“Do you know my husband?” she asked.

“Mike?” He nodded. “Sure.”

“What’s going on with him and that woman Jolie? And what are all those cops doing downstairs?”

“Nothing.” Calhoun had never felt more convincing in his life. “They’re just coworkers. And the cops were escorting some poor cracked-out bastard who needs to have his head looked at. Ain’t too friendly, are they?”

Sarah tilted her head up, what Calhoun first took to be scrutiny. Then he realized she was looking at the great bank of video screens that formed the wall behind him, a mosaic of black-and-white images, empty hallways, vacant waiting rooms, doors, stairwells—all of them still and ghost-ship deserted.

Sarah looked at his ID tag. “Mr. Calhoun, is it?”

“Steve.”

“Are there cameras down in the MRI department?”

“Sure, you bet.” He allowed himself a touch of irrational pride, as if having the whole place under surveillance was somehow his doing. “There’s cameras everywhere.”

“Show me.”

“I’m really not supposed to—”

“Please.” Sarah gave him a smile that was more of a wince, the expression of a woman covering up a deep bruise. “I need to see.”

Calhoun looked down at the little boy who was clinging to her hand, gazing up at her, and realized with a lurch that he was that boy. Not that they’d changed bodies or anything Freaky Friday like that, but the odd, lost look in the kid’s face matched the feeling of dismay sinking into his own heart. The booze evaporated so suddenly that he felt a lump rise in his throat where the right words should have been.

Without much hope, he put his fingers on the keyboard beneath the bank of monitors and typed in the surveillance code for the MRI suite. One of the monitors flicked over to show a deep, empty room with the scanner at the far end.

“Nobody there?” she asked.

“Guess not,” Calhoun said, wondering if he sounded as relieved as he felt.

“But I was just down there. What happened to everybody?”

“Mommy,” the little boy said restlessly, squinting at the screen. “Where’s Daddy?”

“Hold on.” With a grunt, Calhoun got up off his shaky stool and typed again, thick fingers bumbling off the keys. Onscreen, the camera angle flipped lengthwise, showing the suite from the opposite direction. From the right, a figure moved across the waiting room, the normalcy of it made strange by the declarative flatness of the raw video feed.

It was Jolie. Calhoun watched her walk up to a row of employee lockers, putting in a key and opening it up to get her things out. From time to time he and some of the guys watched her down there—the Jolie Broadcasting Channel was what they called it, as in, Let’s see what’s playing on JBC—but never with another woman looking over his shoulder.

“She’s all by herself,” Calhoun said, fully aware that Sarah’s primary interest was Jolie, rather than the handful of boys in blue.

“Hold on,” Sarah said, not looking away from the screen. “Is there a better angle?”