He stalked along the shelves and quickly outfitted the pair of us in dull hospital garb. It was not, I concluded quickly, designed to flatter. My father was annoyed that Sean wouldn’t carry his selections to the cash register for him.
“If you want to shop, carry it yourself,” Sean said flatly.
There was a very good tactical reason for Sean needing to keep his hands free, but by not explaining it, he just came across as rude and argumentative. I scowled at him behind my father’s back. Sean gave me a bland stare in return.
I had to give my father a swift nudge in the ribs when he would have dragged out his platinum AmEx to pay for the gear. We were already leaving a trail that a bloodhound with a heavy cold could have followed through a nest of skunks. There was no point, I reasoned, as I avoided eye contact with the security camera on the way out, in making things worse.
CHAPTER 20
The hospital where Jeremy Lee had been both a doctor and a patient was set a long way back from the road on a huge sprawling piece of land south of Boston itself.
I still had trouble getting my head round how wasteful America was with its land. Unless you were in the heart of a big city, nobody seemed to bother about redeveloping brownfield sites. They just boarded up the old building and went and broke ground somewhere fresh. Even the smallest business had a car park the size of Sweden.
It seemed to take forever to reach the hospital entrance. We drove in through carefully landscaped grounds that looked more like a golf club than a medical facility, with fiercely posted speed limits. I hoped the ambulances had a faster approach road, or their emergency patients were likely to expire between the main road and the front door.
We’d already detoured via a roadside rest stop for Sean and I to change into our disguises. My father had decided to bluff it out in the role he played best—arrogant surgeon. He would walk my mother in through the front entrance and we’d meet up inside. Entirely from memory, he gave us precise directions to the elevators and the stairwell.
“They’re highly unlikely to have removed Jeremy’s records from the system yet,” he said. “All I need is an empty office with a computer terminal.” His eyes flicked over the pair of us. “You won’t be able to take your guns.”
Sean’s silence spoke louder than any verbal disagreement would have done but eventually he sighed and shoved the Glock, still in its holster, into the Navigator’s glove box. I added my SIG and, when I glanced at him, caught my father’s satisfied little smile, like he’d just won a point of principle rather than necessity.
I knew Sean was as unhappy about this as he was about relying on my father’s intel, but he bore it without comment. He’d always been able to listen to orders and evaluate them in a detached manner, even when they were given by officers he despised.
The plan we loosely devised was that Sean and I would go in via the underground ambulance entrance in the guise of nicotine junkies. To this end, Sean had even picked up a discarded cigarette packet and straightened it out, to add a layer of verisimilitude. The empty packet sat on top of the dash and the strange pervasive smell of unburned tobacco leached into the atmosphere inside the Navigator.
“What about me?” my mother asked. She had no surgical wear. “I can play some useful part, surely? If you recall, darling, I was awfully good at amateur dramatics when I was younger.”
“You were.” My father smiled at her fondly if somewhat patronizingly, I thought, and patted her hand. “In that case, we’ll hold you in reserve as our secret weapon.”
She sat up a little straighter and smiled back, hearing only praise.
“Look, can we go and get this over with before I go old and gray?” I said, a little tartly, earning a reproachful look from both of them. When was I going to outgrow that?
We parked up as far away from the security cameras as we could manage and parted company, walking quickly. As my father had predicted, nobody paid us the slightest attention as we ambled inside the building, discussing a nonexistent cop show we were supposed to have watched on TV the night before.
The unflattering skullcap was uncomfortable to someone whose only regular headgear was a bike helmet. I tugged the cap down over my forehead, rubbing the skin carefully as I did so. The lump from when I’d head-butted Vondie in my mother’s drawing room seemed to be taking a long time to disappear. I wondered how her nose was feeling.
The four of us rendezvoused in the ER, where we were swallowed up in the usual bustle. My mother was sitting in the waiting area, close to the stairs, leafing through a magazine. My father, I noticed, had already managed to purloin a white coat and a stethoscope from somewhere, together with what looked suspiciously like an official ID card on a lanyard around his neck. No doubt he knew the layout of the place well enough to know where such things were kept, and the overwhelming self-confidence to simply help himself. I’d no idea his criminal tendencies were so well developed.
“Why couldn’t we just do that?” I grouched quietly, gesturing to my shapeless garb.
Sean’s brow quirked. He was also wearing the delightful little skullcap, but on him it looked good. That wasn’t a stretch. On him, just about anything looked good.
“Because there would be too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” my father said.
“These days,” Sean said, “I think you’ll find that’s Native Americans.”
“If you’ve quite finished,” my father muttered, “perhaps we could concentrate on the matter at hand? There are a couple of security people loitering near the lift and I’d rather not push my luck too far, if I can help it.” He gave a small, almost embarrassed smile. “They may have been briefed to keep an eye out for me.”
“So, we need a diversion,” Sean said, eyes narrowed. He turned to me and opened his mouth but my father held up his hand.
“Leave this to me.” He strode away, looking very much at home in this environment.
Along one side of the emergency room was a row of three glass-walled rooms where patients could be treated more fully. There were Venetian blinds for when more privacy was required. Like watching a movie with the sound turned off, we saw my father enter the middle room where an unattended patient appeared to be either unconscious or asleep, wired up to various monitors. After a quick flick through the chart, he moved alongside the bed and did something that we hardly caught, before leaving quickly. For a few moments nothing happened. Then an alarm began to sound and the nearest medical staff rushed past him to deal with it.
My father calmly walked back to us.
“Shall we go?” he suggested quietly, not breaking stride as he reached us and swept past, heading for the stairs. “It won’t take them more than a few moments to work out what I’ve done.”
“What the hell did you do?” I demanded in a whisper. “Kill him?”
“Hardly.” He shot me a pained little glance as we sidestepped the security personnel whose eyes, naturally enough, were on the drama in front of them and not on us. “I merely loosened his blood-oxygen sensor. Even a very junior intern,” he added with a slightly scathing note in his voice, “would know enough to check that before attempting to resuscitate him.”
“Oh well,” I said under my breath as we took the stairs two at a time and the clamor dropped away behind us, “that’s all right, then.”
He led us without hesitation to the elevator, then up another two floors and through a maze of corridors, finally halting outside an unmarked door that looked no different from any of the others. He tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. My father’s face took on a piqued look, as if the locked door was a personal affront.