“One last file, Casper. That’s all I need.”
41
Abingdon Medical Center
Abingdon, Maryland
Most people hate hospitals. Waggs loved them. They reminded her of giving birth, and those very first days when her son, Vincent, was a little pink marshmallow, lying there on the nursing pillow as she’d gently tickle his toes to make sure he stayed awake during feedings. So much had gone wrong in Waggs’s life—what happened with her mom, plus her marriage, which, even then, was already sinking—but when that baby arrived, healthy, with no complications . . . for Waggs, it was the only thing that had ever gone exactly right. God, it’d been a lifetime since she felt like that.
“Welcome to Abingdon. Who you here to see?” asked the security guard, a seventy-year-old man with a cauliflower nose, skeptical hazel eyes, and 1950s horn-rimmed glasses that were so old, they’d come back in style. His name tag read Stan the Man.
“It ain’t a hard question, ma’am,” he added in a heavy Philly accent, already annoyed. “You here to see someone? Only two choices: doctor or patient?”
“I’m actually looking for . . .” Waggs pulled out Nola’s military ID photo. “Her name’s Nola Brown. She look familiar?”
“She looks miserable.”
“That’s her smile.”
Stan the Man laughed, warming up. On the corner of his desk was one of those day-by-day dog breed calendars. “You sound like a cop,” he told Waggs.
“Let me guess,” she replied, “you used to be one.”
“Thirty years in South Philly. In the bag,” Stan the Man added proudly, meaning he didn’t ride a desk. He was in uniform, on patrol, working the radio. “Dealing with actual people.”
Waggs smiled. Thirty years on patrol meant no promotion, which probably meant he was a wild one back in his youth. Sure enough, among the liver spots that dotted the old man’s knuckles were a fair share of old scars.
“Here’s some cheap advice: don’t leave. The real world sucks,” Stan the Man said. “Anyways, tell me who you’re on the job for. Because you smell like a fed.”
“You still got it, Stan the Man,” Waggs said, flashing her FBI badge.
“Now that’s a nice photo. You got a good smile.”
“I tell people that. No one believes me.”
“Oooh, a charmer, too? That’s my weakness. You got a boyfriend?”
Waggs hesitated for half a second.
“I’m joking,” he teased. “Tell me about Nola Brown . . . what’d she do?”
“Unclear. Apparently, she was here three weeks ago. I’m trying to figure who she was seeing. If she signed in, I assume that’s in your system?”
“Is this the twenty-first century? I used to have to knock on ten doors to get all we got in here. Let’s take a look . . .” he said, pecking slowly at his keyboard. Eventually, he hit Enter, squinting at the screen. “Yeah, I got her right here.”
42
“Ziggy, if I get fired for this, you’re taking over my house payments, my car payments. My Netflix, too. And Disney Plus.”
“You’re not getting fired. You’re doing your job,” Zig said, sitting there at the chaplain’s desk, the background classical music suddenly familiar, something that’d been in an American Express ad a few years back. He was locked on the laptop screen, no longer glancing out the window. If he had been, he might’ve spotted the car that was just pulling into the parking lot.
“Almost there,” Zig told Casper, adding check marks to various digital boxes, like he was placing an online restaurant order and picking toppings.