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M issy raced into her father’s room to find him in bed, in a completely different position than before. “What happened?”

“He was on the floor,” the doctor stated. “I don’t know if he had help getting there, but all his IV lines had been pulled out. I’m in the process of getting everything put back and straightened away.”

Just then came a loud groan from her father. She raced to his side. “Dad, Dad, wake up. Wake up, Dad.”

“Give him time,” the doctor noted. “He’d been in rough shape, and his recovery won’t be quite so fast.”

“As long as there is a recovery,” she stated, looking up at him.

He smiled. “I don’t see any reason why there wouldn’t be, but I can see that we’re definitely not out of the woods yet.”

She sighed but grabbed her father’s hand and gave him a gentle hug. “Any time you want to wake up, it’ll be really good to see you.”

Another half groan came, but he didn’t do anything more than that.

She watched, worried, as the doctor checked him over and worked to get his IVs reestablished. “Please don’t knock him back under again.”

“We’re only keeping him lightly sedated for the pain. When he’s ready to wake up, believe me that he’ll wake up, and nothing we’re giving him would stop that.”

“I just don’t know that he’ll wake up.”

“Everything is good here,” he shared. “He just needs time, and hopefully that’s all he needs.” The doctor looked around and asked, “Where did your partner go?”

“I have no idea,” she muttered, looking around for Trey. “I don’t know where he went.” She was filled with a sense of disquiet at the thought of his not being at her side, and yet she had no claim on him. She’d gotten used to Trey being here for her so steadily.

The doc added, “I did hear him muttering something about the cameras, so I imagine he’s off trying to get a hold of the security camera footage.”

She stared at him and then nodded. “I can see him doing that, and I knew about them, but it never even occurred to me.”

“It occurred to me, but that doesn’t mean anything right now,” he said, with a smile. “I’m a little on the busy side, but it would be great if we can see if anybody came here and disturbed Silas—even better if that didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe Silas heard something, or maybe he was lunging around in his sleep, thinking he needed to do something. Just no real way to know yet.”

“Right,” she muttered, hating the sense of despair that always seemed to take over whenever she considered her father’s condition.

“What is important,” the doc reminded her, “is that your dad is still fighting. He’s still here, and he needs every chance to wake up and to know that he can be just fine.”

“I hope to God you’re right,” she stated fervently.

“I’ll go check on the cameras myself now. You stay here and look after your father.” He stopped as he approached the door, then added, “What about this dog? Will he let me leave?”

She looked over to see Schooner, standing in the open doorway, staring at the doctor with a suspicious gaze. She walked over and placed a hand on Schooner’s shoulder. Immediately Schooner sat down and focused on Missy. “It’s okay now,” Missy said to the doctor. “You’ll be fine.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Maybe you should consider leaving him here on guard the next time you decide to step out for fresh air.”

It’s not that he said anything wrong, but the fact that she had stepped out made her feel horribly guilty. She groaned as she sat back down at her father’s side, Schooner right there with her. “I really need you to come back, Dad. You have no idea what craziness has been going on, and it’s getting worse. I really need you back. But here’s the thing. I don’t want any more of these crazy suspicions every time I turn around. I don’t know who to trust anymore, and just hearing the wrong word, the wrong sentence at the wrong time, makes me so mistrustful. I’m looking at everybody as if they could have done this to you, and yet that’s not fair. It quite possibly was nobody from here. I hate this, Dad. Please, please come back to me.”

She kept talking to her dad, pleading for him to come back to her, and finally, when she went silent, she moved over to her cot and sagged onto it, wondering just when this nightmare would be over. Of course, with that came the horrible thought that the answer to that was never. There was always the chance that her dad could remain in this vegetative state for the rest of his life.

And what would that do to her life?

Schooner came closer to give her a nudge with his wet nose. She hugged him, glad to have him here.

She tossed off that other thought. “It doesn’t matter, Dad. It does not matter. Schooner and I will always be here for you, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. You were there for me all these years, and I will be there for you no matter what,” she vowed, and, with that, she settled back onto her cot to wait.

Trey grabbed his phone and immediately called the sheriff, explaining what the issue was. “I’m here at the hospital in the security office, but they won’t let me see any of the camera feeds without some official request from you guys.”

“Of course not,” the sheriff replied smoothly. “There are all kinds of privacy laws.”

“Maybe, but Silas was attacked in his hospital room while we were out having coffee, and it’s still fresh, still in the camera feed. We need to see it.”

After a moment of hesitation, the sheriff said, “I’ll get right back to you.” With that, he ended the call.

Trey turned to look at the hospital’s IT team, still sitting at the monitors, waiting to hear how it would go. “He’ll get back to me,” he explained in frustration.

At that, the younger man nodded. “That’s pretty typical. He’s got to go through the hospital board first.”

“That’s ridiculous. So, in the meantime, this guy’s getting away.”

The other man didn’t say anything.

Trey asked, “What about your own security procedures? Do you not focus on things like that, strangers moving patients, and send out security to pick up these people?”

The two men looked at each other and didn’t say anything.

Frustrated beyond belief, Trey pinched the bridge of his nose. Then, with a brainstorm of an idea, he immediately stepped out of the security room and called Badger. Within seconds, he explained what was going on and the stumbling block he was up against.

“Of course. Give me a second.” And, with that, Badger ended the call.

Trey groaned as he stared down the hallway to see the doctor who’d been working on Silas coming toward him.

“No luck?” the doctor asked sympathetically.

“No, apparently not,” he snapped, glaring. “Everybody’s more concerned about privacy than the lawsuit that’ll come out of this.”

At the word lawsuit , the doc’s eyebrows raised, and he pondered it. “I guess in this case, there would be some justification for it, wouldn’t there?”

“Absolutely there would be.” Trey snarled and then shook his head. “Sorry, Doc. I’m not angry at you. It’s the damn red-tape bureaucracy.” However, the words had barely come out of his mouth when the door to the security room opened.

The older of the two men motioned them to come in. “We have clearance.” With an odd expression on his face, he told Trey, “You have some friends high up in the federal government.”

Trey didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and immediately stepped into the room. “What do you have?”

“What we have is somebody tall and slim entering, but he’s hiding his face,” the tech noted. He quickly led Trey through the few minutes of footage they had gone through. It’s almost as if, as soon as Trey and Missy shut the door on Silas’s hospital room and entered the elevator, somebody opened up a door to the stairs nearby, then stepped out and walked straight to Silas’s room.

“So, they already knew where he was,” Trey muttered to no one in particular.

The men just nodded and then pointed. “Watch.”

The man, if it was a man, walked into the room and within minutes was back out again. He quickly returned to the stairs again.

“So, you see,” the IT guy shared, “it’s not as if we had anything to offer.”

“Yes, you absolutely did because you should follow this trail all the way back outside again.”

The younger man was working on that, just as Trey suggested it. “He goes to here, and then we lose him.”

“No, you didn’t lose him. He’s taken off the disguise.”

“What disguise?” the older man asked.

“That’s a wig,” Trey declared, immediately pointing to the same slender build he noticed on the guy in the hallway, “and he was wearing a white lab coat. So now we’re looking for anybody in this time frame who is tall and slender but walks out of the hospital without the wig and the lab coat.” It didn’t take them long, and they quickly had somebody going out a side door, moving at a rapid pace.

Trey froze the frame, while they assessed what they were looking at.

“It’s pretty-damn hard to see who it is though,” the older of the two IT men noted, as he studied it.

“Maybe, but we also know that’s who it is now. Do you have cameras out in the parking lot?”

“No,” the older man said, sliding his gaze away. “After the budget cuts happened, that one went down, and it was just one of those things that never got fixed again.”

“Of course it was,” Trey grumbled, staring at him and shaking his head. “How about now? What do you think about the need for that camera now? Do you think it’s worth having a security camera?”

The doctor reached out and gave Trey’s shoulder a squeeze, making him realize that, once again, he was attacking the wrong people.

“Sorry,” Trey muttered. “I know you don’t run the budgets, and you probably would do them in a very different way if you did.” Trey shook his head. “It’s just incredibly frustrating to think that somebody walked into the hospital, attacked a patient, walked back out without his disguise, got in a vehicle, and left, while you guys had no idea.”

The two men stared at each other for a long moment.

“Look,” Trey began. “Can you give me any details off that footage? Can you get me the height of him or any side feature, anything at all?”

They went through the films a couple more times, and Trey grabbed a couple images, a little bit of a profile on the one. Armed with those images, he headed down to the rear parking lot, looking for anything that might be helpful.

He knew that the chances of the guy being around were more than a long shot and was nothing to hope for. The stranger had done what he’d intended to do, and now he was leaving, but, if Trey could at least figure out where the wig and lab coat had disappeared to, they might get DNA, which should at least help get them some evidence. But, of course, that was a long shot too.

He went to Silas’s room, grabbed Schooner, and started to check every garbage can on the way. He walked past several cans, but nothing was here at the parking lot, or, even if there was, he couldn’t see it. Swearing and pissed off at the entire scenario, he called Badger back. “I’m out in the parking lot, but there is absolutely nothing. This guy just slipped in, did this thing, and slipped out again.”

“The disguise has to be somewhere. If he’s smart, he took it away with him. Yet, if he’s not so smart, then it’ll be somewhere nearby.”

“I was hoping he would have just ditched it, and that would have been a lead in terms of finding out who and what,” Trey muttered, “but I didn’t find a thing. I did see on the video that he took a bag outside with him, so it’s quite possible he’s got his disguise, but it’s also quite possible he dumped it somewhere else.”

“I’ll contact the sheriff and let him know to look out for a bag holding a wig and a lab coat.”

“Yeah, you do that. I still highly doubt the sheriff will do anything to help me.”

“I don’t know about that,” Badger argued. “Their hands are often tied in this scenario. They can’t piss off the hospital too much, even though I’m sure he would go running in there, guns blazing, just to look like the big hero. Still, in these cases, there just is no hero.”

“I’m beginning to realize that.” Trey groaned. “I don’t think I can do law enforcement.”

“Are you sure?” Badger asked. “You would be really good at it.”

He snorted. “I haven’t got a new career choice figured out yet, but I can’t really say that being a cop will be at the top of my list.”

“You might change your mind by the time this is over. That’s how change happens, when people want something better, and they have to create it themselves.”

“Okay, enough of the sales pitch,” he muttered. “Is this what you end up doing? Get everybody retrained?”

“As you said, you’re not sure what you’ll do next. We try to help. Besides, have you thought about staying over there?”

“I’ve thought about it,” he admitted. “I was also thinking about coming back to New Mexico.”

“ Hmm , not sure that’ll happen,” Badger said with a laugh.

“Why is that?” Trey asked, puzzled. “It’s nice over there.”

“Sure is, that’s why we settled here,” he confirmed.

“ Nah , you settled there because of Kat.”

Badger burst out laughing. “You’ve got that right, and I suspect you’ll stay where you are for the exact same reason.” And, with that, he ended the call.

Trey stared down at his phone in confusion.