Page 63 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

I had come in contact with more people in the hospital than I ever would have guessed. I recognized several faces, including that of Dr. Tewanda Hardy, the physician who had released me. Because hair can be changed I didn’t look at hair at all, just faces, and particularly eyes. I remembered that she had very long eyelashes, and even without mascara her eyes would be striking.

She wasn’t there. I was positive of it, but went over the faces again at Forester’s insistence, then shook my head just as firmly as I had the first time.

“We’ll go to the security recordings of the hallways,” said Lawless. “I’m sorry this particular floor doesn’t have digital surveillance, not yet, but I’m working on it. The ER and critical care areas do, and some of the other floors, but not this one. Still, our tape quality is good.”

He closed the blinds in his windows, darkening the room. The tape was already in the VCR, because all he did was punch a button and a color picture swam into focus on a second monitor.

“The tape is on a timer,” he said. “Do you remember about what time this nurse entered your room?” With a pen he indicated which room was mine. The proportion of everything seemed off, because the cameras were in the ceiling, but the images were sharp and clear.

I thought back. Siana had arrived about eight-thirty that morning, but even though Mom had had an appointment she hadn’t yet left, so…“Between eight-thirty and nine a.m.,” I whispered.

“Good, that’s a relatively narrow window. Let’s see what we can see.” He fast-forwarded the tape, and people began zipping up and down the hallway and in and out of rooms like Chihuahuas on speed. He stopped the tape twice to check the timer, then overshot a little and had to rewind. “Here we go.”

Surveillance tapes are interesting. I watched Siana saunter into my room, and gave both Forester and Lawless a moment to recover from their silent appreciation. “She’ll be along any minute now,” I whispered. “She was wearing pink scrubs.”

And then there she was, at eight forty-seven. “That’s her,” I said, pointing. My heart started pounding, hard and fast. There was no doubt about it: pink scrubs, tall and slim, no hesitation, walking directly toward my room and entering. That flat brown hair looked unnaturally dark on the film, hanging around her shoulders. She was carrying a clipboard, which I hadn’t noticed at the time, but hey, I’d been concussed. The camera angle caught her from the back, so there wasn’t a good view of her face at all, just an occasional hint of the angle of her jaw.

Both men were leaning close to the monitor, watching the screen as intently as two cats waiting for a mouse to venture from its hole.

Mom left my room and I heard their quick little intakes of breath. “That’s my mom,” I said, before either of them could slip and make some kind of guy comment that would require me to take action.

Then, at eight fifty-nine, she left my room, but again the angle on her face wasn’t good. Either the clipboard was in the way, or her head was down, or her shoulder was hunched.

“She’s aware of the cameras,” Lawless said. “She’s hiding her face. I don’t know every employee in the hospital, of course, but I don’t recognize her. I wish you remembered her name, Ms. Mallory—”

“She wasn’t wearing a name tag,” I whispered. “At least, not one that I saw. I thought maybe it was clipped to one of her pockets, or the waistband of her pants.”

“That’s against this hospital’s regulations,” he said immediately. “The identification tags are to be readily visible, photo I.D. required, either clipped or pinned in the upper left chest area. I’ll have to investigate further before I can say for certain, but I don’t think she’s an employee here. For one thing, she didn’t knock on your door, she just walked in. Everyone employed here knocks before entering a patient’s room.”

“You can get another angle on her, can’t you?” asked Forester. “She had to get to the fourth floor somehow, she didn’t just materialize there.”

“Perhaps,” said Lawless. “That was a week ago. Some of the records, both digital and tape, have already been recorded over or erased. If nothing happened that requires us to make a permanent file, then we don’t. There is also the possibility that she entered the hospital wearing something else entirely, carrying a bag, and changed in one of the public restrooms, so even if we did record her entering or leaving, we wouldn’t know it.”

She could also have worn her hair twisted up, or had on a baseball cap. My hopes had been up, but now they came crashing down. She was smart, savvy, and she was still one step ahead of us. I had no idea who she was, and this review hadn’t provided any answers. I should have realized anyone working at a hospital would be required to have their I.D. tags highly visible, because of security concerns.

“I’m sorry this wasn’t more productive,” said Lawless. “I’ll review what we have from that date, but I’m not optimistic.”

“At least I can guess height and weight,” said Forester, jotting notes down in one of the little notepads all cops seemed to carry. “That’s more description than we’ve had before. Height…five-eight to five-ten. Weight, one twenty-five to one forty.”

We thanked Lawless and left the hospital. My thoughts were racing, because it seemed as if the likelihood that she wasn’t a hospital employee at all meant something—something other than that she worked somewhere else, of course.

As soon as I was belted into Forester’s car, my lap loaded down with his stuff again, I got one of the notebooks, flipped to a blank page, and began writing because I thought it might be a good idea to share my thought about the rental cars with the police, but I wanted to save my voice.

“Throat not any better?” he asked as he buckled himself in.

I nodded and held my left hand up, thumb and first finger about an inch apart.

“A little bit, huh?”

I nodded again, and kept writing. When I was finished I tore out the page and handed it to him. He read and drove at the same time, frowning at my note, and I don’t know why because I used nice clear printing without a single curlicue or a little heart used to dot ani.I never did that anyway.

“You think she might be changing up rental cars, huh? What gave you that idea?”

I wrote some more, then gave him that page.

He read what I’d written, his gaze darting back and forth between the street and the sheet of paper. “Hmm,” he said.

My hypothesis was that, if she didn’t work at the hospital, then logically the only way she could have known I was evenina hospital would be if she’d called to see if I’d been admitted. But why would she think to do that, unless she’d been the one to put me there? Therefore, logically, she had to be the driver of the Buick.

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