Chương 2
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“That wasn’t a request.”
Shaw moved backward.
“Hands where I can see them.”
Her jaw tightened. “Detective, if you spend the next twenty minutes treating me like a defendant instead of listening—”
“You just tried to grab passports connected to two children reported dead.”
“I was trying to—”
“You can explain it after you put your hands where I can see them.”
She did.
Thunder rattled the reinforced basement windows near the ceiling. Rainwater ran over the glass in sheets. The archive smelled of paper, concrete, and the metallic cold of rooms designed to preserve things nobody wanted exposed to daylight.
Claire had imagined this confrontation so many times during the previous eleven months that the reality felt strangely smaller.
In her imagination there had always been an answer that made everything line up.
A mistake.
A switched chart.
A clerical error.
A nurse who had panicked.
Something terrible but finite.
Not passports.
Not money.
Not two nearly one-year-old girls in a recent photograph.
Daniel picked up neither document nor photograph. His hands remained at his sides.
“What’s below us?” he asked again.
Shaw looked at Reed.
“Do I need a lawyer?”
“Yes,” Reed said.
“And if I ask for one?”
“I stop questioning you.”
“And they leave at six forty.”
“That deadline doesn’t erase your rights.”
Her mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “You sound very clean when you say that.”
“I’m trying to keep this clean enough that nobody walks because I got impatient.”
Claire nearly laughed.
It would have been the wrong kind of laugh, the one that came out when reality became obscene.
She pressed her lips together instead.
Shaw stared at the passports behind Reed’s folder.
“I want to cooperate.”
“Then cooperate.”
“I want that understood.”
“Understood by whom?”
“The prosecutor.”
“I don’t negotiate deals.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“You were about to.”
Shaw looked down at the table.
For the first time since Claire had known her, she looked old.
Not forty-eight. Older than that.
Tired in a way expensive skin care and controlled posture couldn’t hide.
“The elevator goes to Sublevel C,” Shaw said. “There’s an old ambulance transfer corridor. It hasn’t appeared on public floor plans since the renovation eight years ago.”
Daniel turned toward the elevator.
Reed said, “What is it used for?”
“Mostly storage.”
“Mostly?”
Shaw hesitated.
Claire saw Reed notice.
“Doctor.”
“Private transfers.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means people were moved through there when they didn’t want them seen in the main loading area.”
“Patients?”
“Sometimes.”
“Children?”
Shaw’s silence answered first.
Claire’s hand began shaking.
She shoved it into the pocket of her jeans.
Reed asked, “Are Claire Morgan’s daughters below us?”
“I don’t know.”
Claire started toward her.
Daniel caught Claire this time.
Shaw flinched anyway.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “I haven’t seen them in this building.”
“But you saw that photograph.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Three days ago.”
“Who gave it to you?”
Another hesitation.
Reed glanced toward the security camera above the archive door. Its indicator light was dark.
He had noticed that too.
A lot of things, Claire had learned, changed in Reed’s face without actually moving.
“Who gave you the photograph?” he asked.
“A woman named Sarah Danner.”
Claire stared.
The name meant nothing.
Daniel said, “Who is she?”
Shaw rubbed the fingertips of one hand against the other.
“The person caring for them.”
Claire’s stomach turned.
“Caring for them.”
“She believed the placement was legal.”
“You expect me to feel better?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Claire,” Daniel murmured.
She turned on him. “Don’t.”
His mouth closed.
It was unfair. He hadn’t done anything.
That didn’t stop her.
For months grief had made them cruel in small, embarrassing ways.
They had fought over dirty dishes because neither of them could say the real thing.
They had argued about whether to keep the twins’ nursery door closed.
Daniel had once moved a bag of diapers into the garage and Claire had accused him of trying to erase the girls.
He had responded that the diapers were attracting mice.
Both of them had known there were no mice.
Three weeks later, Claire had found him sitting on the garage floor beside the unopened bag.
Marriage after loss, she had learned, was often two people injuring each other because the alternative was admitting they were both helpless.
Now helplessness had been replaced by something worse.
Their daughters were alive.
Their daughters were somewhere.
Their daughters had been alive every day Claire and Daniel had been mourning them.
Reed spoke into his radio.
He used short sentences. Locations. Access points. Requests for additional personnel.
Claire caught fragments.
Sublevel C.
Freight elevator.
No solo entry.
Secure hospital security control.
Preserve video servers.
Then Reed turned to Shaw again.
“Who arranged the passports?”
“I don’t know.”
His face hardened.
“I don’t.”
“Who arranged the flight?”
“I saw the itinerary tonight for the first time.”
“Where?”
“In this file.”
“So you came down here at midnight and happened to find a file containing forged death certificates, passports, a photograph of two living children you certified dead, and a payment record for one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars.”
Shaw looked at him.
“No.”
“Then help me.”
“I came because I knew the file would be here.”
The fluorescent buzz seemed suddenly louder.
“Why?”
“Because someone wanted me to find it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
Claire leaned against the steel table.
That answer sounded convenient.
Reed apparently agreed.
“You keep arriving at the edge of knowledge, Doctor.”
Shaw’s eyes flashed. “You think I don’t know how this sounds?”
“I think you know exactly how it sounds.”
“I signed the certificates.”
Claire stopped breathing.
Daniel’s hand left the back of her cardigan.
Shaw continued before either of them spoke.
“I signed them. Yes.”
The words landed differently from everything else.
There had always been the possibility of forgery.
A copied signature.
A stolen credential.
May you like
Someone misusing Shaw’s identity.
Claire had allowed that possibility to survive because the alternative required believing the woman who had held Claire’s shoulder during labor, who had said, I’m sorry, we did everything we could, had known there were two living babies somewhere in the hospital.
