by J. A. Jance
“He’s still in the ICU.”
“Is he able to communicate?” Juanita asked. “If I talk to him, will he make sense?”
Ali glanced toward the charge nurse, who had taken the volunteer and her load of flowers in hand. “Those can’t go in any of the ICU rooms, because they’re supposed to be fragrance-free zones,” the nurse was explaining to the woman, who was evidently new. “You can park them on one of the tables here in the waiting room. Then, when the patient is moved to a regular room, we send the flowers along. Who are they for?”
“The guy didn’t give us a name. Just the woman who was found near Three Points on Friday.”
The nurse gestured toward the room from which Sister Anselm had emerged much earlier. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll just write Jane Doe and tape it to the side, here. That way we’ll know they’re hers. I’m not sure how long she’ll be in the ICU, but you can take charge of them, right, Sister Anselm?”
Bouncing the weeping Carinda on her hip, the nun nodded. “Will do,” she said.
“Excuse me,” Ali said, interrupting the flower discussion. “This is Mr. Reyes’s attorney on the phone. She wants to know if she can come to the hospital to talk to him.”
The nurse shook her head. “Not at this time,” she said. “Family members only.”
“You heard that?” Ali asked.
“Good,” Juanita said. “If I can’t talk to him, neither can Lattimore. At this point, I’m working as your attorney as opposed to theirs. I’m assuming you want me on the job?”
“Yes,” Ali said. “I want you on the job.”
“Very well, then. At their earliest convenience, Ms. Reynolds, I’ll need to have a signed document from all of you, saying that you, Ali, are paying for their legal services, but you might want to reconsider.”
“Why?”
“Because you might be wasting your money. In order to have a search warrant in hand, Mr. Lattimore had to convince a judge that he had some reason to believe illegal activity had occurred. You may believe these people to be friends of yours, Ms. Reynolds, but I must warn you, search warrants aren’t issued easily.”
“I’m aware of that,” Ali said.
“So let me ask you one more question,” Juanita said. “Did you have an affair?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You and Jose? I’m trying to figure out why you’re riding to the rescue here—calling Victor; calling me. What business is this of yours?”
“Jose and I didn’t have an affair,” Ali declared. “He helped me once when I needed it, and I’m trying to help him in return. I’m also trying to help his family.”
“No good deed …” Juanita said with a sigh. “Have it your way. Are you staying at the hospital?”
“For now I am. I don’t know for how long.”
“Okay. Keep me posted. Call me as soon as Mr. Reyes is moved out of the ICU and can have visitors. If that’s what he wants, I’ll come by at that point and sign him up. By all means, see to it that he talks to me before Lattimore gets in to see him. But be advised, if Lattimore decides that Teresa is really a legitimate suspect in the attempt on her husband’s life, then all bets are off. If that happens, I’ll have to represent one or the other of them. I won’t be able to represent both.”
“I understand,” Ali said. “I’ll call if anything changes.”
By the time the call ended, the room was mercifully quiet. Donnatelle had collected the two girls and taken them to the cafeteria. Sister Anselm, in the meantime, was busy examining the flowers.
“That’s odd,” she said to Ali.
“What’s odd?”
“I was looking for a card so I could let my patient know who sent them and who should receive a thank-you note. Usually, when people send flowers to hospital patients, they don’t do so anonymously. They want to get credit where credit is due.”
Ali pointed to the small orange tag on the side of the potted plant. “Those lilies came from Costco,” she said. “That’s a Costco product number.”
“I wonder who delivered them,” Sister Anselm mused, but Ali was far more concerned about Teresa than she was about the appearance of the flowers.
“What do you think happened?” Ali asked.
“To Teresa? If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say preeclampsia,” Sister Anselm answered. “I advised her to talk to a nurse earlier this morning, when I noticed that her hands and ankles were swollen.” She turned to the charge nurse. “Did she mention anything to you?”
“Not to me, and not to anyone else, as far as I know.”
“Preeclampsia is serious?” Ali asked.
“It can be,” Sister Anselm said. “It’s potentially very serious for both the mother and for the baby.”
Leaving the flowers where they were, Sister Anselm excused herself and returned to the room evidently occupied by her patient. In the meantime, Ali pulled Teresa’s phone out of her pocket and scrolled through the list of recent calls. The most recent one was an outgoing call listed as MOM. Punching send, she waited until a woman answered.
“My name is Ali Reynolds,” she said. “I’m calling from Physicians Medical Center. Are you Teresa Reyes’s mother?”
“Oh, no,” the other woman breathed. “Don’t tell me. Is Jose gone?”
“You are Teresa’s mother?”
“Yes. My name is Maria Delgado. I can’t believe this. Please let me talk to my daughter.”
“She’s the one I’m calling about,” Ali said. “Teresa can’t come to the phone because she passed out here in the waiting room a few minutes ago. They’ve rushed her to maternity.”
“But it’s too early for the baby,” Maria objected.
“I don’t know any more about her condition than just that, and the staff here isn’t going to tell me. I think you should come to the hospital right away.”
“That’ll take at least two hours. I can’t drive that far. My brother will have to come from Tucson to get me, or maybe I can ask my neighbor again.”
“Get here as soon as you can,” Ali urged. “And you might want to come prepared to spend the night. I probably won’t be given any more information about Teresa’s condition, but if I hear anything, I’ll give you a call. Is this a landline or a cell phone?”
“Landline,” Maria answered. “I don’t have a cell phone.”
“All right. I have Teresa’s phone. You can call me on that if you need to reach me.”
As Ali ended the call, the phone gave her a low-battery warning. Remembering that there had been a charger among the items from Teresa’s purse, Ali went to the nurses’ station to retrieve it. By the time the phone was charging, Sister Anselm came back into the waiting room. She looked unhappy.
“What’s wrong?” Ali asked.
“The flowers,” Sister Anselm said. ‘’I don’t like the idea that they were dropped off anonymously. I checked with the lady at the main reception desk. She said the same thing the volunteer said earlier, that the guy who dropped them off said they were for the lady who was found over by Three Points. I asked what he looked like. She said he was a young guy wearing jeans, a U of A sweatshirt, and a baseball cap.”
“So?” Ali said, not following. “That sounds pretty ordinary.”
“My patient was savagely beaten and left for dead,” Sister Anselm said. “As far as I know, there have been no published news items about the attack, at least none that I’ve been able to find surfing the Net.”
Ali still didn’t get it.
“Most of my patients never receive flowers of any kind,” Sister Anselm continued. “That’s usually because their friends and relations have no idea where they are, much less that they’ve been seriously injured. Call me paranoid, but I’m worried that whoever sent these lilies has something in mind besides well wishes. So far the victim doesn’t have a name. We know which patient she is, but no one else does. If there’s someone out there who is interested in finishing the job, sending a distinctive flower arrangement or other gift is one way o
f locating her room inside the hospital.” With that, Sister Anselm carried the plant away. Just as she left, Ali’s phone rang.
“How’s your day going?” B. asked.
“Way more eventful than I would have thought,” Ali said. She spent several minutes bringing him up to date. She signed off when Donnatelle returned from the cafeteria with the girls.
“Have you heard anything?” Donnatelle asked.
“Nothing,” Ali said. “Teresa’s mother is on her way, but she won’t be here for a while.”
Donnatelle looked at her watch. “I’m going to have to leave soon.”
“It’s all right,” Ali said. “I’ll be able to look after the girls until Maria Delgado shows up. If she needs it, I’ll help out after she gets here, too.”
There was a fifteen-minute period of chaos while the girls adjusted to the idea of being abandoned by one relative stranger, Donnatelle, in favor of a different one, Ali. By the time Donnatelle took off, things were reasonably well in hand. In the past two years, Ali had spent enough time backstopping Chris with the twins that dealing with a two-year-old and a reasonably self-sufficient five-year-old seemed like a piece of cake.
Keeping an eye on her watch and wondering what was going on in the maternity ward, Ali kept Lucy and Carinda corralled and occupied with the collection of toys, Crayolas, and coloring books that had accumulated in two days. After convincing Carinda that she really did need to take a nap, Ali read to Lucy until she, too, began to fade.
Both kids had nodded off when Sister Anselm returned to the waiting room with her forehead creased by an unaccustomed frown.
“What’s wrong now?” Ali asked.
“I spent an hour working my way up the chain of command. When I connected with the hospital’s head of security, I asked if I could review the security tapes. I told him all I wanted to do was to get a look at the guy who delivered the flowers. He said the only way to get access is to have a search warrant. That’s not gonna happen. But if the guy walks into my patient’s room this afternoon or tonight, I want to know who he is. And it seems to me the hospital would want to know who it is, too.”
It wasn’t such an outlandish idea. After all, Ali and Sister Anselm had some experience with people who came to hospitals hoping to finish off an inconvenient witness or two. The idea of the head of security insisting that Sister Anselm procure a search warrant in order to scan the security film was particularly irksome.
“If all you want to do is get a look at the tape,” Ali said, “let me see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Sister Anselm said. “Now I’d better go check on my patient.”
Ali’s relationship with B. Simpson had taught her that people who know all about online security often come at it from a background of online insecurity. High Noon Enterprises was in the business of teaching companies and individuals how to safeguard their computer presence by knowing all there was to know about penetrating the very systems people counted on for protection.
Carinda had fallen asleep in Ali’s lap. Ali shifted the child to another position, wrestled her cell phone out of her pocket, and speed-dialed High Noon.
It may have been Sunday afternoon, but Ali wasn’t surprised when Stuart Ramey, B. Simpson’s geeky second-in-command, answered the phone. As far as B. was concerned, Stuart was the perfect employee. When it came to computers, Stuart, like B., was a self-taught genius. He loved his work and had no outside interests. B. said he paid the guy a king’s ransom, and he was worth every penny.
“Hey, Ali,” Stuart said. “What’s up?”
“We have a situation. My friend Sister Anselm has a patient here in Tucson at Physicians Medical Center. Somebody delivered some flowers to the patient, and we need to know who it was. I’m sure the guy’s picture is on the hospital’s security tape, but they won’t let us look at it. I was hoping maybe you could—”
“You’re asking if I could I hack into their security system and lift the photo from their video feed?”
“Well, yes,” Ali admitted. “That’s pretty much it.”
“And this is all because someone delivered flowers and didn’t leave their name, address, and phone number?” Stuart asked dubiously. “It’ll probably turn out to be some do-gooder who does this kind of thing all the time and wants to stay anonymous.”
“Someone tried to murder this girl on Friday,” Ali explained. “She should be dead right now. Sister Anselm is worried that the flower delivery guy may be working for the bad guys and is going to take another crack at her. I’m worried, too. If the flower guy turns back up, it would be a big help to know what he looks like. It’s also possible that the flower delivery was a ruse attempting to nail down the girl’s location inside the hospital for someone else. The third alternative is what you said—the guy is totally harmless—but do we want to take that risk?”
Stuart sighed. “All right. No doubt the hospital security system is password-protected, but breaking it will probably be a piece of cake. You want me to send the film directly to Sister Anselm’s phone?”
“No,” Ali said. “Send it to mine.”
“Okay, so when did this questionable flower delivery happen?”
“Right around noon,” Ali said. “The guy should be easy to spot. He was wearing jeans, a baseball cap, and a U of A sweatshirt. He was carrying a pot of Easter lilies with yellow foil wrapped around the pot.”
“Okeydokie,” Stuart said. “I’ll get right on it. Anything else?”
On the drive down, Ali had been thinking about her parents and their plans to sell the Sugarloaf to a party or parties unknown. What if the purported buyers turned out to be some kind of flimflam outfit? Since one of High Noon’s specialties was doing background checks, it didn’t seem completely out of line to ask.
“Now that you mention it, there is one more thing,” Ali said casually. “There are some people I’d like you to check out for me.”
“No problem,” Stuart said. “Who is it?”
Ali had to think a moment before she could dredge up the names. “Derek and Elena Hoffman,” she said at last. “I’m not sure where they live.”
“You mean the people from Milwaukee who are buying the Sugarloaf from your folks?” Stuart asked. “I already did a background check on them for your mother. Since she paid for the initial report, I should probably get permission from her before I copy you on it.”
Chagrined, Ali felt herself blushing. She was surprised to think that it would even occur to her mother to have a background check done on the café’s proposed purchasers, but these days there seemed to be any number of things about Edie Larson that set her daughter back on her heels.
“Never mind,” Ali said quickly, trying to cover her embarrassment. “I didn’t know she had already ordered one. I’ll just get a copy from her.”
23
2:00 P.M., Sunday, April 11
Tucson, Arizona
Breeze Domingo stirred in the bed. She had no idea where she was or how she had come to be there. She seemed to be in a hospital. It looked like a hospital, but the last thing she remembered was being in a house, a big house and … No, she didn’t want to remember that or the man who was there, the one who had burned her and cut her. She could remember that, but she didn’t want to. What she really wanted to know was where Chico was. Why didn’t he come for her? Why had he abandoned her?
In the background, someone was talking—a woman. It was a voice rather than a presence. Breeze could hear the woman speaking, but she couldn’t see her. She seemed to remember having heard the voice before, although she wasn’t sure exactly when or why or who the woman was. Is she someone I know?
For a while—when was that?—the woman had spoken in both English and Spanish. That seemed weird. Why would she do that? Did she think Breeze didn’t understand English? Now she had dropped the Spanish and settled into English, telling a long complicated story.
At first Breeze thought the woman was speaking about someone else. Finally, though, she realized she wa
s talking about Breeze—about what had happened to her; about her being found in the desert; about her being raped and beaten. She tried to stop listening. It hurt too much to think about it. Now the woman was talking about what had happened in the hospital. There were surgeries and something to do with blood poisoning and wiring her jaw shut. Breeze didn’t care about what the doctors had done or would do. It was too complicated. Too much information. All she wanted to do was go back to sleep.
But then the woman said something shocking—her name! Her real name. Not Breeze Domingo but Rose Ventana!
How did the unseen woman know that? How could she possibly?
Now she was talking about Breeze’s family, offering to be in touch with them if that was what Rose wanted, to have them come to the hospital to visit her.
Her family? Her family was so long ago that they might well have lived in another universe. They would be so disappointed in who she was now; in what she had become; in how she had lived all this time. She didn’t want to see them. She was too ashamed. She didn’t want them to know anything at all about her. No. No. No. Especially not her stepfather. Especially not him.
She tried to say the word aloud: NO! But nothing came out of her mouth. So she shook her head instead.
“All right,” the woman said comfortingly. “As you wish. I won’t make any effort to contact them until and unless you say so.”
Breeze wanted to say, Thank you. And who are you? And any number of other things. But that didn’t work, either. With her jaw wired shut, it seemed impossible to speak. She felt the wetness of a single tear rolling down her cheek.
“Rest now,” the woman murmured gently, wiping the tear away. “We’ve talked quite enough.”
24
3:00 P.M., Sunday, April 11
Tucson, Arizona
Teresa’s cell phone rang at ten past three. “Ms. Reynolds?” a male voice asked when Ali answered.
“Yes.”
“I’m Tomás. Maria’s brother. I drove down to pick her up. We’re almost there. Have you heard anything?”