He knew what that was about or at least he could guess. They’d found a patient dead. But they wouldn’t know it was murder, not yet. He’d be long gone by the time that information was known. He’d propped her back on her pillow, leaving her lying there, still and not breathing. Nothing would show, at least not immediately, that he had leaned on that pillow with a good portion of his weight nor that she’d had no chance. She was doomed from the beginning. And she wasn’t Ava.
Ava Adams needed to die and she needed to do it soon. He took the stairs at a run as if flying down the fire exit, possibly breaking his neck, would somehow take Ava out sooner.
* * *
Monday, June 13—8:00 a.m.
WITH HIS THOUGHTS on Ava, Faisal answered his phone with a more abrupt hello than normal.
It was Colin Vanstone. He was the hospital administrator. Faisal had had a few conversations with the man since Ava had been admitted. This time, Colin began the conversation without his usual niceties.
“I don’t know how it happened. Ava Adams has left the hospital.”
“What do you mean ‘left’?” It seemed like time stopped, like he wasn’t making sense of what the man was telling him.
“She’s no longer here. But I can assure you that she was definitely not discharged. In fact, considering the shape she was in earlier, I’m surprised—”
“When? Where?” Faisal punched out the abbreviated questions as he cut the man off. He could feel the plastic of the phone creak under the pressure of his fingertips. He eased his grip.
“I’m sorry—”
“I don’t need your apology,” Faisal cut him off. “Give me the details and quickly.”
He listened as the administrator relayed the few facts he knew. The facts turned out to be nothing more than a bed check that had turned up an empty room. There had been no sign of Ava anywhere on the floor. That was hours ago. Faisal couldn’t believe it. Ava was missing. It was nothing that anyone had predicted or, in his defense, could have predicted. She wasn’t in shape to run. She had shown no signs of that, only a worry about her father. He’d judged all of it wrong. This changed everything, in a way that was unthinkable. In fact, from what he could see, the case—what there was of it—was majorly compromised unless he could find her. And he’d better find her fast.
“I’m not sure how she escaped,” Colin Vanstone admitted. There was a sheepish edge to his voice. “Although, even the security you had in place took breaks.”
“Escaped.” He frowned. As if she was being held prisoner instead of being kept safe. Escaped. Despite everything that had happened, the thing that was highlighted in his mind was the word escaped. It left an ugly taste in his mouth. Escaping was for convicts not for someone like Ava. She’d been a voluntary patient in an American hospital, not a dangerous criminal. All that aside, the thought of her alone on the streets of a big city like Miami in her state was inconceivable. She had no money, no transportation, no nothing and a faulty memory.
“It seems she disappeared several hours ago. The room has since been filled...”
“Filled?” There was a harsh edge to the word. He couldn’t believe any of this.
“I wasn’t notified until...” His voice trailed off as if he had more to say and yet was reluctant to add whatever it might be.
“What the hell?” he spat out, skipping over what only appeared to be a lame excuse. “How did you let her get away?” He paused, realizing that what he had said had been contradictory to his thoughts about escape, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was finding her. “When did it happen?” He had more questions that he wanted to ask. But there were only so many answers he was going to get, and none to the question of where she had gone. He was ready to move now. To get her back. He wasn’t sure how this had happened. He’d never thought she’d run.
“Considering the circumstances, I discharged the security.”
“Discharged the security...” His voice was slow and deadly as his mind tried to wrap itself around the massive screwup that had happened.
Faisal bit back his next comment. He didn’t need to waste time on judgments.
“She was seen going down the corridor, alone. Last evening.”
“Yesterday?” He couldn’t filter the anger from his voice. This was unbelievable. He wanted to hurl the phone and go after her immediately. But that would be ridiculous. He needed the facts, he needed control.
“A volunteer saw her, they had no reason to question her, or, for that matter, report it. In fact, he wouldn’t normally be there that late but he’d brought a magazine up to a patient. Then the ward clerk found the note...”
“What note?”
“She borrowed fifty dollars. At least that’s what her note said. Opened an unlocked cabinet and took a fifty from one of the nurse’s bags.” The administrator cleared his throat. “I’m not sure how it happened. She wasn’t under guard but—”
“She was your responsibility,” Faisal snarled. He couldn’t believe this, the why of it—nothing gibed. Where had she gone and why had she run? Had she felt threatened?
“What kind of shape was she in?” he asked. There were so many concerns here, not least of which was Ava’s physical health. He remembered how she’d been when he’d last seen her. Weak, still confused and lying down.
“When she was last seen by a nurse at 9:30 p.m., she was awake and alert but her memory was still shaky. That’s what the last charting reveals.” He cleared his throat. “They’d given her solids but hadn’t taken the intravenous line out.”
“What are you saying?” He could only picture the needle providing sustenance directly into her vein—it had still been in. That meant...the thought dropped, it was an ugly visual.
The administrator cleared his throat as if his next words were difficult or at least reluctant. “She pulled it out and not well. There was a trail of blood on her bed sheets.”
“She was bleeding?”
“Nothing major, the wound will naturally seal itself within a matter of minutes. Usually we apply pressure in the form of a cotton pad and a light bandage. I wouldn’t worry about that.”
“What do you propose I worry about?” Faisal asked. He’d left money for her in case there was something she needed at the gift shop, or for a meal at one of the hospital kiosks. He’d been generous in what he’d left—now he realized that he might have been too generous. He’d facilitated her escape. Like a fool, he thought as he fought the urge to hurl the phone. Instead he clenched his fist and directed his ire at the man who’d just given him the news.
“Seriously, this has never happened. When we’ve had patients in a hurry to get out of hospital care we’ve been able to convince them that it wouldn’t be in their best interest,” the administrator said as he skated over the damning words.
“Why not this time?”
“She gave no hint of her intention.”
Smart, that was Ava. She’d kept silent and used that as a cloak to slip out under the wire. She’d obviously remembered something that she hadn’t revealed to him.
Darn her, stubborn as he remembered, except now the playing field made the deception on her part all the more dangerous.
“I can’t believe it happened. I mean the hallways are empty at times but this time it wasn’t just the hallway that was empty but the nurses’ station too. She literally lucked out.”
She outsmarted you, he thought. It wasn’t surprising. He remembered how wicked smart she was. She had gone on for an advanced degree long after he’d kicked formal education aside for a chance to work in the field and take the helm of the Wyoming office of Nassar Security.
His mind returned to the present. She might have some resources but she wouldn’t have much. And she had no clothes. He couldn’t imagine that she’d get far considering what she had available for a wardrobe. “What was she wearing?�
�� Faisal asked, thinking of the sleepwear that he’d rescued her in and the equally inappropriate hospital gown.
“I couldn’t tell you.”
He should have expected that answer. “She couldn’t leave in a hospital gown,” he said, trying to keep the edge out of his voice.
“True but in a hospital it’s easy enough to get your hands on a pair of scrubs. It’s the norm to see them anywhere in the city—people coming and going from work. I’m not saying that’s what she did, however.”
Unfortunately, it was a valid point, Faisal thought grimly. The various hospitals and medical facilities in the city employed a huge network of people. Many of them dressed in the classic scrubs, from physicians to nurses and even students. It wasn’t an uncommon sight even outside hospital grounds.
“There’s more,” the administrator said.
“Get to the point,” Faisal growled.
“That patient, the one placed in her room, has since passed on. A tragedy. A young woman admitted for possible gall bladder surgery died before we could help her.”
The blood seemed to roar in his ears. He wasn’t sure if he was hearing right. “Ava’s room was filled and that patient has since died?” he repeated the facts as he understood them. He wasn’t sure how this could happen.
“Yes, it appears that way. An autopsy has been ordered. She was only twenty-eight and this was completely unexpected.”
“What did she die of?”
“We don’t know,” Colin replied. “Could be a number of things. An aneurysm for one. It’s rare but not unheard of.”
“Foul play?” It had to be asked. Faisal was frustrated and not done with this man. Had Ava been the target?
“It’s possible but doubtful.” There was a slight hesitation in the way he said the words, as if he didn’t quite believe them.
“Was there anyone around, anyone suspicious-looking?” Faisal didn’t keep the impatience out of his voice. The man’s methodical tone was driving him crazy.
“One of the nursing assistants saw a man at the elevator shortly before the body was found. Nothing was thought of it. He could be a visitor.”
“What did he look like?”
“Middle-aged. Gray-streaked dark hair. Caucasian. Average height. She only saw him from the back.”
“Anything else?” he asked and his gut told him that everything about this was wrong. Not just the murder, which was beyond wrong, nor the fact that Ava had disappeared, but there was something else, something even more deadly.
“The next patient was moved in immediately after we discovered the first patient, Ava, missing. The room was cleaned an hour after the discovery but the name hadn’t been reassigned. It was still marked Ava Adams,” the man said gravely. “I don’t like what that might imply. The body is just being removed now,” the administrator said in a regretful tone of voice.
Faisal’s entire body was tense. His senses were on high alert. This information changed everything. The woman in Ava’s room was dead, murdered, he was sure of it. Within hours of her leaving...it was beyond hope that the intended target had not been Ava.
The question was still who had killed and why, and more important, where was Ava now? And why had she run?
Five minutes later, Faisal disconnected with less information than he’d like. But considering everything that had happened, he doubted if the woman who had died in Ava’s room had expired from natural causes.
Faisal clenched his fist. He sat for a minute staring silently into space. He could have been anywhere. He didn’t see the elegant decor of the suite. He couldn’t believe that Ava had regained her strength and potentially her memory and then coasted out of the hospital with an ease that bordered on the ridiculous. He needed to find her, like yesterday, and before someone else did.
Chapter Thirteen
It was less than an hour since Faisal had received that fateful call that Ava was missing. Now he looked long and hard at the face of the young woman who lay dead on the cold steel of the examining table. Her hair was long, almost to the middle of her back. She was brunette and a few years older than Ava. After that, the similarities stopped.
He’d insisted on viewing the body in the hope that the similarities would somehow give him a much-needed clue. Now he didn’t know why he’d bothered. It was depressing and frightening all at the same time. Looking at her frightened him for Ava and saddened him for the deceased woman’s family.
“She may have been asphyxiated,” the coroner said.
He listened as the coroner went into some detail on why he believed that could be a possibility.
“Her eyes are bloodshot. Classic sign of asphyxiation.”
A chill ran through him like none he’d felt before. He’d stood in this position many times but never had he felt the haunting fear that the person before him could have been someone he knew and loved. He almost took a step back. That thought combined with the cold steel and sharp smell of disinfectant that depersonalized death was almost too much. This wasn’t Ava but someone had loved her.
Regret and anger snaked through him as he thought of how this young woman had died unnecessarily, how it could just as easily have been Ava on that slab. The reality was as disturbing as it was unthinkable. Whether they could prove it or not, he was sure that this woman had died of unnatural causes. It wasn’t right or fair. And he knew it happened much too often. He’d thought of adding a branch of investigations geared solely to violence against women. He’d seen too much of it in his work. But now wasn’t the time for such considerations.
Five minutes later, Faisal was heading across the hospital parking lot to a charcoal 1967 Mustang he kept in Miami for his rare visits to the city. He slipped behind the wheel and leaned back against the plush leather, the keys in his lap, his arms crossed and a frown on his face.
A woman who supposedly should have been Ava was dead. The fact that the decedent had been in Ava’s room and Ava was still the registered patient indicated that Ava was the target. Now there were questions that needed to be answered, and quickly.
Where had Ava gone? He tamped down the panic he’d felt at losing her when he’d only just found her. He had to stick to facts.
She’d come here for a vacation with her father before starting her working career as a clinical psychologist with a public school in Wyoming. But none of that gave him the answers he needed. She’d flown out of Casper, Wyoming, where she’d leased an apartment. It was interesting that she’d stayed in the state where she’d studied, at least for her first four years, and where they’d met. It was far from her father’s residence in the Caribbean. But as much as he knew she loved her father, tropical life had never been for her, she’d said so often. So Wyoming, the end of school and the beginning of a career, was where her life had been until just a week ago when she’d joined her father in St. Croix for a voyage to the Bahamas. Now, her father was missing and she’d fled. To him, it was clear that she knew something and that she didn’t trust anyone to help her. That pained him but he couldn’t dwell on it. How he felt had no relevance to helping Ava.
He reviewed the facts, running them through his mind in record speed until he hit on what he considered to be key questions. Did Ava’s secret threaten her father’s well-being or his business? Yet her father was missing, possibly already dead, and still she’d run. Was it a threat that had frightened her? Did she know something? What had caused her to leave the hospital?
Whatever Ava was after, he was sure it was major and he was also sure that it was linked to the death in her room. He’d left the morgue with more questions than answers and an unspoken confirmation that Ava was no longer safe. She’d run and he thanked everything he cherished for that. If she hadn’t, she’d be the one in that morgue.
Still, the fact that she’d run left him with questions. Why hadn’t Ava turned to him instead of running? For
whatever reason, she hadn’t trusted him.
He opened the car door and stepped out. Despite the feeling of urgency, he had no direction. He needed to think this through. The door shut and he pressed the key fob, locking the door without a backward glance.
His mind went back over the case, of what he knew and what he might have missed. A yacht with what they could only assume had two men on board had disappeared. The Coast Guard had no answers and the vast Atlantic was hiding its secrets well. What had happened? What had Ava seen? He stood with his hands on his hips for a second, looking right, left and behind him as if on the quiet street there might be an answer. But all he saw was a pretty girl in a sundress walking a white poodle. Her long blond hair had stripes of baby blue. He’d like to tell her to dodge that salon the next time she had her hair done. It was a lighthearted thought amid the gravity of what had happened.
Faisal stared across the street where high-rises hid the vastness of the Atlantic. Somewhere beyond Miami’s crowded docks lay a deadly secret. A secret that may already have killed.
* * *
FAISAL STOOD ON the sidewalk outside of Mercy Hospital considering his options. Ava’s father’s final destination had been Fort Lauderdale. He looked at his watch—it had been over an hour since he’d been told of her disappearance and it had been longer than that since she’d made her escape. From what he knew she might have had all night and had definitely had most of the morning. He’d like to grab the hospital administrator and shake sense into him. Instead he clenched his fist and tried to put himself in Ava’s position.
What was in Miami for her? He couldn’t think of anything. Where would she have gone? Her identification was missing, along with her credit and debit cards. The only money she had was the one hundred and fifty dollars he’d given her and the fifty dollars she’d lifted. Two hundred dollars wouldn’t get you far, not if you wanted to sleep and eat.
A city bus lumbered by and stopped. He waited with the others at the stop and once inside, spoke to the driver. Two minutes later he stood on the curb. He now knew that there was a bus that went from the hospital to the intercity bus depot. It stopped here every fifteen minutes and arrived at the depot with one transfer. Ava could have been out of the hospital area within fifteen minutes of exiting the building. If that were true, she could be long gone. The problem was that, even if he was right, he didn’t know where she was headed or why. He didn’t know if a bus was the answer but it was a place to start.
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