Snow had first come to Tanglewood when he was three years old, the same age that Eli was now.

Mike flipped the page and struggled to decipher the individual’s writing.

Patient is status-post MVA, unresponsive at scene, acute neurological deficit…

MVA meant motor vehicle accident. The details were written in the initial triage report, either by a nurse or the EMT on the scene, along with a diagram showing the extent of the boy’s injuries. Snow’s mother had been the driver, her father the passenger, neither of them wearing seat belts, both killed on impact. Snow, the only one of them properly restrained, had arrived at Tanglewood in a state of deep unconsciousness.

Mike tracked his progress with his fingertip, scanning past pages of handwritten assessments made during the weeks that three-year-old Snow had languished in his bed, eating, breathing, and voiding his waste through a complex network of valves, tubes, and stopcocks.

As he read through the handwritten pages, one style of penmanship began to dominate with great sloping paragraphs of notes. The doctor’s comparatively tidy block letters became more of a hectic scrawl. At times the ballpoint had actually gouged little holes in the triplicate sheet where he’d been logging Snow’s progress. Other times, whoever was writing it seemed to begin a sentence and then stop midway through, slashing out entire thoughts with a single stroke.

Mike flipped another page and looked down at a rat’s nest of handwriting, nearly illegible now: Pt. worsening, febrile with diminished BP, recommend more aggressive treatment in light of steadily deteriorating mental status. Correlate with—

Mike flipped the page over, but there was no more.

Someone had removed it.

CHAPTER 34

34.

“Please…”

Calhoun heard the voice crying out on his way upstairs, just past the fifth-floor stairwell. It was little more than a stifled croak but it carried through the emptiness just the same.

“Help me.”

He froze on the landing, realization soaking through him in a crimson stain, and nudged the stairwell door aside and listened again.

“For God’s sake…someone, please…”

When he’d first heard the voice he had been on his way topside to gain access to the roof, having ruled out his only other option, which was the underground tunnel in the basement. There was no way he was going down into that long, dark tunnel—if Snow caught him in there he’d have no way out. The roof at least offered the comfort of starlight and relatively unobstructed terrain where he could wait out the rest of the night. And if worse came to worst, he could jump.

The voice cried: “Is anyone here?”