much of anything, however. He was simply too sleepy, and too grief-stricken, as Mona herself ought to have been, but was not.
The investigation was entirely private, and it could not have been handled any better by anyone else.
They had begun last night in earnest an hour after Rowan had been found. Several times Pierce and Mona had returned to the hospital. They had been there again at sunrise. And then gone back to work. Ryan, Pierce, Mona and Lauren were the nucleus of the investigation. Randall and several of the others came and went. It was now some eighteen hours since they had commenced their phone calls, their faxes, their communications. It was getting on dusk, and Mona was lightheaded and hungry, but much too excited to think about either thing.
Someone would bring some supper in a little while, wouldn’t they? Or maybe they would go uptown. Mona didn’t want to leave the office. She figured the next piece of information would be from a Houston emergency room, where the mysterious man, six and a half feet tall, had had to seek some sort of medical help.
The Houston truck driver had been the most important link.
This was the man who had picked up Rowan yesterday afternoon. He had stopped in St. Martinville last night to tell the local police about the thin, crazed woman who had struck off on her own into the swamps. On account of him, they had found Rowan. He had been called, questioned further. He had described the place in Houston where she’d run up to his truck. He told all the things she said, how she was desperate to get to New Orleans. He confirmed that as of yesterday evening when he last saw her, Rowan had been right in the head. Crazed perhaps, but talking, walking, thinking. Then she had gone off alone into the swamps.
“That woman was in pain,” he’d told Mona on the phone this morning, recapitulating the entire tale. “She was hugging herself, you know, like a woman having cramps.”
Gerald Mayfair, still stunned and sick over the fact that Dr. Samuel Larkin had slipped away from his care and vanished, had gone with Shelby, Pierce’s big sister, and Patrick, Mona’s father, off to the swamp near St. Martinville to search the spot where Rowan had been found.
Rowan had been hemorrhaging, just like the others, though she was not dead. At twelve last night they had performed an emergency hysterectomy on the unconscious woman, with only Michael there—in tears—to consent. It was either that or she’d never make it till morning. Incomplete miscarriage. Other complications. “Look, we’re lucky she’s still breathing.”
And breathing she was.
Who knew what they might discover up there in the grass in that St. Martinville swamp park? It was Mona who had suggested this and was all for going herself. Patrick, her dad, was all sobered up now and determined to be of help. Ryan had wanted Mona to remain here with him. Mona couldn’t quite figure that one. Was Ryan worried about her?
But then when Ryan started to buzz her over the intercom every few minutes to ask her some minor question, or make some minor suggestion, she knew that he simply wanted her support. OK by her. She was there to give it. In between calls, she typed, she wrote, she recorded, she described.
The Houston office building had been discovered before noon.
It was only walking distance from where Rowan had appeared on the highway. Unoccupied except for the fifteenth floor, which had been leased to a man and a woman. The fifteenth floor was a grim scene. Rowan had been a prisoner. For long periods Rowan had been tied to a bed. The mattress was filthy with urine and feces, yet it had been laid with fresh sheets, and surrounded by flowers, some of which were still fresh. There was fresh food.
It was ghastly, all of it. There had been plenty of blood—not Rowan’s—in the bathroom. The man had been hurt there, obviously, maybe even knocked unconscious. Photographs of the bathroom had already come in. But the bloody footprints leading to the elevator, and out the front doors of the building, clearly indicated he had left on his own.
“Looks to me from this like he fell again in the elevator. See that. That’s blood all over the carpet. He’s weak, he’s hurt.”
Well, he had been then, but was he still hurt now?
They were canvassing every emergency room in the entire city. Every hospital, clinic, doctor’s office. They