“Get here as soon as you can,” Ali urged. “And you might want to come prepared to spend the night. I probably won’t be given any more information about Teresa’s condition, but if I hear anything, I’ll give you a call. Is this a landline or a cell phone?”
“Landline,” Maria answered. “I don’t have a cell phone.”
“All right. I have Teresa’s phone. You can call me on that if you need to reach me.”
As Ali ended the call, the phone gave her a low-battery warning. Remembering that there had been a charger among the items from Teresa’s purse, Ali went to the nurses’ station to retrieve it. By the time the phone was charging, Sister Anselm came back into the waiting room. She looked unhappy.
“What’s wrong?” Ali asked.
“The flowers,” Sister Anselm said. ‘’I don’t like the idea that they were dropped off anonymously. I checked with the lady at the main reception desk. She said the same thing the volunteer said earlier, that the guy who dropped them off said they were for the lady who was found over by Three Points. I asked what he looked like. She said he was a young guy wearing jeans, a U of A sweatshirt, and a baseball cap.”
“So?” Ali said, not following. “That sounds pretty ordinary.”
“My patient was savagely beaten and left for dead,” Sister Anselm said. “As far as I know, there have been no published news items about the attack, at least none that I’ve been able to find surfing the Net.”
Ali still didn’t get it.
“Most of my patients never receive flowers of any kind,” Sister Anselm continued. “That’s usually because their friends and relations have no idea where they are, much less that they’ve been seriously injured. Call me paranoid, but I’m worried that whoever sent these lilies has something in mind besides well wishes. So far the victim doesn’t have a name. We know which patient she is, but no one else does. If there’s someone out there who is interested in finishing the job, sending a distinctive flower arrangement or other gift is one way of locating her room inside the hospital.” With that, Sister Anselm carried the plant away. Just as she left, Ali’s phone rang.
“How’s your day going?” B. asked.
“Way more eventful than I would have thought,” Ali said. She spent several minutes bringing him up to date. She signed off when Donnatelle returned from the cafeteria with the girls.
“Have you heard anything?” Donnatelle asked.
“Nothing,” Ali said. “Teresa’s mother is on her way, but she won’t be here for a while.”
Donnatelle looked at her watch. “I’m going to have to leave soon.”
“It’s all right,” Ali said. “I’ll be able to look after the girls until Maria Delgado shows up. If she needs it, I’ll help out after she gets here, too.”
There was a fifteen-minute period of chaos while the girls adjusted to the idea of being abandoned by one relative stranger, Donnatelle, in favor of a different one, Ali. By the time Donnatelle took off, things were reasonably well in hand. In the past two years, Ali had spent enough time backstopping Chris with the twins that dealing with a two-year-old and a reasonably self-sufficient five-year-old seemed like a piece of cake.
Keeping an eye on her watch and wondering what was going on in the maternity ward, Ali kept Lucy and Carinda corralled and occupied with the collection of toys, Crayolas, and coloring books that had accumulated in two days. After convincing Carinda that she really did need to take a nap, Ali read to Lucy until she, too, began to fade.
Both kids had nodded off when Sister Anselm returned to the waiting room with her forehead creased by an unaccustomed frown.
“What’s wrong now?” Ali asked.
“I spent an hour working my way up the chain of command. When I connected with the hospital’s head of security, I asked if I could review the security tapes. I told him all I wanted to do was to get a look at the guy who delivered the flowers. He said the only way to get access is to have a search warrant. That’s not gonna happen. But if the guy walks into my patient’s room this afternoon or tonight, I want to know who he is. And it seems to me the hospital would want to know who it is, too.”
It wasn’t such an outlandish idea. After all, Ali and Sister Anselm had some experience with people who came to hospitals hoping to finish off an inconvenient witness or two. The idea of the head of security insisting that Sister Anselm procure a search warrant in order to scan the security film was particularly irksome.
“If all you want to do is get a look at the tape,” Ali said, “let me see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Sister Anselm said. “Now I’d better go check on my patient.”
Ali’s relationship with B. Simpson had taught her that people who know all about online security often come at it from a background of online insecurity. High Noon Enterprises was in the business of teaching companies and individuals how to safeguard their computer presence by knowing all there was to know about penetrating the very systems people counted on for protection.
Carinda had fallen asleep in Ali’s lap. Ali shifted the child to another position, wrestled her cell phone out of her pocket, and speed-dialed High Noon.
It may have been Sunday afternoon, but Ali wasn’t surprised when Stuart Ramey, B. Simpson’s geeky second-in-command, answered the phone. As far as B. was concerned, Stuart was the perfect employee. When it came to computers, Stuart, like B., was a self-taught genius. He loved his work and had no outside interests. B. said he paid the guy a king’s ransom, and he was worth every penny.
“Hey, Ali,” Stuart said. “What’s up?”
“We have a situation. My friend Sister Anselm has a patient here in Tucson at Physicians Medical Center. Somebody delivered some flowers to the patient, and we need to know who it was. I’m sure the guy’s picture is on the hospital’s security tape, but they won’t let us look at it. I was hoping maybe you could—”
“You’re asking if I could I hack into their security system and lift the photo from their video feed?”
“Well, yes,” Ali admitted. “That’s pretty much it.”
“And this is all because someone delivered flowers and didn’t leave their name, address, and phone number?” Stuart asked dubiously. “It’ll probably turn out to be some do-gooder who does this kind of thing all the time and wants to stay anonymous.”
“Someone tried to murder this girl on Friday,” Ali explained. “She should be dead right now. Sister Anselm is worried that the flower delivery guy may be working for the bad guys and is going to take another crack at her. I’m worried, too. If the flower guy turns back up, it would be a big help to know what he looks like. It’s also possible that the flower delivery was a ruse attempting to nail down the girl’s location inside the hospital for someone else. The third alternative is what you said—the guy is totally harmless—but do we want to take that risk?”
Stuart sighed. “All right. No doubt the hospital security system is password-protected, but breaking it will probably be a piece of cake. You want me to send the film directly to Sister Anselm’s phone?”
“No,” Ali said. “Send it to mine.”
“Okay, so when did this questionable flower delivery happen?”
“Right around noon,” Ali said. “The guy should be easy to spot. He was wearing jeans, a baseball cap, and a U of A sweatshirt. He was carrying a pot of Easter lilies with yellow foil wrapped around the pot.”
“Okeydokie,” Stuart said. “I’ll get right on it. Anything else?”
On the drive down, Ali had been thinking about her parents and their plans to sell the Sugarloaf to a party or parties unknown. What if the purported buyers turned out to be some kind of flimflam outfit? Since one of High Noon’s specialties was doing background checks, it didn’t seem completely out of line to ask.
“Now that you mention it, there is one more thing,” Ali said casually. “There are some people I’d like you to check out for me.”
“No problem,” Stuart said. “Who is it?”
Ali had to think a moment before she could dredge up the names. “Derek and Elena Hoffman,” she said at last. “I’m not sure where they live.”
“You mean the people from Milwaukee who are buying the Sugarloaf from your folks?” Stuart asked. “I already did a background check on them for your mother. Since she paid for the initial report, I should probably get permission from her before I copy you on it.”
Chagrined, Ali felt herself blushing. She was surprised to think that it would even occur to her mother to have a background check done on the cafe’s proposed purchasers, but these days there seemed to be any number of things about Edie Larson that set her daughter back on her heels.
“Never mind,” Ali said quickly, trying to cover her embarrassment. “I didn’t know she had already ordered one. I’ll just get a copy from her.”
