When the banging stopped, I heard footsteps running away from the door that Billy Feathers had taken Lucy through. Maybe Josie Breed was doubling back to check the patient’s room, where the gurney now holding Lucy had been minutes earlier—the gurney that Josie thought was holding Francie Fain.
I was on the first floor of the stairwell, staring at the door that led to the grimy basement and the tiny confines below it.
I speed-dialed Mike and got him on the first ring.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“It’s Josie Breed,” I said, without answering his question. I was breathing heavily, almost gasping between words. “It’s Zach Palmer’s body man who’s in here trying to hunt us down.”
“I know that,” Mike said. “She’s Zach’s assassin.”
That single word was heart-stopping.
“Tell me where you are,” he demanded.
“I sent Lucy off with Billy Feathers to security. You’ve got to make them safe,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘assassin’?”
“Josie faked her way in tonight as an agent, just using her old badge and fake ID,” Mike said. “She killed the other agent—the real one—in the restroom at the hospital. Shot her twice in the head when her back was turned, with a silencer to muffle the noise.”
That attack had set off the Code Violet we’d heard over the loudspeaker, I thought, covering my mouth with my hand.
“Josie came there tonight to finish off Francie Fain,” Mike said, “and then double the stakes by getting you. Getting Lucy, too, if you have her here with you. The perfect trifecta.”
“I was so careful,” I said, listening for any sounds from above, but hearing none. “How did she—?”
“That was Zach here at the gate, pretending he was Francie’s father, to get them in,” Mike said. “Josie had his back, before she figured out the better trick to get in by pretending to be an agent. And she saw you when you walked Mercer out to his car.”
“So I brought this down on myself?”
“Josie also delivered the perfume bottle with the nerve agent to Francie Fain the day Francie was poisoned,” Mike said. “Short story is that Zach and Francie ran into each other at that conference in England a few weeks back.”
Of course they did, I thought. He had been in London on antiterrorist business. He’d be the first to know about the nerve agents that had been let loose by the Russians on British soil. I was furious.
“They don’t sell nerve agents with the perfume at the duty-free shops at Heathrow,” I said. “How did Zach get his hands on it?”
“Josie and her contacts in the evil empire,” Mike said. “She had a mole in Putin’s crew when she was legitimately with the feds. Now that the stuff is being used in England and Europe, she was able to smuggle out a small amount of the Kiss of Death poison.”
How much was a small amount? How many people were still at risk, and was Lucy Jenner one of them? Was I? My head was spinning.
“Where are you?” Mike asked again.
“In the stairwell that leads down from the solarium,” I said. I didn’t tell him that my knees were shaking and that a terrible chill had seized me from head to toe.
“I’m almost there, kid,” Mike said. “I’m coming to get you out. Just stay on the phone with me. Just keep talking so I know you’re okay.”
I held the phone away and listened for footsteps in the corridor above me, but heard none.
“But why would Zach want to kill Francie?” I asked. “Why, after all this time, and how do you know that?”
I could hear that Mike was jogging, his feet pounding on the asphalt Rock U drive, coming up the hill from York Avenue, toward the hospital.
“Francie took advantage of the meeting in England to confront Zach about what he had done to her so many years ago,” Mike said. “She even told him she was quitting her job to work for Corliss, and that she was having the judge’s baby.”
My trip to get the Judge’s DNA hadn’t been in vain. Small victory on this high-stakes night.
Mike kept talking to keep me with him. “Francie told Zach that she hadn’t been able to have a relationship with a man in all the decades since he had molested her, but that she was ready to go public with her story now.”
“And Corliss?” I asked.
“It seems to be that whatever his faults—and who knows how he really feels—that relationship, her first since Zach raped her, was completely consensual.”
I slumped against the wall and rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “Poor, poor Francie,” I said.
I looked up, thinking I had heard a noise in the corridor above me, but I was just nervous and on edge.
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“You’re slow, Coop,” Mike said. “You didn’t even ask me the good news. We’ve got Zach Palmer in custody over at the Nineteenth Squad, and he’s squealing like a stuck pig.”
“Squealing—why?”
“You didn’t think he was a stand-up guy, did you?” Mike says. “He’s blaming everything on Josie Breed. Zach Palmer says silencing Francie—and Lucy—and you—was all Josie’s idea. Zach says she’s a natural-born killer.”
I rested my head back against the wall.
“Hang tough, Coop. I’m close,” Mike said. “I’m really close.”
I wasn’t imagining it this time. There were footsteps above me. I heard them, and they vibrated down the stairwell wall. The pounding began again on the door to the Nurses’ Residence two flights up.
“So is Josie Breed,” I said. “So is she.”