I slept another hour, waking when the same doctor turned up to peer into my eyes again and make me do more mental arithmetic.
“Your friend the cop says you’re in a hurry to be released. That true?”
“You have many patients who aren’t?”
He laughed.
“Issue is where they go. Some don’t have anywhere, and others are afraid of a place worse than this. But I think you’re okay. Tell you what-it’s just after two now. You spend a couple of hours in the observation ward, and-if you stay stable-you can go home at five. The nurse there will explain what you need to do. Someone’s going to have to stay with you today and tonight, and to wake you up every couple of hours to make sure you’re still alert. Concussions can be tricky.”
“My wife and daughter will love that.”
“And you should consider talking to a counselor of some sort,” he added in a more somber tone. “Priest, therapist, whomever. You’ve had a difficult experience today. You want a recommendation?”
“No, thanks. There’s a family guy we go to sometimes. If I have a problem, I’ll call him.”
“Fair enough. Good luck to you, Mr. Wallace.”
An orderly came to fetch me ten minutes later, moving my bed to a room with a glass wall that looked out onto a nurse’s station. Claire and Kate were waiting for me. After the kisses and the tears, they wanted to know what had happened with Rashid. I asked Kate to summon Reggie and Joe from the waiting room, so they could hear the story at the same time. I was doing a good job of describing it all dispassionately until I got to the bodyguard handing Rashid the phone, and then I lost it. The nurse who’d carped at Reggie’s presence earlier was watching through the window. She pounced, insisting I was emotionally exhausted and threatening to hold me overnight unless everyone left immediately. I made Claire and Kate promise to head straight back to the Meridien with Joe, and not to go anywhere without protection. Neither protested.
True to the doctor’s word, the hospital began processing my release at five, but it was almost six by the time I’d finished all the paperwork. A cheerful orderly rolled me out the front door in the obligatory wheelchair and helped decant me into the front seat of Reggie’s waiting car.
“Better,” Reggie said, nodding approvingly as he scrutinized me. “You got some color back. Thought you might be done for when I first saw you this morning. You looked like fucking Casper.”
“Thanks, I guess. Any more news on Rashid?”
“Nope,” he said, pulling into traffic. The Meridien was only a few blocks away. “The guy with the phone came out of nowhere and disappeared into the same place. Hotel doesn’t have a camera on the street, and the doormen don’t remember seeing him. Feds didn’t get a hit on his picture. They’ll circulate it more widely, to Interpol and other international police forces, and wait to see what forensics on the bomb tell them. But right now it’s a mystery.”
“What about Staten Island?”
“I drove the area Vinny described with the search team this morning. That’s where I was when you were trying to get hold of me earlier. Whole lot of swampland and no cell service. Haven’t had any update yet, but I’m thinking it will take some time.”
“So, nothing and more nothing.”
His phone rang before he could respond. He answered it, his side of the conversation mainly grunts. I slumped in my seat for the rest of the short ride, staring out the window at Christmas lights. I was tired of being in the dark. It was past time for us to catch a break. Everybody made mistakes. We just had to figure out what mistakes the other side was making.
Claire and Kate fussed over me when I got back to the hotel room, insisting that I lie down on the couch while they pored over the home-care instructions I’d been given. Both seemed disappointed that Jell-O wasn’t mentioned, as they’d had the hotel kitchen make me an enormous tub of it. I finagled my way upright by observing that I couldn’t eat lying down and paid for my cleverness by being forced to slurp down a bowl of raspberry goop at the asymmetric breakfast table. The taste reminded me of having my tonsils out at age twelve. But it felt nice to be taken care of by them.
“So,” I said, setting my spoon down resolutely, “have we made any more progress?”
“A little,” Reggie answered. Joe had left to run errands, but Reggie was sprawled on the couch I’d vacated. “Picked up some interesting new information earlier today, although like everything else we learn, it’s hard to know what it means.”
“Tell us,” Claire said, reaching for my hand.
“I mentioned to Mark last night that I was going to take a stab at running down Munoz’s girlfriend. The detectives investigating his murder wanted to talk to her at the time, but they couldn’t locate her. Paid all her bills in cash, didn’t talk much to the neighbors, and no trail at DMV or with Immigration. Also, no match to the fingerprints they lifted from her apartment. They pegged her as an illegal flying under the radar. I figured maybe she’d been printed somewhere in the last seven years, so I had a tech I know run the fingerprints again. Still no luck. And then I started thinking about the hooker.”
He hesitated, glancing uncomfortably toward Kate.
“Hooker,” she said. “Prostitute. Whore. Call girl. Scarlet woman. Come on, Reggie. I’m seventeen.”
“Okay, okay,” he said holding his hands up defensively. “Sorry. According to the file, whoever killed Munoz wiped the room clean, but the crime-scene guys were able to lift a partial from Munoz’s belt buckle. Not enough to get a match but something they hoped to use as corroborating evidence in the event they turned up a suspect. I figured the technology might be better now, so I sent the partial from the file down to the same tech and asked if he could do anything with it. And lo and behold, he did a Rain Man for me. One look at the partial and he calls me and he says that it’s still no good for the database but that he recognizes it. There’s a loop or a whorl or whatever that’s exactly the same as one of the prints from the girlfriend.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
“Nope. Dead serious. This guy has a photographic memory for that sort of stuff. He estimates the odds at about a thousand to one that the girlfriend and the hooker are the same person.”
“Wait. You’re telling me it never occurred to the cops who investigated Munoz’s murder that the hooker and the girlfriend might be the same person?”
“Two biggest differences between good police work and bad police work,” Reggie said, shaking his head. “Doing your leg work and double-checking your assumptions. The guy behind the counter at the motel said the girl was a hooker, and the homicide dicks took his word for it. They must have figured he was an expert on hookers.”
“I don’t get it,” Kate objected. “Munoz sounds like a slick guy. Why would he take his girlfriend to a fleabag motel?”
Reggie looked embarrassed again. Claire intervened before Kate could get huffy.
“It’s okay, Reggie. Really.”
“Guys get turned on by all kinds of stuff,” he muttered. “Although if we’re right that the girlfriend set him up, the motel was probably her idea. She tells him she has this hot fantasy about being a streetwalker, and he hits the bait. It’s not a difficult scenario to imagine.”
Kate looked a little pink. It didn’t make me unhappy to learn that she was still naive about some things.
“You have a picture of the girlfriend that you can match up against the footage from the motel security camera?” I asked, breaking the awkward silence.
“Of the girlfriend, yes,” he said, reaching into his jacket. “Munoz had one in his desk at work. But nothing to match it to. Munoz registered for the room, and the girl kept her face turned away from the camera.”
He handed me a snapshot of a young woman in a bathing-suit top and cutoff jeans. She was wearing dark glasses and looked considerably younger than she had when I met her, but I recognized her immediately. The girlfriend was Theresa Roxas.