Then, sometime in the middle of the night, she finally stirred. Her hand moved under the blanket, and it was like all those prayers of ours were answered in that one small motion.
And then another tiny motion—and her eyes slowly opened.
The nurses had said that I should stay calm and speak quietly if that happened. For the record, it was no easy feat.
I reached up and put a hand on her cheek until she seemed to know I was there.
“Nana, don’t try to say anything right now. Don’t try to argue either. There’s a tube in your throat to help you breathe.”
Her eyes started moving around, taking it all in, staring at my face.
“You collapsed at home. Remember?”
She nodded, but just barely. I think she smiled too, which felt huge.
“I’m going to ring for the nurse and see how soon we can get you off this machine,” I said. “Okay?” I reached for the call button, but when I looked back, her eyes had closed again. I had to check the monitor just to reassure myself she was only sleeping.
All the yellow, blue, and green lines were doing their thing, just fine.
“Okay, tomorrow morning, then,” I said, not because she could hear me but because I needed to say something.
I only hoped there would be a tomorrow morning.
Chapter 49
NANA WAS WIDE awake and off the ventilator by noon the following day. Her heart was enlarged and she was too weak to leave intensive care, but there was good reason to believe she’d be coming home again. I celebrated by sneaking the kids into the room for the quickest, quietest Cross family party ever.
The other hopeful news was on the work front. An FBI lawyer named Lynda Cole had established probable cause and gotten the Bureau back onto the property out in Virginia. By the time I reached Ned Mahoney on his cell, the FBI had a full Evidence Response Team on site.
Bree spelled me at the hospital—Aunt Tia would spell Bree later—and I drove out to Virginia in the afternoon to have another look around Blacksmith Farms.
Ned met me out front so he could walk me through with his creds. The primary area of interest was a small apartment out back. The access was an interior staircase from a three-bay parking garage underneath.
Inside, the place looked like a suite at the Hay-Adams. The furniture was all soft linens and upholstery, mostly in lighter tones. There was a decorative dropped ceiling over the dining area, and a highly polished walnut-manteled fireplace.
If you subtracted the techs in their tan cargos and blue ERT polo shirts, the place was pristine.
“It’s the bedroom that’s the puzzle,” Ned said. I followed him in through a set of curtained French doors. “No carpet, no knickknacks, no bedding, nothing,” he said, stating the obvious. Other than a bare bed, dresser, and two nightstands, it looked like someone had recently moved out.
“Prints and fibers came up with nothing. So we went to luminol.”
That explained the portable UV lamps set up in the room. Mahoney turned off the ceiling light and closed the door. “Go ahead, guys.”
Once they powered up, the whole room seemed to go radioactive. The walls, the floor, the furniture, all fluoresced bright blue. It was one of those occasions when my life actually did feel like an episode of CSI.
“Someone cleaned in here professionally,” Mahoney said. “And I don’t mean Merry Maids of Washington.”
One of the limitations with luminol is that although it can bring out traces of blood, it also responds to some of the things people use to get rid of blood, like household bleach. That’s what we were looking at. It was as if the room had been painted with Clorox.
This looked like a crime scene for sure. And maybe a murder scene.
Chapter 50
THE NEXT THING that happened, nobody saw coming. It was maybe half an hour later, and I was still on the case at Blacksmith Farms.
A rumble of conversation came from the apartment’s living room, and Ned and I went out to see what was going on. Several techies were gathered around a bearded guy on a short ladder near the door. He had the plastic cover of a smoke detector in one hand, with the exposed unit on the ceiling above him. That’s what everybody was staring at.
The tech reached up with a pencil and pointed at an innocuous plastic nub tucked into the circuitry. “I’m pretty sure it’s a camera. Fairly sophisticated.”