I kept walking. Claire was waiting for me at the ambulance bay. As I reached her, I heard shouts at my back: McAllister’s crew threatening to put the Asian men under arrest.
Claire reached out her arms to me and brought me inside. We held on to each other.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “And I never want to see anything like this again.”
CHAPTER 28
IT WAS ABOUT 6 p.m. when I followed my best friend into the morgue and saw the double row of sheet-covered gurneys lining the stainless steel–clad room.
“I’ve got sixteen decedents here, all crash victims,” Claire said. “We’re officially full up, but we took on some overflow. Got six people in there,” she said, lifting her chin toward the autopsy suite.
“How are you holding up?”
“OK, considering that this is the most exhausting night of my life. Most of these victims don’t have ID. I’ve got a three-year-old with no name. Hope I can tag him tonight.”
Dr. Germaniuk, the seasoned on-call pathologist and Claire’s backup doc, was sliding a body into a drawer and three sweaty techs were cleaning up, setting up a body for her next autopsy.
Claire called out, “Dr. G. I’m gonna take a fifteen-minute break, OK?”
“Take twenty,” he said.
I followed Claire along the hallway to her office and she shut the door behind us. She took her desk chair and I dropped down hard into the seat across from her. Claire had made this room as homey as possible, meaning only passably.
A gardenia floated in a bowl of water on her desk, a few finger paintings were under the glass desktop, and framed photos hung on the wall behind Claire: her friends in the Women’s Murder Club and snapshots of her family. Her husband, Edmund. Her two grown-up sons. Her little girl, Rosie.
My eyes got stuck on the baby.
Claire’s eyes were on me. “Talk to me,” she said.
“Richie and I were tasked with escorting kids off school buses today,” I said. “The buses came up to a side entrance to Mills-Peninsula Medical. The parents were behind police lines and crazy with fear. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do, you know? They wanted to rush the buses.
“We had to get those tiny terrified, traumatized kids into the building, make sure they didn’t need emergency care. We got their names. Gave them water. Then we tried to match the kids’ names to the list of parents storming the barricades.
“When we had a match, Highway Patrol would call out the name over a megaphone. Rich and I would escort these five-year-olds outside into this freakin’ mob scene of moms and dads screaming at the child, ‘Do you know my daughter? Did you see my little boy?’
“We had all of the one-at-a-time parent-and-child reunions. Oh, my God, Claire. Each and every time a scraped-up little kid with ripped clothes broke away from me and started running toward loving arms, I thought my heart was going to blow through my chest.”
I had to stop speaking. Claire reached across her desk and grabbed my hand.
I said, “I kept thinking about Julie. How can I protect my own daughter when the world is like this?”
There was a long silence as we pondered the imponderable. Then Claire asked me, “Any word from Joe?”
I shook my head.
“What the fuck has happened to him? How could he not call me? He has to have a good reason, right, Claire? I have to trust that he would call me if he could. But what if he’s hurt? Or dead? No one is going to look for my missing husband in the thick of all this.”
Claire murmured comforting words. “He’s OK. He has a reason, sure. He’ll call soon.”
I looked up at my friend through the tears in my eyes. “I have to get home,” I said. “You haven’t said why you called.”
Claire said, “Right.” She opened a file drawer, took out a small sheaf of paper, and put it down on the desk facing me.
“This is the passenger manifest,” she said. “I’m looking, you know, to see if I can find the name of that little boy and maybe three people I’ve got here who still had wallets in their pockets. And I see this name, Michael Chan. I’m thinking, there’s probably a lot of people named Michael Chan.”
I stared at Claire, and I really didn’t understand what she was saying. Michael Chan had been chilling in this morgue since he was murdered in the Four Seasons Hotel three days ago.
But Claire was saying something different. She was tapping the passenger list where a name had been highlighted in yellow.
“Look at this, Linds,” she said. “Chan. Michael. Professorville, Palo Alto. This is your victim from the hotel shooting, am I right? He couldn’t have been on that plane. He’s here—in a drawer with his name and number on a toe tag. I double- and triple-checked. It’s him.”
My mouth was open. I tried to clear the smoke from my head and absorb the highlighted name on the passenger list. Who was this Michael Chan? Our dead man had been identified by his widow. Even with two shots in his face, he was a match for his DMV picture.
Claire’s incredulity mirrored mine.
“Where is this Michael Chan right now?” I asked, stabbing the highlighted name.
“Metropolitan Hospital,” she said. “He was sent to Metro’s morgue.”
CHAPTER 29
METROPOLITAN HOSPITAL IS a huge general hospital with a lab and morgue that occupies the entire basement level.
At 6:30 p.m., Metropolitan’s parking lot was nearly impassable. Claire carefully maneuvered her car up and down the aisles of hastily parked vehicles. There were no open spots, not for cops or doctors or patients. Meanwhile, Metro’s overextended director of pathology was waiting for us inside.
Claire said, “I’ll call Dr. Marshall, let her know what’s happened to us.”
She took out her phone and I used the moment to call Mrs. Rose—only to find that my phone battery was dead and that I’d left my charger in the squad car.
Claire was saying, “Fine. We’ll park on Valencia. Blue Chevy Tahoe.”
We left the hospital lot, parked on Valencia in the no parking zone in front of an auto repair shop. We didn’t have to wait long. A fantastically fit glossy-haired woman wearing a green leather coat over bloody blue scrubs knocked on Claire’s window.
We got out and I was introduced to Dr. Pamela Marshall. Right after that, we had an ad hoc meeting across the hood of Claire’s car.
“Busy night,” Marshall said, “following the most hellacious day ever.”
“I’ll second that,” Claire said. “Look. We just want to walk back to the morgue with you, get a quick look at Mr. Chan, and get out of your way.”
“Here’s the thing, Dr. Washburn,” said Marshall. “We’ve got sixty bodies and counting. I’ve got Jane and John Does in double digits. You’re lucky Mr. Chan had ID. I gotta be honest with you, I wish I had known and saved you the trip. I couldn’t show you Chan’s body right now if you offered me a million bucks and a house in Cannes.”
“Wish you’d known what?” asked Claire.
“Chan was in line to be autopsied,” Marshall said, “but someone moved his gurney somewhere. He’s been temporarily misplaced.”
I said “Dr. Marshall. You’re saying you lost Chan?”
“Misplaced. He’ll turn up. Don’t worry about that, and I’ll call you when he does. I’ve got to get back,” she said. “I’ll call you. Good night, ladies.”
“Wait,” I called after her. “I need to see his ID.”
Dr. Marshall kept walking.
Claire said, “If she doesn’t have his body, she doesn’t have his ID, either. His personal effects would be on his person.”