Her eyes opened. “Make up for it?”
“That’s right. I told you a long time ago, a headstrong man like Doug needs a lot of attention. And he needs a loose rope, too. Take your father. I’ve always held him on a loose rope, and our marriage is the better for it. These are things a woman learns by experience, and no one can teach her. The looser the rope, the stronger the marriage.”
“I can’t…” Words failed her. She tried again, knocked breathless. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things! Do you mean…you want me to stay with Doug? To look the other way if he ever decides to”—she used her mother’s term—“play around again?”
“He’ll outgrow it,” the older woman said. “You have to be there for him, and he’ll know that what he has at home is priceless. Doug is a good provider and he’s going to be a good father. Those are very important things in this day and time. You need to be thinking about healing the wound between you and Doug instead of talking about divorce.”
Laura didn’t know what she was about to say. Her mouth was opening, the blood was pounding in her face, and she could feel the shout beginning to draw power from her lungs. She longed to see her mother cringe before her voice, longed to see her get up from that chair and march out of the room in a practiced sulk. Doug was a stranger to her, and so was her mother; she didn’t know either of those pretenders to her love. She was about to shout in her mother’s face, though she didn’t yet know what she was going to say.
She would never know.
Two nurses—one of them Erin Kingman and the other an older, stockier woman—entered the room. Following behind them was a man in a dark blue blazer and gray slacks, his face round and fleshy and his brown hair receding from a high globe of a forehead. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and his shoes squeaked as he approached Laura’s bed.
“Excuse me,” the older nurse said to Laura’s mother. Her name tag read: Kathryn Langner. “Would you go with Miss Kingman for just a few minutes, please?”
“What is it?” Laura’s mother stood up, her radar on full alert. “What’s wrong?”
“Would you come with me, please?” Erin Kingman stood at the woman’s side. “We’ll just step out into the hall, all right?”
“What’s going on? Laura, what’s this all about?”
Laura couldn’t answer. The older nurse and the man moved in to take positions on either side of the bed. A foreboding of horror swept like a cold tide through Laura’s body. Oh Jesus! she thought. It’s David! Something’s happened to David!
“My baby,” she heard herself say frantically. “Where’s my baby?”
“Would you wait in the hall, please?” The man spoke to Miriam in a flat tone that said she would, whether she liked it or not. “Miss Kingman, close the door on your way out.”
“Where’s my baby?” Laura felt her heart pounding, and there was a fresh twinge of pain between her legs. “I want to see David!”
“Out,” the man told Laura’s mother. Miss Kingman closed the door. Kathryn Langner grasped one of Laura’s hands, and the man said in a quieter, steady voice, “Mrs. Clayborne, my name is Bill Ramsey. I’m on the security staff here. Do you remember the name of the nurse who took your child from this room?”
“Janette something. It started with an L.” She couldn’t recall the last name, and her brain was sluggish with shock. “What’s wrong? She said she was going to bring my baby right back. I’d like him back now.”
“Mrs. Clayborne,” Ramsey said, “no nurse with that first name works on the maternity ward.” Behind his glasses, his eyes were as black as the frames. A pulse beat at his balding left temple. “We think the woman may have taken your child from the premises.”
Laura blinked. Her mind rejected the last three words. “What? Taken him where?”
“From the hospital,” Ramsey repeated. “Our people are checking all the exits right now. I want you to think carefully and tell me what this woman looked like.”
“She was a nurse. She said she worked on weekends.” The blood was roaring in Laura’s head. She heard her voice as if at the far end of a long tunnel. I’m about to faint, she thought. Dear God, I’m really about to faint. She squeezed the nurse’s hand and was met by forceful pressure.
“She wore a nurse’s uniform, is that correct?”
“Yes. A uniform. She was a nurse.”
“Her first name was Janette. Did she tell you that?”
“It was…it was…on her name tag. Next to the Smiley Face.”
“Pardon me?”
“The…Smiley Face,” Laura said. “It was yellow. A Smiley Face button.”
“What color was the woman’s hair and eyes?”
“I don’t—” Her thinking was freezing solid, but there seemed to be pulsing heat trapped in her face. “Brown hair. Shoulder-length. Her eyes were…blue, I think. No, gray. I can’t remember.”
“Anything else about her? Crooked nose? Heavy eyebrows? Freckles?”
“Tall,” Laura said. “A big woman. Tall.” Her throat was closing up, dark motes spun before her eyes, and only the pressure of the nurse’s hand kept her from passing out.
“How tall? Five nine? Five ten? Taller?”
“Taller. Six feet. Maybe more.”
Bill Ramsey reached under his coat and pulled out a walkie-talkie. He clicked it on. “Eugene, this is Ramsey. We’re looking for a woman in a nurse’s uniform, description as follows: brown shoulder-length hair, blue or gray eyes, approximately six feet tall. Hold on.” He looked at Laura again, whose face had gone chalky except for red circles around her eyes. “Heavyset, slim, or medium build?”
“Big. Heavyset.”
“Eugene? Heavyset. Got a name tag that identifies her as Janette, last name begins with an L. Copy?”
“Copy,” the voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.
“The button,” Laura reminded him. She was about to throw up, the nausea hot in her stomach. “The Smiley Face button.”
Ramsey clicked the walkie-talkie on again and gave Eugene the extra information.
“I’m going to be sick,” Laura told Kathryn Langner, tears burning trails down her cheeks. “Would you help me to the bathroom, please?”
The nurse helped her, but Laura didn’t make it to the bathroom before she expelled her lunch. Laura, cold as death, slipped from the woman’s grasp and fell to her knees onto the floor, and when she splayed there she felt the raw pain of the stitches tearing between her thighs. Someone was called to clean up the mess, Laura was returned to bed shivering and dazed with shock, and Ramsey allowed her mother back into the room with Miss Kingman. The young nurse had already told Laura’s mother what was happening, and Ramsey sat beside the bed and directed more questions at both of them. Neither could recall the woman’s last name. “Lewis? Logan?” Ramsey prompted. “Larson? Lester?”
“Lester,” Laura’s mother said. “That was it!”
“No, it wasn’t that,” Laura disagreed. “It was something close to Lester.”
“Think hard. Try to see the name tag in your mind. Can you see it?”
“It was Lester!” the older woman insisted. “I know what it was!” Her face flamed with anger. “Jesus Christ, is this your way of running a hospital? Letting crazy people come in and steal babies?”
Ramsey paid her no attention. “See the name tag,” he told Laura while the nurse pressed a cold washrag against her forehead. “Look at the last name. Something like Lester. What is it?”
“Lester, for God’s sake!” Miriam insisted.
Laura saw the name tag in her mind, white letters on a blue background. She saw the first name, and then the last name came clear of its fog. “Leister, I think it was.” She spelled it out. “L-e-i-s-t-e-r.”
At once Ramsey was on his walkie-talkie again. “Eugene, Ramsey. Call down to records and have them check a name: Leister.” He spelled it, too. “Get me a printout when it’s done. Metro on the way?”
“Double quick,” the disembodied voice answered.
>
“I want my baby back,” Laura said, her eyes deep with tears. Her mind wasn’t truly registering what was happening; this had to be a gruesome, hideous joke. They were hiding David from her. Why were they being so cruel? She hung to sanity by the pressure of a nurse’s hand. “Please bring my baby back. Right now. Okay? Okay?”
“You’d better find my grandson!” Laura’s mother was right up in Ramsey’s face. “You hear me? We’ll sue your asses off if you don’t find my grandson!”
“The police are on their way.” His voice was brittle with tension. “Everything’s under control.”
“Like hell it is!” the older woman shouted. “Where’s my grandson? You people had better have a damned good lawyer!”
“Be quiet,” Laura rasped, but her voice was lost in her mother’s anger. “Please be quiet.”
“What kind of security do you have around here? You don’t even know who’s a nurse and who’s not a nurse? You let just anybody off the street come in here and take babies?”
“Ma’am, we’re doing the best we can. You’re not helping things.”
“And you are? My God, there’s no telling who’s got my grandson! It could be any kind of lunatic!”
Laura began to cry, hopelessly and in great pain. Her mother raged on as Ramsey took it with a tight-lipped stare and rain slashed at the window. His walkie-talkie beeped. “Ramsey,” he said into it, and Miriam stopped shouting.
The voice said, “Need you down in the laundry, pronto.”
“On my way.” He clicked the walkie-talkie off. “Mrs. Clayborne, I’m going to have to leave you for a little while. Is your husband in the hospital?”
“I don’t…I don’t know…”
“Can you get in touch with him?” he asked her mother.
“We’ll take care of that! You just do your job and find that baby!”
“Stay with them,” Ramsey told the two nurses, and he hurried out of the room.
“Get away from my daughter!” Laura heard her mother command. The nurse’s grip relaxed and fell away, leaving Laura with an empty hand. Her mother stood over her. “It’s going to be all right. Do you hear me, Laura? Look at me.”
Laura lifted her face and looked at her mother through blurred and burning eyes.
“It’s going to be all right. They’ll find David. We’re going to sue this damned hospital for ten million dollars, that’s what we’re going to do. Doug knows some good lawyers. By God, we’ll break this hospital, that’s what we’ll do.” She turned away from Laura and picked up the telephone, dialing the house on Moore’s Mill Road.
The answering machine came on. Doug wasn’t home.
Laura lay on the bed and pulled herself into the fetal position, grasping a pillow against her. “I want my baby,” she whispered. “I want my baby. I want my baby.” Her voice broke, and she could speak no more. Her body, a hollow vessel, ached for her child. She squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out all light. Darkness filled her. She lay at the mercy of God, or fate, or luck. The world spun with her curled up in a tight, hurting ball and her baby stolen from her, and Laura struggled to hold back a scream that she feared might shred her soul to bloody ribbons.
She lost.
III
WILDERNESS OF PAIN
1
Pigsticker
YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THE WOMAN BEFORE?
“Yes. Certain.”
Did she speak your first or last name?
“No, I don’t…no.”
Did she speak the baby’s name?
“No.”
Did she have an accent?
“Southern,” Laura said. “But different. Somehow. I don’t know.” She was answering these questions through a tranquilized haze, and the voice of the police lieutenant named Garrick seemed to be floating to her along an echoing tunnel. Two other men were in the room: Newsome, the craggy-faced chief of security for the hospital, and a younger policeman taking notes. Miriam was being questioned in another room, while Franklin and Doug—who’d returned from a drinking bout in a bar near his office—were down in the administration office.
Laura had to concentrate hard on what Garrick was asking her. The drugs had done a strange number on her, relaxing her body and tongue while her mind was racing, going up inclines and speeding down into troughs like a runaway roller-coaster.
A southern accent? Different how?
“Not deep south,” she said. “Not a Georgia accent.”
Could you describe the woman for a police artist?
“I think so. Yes. I can.”
Newsome was called out of the room by a third policeman. He returned in a few minutes accompanied by a boyish-looking man in a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a black tie with tiny white dots on it. There was a hushed conference, Garrick got up from his chair beside the bed, and the new arrival took his place. “Mrs. Clayborne? My name is Robert Kirkland.” He showed her a laminated identification card. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Those words made fresh panic surge through her, but the drugs kept her expression calm and dreamy. Only the wet glint of her eyes betrayed her stark terror. Scenarios of ransom notes and murdered kidnap victims wheeled through her brain like evil constellations. “Please tell me,” she said. Her tongue was leaden, the taste of the tranquilizers sour in her mouth. “Please…why did she take my baby?”
Kirkland paused, his pen hovering over a yellow legal pad. He had eyes, Laura thought, that resembled one-way blue glass, giving no hint of what went on within. “The woman was not a nurse at this hospital,” he told her. “There’s no Janette Leister on staff, and the only person with that last name who worked here was an X-ray technician in 1984.” He checked his prewritten notes. “A black male, aged thirty-three, who now resides at 2137 Oakhaven Drive in Conyers.” His one-way stare returned to her. “We’re checking the records of other hospitals. She may have been a nurse at one time, or she may have simply bought or rented the uniform. We’re checking uniform and costume-rental stores, too. If she did rent the uniform and a clerk got her address from her driver’s license—and it’s a correct address—we’re in luck.”
“Then you can find her fast, is that right? You can find her and my baby?”
“We’ll act as soon as we get the information.” He checked his notes again. “What’s working for us here is the woman’s size and height, both out of the norm. But bear in mind that the uniform might belong to her, so she wouldn’t turn up on a rental list. She might have bought it a year ago, or rented it outside the city.”
“But you’ll find her, won’t you? You won’t let her get away?”
“No ma’am,” Kirkland said. “We won’t let her get away.” He didn’t tell her that the woman had been allowed into the hospital by a laundry worker, and evidently had spirited the baby out in a linen hamper. He didn’t tell her that there was no description of a car, that the laundress was vague about the woman’s face, but that two things stuck out: the woman’s six-foot height and the yellow Smiley Face button pinned to her breast pocket. It had occurred to Kirkland that the woman had pinned the button there so it would draw attention away from her own face. She had moved fast and known what she was doing; it was no off-the-street patchwork job. His notes told him she’d been wearing a white uniform with navy blue piping, the same colors as the real nurses wore. That was the uniform they were trying to track down. She had acted, as Miriam Beale had put it, “in charge.” The laundress had said “she looked like a nurse and she acted like one, too.” The woman must’ve cased the hospital first, because she’d known how to get in and out in a hurry. But there was an interesting point: the woman had gone to rooms 24 and 23 as well. Had she come expressly for the Clayborne infant, or was she gunning in the dark for a child to steal? Was it important that she steal a boy? If so, why?
Kirkland spent about twenty minutes with Laura, replowing old ground. It was obvious to him that she could offer nothing new. She was drifting in and out of shock, becoming l
ess coherent. Twice she broke into tears, and Kirkland asked Newsome to go get her husband.
“No.” The strength and ferocity of her voice surprised him. “I don’t want him in here.”
On Kirkland’s drive to his office, his car phone chirped. “Go ahead,” he answered.
It was one of the other agents on the case. A clerk at Costumes Atlanta had rented an extra large nurse’s uniform—solid white, with no navy piping—to a “big woman” on Friday afternoon. The address, taken from a Georgia driver’s license, was Apartment 6, 4408 Sawmill Road in Mableton. The name was Ginger Coles. Kirkland said, “Get me a search warrant and some backup and meet me there.” He hung up and turned the Ford around, wipers beating at the steady rain.
Forty minutes later, Kirkland and two more FBI agents were ready to move on Apartment 6 in the dismal little complex in Mableton. The clock had ticked past four, the sky plated with low gray clouds. Kirkland checked his service revolver. He’d been sitting in the parking lot watching the door of Apartment 6 and had seen no movement, but being less than cautious got you killed. “Let’s go,” he said over his walkie-talkie, and he got out of his car and walked with the other two men through the rain toward Apartment 6.
Kirkland knocked. Waited. Knocked again. No answer. He tried the doorknob. Locked, of course. Who would have the key? The apartment manager? “Let’s try this one,” he said, and he went to the next door. Knocked. Waited. Repeated it a little louder. No one home? He tried the knob, and was surprised when the door opened.
“Hello!” he called into the gloom. “Anybody in there?” He smelled it, then: the coppery, unmistakable reek of blood. He had no search warrant for this apartment, and walking in would be asking for an ass-rip. But he could see the result of tumult in the place, could look right through into the guts of the bedroom and see the mattress overturned and cotton ticking strewn about. “I’m going in.” He went in with his hand on the butt of his gun.