Chapter 34

“Poison?” Constantine gaped. “As in ‘Cyanide Poisonings at Local Pharmacy, News at Eleven’?”

She placed her phone on Brock’s window, clicked the camera button. Nothing happened. Right. Intermittent functionality. She wondered how long before it would decide to start working again. If ever.

“Can I borrow this?” She boosted Constantine’s phone from his back pocket, snapped several photos of the backseat, then attached the pictures to a text to Austin, along with an explanation. Hopefully he could still receive text messages.

She handed Constantine his cell and began to lope toward the hospital, cutting through the trying-too-hard picnic area, dodging landmines left by dogs. “Now we’ve contacted the actual authorities and given actual evidence. Come on.”

Constantine was at her heels. “That’s great, but can you tell me what’s going on?”

“Brock has boxes and boxes of ant poison in the back of his Tercel.”

Constantine caught up with her. “So he’s not big on bugs. Me, neither.”

Maggie reached the hospital doors and yanked on the handle, the cool metal solid as the idea forming in her mind. “Some pesticides, especially ant poison, contain cyanide. Brock has enough poison to decimate the ant population. Maybe all of Hollow Pine.”

They ran for the elevator bank, ignoring the man at the reception desk who called after them, unperturbed by the baffled looks of patients and staff whose eyes followed their harried rush to the elevators’ steel mandibles that clenched shut with an automated hiss.

Maggie pounded the call button and looked up, wishing that the hospital lifts had indicators that showed their progress like the green bar that crawled across her computer screen when she tried to save a large file.

Your elevator car is fifty percent of the way to you… eighty percent…ninety-five.

She glanced toward the door leading to the stairwell—the dreaded, deadly stairwell—calculating the PTSD/reward ratio of taking the stairs and reliving the past. The elevator arrived from the hospital’s underground garage and opened to reveal a full car. Constantine stationed himself in the rear right corner. Maggie crammed herself between a woman with an up-do that looked like an abandoned bird’s nest and a man in scrubs who seemed to be having a conversation with someone named “I See.” The woman smiled at Maggie then coughed wetly into her hand. Maggie took a baby step away.

The elevator dinged at the second floor as if ticking off a checklist and again at the third floor. The doors slid open. Maggie and Constantine squeezed to the front of the car and stepped onto the worn carpet of the third floor.

To the left, a nurse restocked her cart. To the right, a patient used a walker to pull himself along the corridor. He took a step, stopped, fought for breath, then took another. He succeeded in making progress, but it was agonizingly slow. Maggie could relate.

Maggie and Constantine began to make their way to room 325 when the stairwell door swung open and vomited out a man. The trio looked at each other for a moment.

“Bradley?” Constantine asked.

The thin young man swept dirty-blond hair from a pimple-corrugated forehead knotted with confusion.

“I stopped by the station to talk to Russ Brock and you directed me to his favorite bar?” Constantine prompted. “Then I called back and we talked about Brock’s obsession with Riley Whitley?”

Bradley’s face reddened. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Constantine countered.

Bradley’s eyes darted down the hall. “I, ah…” He clamped his mouth shut. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I followed Mr. Brock.”

Constantine’s face remained impassive. “Because you’re concerned about his obsession with Mary and Riley.”

Bradley’s tongue arrowed out from between full lips, moistened his mouth. “I was worried he’d…I was worried he’d do something.” His face caved in, the now moistened lips trembling. “I know he’s not supposed to be here. He told me how he got kicked out last time, was almost arrested for trespassing. I, I…” He cast a sidelong glance down the hall then leaned in. “I called security. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt I had to. I didn’t want him to get in trouble, or do something that would make the station look bad.”

The tears pooled behind Bradley’s glasses then began to fall. Constantine clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You did good,” Constantine said. “Did they escort him out?”

Bradley blinked, sniffed, wagged his head from side to side. “They haven’t gotten here yet.”

Constantine shot Maggie a glance. Brock was in the building, perhaps in the Whitleys’ room, and security was nowhere in sight. Maggie and Constantine fell into step toward Room 325, Bradley snuffling behind them.

They didn’t need to make a plan. They didn’t have to discuss. Like twins separated at birth, Maggie and Constantine were tied by an invisible umbilicus that united mind and spirit, sensing what the other knew, experiencing what the other felt. It was a connection that had guided them through a baptism of fire. It also came in handy while playing Pictionary.

The halls were empty, filled only with the sighs of machinery tasked with monitoring and maintaining life. They reached 325 in moments. The door was closed.

Maggie knocked loudly, “Shave and a Haircut” in forte. “Mrs. Whitley?” she called as she eased the door open. “Riley? It’s Maggie and Constantine.”

A silence, deeper and more complete than the emptiness of the hall, echoed back. Maggie strained to hear the whir of machinery, the rustle of bedclothes over bodies and bedframes.

Nothing.

Maggie’s stomach dropped to her knees. They were too late. Wurm had wormed his way into their room and finished the job he’d started, taking two lives, giving himself a shiny new headline. She imagined his satisfaction, pictured the front-page copy: “Whitley Women Succumb to Poison.” She wondered how he expected to get away with it, then remembered people got away with murder on the daily. With a good lawyer, he’d welcome the publicity of a trial.

Maggie gave the door another push, the smooth laminated surface cool beneath her fingertips, and stepped into the room.

Riley lay in her bed, her face a waning gibbous. White. Diminishing. Luminous beneath the fluorescent lights. Mary, similarly wan, was seated beside Riley, the girl’s slight form half on her mother’s lap, a Pieta made of flesh rather than marble. The mother’s head bent as in prayer, one hand on the girl’s arm where the IV needle had bitten cruelly into her daughter’s flesh.

“Mrs. Whitley?” Maggie said gently.

Mary’s head jerked up, the hand that had caressed Riley’s arm flying behind her back. Recognition dawned. The hand dropped to her side. “Maggie!” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

“Mrs. Whitley…” Maggie began, “we’re worried that you and Riley might be in danger.”

The fear returned to Mary’s eyes, pushing them wide. “What do you mean?”

“We have reason to believe that a reporter, Russ Brock, is—”

The door flew open. Maggie spun around, ready to confront, to defend, to do whatever it took to protect the critically ill girl, the recovering mother, the two-unit family with whom she felt an inexplicable yet unyielding kinship.

Deena poked her head around the corner. She saw the group and smiled. “Hey, a party! Looks like I’m just in time.…” She looked at Riley’s unmoving form, took in Mary’s waxen complexion, and frowned.

She crossed the room in four strides, nudged Mary aside and performed the all-too familiar rite of assessment. Riley stirred in response to Deena’s touch.

Deena looped her stethoscope around her neck and sighed. “Seems Whitley the Younger isn’t doing too hot.” Her frown deepened, creating fissures on her otherwise smooth skin. “With a case like hers, it’s hard to know why.” She looked at Mary. “You don’t look so great, either. Let me check your chart and see when you’re due for your meds.”

Mary opened her mouth, but didn’t have a chance to ask what cocktail of medications would be shaken and stirred, whether the hospitalist would be called to assess their worsening health, if they’d have to stay another night or three. The door once again opened and the quintet looked up in orchestral unison.

Russ Brock stood in the doorway, filling it with malevolent intent and lumpy polyester.

His eyes were red and sunken, the thin skin beneath purpled by insomnia. The rest of his face was ruddy and moist as if he’d been running.

Whether it was due to his obsession with the Whitleys, an overabundance of work, or the rigors of arson, one thing was clear: Russ Brock was fraying around the edges.

He scanned the room, his eyes lighting on Deena, Constantine and Maggie before landing on Bradley. “You?” he snarled. “What are you doing here?”

Bradley shrank against Maggie. “I knew you were coming here. I wanted to stop you before you—”

“Before I what?” Brock’s snarl grew to a growl. “You little shit. You disloyal, scheming little—”

Brock sprung forward. The door rebounded and hit him in the shoulder. At first Maggie thought he was going for Bradley. Then the reporter changed direction and charged toward Mary, batting aside Deena’s cart, ramming the rolling food tray into the IV stand beside Riley’s bed.

Brock stormed forward, legs pumping, mouth chewing unuttered words, one arm reaching into the straining pocket of his jacket.

“He’s got a gun!” Bradley cried.

That was all Maggie needed to hear. She switched from defense to offense. She ducked her head, straightened her arms and ran for Brock. Constantine was right behind her.

They hit the reporter simultaneously. Brock reeled back, bouncing from Riley’s bed to the displaced food tray to the room’s small sink in a convincing imitation of a pinball, and fell to the ground.

The hospital room door banged open. A pair of security guards charged inside, eyes flashing, faces red with excitement and exertion.

“What the hell—” a stocky guard with mousy hair shouted, part question, part exclamation. “Freeze!”

Maggie’s brain registered the command then, ignored it. Adrenaline was in charge now. Deference to authority figures had evaporated, along with any sense of self-preservation. The Whitleys were in danger. Brock wasn’t freezing. Neither would she.

Constantine seemed to agree. Together they grappled with Brock, hands scrabbling against shoulders and elbows in an attempt to subdue the man and subvert his plan. Brock writhed and bucked. He shook them off and went for his pocket again.

“Gun!” Bradley yelled.

“Freeze!” the guard shouted again, his voice climbing into the upper registers of hysteria.

Maggie grabbed a pillow from the bed—what, was she going to have a pillow fight with him?—tossed it aside and searched frantically for an improvised weapon. She leapt across the bed and grasped a clipboard from Deena’s cart and raised it above her head, eyes trained on the back of Brock’s skull.

She heard a sharp report. Brock and Constantine reared back then came together as if in a brotherly embrace, Brock lolling atop Constantine. Between them a dark stain spread like night. Venous blood, ruby-red and precious, pumped onto the floor in time with a fading heartbeat.