Critical Impact (14 page)

T
hey searched the entire hospital, every broom closet, every patient room. They found no one. The man in the green scrubs was not there. Whisper Lake Crossing Hospital wasn't large. It didn't take Stu, Alec, the nurses and the hospital security guards very long to go through every floor.

Stu found the pile of wrinkled green scrubs behind a chair near the loading-dock entrance. It was out back—an easy area to escape undetected.

Stu called Alec over. “Look at this,” he said, lifting up each item of clothing with the end of his pen. There were booties, pants, a shirt, mask and cap. Stu said, “I'll bag them. There could be DNA, hair, something we can find.”

Alec bent down, looked through the items one by one and frowned. “My thinking is that he's not going to even be in the police system. If he was, he wouldn't have left these here. He'd be more careful.”

Stu was thinking. “If he's not in the system, if he's
never been arrested before, then this is his first time. So this isn't a random thing. This is personal. He's taunting us.”

Alec said, “My money is still on the missing-in-action Peter Remington.”

Stu frowned. “I'm not so sure. If he's the same guy who was at that church, Anna would have instantly recognized him. She didn't.”

“What about disguises?”

“Not impossible, but I still think Anna would have recognized something. She knew the guy very well, and she's a makeup artist, so she would be able to see through a disguise.”

Stu went up to Anna's room. She would probably be sleeping. He just wanted to look in on her. Liz would stay in her room. Steve was even going to stay the night at the hospital, and of course everyone who was working there was on high alert.

Anna was awake when Stu came to the doorway. She gave him a weak, “Hi.” Liz was there, too. When Stu entered, Liz said, “Do I have time to run down and get a cup of coffee? Mine got spilled when all the commotion began.”

“Go on,” he said.

“I won't be a minute.”

“Take all the time you need.”

He pulled up a chair and sat close to Anna. The back of her bed was in the upright position. She looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes, yet to
him, she still looked beautiful. “I'm so sorry to cause so much trouble,” she said.

“You're no trouble,” Stu said. “You're never trouble.” As he sat beside her bed at three-thirty in the morning he knew beyond a doubt that he loved her. And as big a surprise as this was to Stu, it was a very pleasant surprise.

He didn't quite believe it was happening to him. When his beloved wife, Alesha, died, he never thought he would love again. Alesha was beautiful and strong, and she loved what he loved—mountain-biking, hiking, skiing. She had been a helicopter pilot in the military on her last deployment in Iraq. They were going to start a family when she got home.

She never made it. Instead, the transport vehicle she was riding in the back of, designed to look like an ordinary cement truck, was blown up near Baghdad.

To get away from Boston and all the reminders of Alesha, he had taken this job way out here in the three-person Whisper Lake Crossing Sheriff's Department. What he planned to do was to fill his life with the backcountry and the out of doors. He never expected to fall in love. In fact, he vowed he wouldn't.

Now, as he looked at Anna's sweet smile, he thought how different she was from Alesha. His outgoing, freckle-faced Alesha didn't even know what makeup
was. Now he found himself falling for someone who applied it for a living.

The magazine on her tray featured home-interior designs. He looked down at it and said, “The man who was in the green scrubs isn't here anymore.”

“That first night when I was here, it really was someone trying to smother me, wasn't it?”

“We think so. Maybe.” He didn't want to frighten her, but he did want her to recognize that she was in real danger.

“Did you bring my letter?” she asked.

He patted his jacket.

“Did you read it?” she asked.

“You asked me not to. I didn't.”

She gave him a shy smile. “You could have, though. Read it now. It's important, but I can't figure it out.”

He took it out of his pocket and laid it on her tray table. She reached for it with her left hand, tried to open it. “It takes me a while to do anything one-handed. Why don't you do the honors?”

He pulled out the sheet of paper and laid it down on the table. He looked at it, puzzled. “What is it?” he asked.

“This was leaning up against my porch earlier today. It was addressed to me, but I can't figure out who it's from or what they want.”

She told him that Rodney had come for a visit, and remarked that two people were on her porch. Stu looked at her intensely. Maybe he needed to talk with
Rodney again. “I don't know what will happen to me now that I've showed this to the police. The letter said not to show this to the police. It sounded like a threat.”

“We'll deal with that. Don't worry about it. And, Anna, thanks for trusting me.”

“It's hard for me to trust anyone.”

“I know.”

“But I'm getting better at it. I'm learning.”

“I hope I'm a good teacher.”

Before he left, he bent down, gave her a soft kiss and vowed within himself that he would never let anything bad happen to her again.

He only hoped he could keep his promise.

 

Stu didn't see Anna until the following evening. He had spent the day trying to track down Peter Remington, Jack Habrowser and Reginald Pinter; talking to marine stores about halyard wire; and following up with Alec, Steve and Roy on the electrical box at Catherine's house, the fingerprinting crew at the Seeleys' basement apartment and the letter that Anna had received.

All day long he wanted to stop in and see Anna, but he barely had time to phone her. He knew, though, that he would be seeing her this evening. All of them would be together. All of them would be staying at Flower Cottage, except for Lois, who elected to stay with Marg at the Seeley mansion.

That was fine with Stu. He was also worried about Marg's safety and had invited her to Flower Cottage, but she declined. Should Stu believe Marg's story that she was just looking up bomb-making sites out of sheer curiosity? Or was there a more sinister reason behind her Web surfing?

By the time he got to Flower Cottage, a cold rain was falling. The warm sunshine of just a week ago had shifted into this harbinger of winter. The sky spat down frigid, unrelenting rain. Bette had supper going when he entered the kitchen—a thick chicken soup for all of them. Bette was at the counter chopping salad veggies while Catherine was getting plates down from the cupboard. Anna was sitting at the table, her hand around a mug of coffee. She smiled up at him when he entered, but she seemed unsure, maybe afraid. He knew she had reason to be.

They all welcomed him and Stu said, “Wow, something smells good. I think I'm going to like this hotel.”

If the circumstances for everyone's stay hadn't been so serious, the mood at Flower Cottage could have been described as almost festive. Anna and her mother had decided to share a room on the second floor overlooking the lake and Alec and Megan chose a room opposite that one and down the hall. Liz opted for the small bedroom at the top of the stairs, right next to Bette's spacious room. Ralph, Bette's son, had
the loft in the attic. Stu would stay on the main floor in the room off the one Bette called the library.

“Coffee?” Bette asked.

“Sure. Let me wash up and I'd love some.”

“Caf, or decaf?”

“High test,” Stu said. “Definitely high test.”

He went into the room that would be his and dumped his duffel bag in a small room on the main floor.

When he had changed out of his uniform, he came out and sat beside Anna. “How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.

“Better,” she told him quietly. “They did a bunch of tests and nothing's wrong with me. But I got this.” She pulled out her cell phone, laid it on the table and pressed some of the buttons. “It's so awkward to do this with one hand.”

Catherine and Bette were talking at the counter and couldn't hear this conversation. That was obviously the way Anna wanted it.

“This text message,” she said handing him her cell phone. Her hand was shaking.

Stu took the phone from her and read:

I asked you how much you wanted. We are prepared to pay. But if you don't get back to us, other people will die.

Stu stared down at it. Then up at Anna. “No caller ID?”

“It's blocked.”

Stu said, “Can I borrow your phone for a bit?”

She nodded. There were tears in her eyes. “I just wish I knew what it meant.
What
other people are going to die? And why?”

 

It was late at night. Everyone else had gone to bed long ago. Anna, who was not able to sleep, had wandered downstairs to the kitchen. She was standing by the window now, watching the full moon and thinking.

On one end of the large pine kitchen table beside her, a jigsaw puzzle lay partially completed. Earlier, Bette's son, Ralph, had gotten out the various boxes of jigsaw puzzles from the cupboard and together they chose one that featured a lighthouse surrounded by a garden. Ralph and Catherine and Alec's wife, Megan, had spent most of the evening drinking hot cocoa and working on it, piece by piece.

Anna hadn't. She had merely watched. Neither had Stu. Or Alec or Liz. Stu had Alec spread the case notes all over the coffee table in the living room while Liz was on the phone. Anna knew they were still trying to find Peter. Had Peter sent her those messages? But why? It made no sense.

Anna felt tired, and yawned several times, but she knew she wouldn't sleep. When everyone else went to bed so did Anna, but she tossed and turned, and couldn't find a comfortable position for her arm. Then she remembered that she had left the last of the pain
pills in the parlor at her mother's house. So when sleep wouldn't come, she got up, went downstairs and now stood by herself at the window and looked out at the blackness of Whisper Lake. It was cool in the kitchen and she clutched an afghan around her shoulders. Outside, it looked cold, windy and blustery.

A part of her felt fear, but another part of her just felt numb. It was as if her entire life was in a holding pattern. It was as if she was waiting for something important, something from God. As she stood there at the open window she thought of the verse in Isaiah.
They who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength. They will rise up like with wings like eagles. They will run and not be weary. They will walk and not faint.

That was her—waiting. Waiting to see what kind of feelings developed for Stu. Waiting to see what kind of mobility she would end up having in her right hand. Even waiting to remember what exactly had happened when she entered City Hall on that fateful day. And here she was, not even in her own place. Waiting. That's all she seemed to be doing lately. Waiting to see what happened with her arrest. Alec said that they were going to drop the charges against her; they'd just been overwhelmed with work. She said she understood.

She was formulating a theory, a scenario. When she had lain awake in the hospital last night, she had dreamed a dream she couldn't remember. She had
awakened with a start. It was after that that she began coming up with the picture. But the letter and text message were confusing to her. How did they fit in?

A red leaf blew up against the window for a moment, lay flat against the pane as if trying to gain entrance. Then, just as quickly, another gust blew it away.

She watched that same red leaf dance across the black lawn in the moonlight. Stu and Alec were looking for Peter. She knew that. But she wasn't sure Peter was responsible anymore. In fact, she was quite sure he wasn't.

A cloud scudded across the moon and her thoughts went back to the day of the bombing. She had thought the man in the red jacket, the one who'd looked over at her at that moment, was Peter. She had thought that the man she had seen talking to that woman, holding something away from her grasp, was Peter.

She gasped audibly. Red jacket! Where had that memory suddenly surfaced from? She put a hand to her mouth. He was wearing a red jacket. Bright red. Too red. Not something Peter would wear. It wasn't Peter!

Think,
she said to herself. There had been something in the corner of her eye just before she went into City Hall that day. She'd been holding her very full cardboard cup of coffee. She had added too much cream to the top, and even with the plastic lid, it was leaking over the sides. She had been holding it away
from her body, and trying to ignore Johnny. She hated the way he leered at her.

Just before she had gone into the building, she had looked to the right, for the briefest of instants. What had she seen? There had been someone there. A red jacket. Someone in a bright red jacket was talking to a woman. The woman was shorter than the man. Or was it a woman? Maybe not. Maybe it was a short man.

At the time she'd thought it was Peter. That's what she remembered, that Peter had come back. But no. The man she had seen in the red jacket was not Peter.

Anna let out a little gasp. She stared ahead of her at the moon. Was the woman Marg? She let those thoughts settle for a while.

So intent was she on her train of thought that Anna didn't hear the footsteps behind her.

The arms that went around her pulled her back away from the window.

“You need to get away from the window, Anna.” He held on to her with one hand and with the other he pulled the curtains closed. “These should be kept closed.”

She turned. It was Stu who was behind her. She went into his arms. He drew her to him and kissed her.

When they finally pulled apart, she said, “There was a red jacket.”