He didn’t dare take the time to call Security. He broke into a run, rounded a cement pillar, and wormed his way rudely up the stairs. With the popularity of the baby otters, visitors swarmed around the huge viewing windows, packing the stairs, overloading the balcony. Dewitt shoved his way through the pack, leading with a strong shoulder, ascending the stairs at a frustrating pace. When he finally reached the upper platform, it was so mobbed that he lost sight. Too many heads, faces, cameras, images swirling: strobed, brilliant, spiked flash reflections sparking off the thick glass, drenching the horde in a sterile blue-white light; intrigued, childish, adoring smiles; the puckered, weathered faces of the seniors, confused, even frightened as Dewitt elbowed his way past them.
He finally fought his way to the very front of the group, turned and looked back at all the gleeful faces, their attention focused past him, through him. A strange feeling of invisibility overtook him.
Gone… No Emmy, no Briar, no mystery man.
More desperate now, Dewitt exploded to his right, wrestling his way to the far stairs and descending them hurriedly. There, in front of him, not twenty yards away, he spotted the man—and he was following the girls—who were now just below the pod of suspended orca whales in front of the information booth.
How could there be this many people? He was so accustomed to his somewhat protected position by the Kelp Forest, he rarely grasped the enormity of the crowds. That a majority of tonight’s visitors were aged, frail, and slow only made matters worse.
As Dewitt rounded the corner by the aquarium’s small theater, facing the stairs to the next level, his chest swelled with pain. Only yards ahead, on the incline of the stairs, he spotted the back of his daughter’s head, Briar alongside of her. Five or six steps behind, followed the man. He caught himself about to shout but held off—to do so would only stop Emmy and cause her to turn, giving her pursuer a few more steps to reach her. The man suddenly paused and looked over his shoulder, directly into the eyes of James Dewitt. Shock, even fear, flooded his face. He panicked and started to run.
Dewitt moved to the rail, took hold, and lunged his way up the stairs, his right hand seeking out the knurled grip of the .38 at his side. Only once in his life had he fired a weapon at another individual. That had been Steven Miller. He wondered whether he could do it again. He gained precious little ground. The man bounded up the stairs and disappeared around the corner. An older man slipped and fell to his hands and knees just in front of Dewitt. People piled on in domino fashion, forming a wall of confusion and producing several cries for help as others went down.
Dewitt vaulted the dividing rail to avoid the knot of fallen people, and charged into the oncoming stream of descending visitors. By the time he crested the stairway, he faced a drove of visitors, an impenetrable wall of casual clothes and childlike faces. A boxlike structure ahead of him, an island of Sheetrock, housed the rest rooms. To his left was the second-story viewing area for the Kelp Forest, a display of anchovies, the Kelp Gallery, Kelp Lab, and back toward the center of the building, a display on tides and an overlook at the downstairs foyer.
No sign of Emmy or Briar. No sign of him. It was at that moment he spotted the youthful Billy Talbot just ascending the stairs to the third level.
Talbot? No time for Talbot, although it explained Briar’s blush: The girls had arranged a rendezvous.
Dewitt searched the second level at a run. After several minutes, he rounded the corner and assaulted the stairway to the third-story level, an area that opened onto a balcony to the right, and to the left, a restricted rooftop area. He came face to face with his daughter, Briar, Billy Talbot, and a boy he recognized from the party. They were laughing.
“Dad?” Emmy asked, seeing his flushed face, his frantic look.
He walked over to Talbot and took him by the front of his shirt. “Did you make that phone call, Talbot?” Talbot shook his head. Dewitt grabbed him more tightly. There was no mistaking his rage. “It’s important! Did you?”
“Yeah.”
“Dad!” Emmy beseeched.
Talbot explained in a troubled voice, “I didn’t want you to see me. The only way to get upstairs was to walk right by you. What’s the big deal?”
“Dad!”
Dewitt released Talbot and told him to leave. The boy ran down the stairs three at a time and disappeared.
“Dad!”
Dewitt unleashed a diatribe on honesty, deceit, and kids like Billy Talbot. Briar was crying. Again. The verbal abuse made him feel better. When he was through, he announced they were going home immediately and that he “didn’t want to hear a word.”
On the way, he wasn’t thinking of Emmy or Talbot, or Cynthia Chatterman’s disapproving glance as he left. He was thinking about a face in the crowd, and what it meant if that face belonged to whom he thought it did.
10
Trapper John’s face caught the light briefly, though he shied from it instinctively. He preferred the privacy, the safety of darkness. His eyes, brown as wet earth, sparked with the light, an intensity in them like that of a caged animal. He knew all about cages. He would not be caged again. The bridge of his nose held a twenty-year reminder of a high school fistfight; he wore his thick dark hair slicked back. With a square chin and high cheekbones, he was proud of the ten percent Cherokee blood he carried in his veins. To see him, one would think him quite handsome, though on this night the steely defiance in his sharp movements and calculated efforts warned of his intent. Like a cat slinking close to the ground, there was no mistaking his purpose. If truth be known, purpose drove him on.
His finger found the light switch and pushed it down.
The agony hit him in waves, pain as he imagined a cancer victim must feel, a ripping at the fiber of his heart, a tearing away of his flesh; the stinging grief of loss like a tumor. The same now for five long months. It seemed appropriate that this pain should find him as he entered the back lot kitchen entrance to the Community Hospital. The aquarium had been a failure. This would not be.
He had followed Dewitt here on numerous occasions, knew to turn left down the service hallway, knew that at this time of night the only threat was from the surveillance cameras. That was why he had switched off the hallway lights. If, in fact, those cameras were monitored—which seemed unlikely—he would appear as a dark form, if he appeared at all. How long could it take to pull a couple of plugs? He would be in and out before anyone knew the difference.
The pain stung into his chest again. God, how he missed the boy. He held to his grief like a skid-row bum to his bottle. It fueled his imagination, quickened his heart, drove him like a jockey’s crop.
That the plans could end up so much junk infuriated him. Ad-libbing now for the better part of the week, he was beginning to fray at the edges. He had not slept more than five hours in four days. This, in itself, was nothing new; insomnia was an accepted way of life. The problem was having to think clearly while so fatigued. It had all seemed so straightforward during the planning stages. Then Lumbrowski with his arrogance; Dewitt with his investigation.
He reached the hallway and peered through the crack at the camera that rotated left to right. He could see a single nurse at the nurses’ station, head bent as she worked on paperwork. When the camera rocked right, its single eye looking away, Trapper John moved confidently across the hallway and into number 114. He could hear his own breathing above the hum of the life-support machinery. He did not deny himself the excitement of such moments. He felt no remorse over Anna’s defenselessness. People got what they deserved. This wasn’t about Anna Dewitt, it was about her father.
He moved directly to the far side of the huge bed, dropped to one knee, and pushed his way behind the blue enameled machine. He withdrew the paper clip from his pocket and then tugged the plug from the wall. Briefly, the machine switched to a warning tone. The change in sound charged adrenaline into his system, but his fingers did not pause. He slipped the unfolded paper clip between the tongs of the plug and forced it into t
he wall socket. A blue-white flash flared from the socket and all the room’s machines went dark and silent. He yanked out the plug, removed to his pocket what was left of the charred paper clip, and looked up at her.
He would have liked to stay to watch. It wasn’t so different from the others. Not really. However, he couldn’t count on how, or even whether, the hospital monitored blown circuits. If this failed, he would be back.
He moved across the hallway, having waited for the camera’s rotation, and was about to open the door to the back hall when he heard voices ahead of him. He glanced over his shoulder at the persistent camera, now returning its focus toward him.
Go away! he willed the people down the unseen hallway on the other side of the door. He glanced in panic once again at the camera, this time directly into the lens. The voices faded and died. He pushed open the door a crack to check. Clear.
He switched off the light and hurried down the hall toward his freedom.
One down. One to go.
11
…an emergency: Dewitt heard the words ringing in his ears as he drove at a breakneck pace along the twisting Highway 68. He had dropped off Emmy and Briar at Clare’s. Following the trouble at the aquarium, he was taking no chances.
The hospital hallway suddenly seemed so long. He rounded a corner and found himself walking the corridor that held his daughter’s room. The large clock on the wall read 2:20. A small group of nurses was gathered by Anna’s door. Dewitt slowed, nearly unable to place one foot before the other. A pain stole into his chest. One of the nurses began to cry audibly as she spotted him. He forced himself on, the distance between himself and the room refusing to close.
When he entered Anna’s room, the first thing that struck him was the silence. The absolute stillness. No beeping, no electronic humming. The rotating bed was empty, the sheets wrinkled. He spotted Anna then—all there was to see of her: a wisp of blond hair escaping from beneath a crisp white sheet on a gurney.
He walked over to her, pulled down the sheet, leaned over, and pressed his cheek to hers. He knew that temperature: His daughter was dead. Tears. He cupped her fragile head in his big hand and held her tightly, repeating her name quietly, hoping, miracle of miracles, she might yet come alive. “Anna…,” he gasped.
“I’m sorry, James,” said the voice of Dr. Jerry Rosenberg from behind. A gentle hand touched Dewitt’s shoulder. “A freak occurrence. Or perhaps, just perhaps, James, there’s a higher power at work here. Her time had come.”
Dewitt spun around with angry bloodshot eyes.
“The odds of this happening—” the doctor said.
“The odds?” Dewitt asked through tears.
“A power surge. Something like that,” the doctor said, still groping. “We don’t have any warning system for that, per se.”
“Power surge?” Dewitt asked, motioning Rosenberg away and examining the area around the bed. His eyes—the eyes of a forensic investigator—roamed the wires, the dials, the enamel blue stands with their black rubber wheels. There, on the pristine white speckled flooring, he spotted a small amount of dirt—dried mud by the look of it. He studied the dirt more closely. It had been raining when they had left the aquarium. He jerked a monitor out of his way. By the base of the machine, he found more dirt. One thing about hospital rooms, they were kept clean. Why the dirt? He disconnected the cord. Melted metal studs had welded themselves to the plug’s tines. “Not a higher power, Doctor,” he said. “This was the work of a mere mortal. She had a visitor.”
Dewitt brushed past the doctor, eyes to the floor. More dried mud by the room’s door. Two smears of mud on a line from this door across the hall to the door Dewitt often used to sneak in here late at night. When he reached this other door, he looked back toward Anna’s room. It was then he noticed, to his astonishment, the security camera. He had never bothered to look up, had never considered that his unauthorized visits had been witnessed.
Rosenberg stood across the hall studying Dewitt.
“How long has that been there?” he asked, pointing.
“A year now. A little more,” answered the doctor.
“It works?”
“Of course.”
“Runs all the time?”
“Yes.”
“It’s monitored?”
“Taped. For insurance purposes.”
“I need to see those tapes,” insisted Dewitt. “Now!”
“We’ll call Hank,” said the doctor.
***
Hank Johnson had dressed quickly. Director of hospital security, famous for his white cowboy hat, the black man wore his uniform shirt partially untucked.
On the way down in the elevator, Johnson explained: “We’ve got cameras in every hallway. Insurance company required it after some fool sued us, claiming he had slipped on a wet floor that never existed. Sued the hell out of us. Now the cameras cover our ass. We don’t monitor them. They run on twenty-four-hour loops. If we have a problem that warrants it, we file a tape away and hold on to it.”
The basement room was small and very hot. “Way it works,” the man explained, “is we got fifteen recorders.” He pointed to the bank of VCRs. “Hallways and stairways most important to the insurance company, so we got twelve machines dedicated.” Johnson spent several minutes with the machines, Dewitt looking on. The numbers of a twenty-four-hour counter rolled at fast forward in the upper corner of the television screen he was monitoring. Nurses walked stiff-legged at exaggerated speeds, like characters from a silent movie.
Seven o’clock: The minutes in the lower-right-hand corner sped past. Because the camera rotated in the hallway, there were equal sections of time when Anna’s door was out of view. Look right, look left… look right, look left… like a tennis match. Eight o’clock: visiting hours over, a parade of differing emotions read in the departing postures and embraces. A hospital is a place of great thanks or great despair.
Nine o’clock: Nurses on final rounds, checking on patients. Ten, eleven, midnight, one o’clock. Traffic in the corridor had quieted to none at all.
“Wait!” Dewitt said. “Back it up.”
Johnson worked the machinery. The same time period ran at normal speed. “Again,” Dewitt instructed.
Dewitt then asked for the same passage one more time, requesting the tape be slowed this time. Johnson noticed what had caught Dewitt’s eye. “The hallway door,” he said. “It closes shut.” When the camera panned back to include the door to Anna’s room, the large door thumped shut. “Shit,” the security man said, “he’s inside the room.”
James Dewitt felt his tears threatening, his throat tighten. On the other side of that door, his daughter’s killer. Two passes later, the camera looked back down the hall as Anna’s door opened a crack. In darkness, a face could not be seen. Dewitt said, “He’s waiting for the camera.”
“Making sure the hall is clear,” Johnson agreed.
The camera tracked away and, as it returned, it caught the man standing, his back to the camera. “He’s frozen,” Johnson observed. “Must be someone in the hall.”
“Turn around!” Dewitt demanded, leaning his face to within inches of the screen. “Look at me, you bastard!” he insisted.
The man suddenly obeyed, glancing over his shoulder in a blurry panic.
“Freeze frame,” Dewitt ordered. Although Johnson tried several times to get a single frame that showed definition onto the screen, the face came up a blur of features each and every time. “The tape gets recorded over too much; it loses its clarity,” the security man explained.
After several more tries, Dewitt took the tape from Johnson. “That’s all right,” he said in a dull, stunned voice. “I know what he looks like. We met earlier tonight.”
8
TUESDAY
1
“I thought we were a team?” Emmy pleaded from the Zephyr’s passenger seat, the pale blush of dawn filling the sky, glowing on the roofs of the vehicles in the ever-moving chain of freeway traffic. She had taken
the news of her sister well. Too well. Dewitt worried for her; she was stonewalling her emotions.
“Don’t, Em. It’s settled,” Dewitt said.
“We need each other, Dad, don’t we? A team?”
“I don’t like this, either, Em, but—”
“I hate that line, you know that? If you don’t like it, then why are we doing it?”
“It’s not up for discussion.”
“We’re talking about my life here, Dad, and it’s ‘not up for discussion’? Gimme a break! You can put me on a plane to Gram’s, but how long do you think I’ll stay there? You want to spend the next week picturing me hitchhiking back to Carmel? A runaway?”
“Em…”
“Teammates don’t abandon each other; they work together.”
Dewitt glanced out his side window, cars streaming past heading south on the other side of the freeway’s retaining fence, hundreds of expressionless faces in bright shiny vehicles too similar to differentiate. “I’d rather be safe than sorry. Give me some time, Em. I’ll have you back just as soon as I can.”
“You need me,” she insisted.
“You’re right, I do need you.”
“We’re teammates,” she tried tentatively.
“We are.” He couldn’t explain it to her properly. There were ways around this: He could shuttle her between Clarence, other parents, and himself, making sure she was kept careful track of, but the easiest for everyone seemed to be a short vacation.
A long heavy silence passed. Looking out her window, Emmy shocked him, asking, “How do you do it, Dad?”
“Do what?”
“Act like she never existed. Never talk about her. I don’t see how you can do it. I miss her so much.”
“Nothing wrong with missing her, Em. I miss her, too. But we’ve got to let go. We’ve got to go on.
Probable Cause Page 19
