I scrabble for a pen and pull a black ball point out of the console as she begins.
“Search for a place with … with clinical air. Where worried souls bring their despair.” She hesitates, and I can hear her sniffling, fighting through tears. “Inside, you’ll find what’s meant to heal, instead will leave a wound to fill.”
Her voice fades, and I wait for her to continue, the pen hovering over the manila envelope. “Is that it? Is there more?”
“You have until one-thirty,” she says. “I have to go now.”
“No, Avery! Wait!”
But the line is already dead.
I stare through the windshield, gutted. I don’t look at the finger.What they’ve done to her is unthinkable. I can’t begin to imagine her pain. I wipe the tears from my eyes and tell myself to get it together. I can’t fall apart. Not when I have another fucking riddle to solve.
Chapter 22
GRANT
The automatic doors open with a pneumatic whoosh, and I’m hit with a cold wave of refrigerated air. The air is exactly why I’m walking into Mercy Hospital. It’s the first line in the latest riddle from hell.Search for a place with clinical air.Clinical, a doctor’s office or a medical facility.
A hospital.
What else can it be? There are over a dozen primary care and outpatient procedure offices located in Durango. Even with an entire day to blow, it would be hard to visit them all. With the time I have left—forty minutes now—it would be impossible. Surely Avery’s kidnappers know that, so it has to be the hospital. The logic tracks. Hospitals are full of worried people. Hospitals heal. And if a procedure goes wrong, well, that happens frequently, too.
I march across the beige-tiled lobby with streams of afternoon sunlight spilling through the skylights above. Pastel naturescapes hang on the walls. Horses in mid gallop with their manes streaming behind them. Flowered meadows and sunlit, rolling hills. They’re nothing but a distraction. The only image I can see is Avery’s severed finger. The only noise I can hear is her voice leaking through the phone in tangled sobs.
I will kill whoever is doing this, I think again.I swear it.
There’s a line at the reception desk. Of course, there is. But I don’t have time to wait, so I cut right to the front where a woman is in the middle of telling the receptionist how she isn’t sure how she’s going to be able to afford her husband’s treatment.
“We just switched our insurance and we’re having trouble getting them to—”
“Excuse me,” I say, interrupting her.
The receptionist, a woman with thick eyebrows and the underbite of a pug, looks my way.
“Sir, you’ll need to wait your turn.”
“I have an emergency.”
“A medical emergency?”
“Yes. Has anyone left anything with you?”
“What do mean?” she asks, her eyes narrowing in confusion.
“Has anyone been in here in the last few minutes? A big guy carrying an envelope? Or a kid? Anyone who might have left something for me?”
She frowns, about to respond when a finger taps my shoulder.
“I was here first. We were in the middle of a conversation, and you interrupted me.”
I don’t bother to look at the woman, just raise my hand in dismissal as I continue to interrogate the receptionist: “It would be an envelope or a package—something with my name on it. Can you please check for me really quick?”
Grumbles rise behind me. The receptionist rolls her eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Grant Wilson.”
She leans over and digs through her desk as the people in line mutter with voices loud enough to hear:
