Magic Line (7 page)

Sarah turned back to Fitz, who drooped on his pillows, too wasted to take any interest in another fight. ‘You passed out before you had time to phone in a BOLO, is that right?'

‘But somebody did, I guess,' Fitz said, ‘because you're here.'

Finished or not, she was going to have to stop; he was falling asleep. ‘Can you remember anything about his appearance?'

‘I just got on my feet as he jumped out of the truck.' Fitz's head wobbled. Eyes half closed, he said, ‘He wasn't as big as I expected.' His chin dropped on his chest. Then, with one final heroic effort he lifted his head and added: ‘He was wearing surgical gloves!'

‘Here's my card.' She put it on the bedside table. ‘When you wake up, Fitz, if you think of anything more, call me.' In case he was not as comatose as he looked, she added: ‘Don't worry about this incident. You got handed a rotten mess, and you did the best anybody could do with it. I'll put that in my report. Sleep now.'

Just saying the word made her long to lie down on the hard tile floor beside his bed and grab some Zs for herself.

Don't even think about it.

She hurried out into the hall, nodding pleasantly as she passed Nurse Bell, who was headed toward the doorway with a doctor in tow.

Outside in cooling darkness, she drove back to the Midvale Park neighborhood talking to her buddy Kate, who was running the shift at the West Side Station.

‘Delaney called about the escape,' Kate said. ‘We're setting up the containment area now. Eight blocks each way around UMC – we're getting help from Midtown since the hospital's in their division. Two K-9 units are on their way; they'll walk grids in the area. Sergeant Holly's supervising, and the gang unit from Midtown's coming over, too. You got anything more for a physical description?'

‘Dark hair, pale eyes. Maybe five-nine. Strong but not large. Wearing a dark blue collared polo shirt with the firehouse logo on the back.'

‘What?'

‘Yeah, he took it off the driver, how's that for cool? This guy's quick and resourceful. Armed and very dangerous. Tell everybody, he's . . .' She took a breath, trying to think how to convey the threat. ‘He has some tricks I've never seen before.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like, he knows how to control his pulse and breathing. He can play dead.'

‘Come on.'

‘I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it, Kate. Zimmy declared him dead at the scene and I fully agreed with his judgment. But just now he threw an able-bodied officer right across a gurney that he himself was lying full length on – strapped to it, actually.'

‘Whoa. Houdini's come back?'

‘Or something. Pass the word to everybody on shift tonight, ‘Look around you every minute. Trust no one. A clever killer is on the loose.'

FIVE

R
obin had no plan at all when he jumped out of the van. He just knew he didn't want to be strapped to a gurney under guard, so he took the first chance he got to escape.

He had no idea where he was.
Just get out of the van
, his instincts told him,
and then deal with whatever comes next.
Quick reaction times, he knew, were his major asset.

He had a good eye for foraging, too. Most people in the middle of an emergency entrance, people yelling all around and horns and sirens sounding, might see a guy with a clean shirt and wish they had it but think there was no time for that. Robin made time, almost literally – by not hesitating, he created little pockets of time that most people didn't have. When he saw something he wanted, if nobody stopped him he took it right away. He had been hurt a few times while he learned how fast you had to be, but the reward was worth it – he often threw people off balance by the audacity with which he put his own desires ahead of everything.

The cop whose face he'd smashed was yelling something in the van. It sounded garbled – he must be choking on his own blood. He hadn't followed them out yet so he probably wasn't coming at all. With no cop to worry about and the driver climbing back into his seat, Robin stood still and pulled off his bloody shirt. He started to drop it right there, but then he heard that doctor in the rescue van begin yelling for help on the radio. So now a lot of people were going to be looking for the missing patient, right here. Better if they didn't find a bloody shirt in this entrance.

He rolled the shirt up and got ready to toss it into a big garbage receiver beside the emergency entrance. At the last second he remembered the little radio in the sleeve. He pulled it out and stuck it in his pants pocket, giddy at the thought of how close he'd come to forgetting his favorite small device. He used it all the time, loved it because it kept him in touch with the world but didn't leave a trail or need to be plugged in. Secretly, to himself only, he called it ‘Little Brother.'

There, the bloody shirt was out of sight.

He still didn't know where he was going. The street was full of crazy traffic and offered no cover. There were small bushes and cacti all around this driveway but they wouldn't hide him for more than a minute. The van he'd jumped out of was beginning to move into the building under the emergency sign, so he couldn't go there. He pulled on the clean shirt and walked around the building, toward the front.

He knew he had blood on his pants but they were dark. Indoors out of the sun, the stains probably wouldn't show.

Nobody stopped him on the steps. He took a deep breath and opened the front door.
Look as if you know what you're doing.

Inside was a lobby with a long desk. There were many people – all too busy to look at him, good. He saw a sign that said, ‘Restrooms,' and walked toward it briskly, eyes straight ahead. Inside the men's room, he used the urinal and cleaned up at the farthest sink from the door, using wet paper towels so the blood wouldn't show in the sink. Another good thing: men were mostly uneasy in public toilets these days, not wanting to look at each other. Several came and went, paying no attention to him.

When he came out he walked past the desk to the elevators, got in the first one that opened and rode to the third floor – high enough to see his surroundings, not too far to run down if something spooked him. He didn't know the building and was basically surfing. But he found the first thing he wanted quickly, a service desk where people in scrubs came and went and patients' charts were stacked in a rack. He set an oblique course for it, slowing down while two aides conferred there, speeding up when they walked away. As he walked past the desk he picked a chart off the rack and walked straight on to a door marked, ‘Stairs.'

Climbing to the fourth floor, he felt his confidence soar. He was doing very well, wearing a dark blue uniform shirt that said he worked for the Tucson Fire Department, and carrying a chart he could look down at and appear to study. That was cover enough to allow him to walk these halls till he decided where to go next. He could even stand still for a couple of minutes, pretending to look at the chart while he checked the view outside the windows. So far, he was pleased about what he was not seeing – no squads of armed men in black vests climbing out of vehicles, no blue uniforms leashed to ominously poised dogs. He knew they would be looking for him soon. But they weren't here yet.

Halfway through his circuit of the building he found himself looking out of a huge bank of windows facing west. Across an adjoining parking lot was a large light-colored building with a sign that read, ‘Children's Hospital.' Behind it, connected by a couple of ramps was a four-story parking garage, big enough so a clever guy with the right shirt and a chart for cover should be able to hide there for a long time. He could stay in the shadows . . . move from one floor to another if it looked as if somebody was starting to notice him. But who looks at anybody in a parking garage, unless he's doing something strange?

Since he got out of prison, Robin had made almost an art of looking completely nondescript. He kept his hair short, stayed slim and never wore anything strange or noteworthy. He walked quietly now, keeping his eyes on the floor a few paces ahead. In his mind he was fading into the walls – he was hardly there at all.

With no hesitation, he turned back toward the sign for the stairs, reviewing the advantages of his new hideout. That parking ramp had access to two huge buildings where people came and went at all hours. They would give him cover when he wanted to move. He'd have a choice of restrooms, plenty of vending machines holding food and drinks. Unless a dog flushed him – he'd have to think about that – he could stay in this complex as long as he needed to.

Following signs that said, ‘TO PARKING,' he made his way toward the ramps that led to the garage. This was the hard part, where he was pretty exposed, so he had to do it right away before the search for him got organized. It helped that everybody in this complex was very busy – many looked at their watches as they walked. In a few minutes, he was out of the sun-drenched open spaces between the hospitals and walking into the shadows of the parking garage.

Now all he had to do when anybody came near him was look as if he was looking for a car. Which in fact he would be, pretty soon, he thought with growing pleasure. In a day or two, as soon as all those cops cleared out of the house on Spring Brook Drive, he would start to decide which car he wanted to boost out of this garage. No hurry about it, though. He could decide that fast enough, when he was ready to go back and get the money.

SIX

‘
T
he narc squad came and took away a truckload of marijuana,' Delaney said, ‘and that bag of coke and the pipes out of the kitchen.' He was standing in the middle of the front yard, eerily lit by halogen lamps, when Sarah ducked under the tape. He had his phone in one hand and his radio in the other, and seemed to have a conversation going on both. ‘They didn't find any money, though.'

‘They searched the whole house while I was gone?'

‘No, just the room the dope was in. I asked them not to search the rest of the house because the lab crew was still working inside.'

‘So now it's up to us to find it?'

‘If there's any here. The runaway couldn't have had it on him, could he? You'd have found it.'

‘Yes, I'd have found it.' She said it firmly to hide the little wobble of uncertainty she felt. How could you be entirely sure of anything with a man who had changed from victim to suspect, dead one minute and alive the next? ‘Greenberg's gone with the bodies too, huh? Did he say when he might do the autopsies?'

‘Said he'd have to let us know. My crew's all here, finally – all but Tobin. I forgot his vacation starts tomorrow. I guess he left early.'

Or you didn't have the heart to tell him to stop packing and get over here.

‘So I gave the scene to Jason.' Across the yard, she could see Jason Peete's shaved head gleaming in the light from the front door. He was bent over the plastic bucket with the bullet hole. ‘Ray's down the block talking to the woman who called this in. She wouldn't talk to anybody else, but he dredged up a few Spanish words and persuaded her he was harmless.'

‘Helps if your name's Menendez, huh? I'd like to hear what she has to say, but I'd better not interrupt.'

‘No. Ray'll have a recording. Is Fitz OK?'

‘I think so.' She told him the story of the attack and escape.

‘That's about what I got from the rescue squad.'

‘Except they don't feel any remorse – it's not their job to keep anybody on board if he wants to leave. But poor Fitz is giving himself grief about letting a prisoner escape.'

‘Well, the firemen were giving
me
grief – bad enough we got turned away and called back, they said, but then the guy we're supposed to be saving attacks us. They wanted to know, what kind of police can't tell dead from alive?'

‘Listen, Zimmy and I are the same kind of police we were yesterday – we just ran into a corpse with unusual attributes.'

‘“A corpse with unusual attributes.”' Delaney looked pleased. ‘That's pretty good, Sarah – may I quote you?'

‘Sure. I called Kate, gave her a physical description and told her about the surgical gloves.'

‘Did she get the containment put together fast enough to do any good?'

‘Maybe. She got great help from everybody . . . but he's fast, and there're plenty of places around the university he can go to ground.' She wiped her dry mouth. ‘I have to find some water.'

‘In front of the backup van, just outside the tape there. Soon as you have a drink will you see how Oscar's doing? He's going through that carpet cleaners' van in the driveway. I told him, figure out if it's part of the crime scene. If it's not we'll get it towed out of here.'

‘The techs have finished with it?'

‘Yes. Go on, get some water, you're starting to wilt.'

She ducked under the tape, feeling her knees wobble as she straightened up. She really was dehydrated – damn, it happened fast sometimes when you were rushed in hot weather. She fished a bottle out of the ice in a cooler on the gravel, then climbed inside the trailer and perched on a stool to drink. Cool water running down her throat felt like the correct answer to all the trouble in the universe. She took another gulp, sighed, closed her eyes and felt her molecules expand
. Oh, man. More like it.

When she opened her eyes she was looking at the back of a criminalist sitting at a console, surrounded by wires and electronics. ‘Hey, Woody.' The screen beyond him showed a continuous loop of a running man. ‘Is that Barney's video?'

‘Yup.'

‘Pretty good picture.'

‘Not bad. Ever see that guy?'

‘Don't think so.' She squinted. ‘Shee. Rainbow-colored tats, huh? And an eyebrow ring.'

‘And a Justin Bieber haircut. Quite a dude.'