I felt vulnerable and exposed, with no underwear under a shabby hospital gown, only my smoky jacket keeping my breasts and buttocks from public view. I retreated into a chair behind a potted plant and watched until Murray was inside an elevator.

As I waited, Beth Blacksin from Global Entertainment went up to the reception desk and started gesticulating in indignation, pointing at the elevator. So Murray had scammed his way in. A hospital security guard joined Beth.

Hospitals have a million exits and stairwells. I left the coffee shop by the far end and went into the first stairwell I came to. One flight, and I felt as though I’d been sandbagged, my legs wobbling, my head dizzy. I leaned against the wall and drank some of my coffee. It was bitter—they hadn’t cleaned the machine heads anytime recently—but the caffeine steadied me.

A doctor came running down the stairs but paused when he saw me. “Do you belong here?”

I held out my wrist with my plastic patient tag looped above my gauze hands. “I got turned around when I went downstairs for coffee.”

He read my tag. “Your room is on the fifth floor. You’d better take an elevator. I’m not sure you should be up and about at all … Definitely not climbing five flights of stairs.”

He opened the door to the first floor and held it while I walked past him. “I can call for a wheelchair.”

“No, the nurses told me I needed to start walking. I’ll be okay.”

He was in a hurry and didn’t stay to argue with me. I looked at my tag. Sure enough, it had my room number on it. That was a mercy: I hadn’t bothered to check it when I left.

I found a secondary elevator bank and saw a sign for the hospital library. Carrying my coffee in my fingertips, I walked past the Orthopedic Outpatient Clinic and Respiratory Diseases and came to the library. To my relief, this was merely a room filled with donated books, mostly unread review copies with publicists’ letters still inside the front covers. No staff were present to question whether a person in heavy dark glasses and no underwear ought to be there.

I turned out the overhead lights and curled up in an armchair. Time to stop feeling sorry for myself and guilty about Sister Frankie. Time to think, to work.

The feds had been watching Sister Frances’s apartment and hadn’t intervened in the attack on her. Did that mean they wanted her dead or had they been out getting pizza and not noticed whoever threw the Molotov cocktails?