“GW,” the dispatcher said. “EMTs handed him off twenty-five minutes ago.”
“Who’s the officer with him?”
“Pettit. You want me to raise him?”
Bree stopped at the car and tossed the keys to Sampson, weighing the pros and cons of alerting a young patrol officer that he might be sitting on a would-be presidential assassin. And what if the shooter was with Pettit and heard her warning?
“Chief?” the dispatcher said.
“No,” Bree said, climbing into the front seat. “Get me Pettit’s cell phone number.”
Sampson threw a bubble on the roof and hit the siren. They roared off across town, running red lights in virtually zero traffic as they closed in on George Washington University Hospital in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of the District.
“What’d he do?” Sampson said. “Beat the snot out of himself? Knock out his own teeth?”
“It worked,” she said, furious. “His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him.”
“And being deaf?”
“No idea.”
The dispatcher came back with Officer Pettit’s cell phone number.
“Good,” Bree said. “How many patrol cars available to respond?”
“Four. FBI’s using the rest to keep the city tied down.”
Bree gave orders to move the four cruisers to the roads that formed the perimeter of the medical center, and then she called Pettit.
It went immediately to voice mail. She tried again. Same thing.
Bree still didn’t want to call the officer on the radio for fear he’d be in range of Leonard, or whoever the shooter really was. After trying a third time, she called Alex.
“Hi,” he said, sounding out of breath. “Where are you?”
“About to get on a military jet at Andrews.”
“Going where?”
“West Texas.”
“Why? The president was shot here.”
“We want to see every crime scene.”
She heard the heavy whine of a jet engine on his end.
“When are you coming back?”
His voice was almost drowned by the noise. “I don’t know.”
“I think we’ve got Hobbs’s shooter,” she said. “He’s at GW.”
“What’s that? I can’t hear you.”
The engine roar got worse and the connection died just as Sampson pulled over at the entrance to the GW emergency room. It had started to rain again.
“Chief,” Sampson said. “You need to tell the FBI he’s here.”
Bree had intentionally delayed, but now she nodded and told dispatch to notify FBI command that she and Sampson were investigating a possible suspect at the hospital. She didn’t give any more than she had to, figuring if she and Sampson made the collar on Hobbs’s shooter, she’d never hear another discouraging word from Chief Michaels — or anyone else, for that matter.
Inside, they showed their badges and IDs to the charge nurse and asked where Leonard was being treated. The nurse looked it up, said, “Multiple facial cuts and fractures. He was stitched, bandaged, and moved to radiology. He’s getting a CT.”
She gave them directions to the CT scanner, which had been temporarily moved to a lower level in an older part of the complex while new facilities were being built.
Bree and Sampson followed her directions, getting off an elevator just as a male doctor in scrubs, Crocs, a surgical cap, and a hooded rain jacket entered the elevator next to theirs. Bree caught a glimpse of an older man with gray, loose skin, wavy dark gray hair, and glasses.
He wore headphones but was also talking on his cell phone. Bree heard him complaining about the number of autopsies he had to do before he could go home.
“They’re stacked like cordwood in there,” the pathologist said as the elevator doors shut.
Walking down a hallway with an industrial feel, Bree and Sampson passed pathology and the morgue. They pushed through double doors at the far end of the corridor and took a right into an empty passage with a small sign that read RADIOLOGY.
Bree got her badge out and loosened her service weapon in its holster.
Sampson opened the door.
“No!” Bree said, staring in disbelief at Metro PD Officer Walter Pettit who was lying on the floor with a neck that looked broken and his service revolver missing.
They tore out their pistols. In the room where the CT scanner was still running, they found two female techs in hospital scrubs sprawled on the floor, dead.
Bree called dispatch for backup from the FBI and all available law enforcement.
“Surround George Washington University Hospital,” she said. “The president’s shooter is in here somewhere.”
Chapter 66
Bree listened to the radio chatter as FBI and Metro Police descended on the medical center.
Sampson said, “They’re going to have to clear every room in this place and get all nonessential personnel out of here before they do it.”
“We can get that started down here,” Bree said.
She took a long look at Pettit before she followed Sampson, feeling her stomach churn at her role in the young officer’s death. There would be time for regret and guilt later, she told herself. Once the man who’d killed Pettit and shot the president was caught.
With pistols still drawn, they exited the radiology suite and retraced their steps. They went into the pathology department and found no one at the front desk.
They went around the desk and into a short hallway with autopsy rooms to either side. All were empty, and the stainless-steel equipment inside was spotless.
They reached the door at the end of the hall and found it locked with an electronic key-card slot.
“Probably goes to the morgue,” Sampson said.
That made sense to Bree, and she led them in the opposite direction, past the autopsy rooms and into a separate hallway with office doors on both sides. The first three were empty.
As they headed toward the fourth office, a woman in surgical scrubs crawled out of the door, bleeding from her ears and nose. Bree and Sampson ran to her and called for help from the ER.
A name tag identified the woman as CHRISTINE WILLIS, MD, DEPARTMENT OF PATHOLOGY. She was rambling and in pain, but they figured out that while listening to music, she had been attacked by someone from behind and knocked out.
She said she came around and saw her attacker, who had bandages all over his face, leaving her office with her key card.
“He’s gotta be hiding in the morgue,” Sampson said. “Or was.”
Dr. Willis told them where to find another pass key in a drawer at the front desk. On her radio, Bree heard that nurses and a doctor were arriving from the ER.
Only then did she leave the pathologist and follow Sampson back to the morgue door. He slid the key card in the slot and heard it click.
He opened it slowly. The lights were off.
Sampson reached around, groped for a moment, then flipped a switch. The morgue lights lit, and they eased inside, backs to each other.
Bree saw nothing but rows of cold-storage lockers.
“Over there,” Sampson said.
She turned and peered around him to see a male, Asian, in boxers slumped against the far wall. Sampson went to the man, checked for a pulse, looked for breathing, then shook his head at Bree. She called in the homicide and started opening the cold lockers.
Every one she opened was full. Corpses were stacked like cordwood in—
She opened the second-to-last locker and gaped at the corpse of an obese man.
Three surgical scalpels lay on his chest. From the base of his neck to the crown of his head, he’d been skinned.