Murder on the Champ de Mars Read Online Free PDF Page B

if he helped her or a Gypsy.
    “The patient’s missing. There’s an alert!” Aimée pointed to the red alarm light above them. As she did so, a loud buzzing began to sound. Down the hallway, she heard Dr. Estienne shouting to the nurses.
    “Please be helpful, Monsieur,” Aimée said. “A simple yes or no will do.”
    The receptionist sucked in his breath, checked the log. “Only two discharges this evening. Inter-hospital.”
    “You mean they were headed to another hospital in the Assistance Publique system?”
    He nodded. “But her name’s not on either one.”
    “Then how could she have left the hospital within the last hour? Don’t you monitor patients?” Aimée glanced around. No video cameras, of course; why would they keep the technology up-to-date when they were shutting the hospital down next year?
    Nonplussed, the receptionist nodded. “
Bien sûr
. But it’s shift change, everyone’s updating charts, finishing paperwork.”
    “That’s your excuse?” Nicu pounded his fist on the desk.
    “Describe your mother, Nicu,” she said, trying to keep him calm. “Show the man a photo.”
    Nicu reached in his messenger bag and pulled out a photo ID, Drina Constantin’s permit to work in the markets. On it Aimée saw an unsmiling woman with deep-set eyes and a strong jaw, her greying hair pulled back. She looked to be in her fifties, but her birth date said she was forty-three. How she’d aged.
    “Have you seen her?”
    The receptionist shook his head.
    Aimée worked to keep her voice rational, free of accusation. “How could a terminally ill woman, presumably in a wheelchair or on a gurney, get by you?” she asked.
    “Wheelchairs and gurneys pass by here all the time,” he said. “We’ve had several transfers in the last hour, as I told you. And the lobby was crowded with departing visitors and families.”
    That set her thinking. Someone had probably taken advantage of the departing visitors and the shift change to move Drina. Yet Nicu and his uncle had been arguing outside the hospital entrance when Aimée arrived—they would have noticed Drina leaving, which narrowed the window during which she could have passed through.
    Her mind went back to the emergency exit behind the staircase. She thought of the dark, cave-like recesses in the hallways on either side. They’d be so easy to hide in for a short length of time.
    “Has an emergency-exit alarm been set off near Ward C?”
    The receptionist’s eyes grew wide.
    She needed to propel him into action. “Can you check with security?”
    “
Mais non
, no alarm’s gone off.”
    Suddenly she felt her post-pregnancy fog clear and her investigator’s instincts finally kick in. What if Drina wanted to tell Aimée who killed her father, and the killer had abductedDrina to shut her up? Perhaps she’d known the secret was dangerous, and that was why she had refused to tell Nicu the whole story. She hadn’t wanted to endanger her son.
    Aimée drew Nicu aside to the window by a potted palm tree.
    “How long were you out front talking to your uncle?” Aimée asked Nicu.
    “Five, ten minutes, if that,” he said. “I’d just arrived, so had he.”
    “So Drina disappeared between the time the doctor medicated her, an hour or so ago, and when we entered the ward.” She scanned the courtyard through the glass doors. “Would your uncle lie?”
    “Him? He lies for a living,” said Nicu.
    “I mean to you,” she said. “Could he have taken her and then pretended he’d just arrived? Would he throw a fit to deflect suspicion?”
    “My uncle’s a lot of things, but he’s no body snatcher,” said Nicu. “Tradition insists if we can’t bring the dying one back home, we bring the family to the dying one. You heard him.” His worn sneaker tapped on the linoleum. “We observe rituals, seek forgiveness for any wrongs committed. That’s why my uncle came. Maybe he wanted to settle something before she passed to the next life.”
    Sounded like