“True.”
I tapped a finger against the chair. Since I was still waiting for a doctor, my chances of getting home in time were growing slimmer, but I said, “I’m still hoping to make it by 7:00.”
I heard Cheyenne again: “Check.”
“All right, I’ll see you.” Tessa sounded distracted, and I pictured her studying the board.
She hung up, I called Doehring.
We talked for a few minutes about the case-still no sign of Mollie Fischer, but they were checking the hotel room by room. “Farraday found the wheelchair in room 809.”
“Whose name was the room reserved under?”
“The manager’s. It’s a comp room he keeps reserved for foreign dignitaries visiting Washington.”
Unbelievable.
“Fourteen sets of prints on the chair-so far mostly partials, DNA from Mollie, two maids, some still unidentified. No matches to anyone in the system, though. And the alley? Well, somehow these guys hacked in and looped the video feed. That’s why we didn’t see the woman enter. Marianne’s furious she didn’t catch it.”
So the question remained-where was Mollie?
I remembered reading about a case from the 1990s in which a Belgian couple abducted young children and kept them in a specially designed dungeon. The police searched the house twice and heard children crying each time, but assumed the sounds came from kids playing outside somewhere. Two girls starved to death while the husband was serving time and his wife, who was an elementary school teacher, stayed in the house and ignored the girls’ cries for weeks until the two children finally died.
“Take the room apart,” I said. “Check under the bed frame, move the furniture, assume nothing.”
“It’s done.”
“A maid’s cart? Could they have put her in a laundry cart?”
“We checked. Listen, how is your-”
“I’m fine. The freezers at the hotel? The roof? What about the elevators? Check on top of them-” And then, thinking of the hotel’s state-of-the-art security and ultramodern renovations, I had a grisly thought. “Any document shredding machines at the hotel? Large ones, I mean industrial-sized?”
“Don’t worry. My men are thorough.”
At last, as we were finishing the call, I asked him if he could send an officer to pick me up when I was finished here, take me back to my car.
“You were shot, Pat. I’ll have Anderson take you all the way home.”
“No, I just need to get to my car. I’ll call you when I’m ready to leave the hospital.”
We hung up.
Finally, under the pretext of returning the call he’d made to my cell earlier in the afternoon-but primarily hoping to find out if he was the one who’d told Fischer to keep the information about Mollie from the press-I punched in Director Rodale’s number.
His secretary told me he’d just gone home for the day. “He wants to speak to you too,” she said.
That was no surprise.
We set up a meeting at his office tomorrow at noon, between my classes.
Then I went back to my notes, and a few minutes later the doctor arrived.
39
After unwrapping the bandages that the paramedics had snugged around the arm, Dr. Stearn washed out the QuikClot, carefully inspected the entrance and exit holes, then ordered an X-ray to make sure there were no bone or bullet fragments in my arm.
Which only ate up more time.
Afterward, I convinced him to take me to a patient’s room rather than the exam room so I could watch the news on the in-room television. He irrigated the wound and said, “Prepare yourself.” He was getting a scalpel out to debride the area-a process that involves cutting away the dead tissue surrounding the injured area.
I tried to focus on the news.
Chelsea Traye, Channel 11’s on-site reporter, announced that they were expecting a statement “at any moment” from the FBI concerning “an alleged shooting in the basement of the historic Lincoln Towers Hotel.”
“Alleged, huh?” Dr. Stearn said.
A deep needle prick as he numbed the area.
“Until it goes through the Bureau’s public affairs department, I’m not officially wounded.”
“How nice.”
As I watched the news, Dr. Stearn finished the debridement and as tenderly as possible put a non-occlusive dressing on the wound. WXTN’s news team was explaining that according to their sources, the authorities were looking for a man and a woman as possibly being responsible for Mollie Fischer’s disappearance and the death of Twana Summie.
An orderly holding a doctor’s scrub top for me appeared at the door-something to wear, since my shirt had been stained with blood and scissored to pieces by Parvaneh. “Compliments of Mercy Medical,” he said.
“Pink?” I said. “I thought scrubs were supposed to be green?”
“Discourages people from stealing them.”
“I can’t imagine why.” I pointed at the chair in the corner of the room. “Just set it over there.”
As soon as he was gone, I called for a nurse and handed her a twenty dollar bill. “Can you stop by the hospital gift shop and pick up a T-shirt for me? I’m a federal agent and I’d consider this a great service to your country.”
She smiled. “Sure.”
The doctor had a sling out and was adjusting it to fit my arm. I told him I wouldn’t need it; he told me I would.
The news program cut to the press conference, and Margaret appeared on the screen. I turned up the volume. Even though she was only giving a perfunctory explanation, I had to admit that her statement was much more carefully worded than mine had been earlier in the day.
She finished by announcing that one of the Bureau’s “finest agents” had sustained “minor injuries from adversarial action at a shooting in the basement of the Lincoln Towers.”
A few hours ago I was silly looking, now I was one of the FBI’s finest agents.
Maybe Margaret was just plain warming up to me.
“Minor injuries?” Dr. Stearn said dubiously, and I realized that so far he had only communicated to me in two-word sentences.
“Hurts though,” I said.
In the end, Margaret didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know, then the news program shifted to an “expert’s analysis” of the incident.
The doc finished with my arm and told me to come back and have it checked on Monday for infection. Finally he gave me some pain meds and antibiotics. “No narcotics,” I said. He reluctantly agreed, switched the meds, then said, “Twice daily.” He pointed to one of the bottles of pills and then tipped out two. “Swallow these.”
“For pain,” I said.
He nodded and then stunned me with three complete sentences in a row. “Take another two before going to bed. The next couple days are going to be rough. I’ll give you a prescription.”
I thanked him and was standing up to go when the nurse returned with a hot pink “DC Rules!” tourist T-shirt.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said.
“The only extra large they had left.” She handed me the shirt and my change. “Don’t worry, pink is the new black.”
“Oh. Is that it.”
Dr. Stearn was scribbling his signature on a sheet of paper clamped to his clipboard.
“No driving,” he said.
Okay, back to two-word sentences.
“I understand,” I replied.
The two of them helped me put on the shirt and position my arm in the sling, I grabbed the notes I’d jotted down, and then went outside, eased off the sling, and called Doehring to ask if Anderson was available to take me to my car.
40
Tessa was getting frustrated.
Cheyenne had actually beaten her at chess.
Twice.
“Where’d you learn to play?” Tessa asked her.
“My dad. You know I grew up on a ranch? Well, he wasn’t too thrilled about us watching TV, so in the evenings we’d play games-mostly chess. He was nationally ranked in college. Over the years he taught me a couple strategies.”
A couple.
Yeah, right.