After leaving Anya’s he’d gone back to his father’s place and doused himself with a mosquito repellent spray he’d found on a shelf with the tennis racquets and balls. Then he’d walked around some to clear his head and get the lay of the land. Here it was 9:30 and no one was out. This was good. An occasional car drove by but he’d duck into the bushes as soon as he saw its lights. One set of lights had turned out to be a cruising security patrol jeep.

A couple of times he’d stayed in the bushes longer than he had to because of the faint feeling that he was being watched. He couldn’t find a trace of anyone following him, though, and wrote it off to his being on unfamiliar ground.

He’d approached the clinic building from the rear, where there was less light, and held his breath as he lifted the window, ready to run in case it was armed with an alarm system he hadn’t spotted. But nothing sounded.

Made sense when he thought about it. Why spring for the extra expense of alarming all the buildings when you had a real live security force manning the gates and patrolling the streets?

He crawled through, closed the window behind him, and began searching about. He used the penlight he’d found in his father’s top drawer, flicking it on and off as he moved. He found the small file room to the right of the receptionist area. He’d been hoping it would be windowless, but it wasn’t, so he had to search the files with his penlight.

Again that feeling of being watched, but he was the only one here. He sneaked to the window but saw no one outside.

A few minutes later he found his father’s slim chart. Holding it in his hand, he hesitated before opening it. What was the bad news Dr. Harris had been hiding? He knew the question—did he want the answer?

Again, the matter of his father’s privacy. The information inside could be pretty intimate. Did he have a right to peek this far into the man’s life?

Probably not. But the guy was in a coma, and Jack needed answers.

Taking a breath, he opened the file and flipped through it. He found two pages of lab test results. He didn’t know what all these numbers meant but noted that the “Abnormal” column was blank on both sheets. Good enough. An EKG had a typewritten reading at its top: “Normal resting EKG.” Even better.

But hadn’t Dr. Huerta said something about his father developing an abnormal rhythm in the hospital? Maybe from the stress of the injuries. Everyone had heard of the patient with the normal EKG who has a heart attack on the way out of the doctor’s office.