Page 60 of Gone Before Goodbye

She looks over at the anesthesiologist. “How long will the patient be out?” Maggie asks.

“An hour.”

Maggie nods, turns her attention back toward the scrub nurse. “Where is Doctor Brovski?”

“He left in the middle of the surgery.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Perhaps he is looking in on Mr. Ragoravich?”

Maggie doesn’t hesitate. She hurries out of the operating room and heads down the corridor. Post-op is the corner room. Maggie pulls up when she enters Oleg Ragoravich’s recovery room.

It’s empty.

That’s wrong. She looks for the attending nurse. Nope, not there either.

Where the hell is Oleg?

He should still be here. The plan was to keep him in the recovery room for the next few hours at the very least before moving him to his bedroom upstairs.

So where is he?

Doesn’t matter. Not right now. Right now, she wants to find Brovski and get her phone back. She wants to bring up the griefbot. She wants AI Marc to explain to her how the hell the twenty-four-year-old mistress of an oligarch has the exact same one-of-a-kind Serpent and Saint tattoo that he had.

This palace has workers everywhere, but suddenly Maggie can’t find one. She heads through the abandoned indoor pool area, which is dark and humid, which again reminds her of Marc’s tale about that humid New Orleans night. She still has on her scrubs. The heat from the pool is cloying. She rips off her lowered surgical mask and cap and tosses them in a bin.

When she exits by the other end of the pool, she’s back in the corridor Oleg had led her down when she arrived… wow, was that only yesterday?… when he showed her the locked Mona Lisa room.

The door to the Mona Lisa room is wide open.

Maggie half sprints toward it. When she turns the corner, she sees three identical paintings on the wall, except they are all oil paintings of wildflowers.

NoMona Lisas.

What the…?

No time to worry about it. She continues down the corridor. She passes the fake Gardner Museum pieces and notices that one, the Vermeer, is now missing.

Something is going on.

She isn’t sure what to do when she hears a bellow from above. “Doctor McCabe?”

Maggie spins. It’s Ivan Brovski.

“Where are you going?” he asks. “Why are you still in your scrubs?”

She moves back toward him and starts up the stairs. His face is set. She doesn’t like that. “I need my phone,” she says.

“You can’t have it. You were told as part of your employment there was to be no communication—”

“And I told you that I wasn’t communicating with anyone.”

Ivan Brovski stares her down. “Then why do you want it back so badly?”

“That’s not your concern.”

His voice becomes soft. “It’s not really him, you know.”