Enigma

by Catherine Coulter

  “Yes, but Mr. Pruitt nailed them, though. The lenses were square, perfectly square, with black frames, and they looked weird. He’s the one who handed Manta Ray the cap before he put on his own, so I saw his hair. It was dark brown.”

  Chief called out, “Did you see him walk, Kim? Did he seem old? Young?”

  Kim twirled her ponytail around her busy fingers while she thought about it. “I only had a fast look at the three of them, but he didn’t seem as old as you, Dad.”

  “Thanks, kid. So late thirties?”

  She nodded. “I guess so. And he was tanned, at least his face was.”

  “Show us the second man,” Jack said.

  She pulled out a second drawing. This sketch looked pretty rough. It showed a slender face covered with aviator sunglasses and a dark wool cap pulled low, hiding all the hair.

  Kim said, “This guy was lots shorter than the big guy and Manta Ray. Maybe five foot eight, same as me. He looked like he might be in charge, though; well, that was the impression I got. He kind of swaggered, took the lead, expected the other two to follow him. But there was something different about him, the shape of his face, his really sliced-thin cheekbones.” She shrugged. “I thought first he might be foreign, Hispanic maybe, but I’ve been thinking about him a lot, and here’s the thing.” Kim leaned in close. “I’m not so sure it was a he. It might have been a she.”

  That was a kicker. Jack said, “A woman?” He looked down at the drawing. Impossible to tell. “Why do you think that?”

  “Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure, but what happened is I turned to sneak a look at them as we were driving away. They were moving out fast, with her in front of the two guys. Even though her jeans were loose I got a good look at her butt. It wasn’t a guy’s butt, it was a girl’s.”

  Chief looked at her in his rearview. “Nice timing, Kim, you couldn’t have done that better.” He grinned at her as he turned the SUV onto a short paved driveway toward a low redbrick building nestled among maples, oaks, and larches. “This is the London Ranger Station, where we’re meeting Duke.” Chief checked his watch. “And Harry should be here any minute with the camping gear. Grab your stuff and I’ll give you an overview while we’re waiting.” He pulled out a map of the forest, spread it out on the hood of the SUV. “You see the forest runs along the Cumberland Plateau in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. You can see the roads for vehicles, trails for bikes, hikers, and horseback riding, and the stretches of private property. We’re going to avoid all the visitor areas because we hope Manta Ray and his group will do the same. One of Duke’s rangers will drive us to where Kim saw them last—on East Branch Road. It’s about five miles from here. Duke will go over all this in more detail when he gets here.”

  They looked up to see a young man wearing a John Deere ball cap, jeans, and a cotton shirt climb out of a red Ford F-150 and wave to them. The chief folded the map, stuck it in his pocket. “That’s Harry, right on time.”

  Harry Morsi introduced himself and walked them over to the bed of his truck, piled high with the gear he’d brought. “Didn’t know how heavy you’d be packing, so I brought pretty much everything. I’ve got two light MSR backpacking stoves with fuel canister lines, my newest lightweight Nalgenes along with a water-filter system so you can drink from the streams without worrying about giardia, bivvy sacks, three lightweight sleeping bags with ground pads. Duke told me there was no rain in the forecast, but in case it does rain, here are some lightweight rain jackets, extra socks. A couple of tarps you can build a shelter with if it rains and the ground’s wet, some lengths of nylon and bungee cord to fasten down the tarps if you need them. I’ve got instant oatmeal, freeze-dried eggs, dried fruit, nuts, and some freeze-dried carbs.”

  Jack said, “Chief, you brought along a good set of binoculars and your sat phone, right?”

  “Wouldn’t forget those,” Chief said. “And I’ve got my scoped Remington, the 7600 bolt-action in the SUV. It’s accurate and dependable, fast follow-up shots.”

  Jack nodded. “It’s a fine rifle, and I hope we don’t have to use it.” He looked toward Harry’s truck bed. “Harry, we appreciate all your trouble, but we’re not going out there to relax and get comfortable. We’ll be traveling as light and fast as we can. And I don’t expect we’ll be out there for very long.”

  11

  WASHINGTON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  MONDAY AFTERNOON

  Savich ran into Kara’s room, Ray Hunter the security guard and a nurse from the front desk on his heels. Kara was standing by the bassinet holding a bundle of blankets and towels in her hands, staring down. She wasn’t screaming now. She was silent, frozen.

  “Kara?”

  She slowly turned, raised blank eyes to Savich’s face. “He’s gone, Dillon. I don’t understand. Alex is gone. I wanted to tell the nurse but I couldn’t stop screaming. The nurse who took him for an ultraviolet treatment, she didn’t bring him back. She brought these.” Kara handed him the blankets. Three hospital towels were twisted together inside the blanket.

  The alarm sounded as Philly Adams, the nursing supervisor, came running into the room and slowed, calmed herself. She looked at Kara, at the nest of towels in the blanket, realized exactly what had happened, and went into command mode. “I understand Alex is missing, Ms. Moody. Ray will put all our procedures into motion. There’s the alarm. That means the elevators and stairwells are in lockdown. Hospital security will be here any moment. As you know, Alex has a radiofrequency tag fastened to his umbilicus and another tag around his ankle. I will have the nurses check all the rooms. We will find him, Ms. Moody.” She looked at Savich, eyebrow arched, and he introduced himself.

  Savich ignored the alarm, the sound of voices, running feet, the faces peering into the room. He put the blankets down in the bassinet, took Kara’s arms in his hands to steady her. “Tell me what happened, Kara.”

  He watched her draw on the strength she’d showed at her house with John Doe. “One of the nurses came to take him for his ultraviolet treatment. She said it was to help prevent his getting jaundice. When she brought him back, she told me to let him sleep for a while longer before feeding him.”

  Philly said, “Ms. Moody, Alex wouldn’t have had an ultraviolet light treatment. It’s used for babies who already have jaundice.”

  Savich said, “How long ago did she supposedly bring him back?”

  “About ten minutes. I sat on my bed looking at the bassinet for a while, but I wanted so much to hold him. I had to see him, speak to him, and so I came over to the bassinet and lifted the cover away from his face, but he wasn’t there.” Her voice caught. “Dillon, it was towels, just towels.”

  Savich said, “Kara, the nurse who brought him back, what was her name?”

  “I—I don’t know, I didn’t recognize her, never saw her before. She was very professional, very nice.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She was wearing a cap, so I couldn’t see her hair, and glasses, narrow with black frames. I remember thinking that style didn’t look good on her. She had on a white lab coat over a nurse’s uniform. She was in her midthirties.”

  Savich said, “Picture her in your mind. Was she heavy? Slender? Fit? Anything unusual about her you can see?”

  “She was slender, tall, maybe five foot eight. I think she had a bit of a limp, like she’d hurt her left foot and couldn’t put her full weight on it.”

  “Anything else you can remember about her?”

  Kara shook her head.

  Ray Hunter had come into the room to stand beside Philly Adams.

  Philly placed her hand on his arm. “What’s happening, Ray?”

  Ray said, “Our security chief, Oslo Elk, has contacted the CARD team and Metro, and spread all his people around the exits. The supervisory agent said there’d be two agents on-site real soon along with some FBI agents from the Washington Field Office.” Ray added to Kara, “CARD stands for the Child Abduction Rapi
d Deployment team. They’re a special FBI unit, and they’re experts at finding missing babies taken from hospitals.”

  Chief of Security Oslo Elk rushed into the room, quickly introduced himself to Savich and Kara, and said to Philly Adams, “The security log shows one of your night-shift nurses, Polly Pallen, checked into the unit using her key card forty-five minutes ago.”

  “Polly? She wasn’t scheduled. Wait a second.” She was on her cell, nodded, punched off. “One of our nurses, Abby Hinton, said Polly wasn’t here, but she saw a nurse in the unit she didn’t recognize a few minutes ago. She didn’t think much about it, thought she was a traveler—a visiting nurse—or a temp.”

  Kara stared at Philly Adams. “You’re telling me you let a strange woman loose with our babies? You didn’t double-check that she should be here?”

  Philly looked devastated. “I’m sorry, but we were busy and Abby assumed I’d been notified. It shouldn’t have happened, but we’re doing everything we can.”

  Kara looked like she wanted to leap on Philly Adams. Savich put his hand on her arm.

  Chief Elk said, “Then the woman must have gotten hold of Polly Pallen’s key card. We’ll try to reach nurse Pallen to be sure, but it’s a good bet. Let’s hope she didn’t get out of here before the alarm locked all the doors, and that includes the rear stairwell the personnel use. Agent Savich, you want to come look at some video with me? I’ve seen it once already. I’m hoping you’ll see more. We’ve got cameras on all the stairs. We can see if that’s the way she left the floor.”

  Three nurses stayed with Kara. Before Savich left with Chief Elk, he took her arms in his hands and forced her to look up at him. “I know you want to scream at everyone here who was supposed to keep Alex safe. Believe me, they’re all doing their best now. I want you to keep faith and trust we will get Alex back.”

  As Savich walked down five flights of stairs with Security Chief Elk to the hospital security office off the lobby, he wondered if the media scanners had already lit up like Christmas trees. There would soon be chaos. Elk was saying, “We have eight cameras on the floor, two in the main stairwell, another two in the personnel stairwell. There aren’t any cameras in the patient rooms, so we won’t see the woman actually taking the baby. Damnation, I hate this. It’s the second time it’s happened on my watch. We got the other baby back okay, but this time it looks like a real pro job, and tell me why go to all this trouble to take that particular baby?”

  John Doe knows why. He tried to stop it, tried to save Kara. Savich had wished John Doe were FBI purview. Now he was. Kidnapping was a federal crime, and Alex and John Doe were connected now, one case. Detective Mayer wasn’t going to like being told that at all.

  “All ready, Chief,” the surveillance tech said, so excited he was nearly bouncing up and down in his chair.

  Elk said, “Gilly is showing us three separate feeds on each of the monitors on the maternity floor, in the elevators and in the stairwells. He’s taken the feeds to fifteen minutes before the alarm went off. Fast-forward, Gilly, let Agent Savich see the routine.”

  Savich heard the door open behind him but didn’t look around.

  They watched Ray Hunter, the security guard, check visitors onto the maternity floor and look over staff IDs, watched the public and staff with their carts and equipment enter and leave the elevators. Nurses passed the cameras in the hallways, going about their business, pushing linens and medication carts and computer monitors into and out of patient rooms.

  They saw a nurse in black-framed glasses and a surgical cap walk down the hallway toward Kara’s room. She looked relaxed, at home. She was tall, slender, in her midthirties, exactly as Kara described her. She went into Kara’s room, emerged soon carrying what appeared to be Alex wrapped in blankets. When she reappeared ten minutes later, she was carrying Alex back into Kara’s room.

  Chief Elk said, “She knows where the cameras are, did a good job of avoiding them. I think she left Alex in the empty room next to Kara’s then picked him up. Watch.”

  A minute later she was carrying Alex to the rear personnel door, sliding in the key card and stepping through, the door closing behind her. Fast and slick.

  They watched her walk quickly down five flights of stairs and exit the stairwell into the lobby near the east door.

  “Switch to the cameras at the east exit and the parking lots,” Elk said.

  Gilly pressed a few keys on his keyboard to bring up the lobby feeds. They saw her step into the women’s room and a few moments later, step out, the nurse’s uniform, glasses, and cap gone, carrying Alex. A man in his midthirties, tall, as fit as she, and dressed just as casually in a shirt and chinos, met her in the lobby and walked beside her as she cradled the baby, his hand on her shoulder. They walked out the east exit, the picture of happy new parents.

  “Give me a minute and back that up,” Savich said. “I want to see their faces better.”

  Gilly brought it back to when they were nearer the camera and zoomed in on their faces. Savich took several pictures and uploaded them to the CAU. “That’s probably good enough to run through facial recognition. Maybe one of them is in the database.”

  Gilly brought up the camera outside the east exit, and they saw them again, a man and a woman carrying a baby directly east onto Parker Street. Kara was right, the woman did favor her left foot, only a bit of a limp, barely noticeable. They paused at the intersection, and an old dark blue Toyota SUV pulled up. They climbed in and drove away.

  “Any chance of making out that license plate? Another camera?” Savich asked.

  “No, that’s the closest we can get to them from our property,” Elk said, “but there should be Metro cops covering Parker Street. I’ll call in that car, get an Amber Alert started. There are a couple of banks along that street with security cameras. Maybe that will help.”

  Savich turned to see Sherlock standing beside the security room door. “The chief’s right. It was slick,” she said. “The woman knew enough about nursing to fool the staff and Kara, stole the right key card and knew how to use it, and she and the man were out of the hospital as quickly as humanly possible. Now the question we have to answer is why. And what does it all have to do with John Doe?”

  “I love your brain,” Savich said, touching his hand to her cheek. “You’re only here one minute and you cut right to the core. I want you to speak to Kara, see if she’s remembered anything more, any details at all. The CARD agents should be up there soon. At least we know what they look like, know the woman who stole Alex has a limp.

  “Chief Elk, you’re coordinating the search with the Metro cops? And dealing with the media?”

  “Yeah, no choice there.”

  As Savich and Sherlock left the security office, they heard Elk on his cell calling the public relations department.

  Savich and Sherlock saw the CARD agents when they opened the stairwell door onto the maternity floor, speaking with Ray Hunter. CARD Agent Constance Butler, a honed and fit woman with cropped gray hair, spotted Savich, nodded, and introduced herself. The other agent, Bolt Haller, came up, shook their hands. “I understand you’ve been looking at video with Chief Elk. He’s started things rolling on the Amber Alert on Alex and the blue Toyota SUV. Tell us what you saw, Agent Savich, then we’ll speak to Ms. Moody.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, Dillon,” Sherlock said. “I’m going to go see Kara.”

  12

  BOWLER, BOWLER, AND BOWLER

  CORNER OF K STREET SW AND 17TH STREET NW

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  LATE MONDAY AFTERNOON

  Ruth went with her gut and parked her Fiat across from the Blackthorn Building. She watched the staffers pour out, ready for their Monday-evening rituals. She ducked down when she saw the Bowlers’ receptionist, Kendrick, walk out, pause on the sidewalk, and look around. A classic red Mustang pulled up and Kendrick got in. Ruth saw a flash of blond hair and sunglasses at the wheel.

  Mrs. Bowler and Magda came out a couple of minutes later,
both carrying briefcases, Magda obviously arguing with her mother. About what her daddy had done? Or what the FBI could possibly do to them? They disappeared into the garage beside the Blackthorn Building, and drove out a couple of minutes later together in a dark blue BMW. They weren’t arguing any longer, both staring out the windshield as Mrs. Bowler carefully eased into traffic. Ruth wondered exactly what they knew. How complicit were they?

  Duce Bowler came out thirty minutes later, alone, his head down, carrying a briefcase. It looked to Ruth like he was talking to himself, shaking his head, even nodding. Was he trying to decide what to do? Or had he already made phone calls, made all the arrangements? He disappeared into the garage, came out driving a new dark gray Lexus GS F. Unlike his wife, he screeched into traffic, ignoring honking cars, obviously on edge. Good. It was still powerfully hot, even after five o’clock in the afternoon. His windows were rolled up, the AC doubtless on high.

  Ruth pulled smoothly into traffic, three cars behind Mr. Bowler’s Lexus. She soon realized he wasn’t going home to Bowleigh, Maryland, he was going to Virginia. She was pleased she’d listened to her gut and started the surveillance early.

  Thirty minutes later she was in Alexandria, following Bowler down King Street, past Market Square, and left onto Queen Street. He pulled into a public parking garage and luckily, Ruth managed to squeeze her small Fiat between two SUVs curbside. She watched Bowler come out of the public garage, cross Queen Street, and walk into Bilbo Baggins restaurant with its famous bright yellow facade and red awning.

  She called Ollie, told him where Bowler was. “He’s still alone. I’ll bet you he set up a meet in a nice public spot. I’ll call you in fifteen minutes or when whoever he’s meeting gets here.” Ruth punched off, waited a few more minutes, and slipped into the restaurant after him. It was cool and dark inside, filled to brimming with happy-hour workers and tourists, loud with conversations and laughter. Through the endless shuffle of waiters among the closely packed tables, she spotted Bowler at the bar, hunched over what looked to be a martini. She slipped into the restroom hallway and stood watching him and whoever came through the front door. Minutes passed. It was nearly six o’clock. Could she have been wrong? Was Bilbo Baggins simply one of Bowler’s favorite watering holes, his place to de-stress after a difficult day? This day certainly qualified. He consulted his watch, swiveled on his barstool, and, like her, looked back at the front door, then down at his watch again.