He appeared to attack the nearby inn, setting fire to the Honda—he needed to dump it anyway. The police would concentrate on that, and assume the hotel was the target, while he hurried on foot to the hospital a quarter mile away.

They wouldn’t consider the hospital much of a threat and wouldn’t have added extra guards, he speculated, because there wasn’t any one particular area of concentration; patients and visitors and doctors were spread out over several large buildings, which had numerous exits.

No, the charming and not unattractive Ms. Kathryn Dance was clever but she’d surely miss that those oversize elevator cars in a hospital would be a perfect site for the panic game.

He now double-stepped down to the basement and peered out from the stairwell. He was in scrubs, true, but had no ID pinned to his breast so he had to be careful. The corridor, though, was empty. He stopped in the storeroom and collected a gallon container of a substance he’d found here earlier, on recon.

Diethyl ether.

Ether was a clear liquid, nowadays utilized as a solvent and cleanser but years ago it was used as an anesthetic. Famed dentist William T. G. Morton, of Boston, was the first to use inhaled ether to put patients under for medical procedures. The substance was soon praised as better than chloroform because there was a large gap between the recommended dosage and how much ether it would take to kill you—with chloroform, that window of safety was much smaller.

However, ether did have one disadvantage: Patients who were administered the drug occasionally caught fire. Sometimes they even exploded (he’d seen the remarkable pictures). Ether and oxygen or, even better, ether and nitrous oxide—laughing gas—could be as dangerous as dynamite.

Hence the chemical was relegated to other uses, like here—a solvent. But March had been delighted to find some during his reconnaissance.

March now made his way to the elevator room door. He opened it up and dumped some of the liquid on the floor of the elevator shaft pit, holding his breath (ether may occasionally have blown up patients but it was a very efficient anesthetic).

He tossed a match into the puddle and it ignited explosively. The liquid was perfect since it burned hot but without any smoke; this would delay the fire department’s arrival, since no automatic alarm would be activated. Meanwhile, though, the passengers would feel the heat rising from beneath them and smell the smoke from the Honda burning at the inn and be convinced the hospital was on fire and they were about to be roasted alive.

Now Dr. March walked casually down a corridor, head down, and took the exit to the hospital’s parking garage.

He pictured the people in the elevator car and reflected that they were in absolutely no physical danger from what he’d done. The smoke was faint, the fire would burn itself out in ten minutes, the car’s emergency brakes would not give out and send it plummeting to the ground.