fluffy white towel, the cut on my back leaving a little red on the nap. I put a fresh bandage over the little puncture where the nail had gone in. The flesh around it didn’t look red or feel hot. I was going to get away with my little IKEA vaccination after all. My seared palm didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected either. By the time I was dressed and my hair mostly dry, it was after ten.
“Hey, boss,” Aubrey said as I came out into the kitchen.
“Hey,” I said. “There’s still some coffee, right?”
Kim poured a fresh mug for me. She was swimming in one of Chogyi Jake’s shirts. I always forgot that I was taller than her. Ex was in the living room, almost in the same place he’d been when I went to sleep. His skin had a waxy look and there were dark smudges under his eyes, but he looked content as he read, so maybe the abuse made him happy. Chogyi Jake himself sat at the table between Aubrey and Kim, fresh as if he’d just woken up too, though he’d probably been up for hours.
“Calling in sick again?” I asked Kim as I took the coffee from her.
“It’s Saturday,” she said. “They do let me off for the weekends.”
“Guess days kind of run together when you don’t have that work structure thing,” I said. “Do we have a plan?”
“David called for you,” Chogyi Jake said. “We told him you’d call back after you woke up.”
“Did he sound all right?” I asked.
“He did to me,” Aubrey said. “Better than yesterday, anyhow.”
“Right,” I said. “Besides that?”
“We are going to get through these files,” Ex said, making it sound like a death march.
“I’ve tracked down a couple of the walk-aways,” Kim said. “Huge privacy violation, but they’ve agreed to be interviewed, so a couple of us should do that. And I was trying to find someone else who had heard one of the people coming up post-op speaking in tongues. A recording’s too much to hope, but the hospital’s a pretty cosmopolitan place. Lots of multilingual staff. Someone might have recognized something.”
“Good thought,” I said.
“Declan Souder left his personal papers to the Illinois Institute of Technology,” Aubrey said. “I was going to go take a peek at them. See if there was anything useful.”
“More obscure books of German magic?” I said.
“For instance.”
“So two interviews, a research visit, and everything Eric left,” I said. “Doesn’t leave much time for shopping?”
“Doesn’t,” Ex said, failing to appreciate the joke.
“How about we split up, then,” I said. “Kim and I can take the walk-aways. Aubrey does the Souder recon. Ex and Chogyi plow through as much of the local stuff as possible. Plan?”
“I can drop Aubrey at the institute,” Kim said. “I know where it is, and one of the people who agreed to talk lives in Bronzeville.”
That shouldn’t have given me pause, so I hid it.
“Great,” I said. “Gimme the other guy’s address, and we’ll hit it.”
“Don’t forget to call David,” Chogyi Jake said, which was good since he’d already slipped my mind. I took my phone to the new room to keep the background chatter of the other four planning to a minimum. While the phone rang, I wrote my name in the dust on the window.
“Jayné!” he said. “Thank you. Thank you for calling. I slept last night. I really slept.”
“No dreams?”
“Nothing like before,” he said, “but I was thinking. Maybe I should go down there. To the hospital you were talking about. That’s where this is all coming from. If I go down close to it, knowing what I know now, maybe I can find out something more.”
“Bad idea right now,” I said. “We’re making some real progress, but you shouldn’t jump the gun until we have a better idea what we’re looking at. Just hang tight, and I swear I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve got something solid.”
“I want to be part of it,” he said, and the happy tone of voice seemed a little strained. “I mean, you’re not just breezing in here and then I never hear from you again, right? This was my Grandpa Del. Whatever’s going on, I’m part of it.”
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. I wanted to tell him to sit tight, stay quiet, and hope that whatever we needed wouldn’t require him to do more than let us draw a little blood with a nice sterile needle someplace as far away from Grace Memorial as possible. There was no point. When I’d stumbled into the secret world of riders and magic, that wouldn’t have worked for me. No reason to think it would work on David now.
“You’re absolutely part of it,” I said. “What we’re doing now is background work. The stuff you gave us was really useful. I think we’re on the edge of cracking it open, but for right now, just hang tight.”
“Okay. All right. But if there’s anything I can do—”
“You’ll be the first to know,” I said. “Promise.”
I dropped the call. Kim, beside me, spoke.
“Are you really going to get him involved?”
“He is involved,” I said. “I’m just going to try to keep him out of trouble.”
We broke up a little before noon. As I pulled the minivan up out of the parking structure, it occurred to me again that I still didn’t have an actual vacuum cleaner apart from the borrowed Shop-Vac or a good idea where to get one. Just another little loose end to bug me while I worked on the big stuff, I supposed.
I’d heard songs and stories all my life about the south side of Chicago, starting with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and ending up with Moby singing about having weapons in hand as he went for a ride. I was ready for a war zone, but it wasn’t bad at all. There were plenty of soccer-mom minivans parked on the street. Leticia Cook answered the door. At a guess, she was in her early fifties, graying hair pulled back from her face. She wore clean blue sweats that made me think of what my own mom would have worn on a quiet day.
“You’re the girl who wanted to talk about that hospital?” she said after I introduced myself.
“I am.”
She raised her eyebrows, looking me quickly up and down, then motioned me in. The town house was neatly kept. A couch with understated floral upholstery dominated the front room without being particularly large. The walls were filled with pictures of her and her family. Three children, two boys and a girl, getting older and then younger again, depending on where I looked. Leticia leaned up a narrow stairway and shouted.
“We’ve got company down here. Make yourself decent before you come down.”
A muffled “Yes dear” was answer enough. She waved me into the front room and onto the couch. She pointed to another picture on the living room wall. A tall black man with a sly expression beamed out at us.
“That’s my son, Jimmy. He’s a lawyer. Works out in San Francisco. Made partner last year.”
“Really?” I said. “He looks young for that.”
Leticia laughed, and at first I wasn’t sure if it was with me or at me.
“Keep that up and we’ll get along just fine. Now, what was it you wanted to know about that place?”
I started carefully, asking how she wound up at Grace Memorial, what her doctors had told her about the hospital, things like that. She’d been in after she’d fainted at the grocery store. When she came to, she was in Grace with eighteen kinds of monitors glued to her skin and a saline drip feeding into her arm. Heart attack, and from the test results, not her first one.
“Now they’ve got me sucking down Lipitor and aspirin every day. Walking.” She shrugged. “I should have been exercising my whole life, but who has time?”
“You left before they released you,” I said. “What can you tell me about that?”
The warmth in her eyes drained away as if it hadn’t been there.
“You probably don’t believe in God,” she said.
“I don’t,” I said. Maybe I should have lied, but this didn’t seem like the place for it. I had the feeling she would have known. “If it helps, though, I believe that I don’t know much.”
That got a half smile out of her.
“I believe in our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus. And that’s the reason I left that place even though the cardiologists told me not to. I was in more danger staying.”
“Did you see something? Hear something?”
