It was huge, occupying what felt like a full corner of the ground floor. On every wall, towering stacks of thousands of individual patient records waited for the transportation crews that would ship them to new facilities. Shelves rose up to an industrial skyline of dead light fixtures. In the center, an abstract geometric shape formed by desks and tables contained several computers, copy machines, and phones. Mike hadn’t spent much time among the desks. The bifocal-wearing bitch-goddesses who captained the hospital from behind those rectilinear slabs always seemed to be not-quite-whispering about whose whore daughter had gotten a black eye from her ex-con boyfriend, or whose baby was born with a hole in its heart because its mother had freebased while pregnant.

They’d whispered about him, too, him and Jolie.

Mike turned. The flashlight beam caught one of the printers and he saw a single sheet of paper lying on top.

It was the control sheet, the one that had been printed up when the cops had first brought Frank Snow here for his brain MRI.

Mike looked at the paper for a long time, then up at the file room stacks. Row after row of folders, thousands of lives made flat and packed away, well on their way to oblivion. Frank Snow would be one of those lives. He was in here somewhere, wasn’t he? Was there something here that could help them? It was a long shot, but long shots were all he had left.

Mike checked the different-colored numbers that were adhered to the jackets until he was in Snow’s neighborhood. Getting closer, he slowed down, forcing himself up on a stool that had been left here, and shined the flashlight up.

America’s bogeyman was just another cardboard jacket, thicker than he’d expected, featuring rows of typed and printed bar-code labels across the front that tracked Snow’s medical history at Tanglewood.

According to the front of the file, Snow had been born October 16, 1970. His most recent visit was only a year ago.

The jacket slipped and hit the floor, spilling out subfolders. The one for MRI jumped out at him. Crouching down, flashlight clamped under his arm again, he pulled Snow’s films from his last visit. It was a brain scan like the one they were supposed to have done tonight. Mike held the film up to the flashlight, studying them with a technologist’s eye.

The enhanced axial pictures showed a dime-sized spot in Snow’s cerebellum, encircled in a ring of bright signal. The same mass showed up through all the different pictures.

A brain tumor?

Mike shoved the MRI aside and dug deeper into the jacket, traveling back in time. There were chest X-rays, skull X-rays, OR reports, blood tests, and a complete cardiac and neurological workup. More OR reports. Notes from Pediatric ICU attending physicians.

He glanced at the earliest of the dates: May 12, 1974.