All she had was Patrick and Lien-hua.
So, oh yeah, she’d prayed.
And the fact that she hadn’t really known what to say bugged her. But then she thought that if it’s true what they say, that ninety percent of communication is nonverbal, that most of it comes through in body language, gesture, posture, facial expression, eye contact, and inflection, then why wouldn’t our prayers, our communication with God, be the same way? Why should words suddenly matter so much, especially to someone who’s so good at reading hearts?
But in the end, praying — the right words or not — hadn’t been enough, and Tessa felt like something terrible might happen to Lien-hua while she was stuck out there in the waiting area, and she couldn’t bear the thought of that.
So, while the receptionist was looking over some paperwork, Tessa had slipped into the hallway, walked to the nearest nurses’ station, and asked what room Special Agent Lien-hua Jiang was in.
The woman looked at her skeptically. “Are you a relative?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“And how are you related to Ms. Jiang?”
The words came out before Tessa was really aware of it, and it both surprised her and did not surprise her when she said them: “She’s my mom.”
9
They’d already left post-op to take Lien-hua to her room, so I headed directly toward 414.
As I was stepping out of the stairwell, I saw Tessa in the hallway in front of me.
“Hey,” I called, and she stopped and faced me. “What are you doing up here?” My words were sharper than I intended them to be. “I told you to wait in the lobby.”
“I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing.”
“Tessa, you have to—”
“Let’s not do this right now. Okay? I get it. Just… how is she?”
Why didn’t she text you? She could have done it at any time!
Of course, part of me was relieved to see her, but part of me was angry because she’d made me search for her. “From what I heard, surgery went well. I went looking for you. I was worried.” Though I was trying my hardest, my words still had an edge to them, however it was concern, not anger, that lay beneath them.
Tessa said nothing, but gave me a look that made it clear she didn’t understand my tone. But she couldn’t possibly have known what was going through my head concerning Basque when I’d found that she wasn’t in the lobby.
We passed down the hallway toward the room. We were halfway there when a gruff voice rumbled behind me, “Pat.”
I turned and saw my friend Special Agent Ralph Hawkins come lumbering our way, his wife, Brineesha, beside him.
Tessa and I paused to let them catch up.
“What do we know?” Ralph asked me.
“They were bringing her up here. She might be in the room already. I’m not sure.”
The four of us proceeded and I eased the door open but saw that room 414 was empty. “She should be here any minute. I was just telling Tessa that surgery seemed to go faster than they anticipated.”
An ex-Ranger and still a bodybuilder, Ralph seemed to fill the entire hallway. We’d first worked together to solve a series of homicides and mutilations back when I was still a detective in Milwaukee, fourteen years ago. As it turned out, Basque had been the man responsible for the murders we were investigating.
After that case, Ralph encouraged me to join the Bureau, and now, as the head of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, he was officially my boss. He was also my best friend.
Brineesha edged around him to peer into the room. A slim, confident African-American woman with a no-nonsense attitude, she worked as a nurse at a hospital across town and called the shots in the family despite the fact that Ralph was the most alpha male guy I’d ever met.
Ralph and Brineesha had one son who was twelve, and they’d just found out that they had a baby girl on the way. Over the last year Brineesha and Lien-hua had grown close, and I could see deep concern etched across her face.
Tessa gestured down the hallway, and when I followed her gaze I saw a doctor coming our way, walking beside a gurney being pushed by an orderly. A nurse walked beside them. I couldn’t tell who might be on the gurney, but guessed it was Lien-hua. The four of us started toward them.
“I heard she was hit by a car,” Brineesha said, “and—”
“She was stabbed too,” Tessa said soberly.
“Yes. Ralph told me.”
“By Basque.”
“Yes.”
We were close enough now for me to see. It was Lien-hua on the gurney.
She was on oxygen, had a chest tube, and it looked like she was asleep.
Even before I could ask him, the doctor leading the crew assured us, “Surgery went well.” He was a studious-looking man, mid-fifties, with white hair that had a windblown, Einstein-ian look to it. That, along with his rumpled clothes, made me wonder how long he’d already been on his shift. “We gave her something to help her rest.”
It seemed odd that they’d give a sedative to someone right after she awoke from anesthesia, but with a thoracic injury that severe, she probably did need to sleep.
“I’m her fiancé,” I told the doctor as I went to Lien-hua’s side and took her hand. “Pat Bowers.”
While he was introducing himself as Dr. Frasier, the attending surgeon, Ralph got a call and stepped away. Frasier looked at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses and gave me a reserved smile. “The good news is, her injuries weren’t as extensive as we initially thought. No arteries were nicked in her leg. She has a pneumothorax or—”
“A collapsed lung,” Tessa said.
He looked a little surprised that she would know that. “Yes.”
I suspected most teenagers wouldn’t have any idea what a pneumothorax was, but I would’ve been surprised if Tessa hadn’t known.
As we passed through the hallway back toward the room, Brineesha told the nurse beside me that she was a nurse as well, and they spoke softly about some of the specifics regarding Lien-hua’s injuries.
It bothered me that Dr. Frasier had said, “The good news is…” And I was waiting for the other shoe to drop—What’s the bad news? — but just as I was about to ask him, I thought that if Lien-hua wasn’t all the way out it was possible she would hear me, and I didn’t want her to overhear any bad news, so I held back.
Instead, I told her that I was here and that I loved her and — perhaps somewhat prematurely — that she was going to be fine.
We entered the room, the nurse and the orderly transferred her onto the bed, then tilted it into a slightly inclined position. Ralph returned to my side. “Pat”—his voice was soft, meant only for me—“we might have something.”
“Tell me.”
He indicated toward the window, and we crossed the room for a little privacy. Ralph kept his voice low. “We have video of Basque leaving the Cleveland Park Metro station earlier, at six.”
“That would be when he went to the park to abduct her.”
“There’s more. Traffic cams caught the license plate of a stolen car eight blocks away from the apartment after the abduction and traveling east.”
“Which street?”
“Benning Road.”
Basque liked toying with law enforcement, and I could picture him going from one means of transportation to another, one car to another, not just to elude capture, but to lead us on an elaborate chase.
“You said cameras, so we know which direction he headed?” My phone vibrated, and I saw a text from Doehring that he was on his way up and that Honeycutt was at one of the hospital’s other entrances.
“Using the shots from the traffic cams,” Ralph went on, “Angela tracked the car to a water treatment plant in southeast quadrant of the city. SWAT’s on its way over there now.”