First the helicopter, and now the all-but-empty parking lot.
Something, obviously, was going on.
Abandoning her intention to go out to the site in the ravine this morning, Katharine pulled the Explorer into one of the empty slots in the parking lot. Entering the main lobby — and again resisting the urge to look for security cameras — she started toward the doors leading to Rob Silver’s office, but then stopped abruptly, as if having just changed her mind. As she approached the security desk, the guard looked up, and she was certain she detected a look of surprise in his eyes. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to pump him for information; with a little luck, he might just tell her what was going on without her even having to ask. A second later he spoke the words she’d hoped for: “Thought everybody’d gone up to the meeting in Hana.”
She struggled not to betray her ignorance. Hana? What was he talking about? What was going on up there?
“I’m going up this afternoon,” she said smoothly.
Why had she felt the need to lie?
But of course she knew — the paranoia she’d felt last night as she’d watched the clandestine delivery, then driven home with the feeling that eyes were watching her all the way, was creeping over her again, wrapping its coils around her like a boa constrictor.
But at the same time, the inkling of an idea that she’d had in the parking lot was quickly taking shape. “Has Dr. Jameson already gone?” she asked, her mind working quickly as she tried to inject a note of anxiety into her voice.
The guard nodded. “Took off in the chopper with Mr. Yoshihara a few minutes ago.”
“Damn,” Katharine muttered, carefully setting her features into a mask of annoyance.
“Pardon me?” the guard asked.
Katharine sighed heavily. “My son thinks his keys might have fallen out of his pocket yesterday. I was going to ask Dr. Jameson if he’d found them.” She opened her mouth as if about to say something else, then closed it again, indicating a change of mind.
She hesitated, then fed out a little line, as though playing a fish: “Of course, he’s blaming it all on me. Kids.” She turned away as if having no expectation that the guard might offer to help her. But as she started toward the double doors leading to the north wing, she could almost feel him sniffing the bait, considering whether there was a hook in it.
“Maybe I could let you in for a minute, Dr. Sundquist,” he suggested.
Katharine turned back as if she could hardly believe what he’d said. “I couldn’t let you do that,” she said, risking everything to set the hook firmly. “With him being gone—”
“No problem,” the guard told her. “And I’ve got a sixteen-year-old of my own. I know how they can be. If the keys are there, we should be able to find ’em in a couple of minutes.”
As she trailed along, the guard led Katharine down the north corridor. When he stopped, searching his ring for the key to Stephen Jameson’s office, she glanced at the elevator at the far end. Above the call button was the drab gray plate, its red light glowing mockingly at her.
“Where should we start?” the guard asked.
Katharine shrugged a display of helplessness. “The examination room, I suppose. That seems the most likely place for him to have dropped them, doesn’t it? Why don’t I check the chair he used in Stephen’s office while you look around the examining room? It’s just a ring with half a dozen keys on it.” As they entered Jameson’s office, Katharine made a show of searching the chair while the guard went into the examination room. Alone then, she darted to the credenza, praying the drawer would not be locked.
It wasn’t. There, in plain sight, was the gray plastic card, not even concealed under so much as a sheet of paper. Snatching it up, she slid the drawer silently closed, then joined the guard in the examination room. “Well, they weren’t in the chair.”
“And I’m not finding them in here, either.” He nodded toward a cabinet containing half a dozen drawers. “Why don’t you go through those while I take these? Did you look in his desk?”
“If anyone’s going to prowl through someone else’s desk, it’s going to be you, not me,” Katharine replied. “I’m the new kid around here, remember? I just barely got my key to the elevator. I’m not about to start rifling through desks.”
They left Jameson’s office a few minutes later, chatting cordially.
The key to the elevator was in Katharine’s pocket.
And Michael’s keys, she assumed, were still in his pocket. As far as she knew, he’d never lost them once in his whole life.
She waited half an hour before setting out for the north corridor, pausing only to exchange a few words with her new friend, the guard. “Well, down to the salt mines,” she said, winking at him before pushing her way through the double doors and walking purposefully toward the elevator. It took all her self-control not to look back and glance up at the security camera she suspected was trained on her. When she took the card from her pocket and held it over the gray sensor plate, she prayed the trembling of her hand was not visible.
The light turned green. A moment later the elevator doors slid open. She stepped in and pressed the Down button, then tried to judge how far the car traveled. The ride was so smooth, though, that she had almost no sensation of movement; when the doors slid open fifteen seconds later, she could have been fifteen feet down, or fifty.
Or a hundred.
The corridor was deserted. Katharine walked along it as purposefully as she’d strode down the hallway above a moment ago, though she had no idea of precisely what she was looking for.
First, of course, she wanted to find the object that had been delivered last night. In her mind’s eye she summoned up the floor plan of the lower level as it had appeared on the security monitor, and tried to remember in which room she’d seen the coffinlike box being opened.
Third door on the right, she was almost certain.
When she came to the third door, she paused, resisted an overpowering urge to glance back at the camera above the elevator door, then twisted the doorknob. To her vast relief, the door opened.
She recognized the room the instant she stepped inside: immaculately clean, its floor was covered with white tile, a white-enameled metal examination table stood in its center, and there was a large lab bench against one wall. Another wall was lined with three rows of large drawers.
Drawers she immediately recognized from the morgue scenes in countless television shows.
Steeling herself, Katharine crossed the room and stood before the bank of drawers.
She was wrong, of course. She had to be wrong! It couldn’t possibly be a morgue.
Unsettling thoughts were tumbling through her mind. What if someone came in?
What if the guard was watching?
What if the room was alarmed?
Get out, a voice inside her head whispered. Get out, and go back upstairs, and mind your own business. All you have to do is work on one skeleton. One skeleton that Rob found two miles away. Whatever is in here is none of your business.
Get out.
Get out!
But even as the voice kept whispering to her, she reached out with a trembling hand and pulled one of the drawers open.
Empty.
The tension in her body easing only a fraction, she moved her hand to a second drawer.
Empty.
So was the third, and the fourth.
Now her hand was no longer trembling, and she was starting to feel a little foolish. Whatever she’d seen last night, it couldn’t have been a—
The thought shattered in her mind as she pulled open the fifth drawer and found herself staring into the face of a boy.
A boy of seventeen or eighteen, perhaps, with strong features, blond hair, and a cleft chin.