Boone’s phone began to ring while the plane was still descending, and she caught a reproachful look from one of the flight attendants.
“Airplane mode until we’re on the ground, please.”
“Right,” Boone said. She’d never used airplane mode in her life, preferring to have her phone flood with e-mails and messages while they eased down through the clouds. If this habit were truly dangerous, a lot of planes would be tumbling out of the sky, she thought. But why quibble with the flight attendant—Boone’s business cards said Department of Energy, but her expertise wasn’t really in that field.
Instead, she simply silenced the phone while pretending to put it in airplane mode. The caller went to voice mail. Boone looked at the number and didn’t recognize it, but the area code was Boston’s.
It’s a big city, she thought, trying to tamp down the swell of hope. Could be anyone, about anything. Could be the boneheads in the Brighton PD calling to state their unequivocal confidence that Carlos Ramirez was killed in a drug buy gone bad.
Or it could be her one hope: Dr. Pine.
She held the phone in her lap as the plane made what now felt like an endless descent, and as the signal strengthened, the iPhone offered an awkward attempt at transcribing the voice mail. While some of it was clearly a mistake—she doubted the phrase jazz trombone would be involved—the first words were crystal:
Hello, this is Dr. Pine.
Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch. There was hope. Dr. Pine meant there was hope.
The plane finally hit Tampa tarmac, tires shrieking, cabin shuddering. Boone was in the aisle seat, still staring at her phone, and when she didn’t rise instantly at the chime indicating they were now free to take off their seat belts and exit the plane, the passenger beside her cleared his throat loudly and made an impatient gesture toward the aisle, where people were attacking the overhead bins in a frenzy, as if they’d all boarded the last flight out of a failed nation-state. Actually, Boone had been on two of those flights, and they weren’t all that energetic.
She unclipped her seat belt and rose, ducking her five feet ten inches to avoid the overhead bins but never taking the phone from her ear. Now she could hear what the transcription software had missed.
“Hello, this is Dr. Pine, in Boston. I trust you’ll remember me. I just left a pretty jazzed-up room. Tara Beckley is alert. She has what we call locked-in syndrome. This means her ability to move and vocalize her thoughts is lost, at least temporarily, possibly forever, but her mind is intact, and she is aware. I just asked her to spell out a message to the family and she completed this task successfully. She is also capable of answering yes-or-no questions.” He paused, and Boone could sense both his pride in the moment and his conflicted feelings about sharing the information.
“I’m not sure if I would have made this call if not for the mother,” he continued. “She’s making regular updates on social media, broadcasting Tara’s condition to the world. Since it seems the news will not be hard to find, I suppose I will take a chance on telling you. If, as you once suggested, her life may be in danger…well, we’re going to need to take swift action on that. I didn’t know how to keep the mother from sharing this joyful news. Perhaps this is why you should have dealt with the family to begin with. At any rate, this is Tara’s status at the moment. If you have any questions that don’t involve a deeper invasion of my patient’s confidentiality, I would be happy to answer them.”
“You stupid bitch,” Boone said aloud, and though the sentiment was directed at a joyful mother two thousand miles away, her seatmate clearly thought it was for him as he rushed to pull his bag out of the overhead bin. Boone ignored his umbrage while she called Pine back. Answer, damn it. Answer.
She was on the jet bridge being jostled by the crowd when he picked up.
“You’ve got to shut her down,” Boone said without preamble.
“Pardon?”
“Protect that girl. Limit access to her and get the mother to pull that shit off the web.”
“Isn’t this your role?”
“Yes, it is. But I just touched down in Tampa, where I’m not even going to leave the airport, I’ll just get the first flight back north. In the meantime, I need your help.” She felt a rush of humid Florida air as she crossed the jet bridge and entered the terminal, and then the blast of air-conditioning washed it away and brought harsh reality along with the temperature drop. Boone was in the wrong city and she could not fix what had already happened. She said, “It’s too late to pull the news down, isn’t it? People will have gotten notifications as soon as she posted. They’ll be sharing it. So we don’t need to worry about the mother. We just have to limit the people who have access to the girl.”
“This simply isn’t my role,” Dr. Pine said. “You need to get the police to talk with this family if they are—”
“I understand your role, and I understand mine much better than you do. Bringing police off the street and into that hospital will only make things worse. I just need to interview her. That’s all. You say she’s able to communicate.”
“In a limited fashion, yes.”
Boone fought through the crowd to a row of flight monitors and looked for the next departure to Boston. It was a three-hour wait. Not great, but not terrible either. She wouldn’t be able to charter a plane much faster, and until she knew if Tara Beckley had any memory of the event, nobody was going to approve that budget item.
“Does she remember what happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know. That wasn’t today’s priority. Again, this is simply not within the—”
“A lot of the risk depends on whether she has any memory at all of the moments around Oltamu’s death,” Boone said. “You need to find out if she remembers the night.”
“That’s your job!”
“And I’m going to do it. But Doctor? You’re there. She’s there. Her protection and her threat are both still outside the hospital walls. Want to make sure the right one gets there first? Find out if she remembers the night. I don’t need you to interrogate her, I need you to assess whether she has any memory of it. It’s that simple, and it’s that crucial.”
Silence. She thought about waiting him out but decided to press instead. “When you do that, make sure the mother is out of the room. Then call me immediately.”
She hung up on his protest.
Did it matter that Tara Beckley was back? It was surprising—stunning, actually, based on the initial diagnosis—but it wouldn’t mean a damn thing if she couldn’t remember her ride with Amandi Oltamu. If she had any memory of that night, she would be of use. Boone was confident of that because of Oltamu’s last message.
Ask the girl.
Boone walked toward the nearest Delta gate. If she could get on the next flight to Boston, she would ask the girl. And if the girl remembered?
If she woke and remembered, they’d need the best in the game. If she woke and remembered, they’d need Boone.