Certainly, Harvey was curious about the life of a woman exotic enough to be a movie star, and I wondered if someone could have stalked Shephard without her neighbor noticing a strange car or person in the area. But I had to be careful what I asked, because it was not publicly known that Shephard had died a violent death.
'Well, I can't believe it,' Harvey called out to me as she returned to the kitchen. 'I got something better. You know, some television crew was at the hospital last week filming a feature about the trauma center. It showed on the evening news, and Kellie was in it, so I taped it. I can't believe it took me this long to think of it, but my brain's not working all that well, if you know what I mean.'
She was holding a videotape. I accompanied her into the living room, where she inserted the tape into the VCR. I sat in a blue wing chair in a sea of blue carpet while she rewound and then hit the play button. The first few frames were of Lehigh Valley hospital from the perspective of a helicopter swooping in with an emergency case. It was then I realized that Kellie was really a medflight paramedic, and not merely a nurse on a ward.
Footage showed Kellie in a jumpsuit dashing down a corridor with other members of the flight crew who had just been paged.
'Excuse me, excuse me,' she said on tape as they darted around people in the way.
She was a spectacular example of the human genome working just right, her teeth dazzling, and the camera in love with every angle of her fine features and bones. It was not hard to imagine patients getting major crushes on her, and then the film showed her in the cafeteria after another impossible mission had been accomplished.
'It's always a race against time,' Shephard was telling the reporter. 'You know even a minute's delay could cost a life. Talk about an adrenaline rush.'
As she continued her rather banal interview, the angle of the camera shifted.
'I can't believe I taped that, but it's not often someone I know is on TV,' Harvey was saying.
It didn't penetrate at first.
'Stop the tape!' I said. 'Rewind. Yes, right there. Freeze it.'
The frame was of someone in the background eating lunch.
'No,' I said under my breath. 'No way.'
Carrie Grethen was wearing jeans and a tie-dye shirt, and eating a sandwich at a table with other busy hospital personnel. I had not recognized her at first because her hair was below her ears and henna red, and last I had seen her, it was short and bleached white. But it was her eyes that finally pulled at me like a black hole. She was staring straight into the camera as she chewed, her eyes as coldly bright and evil as I remembered.
I came out of the chair and went straight to the VCR and popped out the tape.
'I need to take this,' I said, my voice on the verge of panic. 'I promise you'll get it back.'
'Okay. As long as you don't forget. It's my only copy.' Sandra Harvey got up, too. 'Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost.'
'I've got to go. Thank you again,' I said.
I ran next door and trotted up steps into the back of the house, where cold water was an inch deep on the floor and dripping slowly from the roof. Agents were moving about, taking photographs and talking amongst themselves.
'Teun!' I called out.
I carefully moved further inside, stepping over missing areas of flooring and doing my best not to trip. I was vaguely aware of an agent dropping the burned carcass of a cat into a plastic bag.
'Teun!' I called out again.
I heard sure feet splashing and stepping over fallen roofing and collapsed walls. Then she was mere inches from me and steadying my arm with her hand.
'Whoa. Careful,' she started to say.
'We've got to find Lucy,' I said.
'What's going on?'
She began to carefully escort me out.
'Where is she?' I demanded.
'There's a two-alarm fire downtown. A grocery store, probably an arson. Kay, what the hell…?'
We were out on the lawn and I was clutching the videotape as if it were my only hope in life.
'Teun, please.' I held her gaze. 'Take me to Philadelphia.'
'Come on,' she said.
16
MCGOVERN MADE THE trip back to Philadelphia in forty-five minutes, because she was speeding. She had radioed her field office and talked on a secure tac channel. Although she was still very careful what she relayed, she had made it clear that she wanted every available agent out on the street looking for Carrie. While this was going on, I reached Marino on my cellular phone and told him to get on a plane now.
'She's here,' I said.
'Oh shit. Do Benton and Lucy know?'
'As soon as I find them.'
'I'm out the door,' he said.
I did not believe, nor did McGovern, that Carrie was still in Lehigh County. She wanted to be where she could do the most damage, and I was convinced she somehow knew that Lucy had moved to Philadelphia. Carrie could have been stalking Lucy, for that matter. One thing I believed but could not make sense of was that the murders in Warrenton and now here were intended to lure those of us who had defeated Carrie in the past.
'But Warrenton happened before she escaped from Kirby,' McGovern reminded me as she turned onto Chestnut Street.
'I know,' I said as fear turned my pulse to static. 'I don't understand any of it except that somehow she's involved. It's not coincidence that she was on that news clip, Teun. She knew that after Kellie Shephard's murder we would review everything we could find. Carrie knew damn well we would see that tape.'
The fire was located on a seedy strip on the western fringes of the University of Pennsylvania. Darkness had fallen, and flashing emergency lights were visible miles away. Police cars had closed off two blocks of the street. There were at least eight fire engines and four ladder trucks, and more than seventy feet in the air, firefighters in buckets blasted the smoking roof with deluge guns. The night rumbled with diesel engines, and the blasting of high pressure water drummed over wood and shattered more glass. Tumescent hoses snaked across the street, and water was up to the hubcaps of parked cars that would be going nowhere anytime soon.
Photographers and news crews prowled sidewalks and were suddenly on alert when McGovern and I got out of her car.
'Is ATF involved in this case?' asked a TV reporter.
'We're just here taking a look,' McGovern answered as we walked without pause.
'Then it's a suspected arson, like the other grocery stores?'
The microphone followed as our boots splashed.
'It's under investigation,' McGovern said. 'And you need to stay back, ma'am.'
The reporter was left at the hood of a fire engine while McGovern and I drew closer to the store. Flames had jumped to the barbershop next door, where firefighters with axes and pike poles chopped square holes in the roof. Agents in ATF flak jackets were interviewing potential witnesses, and investigators in turn-outs and helmets moved in and out of a basement. I overheard something about toggle switches and the meter and stealing service. Black smoke billowed, and there seemed to be only one area in the plenum that stubbornly smoldered and spurted flame.
'She might be inside,' McGovern said in my ear.
I followed her in closer. The plate-glass storefront was wide open, and part of the inventory flowed out on a cold river of water. Cans of tuna fish, blackened bananas, sanitary napkins, bags of potato chips, and bottles of salad dressing flowed by, and a firefighter rescued a can of coffee and shrugged as he tossed it inside his truck. The strong beams of flashlights probed the smoky, black interior of the devastated store, illuminating girders twisted like taffy and exposed wires hanging in tangles from I-beams.