Syndrome

didn't know why she had done it or where precisely she had moved to, but she got the impression some very rich new sugar daddy was setting her up and he wanted the privacy of a town house.

Could it be thatKristenwas the mysterious missing patient Stone was trying to locate and interview? Ally hadn't seen her on TV for a while, so maybe she had moved on to other things.

'I really don't know where she is now,' Van de Vliet said. 'She became emotionally unstable in the middle of her treatment. It's a rarity but it has happened. She checked out. After that, I don't-'

'That's a damned lie,' the woman declared. 'I know it now. That's what your receptionists have been telling everybody. It sounded a little like her at first, but now I realize it's preposterous. She didn't just up and run off. You're keeping her somewhere. Where is she? Where's my only child?'

'Wherever she is, I can assure you she's most assuredly nothere,' Van de Vliet intoned smoothly, even as his eyes struggled to stay calm. 'Would that she were. She wanted … a procedure done and I think we were having some success. But then she became traumatized for some reason best known to her and insisted on leaving. No one is forced to complete the regimen here against their will. As best I recall, someone said she went to a spa in New Mexico.'

'I know that's what your flunkies have been telling me over the phone. That she went to New Mexico to hide out. But now I know everybody lied to me. For the last three years she's been sleeping with that bastard Winston Bartlett, but now his office won't even return my phone calls. You all think you're so smart, but I could smuggle a gun past your guards. In my bra!' Her eyes had acquired a further kind of wildness now as she awkwardly began opening her purse, hanging from a shoulder strap, with her left hand while still holding the pistol in her right. 'And I got a letter from her just this morning. The postmark is New York City. So-'

'What-' Van de Vliet's eyes began to blink rapidly.

'She's not in New Mexico now. If she ever was.' The woman waved a small tan envelope at him. There was large, loopy writing on the outside.

'Could. . could I see that?' He started to reach for it, but she waved the black Beretta at him and shoved the letter back into her purse.

'No you can't. What youcando is tell me where thehellyou're keeping her.Now.'

'Before we proceed any further, that gun really isn't necessary,' Van de Vliet said as he reached and deftly seized her wrist. He was quick, and his quickness seemed to spook her, because just as he turned the pistol away, it discharged.

The round went astray, ricocheting off a metal lighting fixture at the end of the hallway and into the wall. The hapless, unarmed guard who'd followed her downstairs yelled and dived behind a large potted corn plant near the office door. Both Ellen O'Hara and Debra Connolly just stared, momentarily too stunned to move.

Ally stepped toward the woman, wanting to help Van de Vliet disarm her. She was feeling her heart race dangerously upward.

Van de Vliet was still struggling with the woman when the Beretta discharged again. This time it was aimed downward, at the hard tile floor, and the ricochet was not so harmless. The round bounced back and caught the woman in the chest knocking her sideways. Van de Vliet unsuccessfully grabbed for her as she crumpled. Ally reached for her too, but by that time she was already on the floor. Ally pulled the hot pistol from her fingers, then turned and handed it to Ellen.

'Here. For God's sake, do something with this.' She realized she had never actually held a real pistol before.

Blood was flowing across the floor as Van de Vliet and Debra Connolly began tearing open the woman's blouse. The bullet appeared to have entered her chest just below the rib cage, a jagged wound caused by the projectile's tumble and splattered shape, and then exited a few inches away, at her side. She had passed out.

'Get a gurneynow,' he yelled to Ellen. 'We've got to get her into OR one and try to do something about the bleeding.'

My God, Ally marveled,what desperation drove her to threaten him with a gun when she obviously didn't know the first thing about how to use it?

The woman's open purse was lying no more than two feet from where she had fallen. With the hallway rapidly filling as nurses from upstairs poured off the elevator, no one was paying any attention to anything but the prostrate woman.

Get the letter, Ally!

She gingerly moved over to where the purse was resting and peeked in. There was a jumble of the usual things: cosmetics, a ballpoint, a change purse, an address book, and a billfold. There also was the tan envelope. Yes!

The scene in the hallway was increasingly chaotic. Two of the researchers from the laboratory had come out, in their sterile whites, with disinfectant and a roll of bandages. As they began to bind her wound to stanch the bleeding, her eyelids fluttered and she groaned.

'She's just in shock,' Van de Vliet said with relief. 'Ellen, page Michael and tell him to bring the ambulance around front. Just in case. But I think we can handle this here.'

Now two nurses were rolling a gurney off the elevator. While Van de Vliet and the two lab researchers lifted her onto it, Ally realized that nobody seemed to think that calling the police-about any of this-would be a constructive step.

She pulled out the letter and examined it. The oversize script on the front readKatherine Starr, 169 East 81st St.There was no return address.

Katherine Starr. She was repeating the name and address, trying to lodge them in her memory, while she was pulling the letter out of the tan envelope.

It was in the same rotund script as the address:

Dear Whoever You Are,

I think you're my mother but I'm not sure. Please help me. I don't know where I am or what my name is. But I found a bracelet with Starr on it and I looked in the phone book. Your name sounded kind of familiar. I think I'm. .

'I'd better take that,' Van de Vliet said, lifting the letter out of Ally's hands. 'All her personal effects should be kept with her.'

'Dr. Vee, OR one is open,' Ellen was saying as she marched down the hall toward them. 'Debra has the IV and oxygen ready.'

'Good,' he said, glancing at her for a second. As he did, Ally reached into Katherine Starr's purse and palmed the small black address book.

Then Van de Vliet turned back to her. 'Let me see about her bleeding and then I'll try to explain. I now remember this woman all too well. It's all coming back like a bad dream I'd repressed. I pegged her as schizophrenic the minute I saw her, when she came here and tried to talk her daughter into leaving. She's paranoid and-'

'What was Kristen Starr here for?' Ally asked. 'I actually did an interior-design job for her a few years back and she never mentioned any health issues.'

'Actually nothing,' he declared quickly. 'She was having an early midlife crisis. I gather she'd had some kind of television program and her contract wasn't renewed. She'd decided it was because of her appearance.' He shrugged and gestured with empty palms, Iike,How absurd but that's the way some women are.”It turned out we had a. . mutual acquaintance who told her about the stem cell procedure here at the institute. When he brought her in, I wasn't in a position to turn her away.'

'That wouldn't be Winston Bartlett, by any chance?'

He nodded. 'As a matter of fact. He writes the checks, so he has a certain amount of influence around here. As it happened, I had experimented with a procedure some years ago involving stem cells and the epidermis. There seemed to be a regenerative effect. And I thought there was a reasonable chance she might respond to it. Since we had clinical trials for other stem cell procedures already under way, it was easy to fit her in. But I had a lot more important things going on at the time than her cosmetic work, so I didn't pay much attention to her. Then she abruptly left, and since then I've had so much else happening, I just haven't thought about her.'