have willingly left that photo behind. He reached for his holster and whirled around to the nurse who’d followed him. “She’s gone.”
Unconcerned, the young woman shrugged. “She was cleared to get dressed and leave.”
“She came by ambulance and didn’t have her purse,” he said. “She couldn’t have left on her own.” Not with no car and no money for a cab. At the very least, she would have had to call someone to pick her up. But then, why wouldn’t she have taken the ultrasound photo with her? “Did you see anyone come back here?”
Metal scraped against metal as another curtain was tugged back, its rings scraping along the rod. A little girl, propped against pillows in a bed, peered out at Blaine. “The monster came for her.”
His skin chilled as dread chased over him. “What monster?”
An older woman, probably the little girl’s mother, was sitting in a chair next to the bed. With a slight smile, she shook her head. “It wasn’t a monster. Just someone wearing a silly Halloween mask.”
“But it’s not Halloween,” the little girl said, as if she suspected her mother was lying and that the monster was very real.
Blaine was worried that the monster was real, too. “Was it a zombie mask that the person was wearing?”
The woman shrugged. “I don’t know.”
But the little girl’s already pale face grew even paler with fear as she slowly nodded. “It was a really creepy zombie. He was wearing a long black coat.”
Blaine’s dread spread the chill throughout him. He bit back a curse. One of the robbers had tracked her down at the hospital?
The woman shrugged again. “He put his fingers to his lips, so that we wouldn’t say anything. He was just playing a joke.”
Apparently the woman hadn’t seen any of the news coverage about the zombie robbers.
The nurse shook her head in vigorous denial of the little girl’s claim. “I didn’t see anyone dressed like that in this area, and the security guard wouldn’t have let him through the front doors.”
“What about the back doors?” he asked. “Could someone have come in another way?”
“Only employees can,” the nurse replied.
He doubted that employees had to go through a metal detector the way visitors had to. “Show me.”
The nurse stepped around the curtain to show Blaine another set of double doors on that end of the emergency department—just a few feet from where Maggie had been. If the robber had come through those doors, no one would have seen him but Maggie and apparently the little girl next to her. He wouldn’t have gone through security if he’d come in the employee entrance. The nurse had to swipe her ID card to open those doors. They swung into an empty corridor.
“How would someone get to the parking lot from here?” he asked.
With a sigh of exasperation, as if he was wasting her time, she turned left and continued down the corridor to a couple of single doors. “The locker rooms have doors to a back hallway that leads to the employee parking lot,” she said in anticipation of his next questions. “But it’s too soon for a shift change, so nobody’s back here now.”
But a noise emanated from behind one of the doors. A thump. And then a scream pierced the air. Blaine grabbed the nurse’s ID badge and swiped it through the lock. As he pushed open the door, shots rang out. A bullet struck him—in the vest over his heart. The force of it knocked him against the door and forced the breath from his lungs.
The nurse cried and ran back down the corridor. Then another scream rang out—from Maggie Jenkins. She had fallen to her knees. But the bank robber had a gloved hand in her hair, trying to pull her up—trying to drag her to that door at the back of the locker room—the door that would lead to the employee parking lot.
How did he know where to take her? How did he have the access badge to do it? He must either be an employee of the hospital or he knew an employee very well.
Ignoring the pain she must have been in from that hand in her hair, Maggie wriggled and reached as she continued to scream for help. But she didn’t wait for Blaine’s help. She tried to help herself. She grabbed at the benches between the rows of lockers and at the lockers, too, as she tried to prevent the robber from dragging her off. She flailed her arms and kicked, too, desperately trying to fight off her attacker. But then the gun barrel swung toward her face and she froze.
Was the robber just trying to scare her into cooperating? Or did he intend to kill her right here, in front of Blaine?
Maggie couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything but stare down the barrel of the gun that had been shoved in her face.
Agent Campbell had stepped inside the room, but then a shot had slammed him back against the door. Wasn’t he wearing his vest anymore? Was he hurt?
Or worse?
She wanted to look, but she was frozen with fear. Because she was about to be worse, too. With the barrel so close to her face, there was no way the bullet could miss her head. She was about to die.
In her peripheral vision, she was aware of the gloved finger pressing on the trigger. And she heard the shot. It exploded in the room, shattering the silence and deafening her. But she felt no pain. Neither did she fall. She still couldn’t move. Apparently she couldn’t feel, either.
But the gun moved away from her face. With a dull thud, it dropped to the floor. And the robber fell, too, backward over one of the benches in what appeared to be the employee locker room.
The robber had forced her to be quiet while they’d been in Emergency—because he’d kept the barrel of the gun tight against her belly. He would have killed her baby if she’d called out for help. But when he’d brought her to this locker room, he’d had to move the gun away to swipe the badge. And so, as the doors were closing behind them, she’d risked calling out.
But she hadn’t expected Agent Campbell to come to her aid again. He must have recovered from the shot that had knocked him back because now he started forward again, toward the robber. But he stopped to kick away the gun, and the robber vaulted to his feet. He picked up one of the benches and hurled it at the FBI agent. It knocked Blaine Campbell back—into Maggie.
She fell against the lockers, the back of her head striking the metal so hard that spots danced before her eyes. Her vision blurred. Then her legs, already shaking with her fear, folded under her, and she slid down to the floor.
While the bench had knocked over the agent, he hadn’t lost his grip on his gun. And he fired it again at the robber. The man flinched at the impact of the bullet. But like the agent, he must have worn a vest because the shot didn’t stop him. But he didn’t fight anymore. Instead he turned and ran.
“Stop!” the agent yelled.
But the man in the zombie mask didn’t listen, or at least he didn’t heed the command in Agent Campbell’s voice as everyone else had. He pushed open the back door with such force that metal clanged as
