The Pregnant Witness. Lisa Childs
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in the van.
“Why did one of them come here?” she asked—the same question Blaine had been asking himself. “What do they want with me?”
That was another question Blaine had been asking himself. “Maybe you saw or heard something back at the bank,” he suggested, “something that might give away the identity of one of them?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t see any of their faces. They wore those horrible masks...” And she shuddered.
“What about their voices?”
“Only one of them spoke at the bank,” she said, “and I didn’t recognize his voice.”
Did the others not speak because she would have recognized one of their voices? And now he wondered about the father of her baby...
But wouldn’t she have recognized him despite the disguise? Wouldn’t she have recognized his build, his walk, any of his mannerisms? Or maybe she had but wasn’t about to implicate him and possibly herself.
Blaine waited, hoping that she would voluntarily admit to having been robbed before. But if she’d been about to confess to anything, she was interrupted when the hospital security chief approached.
The chief was a woman—probably in her fifties, with short gray hair and a no-nonsense attitude. Blaine had been impressed when he’d spoken with her earlier when she’d joined her security guards in the locker room. She was furious that someone had brought a gun into the hospital and nearly abducted one of the patients.
“Agent Campbell,” Mrs. Wright said. “As you requested, I have all the footage pulled up from the security cameras.”
“Thank you,” he said. “That was fast.” Hopefully one of those cameras had caught the robber without his hideous disguise. But Blaine hesitated again.
“The security room is this way,” Mrs. Wright said, making a gesture for him to follow her from the emergency department.
But he didn’t want to leave Maggie Jenkins alone and unprotected. “Do you have a guard that you can post here with Ms. Jenkins?”
Mrs. Wright nodded. “Of course. The police are here now, too. Sergeant Torreson is waiting in the security room to meet with you.”
He needed Sergeant Torreson posted by Maggie Jenkins’s bed, so that nobody could get to her. And so that she couldn’t get away before she finally and truthfully answered all his questions. “Is he the only officer?”
Because he really didn’t want to use one of the security guards—not when the zombie robber had to either be an employee or be close friends with an employee. He couldn’t trust anyone who worked for the hospital. Not a doctor, nurse or even a security guard...
Mrs. Wright gestured to where a young policeman stood near the nurse who’d brought Blaine back to the employee locker room. He wasn’t sure if the man was interrogating or flirting with her, so he waved him over to Maggie’s bedside. “I’m Agent Campbell.”
“Yes, sir,” the young man replied. “We’re aware you’re the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation into the bank robberies.”
Blaine studied the kid’s face, looking for the familiar signs of resentment from local law enforcement. But he detected nothing but respect. The tightness in his chest eased slightly. He had backup, and given how relentless the bank robbers were, he needed it.
Of course, he could have called in more agents. Immediately after the robbery, he’d checked in, and the Bureau chief had offered him more FBI resources. But Blaine had thought the bank robbers gone—the immediate threat over—until he’d come to the hospital and nearly lost the witness. But was Maggie a witness or an accomplice?
“Officer, this is Maggie Jenkins, the woman who was nearly abducted,” he introduced them. “I need you posted here to protect her until I come back.”
“I’ll be fine,” Maggie said. “I’ll be safe.” But her hands trembled as she splayed them across her belly again. She was either afraid or nervous. “I’ll be safe,” she repeated, as if trying to convince herself.
“We can’t be certain of that,” Blaine said. After all, the robbers kept returning...for her.
She slowly nodded in agreement, and tears welled now in her dark eyes. The tightness returned to his chest. But, growing up with three older and very dramatic sisters, he should have been immune to tears—especially since Maggie actually looked more frustrated than sad. But something about the young woman affected him and brought out his protective instincts.
But maybe the person he needed to protect when it came to Maggie Jenkins was himself.
“Be vigilant,” Blaine advised the young officer. “For some reason these guys keep coming after her.” And he intended to find out that reason. But he suspected he could learn more from the footage than he could Maggie Jenkins. She obviously wasn’t being forthcoming with him.
So he headed to the surveillance room. But his mind wasn’t on the footage he watched or on the police sergeant’s questions, either. The hospital was a busy one—with so many people coming and going that it wouldn’t be easy to determine which one might have walked in as himself and emerged as a zombie robber.
That was the only footage in which he could positively identify the person—as he burst through the back door and ran across the employee parking lot. But he kept the disguise on even as he jumped into an idling vehicle.
The sergeant cursed. “These guys—with those damn silly Halloween masks—have hit two banks in my jurisdiction.”
As the vehicle, another van, turned, the driver came into view of the camera. But they must have known that camera would be there because the driver wore one of those damn masks, too.
“I want you to review your employees,” Blaine told the hospital security chief. “Find out who wasn’t working today.”
“The hospital has hundreds of full-and part-time employees,” Mrs. Wright said. “That’ll take some time.”
“Your employees,” Blaine said. “I want you to focus on the security staff.” He was really glad that he hadn’t left Maggie Jenkins in the protection of one of the hospital guards.
“You think it’s one of my people?” Mrs. Wright asked—with all the resentment he usually confronted with local law enforcement.
He pointed toward the masked men. “They knew where the cameras are—they knew how to get a gun in and out. They were familiar with employee-only areas of the hospital.”
“But...” The woman’s argument sputtered out as she grimly accepted that he was right.
Blaine turned toward the police officer. “I’d like you to bring in more officers, Sergeant. And check out anyone on that footage who walked in carrying a bag or a suitcase—anything big enough to carry that disguise and a weapon.”
The woman sighed. “There is a metal detector at the front door.”
Blaine was well aware of that—since he’d had to have a security guard wave him through it. But he’d wanted the security chief to come on her own to the same realization that he had. It had to be one of her people. But that didn’t mean another robber hadn’t come through the front door—an injured one.
“It’ll still take me some time,” she said. “We have three shifts, and since we have some trouble with gangs in this area, we have several guards on staff.”
“Check out ex-staff, too,” Blaine suggested.
“I’ll help you,” the sergeant offered.
He wanted the robbers, as well. But he didn’t want them as badly as Blaine did. One of them had killed his friend and former mentor. Blaine couldn’t let them get away with that—with ending what should have been Sarge’s golden years way too soon.