_Wednesday, April 8

11:03 A.M.

_

"Who are you and how did you get in here?" Debra Connolly demanded backing away from the door and quickly settling her steel tray onto a table. Ally got the instant impression that Deb knew exactly who she was.

The woman's hair was an ash blond tint above dark roots and was clipped short in a curt style. Her troubled face had stress lines, and her heavy makeup reminded Ally of a younger Sylvia Miles or perhaps a particularly intense real estate agent, except that real estate agents don't charge in on you brandishing a Beretta.

"It's all been a lie," the woman declared her cigarette-fogged voice shrill. If she recognized Debra, it wasn't apparent.

Ellen hit a b.u.t.ton on the desk and spoke into the intercom. "Dr. Vee, could you please come to your office immediately. It's an emergency.

There's someone here who--"

"You're d.a.m.ned right it's an emergency," the woman barked at her.

"Hadn't you better give me the gun?" Debra asked, holding out her hand and stepping toward her.

The woman turned and trained the pistol on her. "Just back off, sister.

And keep out of this. I know you work for him but you're just a flunky."

"Then could you at least keep your voice down," Debra Connolly said, her composure hard as ice. The jab had bounced right off. Underneath the beauty pageant exterior she was all steel and sinew. "There are patients upstairs...."

The hapless security man who'd been trailing behind the woman had gone over to the positive-pressure door of the laboratory and was desperately banging on the gla.s.s and waving for Dr. Van de Vliet. A moment later, he strode out, still wearing his white lab jacket.

"You," the woman hissed, turning to meet him. "You're the one who has her. You and that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Bartlett."

"Madam, I must ask you to leave," he said warily as he came up to her.

"Immediately." He glanced down at the pistol. "Otherwise I'll have to call the police."

Although he was giving the impression that the woman was just an anonymous annoyance, Ally was sure she caught a glimmer of recognition, and a patina of poorly disguised panic, in his eyes.

"I want to see Kristen, d.a.m.n you. I want to know what you've done with her. To her. You and that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Winston Bartlett who got her into--"

"Kristen?" He seemed puzzled. Then he appeared to remember. "There was a patient here briefly a while back, who I believe was named--"

"Kristen Starr. That's right, you f.u.c.ker. And you d.a.m.ned well do remember her. And me. She's my daughter. Where is she?"

My G.o.d, Ally thought, could she mean that Kristen Starr, the one who had an interview show on cable. The world around this inst.i.tute just keeps getting smaller.

Ally had actually done an interior-design project for Kristen

Starr back when she was first getting up to speed at Citis.p.a.ce. It was one of her first jobs. At that time Kristen had just signed a two-year contract with E! and she wanted to renovate her co-op in Chelsea. But then just as the job was completed, she sold the place and moved to a brownstone in the West Village, or so she'd said. Ally didn't know why she had done it or where precisely she had moved to, but she got the impression some very rich new sugar daddy was setting her up and he wanted the privacy of a town house.

Could it be that Kristen was the mysterious missing patient Stone was trying to locate and interview? Ally hadn't seen her on TV for a while, so maybe she had moved on to other things.

"I really don't know where she is now," Van de Vliet said. "She became emotionally unstable in the middle of her treatment. It's a rarity but it has happened. She checked out. After that, I don't--"

"That's a d.a.m.ned lie," the woman declared. "I know it now. That's what your receptionists have been telling everybody. It sounded a little like her at first, but now I realize it's preposterous. She didn't just up and run off. You're keeping her somewhere. Where is she? Where's my only child?"

"Wherever she is, I can a.s.sure you she's most a.s.suredly not here," Van de Vliet intoned smoothly, even as his eyes struggled to stay calm.

"Would that she were. She wanted... a procedure done and I think we were having some success. But then she became traumatized for some reason best known to her and insisted on leaving. No one is forced to complete the regimen here against their will. As best I recall, someone said she went to a spa in New Mexico."

"I know that's what your flunkies have been telling me over the phone.

That she went to New Mexico to hide out. But now I know everybody lied to me. For the last three years she's been sleeping with that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Winston Bartlett, but now his office won't even return my phone calls.

You all think you're so smart, but I could smuggle a gun past your guards. In my bra!" Her eyes had acquired a further kind of wildness now as she awkwardly began opening her purse, hanging from a shoulder strap, with her left hand while still holding the pistol in her right.

"And I got a letter from her just this morning. The postmark is New York City. So--"

"What--" Van de Vliet's eyes began to blink rapidly.

"She's not in New Mexico now. If she ever was." The woman waved a small tan envelope at him. There was large, loopy writing on the outside.

"Could ... could I see that?" He started to reach for it, but she waved the black Beretta at him and shoved the letter back into her purse.

"No you can't. What you _can _do is tell me where the h.e.l.l you're keeping her. Now."

"Before we proceed any further, that gun really isn't necessary," Van de Vliet said as he reached and deftly seized her wrist. He was quick, and his quickness seemed to spook her, because just as he turned the pistol away, it discharged.

The round went astray, ricocheting off a metal lighting fixture at the end of the hallway and into the wall. The hapless, unarmed guard who'd followed her downstairs yelled and dived behind a large potted corn plant near the office door. Both Ellen O'Hara and Debra Connolly just stared, momentarily too stunned to move.

Ally stepped toward the woman, wanting to help Van de Vliet disarm her.

She was feeling her heart race dangerously upward.

Van de Vliet was still struggling with the woman when the Beretta discharged again. This time it was aimed downward, at the hard tile floor, and the ricochet was not so harmless. The round bounced back and caught the woman in the chest knocking her sideways. Van de Vliet unsuccessfully grabbed for her as she crumpled. Ally reached for her too, but by that time she was already on the floor. Ally pulled the hot pistol from her fingers, then turned and handed it to Ellen.

"Here. For G.o.d's sake, do something with this." She realized she had never actually held a real pistol before.

Blood was flowing across the floor as Van de Vliet and Debra Connolly began tearing open the woman's blouse. The bullet appeared to have entered her chest just below the rib cage, a jagged wound caused by the projectile's tumble and splattered shape, and then exited a few inches away, at her side. She had pa.s.sed out.

"Get a gurney now," he yelled to Ellen. "We've got to get her into OR one and try to do something about the bleeding."

My G.o.d, Ally marveled what desperation drove her to threaten him with a gun when she obviously didn't know the first thing about how to use it?

The woman's open purse was lying no more than two feet from where she had fallen. With the hallway rapidly filling as nurses from upstairs poured off the elevator, no one was paying any attention to anything but the prostrate woman.

Get the letter, Ally!

She gingerly moved over to where the purse was resting and peeked in.

There was a jumble of the usual things: cosmetics, a ballpoint, a change purse, an address book, and a billfold. There also was the tan envelope. Yes!

The scene in the hallway was increasingly chaotic. Two of the researchers from the laboratory had come out, in their sterile whites, with disinfectant and a roll of bandages. As they began to bind her wound to stanch the bleeding, her eyelids fluttered and she groaned.

"She's just in shock," Van de Vliet said with relief. "Ellen, page Michael and tell him to bring the ambulance around front. Just in case.

But I think we can handle this here."

Now two nurses were rolling a gurney off the elevator. While Van de Vliet and the two lab researchers lifted her onto it, Ally realized that n.o.body seemed to think that calling the police--about any of this-- would be a constructive step.