The Timer Game (18 page)

“No.” Jazz tightened into a ball. “Not there.”

“Jazz, it’s not safe here.”

Jazz recoiled. “Not safe with you,” she hissed. “You’re the keeper now.”

In the moldering pile of rags a cell phone rang in the shopping cart.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Jazz moaned. “He left it here for you. Told me not to touch it! If I touch it, he’ll disembowel me, put me in a soup, use it to soften my bones! Only you! The new keeper. It’s ringing for you.”

Grace reached into her wallet and extracted a twenty-dollar bill, sliding it into Jazz’s icy hand. “I’m sending somebody for you,” she said, feeling helpless.

“Answer, then go away!” Jasmine shrieked over the sound of the phone.

Grace plunged her hand deep into the cart and pulled out the cell phone, clicked it on.

“According to my calculations, you have four and a half minutes before time’s up.” The voice was distorted, tinny.

“I found the charts.”

“Now find the timer.”

“Wait.”

“Four minutes, Grace.”

Grace upended the shopping cart, ignoring the wail that erupted from Jazz, and plowed through the bits of Jazz’s life. This timer was Art Deco, shaped like a palm tree, with fronds that swiveled as the time evaporated. Along the base of the palm tree were enameled coconuts, and Grace realized they counted out hours and minutes.

The biggest frond was pointed at two hours. A hundred and twenty minutes. Her watch said 2:59, so she had until almost five that afternoon.

“Found it,” she barked into the cell.

“Congratulations. You’ve just bought your daughter two hours.”

“But—”

“Leave this cell phone with Jazz. Go home, Grace. You have work to do.”

He clicked off.

“He wants you to have it now, it’s yours.” Grace put the phone down next to Jazz’s head. “Jazz?”

“Go. Go,” Jazz moaned, her eyes radiant with insanity.

“I’ll get somebody here for you,” Grace promised. “I will.”

She left Jazz motionless, breathing shallowly, and when she turned to look back at her, Jazz was asleep. Grace wondered if she’d been awake all night and all that day, waiting.

Two hours.

Was he watching her? Is that how he knew she’d picked up the charts?

If so, then who was watching Katie? She felt tears come and she blinked them away as she drove out of the parking lot. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she’d been hoping she’d find her daughter with Jazz.

The car in front of her slammed on its brakes and Grace leaned on her horn and changed lanes. She’d scribbled the number of the halfway house on a grocery receipt, and she pawed through her purse until she found it.

At the halfway house, an answering machine picked up, the message recorded by the same impatient caretaker, Opal, who bullied clients. Grace left anonymous, explicit directions on where to find Jazz. It was three-fifteen when she pulled into her driveway.

Jeanne and Helix met her at the front door. Grace shook her head and walked into the kitchen. She dumped the charts on the table and placed the palm tree timer next to them.

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Jeanne’s face was chalky white, every line deep.

“Tried that. Jeanne, he’s serious. He’s going to kill her if we contact the police. He’s listening.” She looked around the quiet kitchen. “He could be listening here. For all I know, he’s planted bugs in this house. Jeanne, I have less than two hours and work to do.”

“What’s going on?”

“He’s playing the Timer Game, Jeanne. Katie’s favorite game. I have to play the Timer Game to get her back.” Grace banged the timer down on the table. The frond had turned slightly. She had one hour and forty-three minutes left.

Jeanne closed her eyes. “How can I help?”

“I don’t know if I’ll be leaving suddenly or how long I’ll be gone. Take Helix and go to your house. Wait for my call.”

Jeanne locked eyes with her for a long, measured beat. “Call me if there’s—”

“Of course.”

Grace opened the first chart, and after a moment heard the sound of the front door closing. It was quiet then and she sorted charts on the table.

There were five medical charts.

One of them was Katie’s.

Chapter 20

Saturday, 3:22 p.m.

Grace found Warren’s card and ran outside, crossing the street to the side that didn’t have the view. She rang the doorbell on a house with a faded paint job and waited as she heard a woman’s quavering voice. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Montgomery. It’s Grace. From down the street.”

“Grace?”

“Down the street. Remember, Katie and I brought you cookies last Christmas?”

The door unlocked. “Goodness, is it Christmas already?” Mrs. Montgomery blinked in the sudden light. She had beautiful thick white hair and dark brown eyes and still perfect teeth in a face seamed with age. She was wearing a stained bathrobe that was missing a button and Grace felt a stab of guilt that she hadn’t thought to stop by in almost a year.

“My telephone is broken. I was wondering if I could use yours for a brief call?”

“My phone?”

“Your telephone.”

“I think it works fine, dear.”

“Good, that’s good. I need to use it. Just for a minute. May I come in?”

“Of course, come in. Come in. I’ll fix tea.”

“Oh, no, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If I could just use the phone.”

“Of course. But I think it works fine.”

She ushered Grace into the small kitchen. Remnants of several meals still lay on the counters and Grace darted a look at the burners. All off. The phone was a rotary dial and it took her a moment to get used to how slowly it clicked around the face.

Mrs. Montgomery shuffled to the stove, a pan in her hand. “Would you like some tea?”

“Oh. Thank you, but I can’t.”

“Of course. Some other time.” The old woman went to the table and put the pan down next to a pillbox and a bowl of aging fruit.

She tried his home first and got a recording and tried his office. Warren lived and breathed the Center; if she could reach him anywhere, it would be there. He picked up on the fourth ring, his voice cautious. “Yes.”

“Warren. It’s Grace. Katie’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “Please, can you just come over right away?”

Mrs. Montgomery picked up the pan, a bright smile on her face. “I’m going to make us some tea. Isn’t that a good idea?”

Grace covered the phone. “Mrs. Montgomery, your program’s on and it’s really good.”

“Oh. My program.” She wandered into the living room, still clutching her pan.

“Grace, tell me everything. What do you mean, she’s gone?”

Grace told him the rest. On the way out, she stopped in Mrs. Montgomery’s living room. The old woman was dozing in front of the television, mouth open. Grace locked the door.

At home, she searched the house and found two stray balloons, bagging them in the trash. She washed her hands and changed clothes, then brought a legal yellow pad into the kitchen and sat down, forcing herself to pick up the stack of charts.

Touching them made her feel slightly sick. She got up and poured a glass of water, staring out the kitchen window across the boats bobbing gently with weekend passengers. Her hands trembled. She drained her glass and went back to her seat.

She worked with charts in the lab, but before a moment ago, she hadn’t held a medical chart in over five years. She braced herself and picked up the top one. It had a small row of gold stars pasted to the tag. A quick shuffle revealed gold stars on all of them. That explained one thing: why Jazz had gone straight for those charts when she’d created such a mess in Deep Six. Grace remembered the row of gold stars on the outside of the metal filing cabinet that Rosemary Melzer said housed the pediatric files that went back years. Somebody must have put those stars on the filing cabinet, making it easy for Jazz to find them

Four charts were similar and Grace stacked those together and put them aside.

She skimmed Katie’s chart. The chart was for ear surgery when Katie was eleven months old. Grace frowned, taking down names and details, wondering what she was supposed to find.

She closed the chart and reached for the other pile. She knew what waited for her. This was a special hell she was entering, a door she’d locked and barred years ago. A specialized world she’d spent years of training to enter, and minutes to leave.

She wiped her mouth with the flat of her hand. Black-and-white grainy prints, sonograms. Four pregnancies. Each fetus with a serious heart defect revealed by ultrasound in utero. Developing hearts that needed repair. Or worse.

Her specialty. Navigating the fragile world of reconstructing damaged hearts for kids born with constricted valves. Or missing chambers. Or faulty pumping. And when that failed, for those who’d lost all hope, sometimes transplants. Taking away shredded hearts and putting alien ones in their place, donor hearts that beat at a cost, beating only as long as the savage mix of lethal cocktails—prednisone, cortisone—kept rejection at bay and opportunistic diseases, cancer, fungal pneumonia, osteoporosis—in a five-year-old! she’d marveled the first time she’d seen it—from invading the already breached immunity wall.

So many ways to die.

She’d soldiered on. Soldiered. That was an image she didn’t want in her head.

Okay, she’d gone on, stitching, healing, transplanting, working with hearts sometimes as small and soft as figs. A pediatric heart surgeon.

Almost. She quit right after Guatemala, before she’d taken the boards. But almost.

She’d been so proud of that. She picked up the two charts on the top of the stack and placed them side by side, turning to the face sheets, copying facts onto two yellow lined pages: names, addresses, phone numbers:

DeeDee and Fred Winger Terry and Bob Frieze

She didn’t recognize the Winger name, but Bob Frieze’s name was familiar. She scanned down the page, checked his occupation. Of course. Robert Harling Frieze.

He was an internationally acclaimed artist based in L.A., using found objects combined with acrylics and photos, to create disturbing and savage-looking works of art. She’d seen his name recently in the paper, hosting an art auction benefiting kids with genetic anomalies. But five years before, being rich and famous didn’t stop Frieze and his wife from the pain of knowing their unborn child had a heart defect that killed a third of its victims before they were ten. Without a transplant, it was a death sentence.

Neither chart went past birth. They were only charts identifying heart anomalies.

One hour seven minutes left. Where in the hell was Warren?

She massaged her temples. These kids were being typed for transplants before they were even born. She reached for the third chart. Four years ago, a poor and frightened native couple, Maria and Arturo Miasonkopna, had listed as their address Mile 36, Dry Arroyo Creekbed, Old Pascua Village, Arizona. They’d used Medicare to pay for a sonogram that revealed their unborn daughter’s withered left ventricle. The chart ended two days after delivery, with an infant named Hekka.

Hekka. A shock ran up her. Hekka. That was the name of the Indian girl in Mac’s report, the one going into the Center to wait for her heartin-a-box.

The palm tree frond on the timer swiveled over a notch and she stole a quick look. An hour and three minutes left. That was all. She reached for the next chart.

Richard and Adrian Bettles. Bettles. Eric Bettles. She was looking at the chart of the boy who had later gone on to make history. The first heartin-a-box. Two out of the four charts dealt with kids getting lab-created hearts. Perfect matches.

She jerked her head up. A banging, a muffled voice. She eased the chart down and crept to the door. Through the viewfinder, Warren looked rumpled, his white hair sticking up. He wasn’t alone. Three men stood silently behind him, a squat older man and two workmen carrying boxes of equipment.

Grace stepped outside and closed the door. “I told you to come alone.”

“How much time do we have?”

She glanced at her watch, disbelieving. “Fifty-nine minutes. Did you hear what I said?”

“Hustle, people.” Warren reached around her and opened the door and the workmen took the boxes into the house.

“Who are these people? Didn’t you hear what I said? What are they doing?”

“Checking for bugs.” He nodded at the man standing next to him. “This is Bill. A PI specializing in finding missing kids.”

Bill had an old man’s bulbous nose and hearing aids wedged into mottled ears. He held himself proudly and carried a CSI kit in an age-freckled hand

She remembered the voice on the phone. The warning.
If you try that again, she’s dead
.

Warren said quietly, “Bill’s the man who found Sara for me, Grace.” He looked away.

Grace exhaled and nodded. It was terrible, this choice, risky as hell, but maybe this was her best chance at finding Katie. Her only chance.

“Come inside.”

She told Bill everything she could remember about the doll and Katie disappearing and finding Jazz and the charts. He took careful notes and asked few questions.

A workman wearing a Bartman T-shirt poked his head into the room. “Found one in the phone. I disabled it, but he won’t know that.”

“Thanks, Stu.” Warren turned back to the charts. Stu nodded and went back to work in the family room.

“They’re wiring your house, Grace. This goon has got to be contacting you, right? We’ll be able to put a trace on the phone and find out where he’s got her.”

“You could do that?” She almost wept.

“It’s already happening. These are the charts?”

She nodded.

He took out a pair of reading glasses. A muscle in his jaw clenched as he picked them up. He looked up briefly and there was bitter anger in his eyes. “My charts. My Center. My credibility. I’m pissed.” He raised his voice. “Stu?”

Stu trotted in, holding a cable wrapped around his wrist like a thick snake. “Sir?”

“Before the day is out, I want an extra dozen working security at the Center.”