Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [122]
“I guess I’ll be going back to see Dr. Stryker first thing tomorrow morning, Damsel girl,” Brandon said, speaking to the dog, who had remained in the knee-well of his desk the entire time.
Having once been spoken to, Damsel stood up and stretched. “Out?” Brandon asked. Obligingly, Damsel headed for the door.
He had let the dog back in and had apprehensively checked the yard one last time when the phone rang. The sound of it electrified him. Late-night calls were usually bad news. Fighting a wave of panic, he leaped to answer. “Hello!”
“Dad?” Lani asked.
“Where are you?” he demanded, his voice fueled now by a rush of relief. “Are you all right?”
“I’m at the hospital in Sells, and yes, I’m fine.”
“Are you hurt? Is anyone else hurt?”
“Nobody’s hurt,” Lani answered, “but there’s a slight problem.”
“Don’t tell me! You wrecked your mother’s Buick!”
“It’s not wrecked,” Lani corrected. “But there’s a problem. Delia’s water broke while we were still at Ban Thak. Kath and I tried to get her to the hospital in time, but we didn’t make it. Gabriel Ortiz was born in the backseat. The car will have to be cleaned. It’s a mess.”
“What is it, Brandon?” Diana Ladd asked from behind her husband’s shoulder. “Is it Lani? Is she all right?”
Brandon Walker suddenly felt like laughing out loud. “She’s fine,” he said, handing her the phone. “Perfectly fine, but you may want to talk to her. It sounds like our daughter has been practicing medicine without a license and playing midwife—in the backseat of your Invicta.”
A phalanx of media people were ranged around the entrance of St. Mary’s Hospital when Brian arrived there. He had to shoulder his way through them in order to get inside. When he reached the ICU waiting room, PeeWee Segura was there.
“How’s it look?” Brian asked.
PeeWee shook his head. “Not good. From what I hear, the guy’s brain-dead. They’ll probably end up pulling the plug.”
“Shit!” Brian muttered. “Why wasn’t he on a suicide watch?”
“Not our job, Brian baby. Not our job.”
Brian glanced around the room. There were several different groups of people, each of them huddled in its own private hell of shared misery. “Anybody else here for LaGrange?”
“Nope. When it comes to next of kin, you and I are about it,” PeeWee said.
“What about Gayle Stryker? If Erik and Gayle Stryker were as close as he claimed, why isn’t she here?”
“Funny you should mention her,” PeeWee said. “She was on the news a little while ago.”
“Doing what?” Brian asked.
“Throwing poor old Erik to the wolves, saying how sorry she and Doc Stryker are that their employee could do such a terrible thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
“In other words, she’s doing damage control to pull Medicos’ reputation out of the fire.”
“You got it.”
The door at the far end of the waiting room opened. A bull-necked man in a T-shirt, cutoffs, and sandals burst into the room. He spoke briefly to the clerk at the reception desk, who nodded toward Brian and PeeWee. Leaving her, he hurried over to the two detectives.
“My name’s Ryan Doyle,” he said, holding out his hand. “Erik and I have been friends since grade school. Who are you?”
PeeWee and Brian produced their respective IDs. When he realized who they were, Ryan Doyle’s whole body was transformed. His fists knotted. His muscled neck bulged. His face reddened with anger. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed furiously. “You must be the ones who arrested him!”
“That’s right,” Brian said mildly. “We are.”
“Well, you’re dead wrong about Erik. Him hurt a little girl? Not ever. He wouldn’t do such a thing, never in a million years. I just heard about it tonight, on the news. We didn’t know anything about it—that he’d been arrested, nothing. Why the hell didn’t he call us? Brianna and I would have tried to help. We would have been