“How did that little bit of a thing get away from you and the guard and everyone?” Mr. Contreras demanded.
Lundgren didn’t look at us. “I wasn’t on duty when it happened. I was told she used her small size to follow behind the laundry cart, on the side away from the guard, and that she probably concealed herself in the cart when the janitor stopped to talk to someone. In theory the laundry would be inspected before leaving this ward, but in practice they probably let it go through without poking at it: no one wants to touch soiled linens. A number of the women have AIDS.”
“And you believe Aguinaldo escaped that way?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral. “Wasn’t she cuffed to the bed?”
Lundgren nodded. “But these girls have nothing to do all day long except figure out how to use a hairpin on their handcuffs. It happens now and then that one of them gets loose, but since the ward is locked it doesn’t do them much good. I don’t think there’s anything else I can tell you. If you’d like some time alone in the chapel before you set out, I can have an orderly show you to it. Otherwise he’ll escort you to the main entrance.”
I left my card on the table when we got up to leave. “In case something else occurs to you that you’d like me to know about, Nurse.”
On the way out, Mr. Contreras exploded with frustration. “I don’t believe it. A laundry cart, huh? Things ain’t bigger than a minute, and not even Nicola was that tiny. I want you to sue them. Sue them for—what was it you said—not taking due something?”
Veronica, the woman who’d had the baby, managed to be in the hall, cuffed to the orderly, who was escorting her back from the bathroom. “You know Nicola? What happened to her?”
“She’s dead,” I said. “Do you know why she was in the hospital?”
Nurse Lundgren appeared next to us. “You can’t be talking to the patients, ma’am. They’re inmates even if they’re in the hospital. Veronica, you’re well enough to parade the hall, you’re well enough to get back to the house. Jock, you can take these visitors out to the main entrance. Show them where the chapel is before you come back.”
Veronica looked momentarily furious, then, as if her powerlessness were something she’d just remembered, her shoulders sank and her face crumpled into despair.
Jock gave permission to the man behind the glass wall to release the doors. At the entrance to the main hospital wing, he pointed down a hall to the chapel.
19 Power Dining
“So what do you think, doll?” Mr. Contreras asked as he buckled himself into the seat. “That nurse seemed mighty uneasy. And how would a little thing like that girl was get out of a place like that?”
I didn’t have an answer. Nurse Lundgren seemed competent, and even, for the setting, compassionate. I agreed she’d seemed uncomfortable, but it would be easy for me to read into that what I wanted to. Maybe she was troubled at the loss of a patient rather than covering up special knowledge of Aguinaldo’s escape.
We drove over to Smallpox Creek to let the dogs cool off again before the drive home. Mr. Contreras, suddenly seeing Nicola Aguinaldo as a person, not an illegal immigrant or a criminal, was subdued during the ride. We got home a little before six. Mary Louise had shoved a packet underneath the locked inner door with a report on her day’s work. She had delivered our report to Continental United; the human resources vice president had called to say they were delighted with our work, but that they thought they would have to send someone down to Georgia to check on things in person. And that someone would likely be me—unless Baladine persuaded the company to turn all their work over to Carnifice.
I didn’t want to hang about the back roads of Georgia, waiting for someone with a tire iron to hit me on the head. On the other hand, if I stayed in Chicago I might start doing unlucrative things like tailing Morrell, to see if a man worried about committing himself on the phone might drive to Nicola Aguinaldo’s mother’s home.
A man named Rieff phoned from Cheviot Labs at eleven, Mary Louise had written in her round schoolgirl hand. He says he can provide a printout of what is on Aguinaldo’s dress, but he does not know how meaningful it is. It was a long T–shirt with Lacey Dowell as the Mad Virgin on it. A label said it was a specialty shirt but did not identify where it was manufactured. There are traces of sweat, which are presumably Aguinaldo’s, but without a DNA sample he couldn’t say. There is a trace of cigarette ash around the inside of the neck. He is not charging for that information because the analysis was already done when they inspected the dress last week, but if you want to know what brand of cigarette, that will cost around two hundred extra.