Page 78 of King’s Ransom

Phelps Hospital was only a mile from the cemetery.

It was a garden-variety regional hospital: a neat and tidy five-storey red-brick building.

When I arrived there with Bill, we were informed that Audrey had been rushed to Emergency and was already in surgery.

(They didn’t get many gunshot victims at Phelps Hospital, let alone an FBI agent who had been shot during a major incident, so Audrey was getting the royal treatment.)

I was very worried.

Gunshot wounds can be tricky.

If the bullet strikes a major organ, the wound can be fatal. Shots to the abdomen can also cause ruptures in the stomach wall, leading to sepsis and a painful death.

But then at other times—quite often, actually—the bullet can go right through the victim’s body and not hit anything vital, and the victim survives handily.

There was, of course, nothing Bill and I could do to help Audrey now, so we took seats in the waiting room of the emergency department and waited.

An hour passed.

I didn’t move from my plastic seat.

(I can do this: simply sit in a spot and wait. I don’t fidget or pace or scroll on my phone.)

I just sat there, staring, eating the occasional sultana that I absently lifted from my backpack.

Bill did move around some. At one point, he stepped away to call his daughter in Texas and at another to get us some drinks from the vending machine.

At first, I stared at the swinging doors leading to the surgical rooms of the ER, waiting for them to open and for a doctor to come out and tell us Audrey was okay.

Eventually, my attention was drawn to a television mounted up near the ceiling of the waiting room playing CNN.

The TV was showing scenes from the cemetery—images of the open grave with the wooden coffin inside it and the covered bodies of the three killers—but mainly shots of Aristo King, draped in his thermal blanket, surrounded by cops and FBI agents, sitting on the rear fender of the ambulance, bathed in flickering police lights.

Reports of his kidnapping and rescue, culminating in a dramatic shootout at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, had hit the news.

One hour became two.

Still no word about Audrey.

At some stage during that time, Heidi arrived at the hospital.

‘I booked us a couple of rooms at a motel near here,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I could only get two rooms, so you two’ll have to be roomies. The Feds might’ve flown us here on a private jet, but when it comes to accommodation, they told me we were on our own. Jerks. Here, little man’—she handed me a sandwich—‘eat something other than sultanas.’

‘Thanks, Heidi.’

With nothing else to do but wait, we watched the news coverage on the wall-mounted TV.

The day’s events had become the biggest story in the world.

After lots of early speculation about what had gone on at King’s penthouse—the CNN hosts talked over looping B-roll of King and the ambulance—eventually the media scored some interviews with people who had actually been there.

And so while I sat in the waiting room of the hospital, hoping for some news, any news, of my girlfriend’s condition, I saw Special Agent Trey Hooper—and to a lesser extent, Merritt Garrett—step in front of the cameras to inform the world about what had happened that day.

They spoke of solving complex riddles and desperately saving members of King’s family.

Of course, Hooper gave most of the credit to the FBI. (‘This is what the Bureau does and we’re pretty darn good at it.’)

The only detective he praised was Garrett: the brilliant private investigator who, after hanging from the side of the building to rescue Cassandra King, had solved the riddle that led to King’s location and had then single-handedly killed King’s three captors in a shootout in a graveyard, suffering a gunshot wound in the process. (This last solo act of bravery was bolstered by the testimony of Maria Dubrowski, the gardener who had witnessed the shootout and been interviewed by the FBI at the scene.)