If she really does survive after all.
No, she would be okay.
She would.
After I hung up with Doehring, Tessa said to me, “St. Mary’s is a teaching hospital.”
“Yes.”
“So Lien-hua’s getting the best medical care in the region, right?”
I could tell she was trying to convince herself of the same thing I was trying to convince myself of.
“That’s right.”
Then we were both quiet. I sped down the street that led to the hospital and squealed to a stop just outside the emergency room doors.
As Tessa and I entered the building, I told her she needed to stay in the waiting room, but she shook her head. “No, I’m—”
I laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I promise I’ll come and get you as soon as I find out how she is. But you need to stay here right now.”
“Why?”
“Because…” If Lien-hua is as bad off as I think she might be, I don’t want you to see her, I thought, but said, “Because I need to make sure she’s in a condition first where she can see visitors.”
Tessa opened her mouth as if she were going to reply, then closed it again. I think she caught the deeper gist of what I was saying.
“What am I supposed to do out here?”
“You believe in prayer, you told me that, right?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Now would be a good time.”
I held her for a moment to try to reassure her, and then I saw Doehring approaching.
“Text me right away.” Her eyes went to a sign on the wall prohibiting cell phone use in the hospital, but she ignored it. “As soon as you know anything.”
I ignored it as well. “I will.”
Lieutenant Cole Doehring stopped in front of us. He’d been a cop for two decades and had the look of a tough, 1930s boxer about him; still, he was a pushover when it came to relating to his two young daughters — a side of him that he tried to keep hidden from other cops. I respected him, even though I didn’t always agree with his traditional approach of looking for means, motive, and opportunity when it came to tracking offenders.
Those were not the things I relied on — especially not motives, since they’re nebulous, hard to pin down, impossible to identify with any degree of certainty, aren’t required to be shown in court, and focusing on them rather than on the timing and location of the crime more often than not slows down or derails investigations.
I hurried with Doehring down the hall toward the operating room. “Who’s working the apartment?” I asked him. “Metro PD or the FBI?”
“Our guys are there now. I called the Bureau to get the ERT out there too. Cassidy and Farraday are on the way.”
“Good.”
The ERT, or Evidence Response Team, is the Bureau’s forensics investigation unit. Although the attack on Lien-hua was technically under the jurisdiction of the Washington, DC, Metro Police Department, since she was a federal agent, the Bureau’s involvement in the investigation went without saying — especially if her assailant was Basque, who was number three on our Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Lien-hua was still in the operating theater when we arrived.
One of the nurses led Doehring and me quietly up a short set of steps to a landing with a wide window allowing a view of the surgeons at work. “They told us they were hoping to have her out within the hour,” she explained.
“So that’s good news, right?” I said.
She didn’t reply right away. “Yes. That’s good news. Often thoracic surgery like this can last up to six hours or more.”
Just seeing Lien-hua there, the tube in her throat, the doctors bent over her chest, was hard enough, but seeing the blood, so much blood, was almost unbearable.
Blood.
I’ve seen too much of it in my career. Too much suffering. Too much death.
I didn’t want to think about that, but it struck me that in America, death is sanitized. There’s a disconnect. To a certain extent Tessa and her vegan friends realized that in a way so many of us don’t. We don’t think about where meat actually comes from: our beef doesn’t have hair on it, our bacon doesn’t have hooves, the chicken nuggets we buy at the drive-through don’t look anything at all like chickens.
And as far as the death of people is concerned, we prefer to either avoid the topic altogether or speak in euphemisms: “He passed away,” “The tumor was inoperable,” “We weren’t able to resuscitate him,” “There was nothing we could do.” Those phrases are supposed to make it easier than the stark, honest truth.
I’m not sure they do the trick, but I do know that we all tend to do whatever we can to try to ignore the fact that death is the default setting for the universe, that it’s on our heels and gaining on us every moment. In this job, you end up using those euphemisms to try to help others, but you know the game all too well, and they don’t work when you tell them to yourself.
I tried my hardest to focus on the fact that Lien-hua was in the hands of the region’s best surgeons, of people who were going to save her, but images of death just wouldn’t leave me alone.
Too much death.
A few years ago I went to Mumbai, India, to train their police force on principles of environmental criminology. As we were leaving the airport, traffic on our street came to a standstill because of a funeral. Six men were carrying the corpse of a young woman on a funeral pyre that was balanced on their shoulders. Her body lay on a pallet showered in flower petals. The people wailed and wept publicly as they passed. No hiding their grief. Nothing sanitized. No euphemisms.
Definitely not like in America.
Stop thinking about dead bodies, Patrick! Lien-hua’s going to be okay.
As I watched the doctors work on her, I wanted so badly to help her, but right now there was really nothing I could do.
Prayer didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all, but I figured God didn’t need me to fold my hands or close my eyes to know what I was crying out for in my heart. Instead, I could do what I was made to do. Maybe that would be the best kind of prayer of all.
“CSIU is there now?” I said to Doehring. “At the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Alright.” I pulled out my phone. “Good.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Help them find Basque.”
6
My cell phone was not your typical phone.
It’d been issued to me from a branch of the Department of Defense that I consult with called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The agency specialized in using geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, to monitor military hot zones, find terrorist training camps, identify nuclear research facilities in rogue nations, target laser-guided weapons systems, and coordinate troop movements.
Not only did the phone contain the typical array of high-end law enforcement apps (like an infrared camera and a touch screen that could scan fingerprints and pull up names through AFIS), it also had a real-time defense satellite feed and a 3-D hologram projector.
By accessing the world’s most advanced geospatial digital mapping program, the Federal Aerospace Locator and Covert Operation Network, or FALCON, I could visually soar through a 3-D landscape of any geographic region on the planet. FALCON contained a degree of detail Google Earth just might reach in ten or fifteen years.
And when I had video footage of the interior of a building to work with, the phone could project and manipulate a 3-D view of the structure’s interior.
That’s what I was about to do right now.
Doehring and I found an empty exam room and I reached Tanner Cassidy, one of our ERT agents and a good friend of mine, at the scene.