“You said the nursing supervisor keeps the key,” said Bernadette.
“I should have said generally keeps the key,” he said quickly. “Tonight, I had it. Sometimes at night, it’s the physician on duty. It never left my pocket.”
“What if the cafeteria needs to get something out of there?” asked Garcia.
“Cafeteria is closed at night.”
“During the day,” said Bernadette. “Do they have to hunt down the nursing supervisor, or does the cafeteria staff have access?”
“Cooks have a key,” said Hessler.
“Where do they keep it?” asked Bernadette.
He hesitated. “Hanging up in the kitchen.”
“So anyone can use it?” asked Garcia.
“When there’s a body in the room, they don’t enter,” the doctor said defensively.
“Honor system?” asked Bernadette.
Hessler: “Well… I guess.”
“I saw computer paper in there,” said Bernadette. “Office staff have a key?”
Hessler rubbed his bloodshot eyes with his thumb and index finger. “Yes, but they know not to go in.”
“No security guard on at night?” asked Bernadette.
“Budget cuts,” Hessler said tiredly “We’ve got a sign. Visitors use the desk phone to call ER for an escort.”
“Anyone call tonight?” asked Garcia. “Anyone come to see a patient late? Anyone come by late for any reason? A pharmacy delivery or—”
Hessler shook his head. “No one.”
“That you know of,” said Garcia.
“That I know of,” Hessler conceded.
“And during the day virtually anyone could have grabbed a key to that room,” said Bernadette.
Hessler: “What do you want me to say?”
“One other question,” said Bernadette. “Did Delores Martini disappear at all during her shift?”
Hessler rubbed his eyes again. “Agent Saint Clare, there are so few of us on at night, and this is such a small hospital. I not only cover the ER, I take care of all the patients on the floor. Same with the nurses. ER and the patients on the floor. Back and forth. We all wear many hats and do everything. We hardly have time to use the bathroom.”
“You had time for birthday cake,” Bernadette said dryly.
Hessler frowned. “Why are you focusing on Delores? Did she—”
“We’re not focusing on anyone,” Bernadette said quickly. “She’s the only nurse we’ve interviewed so far. Trying to see who can vouch for whom. Anyone else disappear, even for a few minutes?”
He raised his right hand. “Swear to God, no one working under me tonight had opportunity to touch that body.”
“Don’t speak to anyone about the details of this conversation,” said Bernadette as she and Garcia got up.
“I’d like to go home and go to bed,” Hessler said. “Am I free to leave?”
“Go ahead,” Bernadette said over her shoulder.
When they were down the hall and out of Hessler’s earshot, Garcia asked, “Why’d you toss in that question about Martini specifically?”
“She was a little too helpful.”
“A tight little group, this ER crew,” said Garcia. “They’re going to back each other up.”
Bernadette looked into an empty patient room. Through the windows, she saw Hessler heading for his car. The tall man was bent over in a question mark as he walked. The long black coat hanging from his lean frame only added to his insectlike appearance. “He sure flew out of here,” she said, pointing toward the window.
They saw Hessler get in a sedan, start up the car, and peel out of the lot without bothering to clear even his windshield.
“Wonder where he’s going in such a hurry,” said Garcia.
“Miss!” yelled a voice across the hall.
Both agents turned. An enormously pregnant woman was summoning them from her bed. She’d kicked off her covers and seemed to be struggling to sit up. Her hospital gown was hiked halfway up her generous thighs.
Bernadette headed for the room. “She needs a hand.”
“I’m not going in there,” said Garcia. “She said Miss, not Mister.” One of the Minneapolis agents came up to him with a question, and the two men went down the hall together.
“Want help sitting up?” asked Bernadette, moving to the bedside.
“Ah, screw it. Isn’t worth it.” The woman dropped back against the pillows. She had a plump, rosy face and straight blond hair down to her shoulders.
“Want me to raise your head?”
“That’d be great, doll.”
Bernadette pushed the controls on the bed rails. “When’re you due?”
“First thing in the morning.”
“A Cesarean?”
“Yup.”
“Good luck.”
“I saw deputies going up and down the hall,” said the woman. “A bunch of guys in suits. Are you with them?”
“Yeah. I’m an FBI agent. Bernadette Saint Clare.”
“This about that girl on the news?” The woman protectively put her hands on her mountainous belly. “Television said they cut out her baby.”
The details had gotten out, and quickly. Bernadette took the photo from her jacket and showed it to the woman. “See her around town?”
The woman whipped the picture out of Bernadette’s fingers. “So this is the poor thing. What’s her name?”
“She look familiar?”
“I’ve been on bed rest. Stuck inside.” The woman handed it back to Bernadette, and her eyes widened. “Christ. Did someone at the hospital do it?”
“No, no,” said Bernadette, afraid to upset the expectant mother. “The body was brought here, that’s all.”
That lame explanation seemed to satisfy her, and she nodded. “Oh. Right.”
“If this girl sought out prenatal care, any idea where she might have gone?”
The woman didn’t hesitate. “Clinic in Akeley. West end of down town, a couple of blocks off the main drag. It’s close to the hospital, and the doctor there is the best. Eve Bossard. She’s so popular, everybody loves her. Around here, you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a girl named Eve.”
“Eve Bossard,” Bernadette repeated.
“Really nice lady. Makes house calls. Can you imagine that in this day and age?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Operates a free clinic certain afternoons. Doesn’t care how poor you are or what sort of health insurance you’ve got.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Bernadette.
“Plus she’s a specialist. Handles difficult pregnancies.” The woman added proudly, “I’m having twins.”
After Bernadette left the room, she took out her notebook and flipped to a clean page. Wrote down two words:
Eve Bossard.
Garcia came up to her with a cup of coffee in each hand. He passed her one.
She sipped. Scalding, black, and bitter, exactly how she liked it. She told Garcia about the Mother Teresa obstetrician.
“We can follow up tomorrow,” he said. “She might have seen the kid in her clinic.”
She checked her watch. “We’ve still got a lot to do here to night.”
Bernadette and Garcia went down the hall, strategizing. They had to talk to four more nurses, a janitor, and a radiology tech. Though the disinfectant smelled fresh, they didn’t want to rule out anyone who’d been in the building the previous twenty-four hours, and who had knowledge of the storage room/morgue. They’d finish interviewing the second shift, catch the third as they were punching in, and stay for the morning crew.
Garcia dragged a hand down his face. “Let’s have our Minneapolis guys do the cafeteria ladies and office folks. You and I will stick with the medical people.”
“No cameras, spotty security at the door,” said Bernadette. “Reality is, anyone could have walked in off the street, jimmied the lock, and slipped into the room.”
“They’d have to know about the roo
m,” said Garcia. “It’s kind of a secret.”
“Try keeping a secret in a small town.”
CHAPTER SIX
It was shortly before midnight, in the cinder-block basement of a house on the edge of the forest. Twenty black-robed adults stood in a circle around an altar, which in its previous life had been an oak dining-room table. The rectangle was covered with a purple cloth, its center embroidered with a pentacle. Pillar candles flickered at each corner of the table. The altar stood in the center of a five-pointed star that had been drawn on the concrete floor.
Two robed couples stood at the altar, a set anchoring each end of the table. The younger couple carried a baby boy dressed in a black velour romper, gold pentacles embroidered on the front and back. The boy was crying and hiccuping, and his mother and father kept passing him back and forth to each other.
“Come on, sweetie pie, one burpy” cooed the mother, holding the infant over her shoulder, which was draped with a Winnie the Pooh spit rag. “Come on, Tommy.”
“You shouldn’t call him that,” the father whispered into her ear.
“The ceremony hasn’t started,” she said. “He doesn’t have his pagan name yet.”
“You can still use it,” he said, taking the boy from her.
“It’s against the rules,” she said, and looked across the table toward the older couple, the priest and the priestess. “Isn’t it?”
The white-haired, bearded man shrugged, and his silver-haired female companion whispered to the younger pair, “We’re not following a set form here, dears. This coven doesn’t have hard-and-fast rules. We do our own thing. Just go with the flow.”
“What about the ceremony?” asked the younger woman, adjusting the hood on her robe. “This isn’t just a bunch of made-up stuff, is it? I want it to mean something.”
“It will,” the priest reassured her.
“We got the ritual from a coven out East,” added the priestess. “Tweaked it a bit to make it our own.”
The other adults ignored the discussion that was taking place inside the circle. Two of the robed men had pushed their hoods back to have an animated argument about the value of various ice-fishing electronics.
“If you ask me, a depth finder that goes for under five bills has gotta be shit.”
“Any depth finder is shit if you don’t know how to use it.”
Three of the women were comparing corn-pudding recipes.
“A box of that corn-muffin mix, a can of creamed corn, a can of regular corn, three eggs, a carton of French onion dip from the dairy case, and a stick of melted butter.” The woman tucked her hands into the voluminous velvet sleeves of her robe. “Make sure you spread the batter out in a wide pan or it’ll never bake through.”
“I like to use fresh corn when it’s in season; otherwise I stick with frozen.”
“Fresh, canned, or frozen, it all tastes the same if it’s buried in a hot dish. This one time I tried substituting the onion dip for a carton of—”
“Time to get started,” announced the priest, clapping his hands together.
“Quiet, please,” said the priestess, stepping over to the wall and dimming the lights. The black-painted walls of the room became blacker.
Hoods that had been pushed off were put back up and the room fell silent, except for the sound of the hiccuping baby.
The silver-haired woman retrieved a bowl of salt from the altar. Standing with the bowl cupped between her hands, the priestess addressed the group in a clear, strong voice. “This child has chosen to be born to our sister Cerridwen and our brother Odin.”
“In his past life, he played and worked and walked among us,” continued the priest, fingering his beard while he spoke. “He has reincarnated, and elected to come back to those who knew and loved him before.”
“Though his spirit is old, his body is brand-new,” said the priestess.
“Therefore it must be introduced to the ancient ways,” said the priest.
Tipping her head to the parents standing on the other end of the altar, the priestess whispered, “Go ahead, dears.”
The man passed the baby back to the woman. Holding the boy under the armpits, the mother faced him to the north. The priestess went over to the infant, sprinkled salt on his downy head, and said, “I Isis, named for the consort of Osiris, call to the north. Creatures and powers of earth, welcome this babe with open arms. Bestow upon him your great blessings.”
The mother turned her baby to face the east. The priestess returned the salt bowl to the altar while the priest retrieved a bowl smoking with incense. Moving the bowl in front of and under the dangling infant, so that the incense wafted around the baby, the priest said, “I Osiris, named for the beloved of Isis, call to the east. Creatures and powers of air, welcome this babe with open arms. Bestow upon him your great blessings.”
The baby hiccuped loudly, and one of the corn-pudding witches chuckled. The mother passed the infant over to the father, who burped the child and turned him around again, this time to dangle facing the south.
The priest set down the incense and picked up a dagger from the table. He touched the flat of the blade to the baby’s head and said, “I Osiris call to the south. Creatures and powers of fire, welcome this babe with open arms. Bestow upon him your great blessings.”
While the priest set the dagger back, the priestess lifted a chalice from the altar. The child’s father held him facing the west. The priestess dipped her fingertips into the water and sprinkled the infant’s head. “I Isis call to the west. Creatures and powers of water, welcome this babe with open arms. Bestow upon him your great blessings.”
The parents went back to their end of the altar with their baby while the priest and the priestess returned to theirs. The infant had stopped hiccuping and was starting to doze off in his father’s arms.
The priestess: “Odin and Cerridwen, what Wiccan name have you selected for your boy child?”
The baby’s mother took a small cup from the altar, dipped her fingertips into it, and traced a pentagram on the sleeping child’s forehead. “With this blessing oil, we name thee Herne.”
The infant’s father: “God of the wild hunt, god who is celebrated in the autumn months when deer go into rut.”
A murmur of approval from the males in the circle.
The priest: “Herne, you have honored your parents by choosing to be born to them. Now they honor you with these vows.”
Together, the parents recited, “We promise to love, honor, and respect you. We shall protect you from all that is evil and leave you free to enjoy all that is good.”
The priestess went around the table and gently lifted the sleeping child from his father’s arms. “The gods and all present bear witness to the naming of this boy child.”
As the priestess walked in a clockwise direction around the circle, each person she passed touched a hand to the top of the baby’s head. Some offered their own impromptu blessings.
“The gods be with you, Herne.”
“Bless you, little boy.”
“Live long, Herne.”
“Be a good deer hunter like your old man, kid.”
After the baby was returned to his parents, a chalice of red wine was passed around clockwise. Before sipping, each drinker raised the goblet toward the child and said, “I honor you, Herne.”
After the naming ceremony, everyone went upstairs for cake and decaf coffee. Most removed their robes first, however, tossing the heaps of black velvet over the coats and jackets they’d deposited in the guest bedroom.
The three corn-pudding ladies plopped next to one another on a sofa, their cake plates balanced on their laps and their coffee mugs locked in their fists.
“Did you see the cake before they cut into it?” asked the one in the middle. “It was one of those photo cakes from that bakery in Park Rapids. It had his hospital picture on it. Adorable.”
“I didn’t get a chance to see it,” said the witch on the right, taking a sip of coffee.
; “My grandson had one of those for his graduation open house,” said the witch on the left.
The one in the middle took a bite of cake and declared, “Marble. A little dry. I would have ordered the chocolate instead. That bakery does a good chocolate.”
“I’ve got the best recipe for carrot cake,” said the witch on the right, and the other two leaned toward her to hear it.
Herne, named for the god of the wild hunt, was in the bathroom getting his diaper changed.
Separated from the group, two of the men stood whispering in a corner. Both were tall. One was bony and haggard, and the other was carrying extra weight around his middle. Each had a paper coffee cup in his hand, but neither was drinking out of it. Neither seemed very happy.
“I warned her to leave it alone, but she did it anyway,” growled the gaunt man.
“What’s done is done,” said the man with the gut.
“Should we tell the others?”
“No need to agitate them. We agitate them, one of them might do something rash and foolish.”
The gaunt man chuckled dryly. “You mean more foolish than has already been done?”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“We have to talk about it. What if the feds come after one of us? We all need to be telling the same story, otherwise they’ll know.” The narrow man swept the room with his eyes. “I say we tell the group. They’re all here.”
The man with the big gut finally took a sip of his coffee and shuddered. It was ice-cold. He tipped the cup back and swallowed. “We don’t know who we can trust. Hell, for all I know you did it.”
“You know for a fact that tonight I was—”
“I’m not talking about tonight. I’m talking about last night.”
“What about you?” the gaunt man growled. “Where were you? It could have been you.”
“That’s my point. It could have been you. It could have been me. It could have been any of us.”
He surveyed the room again, finding potential fiends instead of friends. “You really think one of ours did it? Why would they?”
“I don’t know why.” The fat fingers crushed the paper cup. “But if it was one of our own, I say we take care of it ourselves.”
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