PART FOUR

FRIDAY NIGHT/SATURDAY MORNING

While the doctors took Ginny to surgery, I stayed where I was, sitting on the floor in the gutted room with my back against one wall, staring through the dusty air at nothing. The doctors had wanted to take me down to Emergency, examine me for possible concussion, shock, hearing loss, whatever. I'd refused. I was in some kind of shock, no question about it. But they couldn't do anything to help me. I didn't even want them to touch me. I sat with my back against the wall, staring at nothing. Like a drunk.

Before long the door opened and Ted came into the room. He stood close to me, but I didn't have the strength to raise my head, so all I saw of him was his old jacket and his stale shirt and his ratty tie. For a couple of minutes he just stood there. His awkward hands twitched once or twice, but he didn't say anything. Then he managed to force out a few words.

"Stretto left."

I didn't answer. If there were an answer anywhere in the room, I didn't have it.

"Before he left"-Ted sounded like someone had gone over his vocal cords with a rasp-"he gave me a message for you. He said he wants you and Ginny to vote for him. The next time he runs for something."

Vote for him. Dear God in Heaven.

"Brew." Ted was pleading with me, but I had no response to give him. "Brew, get up. We've got to find Mittie." He didn't seem real enough to move me. The only thing I could see in the dust and the late afternoon sunlight was the blood pumping out of Ginny's forearm.

But then I saw something else too. Thin silver streaks that fell and splashed on the floor. They made me look up.

Tears oozed from Ted's face like booze-sweat.

He had the power to move me after all.

They all had power-Stretto, Acton, Ginny, even Ted. They could all make other people feel fear or grief or respect. The bastard who did this to Alathea sure as hell had power. I was the only exception. I didn't have any of my own, so I lived off other people's. And when I couldn't get that, I accepted the most convenient substitute. Convenient and forgiving. Alcohol. Being drunk.

I didn't seem to have any choice about it. I was on my feet.

"Brew," Ted said, "you look terrible." He tried to smile.

That finished the job. Despite myself, I started to function again. "I look terrible? How long has it been since you had anything to eat?"

He shrugged. Food was irrelevant. "We've got to find Mittie."

"We're going to. As soon as I know Ginny's all right. But while I'm waiting I'm going to take you down to the cafeteria and put food in you if I have to shove it down your throat."

He attempted another smile. "Sure, hotshot. But before you do anything you might regret, you ought to take a look at yourself."

The mirror in the bathroom had survived the blast. When I looked in it, I saw what Ted was getting at. Plaster powder caked me so thickly that I looked like a spook. White dust made the rims of my eyes and my gums look red as fever.

I slapped at my clothes a couple of times, and spent a minute coughing. Then I ran water in the sink, washed my face and hands, dried them on some paper towels. I still looked like I'd just climbed out of a ruin, but at least I was clean enough to get by.

With Ted behind me, I left the room.

A second later I remembered something and went back. After hunting around the room for a minute, I found Ginny's purse. I fished out the keys to the Olds and took the purse with me.

After all the confusion, things in the hospital were starting to get back to normal. Cops poured in, but at the nurses' station some people had already resumed doing paperwork. I told them where I was going, and asked them to get word to me as soon as Ginny came out of surgery. Then I took Ted down to the cafeteria and bought us both supper.

Not because either of us was hungry. I had as much trouble as he did choking down whatever it was the hospital called food. But we had a long night ahead of us, and we couldn't afford to collapse. A long night-and the only part of it I was sure of was the part where I intended to knock heads with Detective-Lieutenant Acton. So I chewed away at some kind of cardboard-and-sawdust sandwich until it disintegrated in my mouth, and whenever Ted pushed his plate away I pushed it back in front of him. And all the time I couldn't help thinking that the two of us together made a pretty poor replacement for Ginny Fistoulari.

If we had any alternatives, I couldn't figure them out.

I was in the middle of repeating my threat to force-feed Ted when a man the size of a small tank appeared in the doorway, and in a voice like a bulldozer with the cutout open said, "Axbrewder."

Acton. When he saw me looking at him, he beckoned for me with two middle fingers of his right hand, "I want you."

Ted glanced back and forth between Acton and me with something like nausea in his face, but I didn't give him a chance to ask any questions. "Stick with me," I whispered. Then I got up and left the cafeteria.

Acton was waiting in the hall. As I came through the doors, he started to say something, but when he saw Ted following me, he changed it. "This is private, Axbrewder."

I stopped in front of him, looked at the dull glare in his eyes, at the way his jaws were clamped together. "No way," I said. "I need a witness who can tell the judge you hit me first."

His fists came out like pistons, caught hold of my jacket, rammed me against the wall. "Listen, Mick," he growled, "I'm the law, remember? I can have you locked up so fast it'll make you piss yourself. I said this is private."

I didn't struggle. I didn't even want to. I just stared him straight in the face. When he started to feel hesitant because I wasn't resisting, I said, "My partner got her hand blown off. My niece is in a coma. Do you really expect me to just walk away from it?"

He held me for another ten seconds. Then he took a deep breath through his teeth and backed up.

"All right," he said. Still deciding what to do with me. "Tell me something. I was in the medical superintendent's office a little while ago, and this goddamn sonofabitch Stretto came in. He damn near accused me of setting that bomb myself. According to him, I'm implicated in what's happened to all these girls. Now where did he get an idea like that?"

I shrugged. Trying to stay calm. But all of a sudden my heart started to pound. Without transition I felt sure that I could get something I needed out of Acton.

"Stretto almost got killed," I said as evenly as I could. "Now he wants to blame somebody. You're as good a scapegoat as any."

"How do you figure that?" He sounded like he needed a lump of granite to chew on.

"The bastard who set the bomb knew Alathea was here. Who could've told him? Five people. You, me, Stretto, Ginny, and Lona. And you're the only one who wasn't there."

I had him now. That was the kind of argument he understood. He chewed his lip for a while. When he said, "I didn't even know what room she was in. Who did you tell?" he wasn't challenging me anymore. He was working on the case.

I said, "Nobody," and waited.

He chewed for another moment, then spat, "Damn it, I did. I didn't talk to Stretto at all. He wasn't in when I called. I left a message for him with one of his secretaries."

"Which one?"

When he finally met my eyes, he looked like he was actually angry at himself. And just like that I knew what was going on with him. He was such a belligerent cop because he didn't have any other way to let out his frustration. For almost two years now, he'd been trying to figure out what happened to these missing girls, and all he'd got was nowhere. Their deaths-and the manner of their deaths-made him sick with rage, but he hadn't accomplished a thing. So he took it out on people who made him look bad to himself. When he said, "I didn't get her name," I wasn't even disappointed. I was relieved. Because now I knew he would answer my questions.

"Never mind," I said. "We already knew it has to be somebody who works for the school board."

His anger jumped into focus on me. "How the hell do you know that?"

I took out the piece of paper that Ginny had taken from Martha Scurvey's office and handed it to him. While he checked it out, I told him where it came from.

That made a difference to him. "Now maybe we've got something." He put the paper away in his pocket. "All those other sheets. We've had them analyzed. We can prove they were all made by the same company-but we already knew that from the watermark. We haven't been able to prove they came from the same ream. Too many minute variations in the composition of the paper. Except for the last two. The lab boys are ready to swear they came from the same sheet. Fiber-tear, composition, everything matches.

"If this piece comes from the same ream, we'll have some proof we can use."

I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. Get a warrant, search the school board offices, track down the source of the paper. Embarrass Stretto as much as possible in the process. It was a good system. It; might even work.

But it would take time-and I didn't have time. Mittie didn't have time. So I took hold of myself and asked, "Acton, why did you have to scare people like the Christies? You didn't think they were pimping or pushing for their own daughters. What were you trying to do?"

He didn't look at me. But he answered.

"Ah, screw it. I was trying to make something happen. Push here, and hope the wall cracks over there. I wanted to keep it all out of the papers. Send a message to whoever was responsible. If I kept a lid on sensational stuff like that, the people who knew what was going on would know I was still after them. I wanted to make the bastards nervous."

I almost asked him why he thought that was a good enough reason to make miserable parents feel even worse, but I was afraid he'd stop talking. Instead I said, "It was worth a try. Tell me how you found Alathea."

He still didn't look at me, but now it was for a different reason. "I didn't tell Mrs. Axbrewder the whole truth about that. Some guy saw her out on Canyon Road and called in. I told Mrs. Axbrewder she looked sick. The fact is, she was wandering down the middle of the road buck naked. And bleeding. The guy who called said he thought she was trying to hitch a ride. When the doctor saw the cuts and scrapes on her, he said it looked like she'd crawled through a broken window or something."

I was staring at Acton, but I didn't really see him. I was thinking, Naked. Crawled. Something I'd been trying to figure out earlier came back to me. The timing. Every one of those kidnapped girls had been missing for two or three months before turning up dead. Except Alathea. She'd only been gone for ten days. Why?

Now I knew why. Because she'd escaped. They didn't fill her up with junk and then leave her to die like the other seven. She escaped. For a while, she managed to fight off the junk. She broke a window where they were keeping her, and crawled out, and went down Canyon Road, trying to hitch a ride until it was too much for her and she passed out.

Which put her in a coma.

She'd tried to do something that nobody could do. Alone she'd struggled to climb out of a hell she hadn't chosen and couldn't refuse. Just thinking about it made me want to scream. But I didn't. Instead I said, "This time you'd better put a guard on her room."

"Believe it," Acton growled. "Anybody who wants to get at her now will have to fight off half the department."

I said, "Good."

Then I asked Ted to tell Acton everything he knew about Sven Last.

Acton had already heard that the bomb was planted by some clown pretending to be a doctor, but he didn't have the details. I made Ted spill them all. He hated doing it- hated having to say such things out loud-but I didn't leave him any choice. I wanted to cover every bet I could think of.

When Ted was done, Acton went one way to put out an APB, and I went the other. Ted followed me as if he were being sucked along in my wake.

I didn't have a very clear idea of where I was going. First I wanted to see Ginny. After that I'd try to figure out what came next.

I got lucky. I caught up with her while she was being wheeled from surgery to recovery. The aides objected, but I made them stop long enough to let me take a good look at her.

She was still unconscious-dead to the world, pale, breathing gracelessly through her mouth. The stump of her left forearm had been strapped in tight white bandages, and the rest of the arm wore a cast to keep the bones from shifting. Helpless as a kid.

I could've kissed her and she never would've known the difference.

I let her go. I was too tense to stand there. Once I'd put her purse beside her so that she'd have her .357 handy when she woke up, I found out from the aides what room she'd be in when she came out of recovery. Then I let them take her away.

With Ted still trailing behind me, I left the hospital, feeling like a murderer who just hadn't managed to find the right victim yet.