Page 57 of Harrison Hyde and the Runaway Bride

“What about my father?” His words were nearly a croak.

“Your dad’s fine,” Willow said. “There’s excellent security at his apartment complex and officers are checking in periodically,just in case. But there’s no indication either of them are in danger.”

“Except that my sister has vanished,” he returned.

The PA system crackled, then “Code blue, five west,” just as a herd of staff, some pushing equipment, stampeded past the open door toward the prisoner’s room.

The three cops lunged out of Harry’s room, Maria and Harry right behind them. Harry was still in jeans and a hospital gown, rolling his IV pole with him. Staff had flooded into the suspect’s room as the Rangers, looked on.

“No,” Willow said, moving that way.

“What the hell happened?” Agent Hofstadler demanded.

People were pumping the shooter’s chest in between electric jolts, but nothing was working. Harry was still in the doorway of his own room, but he’d found his shoes. He shoved his phone and wallet into his pockets, and he was holding his shirt in his hand.

The commotion stopped. The people left the shooter’s room, exited slowly, shaking their lowered heads. Dead. The shooter was dead.

“That lawyer,” Maria said softly. “He did something to him.”

Willow nodded. “He sure didn’t die from a busted clavicle.”

Harry whispered, “I have to find my sister. I have to go home and check on my father. I have to?—”

Maria closed her hand around his. “We will.”

Harrison had been discharged and was dressed in his own clothes by the time Willow, the Rangers, the FBI agent, and theNYSP detective had been ready to move the body of the shooter from the room where he’d died.

Willow, who didn’t want the body out of her sight and who kept muttering “right under our noses” over and over to no one in particular, glanced back at him. “I have Uncle Garrett workin’ on the fastest way to get you home to Ithaca to check on your family, Harry,” she said. “Follow me. I don’t want you out of my sight, either.”

So Harrison, Maria, Agent Hofstadler, and Detective Wynn followed the dead man on a stretcher with a sheet over his face, into an elevator. They rode two levels down then exited into a dim concrete corridor. The solid metal door, gray and unmarked, led into the morgue. At least he thought it was the morgue. It was a small, cool room lined with medical equipment, and a single “corpse-drawer” in one wall. Just one.

He was terrified for his sister.

“Only one?” Maria asked, nodding at the drawer in the wall. Her voice trembled a little. She was not comfortable so close to a dead body.

“Even that barely ever gets used,” the attendant said. He was a scrawny, sandy-haired young man whose jaw was the biggest part of his whole head. “Small town. The dead go straight to the funeral home most of the time.”

“Well, this guy won’t need it long,” Agent Hofstadler said. “I’m shipping him to the nearest forensics lab, soon as I can arrange it. We just need to preserve evidence until then.”

The attendant nodded and took hold of the drawer’s handle to pull it open, saying, “I can’t remember the last time we—” And then he stopped in mid-sentence, because the drawer was not empty. There was already a body in it, zipped into a body bag.

“Well, that’s not right,” the attendant said. “How could…?” He pulled the drawer the rest of the way open. Willow had tomove the gurney with the dead shooter on it, to make room for the drawer to open all the way.

“Who is this? There’s not supposed to be a body here. Where’s the paperwork? Who the hell…” The attendant asked no one, as he unzipped the body bag and folded it open.

“Holy God,” Harry said. “That’s Robert!”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Stay at the ranch,” Maria said. “Just for tonight.”

Harrison lowered his head, because he couldn’t refuse her while looking into her eyes. And yet, when he wasn’t looking at her, he kept seeing Robert again, lying on a stainless-steel bed, his skin gray-blue, a small round hole in the center of his forehead. So he looked at Maria again. “Robert didn’t do any of it,” he said and realized he’d said it a few times already.

They’d been sent packing. There hadn’t been room in the tiny morgue anyway for that many living bodies and two dead ones. So they’d decided to return to the ranch for the moment. They were in Maria’s van, and she was driving.

“I was sure Robert wouldn’t hurt anyone, and Solomon was an accident,” he went on. “But it wasn’t Robert at all. He was a victim, too. And Carrie’s still missing, and I can’t find my sister. You…” He stopped talking, swallowed hard. “If you’re near me, you’re in danger.”

“So, what are you fixin’ to do? Head home and put yourdadin danger?”

---