“I didn’t ask,” Gregor said. “I just know. She didn’t see who hit her. But she does know who promised to sell her a forged green card. And that’s all we need.”
“You mean if we can’t get a murder charge to stick, we can go to the Feds and let them charge forgery and conspiracy and all that? That’ll get our murderer five years in Danbury and he’ll be out in eighteen months.”
“The Feds couldn’t make forgery and conspiracy stick,” Gregor said. “We’d have to get some physical evidence to go along with it. Carmencita Boaz’s unsupported word won’t do it, especially since Carmencita has a forged green card of her own, and our friend didn’t get it for her.”
“Then why does it matter if she knows who promised to sell her the green card? Why is that all we need?”
“Because we can use it.”
“For what?”
To be sure, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say it, because the doors had opened on the fifth floor and as soon as they had he could sense something off. Not wrong, not really. Not flagrantly out of place. Just off. He stepped out of the elevator car and looked around. They had ridden in the car with Hanukkah decorations again, but Gregor hadn’t paid attention to them. Now he saw the Christmas decorations around the elevator bank and decided to ignore those, too. Whatever was bothering him had nothing to do with any of that.
John Jackman stepped out of the car behind him and looked around.
“It seems quiet to me,” he said to Gregor.
Too quiet, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say that either, because it was too much like what one of the detectives in the mystery novels Bennis was always giving him would say. Instead he looked around and then down the short corridor to Five North proper. There was nobody and nothing to be seen. Even the nurses’ station seemed to be deserted.
“Where would your cop be, if he was where he was supposed to be?”
“Not here,” John Jackman said. “Too much could happen behind his back, and he’d bother too many people who have a right not to be bothered.”
“Where?”
“Down by Carmencita Boaz’s room.”
Gregor looked down the corridor again. “He isn’t there.”
John Jackman came to stand behind Gregor and looked, too. “Don’t panic,” he said. “He could be in Carmencita Boaz’s room.”
“That’s true. He could be in the bathroom.”
“If he goes to the bathroom, he’s supposed to get someone to take over while he’s gone. You know that. You’ve been on stakeouts.”
“On the kind of stakeouts I was assigned to,” Gregor said, “there was nobody to take over for us when we were gone and no place to go anyway. We used to carry these little plastic jars…”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” John Jackman said. “This doesn’t feel very good, does it?”
“No. But still—”
“Still?”
“Itzaak Blechmann is in the room with her,” Gregor said.
“Would that make a difference?”
Gregor didn’t know. He went a little farther down the corridor, being as quiet as he could, making no noise. He went past the door of the woman he had seen propped up in a chair earlier in the day. Her lights were out and she seemed to be asleep. He walked up to the edge of the nursing station and looked around.
It really was quiet. And empty. There was no sign of anything or anyone. He looked behind the nurses’ station counter and found nothing. He looked through the glass window in the door to the head nurse’s office and saw that the office was empty. What did I expect? he asked himself. Blood stains on the floor? Maybe that was exactly it.
Jackman came up behind him. “This is weird,” he whispered.
“There isn’t any need to whisper,” Gregor whispered back. “By now, anyone who isn’t asleep knows we’re on the ward.”
“Anyone who isn’t asleep or dead.”
“There should be at least one nurse somewhere on the floor,” Gregor said, “they can’t all have gone to the bathroom.”
“Maybe there’s just one nurse and she’s in with a patient. I think I’m going to go into Carmencita’s room now, Gregor. I think I have to.”
“Wait,” Gregor said.
For once, the “wait” had a substantive reason behind it, not just hunch and not just emotion. Gregor felt like he’d been saying “wait” now for hours, and always on the basis of some nebulous concept. But this was no nebulous concept. This was a leg.
“In the laundry bag,” Gregor said, pointing.