I bundled Peppy into the Mustang and took off with a great squealing of rubber. I tried phoning Everard, but my call went to voice mail. He was in church or on a golf course. Or lying in on Sunday with some woman or man I hadn’t met.

At the hospital I sprinted across the lobby to the ICU elevators, skidding on my boot heels. Slow it down, take it easy: not good if I ended up in an emergency ward myself.

Tricia Polanco was waiting near the elevator when I got off. A woman in her late fifties, with hazel eyes, she was probably usually as calm and commanding as Heinz, but today she was frightened. Her face lightened when she saw me, which made me feel as though a yoke loaded down with steel buckets had been plopped onto my neck.

“What happened?”

“Sonia’s brother—at least a man who said he was her brother—he’s been calling every day. I recognized his voice from the phone. I took him back to see her. She’s been waking up more, been more alert all weekend, but she’s often belligerent, so when she said, ‘Not my brother,’ I thought she was . . . you know, the way she can get.”

“And then?” I prodded.

“I left them together. In about one minute, she flatlined. We ran in at once—the emergency-response team is there now, and our security team, but the brother disappeared. Hospitals—so many exits and stairwells—people can vanish in a blink.”

“What do you think he did—if he did do something?”

She shook her head. “Her IV lines are intact. We replaced all the bags, the saline and so on, just in case, you know, in case he . . .”

I nodded. “Good thinking.”

“We’ve sent them to the path lab. But honestly, I think he put a pillow over her head and . . . and held it. The bedclothes are disturbed, as if she’d been thrashing her legs, trying to fight—her arms are in restraints—light ones, you understand—to keep her from pulling out her lines. The response team is using defibrillators now, and they don’t need me for that, but I have to monitor how she’s doing.”

I trotted into the back with her, through the wide doors that hissed open and shut as we passed. When we got to Sonia’s room, it was packed with the emergency crew. It was impermissible for me to join the throng, but what would I have done anyway, besides peer anxiously over the professionals’ shoulders?

I stood in the hall listening to the sounds of controlled excitement. Not the shouts of a TV show, where someone is yelling “Clear!” and other characters are calling back, but urgent voices speaking too softly for me to understand.