Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(28)
She felt irresponsible for having shied from the prospect of being studied. “Well, if you put it that way…”
“I do. I put it that way.” He released her shoulders. His happy expression was infused with wonder again. “Yesterday, when I said you had at most a year to live, you said, ‘We’ll see.’ Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“It’s almost as if you knew then that you’d go home today.”
Because Nancy and Murphy were coming for a long visit at four o’clock, Bibi hadn’t called to tell them what had happened in the night or that her death sentence had been miraculously commuted. Although she’d known that her health had been restored, she hadn’t wanted to pop the champagne cork with them, figuratively speaking, until she had Dr. Chandra’s confirmation. Besides, she wanted to see their surprise, their disbelief, their joy when they walked through the door and saw her in street clothes, her former glow restored.
Fifteen minutes before Bibi’s parents were due, Chubb Coy, chief of security, peered through the open door. His pale-blue shirt with epaulets looked fresh, and his dark-blue slacks still held a sharp crease. He said, “Got a minute?”
Rising from a chair by the window, Bibi said, “Suddenly, I have millions of minutes.”
Failing to match her smile, Coy entered the room. “Since I spoke to you last, we’ve quick-scanned the parking-lot video for the past twenty-four hours. No Mr. Hoodie. No golden retriever. Seems they didn’t drive here or walk, and I’m not a guy who believes in crap like teleportation. What about you? You believe in teleportation?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“So I asked myself, did they come here more than a day ago and hide out in the building? Are they still hiding in the building?”
“Why would they do that?” she asked.
“Damn if I know.” He shrugged and looked bewildered, pretending for a moment to be without suspicion. “So we searched the place, end to end. Nada. Zip.” He walked past her to stare out the window. Head tipped back. Pondering the sky. “It makes me feel stupid, you know? So I kept looking at the same scrap of video till I noticed something weird. Want to guess what it was?”
“I have no idea.”
Still at the window with his back to her, Chubb Coy said, “When the guy and the dog come along, they pass two other people going the opposite direction. A nurse. Then an orderly. Neither one glances at Mr. Hoodie. Kind of peculiar, huh? That hour, the hoodie, and not even a glance? But stranger still, here’s this beautiful dog at four in the morning, and they don’t glance at it, either. People see a beautiful dog, they stare, they smile. Most want to pet it, ask the owner its name. They’re off-duty now, the nurse and the orderly, so I called them. Both swear there wasn’t a dog. They’re adamant. They never passed a dog in the hallway. You know what I’m wondering now?”
“I don’t have a clue,” Bibi said. “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
He turned from the window to face her. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but just about anything is these days, when it comes to fiddling with digital recordings, sound or image. So I’m wondering if some hacker breached our security archives, somehow inserted Mr. Hoodie and the dog in our video, made them be where they never were.”
Perplexed, Bibi said, “Who’d go to all that trouble? And why?”
Instead of answering her, Chubb Coy said, “Watching it about a hundred times, I still can’t see any technical giveaway. The guy and the dog register with the same clarity as the nurse and orderly. The light plays off them exactly as it does other people in the scene. But I’m no expert. A first-rate techie specialist, an analyst with the right credentials, should be able to prove it’s a fraud.”
“Except for one thing you seem to have forgotten,” Bibi reminded him. “I saw them. The man, the dog. They came into my room. The dog stood on its hind feet, put its front paws on my bed. Those lovely luminous gold eyes. It licked my hand.” She held up her left hand, as though a residue of case-closing golden-retriever DNA might still be found between her fingers.
The security chief’s blue-flecked steel-gray eyes were to him as scalpels to a surgeon. Direct and sharp and intent on cutting through all deception, his gaze seemed to flense her with exquisite delicacy, peeling away the layers of her image in a search for the most artful chicanery, some subtle telltale, that would put the lie to everything he’d been told.
“These days,” he said in a dead-flat voice from which he took care to bleed all inflection, “I may be just a glorified mall cop, in a somewhat more respectable environment, but I was once the real thing, and I still have good gumshoe instincts.”
Regarding him with growing amazement and uneasiness, Bibi asked, “What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything, Miss Blair.”
“That I’m some kind of suspect?”
He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes in an unconvincing pretense of surprise, as if she had misinterpreted what he’d said and had leaped to a conclusion about his intentions that astonished him.
“What am I supposed to have done?” she asked, not with offense or anger, but with a kind of amused bafflement. “Faked the remission of my cancer? Tricked the MRI machine? Deceived all my doctors? Does any of that make sense?”