Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(49)
“Georgetown Medical Center, Kelli Ann,” one of the nurses said.
“She headed to surgery?” I asked the doctor.
“CT first,” she said. “The neurosurgeon’s on her way.”
“Mind if I tag along with her to CT?”
“Be my guest.”
I hurried down the hallway following Higgins’s gurney. I showed the nurses my badge, said, “FBI.”
“B? I?” Higgins said, blinking.
They stopped outside the radiology department.
I got down low to where I thought Higgins could see me. “That’s right. FBI. You remember me?”
She looked like she was having trouble focusing, but then she said, “Craw.”
“That’s right, Cross,” I said.
The nurses started wheeling the gurney again, and I had to wait until they’d gotten her inside the CT room.
One nurse said, “You’ve got two minutes while the techs set up, and then you’re going to have to leave the area, Dr. Cross.”
I went around to where Higgins could see me again.
“Hit me,” she said.
“Who hit you?”
She swallowed. “Craw … bar.”
“They hit you with a crowbar. Did you know your attacker?”
She blinked. “Claw … bar.”
“Why did this person attack you?”
Higgins looked puzzled, squinted at me. “Claw? Craw?”
“Yes. I’m Dr. Cross. Why do you think you were attacked?”
Her eyelids drifted shut.
“Kelli Ann?” I said and touched her lightly. “Stay with me.”
“Uh?” she said, opening her eyes.
“Do you know why you were attacked?”
“Na.”
“Were you selling or buying something that could get you attacked?”
Higgins didn’t move, and I thought she hadn’t heard. Then she licked her lips and croaked out, “Why cuh-ay?”
Why cuh-ay? My heart started slamming against my chest. “Why Kay? Why Kay Willingham?”
Higgins relaxed and nodded.
“What about Kay?” I said.
“Why Kay kill.”
I stared at her. Why Kay kill. “You were beaten because of why Kay was killed?”
Her jaw slackened, her eyes closed, and she nodded slightly.
“You know why she was killed?” I said, knowing the techs were coming.
She nodded slightly again. “Ahh-sigh.”
“Ahh-sigh?” I said.
She made a humming noise in her throat.
“I don’t understand. Ahh-sigh?”
The radiology tech came over. “We need her now.”
“Lum,” Higgins said. “Lum.” She saw I didn’t understand and got agitated. “Ahh-sigh. Lum.”
“You can tell him afterward, dear,” the nurse said, rolling her away from me. “We just need you to be still while the machine tells us exactly where you’re hurt.”
I stared after Higgins and suddenly understood what she had been trying to say: asylum.
She had been beaten for knowing that Kay was killed because of the asylum.
What asylum? That psychiatric facility Kay went to in Alabama?
Was that what she was trying to tell me?
CHAPTER 54
Alabama
Two days later
NED MAHONEY WAS AT THE wheel as we drove north of Montgomery in stifling heat and humidity that would have made a DC summer day feel fall-like by comparison. It was August. The crops were tall. The foliage between the fields was a dark gray-green, pines, oaks, and creeping vines alike.
“You think Bree’s changing her mind?” Mahoney asked.
I shrugged. After the Higgins attack, Chief Michaels showed up at our house and convinced her to take two weeks to cool off and see if quitting was really in her long-term best interests. Evidently, the idea for him to come had been Commissioner Dennison’s.
“Dennison was a man about it,” I said. “He admitted he was wrong and said he recognized her clear value once it was no longer there, that he wished to apologize and move on. He also apologized to me for sharing the information about Kay.”
“Odds of her going back?”
I shrugged again. “Fifty-fifty?”
“That’s about what I’m giving this trip of yours not being a wild-goose chase. I mean, we have Elaine Paulson dead to rights.”
This was ground we’d covered before, but I replied, “But we don’t know the truth. Do I wish Higgins had said more before she died on the operating table? Of course. But we have a dying statement from a known peddler of scandal who told me she was beaten and Kay and Christopher were shot to death because of Kay’s time in the asylum. We have to chase this.”
My phone buzzed with a text. I read it, then told Ned, “Rawlins says Higgins’s computers have one of the most sophisticated encryption systems he’s ever seen. He’s days from being inside them.”
“Kay’s asylum it is, then,” Mahoney said, surrendering. “And again, I wish I could have justified bringing Sampson down with us.”
“He figured out he needed to be with his family,” I said.