Vicious Grace Part 3

"What kind?" Ex asked.

Kim settled back into the couch, her brow breaking into half a dozen tiny lines. She waved vaguely with one hand, holding her fingers as if she had a cigarette between them. I wondered if she'd ever been a smoker.

"Little things," she said. "One of the recovery room techs was talking about people coming out of anesthetic saying words and phrases in languages they don't speak. And apparently there's been a huge upswing in walk-aways in the last year."

"Walk-aways?" Chogyi Jake said.

"Patients on the care floors go missing," Kim said. "Walk out on their own, AMA."

"Against medical advice," Aubrey said, antic.i.p.ating my next question.

"Any signs of riders?" Ex asked.

Kim's sigh was sharp.

"I can't find anything," she said carefully. "I used some of the things Eric taught me. The Mark of Kadashman-Enlil and de Lancre's candle meditation."

"De Lancre?" Chogyi Jake said, a little taken aback.

"What's de Lancre?" I asked.

"Seventeenth-century demonologist," Ex said. "Witchfinder. Burned a lot of women and Jews. He's not generally very well regarded."

"Be that as it may," Kim said, "I can't find anyone who seems like a good suspect. I won't say there aren't any riders in the hospital, but if there are I haven't found them. And I can't explain what I have seen."

"Meaning Oonis.h.i.+'s data," Aubrey said.

"Yes," said Chogyi Jake. "Could we actually see that recording?"

While Kim fished around in her purse, I went back to my bedroom to get my laptop. I had the master suite with my own bathroom and a king-sized bed and a window that would probably look better in the morning. Aubrey's bags were in there too, open and empty. I stopped for a few seconds to open the dresser and see his socks there beside my own. The little bits of cloth tangled together calmed me, and I went back into the living room feeling a little more grounded. Kim handed me a thumb drive, and I popped it in one of the laptop's USB ports. It took a minute to get the right application up, but then a huge window opened. We all crowded close to watch. The resolution sucked, but if I squinted, it was like seeing some old silent horror film. Count Orlok rising from his grave. The dream images went white, then flickered with strange things. An eye. A mouth. An oddly shaped hand. I felt a deep stillness in me, like they were things I recognized except for the bit where I didn't know what they were.

"Well," Aubrey said from just behind me, "the box looks like maybe an interment binding?"

"Symbolic burial," Chogyi Jake said with what sounded like agreement. "But if it's leaking like this, not a totally successful one. It could also be some kind of historical echo."

"What about that hand?" Ex said. "Did that seem familiar to anyone?"

"Couldn't tell much about it," Aubrey said. "It was pretty blurred."

"Could it have been a Masonic reference?" Kim asked.

"Maybe Daughters of the Nile," Ex said, but his voice carried a weight of skepticism.

The conversation dove into references and occult theory deeper than my personal bookshelf went. I detached myself from the group and headed for the kitchen. When they'd hashed it out, I'd get the FAQ version. That was how it usually went, and the scheme worked for me well.

There wasn't much. Eric hadn't stocked the place with anything that wouldn't last more or less indefinitely. Some canned beans. A few boxes of antiquated tea. The only thing in the cupboard was a box of Twinkies. None of it looked appealing. My cell phone said it was already after midnight. I'd woken up in Montana, and now, looking out over Lake Michigan as lightning arced over the water, I let myself feel a little tired. A hard gust of wind bowed the dark gla.s.s of the window, and in its dim reflection, the door opened behind me. Kim stepped in.

"Hey," I said, turning to her.

"Is there any tea water left?" she asked.

"Can be," I said, scooping the kettle off the stovetop. As I filled it, the tame water from the tap like a parody of the falling rain outside, Kim stood behind me, her arms crossed.

"How have you been?" she asked.

"Busy as h.e.l.l. You?"

Kim pushed a lock of hair back from her eyes and I lit the fire under the tea kettle.

"The same," she said. "Half the time I'm writing grants. I got on a good study with some guys I know over at UIC's public health department tracking Toxoplasma gondii strains. The data's not all in, but I think we're going to have some pretty good papers coming out of it. I'm linking the extent of behavior modification in the host with the virulence of the strain. The correlations are pretty nice."

"Sounds good," I said.

"It's kicking my a.s.s," Kim said. "And the politics get old fast. Everyone's jockeying for money and attention. And there's a more or less constant war between patient care and research at the hospital. I get tired."

"Yeah," I said.

"And . . . and it's good to see you again. All of you," she said. "There's really no one in Chicago I can talk to. I slipped a few times when I first came here. Said things about riders. I'm still paying for it. Getting to let my guard down is . . . it's nice."

It struck me harder than I'd expected. Standing there, her arms across her chest, her lips just slightly pinched, her shoulders tight and unmoving-this was Kim at rest. Unguarded. Relaxed. I wanted to ask if she was seeing anyone, but that was answer enough. I wondered how I would have met someone new, knowing all that I'd learned about the secrets of the world. Would I have brought them into the fight too or kept it secret or given up the attempt and accepted my own isolation? I could see it going any of those ways.

"How about you?" she asked. "What have you been doing?"

I ran down the past few months. Kim listened. The flow of words relaxed me, slowly. By the time I caught up to the present, I felt almost like we were just two old friends, catching up. And maybe gossiping a little.

"Does Ex have a little thing for you?" Kim asked.

"Um," I said, glancing at the door. Then, quietly, "A little one. I think it's little anyway. We don't make a big issue out of it. Is it obvious?"

"A little," Kim said. "Aubrey looks really good, though. It's nice to see him happy."

It was the olive branch I'd been unconsciously asking for. My chest felt warm and softer, and laughter I didn't expect bubbled up out of me.

"Christ, I'm glad you think so," I said. "I can never tell with him. It's like if I was driving him crazy, I think he'd act just the same. How would I know, you know?"

Her smile was pure sympathy, and she reached out to press her fingertips briefly against my arm.

"Makes you crazy, doesn't it?" she said. "About two years ago, I made the mistake of sleeping with a psychiatrist a few times. Whenever we had a disagreement, he'd start his active listening routine. Half the time I didn't know whether we were fighting."

The kettle made a soft plopping noise and steam began to wisp up from the spout. I turned off the fire.

"It's good seeing you too," I said.

"Good," she said, and grinned. When she did that, the extra weight looked a lot better on her.

We went back into the living room together. Ex, Chogyi Jake, and Aubrey were all busily talking over one another, each of them apparently keeping track of what the others had said and responding even as new points were being made. Their excitement spilled over into me as I sat down.

"Hey. Hey!" I shouted. Anything more gentle would have been whispering in a windstorm. "Have we figured anything out yet?"

The three men looked at one another.

"There's not enough here. We need more information," Ex said, as if he was delivering a challenge. "I'd like to examine the site."

Maybe my relief at having a little ice-breaking moment with Kim blinded me. Maybe I was tired and careless. Or maybe I was too comfortable being who I had always been, rus.h.i.+ng in again where angels feared. I didn't think. Didn't ask or even consider what the risks might be. I didn't feel a moment of apprehension or fear.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go."

FOUR.

Two hours with a strong cup of morning coffee, Google, and Wikipedia yielded this: When it was built in 1921, Grace Memorial was the second largest hospital in a city that was thick with them. Cook County Hospital was only a mile away, and Grace's redbrick towers and colonnaded walks, cathedral-style entrance, and ma.s.sive network of wards and offices were a response to the older hospital's preeminence. But the original buildings changed fast; almost as soon as Grace opened for business, the construction crews came in.

In 1929, the Bureau of Prohibition raided the hospital, recovering enough gin, rum, and beer to feed Chicago's speakeasies for a week. The men responsible for building the network of smuggler's tunnels and secret warehouses fled or were arrested, and the hospital itself almost didn't survive the scandal. All through the 1930s, Grace Memorial had a reputation as Chicago's hospital of last resort. A prost.i.tution ring ran out of it from 1936 to 1939. One whole wing was demolished as structurally unsound.

The Manhattan Project came to its rescue in 1942. While Fermi conducted the first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago, the Army Corps of Engineers quietly took control of Grace Memorial, retooling it for research on the effects of radiation. When, in 1946, that project ended, a new group stepped up with the stated intention of making Grace Memorial a functioning hospital again. President Truman himself signed the doc.u.ments that transferred control of the buildings away from the army. Over the next half decade, Grace Memorial became a cause celebre among the highest ranks of Chicagoan society. Mies van der Rohe and Declan Souder-the two great lights of Chicago architecture-competed for the chance to redesign it, with van der Rohe dropping out at the last minute to go work on the Farnsworth House.

In the 1970s, it entered into partners.h.i.+p with the University of Illinois at Chicago-one of the largest medical schools in the nation-and became a teaching and research hospital with the joint missions of serving the poor and supporting cutting-edge medical research. If that particular pairing sounded a little ominous to me, no one else seemed to blink. The worst scandal it had been involved with since then was a 1998 report about failures to conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Nothing online mentioned ominous dreams or boxes in dark earth. None of the graphics were of weirdly staring eyes or improbably jointed hands. I hadn't really expected the Internet to deliver all the answers, but there was nothing there to give me traction. My little spate of research did give me enough background to understand what I was looking at when, after a half-hour drive through the rain-scrubbed streets, we got there.

"Wow," I said. "Ugly."

Ex craned his neck as Aubrey drove us all past.

"It looks like ten other buildings that got in a car wreck," he said.

"It's worse inside," Kim said. "When I was interviewing for the job here, they asked how well I read maps. I thought it was a joke."

She was understating the case. After we stuck Kim's permit to the window and found a s.p.a.ce in faculty parking, she led us to her office. The public areas of the hospital were pleasant enough-well lit, with living plants and relatively humane paint jobs-but as soon as Kim used her key card to get us past the wide metal Authorized Personnel Only doors, things got weird. We pa.s.sed through two long, looping hallways to an elevator that said we were on the second floor even though we were still at street level. Then up three levels to floor 5-East (as opposed to 5-West, which was actually the floor below). Kim led us through two more sets of locked doors with bright orange biohazard markers on them, and we stepped into a cramped area wider than a hallway but too narrow to be a room where three desks huddled together. A black man with thinning white hair nodded to us as we pa.s.sed.

"This has got to be a joke," I said as Kim unlocked the final door. "Who designed this place, and where'd they put my cheese?"

"All hospitals are like this to some degree," Aubrey said. "My postgrad research was a collaboration with some MDs at the University of New Mexico. I always had to meet people at the front of the place and guide them in."

"I remember that," Kim said. "Grace is worse."

The office was too small for all of us to fit comfortably. There wasn't even s.p.a.ce to put down the backpack I used as a purse. A thin window had wedged itself in one corner, daylight spilling across one wall. Kim's computer hummed and whirred, a screen saver cycling through images that I a.s.sumed fit in with her work: X-rays of skulls, bright pink-and-white pictures of what might have been flesh, drawings of complex microorganisms with joke labels on them like "extra cheese" and "On the Internet, no one knows you're infectious." The air smelled of oil and old carpet.

"We do our actual lab workups down in Pathology or over on the UIC campus," Kim said as she dug through a small metal filing cabinet, "but the paperwork's all here."

"Who are you working with?" Aubrey asked.

"Alepski and Namkung," she said.

Aubrey crossed his arms and leaned against one wall.

"Didn't expect to hear those names again," he said.

"Namkung's the official lead, but she came here because Alepski and I were willing to sign on if the study was based out of Grace. They ask about you sometimes."

"And what do you tell them?" he said with a laugh in his voice.

"That you're traveling the world," Kim said. "They're comfortable with that. It's a good team. One of the nice things about working with them is that sometimes the residents will actually consult with me."

"Why wouldn't they?" Ex asked.

"I've got a PhD. Alepski and Namkung both went on to get MDs, and so I'm respectable by a.s.sociation," Kim said, as if that explained everything. When she stood up, she had a card in her hand. I caught a glimpse of an old picture of Aubrey on it and a silver magnetic strip. "I got guest researcher access for Aubrey on the strength of the papers we did together. It won't get you on the medical wards, but if you need to get in there, you can use it to sweet-talk the nursing staff."

"And the rest of us?" Chogyi Jake asked.

"Are limited to public areas or else going chaperoned," Kim said. "Or you can get a white coat, carry a clipboard, and scowl a lot. That's usually enough to keep anyone from bothering you."

"Security would be difficult with this many people," Chogyi Jake said.

"More than people, it's the different systems," Kim said. "On any given ward, you've got the nurses and technicians who work there, and the doctors who come in and out. And then the therapists. And the social work staff. And security and the physical plant guys. Janitorial. Kitchen staff. Compliance inspectors from the state and the fed. And the researchers like me. And the patients. And the families. And everyone answers to a different set of management, if they answer to anyone at all. Everyone has different methods for interacting with everyone else. It's a complex tissue. By and large, if you aren't keeping someone from doing their job, they don't much care whether you're there or not."

"So don't p.i.s.s off the security guys," Aubrey said as he clipped his new ID card to his belt. It was just a little square of plastic, but it made him look like he belonged there. It was such a small thing to be a disguise.

"That should be all right," I said. "We're just getting the lay of the land, right? Basic recon."

"Fair enough," Kim said. "Where did you want to start?"

"I a.s.sume there's a chaplain," Ex said. "Resident priest might have more of an idea of the spiritual state of play than the other staff."

"And is there a mental health service?" Chogyi Jake asked with his customary smile. "Possession can be mistaken for mental illness."

"There are three, actually," Kim said. "Adult, pediatric, and geriatric, but the psych wards are high privacy. They're strict about keeping patient information away from anyone but physicians and family. If we get someone specifically that we want to look at, I can try to talk to the attending. But even then it'll be tough."

"Maybe just the commissary, then," Chogyi Jake said. "Where the nurses and technicians would be likely to eat."

"Is there something you're looking for?" I asked.

He spread his hands in a gesture I took to mean anything interesting.

"I'd like to see Oonis.h.i.+'s lab," I said. "Dreamland. If that's where this thing is showing up, that seems like a good place to start."

"I'm fine with any of it," Aubrey said. "How do you want to do this? All stick together, or split up the party?"

The last questions were directed at me. All gazes s.h.i.+fted. While it was true that I was responsible for signing all the checks, I still hadn't quite gotten my head around being the boss. Moments like this one left me squirming inside, but I put my brave face on.

"Let's split up," I said. "Cover some ground. I figure the chaplain is going to be someone you can get to without going through restricted-access areas. The staff commissary, maybe not. So how about Ex tackles the priest, Aubrey and Chogyi Jake can go schmooze with the locals, and Kim can introduce me to Oonis.h.i.+. It's eight thirty now, so find out what you can, and we'll plan to meet up for lunch and compare notes."