The Overlook - Michael Connelly [60]
She closed the phone and Bosch hit the siren toggle.
“I said four minutes!” he yelled.
“Impress me!” she yelled back.
He pinned the accelerator again even though he didn’t need to. He was confident they would be first to the hospital. They were already past Silver Lake on the freeway and closing in on Hollywood. But the truth was that any time he could legitimately hit ninety on the Hollywood Freeway he took advantage. There were not many in the city who could say they had done that during daylight hours.
“Who is the victim?” Rachel shouted.
“No idea.”
They were silent for a long period. Bosch concentrated on the driving. And his thoughts. There were so many things that bothered him about the case. Soon he had to share them.
“How do you think they targeted him?” he said.
“What?” Walling replied, coming out of her own thoughts.
“Moby and El-Fayed. How’d they zero in on Stanley Kent?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if this is one of them at the hospital, we’ll get to ask.”
Bosch let some time go by. He was tired of yelling. But then he called over another question.
“Doesn’t it bother you that everything came out of that house?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The gun, the camera, the computer they used. Everything. There’s Coke in liter bottles in the pantry and they tied Alicia Kent up with the same snap ties she uses to hold her roses up in the backyard. Doesn’t that bother you? They had nothing but a knife and ski masks when they went through that door. Doesn’t that bother you at all about this case?”
“You have to remember, these people are resourceful. They teach them that in the camps. El-Fayed was trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. He in turn taught Nassar. They make do with what’s available. You could say that they took down the World Trade Center with a couple of airliners or a couple of box cutters. It’s all in how you look at it. More important than what tools they have is their relentlessness—something I am sure you can appreciate.”
Bosch was about to respond but they came up on the exit and he had to concentrate on weaving around the traffic on surface streets. In two minutes he finally killed the siren and pulled into the ambulance run at Queen of Angels.
Felton met them in the crowded emergency room and led the way to the treatment area, where there were six ER bays. A private security cop stood outside one of the curtained spaces and Bosch moved forward, showing his badge. After barely acknowledging the rent-a-cop he split the curtain and moved into the treatment bay.
Alone in the curtained space was the patient, a small, dark-haired man with brown skin lying beneath a spider web of tubes and wires extending from overhead medical machinery to his limbs, chest, mouth and nose. The hospital bed was encased in a clear, plastic tent. The man barely took up half the bed and somehow looked like a victim under attack by the apparatus around him.
His eyes were half-lidded and unmoving. Most of his body was exposed. Some sort of modesty towel had been taped over his genitals but his legs and torso were visible. The right side of his stomach and right hip were covered with blooms of thermal burns. His right hand exhibited the same burns—painful-looking red rings surrounding purplish wet eruptions in the skin. A clear gel had been spread over the burns but it didn’t look like it was helping.
“Where is everybody?” Bosch asked.
“Harry, don’t get close,” Walling warned. “He’s not conscious so let’s just back out and talk to the doctor before we do anything.”
Bosch pointed to the patient’s burns.
“Could this be from the cesium?” Bosch asked. “It can happen that fast?”
“From direct exposure in a concentrated amount, yeah. It depends on how long the exposure was. It looks like this guy was carrying the stuff in his pocket.”
“Does he look like Moby or El-Fayed?”
“No, he doesn’t look like either one of them. Come on.”
She stepped back through the curtain and Bosch followed. She ordered the security man to get the ER doctor who was treating the man. She flipped open her phone and pushed a single