“Sure thing.” McPhee pointed at the desk. “Hey, don’t forget your camera. Looks expensive.”

“Thanks.” She gave him an actual smile and saw kindness amid the wrinkles of his face. Maybe she’d misjudged him, a lonely guy with no wedding band hoping for a few moments of stolen felicity with a woman half his age. “It can’t be easy dealing with prisoners all day.”

“I’m on the job,” he shrugged. “Transporting this lowlife scumbag is just a favor to the DOC. Still”—he frowned, weighing the difference—“it ain’t the Bahamas, that’s for sure.”

“I bet.” Jolie cast one final glance around the MRI suite, bidding good-bye to a place she wasn’t going to miss all that much. She glanced at the pile of papers Mike’s wife had dumped from her purse, briefly considered picking them up. She wasn’t doing Sarah Hughes any favors.

“I have to admit I almost stopped you from taking those snapshots of that son of a bitch,” McPhee said. “They worth anything?”

“You bet.”

“How much?”

“Let’s just say he enjoys a certain cult following.”

“Is that so?” McPhee hesitated, then seemed to arrive at a decision. “I got something here.” He reached into his hip pocket. “Took it off of him as we were strip-searching him for his ambulance ride. You think something like this would be worth anything?”

Jolie looked at the piece of onionskin paper in McPhee’s hand. It was a hand-drawn diagram, done in thin marker on the back of what she realized was a page torn out of a Bible. Cutting crosswise across the tiny lines of Scripture she saw lines and squares, numbers, arrows, and scrawled words in big spidery capital letters.

“Snow drew this?”

“Yeah, I guess.” McPhee frowned. “Why, you know what it is?”

“Sure.” Jolie nodded. “It’s a map. Of the hospital.”

9.

Sarah’s eyes were still locked on the video monitors in Calhoun’s security booth when Eli started screaming.

Just moments before, Calhoun had rushed upstairs to meet Mike and the others on the sixth floor, leaving them to watch her husband stuck in the now-moving elevator. “There’s Daddy!” Eli had squealed, pointing at the monitor with heartbreaking excitement, “Mommy, Daddy’s on TV!” And sure enough, there he was, packed in with the cops and a man in a prison uniform whose face disturbed Sarah in a way she couldn’t have articulated intelligently, even under the most mundane of circumstances.

That’s when the crash came, followed by Eli’s scream, the shrillness of it bringing up the hairs on the backs of her arms. Pivoting, she saw him sprawled on the floor beside Calhoun’s fallen stool. She could tell from his howling cry that he had really hurt himself, but she didn’t know how bad it was until the bulge on his forehead started swelling just above his right eye.

“Oh, sweetheart.” She knelt down next to him and tried to pick him up, but that only made him scream even harder, thrashing and pulling away as the pain got worse. “What happened? Let me see.”