Or, he thought, if all else fails, I just may need to have a chat with Doctor, find out what he has to say. The prospect made him smile.
He motored past the private driveway once more, no special reason, just to check it out, but what he saw made him brake his Chrysler in the middle of the road. The heavy chain was down and puddled in the grass to one side of the driveway, its warning sign forgotten. There was nothing to prevent his driving in.
Was it a trap…or had something bad gone down here?
He thought about retreating, going overland on foot, as he had done the night before, but Remo didn’t want to waste the time. He had a sickly feeling in his stomach—formless apprehension mingled with a premonition of disaster—but it did not translate into fear. He thought about the girls—young women—who would be the only living witnesses against their captors if the game went sour, wondering exactly how far Dr. Radcliff and his staff would go to save themselves.
He turned into the driveway, checking out the trees on either side. He kept one hand on the door latch and the other on the steering wheel, prepared to bail or ram with equal speed if he was ambushed. As it was, he had an uneventful drive up to the building.
He circled once around the brooding structure, watching windows, picking up no signs of movement behind the glass. There were no cars in evidence, and Remo saw the back door standing open, just an inch or two, as if the last one out had more important things to think about and didn’t care much if the building was secured or not.
He recognized the signs of an emergency evacuation, but he parked out front and blew the Chrysler’s horn regardless just to see if any stragglers might reveal themselves. The flicker of a curtain at an upstairs window, anything at all.
But there was nothing.
Remo was too late.
He left the car, not bothering to lock it, walked up to the front door and tried the knob. It opened at his touch.
He lingered on the threshold, sniffing at the air for any scent of blood or death. Instead, he picked up Lemon Pledge and Lysol. They were keeping clean, whatever else transpired inside these walls.
He stepped into the foyer, listened, heard no sounds that would suggest a living presence in the house. Immediately on his right was a parlor with chairs and couches arranged around a Sony console television with a VCR on top. The coffee table held a spread of magazines that ran toward Seventeen and Tiger Beat, in keeping with the average age of inmates at the home. The room was spotless, nothing to suggest a whirlwind had ripped through it hours earlier.
He checked the dining room, found nothing, moved on to the kitchen. Twin refrigerators were well stocked with food, milk, lean meat, but there would be no breakfast served this morning. Pots, pans and utensils had been washed up after supper, neatly put away in readiness for morning, but the staff and inmates had evacuated prior to feeding-time.
From Joy’s description of the place, he knew the laundry room would be downstairs, with storage in the basement. Past the kitchen pantry with its loaded shelves, the office lately occupied by Matron, or Althea Bliss, revealed the first clear evidence of a departure staged in haste. The desk had been swept clean, drawers dumped and scattered. In the corner, two green filing cabinets stood with empty drawers pulled open. Nothing in the closet but a metal hanger lying on the floor.
Whatever paperwork might have existed to detail the operation of the home for unwed mothers, it was gone. A watercolor painting of a meadow bright with poppies hung askew beside the office door, forgotten in the rush to get away.
He checked the next four rooms downstairs, staff quarters by the look of them, and found no clothes, no personal effects of any kind. Each room had beds for two, one pair still neatly made, not slept in, while the others were in disarray.
The maid would not be coming in today.
The last room on the ground floor would have been what Joy had called the lab, complete with vinyl floor and cabinets that reminded Remo of a medical-examination room. The operating table Joy described was missing, though, marks on the floor remaining where it had been bolted down. The other furnishings were also gone, including the track lighting overhead, and someone had cleaned out the cabinets, left nothing but a paper-towel dispenser on the wall above a sink constructed out of stainless steel.
The kind of heavy-duty gear you found in operating rooms wouldn’t fit in a normal car, which meant Bliss and her people had been stepping lively for their getaway. One truck, at least, called in from somewhere, probably with extra muscle to complete the move in record time. Wall sockets, scuff marks and assorted other signs told Remo they had also taken out a large refrigerator, plus some countertop appliances. The air was sharp with disinfectant, even now, and while he couldn’t prove that Joy’s report was accurate in all particulars, he was prepared to take her word.
He left the operating room and went upstairs, still listening for any sound that would betray a lurker in the house, to search the rooms once occupied by the young mothers of Ideal Maternity. Ten rooms, again with two beds each, though three rooms apparently had been unoccupied before the hasty exodus, beds stripped of linen, drawers and closets undisturbed.
A fourth room had one bed made up for sleeping and the other bare, exactly as Joy Patton had described the room she occupied alone.
And that left six. Twelve pregnant girls, all missing now. Their dresser drawers and closets had been emptied out in haste, but no private items were left behind. There was a common bathroom at the far end of the hall, some of the hanging towels still damp, but nothing in the way of makeup, medicine, perfume—in short, no other trace of habitation by a living soul.
Forensics experts could have torn the place apart, thought Remo, and come up with clothing fibers, fingerprints, perhaps hairs clinging to a bar of soap—but what would be the point? It was no crime to occupy a room or take a shower, and his work was not geared toward a trial, in any case.
As for Thomas Allen Hardy and his doppelgangers, Remo knew no more for having toured Ideal Maternity than when he took the case from Smith. He had a sense of precious time escaping, slipping through his fingers. Where would it end? And how?
One thing he knew for certain: if the place had been evacuated overnight, then Dr. Radcliff must be on alert. Would he attempt to flee, abandon home and clinic in Kentucky, or would he assume that he was safe, his anonymity preserved by the preemptive strike in Dogwood, Indiana?
Remo didn’t know, and there was only one way to proceed. He had to find the man, or try to. Face him one-on-one and wring the secrets of his operation out of Radcliff, one way or another.
At the moment, he was hoping the doctor would resist, give him a reason to inflict some pain.
The ghost was waiting for him when he stepped out of the common bathroom, standing twenty feet away, holding a semiautomatic pistol. Remo recognized the face immediately. He had smashed it several days earlier, in Florida.
The walking dead man smiled at Remo, raised his pistol in a firm two-handed grip and fixed the sights on Remo’s chest.
“Come here,” he said.
“Okay.”
It was a serious miscalculation, bringing Remo closer, but the stranger had no way of knowing that. He held the pistol steady, keeping both eyes open, just the way they taught it at the FBI Academy. At this range, anyone not educated in the fine points of Sinanju should have been dead meat, but Remo wasn’t worried.
As Remo closed the gap, his adversary started backing toward the stairs, kept roughly fifteen feet between them all the way. He knew exactly where the staircase was, without a backward glance, and wedged himself into the nearest corner, giving Remo ample room to pass.