"Not tonight?"
"Nope. Why would I? He hasn't worked here in months."
"Who are we talking about?" said Swig.
"Has he visited since he quit?" Milo asked the Samoan.
"Hmm," said the Samoan. "Don't think so."
"What kind of guy was he?" said Milo.
"Just a guy." The Samoan favored Swig with a smile. "Love to chat, but got to clean up some shit." He lumbered off.
"Who's George Orson?" said Swig.
"One of your former employees," said Milo. Watching Swig's face.
"I can't know everyone. Why're you asking about him?"
"He knew Mr. Peake," said Milo. "Back in the good old days."
Swig had plenty of questions, but Milo held him off. We rode the fifth-floor elevator down to the basement, took a tense, deliberate tour of the kitchen, pantry, laundry, and storage rooms. Everything smelled of slightly rotted produce. Techs and guards were everywhere. Helping them search were orange-jumpsuited janitors. White-garbed cooks in the kitchen stared as we passed through. Racks of knives were in full view. I thought of Peake passing through, deciding to sample. The good old days.
Milo found four out-of-the-way closet doors and checked each of them. Key-locked.
"Who gets keys besides clinical staff?" he asked Swig.
"No one."
"Not these guys?" Indicating a pair of janitors.
"Not them or anyone else not engaged in patient care. And to answer your next question, nonclinical staff enter through the front like anyone else. I.D.'s are checked."
"Even familiar faces are checked?" said Milo.
"That's our system."
"Do clinical staffers take their keys home?"
Swig didn't answer.
"Do they?" said Milo.
"Yes, they take them home. Checking in scores of keys a day would be cumbersome. As I said, we change the locks. Even in the absence of a specific problem, we remaster every year."
"Every year," said Milo. I knew what he was thinking: George Orson had left five months ago. "What date did that fall on?"
"I'll have to check," said Swig. "What exactly are you getting at?"
Milo walked ahead of him. "Let's see the loading dock."
Sixty-foot-wide empty cement space doored with six panels of corrugated metal.
Milo asked a janitor, "How do you get them open?"
The janitor pointed to a circuit box at the rear.
"Is there an outside switch, too?"
"Yup."
Milo loped to the box and punched a button. The second door from the left swung upward and we walked to the edge of the dock. Six or seven feet above ground. Space for three or four large trucks to unload simultaneously. Milo climbed down. Five steps took him into darkness and he disappeared, but I heard him walking around. A moment later, he hoisted himself up.
"The delivery road," he asked Swig, "where does it go?"
"Subsidiary access. Same place the jail bus enters."
"I thought only the jail buses came in that way."
"I was referring to people," said Swig. "Only jail bus trans-portees come in that way."
"So there's plenty of traffic in and out."
"Everything's scheduled and preapproved. Every driver is preapproved and required to show I.D. upon demand. The road is sectioned every fifty feet with gates. Card keys are changed every thirty days."
"Card keys," said Milo. "So if they show I.D., they can open the gates on their own."
"That's a big if," said Swig. "Look, we're not here to critique our system, we want to find Peake. I suggest you pay more attention to-"
"What about techs?" said Milo. "Can they use the access road?"
"Absolutely not. Why are you harping on this? And what does this Orson character have to do with it?"
Shouts from the west turned our heads. Several fireflies enlarged.
Searchers approaching. Milo hopped down off the deck again and I did the same. Swig contemplated a jump but remained in place. By the time I was at Milo's side, I could make out figures behind the flashlights. Two men, running.
One of them was Bart Quan, the other a uniformed guard.
Suddenly, Swig was with us, breathing audibly. "What, Bart?"
"We found a breach," said Quan. "Western perimeter. The fence has been cut."
Half-mile walk to the spot. The flap was man-sized, snipped neatly and put back in place, wires twisted with precision. It had taken a careful eye to spot it in the darkness. Milo said, "Who found it?"
The uniform with Quan raised his hand. Young, thin, swarthy.
Milo peered at his badge. "What led you to it, Officer Dalfen?"
"I was scoping the western perimeter."
"Find anything else?"
"Not so far."
Milo borrowed Dalfen's flashlight and ran it over the fence. "What's on the other side?"
"Dirt road," said Swig. "Not much of one."
"Where does it lead?"
"Into the foothills."
Milo untwisted the wires, pulled down the flap, crouched, and passed through. "Tire tracks," he said. "Any gates or guards on this side?"
"It's not hospital territory," said Swig. "There has to be a border, somewhere."
"What's in the foothills?"
"Nothing. That's the point. There's no place to go for a good three, four miles. The county clears trees and brush every year to make sure there's no cover. Anyone up there would be visible by helicopter."
"Speaking of which," said Milo.
By the time the choppers had begun circling, nine sheriff's cars and the crime-scene vans had arrived. Khaki uniforms on the deputies; I saw Swig tense up further, but he said nothing, had started to isolate himself in a corner, muttering from time to time into his walkie-talkie.
Two plainclothes detectives arrived last. The coroner had just finished examining Dollard, searching his pockets. Empty. Milo conferred with the doctor. The paper scrap in the staff elevator had been retrieved and bagged. As a criminalist carried it past, Swig said, "Looks like a piece of slipper."
"What kind of slipper?" said one of the detectives, a fair-haired man in his thirties named Ron Banks. Milo told him.
Banks's partner said, "So all we have to do is find Cinderella." He was a stout man named Hector De la Torre, older than Banks, with flaring mustaches. Banks was serious, but De la Torre grinned Unintimidated by the setting, he'd greeted Milo with a reminder that they'd met. "Party over at Musso and Frank's-after the Lisa Ramsey case got closed. My buddy here is good pals with the D who closed it."
"Petra Connor?" said Milo.
"She's the one."
Banks looked embarrassed. "I'm sure he cares, Hector." To Milo: "So maybe he rode down in that elevator."
"No inmates allowed," said Milo. "So there's no good reason for there to be a slipper in there. And Dollard's key ring is missing, meaning Peake lifted it. The rest of the techs were in a meeting, so Peake could've easily ridden down to the basement, found a door out, and hightailed it. On the other hand, maybe it's just a scrap that got stuck on the bottom of someone's shoe."
"No blood in the elevator?" said Banks.
"Not a drop; the only blood's what you just saw in the room."
"Clean, for a throat cut."
"Coroner says it wasn't much of a cut. Peake nicked the carotid rather than cut it, more trickle than spurt. Came close to not being fatal; if Dollard had been able to seek help right away, he might've survived. Looks like he went into shock, collapsed, lay there bleeding out. No spatter-most of the blood pooled under him."
"Low-pressure bleedout," said Banks.
"A nick," said De la Torre. "Talk about bad luck."
"Peake didn't have much muscle on him," said Milo.