J. Jance - Hand of Evil

“Whose house?” Ali asked.

“The house belongs to some well-to-do guy from Minneapolis named Karl Gustavson. He bought it for his son, Jason, who’s going to school at ASU. According to the neighbors, the kid lives there with two roommates.”

“What happened?”

“Gas leak. At least that was what the Tempe Fire Department had said on a preliminary basis. Now they’re saying that there could have been some explosives involved as well.”

“Does Lee Farris know you’re there?”

“He wasn’t happy about it when I turned up a few minutes after he did, but he’s over it now.”

“How bad a fire?” Ali asked.

“Very,” Dave said. “The home is gutted, a complete loss. One of the firefighters told me they know of at least one fatality. We’re waiting for someone to go inside and check. Right this minute, what’s left is still so hot and so unstable that no one can get near it.”

“If no one’s been inside, how do they know there’s a fatality?”

Dave sighed. “Believe me,” he said, “there are ways to tell. I had planned on coming back to the hospital, but right now, I don’t know when I’ll get away. Depending on the time, I’ll either come there or else go straight back to Prescott.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ali said. “Crystal is with me, and we’ve got it covered.” She closed the phone.

“He always does that,” Crystal said. “The cases he’s working on are always more important than we are.”

Ali couldn’t help leaping to Dave’s defense. “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Crystal replied. “Coach Curt is dead. If Dad doesn’t care about me either, I could just as well go back to Vegas.”

Ali had no idea how to respond to that. If Coach Curt was a preferred alternative to going home to Vegas, Crystal’s family life back home with her mother had to be far worse than anyone knew.

It was almost ten by the time they returned to St. Francis Hospital, where they discovered that getting inside the facility at night was a lot more difficult than it had been during the day. A seemingly humorless security guard had set up a check-in stand just inside the sliding lobby doors. All visitors arriving between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. had to present valid identification, sign in, list the name of the patient they intended to visit, and be issued a visitor’s pass. Since Crystal was only thirteen, she had no photo ID available.

Ali was still trying to argue her way past the gatekeeper when Jane Braeton showed up pushing a wheelchair. In it sat a tiny, white-haired woman who had to be Kip’s mother, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Hogan.

“What’s the problem?” Jane stopped the chair directly behind Ali.

“Crystal doesn’t have any ID,” Ali explained. “They’re not going to let her in.”

“Who are these people?” Elizabeth wanted to know, turning her head back and forth in the direction of each of their voices. “What’s wrong?”

“These are the people I told you about, Nana,” Jane said. “The ones who drove down this evening to let us know what had happened to Kip. This is…” She paused, having forgotten Ali’s name.

“Alison Reynolds,” Ali supplied, reaching out and taking Elizabeth’s trembling and icy-cold hand. “And this is my friend, Crystal. The problem is, she’s thirteen and, as a consequence, doesn’t have any photo ID. They won’t let her into the hospital without it, so I guess we can’t go up.”

“Who won’t let her go up?” Elizabeth asked.

“The security guard here,” Jane said. “The one who issues the visitor’s passes.”

“Where?”

Jane had maneuvered the chair so it was parked directly in front of the desk and then began searching for her own ID. Elizabeth, in the meantime, moved her head around until she found a spot where her macular degeneration still allowed her some degree of sight.

“Young man,” she said briskly. “You are a young man, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said with an uncomfortable grin. “Yes, ma’am, I suppose I am.”

“And these people here, the woman and the girl with no photo ID, are people I’ve only just met. They drove all the way from here down to Chandler to let me know that my son has been injured and is in your hospital. Do you have any children?”

“Yes, I do,” he replied.

“And how old are they?”

The guard looked ill at ease, as though he was uncertain whether or not he should answer his pint-size wheelchair-bound inquisitor. Finally he did. “One is four and the other is six months,” he said.

“And you,” she said. “When were you born?”

The security guard turned to Jane, hoping for assistance. Aside from holding up both her own and her mother’s photo IDs, she wasn’t giving him any.

“Well?” Elizabeth prodded. “When?”

She may have been old and blind, but she was still sharp. Evidently her years of practice in herding high school students had made Elizabeth Hogan more than a match for the hapless security guard.

“Nineteen seventy-seven,” he said.

“See there?” she crowed. “I haven’t seen my son since July the fifth, nineteen seventy-three. That was before you were born-longer ago than you are old. Until today, that is. Today I have a chance to see him again, and that wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for these very kind people. These women aren’t criminals-as you can plainly see-especially this young girl here. And they’re not here to harm anyone, either. I can vouch for that personally. Now, are you going to let them come into the hospital or not? Because if you don’t, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take this matter up with your superiors.”

Since keeping unwanted visitors out was the security guard’s primary function, reporting him to his superiors for actually doing his job seemed like an idle threat. Much to Ali’s surprise, the man caved.

“Who is it you ladies are going to be visiting?” he asked.

Elizabeth beamed at him. “My son,” she said. “Rudyard Kipling Hogan. I call him Rudy, but you may have him listed as Kip. He always hated his given name.”

“And what’s this young lady’s name again?” he asked, peering across the desk.

“Crystal,” Ali supplied quickly. “Crystal Holman.”

The guard took the other names off the sign-in sheet. “Mr. Hogan is up in the third floor ICU,” he said as he finished filling out the set of four stick-on badges. “There you go.”

With Ali leading the way, they headed for the elevators.

The downstairs lobby had clearly received a recent upgrade that made it seem more like an upscale hotel lobby than a hospital. Renovations had not yet made their way to the ICU waiting room. It was as small and unremittingly grim as all the other hospital waiting rooms in Ali’s experience. It was also surprisingly chilly.

There were only three people gathered in the room, no doubt prepared to maintain a long, overnight vigil. The first, Sandy, sat at a small table in the middle of the room. A Bible lay open on the table in front of her, but her chin rested in her hand and she appeared to be dozing. The second was a middle-aged woman, a few years older than Ali, who sat in the farthest corner of the room, knitting frenetically. The only sound in the room came from the industrious click of her needles. The third occupant, a balding, potbellied man, sat on a stiff-backed chair staring up at a wall-mounted television. The set was on and tuned to CNN, but the volume was muted. The lips of the broadcasters moved but nothing emerged. The only news available was whatever scrolled silently and with endless repetition across the bottom of the screen. Still, the man watched it with avid attention, as though his very life depended on what he saw there.