Mount Sutro loomed behind the UCSF Medical Center, its radio tower cutting through the low clouds that were piling against the heights. They rode the elevator up to the intensive care unit, and Fischer hung back with Cain while Nagata talked to the nurse at the triage desk.
“Three minutes,” Nagata said when she came back. “And just you.”
“All right.”
Cain crossed the hall to Chun’s room and opened the door. She lay on an angled bed. There were intravenous tubes running into a port on her forearm, oxygen tubes in her nose. Catheter lines ran from beneath the blue sheets, and he saw a urine bag hanging from the end of the bed, its contents the color of weak coffee. Her face and head were bandaged, and it looked like half her hair had been shaved off so the doctors could examine her head wound. There was a line of staples and sutures from her left ear to the base of her throat. The vascular surgeon must have gone through the existing knife wounds to repair her damaged carotid artery.
Cain pulled up a chair and sat next to her. He opened his briefcase and took the gunshot residue field kit he’d brought from his office. He opened the package and put on the gloves that were inside it, then ripped open the cotton swab’s foil envelope.
“You hang in there, Angela,” he said. “We need you back.”
He took her right hand and gently swabbed it, getting the webbing between her thumb and forefinger and the backs of her knuckles. He opened the plastic box and put the swab in, and squeezed the ampule of reactive agent, feeling the thin glass break inside the plastic dropper. He dripped the reactant onto the cotton and then closed the box. He held Angela’s hand and waited for the swab to develop. Her skin was cold and there was no reaction at all to his touch. It wasn’t like touching a sleeping woman. He thought of the photographs of the drugged girl, the shape she’d taken after the Thrallinex took her.
When he looked through the lensed lid again a moment later, he saw the fine blue specks that had appeared on the surface of the swab, and he knew what they meant.
“You did just fine, Angela,” he whispered to her. “You got him high in the leg. He’s holed up somewhere, and he’s hurting worse than you.”
When he let go of her hand, her fingers stayed curled in the same position. He had to look at the flickering green line of her pulse on the EKG to be sure she wasn’t dead.
For a moment, in the crowded elevator heading down to the street level, he thought again of the shallow cuts on Grassley’s neck. The gunshot residue on Chun’s right hand, which meant the single .40 caliber round on the floor had come from her gun.
Something didn’t match. He was sure there was a flaw in his story. But once the elevator doors slid open and he’d followed Fischer through the main entrance of the hospital, out into a cold gray noon, he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
“Where to now?” Fischer said.
He didn’t know. He wanted to go back to Yerba Buena Island, back to the safe room on the Coast Guard’s fenced-off lot. He wanted to put his arms around Lucy and spend all afternoon watching the wind stir up the bay. But he had to keep up the initiative. They had to keep moving, or they’d sink.
“Let’s go to Union Square,” Cain said. “I’ve got an idea.”
31
THEY PARKED IN the garage buried beneath Union Square, then came up to the street level and crossed Stockton. They followed the sidewalk past a narrow brick building, the fa?ade of which carried the zigzag lattice of a fire escape, and then at the next door, they turned in to Britex Fabrics.
Grassley had been on his way here the last time Cain had spoken to him.
The door closed behind them, and they stood looking at bolts of silk and printed fabric stacked on racks and arranged on shelves. The store was deep, and occupied the entire four-story building. Cain thought there might be enough fabric in here to clothe every woman in the city. A salesperson came over. She looked past Cain at Fischer.
“May I help you find something?”
“Ask him,” Fischer said. “He’s the one looking.”
Cain already had out his phone. He gave it to the woman, and she looked at the photograph of Grassley. He was in his SFPD dress uniform, to the left of a U.S. flag. The woman handed the phone back.
“He was my partner,” Cain said. He put the phone in his pocket and then brought out his inspector’s star. “He came in here yesterday.”
“I remember him.”
“Did he talk to you?”
“He asked for the manager. I took him upstairs.”
“Is she up there now?”
“I’ll take you.”
They found the manager on the third floor. She was working with a younger woman to arrange a display of sewing notions.