Davis nodded, his hand dropping firmly onto Julian Mercer’s shoulder. Mercer did not resist. He walked like a condemned man, his head down, his tailored dignity stripped down to the bare bone of an exposed thief.
Sterling turned to me, his expression softening into an exhaustion that seemed twenty years older than when he had stepped out of the elevator. He reached out and gently touched the wool blanket wrapped around Maya’s back.
"Mr. Vance," Sterling said quietly. "Your debit card charges have already been flagged for immediate voiding. Suite 412 is yours for the week, with our full house staff at your disposal. I am calling Dr. Halloway from the residential clinic right now to examine your daughter in this bed."
He stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him, leaving us inside the quiet, warm expanse of the room we had earned.
CHAPTER 4: What The Daylight Settled
The door clicked shut with a heavy brass thud, leaving the sitting room in sudden, unbroken quiet. The faint smell of toasted sourdough and Gabriel Ross’s citrus cologne still hung in the heated air, but the room itself was immense and still, insulated by thick plaster and triple-paned glass from the sleet rattling against the high cornices outside.
I carried Maya past the dining table where the half-eaten club sandwich remained on its bone china plate, moving straight into the bedroom. A king-sized bed stood centered against an upholstered wall, dressed in crisp white linen turned down with hotel precision. I laid her down gently in the center of the mattress. Her small body looked impossibly slight against the sea of down and pressed cotton. Her eyes stayed half-closed, her lashes wet with perspiration, her breathing shallow and raspy.
I knelt beside the frame and unlaced her tiny soaked boots. The leather was stiff from street salt and freezing slush, the fleece lining damp all the way through to her yellow cotton socks. I peeled the socks away, rubbed her cold, pale feet between my rough palms until friction brought the pink back into her skin, and stripped off her wet denim jacket. When I pulled the heavy wool duvet up to her collarbone, she let out a long, shuddering sigh and turned her hot cheek against the cool pillow.
A soft double tap sounded at the outer suite door.
I crossed the sitting room with my boots squeaking faintly against the parquet border. When I turned the brass knob, Officer Davis was standing in the corridor beside a short woman in her sixties wearing a wool cardigan over dark scrubs, a black leather medical satchel gripped in her right hand.
"Mr. Vance," Davis said, his voice dropped to a respectful murmur. "This is Dr. Halloway. The director asked her to come up immediately from the clinic wing."
"Come in," I said, stepping aside.
Dr. Halloway did not waste time with formal pleasantries. She set her bag on the nightstand beside Maya, unzipped the brass clasp, and washed her hands in the adjoining marble bath with hot water that steamed against the glass. She dried her hands on a clean towel, sat on the edge of the mattress, and warmed the diaphragm of her stethoscope against her palm before slipping it under Maya's cotton shirt.
"Take a quiet breath for me, little one," Dr. Halloway whispered, resting a gentle hand against Maya's temple.
Maya stirred, her brow furrowing, but the doctor’s touch was practiced and steady. For three minutes, the only sound in the bedroom was the click of the doctor’s instruments: the cold chime of the stethoscope, the soft digital beep of a temporal thermometer, and the rustle of sterile packaging.
"One hundred and two point four," Dr. Halloway said, looking up at me over half-moon glasses. "Her lungs are tight in the lower right lobe—an acute bronchial infection, exacerbated by two hours in the wet cold. It has not crossed into pneumonia, but another night without heat would have put her in an emergency room by morning."
She drew a calibrated dose of clear liquid antipyretic into an oral syringe, slid it gently between Maya’s lips, and stroked her throat until Maya swallowed with a sleepy grimace. Then the doctor set two amber prescription bottles, a blister pack of electrolyte tablets, and an inhaler beside the telephone.
"The fever will begin to break within forty minutes," Dr. Halloway told me, her voice firm and reassuring. "She needs four ounces of water every two hours, and I will be back at eight in the morning to check her chest sounds. Keep her under these blankets, Mr. Vance. The room is heated to seventy-two degrees. Let her sleep."
As Dr. Halloway packed her satchel, two men in dark civilian overcoats appeared in the open doorway of the sitting room behind Officer Davis. One was Director Sterling, his reading glasses back in his pocket, his face set in hard lines of controlled authority. Beside him stood a broad-shouldered man with a gold shield pinned to the breast pocket of his coat, a narrow legal pad tucked under his arm.
"Mr. Vance," Sterling said from the threshold of the bedroom. "This is Detective Miller from the Central Precinct. He needs five minutes of your time to take your formal statement while the facts are fresh."
I looked back at Maya. Her breathing had already begun to even out under the weight of the duvet, the raspy catch in her throat softening into a steady rhythm. I pulled the bedroom door almost closed, leaving a narrow crack of light across the floor, and stepped into the sitting room.