I’d like her to be as close to normal as possible.”
“The bills are going to be-”
“I don’t care what they’re going to be.” Justin handed over a credit card. “Run this through. If you reach any kind of a limit, which I don’t think you will, just let me know and I’ll provide more.”
“Mr.”-the doctor looked down at the card-“Westwood, this is fairly irregular. It would help if I had a little more information.”
“Well, you’re not going to get any. I want to be out of here in five minutes. All I want to do is make sure this little girl gets as well as she possibly can get. And I want no publicity whatsoever. This stays strictly between you and me and whatever hospital administrators you have to deal with.”
“Do you want to see her?”
“Is she conscious?”
“In and out. Not really.”
“I’d like her to have twenty-four-hour nursing. I don’t want her to be alone.”
“I understand.” The doctor kept silent for a moment, they both did, then Graham said, “So do you want to see her?”
Justin nodded, just the smallest of nods, and the doctor escorted him down the hall and down the elevator to the intensive care unit and down another hallway until he was standing not far from a bed, on it the small form of a young girl. Her face was bandaged, her head shaved, a seemingly endless maze of tubes running to and from her body. Her chest was rising and falling in short, rhythmic bursts, the only sign that inside the bandages was a living thing.
“You can talk to her,” the doctor said. “I’m a believer in that. Even if they can’t respond, sometimes they know when we talk to them. And even if they don’t know, sometimes it just makes us feel better.”
“When it’s over,” Justin said.
“When what’s over?” the doctor said.
But he didn’t get an answer. Justin was already heading back down the hall.
Graham was about to call after him, decided against it, instead he let the guy turn toward the elevator and disappear. Strange, the doctor thought. Strange guy all around. He seemed so. . tormented. So determined.
Graham decided part of the strangeness was that he couldn’t figure out exactly what this guy Justin was so determined to do.
Oh well, he thought. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Better get back on my rounds.
But as he walked off down the hall, smiling at two nurses hurrying past him, he realized he couldn’t quite get Hannah Cooke’s new benefactor out of his mind. And, turning into a patient’s room-he checked his chart to make sure he got the name right; a Mrs. Isadora Sashaman-he thought, I wonder what he meant by “over.”
26
When Justin stepped into his living room at five-thirty that afternoon, it looked like a hurricane had swept through the house. Papers were scattered everywhere. As were beer cans and two pint containers of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream.
“Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” he said to Reggie Bokkenheuser.
“You can’t have it both ways,” Reggie said. “You want neatness or you want results?”
She was in jeans and a T-shirt, on the couch, her black boots curled under her. He smiled at how natural she looked, and how earnest. Her hair was kind of a mess, one lock kept falling over her eye and she kept blowing it away.
“Any calls for me? Any word from someone named Wanda?”
“No calls, no women named Wanda banging down your door. Sorry.”
“Okay, what have you got for me?” Justin said.
“I haven’t moved in, like, eight hours. How about a ‘thank you’ or ‘how are you’ or something good for morale like that?”
“Thank you. How are you?”
“Fine. Thanks for your sincerity.”
“What have you got for me?”
She blew out a breath. “A lot.”
He gave her a “gimme” sign with his hands and her response was to lift her right hand to her mouth and mime drinking from a bottle. He went to the kitchen, came back with two bottles of beer. She nodded a thank-you, and then she began to roll off what she’d learned from reading through Roger Mallone’s suitcase full of material.
She told him that there was some financial material she just wasn’t capable of understanding, but she’d tried to note anything of relevance, even if she couldn’t quite follow it. Mostly, she said, she had tried to follow his instructions and trace connections between people and organizations. Three hours later, she was still reading from her notes and interpreting and he was still inputting info into his computer, dizzy from the information he was trying to absorb and translate into workable patterns.
He tried to organize everything into his preexisting lists and some things fit nicely into the categories he’d already set up. Other pieces of information required their own separate organization. Reggie had done a superb job of sifting through Mallone’s research. She provided him with charts detailing Phil Dandridge’s long relationship with EGenco-as well as the company’s ties to other government officials. She also provided a kind of political family tree for him, with Dandridge the head of the family. The interconnection between EGenco and the vice president stretched all the way back to his days at Yale University. Yale was the breeding ground and seemingly the genesis for the political and economic ties that appeared to be at the core of everything that was now going on around them. Dandridge had been at the college at the same time as Bradford Collins, the EGenco CEO who’d been killed in the blast at Harper’s. Dandridge and Collins had both been members of the tight-knit and secretive campus organization Skull and Bones. Jeffrey Stuller, the attorney general, had also attended Yale during those years, but was not a Bonesman. Stephanie Ingles, the current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was also a Yalie from those days, and although Justin could not see any relevance she might have to his investigation, he entered the connection into his computer. He would worry about information overload later.