"Why not?" Karl said. "They do it with hypnosis."
I looked at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"My cousin Cheryl's a therapist. You know, like a shrink. I guess she uses hypnotism in her job. Helping people recover memories, stuff like that. She told me once that when she was in school, they had 'em watch movies of some of the experiments in hypnosis. From like thirty years ago. Stuff that you couldn't get away with today. One guy in this film was put into a real deep trance, right? Then the hypnotist told him he was on fire."
"Bet I can guess what happened then," I said.
"Fuckin' A. Cheryl said the guy was on the floor, screaming like he was being burned alive."
"Just like Rachel, who thought she was being tortured to death."
"Cheryl said it took days to get that guy's screams out of her head."
"I've got a feeling," I said, "that it's gonna take me a hell of a lot longer than that."
"It's Charlie Mulderig, Stan. I'm calling about Rachel Proctor."
"Hey, Charlie. How is she?"
There was a brief silence, then: "She's gone, Stan."
I felt an icy fist reach into my stomach, grab my guts, and twist them.
"Stan? Are you there? Stan?"
"Yeah, Charlie, I'm here." I cleared my throat, then did it again. "What happened? Heart failure?"
"No, Stan, I'm sorry for… Rachel isn't dead, as far as I know. She's just – gone. Missing. Her bed in the ICU is empty."
The icy fist loosened its grip, but only a little. "Did she regain consciousness, Charlie?"
"Not according to the nurses, and they were checking on her every hour or so. And if something had gone bad at any time – iegular heartbeat, sudden drop in blood pressure, something like that, the alarms built into the monitors would have gone off at the nurses' station. Those were still functioning, by the way. We checked."
"Could some nurse have missed something? Maybe forgot one of the hourly checks?"
"No way, no how. The ICU nurses are the best in the hospital, Stan. They do not fuck up, and that would constitute a major fuck-up."
I closed my eyes and tried to make my miserable excuse for a brain work. "You've got surveillance cameras over there, Charlie. I've seen 'em."
"Yeah, we do, and I know what you're thinking. There's one trained on the hallway right outside the ICU. Our security guy is reviewing the disc now."
"There's no other way out of there, except for the windows, is there? And the ICU's on the fifth floor."
"Exactly. However she left, conscious or not, on a gurney, in a wheelchair, or walking, she had to go along that corridor. We'll find her – well, find her image, anyway."
"Give me a call when you do."
I put down the phone and sat at my desk, staring at nothing. I was thinking about magic – and about disappearing acts.
I didn't hear back from Charlie until the next night. He called right after I came on shift.
"So, how did she leave the ICU, Charlie? Was it under her own power, or was she taken?"
There was a long pause before Charlie said, "We'd like to discuss that with you face-to-face, Stan. Can you drop by Mercy sometime tonight?"
"Who's we?"
"The head of security. And me."
"All right, Charlie, I'll come over now, if the boss doesn't need me. But give me the short version now – how did she get out of there?"
"There actually isn't a short version, Stan. That's why we'd like to discuss this with you in person."
Arguing with him was just going to waste time I could better spend driving to Mercy Hospital. "I'll be there in twenty minutes," I said. I asked Karl to stay at the squad and call me if anything urgent came in. Then I got moving.
The head of security at Mercy was an ex-cop named Sam Rostock. He'd let himself go to seed after leaving the force, to the point where his belly now hung over the belt of his Wal-Mart grade slacks – but I guess muscle tone isn't too important when your toughest job is getting people to leave the hospital after visiting hours are over.
I sat down after the introductions – which were unnecessary, but Charlie didn't know that. I was looking at Rostock but speaking to Charlie when I said, "So what was so important that you couldn't tell me about it over the phone?"
"I checked the video feed from the camera that's aimed at that hallway," Rostock said. "The one outside the ICU. Checked it twice, for the period when what's-her-name, Proctor, was brought in until an hour after she was declared missing."
I expected more, but Rostock stopped talking and just sat there, looking at me. It was impossible to read his face – he'd been a cop, after all.
"There's nothing, Stan," Charlie said finally. "No indication that she left the ICU, either under her own power or with assistance. Nothing."
"I don't suppose that a body was wheeled out of there, in a body bag or under a sheet, maybe," I said. "Or somebody in a wheelchair who'd suffered bad facial burns and was heavily bandaged – anything like that?"
"Of course I checked stuff like that – you think I'm stupid?" Rostock said. "And it wasn't hard to do, because not one patient, living or dead, was taken out of the ICU during that period. Not one ."
I ran my hand through what was left of my hair a couple of times. "What about visitors? Did you check to see whether one more visitor left there than went in?"
"My God, I never would have thought of that," Charlie said, softly.
"Well, I did," Rostock said, but without the defensiveness in his voice. "Same time period – an hour before she was admitted, in case somebody was already in there, visiting in another room, to an hour after she was found gone. Every damn visitor that went in there is accounted for. And this is spring, so nobody's wearing hats or scarves that could hide their face. The ones who came in, went out. And only them."
"Except for the nurses and doctors," I said.
"Not bad," Rostock said, as if he meant it, "but I thought of them, too. Every doctor, nurse, and med tech working here is somebody I've met personally. I make a point of that. Plus, each one has a photo on file with Human Resources, the same picture that's on their ID badge. And with the computer system we have, I was able to do close-ups on the faces of everybody who passed through that door, in either direction. Nothing suspicious. Nothing even close."
The three of us sat there for a while. "Okay, then," I said, finally. "Let me summarize the facts, such as they are." I ticked them off on my fingers as I went along.
"One, Rachel Proctor was brought into the ICU, from the ER, at 4:18am two days ago. Two, Rachel Proctor did not leave the ICU through its only door, and getting away through the fifth-floor window is only gonna work if you're a bird. And three, Rachel Proctor is undeniably gone."
I looked at each of them. "Accurate?"
Their silence said it all.
"So, what happened was impossible, except that it did," I went on. "And there's only one thing that makes the impossible happen, these days – and that's magic."
"Why would Rachel use magic to make herself disappear?" Karl asked me. "If she wanted to leave the hospital, all she had to say was, Okay, I'm all better – release me."
"Yeah, it makes no sense. Unless she wanted to disappear from sight for a while, you know, hide from somebody. Or something."
"Hide from who?"
"Maybe from me. Can't blame her for that – I'm the asshole who got her into this mess, whatever it is."
"Don't start with that again, all right? The chick's all grown up, and everything. She knew what she was getting involved in – probably better than you did. And nobody held a gun to her head that I know of. Or a wand."
"I know, but – what did you say?"
Karl looked at me. "Just that nobody forced her to-"
"No, about a wand."
He shrugged. "I said wand cause it seemed more, like, appropriate for a witch, that's all. What's the big deal?"