Walk in the front door, like we’re there to visit a relative.
He felt her cringe.
Did you change your mind?
No.She took his arm, and they went through the oversized revolving door and into the main lobby.
Rachel moved along the wall, her gaze turned inward.
What are you doing?
I need to focus.Her urgency made him keep any furtherobservations to himself as he watched people come and go. At least nobody was paying them any attention.
He was still taking in the busy lobby when she spoke again.
The woman at the front desk is busy. Pick up the two visitors’ passes that a man and woman just left on the counter.
Jake blinked, looking toward the desk as a man and a woman walked away. While the clerk’s back was turned, he picked up the passes and kept his body angled away from the desk as he returned to Rachel. She clipped on her badge, and he did the same as she led him toward the elevator.
They’d come here to find Carter Frederick. And Jake was thinking that if the man was alive, he was in the emergency room, or being operated on. So why were they going up to one of the wards?
But Rachel had a head start on psychic talents, and she must be operating on some knowledge that he didn’t possess.
He sensed her excitement but couldn’t catch her thoughts.
In the confines of the elevator, he tried unsuccessfully to read her expression, before he asked,Rachel?
Her mind gave away nothing. Cryptically she only told him,Let’s see if I’m right.
He went along with her.
They got out on the third floor, and he followed her around a corner and down a hallway. When he saw uniformed police officers stationed outside a door, he wanted to run in the other direction, the way Carter Frederick had run, but he wasn’t going to leave Rachel.
“We’re expected,” she said to the officer.
“Names?”
“Rachel Gregory and Jake Harper.”
Jake stiffened as she gave their names. What was shedoing, leading them to the cops? But the officer only nodded and stepped aside.
Confused yet intrigued, Jake followed Rachel into the hospital room and stopped short when he saw a woman lying in the bed. Her head was wrapped in bandages, but when he stared at her face, he felt the shock of recognition. It was Evelyn Morgan.
In the chair beside her was Detective Paul Moynihan.
“You’re alive.” Jake gaped at the woman who had come to his office.
She looked like she had aged ten years since he’d seen her last.
“And very lucky. I was in a coma,” she said in a halting voice. “They didn’t think I would wake up, but I fooled them.”
“I see you got my message,” Moynihan said to Jake.
“Which message?”
“The one I left this morning on your voicemail and with your assistant--where I told you it was safe to come out of hiding.”
Jake nodded. He hadn’t gone near his voicemail or contacted his assistant, but he preferred not to explain how they’d arrived at the hospital.
