“It’s like Novak,” Faith said. “He always set off bombs as a distraction, not as a means to an end.”

“Good girl. You’ve been hammering around that nail all day.”

Amanda sprinted up the stairs. They ended up in the third-floor recovery room. Rows of gurneys were screened off by hospital curtains. There was a nurse’s station, an ice machine, a clearly marked bathroom. The space was empty except for a cop and three crime scene techs. The bed in the second bay was cordoned off with yellow tape. Blood dripped across the floor, heading in the direction of the second set of stairs.

Amanda showed her ID to the officer by the door while Faith signed them into the crime scene log.

The cop said, “Dr. Lawrence is on his way up. He did two tours in Iraq. No-bullshit kind of guy.”

“Are you the police?” A woman had appeared behind the nurse’s station. She was crying, clearly distraught. “I couldn’t stop it. I tried to—”

“You’re Lydia Ortiz?” Amanda asked.

The woman cupped her hands to her face. All she could do was nod. She probably had friends in the parking deck. She had come face to face with a mass murderer and a woman who had been abducted right in front of her eleven-year-old daughter.

Faith said, “Take your time.” She found her notebook in her bag. She flipped past a bunch of empty pages. She twisted her pen open.

Amanda asked, “What are the symptoms of appendicitis?”

“Uh—” Ortiz hadn’t been expecting the question. “Nausea, vomiting, spiked fever, constipation.”

“Does it hurt?” Amanda asked. She was trying to center the woman with the familiar.

“Yes, the pain is off the charts. Here.” She put her hand to her right lower abdomen. “Breathing, moving, coughing—it feels like you’re being stabbed.”

“How long before it ruptures?”

She shook her head, but said, “Twenty-four to seventy-two hours from onset of symptoms. And it doesn’t rupture like a balloon. It’s more like a tear. The bacteria leaks into your bloodstream, where it leads to sepsis.”

Faith could’ve looked this up on WebMD, but she wrote it down in her notebook anyway.

“Now,” Amanda said. “Take me through when you first saw Michelle. They brought her into recovery. Was she on a gurney?”

“Yes.” Ortiz took a tissue from her pocket. She blew her nose. “She was in bay two. One of the porters brought her husband—he said to call him Hurley—from the waiting room. I introduced myself to him. I ran down the usual post-op care.”

“Did he ask any questions?”

“No. He barely listened. He kept asking for the scripts.”

“Scripts?”

“Prescriptions. Antibiotics. Generic. You can get them for free at Walmart. I got the feeling that he wanted them so they could leave.”

“What was her medical prognosis?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you because of patient’s rights, but fuck it. She needed to be admitted. The husband refused. She signed herself out AMA—against medical advice. The doctor was loading her up with antibiotics. She’s going to need follow-up care. Sepsis isn’t a joke.”

“Would she have died without the surgery?”

“Yes. She could die anyway. Hurley didn’t seem interested in managing her care.”

Faith stared at her notepad. Ortiz didn’t know about the car accident, that Hurley had a team and that the team had abducted a doctor. Faith wrote down a question for later: Hurley needed Michelle alive—for what?

Amanda asked, “When did you recognize the patient as Michelle Spivey?”

“I didn’t. Not at first. It was the husband who set me off. There was something about him. He felt squirrely. We get abusers sometimes, where the husband won’t leave the wife alone. He’s afraid she’ll ask for help.”

“Did she show any signs of abuse?”

“She looked malnourished. I gave her some warm blankets, but then I realized she didn’t have socks. So I put socks on her feet. That’s when I saw the track marks.”

Faith looked up from her notebook.

Ortiz said, “That’s when it happened. I was putting on her socks. I looked up at her face, and from a different angle, something clicked. Her hair’s been cut and bleached blonde, but I recognized her. And that’s when she looked at me—right in the eye. She mouthed the word ‘Help.’”

Faith wanted to make sure she got this right. “She asked you for help?”

“Not audibly. But you can read the word on somebody’s lips, right?” Ortiz walked over to the bed. “I was here. She was sitting up.”

“Did the husband see her mouth the word?”

“No. I mean—I don’t know for sure. I went back to the nurse’s station. I said I was going to get her some Vaseline. Her lips were really chapped. I gave the emergency code to Daniel, the porter. He was real cool about it, just slipped out the door, but the husband had picked up on something. When I turned around, he was making her put on her pants. She couldn’t get them zipped. The sutures broke. She was bleeding. She started to cry. He wouldn’t let her put on her shirt. He gave her his jacket. He pulled her into the stairs. That’s the last I saw of them. I heard gunfire downstairs. We got the alarm to shelter in place. Then a few minutes later, the bombs went off.” She shook her head. “They’re saying Hurley had a group of men with him, that they shot a bunch of people.”

Amanda didn’t offer to fill in the blanks. She walked around the gurney. She looked down at the floor. “Is this her shirt?”

Ortiz nodded.

Amanda bent down. She used a pencil to move the shirt. Cotton, short-sleeved, button-up front, white with red vertical stripes. “Homespun.”

Faith knelt beside her. The seams looked handstitched. The cloth could’ve been from a sack of flour.

“Thank you, Ms. Ortiz.” Amanda stood up. She told Faith, “Meet me in the hall.”

Faith used her phone to photograph the shirt. She zoomed in on the seams. The buttons were all the same color, but they were mismatched. Michelle Spivey had worked at the CDC. She was a marathoner, a mother of an almost teenager. She didn’t strike Faith as the type of woman who would make her own clothes.

“I’m sorry,” Ortiz said. “I should’ve—I don’t know. I should’ve stopped him.”

“He would’ve killed you.” Faith found one of her business cards. “Call me if you think of anything else, okay?”

Back in the stairwell, Amanda was ending a call on the satellite phone. She told Faith, “Sara’s mother is claiming that her daughter went with the kidnappers in order to protect Will.”

Faith could very easily see that happening, but putting it in a police report could mean a lot of bad things for a law enforcement career, especially if the press got hold of it.

Amanda said, “I asked her to take a cooling-off period before she signs her statement. I’m not sure she was listening. She came across as a raving bitch.”

Faith felt a new knot in her stomach. She would be a raving bitch, too, if someone abducted one of her children.

She asked Amanda, “Who wears homespun?”

“Not a woman who makes $130,000 a year.”

Faith skipped over the astounding salary and tried to talk out what she knew. “So, Hurley kidnaps Michelle Spivey. He makes her wear homespun. He takes her to the hospital to get her appendix out instead of dumping her on the side of the road. He calls up his buddies to bring some bombs so they can escape?” She couldn’t put together any of this. “Why?”

Amanda looked over the railing. “Dr. Lawrence?”

“Guilty.” A short, stocky man came into view. He was wearing pinstriped pajama pants and dress shoes. His scrub shirt was spattered with blood. Smeared black eyeliner rimmed his eyes. He looked like he’d rolled out of bed after a night of raving and run to the hospital the second he’d heard the siren.

Lawrence didn’t make apologies for his appearance. “I can hold off wiring his jaw shut as long as you want. He deserves to suffer.”

“What about my man downstairs?”

“I popped a staple in his scalp. He’s disoriented, concussed. He took a hell of a beating to his lower belly. He’s probably got a cracked rib or two. He needs a CT to rule out bleeding.”

Amanda asked, “What can you give him to get him back on his feet right now?”

Lawrence thought for a moment. “This’ll have my ass in front of the medical board, but a tab of Percocet 10 should do the trick. Tell him to take half if you want to keep him awake.”

“What if I need him more than awake?”

Lawrence scratched his prickly beard. “An ammonium inhaler might—”

“Poppers?” Faith felt the word explode out of her mouth. “You can’t be serious.”

“It’s not a popper. It’s a nasal irritant. It’ll make him take a really deep breath and put a lot of oxygen in his body.” He told Amanda, “We’ve got some downstairs. Give him a hit when he needs his game face on.”

Faith shook her head. She didn’t trust any of this.

Lawrence was already leaving. “Find Conrad downstairs if you want the meds.”