Enigma (FBI Thriller #21)(22)
Savich said, “Kara, the nurse who brought him back, what was her name?”
“I—I don’t know, I didn’t recognize her, never saw her before. She was very professional, very nice.”
“What did she look like?”
“She was wearing a cap, so I couldn’t see her hair, and glasses, narrow with black frames. I remember thinking that style didn’t look good on her. She had on a white lab coat over a nurse’s uniform. She was in her midthirties.”
Savich said, “Picture her in your mind. Was she heavy? Slender? Fit? Anything unusual about her you can see?”
“She was slender, tall, maybe five foot eight. I think she had a bit of a limp, like she’d hurt her left foot and couldn’t put her full weight on it.”
“Anything else you can remember about her?”
Kara shook her head.
Ray Hunter had come into the room to stand beside Philly Adams.
Philly placed her hand on his arm. “What’s happening, Ray?”
Ray said, “Our security chief, Oslo Elk, has contacted the CARD team and Metro, and spread all his people around the exits. The supervisory agent said there’d be two agents on-site real soon along with some FBI agents from the Washington Field Office.” Ray added to Kara, “CARD stands for the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team. They’re a special FBI unit, and they’re experts at finding missing babies taken from hospitals.”
Chief of Security Oslo Elk rushed into the room, quickly introduced himself to Savich and Kara, and said to Philly Adams, “The security log shows one of your night-shift nurses, Polly Pallen, checked into the unit using her key card forty-five minutes ago.”
“Polly? She wasn’t scheduled. Wait a second.” She was on her cell, nodded, punched off. “One of our nurses, Abby Hinton, said Polly wasn’t here, but she saw a nurse in the unit she didn’t recognize a few minutes ago. She didn’t think much about it, thought she was a traveler—a visiting nurse—or a temp.”
Kara stared at Philly Adams. “You’re telling me you let a strange woman loose with our babies? You didn’t double-check that she should be here?”
Philly looked devastated. “I’m sorry, but we were busy and Abby assumed I’d been notified. It shouldn’t have happened, but we’re doing everything we can.”
Kara looked like she wanted to leap on Philly Adams. Savich put his hand on her arm.
Chief Elk said, “Then the woman must have gotten hold of Polly Pallen’s key card. We’ll try to reach nurse Pallen to be sure, but it’s a good bet. Let’s hope she didn’t get out of here before the alarm locked all the doors, and that includes the rear stairwell the personnel use. Agent Savich, you want to come look at some video with me? I’ve seen it once already. I’m hoping you’ll see more. We’ve got cameras on all the stairs. We can see if that’s the way she left the floor.”
Three nurses stayed with Kara. Before Savich left with Chief Elk, he took her arms in his hands and forced her to look up at him. “I know you want to scream at everyone here who was supposed to keep Alex safe. Believe me, they’re all doing their best now. I want you to keep faith and trust we will get Alex back.”
As Savich walked down five flights of stairs with Security Chief Elk to the hospital security office off the lobby, he wondered if the media scanners had already lit up like Christmas trees. There would soon be chaos. Elk was saying, “We have eight cameras on the floor, two in the main stairwell, another two in the personnel stairwell. There aren’t any cameras in the patient rooms, so we won’t see the woman actually taking the baby. Damnation, I hate this. It’s the second time it’s happened on my watch. We got the other baby back okay, but this time it looks like a real pro job, and tell me why go to all this trouble to take that particular baby?”
John Doe knows why. He tried to stop it, tried to save Kara. Savich had wished John Doe were FBI purview. Now he was. Kidnapping was a federal crime, and Alex and John Doe were connected now, one case. Detective Mayer wasn’t going to like being told that at all.
“All ready, Chief,” the surveillance tech said, so excited he was nearly bouncing up and down in his chair.
Elk said, “Gilly is showing us three separate feeds on each of the monitors on the maternity floor, in the elevators and in the stairwells. He’s taken the feeds to fifteen minutes before the alarm went off. Fast-forward, Gilly, let Agent Savich see the routine.”
Savich heard the door open behind him but didn’t look around.
They watched Ray Hunter, the security guard, check visitors onto the maternity floor and look over staff IDs, watched the public and staff with their carts and equipment enter and leave the elevators. Nurses passed the cameras in the hallways, going about their business, pushing linens and medication carts and computer monitors into and out of patient rooms.
They saw a nurse in black-framed glasses and a surgical cap walk down the hallway toward Kara’s room. She looked relaxed, at home. She was tall, slender, in her midthirties, exactly as Kara described her. She went into Kara’s room, emerged soon carrying what appeared to be Alex wrapped in blankets. When she reappeared ten minutes later, she was carrying Alex back into Kara’s room.
Chief Elk said, “She knows where the cameras are, did a good job of avoiding them. I think she left Alex in the empty room next to Kara’s then picked him up. Watch.”