Chapter 7 - the safest place to disappear)
Voss took Holt away but did not enter the rescue station.
That frightened Emily more than a search would have. It meant he already knew where she would go next.
Pike drove Ruth and Emily out in an ambulance through the rear service gate. Emily wore an oxygen mask and lay beneath a blanket while Ruth entered false information into the transport computer. They were not fleeing the hospital system now. They were using its size to disappear inside it.
Saint Catherine’s received three emergency maternity patients during the thunderstorm. Emily became the fourth under the name Jane Miller.
Ruth arranged a private room on the seventh floor. She taped Holt’s body camera beneath the television, its lens aimed toward the bed. Pike kept the recovered memory card. A second copy lay sewn into the hem of Emily’s coat. The third had been mailed without a return address to a federal prosecutor in the capital.
“If we lose contact,” Ruth said, “the package arrives tomorrow.”
Emily looked at the clock. September 17. One day before the date in Marcus’s file.
“He’ll come tonight.”
“Then we make him tell the camera where Anna is.”
The plan sounded clean when spoken aloud. Nothing about Marcus was clean.
At eight, a young resident examined Emily and confirmed she was not yet in active labor. At nine, Ruth disabled the electronic lock on the stairwell. At ten, the storm cut power for five seconds. Emergency lights came on.
At ten fifteen, Dr. Mira Patel entered the room.
She wore a white coat over blue scrubs and carried Emily’s real medical chart.
“Mrs. Vale,” she said. “Your husband is very worried.”
Ruth stepped between her and the bed. “How did you find her?”
Patel ignored the question. “Emily, you’re experiencing a psychiatric crisis associated with late pregnancy. Marcus has obtained an emergency order allowing him to supervise your treatment.”
She placed a court document on the bedside table. Judge Alton Reed had signed it thirty minutes earlier.
“You cannot make me leave,” Emily said.
“No one is making you leave. We’re keeping you here for observation.”
The door opened behind Patel. Detective Voss entered with two uniformed officers.
Ruth’s hand moved toward her pocket.
“Don’t,” Voss said. “You’re already facing charges for kidnapping and falsifying a medical record.”
“Where is Holt?” Emily asked.
“Protective custody.”
“You mean a cell where his camera can fail again.”
Voss smiled. “Your husband was right. You have an active imagination.”
He did not know Holt’s body camera was recording from beneath the television. Emily watched him step fully into the frame.
“What happened to Lena Ortiz?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The woman you took from the motel.”
“I’ve never met her.”
“You left blood on the sink.”
Voss’s expression did not change, but Patel looked at him.
It was small, that glance. It was enough.
Emily understood that Patel did not know everything. Marcus had divided his accomplices so no one possessed the whole truth.
“The baby is showing signs of distress,” Patel said. “I need to examine you.”
She opened a syringe case.
Ruth moved first. She snatched the court document and flung it toward the sprinkler above the bed. Hidden inside the folded pages was a magnesium flare from the rescue station. It struck the ceiling and erupted in white fire.
Alarms screamed. Water burst from every sprinkler. The room vanished behind steam and rain.
Ruth shoved the body camera into Emily’s hand. “Stairwell. Now.”
Patients poured into the corridor. Nurses pushed beds toward the elevators. Emily joined the confusion, keeping one hand against the wall. She reached the stairwell before a contraction stopped her. This one came harder than the others and did not release for almost a minute.
Marcus was waiting on the landing below.
His dark suit was dry. He held no weapon. He simply looked up at her as the alarm lights painted his face red.
“You put our child in danger,” he said.
Emily slipped the body camera beneath her coat and kept walking down.
“Where is Anna?”
“Safe.”
“Show me.”
Marcus raised his phone. On the screen, a thin woman sat in a white room. Her hair was shorter and threaded with gray, but Emily recognized the scar at the edge of her left eyebrow.
Anna looked directly into the camera.
“Em,” she whispered.
The image disappeared.
Emily gripped the railing.
“Come home,” Marcus said. “Sign what I need, and you both walk away.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Because your sister has lived eleven years only because I kept her alive.”
“You took her.”
“Not me.”
For the first time, Emily heard fear in his voice.
Footsteps thundered in the corridor above. Voss shouted her name.
Marcus extended his hand. “You have five seconds to decide whether Anna sees morning.”
Emily thought of the camera beneath her coat. She thought of Ruth, of Holt in a cell, and of the video already traveling toward a federal prosecutor.
Then she placed her hand in Marcus’s.
He took her down through the smoke-filled hospital, past a service entrance where an orderly lay unconscious, and into a black sedan.
As the city vanished behind rain, Emily counted every turn.
Marcus drove toward Blackwood House.
May you like
He believed she had surrendered.
He did not know she had stolen Dr. Patel’s syringe.
