He shrugged. He watched Jedimiah Caper bark orders to the kitchen while punching numbers into the register at marathon speed. “I was reassigned.”
“To this case? Why would vice work this case?”
“I haven’t been in vice for a month now. Guess you didn’t get the memo.”
If there were such a memo, it was probably lying with the stack of unread faxes.
“They started up a new unit and thought I’d be perfect for it. The pervert beat.” He shrugged again.
Ellie chuckled. “You’re working sex crimes?”
Jesse sighed and rolled his eyes. “Pedophiles in particular. Lovely job. Meet you back at the office.”
****
Ellie left Caper’s and swung by the hospital. She headed straight for the pediatric floor with her bag of little boy clothes, all decorated with spiders and webs. If he was going to be in the hospital for a while, there was no need in him having to wear those silly little hospital gowns, and there was nothing more comfortable than a good pair of sweats.
She found Deveraux outside Johnny Doe’s room with his nose stuck in a report of some kind. The door to the room was partially closed.
“Hey. How is he?”
Deveraux looked up and smiled. “Good. He’s doing very well. They’re taking some tissue samples.” He bobbed his head toward Johnny Doe’s room.
Ellie’s eyes widened. “Tissue samples? That sounds painful.”
Deveraux shook his head and that comforting smile spread gently across his face. “It’s not. Just a skin scrape, really.”
Ellie let out her breath and relaxed. Although Johnny Doe appeared to be in perfect health and seemed to be suffering no pain, she couldn’t shake the images of his tiny beaten body in that alley. He suffered pain then, and she would do everything in her power to prevent him from suffering more.
“We have some parents coming in this afternoon to take a look at him,” Ellie said.
“So, you’ve got a lead?”
She shrugged. “I’m trying not to get my hopes up.”
He smiled that brilliant smile. “Sometimes hope’s all we’ve got.”
Ellie grinned. “I’m not real good with hope.”
He nodded, understanding. “It would probably be best if they observed him in the playroom. It’s one-way glass. They can see him but he won’t be able to see them.”
“I’d like to gauge his reaction, though. Even if it turns out they are his parents, there’s a lot of explaining to do.”
Deveraux nodded again. “I understand. If they make a positive identification, then we’ll invite them to join him in the playroom. A parade of prospective parents could traumatize him. Especially if the parents have questionable intentions.”
Ellie thought about the parents coming up from Avery County. No Amber Alert. No decent picture in the house. Thin shorts and an even thinner t-shirt. There was snow on the ground for goodness sake.
“I don’t want him traumatized any more than he already is.” She pulled one of the sweatshirts out of the bag and held it up for Deveraux’s approval. “He can wear these, can’t he? Maybe I should have asked first, but, I just thought he’d be more comfortable.”
Deveraux smiled. “I’ll make sure he gets them.”
Ellie handed him the bag and nodded. “He likes Spiderman. He told me that down in the morgue when I spoke with him earlier this morning. He told me he liked Spiderman. I’m an Ironman girl myself. I mean, not that I really enjoy any of that…” She chewed on her bottom lip like a nervous school girl. “I need to get down to the basement to pick up some security tapes. I’ll see you around three.”
Deveraux grinned. Ellie figured he was used to women blabbering like idiots in his presence. She felt the heat rise to her face and knew her cheeks were blood red. She took a step or two backwards hoping to put some distance between them. Maybe from a distance, the glow of her cheeks wouldn’t be as obvious.
She smiled through her embarrassment and slowly backed away then walked quickly to the elevator. She tapped her foot impatiently while she waited, afraid to glance back down the hall. Deveraux was probably staring at her wondering what planet she fell off of. Where was that elevator? There were only six floors in this hospital—it couldn’t take that long to call it to a floor. Finally, the doors opened and Ellie rushed in, leaning hard against the back wall.
The hospital’s security room was at the opposite end of the basement from the morgue, which Ellie was glad for. She didn’t want to run into Leon. Her back was still aching from the dancing dip.
She rang the bell, expecting the Great Oz himself to peer through the peephole. The small window slid to the side and she showed her badge and smiled. The door opened and a stocky man in a blue uniform ushered her into the room. He had a seriously thin mustache that looked out of proportion on his seriously fat face. He waddled over to a bay of color monitors and sat in a cheap office chair on wheels. Half a million dollars’ worth of security equipment and the hospital sticks the poor guy with a twenty-nine-dollar chair.
Images of every entrance and exit into and out of the hospital, every elevator, every floor, and the door to the morgue glowed across the bay in living time and in living color. Burkesboro Regional Hospital had a better security system than the county jail.
“I pulled tapes from every camera for the last ten days. They’re date, time, and camera stamped so I made you a reference copy of the camera locations. If you find something, just note the camera stamp on the tape then cross reference that to the sheet.” He spoke in a high, nasally voice.
He picked up a list and pointed to one of the numbers. “See—your reference sheet refers to camera fourteen. You follow along here, and you’ll see camera fourteen is in the east wing, fifth floor.” He pointed to the camera fourteen monitor.
Ellie glanced at the monitor and her heart stopped. Her hand flew to her mouth as she leaned in for a closer look. She stared at Aunt Sissy leaning against the wall outside a patient room, one foot pulled up and propped against the wall. There was no doubt it was Aunt Sissy. She was wearing a flannel shirt with quilted lining over a t-shirt, jeans, and hiking boots—her ‘uniform’ as she called it. “What floor is that?” Ellie asked.
“I just said it was the fifth floor.”
“No, I mean what floor? Cardio, ortho?”
“That’s the oncology floor. Cancer.” He made a tsk-tsk sound and shook his head.
Ellie grabbed the box of tapes and hurried out. Sissy didn’t look like a patient, so why was she here? It had to be Ellie’s father. She thought of all the messages he had left over the last few weeks, messages she had ignored.
She rushed to the elevator, waited forever for it to drop to the basement then hurriedly punched the button for the fifth floor. “Come on, come on….” she said as the carriage slowly rose.
When it settled into a stop, Ellie burst through the door, found the sign pointing out the east wing and hurried in that direction. The wing’s entrance was decorated with pictures of smiling faces and bald heads. Their darkened eyes held the slightest hint of a sparkle. Above the pictures was a colorful banner proclaiming it as the “Wall of Fame,” below the banner, a cartoon picture of a bruised and battered prize fighter with gloved hands raised in the air victoriously and the words “I beat cancer” written in a balloon hanging in cartoon space beside his head.
Ellie glanced down one empty hallway. She turned and headed down the second hallway, and there was Aunt Sissy, still propped against the wall.
“Aunt Sissy…” Ellie bolted down the hallway toward her aunt.
Sissy met her with a long embrace then stepped back and ran a hand over Ellie’s hair. “Hey, sweetie. Your daddy’s going to be so happy you came.” Her smile was as warm as ever.
Sissy carried her seventy years well and had only over the last few years begun to show a wrinkle. She lived alone in a log cabin overlooking a stream where she fished daily for trout and bream. She chopped her own firewood and could handle a ham
mer and nail as well as a trained carpenter. She had her share of suitors but had never married, saying she wanted to be madly in love with her husband and had yet to find anyone who “tripped her trigger.”
“Guess you got your daddy’s messages?”
Ellie nodded, ashamed to admit she hadn’t actually listened to any of them. “How bad is it?”
Sissy shrugged her shoulders then shook her head. “We thought they had got it all during the surgery, but it looks like it spread.”
“When was the surgery?”
“Right after Christmas. Your daddy thought you’d be home, so he wanted to tell you then.”
Yeah, and Merry Christmas to you, too. Ellie picked at a phantom cuticle, embarrassed to look at Sissy. “Can they operate again? Maybe they can get it all if they operate again.”
Sissy stroked Ellie’s hair. “They can’t sweetie. It’s spread too far. All they can do is make her comfortable.”
Ellie pulled away from her and stared at Sissy. “Her? As in Peggy?”
Sissy cocked her head to the side and scowled at Ellie. “You didn’t listen to the messages, did you?”
“I was going to call him back. It’s just I’ve been real busy. You know, with work.”
Sissy eyed her suspiciously. “Uh-huh.”
Ellie dodged the penetrating stare by glancing at the ceiling, at the nurses’ station, anywhere but at Sissy.
After a moment, Sissy dismissed the lie with a wave of her hand. “Well, anyway, Peggy is very sick, and your daddy could use your support right now.”
Ellie scratched at her neck, still avoiding Sissy’s glaring eyes. “I don’t know, Aunt Sissy.”
“Regardless of the past, she is his wife, and he loves her very much. You need to get over whatever problems you have with her and be there for him.”
“She killed my mother.”
Sissy rolled her eyes. “You do have a flair for the dramatic, don’t you, kid?”
Ellie shifted the box of tapes to her hip; they were growing heavier by the minute. “I really do need to get back to the office, but I’ve got to come back later this afternoon. Tell Daddy I’ll try to see him then.”
Sissy slowly nodded, a hint of suspicion still burning in her eyes.
Ellie sighed. “She’s not going to die like within the next hour, is she?”
“You should get so lucky.” She shook her head. “No, it may be days; it could be another month.”
“Then tell Daddy I’ll see him later today.” She gave Sissy a kiss on the cheek then hurried to the elevators.
The oncology floor was on the east wing of the hospital, and the ER, where she always parked, was on the west. She took the central elevator, figuring it would cut down on her time traipsing through hallways, but when the central elevator doors opened in the main lobby, she wished she hadn’t taken any elevator at all.
The lobby was packed with reporters and cameras and blow-dried evening news anchors clamoring over one another at the main desk. She recognized a few of them from the local network affiliates and a couple from local papers. A wave of sheer panic hit her like a sledgehammer while hot-burning bile churned deep in her stomach.
“Detective Saunders—” Sara Jeffries from the Burkesboro Bulletin pushed her way through the crowd. She pointed a palm-sized digital recorder straight at Ellie as if it were a gun loaded and cocked. “Can you give us an update on Little Lazarus’s condition?”
Ellie jammed her shoulder to the wall and rushed down the hallway. Several of the others took their cue from Jeffries and tailed the moving target.
“Are there any leads in the investigation?”
“What was his condition when he was brought in?”
“Will the FBI be called in?”
Ellie felt like little Joey Tansley, a kid she grew up with who fell in a beehive. She remembered the sound of the angry bees as they swarmed around him, engulfing him in a cacophony of pure horror. She remembered seeing him twisting and turning and knocking at the swarm with his tiny fists as he fought to get away.
Sara Jeffries, the queen bee, was now side-by-side with Ellie, the recorder inches away from her face.
“What steps are you taking to identify the boy?” She took a wide step and planted herself in Ellie’s path.
Ellie had to stop or else run over the woman. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “I’m not at liberty to answer any questions right now. I’m sure the chief will let you know as soon as any information becomes available. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the office.” She sidestepped around Jeffries and ducked through a door with a sign that read “Emergency Room Personnel Only.”
Her eyes wet with tears, she pressed her back to the door and forced herself to breathe.
7
As far as Ellie was concerned, Peggy had played a part in her mother’s death. The woman may not have held the razor, but the blade was laced with the humiliation Peggy had caused. Humiliation, betrayal, ruined public image. They all played a part, and Peggy had been at the root of it all.
Ellie parked beside Jesse’s Camaro and lugged the box of tapes up two flights of stairs. She didn’t feel up to her standard three and sure didn’t feel like pressing for the fourth flight.
Jesse was at her desk, in her chair, on her computer. She dropped the box beside the desk and fell into the other chair.
“I’ve already emailed the picture,” he said, his nose buried in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website. “Remind me again why you don’t want the center involved?”
She ignored him. “How did you get into my email?”
“Connections.” He glanced up at her and raised his brows. “What have you been crying about?”
Ellie quickly wiped at her face. “It’s windy outside.”
“You’re crying because it’s windy?”
Ellie huffed then sniffled. “I haven’t been crying. How long will it take for the Feds to get back to us?”
Jesse shrugged. “They said they’d call me today.”
Me? She wondered if there was a memo back there with all the un-read faxes informing the department Jesse Alvarez was now a part of this investigation. She glanced at the box of tapes, figuring if he was going to continue to involve himself in her case, she might as well use it to her benefit. “Want to take a look at these tapes while you’re waiting?”
He glanced over the desk at the box on the floor. “You know the kid’s probably between four and six years old, and you’ve got about twenty years’ worth of tapes there. I think we can safely cut out the ones prior to 1998.”
Ellie grinned. “Actually, it’s only the last ten days. But fourteen cameras.”
“Is hospital security a little paranoid?” He rose from her chair at her desk and picked up the box.
“We’re particularly interested in the morgue. The last forty-eight hours.”
“How do I know which camera’s the morgue?”
She dug out the reference sheet and handed it to him. “They’re very thorough.”
“But they still can’t explain how a dead kid’s not dead anymore.” He smiled and then disappeared into the audio/video room.
Ellie sneaked a peek at herself in a chrome clock on Mike Allistar’s desk. Satisfied she could get by with the wind story, she headed into Jack’s office.
He was on the phone and motioned for Ellie to sit.
“I agree we need security up there, but I don’t think it should come out of CID’s budget. The chief’s the one that wanted to go public.” He glanced at Ellie and rolled his eyes. “Well, see what he says and get back to me. Yeah, OK, I will.” He hung up and blew enough air through his nose that Ellie felt the breeze ruffle her hair. “Hospital’s wanting extra security.”
The weight of her brief encounter with Sara Jeffries drove Ellie deep into the chair. “I swung by there after lunch, and the place was swarming with media.”
Jack removed his glasses and massaged his eyes. He picked up a stack of pink pho
ne messages and handed them to Ellie. “Some are requests for interviews; some are people claiming he’s their kid.”
Ellie’s mouth fell open as she skimmed through the pieces of paper. “There must be thirty messages here.”
“I’m going to have the tips routed to Mike. He can tell the difference between the crackpots and the legits.”
“You know you’re going to be cutting into his on-line shopping time.”
He almost smiled and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head. “You know not to release information like what he was wearing and his exact height and weight, right?”
She glared at him, wondering if he reminded all of his investigators of the rules of play before the big game. She doubted it. “Can I refer interview requests to the chief?”
Jack grinned. “You’re going to try to weasel out of any contact with the media, aren’t you?” He leaned forward, resting his arms on his desk. “Actually, yes. It’s a big case, his department. He’s going to want the face time on this one.”
That was fine with Ellie. She could say “no comment” as well as any seasoned politician. “I’m meeting with the detective and parents from Avery County at the hospital at three. You think we could have security in place by then?”
Jack shook his head. “I doubt it. We’re negotiating whose budget it’s going to come out of.”
“Wonderful.”
“Also—you need to keep in mind news times. The chief’s going to be wanting updates in time to get it on the different newscasts.”
Ellie played it safe and held back the things she wanted to say. “Anything else the chief would like?”
“I’m sure he’ll come up with something. Let me know how it goes at the hospital.” He slipped his glasses back on, a sure indication he had said all he intended to say.
Ellie got up and started out, but Jack added one more thing.
“You OK working with Alvarez?”
She jerked around and stared at him. “What?”
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