He greeted them, then sat in the fourth chair at the table.
“There’s coffee,” said Heather, pointing to the sideboard.
“Maybe later. Is there any news about Rick?”
“They say he’s in stable condition.”
“Barbiturate-induced coma,” said Madeleine evenly. “To relieve the pressure on his brain. So it can heal. Like after my friend Elaine’s car accident. She was put in a therapeutic coma for a couple of weeks. And she’s perfectly fine today.”
Heather blinked and managed a small smile. Kim took her hand and held it.
A cleaning woman with striking almond-shaped eyes, a dust-mask over her mouth and nose, and a name tag identifying her as Chalise Creel came into the room pushing a janitorial cart. She steered it through the obstacle course of couches and chairs to the sideboard, emptied its waste container into one in the base of the cart, and steered her cart back out into the corridor.
Heather turned to Gurney. “You got my message?”
“It was patchy, but I got enough of it to know you wanted to see me.”
She reached into her sweatshirt pocket, pulled out an index card, and handed it to him.
Scribbled across the middle of the card were some unevenly spaced letters and numbers:
He examined it for a moment. “What is this?”
“It’s a message from Rick. When they brought him in from the ambulance and were attaching the monitor things to him, he was trying to speak. They wanted me to see if I could understand what he was saying, but he couldn’t get it out. I asked the nurse to get something for him to write on, and she came back with a pen and that index card. I put the pen in his hand and the card under it on the stretcher. It took him a long time to print those letters, lying on his back, barely conscious. But that’s what he wrote.”
After studying the sequence of characters, Gurney tried one way of grouping them, reading aloud, “‘To LDC thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’” He looked at Heather. “Do the initials ‘LDC’ mean anything to you? Or that number? Possibly as an amount of money?”
She shook her head.
“Suppose we grouped the opening letters differently: ‘Told C thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’”
She shook her head again.
“Maybe we should read the number as individual digits, like a zip code.”
“It still doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“It has to mean something,” said Kim. “Something he wanted you to know.”
It occurred to Gurney that the “message” might be nothing more than the product of a delirious brain; but it was clear that Heather and Kim wanted it to be important, and he wasn’t going to deflate that hope.
“May I take this with me?” he asked Heather.
She nodded. “I think Rick may have intended it for you.”
“I pray to God you get the bastard who shot him,” said Kim. Her eyes were welling with angry tears.
Her emotion led to a silence.
Finally Heather spoke up in a controlled voice. “Dell Beckert was here.”
“What did he want?” asked Gurney.
“At first? To pretend that he cared about Rick.”
“And then?”
“He wanted to know how many phones Rick had.”
Gurney had a sinking feeling. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him Rick had a department-issued BlackBerry, an iPhone, and our house phone.”
“Did he want to know anything else?”
“He asked if Rick had any contact with individuals from the Black Defense Alliance or from that other one, whatever it’s called. White Men for Black Justice? Their spokesman keeps popping up on those programs where everybody yells at each other. Cory Payne? I think that’s his name. He hates the police.”
“And you said?”
“I said Rick kept his police work to himself. Then Beckert told me the . . . the other shot . . .” She hesitated, glancing at Kim.
“It’s all right. Go ahead.”
“He told me the shot that hit John Steele came from an apartment linked to a BDA member. And the one that hit Rick may also have come from a house with a BDA link.”
Gurney paused, taking this in, before returning to an earlier point. “Those phones you told Beckert about—do you know which of them Rick used for the calls he made to me, or to the diner, or to the person who wanted to come to the meeting we were supposed to have?”
“None of them. Rick has a fourth phone I didn’t mention, an anonymous prepaid one he used for calls about the project he and John were working on.”
“Where’s that fourth phone now?”
“Rick keeps it hidden. All I know is that it never leaves our house. And that he’d never want Beckert to get hold of it.”
Gurney felt a sense of selfish relief. That hidden phone was the only hard evidence of his conversation with Loomis. As long as it remained hidden there was little chance of his being charged with failing to report that conversation. As he was wondering how well hidden it was, a short brown-skinned man in green hospital scrubs entered the room. A white plastic name tag identified him as P. W. Patel, MD.
“Mrs. Loomis?”
She turned toward him, her eyes full of fear.
“I don’t bring you any bad news,” he said in a softly accented voice. “I came only to tell you that in a few minutes we will take your husband to radiology for another brain-imaging procedure. The neurosurgeon has requested this. It is a normal request, not a cause for worry. If you and your companions wish to see the patient before he is taken to radiology, this must be done now. You understand?”
Heather nodded. “Can you tell if there’s been any change in his condition?”
“No change, but this is not bad. With TBI we must wait and see.”
“TBI?”
“Traumatic brain injury. We wait and monitor intracranial pressure. Because of damage to the temporal bone structure. Perhaps this will not be a problem, since the bullet did not perforate major brain areas. But we wait and watch.”
Heather nodded uncertainly. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Mrs. Loomis. Perhaps not too far away there can be good news. But now, if you wish to see your husband for a few minutes . . .”
“Yes, I understand.”
After he left the room, Madeleine asked Heather, “Do you want us to come with you?”
She blinked in confusion. “Yes. I don’t know. Yes, come.” She stood up and headed out of the room, seemingly unaware of banging her shin on the corner of a low coffee table.
They followed her—Kim, Madeleine, and Gurney in that order—into the corridor and past the nursing station, where the cop and the nurse’s aide had resumed their conversation. Behind the nursing station they came to a row of patient enclosures with sliding glass doors. At the center of each enclosure was a high-tech hospital bed surrounded by monitoring equipment.
Only one enclosure was occupied. The four visitors gathered outside it in the single-file order in which they’d come down the hall. From where Gurney stood, all he could see of the patient in the bed was a massive bandage covering his head, an oxygen mask covering most of his face, and a web of wires and tubes connecting him to the bedside machines. He looked vulnerable and anonymous.
A tall nurse approached Heather. “You know the routine here, but I’ll repeat it for your friends. Please do not touch anything beyond those glass doors. Especially do not touch the patient or the devices connected to him. The sensors are sensitive. The alarms go off easily. Are we all okay with this?”
Heather answered for everyone. “Of course. Thank you.”
Leaning toward her, the nurse spoke softly. “I’ve seen folks in worse shape than your husband come through just fine.”