'He had his wallet? Was there still money in it?'
'I don't know. I didn't even…'
She caught Hardy's shift of focus and turned. A young woman in green scrubs had come out into the waiting room. Roake touched his arm and went to her. He followed, noting with a sinking heart the grave look on her face.
'We've done all we can for the moment,' she was saying. 'We'll be bringing him to the ICU, where we can keep a close eye on him.'
'But how is he?' Gina asked.
The young doctor's eyes quickly went to Hardy, came back to Gina. 'He's taken quite a beating. He's got severe head trauma and internal bleeding and he hasn't regained consciousness.' She took in a deep breath and let it out. 'I'd have to call his condition critical.'
Roake closed her eyes. Her shoulders seemed to collapse. After a short moment, she opened her eyes and nodded. 'Is there anything at all I can do?'
There wasn't. The doctor said she had to go and supervise the transfer to the ICU, and she went back behind the door to the ER.
Without a word, Roake and Hardy sat down next to one another on the waiting room chairs. To his surprise, Hardy realized that they weren't alone in the room-a young black woman rocked a baby across the room and stared into empty space in front of her. An elderly Asian man was reading a newspaper.
A young person let out an agonizing moan somewhere behind them, and sirens cried somewhere close in the night.
After a minute, an orderly came out holding a large plastic sack. He looked around and came over to them. 'Are you with Mr. Freeman? I've got some of his personal effects that you might want to take.'
Roake reached out for the bag, and for the first time Hardy noticed the ring-twice the size of Frannie's diamond, newly mounted and bright. She opened the bag and looked inside, then closed it back up. 'His good suit,' she said as though to herself. 'I bought it for him.' Turning to Hardy, her lip quivered for an instant. She bit down on it. 'How could this happen?' she asked. 'Who could have done this to him?'
After a sleepless night, Hardy's first stop at a little after 6:00 a.m. this morning had been the hospital again. It was still long before visiting hours and though he believed he had no chance to get in and see Freeman, he knew he'd get more information talking to a human being than to a voice on the telephone.
Sure enough, at the nurse's station, he had learned that Freeman's condition was unchanged from the night before, but that at least there had been no deterioration. He was no more critical than he'd been. Armed with that news, he walked down the hallway and looked in on the ICU waiting room, where the nurse had told him another of Freeman's visitors had spent the night.
Roake clearly hadn't spent it sleeping either. Alone in the room at this time of the morning, she'd aged five years in the past six hours. Her eyes were heavy, red-rimmed, her hair all over the place. As Hardy got to the door, she was running her hands through it as though trying to still the ravages of a severe headache.
Seeing him, she stood and walked over, put her arms around his neck and sagged for an instant. He saw the plastic bag that held Freeman's suit on the floor next to the couch where Roake had been sitting-she really hadn't gone home.
After they'd sat, Hardy delivered the latest prognosis in the best possible light, then asked if he could do something for her, drive her home, anything.
Her first reaction was to shake her head as though she didn't understand the question. A random syllable escaped, stopped again. She ran a hand through her hair again, squeezed at her temples. 'I suppose I've got to get to my clients. I know there's something this morning, but… but that's not you, is it? I'd better leave a message for Betsy.' She looked out beyond Hardy. 'It's morning already, isn't it?'
'Getting there,' Hardy said. 'You ought to go home and get some sleep, Gina.' It was hard advice but she had to hear it. 'Nothing's happening here. The nurse told me this could go on for a while.'
'I know.' Then, again, 'I know. I just wanted to stay. I thought
…'
He waited, but no further words came. 'I can drive you to David's now,' he said. 'You get a little sleep, call your office when they open. If they need you here, you can be back in five minutes. How's that sound?'
She was perfectly immobile for half a minute or more, then finally let out a heavy breath, reached for the plastic bag, stood up. 'You're right. You talked me into it.'
Fifteen minutes later, he couldn't believe the amount of legal curb that was available just around the corner from the Hall of Justice. Then he remembered, of course, the time. But he'd wanted to get down here if he could while someone from the night shift might still be in the building.
Miraculously, he was talking to Inspector Hector Blanca within ten minutes, Blanca was a dark-skinned Hispanic sergeant with the General Work Detail and he'd pulled the call on the Freeman beating. It was not only fresh in his mind, he was reviewing the incident report, written by the patrolman who found Freeman, as Hardy got to his desk. After the introductions, and Hardy's reassurance that he was a friend of Abe Glitsky and used to be a cop himself, that he wasn't some ambulance-chasing dick of an attorney looking to make trouble, Blanca must have decided it was okay to talk. 'So, this man Freeman. He was your partner?'
Technically David wasn't, but Hardy didn't think it mattered. 'I hope he still is.'
The sergeant grimaced. 'Sorry. I didn't mean that. What's the word at the hospital?'
Hardy told him, but he'd come to Blanca to get information, not give it. 'His fiancee, Gina Roake, told me he still had his wallet. That's how you guys knew to come to his house.'
'That's right. Beat him near to death, but didn't take his wallet, his watch, nothing.'
'Was there money in it?'
Blanca tried to keep his face neutral, but it wanted to react. 'Six hundred fourteen dollars, right there in the regular section.'
Hardy sat with that a minute. 'So it wasn't any kind of robbery. You saw him. What was it about?'
'I've got no idea. It was about as brutal as I've seen. He fucking somebody's wife, anything like that?'
'No,' Hardy said.
'What I mean is, maybe if it was personal…'
'Yeah, I know. I can't think of anything-' He stopped.
'What?' Blanca asked.
'I just thought about this pretty ugly lawsuit we're working on. But I've never seen anything like that before and I've been practicing twenty years.'
Blanca gave him another chance. 'You sure? I'll grab at anything.'
But after another minute with it, Hardy shook his head. 'No. Couldn't be.'
'All right. But whatever it was, let me tell you, this was deliberate damage. Boots and blunt objects. Not just fists.'
Hardy didn't want to think about Freeman lying helpless, curled on himself, as a group of vicious assailants worked him over. 'So there was more than one guy?'
A shrug. 'I can't say for sure, but I'd bet on it.' He drummed his ringers on his typewriter keys, then met Hardy's eye. 'I guess there's no nice way to put it, sir. Whoever it was, these guys left him for dead.'
'But took nothing?'
He shook his head. 'Nothing obvious, at least.'
'So what's that leave?'
Blanca frowned in concentration. 'It leaves the whole universe, to tell you the truth. People nowadays, you wouldn't believe how many are just nuts.'
'I bet I would. You think it was just some kind of rage?'
'It looked like that, but who knows? It might have been just for the thrill.' Something seemed to nag at him. 'An old guy like this, though? It doesn't make any sense, not that it has to. Tell you what I'll do. I'll pull some other reports from the general vicinity. Maybe come up with something similar. MO. Something.'
'Thanks,' Hardy said. 'I'd appreciate it.'
Okay, Hardy told himself. He'd done his little bit with detective work, and without any conclusive results, but
