Seeing the question on Dennis’s face, Luke shrugged his eyebrows. No, he hadn’t made any progress.
In a relaxed motion, Dennis crouched to meet the woman’s downward gaze. He smiled, introduced himself, and said, “A police officer is on his way to the hospital. He has some questions for you—”
“No police!” she snapped.
Her daughter startled with a loud cry.
The woman reached over and stroked the girl’s forehead with an unsteady hand. “Really, we’ll be fine,” she said in an unconvincing tone. “I don’t need to talk to anyone. I just want to go home.”
The intercom unit lit up again. “Dr. McKenna, they’re calling again. They say they need you in Trauma One.” The red light blinked off.
“Mrs. Erickson, we’re here to help you,” Dennis continued. “When we see injuries that aren’t easily explained by an accident, we have to notify the police, as well as the county’s Department of Children and Family Services. It doesn’t mean that we’ve decided anything, only that we believe the injuries could have been caused by another person. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The woman’s gaze swung back and forth between her daughter and her trembling hands. Finally, she said, “Yes.”
“I hope you also understand that we’re doing this out of concern for both of you. We need to be sure that you and your daughter are safe, which I know is also what you want.”
She nodded without looking up. The shields were coming down.
“We can help you deal with this,” he said.
“There’s nothing to deal with.”
“I think there is,” Luke broke in.
Dennis shot a glance at Luke. The message was clear: Let me handle this.
But Luke knew they were battling the same frustration. For reasons a man could not easily understand, this battered woman would probably retreat into the clutches of her captor. She seemed to shoulder the feelings of shame and worthlessness as though she’d come to accept them as part of her core identity.
Everyone in the room shared at least one feeling — helplessness. Luke watched the woman knead the palms of her hands with nervous thumbs. He wondered how she endured the cruelty in silence. He wondered how she could surrender herself to the creature that had beaten her child.
But this woman had come to the hospital. At least part of her was begging for help.
A man’s angry shouts interrupted Luke’s thoughts — an enraged parent launching into a tirade down the hall.
Moments later there was a loud smack—someone’s fist slamming against a wall or countertop.
The woman flinched, her breathing quickened, and her face bloomed with fear.
Calderon stood at the curb outside the terminal and watched the ambulance blast its way through a phalanx of traffic. Brake lights veered to each side of the street in a modern day version of the Red Sea. A duet of sirens faded to a low-pitched yawn as the flashing lights shrank into the distance.
“What do you mean, you lost him?” asked the voice in his earpiece. The encryption technology built into Calderon’s cell phone shaved some of the subtle inflections from his client’s digitally reconstructed words, giving them an unnatural quality.
Calderon spoke into the tiny boom microphone hanging from his right ear. “A medical team took the kid away on a stretcher. There was no way to grab him. Cops and security were all around him.”
He unbuttoned his black coat and pressed a hand against his left ear to muffle the street noise. The coat collar rose awkwardly on his steeply sloped shoulders, and his flexed arm swelled like a tire filling with air. Calderon had always been big, favoring the genes of the German banker in Guatemala City whose home his then-teenage mother had cleaned for the equivalent of fifteen U.S. cents a day.
After a three-second delay during which Calderon’s phone ciphered the encrypted code, his client’s voice came back: “He was alive?”
“Yeah, but it looked like he was struggling to breathe.” Calderon stepped away from a noisy Chinese couple who were barking at each other in what sounded like Cantonese. He was careful to stay beyond the reach of three security cameras tucked into the ceiling over the baggage carousels. “Airport security had cordoned off a path. I couldn’t see much.”
During the commotion, he had joined a crowd of spectators who stood gawking as a medical team — dressed in blue coveralls with incongruously cheerful rainbow insignias — trotted alongside the stretcher carrying his mission objective. Calderon had caught only a fleeting glimpse of the boy grimacing through an oxygen mask as the stretcher raced through the baggage claim area.
“You’re sure it was our boy?” asked the flat voice in his earpiece.
Encryption technology didn’t explain everything that Calderon was hearing, and not hearing. The pitch of his client’s voice was oddly high, and his words were stripped of the intonations that gave human speech its texture. His client was using embedded software to camouflage his voice.
“My man at the gate got a good look at him. It was our boy,” Calderon said. “His mother was right there, too, walking alongside the stretcher. She matched the picture you sent me. One of the medical people was firing questions at her.”
He raked his upper lip with his teeth. His paste-on moustache was beginning to itch. The rest of his disguise was minimaclass="underline" implants stuffed inside his cheeks to soften the lines of his face, red-tinted eyeglasses, and a wig. The wig was just long enough to cover the lower half of his left ear, which was missing.
His mother had always wanted him to get that ear fixed. Now, he wished he had — for her.
A small throng of camera-toting tourists spilled out the exit, luggage in tow, passing on either side of him. Calderon turned to avoid the lens of a trigger-happy woman for whom the taxi-stand sign held some profound photographic interest.
Just as he turned, a swarthy young man brushed up against him. Rap music leaked from headphones that were hanging loosely around the man’s neck.
The would-be chauffeur’s right hand instinctively twitched toward the shoulder holster that wasn’t there. The weapon was tucked away in the trunk of his rented town car.
After another several-second delay, the voice in Calderon’s earpiece said, “Do you know where they’re taking him?”
A chorus of horns sounded.
“The logo on the side of the ambulance says University Children’s Hospital,” Calderon said — too loudly, he realized. He glanced to either side.
The swarthy man was crossing the street, walking toward the parking structure. Something about his casual gait seemed exaggerated, like that of a stage actor who wasn’t yet comfortable in his role.
A gust of wind whipped up a sooty air funnel. Calderon reached down and rebuttoned his blazer.
Something didn’t feel quite right. His body had always perceived the smallest things, things that were imperceptible to others. The left side of his blazer was too light, a few ounces of drag missing when he drew the lapels together.
His wallet was gone.
His eyes shot across the street.
The swarthy man was walking into the parking structure.
3
Megan Callahan challenged the thick metal doors with a heavy stare, willing them to remain shut until she was ready — which might be never, she realized. Her blank expression and clouded blue eyes were a message to the other members of the trauma team: I’m preparing. Leave me to my thoughts.
University Children’s Hospital was the third largest pediatric hospital in the United States, and one of only a few medical centers in southern California equipped to deal with critically ill children. The first stop for every patient arriving by ambulance was the Trauma Unit.