The Timer Game (38 page)

Inside the door, a shadow appeared.

“Drop your hands and get away from that door.” Behind her in the hall, the gunman’s voice was flat and he carried his weight on the balls of his feet, coiled and tense.

Grace took her hands away from the glass and stared in the direction of the voice. There were two men, both with weapons drawn and pointed at her.

In unison they said, “Grace.”

They lowered their weapons and she did a double-take, recognizing Stuart and the shorter man who had been in her house the day before, wiring it.

“I’ve got to find Lee before the timer goes off. Please.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Can you open the door?”

“That I can do.” Stuart put his revolver back in his shoulder holster. They came down the hall as he was taking keys out of his pocket. “You remember Brian.”

Brian nodded curtly at her, his gun still drawn.

“He has to stay out here, guard the hall.” Stuart unlocked the doors. “There’s shit going on right now, we have to protect Dr. Pendrell. Where in the hell have you been? We tracked you to the Century Plaza and then zip. Dr. Pendrell’s been worried sick about you.”

She ignored the question and pushed open the doors with such violence she fell into Warren’s arms.

“Hey,” he said in surprise.

The steel door was closed, the lobby empty. He was dressed in a trench coat and the lines in his face seemed deeper.

“Did you get my message? Come on, I need you to open the door.” She pulled him toward the retina scanner.

“Let me take off my coat, okay?” His movements were weary. He looked exhausted.

“There’s no time.” She pushed him forward.

He allowed the red light to spark his retina. He blinked and Grace sped around him into the lab hallway as the steel door opened.

“I’m coming with you.” Stuart slid through at the last moment. The lab hallway was silent and their footsteps echoed as Grace raced past Warren’s open office and tried the door to Lee’s lab. Locked.

“What’s going on?” Warren said again. He had taken off his trench coat and he gave it to Stuart to hold.

“I was right. Lee’s got Katie stashed someplace, and, Warren, she’s going to kill her.”

“Wait a minute, stop. Grace, slow down. You’re not making any sense.”

“There’s no time to slow down!” Grace pounded on the door and twisted the handle. “Katie! Honey? Can you hear me?” She twisted the handle again. “Where’s the key, give it to me.”

Warren clamped his hands gently on her shoulders and turned her toward him, forcing her to look at him. “Grace. Take a breath. Now.”

She forced herself to slow her breathing.

“First of all, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t get my message?”

Warren looked at Stuart. He shook his head. “Grace, I just walked back in here not more than five minutes ago. We’re closing escrow within minutes. Remember? I have to be back for the wire transfer. That’s why I’m here. I want to get that handled and then I swear I’m yours. However you need me.”

He glanced back at his open office door, and she sensed his troubled preoccupation with business. It made her feel even more frantic.

“I left you a message,” she repeated. “Where have you been?”

Again, he looked at Stuart. Stuart looked pained. Warren said quietly, “Grace, we just came from the police.”

It was one of those moments that seemed to hang. Time was suspended. In that instant, all the life surging through her froze, waiting for the rest of it. Adrenaline rushed up her body in a volcanic swell. She was disoriented and calm. So calm. That’s because it wasn’t happening.

“No,” she said. “No.”

“I had to identify—”

“No,” she said more loudly. It was rude of him, continuing to speak. When she’d made it so clear she couldn’t hear this. Wasn’t going to hear this.

“They found her in an alley off of Midway.”

Grace blindly reached a hand out and missed the wall. She was falling.

“She was shot, Grace. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this way.”

She couldn’t breathe. The floor was rushing toward her. Warren caught her and held her. She took a ragged breath.

Dimly, she heard him say, “I can’t believe I lost her. Jasmine’s dead, Grace. She’s dead.”

She looked at him blankly. “What did you say?”

“I tried to find her and I failed. I
failed.”

She righted herself. “Wait. What did you say? You said Jasmine. It’s not Katie?”

He looked confused. “No.”

His eyes cleared.

“Oh, dear God. Katie’s still gone. Oh, Grace, you thought—” His voice sharpened. “No. Grace, what’s happened since yesterday? Where did you go?”

He hadn’t heard her before. Hadn’t understood.

“Katie’s here somewhere. At the Center. I’m sure of it. Lee’s heartin-a-box never worked, Warren. It’s a lie. We have to find Katie and stop this.”

“Stop what?”

“Lee’s going to kill Katie and use her heart.” Grace wrenched the key out of his hand and opened the door. “Katie?”

The lab had been stripped. Counters wiped clean, no vats.

“What happened here? Where is everything?” Grace ran down the aisles, yanking opening cabinets. Where was her daughter? Was it too late?

Warren cut her off rounding a corner and clamped a hand on her arm. “Remember, I said the sale was going through? Lee’s cleaned out her lab, she hasn’t run off, Grace.”

Grace wrenched her arm free. “Warren, listen to me. Lee Bentley is the one who sent you the postcard. She and Mac McGuire are in this together. They’re married. Did you know that?”

Warren’s eyes snapped open in confusion.

“Mac’s wounded, I stuffed him into a scrub locker in the cardiac OR wing on three, across the sky bridge.”

“I’m not tracking any of this.”

“Listen carefully to me, Warren. Mac and Lee have been in this together, along with a woman named Opal. She runs the halfway house Jasmine and Eddie were in. Lee has Katie somewhere here, and we have to find her before she’s killed. Understand? Stop Hekka’s operation, that second heartin-a-box
.
It’s not a heartin-a-box
.
It’s Katie’s heart Lee plans on harvesting and using in Hekka.”

Warren took a stumbling step. She reached out and he pushed her hands away, and in that simple gesture was the stunned humiliation of an old man.

“I’m okay,” he said abruptly. “Stuart. You and Brian find Lee. Contain her discreetly, but I want her stopped, got that? And brought to me. Until this mess is sorted out, nobody operates on Hekka.”

“Sir,” Stuart spoke in a short burst, his words clipped and urgent, “all due respect, what about guarding you? Until the sale goes through you’re—”

“Nobody’s back here, we’ve checked. Nobody can get through that retinal scanner without me. I’ll be fine. The important thing is finding Lee. And stopping her. Hurry. I’ll reach you by cell if necessary.”

Stuart nodded. He raced down the corridor and pushed the button to open the steel door. It whispered shut behind him. Warren took his cell phone out of his jacket pocket.

“Now tell me what this is and what I can do.”

“There aren’t lab-built hearts; it’s all an elaborate fraud.”

“Lee showed them to me, in the lab. Wait. Let me take care of this.” He spoke curtly into his cell phone. “Dr. Frederickson. Anesthesiology. I don’t care. No. Patch me through.”

“Lee knew you wanted to sell, right? She knew if she came up with a heartin-a-box
,
her cut would be millions.”

She could see Warren processing it, not liking what he found. “There never was a heartin-a-box
,
is that it?”

“Lee extracted marrow from specific healthy kids and injected that marrow into developing fetuses with bad hearts.”

“The neonatal window,” Warren whispered. “When all matter is considered self.”

Grace nodded. “Exactly. While the fetus is developing there’s that small, brief time when it’s sorting out what’s self and what isn’t.”

“So you’re saying, she took this bone marrow from healthy kids and injected it into the developing fetus during the neonatal window so—”

“So there’d be perfectly matched hearts ready and waiting when the time came. Total compatibility. Hearts perfectly matched, because the injected marrow was treated as self.”

Into the phone Warren said, “Phil, how far are you? No. You’re not going to get that heart. We’ll try another donor, if one comes available—no, that heart’s not coming.”

Warren grimaced and shouted into the phone. “I’ll explain later. Security’s on its way to enforce it. No, that’s it. It’s going to
have
to be. Fine.” He clicked his cell, got a new line, and placed a quick call to security, describing Mac’s location, but his mind was on Lee and the damage she had done.”

“Is there any other place she could be? Any place else in the Center that’s security monitored and sealed?”

“Lee lied to me. The sale’s a fraud. Jesus. I’ve got to call—”

Grace clamped her hands on the old man’s arms and felt his muscles tense. “
Where could she have put Katie?”

His eyes refocused. “She has a second lab down the hall but believe me, there’s nothing there.”

They ran down the silent hall and Warren unlocked the second lab. He was right. There was nothing. She could see Warren’s growing desperation. He unlocked the door to his private lab, roving the immaculate aisles, pace speeding up, already knowing the futility of their search. Nothing but gleaming counters, wide empty spaces. Where was Katie?

“Empty because of the sale, but I thought maybe—”

“There’s got to be someplace else,” Grace cried. “Think.”

Warren closed his eyes. “We have a supply room tucked around the corner. We’ve used it as a staging area for things we’re taking with us. Believe me, there’s not enough room in there to move around, let alone—”

They heard it the same instant. Faint, thready, coming from down the hall.
“Mommy.”

Tears blinded her eyes. She ran toward the sound, toward her daughter, her terror melting into relief. A single door padlocked stood in the cramped hall.

“I’m
here,
honey. Hang on. Mommy’s here.”

Warren twisted the key in the lock. Grace yanked open the door. A dim cave. “Katie, honey? It’s Mommy. Warren, could you turn on—” She stopped.

Mommy.
The same sound. The same intonation.

Plexiglas cubes glowed in Day-Glo colors: lemon, lime green, pink, purple, the cubes hanging in the darkened room like props on a set. In the corner, something wheezed.

Katie’s doll hung in a vise, tipped, its tiny chest pressed by a metal screw.

Mommy.
There were sixteen squares on the wall, flickering with images.

She backed away. Four wide screens across, four down, each of the sixteen danced with different videos, black-and-white, color, some in extreme close-up, and one shot as if it had been sighted along the ridge of a gun. The images capturing the moments of Grace’s life. Katie taking toddling steps, crowing with delight. Katie wearing soccer pads eating an ice cream cone.

Katie getting into the car at Albertson’s, talking to Grace, both of them laughing.

Behind her, the door closed and locked.

Warren smiled. In the half-light of flickering monitors, his mouth twisted in a nasty grin.

From her bag came the sound of a bell, tolling. It was a rich, deep sound that lingered in the air and faded into silence, and in that moment, Grace felt as if her soul itself hung suspended. It tolled again.

Warren extended his hand and Grace pulled the timer from the bag and gave it to him. He clicked it off.

“Welcome to my world, Grace. Welcome back.”

Chapter 44

Midnight

Grace backed away and banged into something behind her. A shrunken body of a girl stood in a Plexiglas case, her eyes permanently wide and staring, her tiny feet planted a distance apart. She was wearing pink shorts and carrying a puppy she held frozen against her chest.

No. A statue, so lifelike it looked miniaturized. Grace recognized Warren’s daughter at about age six. Wearing anklets with scallops and Buster Brown shoes and a T-shirt hiked up on one side. She wore her straight brown hair in bangs, and a small yellow plastic barrette pushed the hair away from an ear.

The daughter who’d grown up and run away. Grace’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light and she looked past the statue and saw a heavy chair with arm clamps. A chain lay on the floor next to it, bolted to the wall of screens, and the flickering images played along its length, culminating in a set of ankle cuffs. Somewhere a bellows sounded, air wheezing like a manic fun-house distortion. Something made of cloth fluttered on a frame like a torn flag.

It was a small room, and a console rose in the middle of it. It was from here that Warren could regulate the video on the screens. He watched her taking it all in, a smile playing across his face. She gauged how far the door was, and how fast she’d have to move to get there. What she’d have to do to disable him.

He reached into his suit pocket and lifted out a small, snub-nosed revolver and pointed it at her. She took another step back and heard the sound again, more distinctly, the throaty rasp of bellows pushing air through a contained space.

“In a few moments that phone will ring, and when it does, I’ll put in my access code and my part of the deal will be wired to the Caymans. Within five minutes, a helicopter will be landing on the roof to take me to an undisclosed location, a location which is sympathetic to
americanos
with large bank accounts and a need for privacy.”

“What about Katie?” Her fingertips were turning numb. It was spreading up her arms.

“There will be no Katie by then.” His voice was matter-of-fact. “You’ll have a choice. Come with me. And live. Or stay. And be killed.” He motioned toward a door. “This leads to an anteroom. Strictly off-limits but you’re welcome to look.”

He prodded her with the gun, and she stumbled and righted herself and walked down a small set of stairs leading to the side room. “Go on. Poke your head in. Take a look. That way you won’t entertain any fantasies about where it leads.”