“I’ll call it in, get someone over there now, but Maggie…”
Maggie was already lowering the phone, Reid’s voice fading into the background. She turned toward the entrance as if she were walking in molasses. And Maggie, with the shadows of night bleeding into her very soul, ran.
Ran.
Ran.
Ran.
She flew through the main lobby to the elevators and slipped into the one on the far left just as the doors were closing. The man in the back shot her a dirty look when she hit level five first and then seven—seven, he’s on seven—then went back to his cell phone.
Please let him be okay. But he wasn’t. He was vulnerable, he was sick, he wasn’t even awake. Her father was asleep the way the suspect liked his victims—that was his pattern. Killing without consequence. Attacking when they couldn’t fight back. Because he had been a vulnerable child who was hurt by those who were supposed to care for him, and now he was finished being defenseless, and how long is this fucking elevator ride?
The elevator slid to a stop at five.
Come on, come on, come on.
The doors slid shut. Her breath was a pressured hiss, so loud the man in the corner looked up from his phone. Six. “Ma’am? Are you okay?”
Seven.
She rushed out through the half-open doors. The floor near the bank of elevators was clear, just a young woman with a cane and a nurse who looked to be coming off a thirty-hour shift. But as she squealed around the corner and into the hallway, her heart stopped. So did her feet. A throng of people blocked her way, a bustling wall of macabre fascination. Security swarmed the hallway.
Too late—she was too late.
Maggie shoved her way between two men who were standing on tiptoes, trying to see down the hall, then slipped around another man gripping the handles of a wheelchair—the one from the hall earlier. No child; the killer wasn’t with him. The child had never been with him.
He’s with Dad—the killer is with my father!
“Need to get by!” she yelled, but her plea was lost in the din. The commotion was deafening. Her heart was louder.
She pushed harder, earning a startled “Hey!” from a woman with a long blonde braid and a grunt from a fortysomething man with a buzz cut as she wedged her shoulder past him, pushed between two more people, and then she was standing at the front of the knot of bodies. Security guards were locked in tight formation here, blocking her path to her father. She went at them and ran right into a short, pale guard who gripped her shoulder with enough force to bruise.
“Ma’am, you’re going to have to step ba—”
“That’s my father!” she said—no, yelled, she was yelling. “Is he dead? Did that bastard kill him?”
The security guard’s eyes widened, his unibrow at his hairline. He kept his hand on her upper arm, tugging her sideways, away from the line of people—away from her father’s room. “Listen, there was an incident…”
That stupid word again. She jerked her arm free. “Don’t tell me there was a goddamn incident!”
“You can’t go in, ma’am,” the guard said, more firmly this time, waving her toward the nurses’ station. Adjacent to her father’s hospital room. Police—actual police—surrounded her father’s door in a respectful circle around… the body. Feet still inside the room. Facedown on the linoleum. Dad, no. She couldn’t see his head from this angle, but she knew what that garish crimson puddle meant, and then she could see the other bodies in her mind, the severed muscle and windpipe, and the blood, all that blood…
Her eyes burned; her face was wet. Though she hadn’t registered that she was crying, she felt the tears dripping off the end of her chin and trickling in hot salty rivers down her neck. She’d failed him. She had been here, she had seen the killer, she’d even had a moment of unbridled panic when he’d waved at her. She’d known something was wrong. And she hadn’t done a thing. Oh, Dad, I’m so, so—
“Hey! You!”
She jumped and stepped forward, ramming her hip against the counter of the nurses’ station, but the guard raised his hands, forcing her back. Maggie sidled to the left instead, squinting. Too many people between her and the room’s entrance, too many cops to see inside. Then one of them stepped away.
Dad?
He sat on the bed, flanked by nurses, his left side red with blood—his arm? Yes, his arm, weeping from the wound he’d sustained at his apartment and a new gash near his shoulder. But if he was on the bed…
Her eyes dropped to the floor. To the child—killer—with the flowers, petals from the basket scattered near his left shoe. The puddle of claret had stopped growing. A scalpel protruded from the side of his neck, a shining thorn.
Relief coursed through her, her body celebrating what looked like a dead child, but she felt no guilt about it. None at all.
Had her father woken up in the middle of the attack and kicked the suspect, hit the blade just right? Had security stopped the guy, killed him in the struggle? Had the suspect turned for the door and fallen on his weapon? Maybe he’d come here to kill himself. But where was his ax?
“Get me a cheese sandwich!” her father yelled across the hall.
“He doesn’t seem to know what happened,” the guard told her, his gaze on her father’s room. “He keeps asking for a cheese sandwich and to watch some show.”
“World’s Most Baffling.” Her voice belonged to someone else; she had the sudden urge to look around and see who’d spoken.
“That’s the one.” He turned back. “But he’s got some wounds on his arms, and with the… the incident…” He swallowed hard as if expecting her to protest the word. When she didn’t, he went on: “Once he’s stitched up, and the officers have done their thing, you can talk to him. They might take him downtown, but not until he’s stabilized.”
“Okay,” she said, voice hollow, the tears still flowing freely—her father was alive. Twice today, he had cheated death. But… “How is he awake right now?” And had he said downtown?
She caught the guard’s shrug in her peripheral vision. Of course he shrugged. Why would he have inside information about her father’s health? She locked her gaze on her dad’s, squinting across the expanse that divided them, carefully avoiding the body on the floor.
“Do you know the child?” the guard asked.
“The… what? No, he’s not a child. He’s a serial killer.”
The guard gasped, probably with disbelief, but she couldn’t read his face because she wasn’t watching him. “Can you see the boy, ma’am?”
No. She could not pull her gaze from her father’s. Maggie frowned. His eyes were wrong—they weren’t dull or confused, and they weren’t agitated either, the way they should be if he was being kept from his show. Knowing glittered in his irises. His mouth was set in a sedate line while the nurses worked on his shoulder. Calm and collected, despite his weird demand of a sandwich—despite the yelling. It was an incongruence that twisted her belly into a bristling nest of doubt. Did he… remember?
“Detective Hanlon will be here soon to explain everything,” she said. “It’s related to an ongoing case, but that man on the floor was here to murder my father.”
“I see.” He still sounded suspicious. “Well, if he knew someone was after him, I guess that explains why your dad had the scalpel ready. No one seems to know where he got it from. It’s a different brand from the ones they keep in this hospital.”
The… scalpel. Wait, what was he saying? She finally drew her gaze to the guard. “My father killed this man?” And they thought… he brought the weapon with him?
She blinked, trying to piece it together. That was ridiculous. Her dad didn’t have access to random scalpels, except… maybe after the attack in his apartment. The nurse had brought in a fully stocked rolling cart to suture his wound.
But why would he have kept it all this time? And to bring it with him to the hospital showed more foresight than she imagined him capable. Even if he’d registered that the killer was after him, he hadn’t faked a stroke to get out from under the guards. He wouldn’t allow the killer to confront him just so he could—
“Cheese sandwich!” her father called. “I’m starving!”
The guard sniffed. “Any interest in rustling that up?”
Maggie blinked once more at her father’s bright eyes, her heart lodged in her throat. He remembered. Right now, he was fully aware of his surroundings. She was certain of it.
But she would not ask him about this. Not ever.
Maybe she wanted to assume him capable of pondering, planning… self-defending. Maybe she’d rather pretend.
Either way, sometimes it was better not to know.