More Than It Seems

by David Archer

  “I think we’re going to call it a day,” Sam said. “Eric is staying at the hospital tonight, and so is Steve, of course. I’ll call Darren and Summer and let them know, and we can all head for home. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

  They made their way out of the building and toward the parking lot again. Walter stopped once and looked back, staring at the blown out windows where Jade had lost her life, then turned and went on to the car. He climbed into the front passenger seat and fastened the seat belt without a word, and Sam got behind the wheel and started it up.

  Sam’s phone connected to the sound system in the vehicle, and he called Indie again.

  “Sam? Is anything new happening?” Indie asked.

  “Not yet,” Sam said. “Eric is spending the night in the hospital up here, but the rest of us are coming home for the night. We’ll get back on it tomorrow. How are you holding up, babe?”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “It was just a shock, Sam. Jade wasn’t that much older than me, I don’t think.”

  “We’re all going to miss her. The company will be footing the bill for the funeral, so of course we are going to attend. Have you told Kenzie yet?”

  Their daughter Mackenzie had been very fond of Jade. “I had to,” Indie said. “She was standing right beside me when I started crying earlier. She’s upset, but she’ll be okay. We’ll all be okay, we just have to come to grips with this.”

  “What I want to come to grips with is James Franklin’s neck,” Sam said bitterly. “Unfortunately, I have to bring him in and let justice have its way. It’s times like this I start to understand people like Noah Wolf.”

  Indie shuddered. “Oh, no, Sam, you don’t want to be like him. I saw the nightmares you had last time you worked with him.”

  “I don’t want to be like him,” Sam said. “I just said I start to understand him. Sometimes it would be nice just to make people like this vanish from the world, but I have no itch to play God.”

  “Okay, good. Hey, it’s getting pretty late. Have you had anything to eat?”

  “No, we haven’t had time. Too much going on. I can whip me up a sandwich or something when I get home.”

  “Nonsense, I will put in a pizza. It should be ready about the time you get here, and then we can sit down and relax for a bit.”

  “That sounds good, babe. I’ll see you pretty soon.”

  He cut off the call and glanced over at Walter. “Walter? You want to stop and get yourself something to eat before we get to your place?”

  “I need to go to the office,” Walter said. “My car is at the office. I can stop after I get my car, I can go to McDonald’s.”

  Sam grinned. “The office it is.”

  Thirty minutes later, Sam pulled into his own driveway and limped his way up the front steps. He hadn’t even bothered to pick up his car at the office, because the sudden fall when the bomb had gone off was beginning to show itself in soreness. His back and hip were both complaining as he crossed the porch, but then Indie opened the door for him and he forgot about the pain in her embrace.

  Kenzie was still awake, and she had several questions about what happened. Sam answered her honestly, only tempering his responses for her level of understanding. She shed a few more tears for Jade, but then she was just glad that her daddy had not been injured.

  They sat in the living room and had a pizza, then Indie turned on the television and found a comedy on Netflix. They watched a couple of episodes and some of the tension drained away, and then they put Kenzie to bed and followed suit themselves.

  * * *

  He sat in his old pickup truck and watched the ER door of the hospital in front of him. It was almost eleven o’clock at night, and there wasn’t a lot of traffic going in and out, but he was being cautious. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself, but he needed to be sure that certain people didn’t dredge up old memories that could ruin his life. To do that, he needed to get into the hospital without being noticed.

  Of course, there was security watching over them, so that was another problem. Luckily, he was pretty sure that none of the security people had been to the department or gotten a look at him, so they weren’t likely to recognize him. If he could lay his hands on one of the smocks that the doctors and staff wore while they were on duty, there was at least a chance he could get close without being noticed.

  First things first, though. There were security cameras on every floor, and they needed to be disabled. That wasn’t going to be too difficult; the hospital’s security budget wasn’t very big, so they didn’t have anybody watching the monitors at night. He could get in and shut down the recorders so that there would be no record of his visit.

  He opened the door of the truck and stepped out, then jogged across the street to the ER entrance. With his hat pulled down low over his eyes, he ducked under the security camera by the door and hurried through when it slid open automatically. Instead of heading toward the ER intake desk, he turned left and walked purposefully down the hall. He’d learned years earlier that nobody paid attention to a man who seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing, and he had become very good at giving that impression. He made a right at the next hallway and glanced up at the camera hanging from the ceiling as he stopped in front of the security office and quickly picked the lock. Less than a minute after entering the building, he was inside the security office and sitting at its control computer.

  Cameras had seen him coming in the building, and another couple of them had caught him moving through the hallways. It took him only a moment to figure out which cameras they were, and then he quickly deleted the previous hour from their records. After that, it was simply a matter of shutting all of the cameras down. If none of them were working, none of them could possibly catch sight of him.

  He had only been in the building for five minutes by the time he stepped out of the security office again. He had checked the registration roster while he was in there, and learned that Steve Beck and Eric Brenner were in the same room. There was also a security notation that Mrs. Beck and Kenny Givens were staying in that room for the night, as well. He chuckled as he realized he was going to able to take them all out at once.

  There was a doctor’s office a couple of doors down the hall, and he had no trouble picking that lock, either. Sure enough, there was a smock hanging on a hook on the back of the door, and he even found a stethoscope to loop around his neck. The doctor’s badge was still clipped to the smock, so he would look the part as long as nobody got too close.

  Kenny Givens was kind of a pity, because he’d honestly gotten over losing that kid way back then. He hadn’t known why Jensen let the kid go, not at first; when he learned the answer, it had sent him into a rage that ended up with Jensen dead and his realization that he couldn’t continue their hobby, or at least not locally. He had begun finding excuses to travel, indulging himself on those trips.

  He chuckled again. A lot of those trips had been on police business, and that meant the taxpayers had been footing a lot of the bill for his abductions. He wondered how Chief Kelly would feel about that.

  He took the elevator up to the third floor, where his quarry awaited. As he stepped out, the military-looking security guards glanced his way, but he turned in the opposite direction. It wasn’t going to be hard to pull this off; by turning away, he had essentially made himself invisible to the security guards. They paid no attention as he stepped into a room down the hall, and that was exactly what he wanted.

  The elderly woman in that room was sleeping soundly, and he simply went through the motions of glancing at her chart and then replacing it. None of the scribbles on it really meant anything to him, but it was something anyone looking in would expect to see. When he was done, he stepped directly out of the room again, this time turning toward the security guards.

  The ruse had paid off. The security guards glanced at him, but then seemed to lose interest. When he stepped into the room beside the one they were guarding,
they seemed no more interested than when he had been walking directly away from them.

  There was an old man in this room, but he looked like he was already at death’s door and only needed the slightest nudge to fall through it. He was certainly not conscious, and the machines hooked up to him were beeping steadily.

  He reached up into the back of his shirt through the inch-thick, ten by thirteen envelope he had put there before he left home. He applied some double-sided tape to it and stuck it to the wall behind the headboard on the old man’s bed. That was the wall that adjoined this room and the one Steve Beck and company were in, and the four pounds of C4 inside the envelope would be more than enough to blast through the wall, sending hundreds of BBs into the room with the force of bullets. Nobody inside that room was likely to escape unscathed, and they probably wouldn’t even survive.

  He reached into a pocket and withdrew a cheap cell phone, the old flip phone style that were used mostly by those who didn’t like being traced too easily. There was a wire sticking out of the envelope with a male plug on it, and he had glued a female plug to the phone’s classic case. He connected them together, then pushed the bed back up against the wall and walked immediately out of the room. He nodded toward the security guards, only one of whom was even looking in his direction, then made his way to the elevator again and punched the down button.

  No one paid any attention to the white coated doctor as he walked out the ER door and kept going. He was in the truck and gone only seconds later, and he didn’t bother to take out the second throwaway phone until he had put a half dozen miles between him and the hospital.

  He had programmed the other phone’s number into the one he was holding, so it was just a matter of pressing a single button. He heard the sound of the other phone ringing once, and then there was a squeal on the line. He grinned, closed the phone and tossed it out the window as he continued driving.

  TWENTY-TWO

  His cell phone ringing on the nightstand woke Sam, and he glared at his alarm clock when it dared to tell him that it was only a quarter after five in the morning. He fumbled for the phone and pulled it to his ear, barely even registering the caller ID display.

  “Prichard,” he said.

  “Mr. Prichard?” said a woman’s voice. “This is Officer Ramirez at Boulder PD. Chief Kelly told me to call you, sir, to tell you that there has been an explosion at the Boulder Hospital. It appears that your friends were targeted with a bomb.”

  Sam was instantly wide awake, and sat up to throw his legs over the side of the bed. “A bomb? Oh, my God, are they…”

  “There were only minor injuries in their room, sir,” Ramirez said. “CSI is on the scene, but it appears that the explosive may have been placed against the wall of a neighboring room, but then it fell off and ended up under the bed of the occupant. He was the only fatality, I’m afraid.”

  “You said minor injuries,” Sam said. “Who was injured?”

  “Well, everyone who was in the room suffered some level of minor injury. The bomb was packed with BBs, the kind kids use to shoot birds and such. They ricocheted around both rooms pretty badly, but I believe the most serious injury in your friends’ room was a few dozen BBs that ended up in their skin. Doctors are treating them now, but they don’t expect any serious complications.”

  “Do we have a lead on who did this?” Sam asked, though he was certain Franklin had to have been behind it.

  “Nothing yet, I’m afraid. It seems the security cameras were all disabled, so there is no record of who came in or out. The security guards stationed outside the room were not injured, but the only people they saw were doctors and nurses. They did say that a doctor went into the room where the bomb was placed a short time before it went off, so the assumption is that he was the one who planted the bomb. The trouble is, the only doctor on duty tonight was in the ER when the bomb had to have been placed, so it wasn’t him.”

  “Okay. I’ll be down there as soon as I can. Tell them not to disturb the crime scene more than necessary, because I want my own expert to look at it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ramirez said. “I’ll pass that message along.”

  Sam cut off the call as Indie sat up in the bed and wrapped her arms around him. “What’s going on, Sam?”

  “Somebody put a bomb in the room next to where Steve and the rest of them are, and set it off. Only minor injuries to our people, but the man in the room next door was killed. It has to be Franklin, there’s no doubt in my mind. I’m going to call Walter and pick him up, then we’re headed down there. This means Franklin is still in the area, and there’s a chance we can catch him before he gets away.”

  She gave him a squeeze. “Okay. Do you want me to call everyone else for you?”

  “You can call Summer and let her know,” he said. “She can take care of notifying everyone else. Then, do me a favor. Find a picture of Franklin and start doing your thing with traffic cameras around Boulder. See if you can come up with anything to give us an idea where he might be hiding.” He held up his phone and hit the button to call Walter, and it was answered almost instantly. “Walter? It’s Sam. How quickly can you be ready to go? We need your talent, and we need it now.” He listened for a moment, then nodded. “Good. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  Indie was up out of bed and holding her own phone as she walked out of the room. Sam hobbled into the shower and rinsed himself off with hot water, then hurriedly got dressed and headed toward the kitchen. She had coffee ready when he got there, already poured into a large travel cup that he could take along.

  “Thanks, babe,” he said, kissing her quickly and hurrying out the door.

  * * *

  Walter was waiting on his front porch when Sam pulled up, and hurried to slide into the front passenger seat.

  “Is Steve okay?” he asked.

  “From what I know, yes,” Sam said. “Somebody put a bomb in the room next door and it went off, but the people in Steve’s room only got minor injuries. Everyone is going to be okay, but I want to get you to look at the scene before it gets too contaminated.”

  Walter nodded, but didn’t speak. He turned and looked at the road ahead, his eyes wide and his hands playing drums on his thighs. This was a typical sign that Walter was agitated, and sometimes preceded a meltdown.

  “Walter,” Sam said softly, “Steve needs your help. We have to stop whoever did this before he can try again. Can you stay focused long enough to help me?”

  “I’ll focus,” Walter said. “I’ll focus. No problems, no meltdown. I’ll focus.” His hands played a faster beat, but Sam relaxed a bit. Walter was pretty good at controlling his emotional outbursts most of the time, and especially when it was critical that he do so. Later, he would probably become hysterical for a while, but Sam would deal with it when the time came.

  When they arrived at the hospital, Rob Feinstein was waiting for them near the entrance. There were police officers all over the hospital, and Sam and Walter would have been stopped a dozen times were it not for Rob’s presence. They made it to the third floor without being interrupted and went directly to the room that had been utterly destroyed by the blast.

  Walter stepped inside without hesitation and began looking at the ruins of the room. The blast had flipped over the hospital bed and shattered all of the equipment in the room, but the body of the victim had already been removed. Sam mentally groused about that, but he could understand; the hospital would face liability if the body were allowed to lay too long without some sort of care, even though it was too late to save the victim’s life.

  Walter stood in one spot and looked all around the room for a moment, then walked over to the gaping hole in the floor. It was about two feet in diameter, and was almost that far from the wall that separated Steve’s room from this one. Most of that wall was intact, though there were some holes between the studs toward the bottom of it. There were also several dozen tiny holes that peppered the rest of the wall, evidence of the BBs that had served as shrapnel.<
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  Walter stepped close to the wall and looked closely at it, then rubbed a finger across one spot. He looked at the tip of his finger and sniffed it, then got down on his knees and looked through one of the bigger holes into the other room. It was empty, everyone was gone, and he turned back to his examination of the scene.

  Moments later, he got to his feet and turned to Sam. “The bomb was thin and flat,” he said. “It was stuck to the wall with adhesive, but it must’ve been too heavy. It fell off and hit the baseboard, and that made it slide up under the bed. It was set up by a cell phone, like the other one.”

  Sam’s eyebrows rose. “You found evidence of a cell phone?”

  “Just pieces,” Walter said. “There’s lots of them, all over the place.”

  Sam nodded. “Makes sense. That’s the way he set off the one at the department yesterday.” A brief expression crossed his face as he remembered that Jade had died in that explosion. “Come on, let’s go find Steve.”

  Rob led them down the hall to the new room to which Steve and Eric had been relocated. Kenny and Denny were still with them, and Sam was surprised to see that each and every one of them was sporting multiple Band-Aids. Denny had one under his left eye, and Kenny had one across the tip of his nose.

  “Everybody’s okay?” Sam asked.

  “We’re all fine,” Denny said. “Though I suspect a bit of luck might have helped with that.”

  “Probably more than you know,” Sam said. “Walter says the bomb was stuck to the wall between the rooms, but the adhesive failed and it fell off. It bounced off the baseboard and that made it slide up under the bed in the room, so the bed ended up taking a lot of the blast. You probably only got a tiny fraction of the shrapnel that was intended for you.”

  “So who did it?” Steve demanded. “Was it Franklin?”

  “We don’t have any hard evidence, but he’s my guess. The important thing is, this means he’s probably still in the area. At least we have a chance to catch him before he can get away.”