Chapter Seventeen
“I THOUGHTyour diagnostic superpowers were restricted to the ER, Dr. Hayes,” Deputy Tancredi said. She wiped at the shoulder of her uniform with a wet paper towel an apologetic nurse had run to the bathroom to get. “What made you pay special attention to this child?”
Did she sound suspicious? Tag couldn’t tell. He slouched down in the molded plastic chair in the hospital waiting room and stretched his legs out in front of him. His sneakers almost touched Tancredi’s polished police-issue boots.
“I don’t know,” he said. “They lived above me, and I heard them a lot? I was in a good mood one day and noticed she was worried? I thought I was going to hand over a packet of antibiotics and have that warm feeling of being a good guy.”
Tancredi sniffed the damp spot on her shoulder. “You save lives every day. Wasn’t that enough?”
He shrugged. “I guess? Deputy, I don’t know why I decided to stick my nose in. But I assure you I thought Ribka had bronchitis,maybewhooping cough from the unvaccinated suburbs. Not that he was….”
The sentence trailed off as Tag shrugged helplessly. It hadn’t taken long to confirm Tag’s diagnosis once they got the baby to the ER pediatrician, but the other questions around Ribka were still up in the air. All they had was Maria’s name, the fact that she disappeared rather than come to the hospital, and Tag’s account of what happened.
It was possible, although hopefully unlikely, that they thought he’d killed her and stolen the baby.
“Ribka,” Tancredi said as she sat down next to him. She pulled a notebook out of her pocket and unclipped a pen from it. “Is that his name?”
Tag shrugged again. “It’s what Maria called him,” he said. “It means little fish. I’ve never heard it used as a given name before, but it’s a common Ukranian nickname and I guess people have called their babies weirder things.”
“You know a lot of Ukrainian?”
“That and ‘where does it hurt,’” he said. “I’ve never had enough Ukrainian patients to make learning more a priority. Look, I don’t know what’s going on here. The only reason I got involved was because the kid was—”
“Do you know the name Ville Ritola?”
“No.”
“Nico Sebastiani never mentioned him to you?”
“Who—” Tag stopped midquestion as his brain tripped over the surname. He’d known Bass was only a nickname. That’s what they agreed on. It was just not something he expected to come up in the middle of a police interview. “Bass? No, he never did. It doesn’t ring a bell, anyhow. Why?”
Tancredi scribbled something and turned a page. “The girl in the apartment, Maria, she never mentioned Ville Ritola?”
“No. Why?”
“The apartment is in his name,” Tancredi said. “Maybe he’s the child’s father?”
“I never saw her with anyone,” Tag said. “But I work shifts, sometimes nights. It doesn’t make it easy to socialize with the neighbors.”
A quick smile creased Tancredi’s freckled face. “Tell me about it,” she said. “I think my neighbors think my partner lives there alone.”
“Maria never mentioned anyone else,” Tag said. “We didn’t talk much. I used to live in New York. It didn’t seem that odd.”
“Until today.”
“Well, yeah. When she implied this wasn’t actually her baby and then ran away, even in New York, that’d be considered a bit odd.” Tag scrambled up out of the chair and paced across the room. There was a shelf of small toys tucked in behind the door—a teddy bear and a couple of ragged-cornered board-game boxes.OperationandKerplunk.He wondered if anyone had ever actually cracked them open for a game while they waited for word on their baby. “What’s going on, Deputy? Maria…. Look, I don’t know what she did, or if she did anything, but she couldn’t have been older than nineteen. Whatever is going on, she’s probably in danger right now.”
“Probably,” Tancredi agreed. “And we are looking for her, but as far as we can tell, you’re the only person in that building who ever spoke to her. So if you want to help Maria, you need to talk to me.”
Tag clenched his hands at his sides and breathed through the urge to throw something. He knew the deputy was just doing her job, but it felt like a call to a computer helpline. Yes, he had turned his computer on and off. No, he hadn’t forgotten the time Maria talked about her mother who worked in the new Starbucks.
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Tag said. “Maria didn’t tell me anything. I think I did most of the talking, to try and convince her to let me bring the baby here.”
“The baby was sick,” Tancredi said. “Why wouldn’t she want to bring him here?”
“She said he couldn’t be sick, that they wouldn’t want him if he was sick,” Tag said for the sixth time. He understood the theory—make people say it often enough, and they’d eventually slip up and tell the truth—but he was still tired. Nervous. “And she said that if someone found out she’d asked for help, they’d kill her. So I suppose it was mostly that.”
“That didn’t alarm you? You were happy to still leave her with the baby while you went to get your phone?” Tancredi watched him as he paced back and forth, her dark eyes interested. “Weren’t you worried that she might hurt the baby rather than let him go to the hospital?”
