"Lester, for God's sake!" Miriam insisted.
Laura saw the name tag in her mind, white letters on a blue background. She saw the first name, and then the last name came clear of its fog. "Leister, I think it was." She spelled it out. "L-e-i-s-t-e-r."
At once Ramsey was on his walkie-talkie again. "Eugene, Ramsey. Call down to records and have them check a name: Leister." He spelled it, too. "Get me a printout when it's done. Metro on the way?"
"Double quick," the disembodied voice answered.
"I want my baby back," Laura said, her eyes deep with tears. Her mind wasn't truly registering what was happening; this had to be a gruesome, hideous joke. They were hiding David from her. Why were they being so cruel? She hung to sanity by the pressure of a nurse's hand. "Please bring my baby back. Right now. Okay? Okay?"
"You'd better find my grandson!" Laura's mother was right up in Ramsey's face. "You hear me? We'll sue your asses off if you don't find my grandson!"
"The police are on their way." His voice was brittle with tension. "Everything's under control."
"Like hell it is!" the older woman shouted. "Where's my grandson? You people had better have a damned good lawyer!"
"Be quiet," Laura rasped, but her voice was lost in her mother's anger. "Please be quiet."
"What kind of security do you have around here? You don't even know who's a nurse and who's not a nurse? You let just anybody off the street come in here and take babies?"
"Ma'am, we're doing the best we can. You're not helping things."
"And you are? My God, there's no telling who's got my grandson! It could be any kind of lunatic!"
Laura began to cry, hopelessly and in great pain. Her mother raged on as Ramsey took it with a tight-lipped stare and rain slashed at the window. His walkie-talkie beeped. "Ramsey," he said into it, and Miriam stopped shouting.
The voice said, "Need you down in the laundry, pronto."
"On my way." He clicked the walkie-talkie off. "Mrs. Clayborne, I'm going to have to leave you for a little while. Is your husband in the hospital?"
"I don't… I don't know…"
"Can you get in touch with him?" he asked her mother.
"We'll take care of that! You just do your job and find that baby!"
"Stay with them," Ramsey told the two nurses, and he hurried out of the room.
"Get away from my daughter!" Laura heard her mother command. The nurse's grip relaxed and fell away, leaving Laura with an empty hand. Her mother stood over her. "It's going to be all right. Do you hear me, Laura? Look at me."
Laura lifted her face and looked at her mother through blurred and burning eyes.
"It's going to be all right. They'll find David. We're going to sue this damned hospital for ten million dollars, that's what we're going to do. Doug knows some good lawyers. By God, we'll break this hospital, that's what we'll do." She turned away from Laura and picked up the telephone, dialing the house on Moore's Mill Road.
The answering machine came on. Doug wasn't home.
Laura lay on the bed and pulled herself into the fetal position, grasping a pillow against her. "I want my baby," she whispered. "I want my baby. I want my baby." Her voice broke, and she could speak no more. Her body, a hollow vessel, ached for her child. She squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out all light. Darkness filled her. She lay at the mercy of God, or fate, or luck. The world spun with her curled up in a tight, hurting ball and her baby stolen from her, and Laura struggled to hold back a scream that she feared might shred her soul to bloody ribbons.
She lost.
Part III – Wilderness of Pain
1: Pigsticker
You're absolutely certain you've never seen the woman before?
"Yes. Certain."
Did she speak your first or last name?
"No, I don't… no."
Did she speak the baby's name?
"No."
Did she have an accent?
"Southern," Laura said. "But different. Somehow. I don't know." She was answering these questions through a tranquilized haze, and the voice of the police lieutenant named Garrick seemed to be floating to her along an echoing tunnel. Two other men were in the room: Newsome, the craggy-faced chief of security for the hospital, and a younger policeman taking notes. Miriam was being questioned in another room, while Franklin and Doug – who'd returned from a drinking bout in a bar near his office – were down in the administration office.
Laura had to concentrate hard on what Garrick was asking her. The drugs had done a strange number on her, relaxing her body and tongue while her mind was racing, going up inclines and speeding down into troughs like a runaway roller-coaster.
A southern accent? Different how?
"Not deep south," she said. "Not a Georgia accent."
Could you describe the woman for a police artist?
"I think so. Yes. I can."
Newsome was called out of the room by a third policeman. He returned in a few minutes accompanied by a boyish-looking man in a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a black tie with tiny white dots on it. There was a hushed conference, Garrick got up from his chair beside the bed, and the new arrival took his place. "Mrs. Clayborne? My name is Robert Kirkland." He showed her a laminated identification card. "Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Those words made fresh panic surge through her, but the drugs kept her expression calm and dreamy. Only the wet glint of her eyes betrayed her stark terror. Scenarios of ransom notes and murdered kidnap victims wheeled through her brain like evil constellations. "Please tell me," she said. Her tongue was leaden, the taste of the tranquilizers sour in her mouth. "Please… why did she take my baby?"
Kirkland paused, his pen hovering over a yellow legal pad. He had eyes, Laura thought, that resembled one-way blue glass, giving no hint of what went on within. "The woman was not a nurse at this hospital," he told her. "There's no Janette Leister on staff, and the only person with that last name who worked here was an X-ray technician in 1984." He checked his prewritten notes. "A black male, aged thirty-three, who now resides at 2137 Oakhaven Drive in Conyers." His one-way stare returned to her. "We're checking the records of other hospitals. She may have been a nurse at one time, or she may have simply bought or rented the uniform. We're checking uniform and costume-rental stores, too. If she did rent the uniform and a clerk got her address from her driver's license – and it's a correct address – we're in luck."
"Then you can find her fast, is that right? You can find her and my baby?"
"We'll act as soon as we get the information." He checked his notes again. "What's working for us here is the woman's size and height, both out of the norm. But bear in mind that the uniform might belong to her, so she wouldn't turn up on a rental list. She might have bought it a year ago, or rented it outside the city."
"But you'll find her, won't you? You won't let her get away?"
"No ma'am," Kirkland said. "We won't let her get away." He didn't tell her that the woman had been allowed into the hospital by a laundry worker, and evidently had spirited the baby out in a linen hamper. He didn't tell her that there was no description of a car, that the laundress was vague about the woman's face, but that two things stuck out: the woman's six-foot height and the yellow Smiley Face button pinned to her breast pocket. It had occurred to Kirkland that the woman had pinned the button there so it would draw attention away from her own face. She had moved fast and known what she was doing; it was no off-the-street patchwork job. His notes told him she'd been wearing a white uniform with navy blue piping, the same colors as the real nurses wore. That was the uniform they were trying to track down. She had acted, as Miriam Beale had put it, "in charge." The laundress had said "she looked like a nurse and she acted like one, too." The woman must've cased the hospital first, because she'd known how to get in and out in a hurry. But there was an interesting point: the woman had gone to rooms 24 and 23 as well. Had she come expressly for the Clayborne infant, or was she gunning in the dark for a child to steal? Was it important that she steal a boy? If so, why?