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After studying the sequence of characters, Gurney tried one way of grouping them, reading aloud, “‘To LDC thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’” He looked at Heather. “Do the initials ‘LDC’ mean anything to you? Or that number? Possibly as an amount of money?”

She shook her head.

“Suppose we grouped the opening letters differently: ‘Told C thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’”

She shook her head again.

“Maybe we should read the number as individual digits, like a zip code.”

“It still doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“It has to mean something,” said Kim. “Something he wanted you to know.”

It occurred to Gurney that the “message” might be nothing more than the product of a delirious brain; but it was clear that Heather and Kim wanted it to be important, and he wasn’t going to deflate that hope.

“May I take this with me?” he asked Heather.

She nodded. “I think Rick may have intended it for you.”

“I pray to God you get the bastard who shot him,” said Kim. Her eyes were welling with angry tears.

Her emotion led to a silence.

Finally Heather spoke up in a controlled voice. “Dell Beckert was here.”

“What did he want?” asked Gurney.

“At first? To pretend that he cared about Rick.”

“And then?”

“He wanted to know how many phones Rick had.”

Gurney had a sinking feeling. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him Rick had a department-issued BlackBerry, an iPhone, and our house phone.”

“Did he want to know anything else?”

“He asked if Rick had any contact with individuals from the Black Defense Alliance or from that other one, whatever it’s called. White Men for Black Justice? Their spokesman keeps popping up on those programs where everybody yells at each other. Cory Payne? I think that’s his name. He hates the police.”

“And you said?”

“I said Rick kept his police work to himself. Then Beckert told me the . . . the other shot . . .” She hesitated, glancing at Kim.

“It’s all right. Go ahead.”

“He told me the shot that hit John Steele came from an apartment linked to a BDA member. And the one that hit Rick may also have come from a house with a BDA link.”

Gurney paused, taking this in, before returning to an earlier point. “Those phones you told Beckert about—do you know which of them Rick used for the calls he made to me, or to the diner, or to the person who wanted to come to the meeting we were supposed to have?”

“None of them. Rick has a fourth phone I didn’t mention, an anonymous prepaid one he used for calls about the project he and John were working on.”

“Where’s that fourth phone now?”

“Rick keeps it hidden. All I know is that it never leaves our house. And that he’d never want Beckert to get hold of it.”

Gurney felt a sense of selfish relief. That hidden phone was the only hard evidence of his conversation with Loomis. As long as it remained hidden there was little chance of his being charged with failing to report that conversation. As he was wondering how well hidden it was, a short brown-skinned man in green hospital scrubs entered the room. A white plastic name tag identified him as P. W. Patel, MD.

“Mrs. Loomis?”

She turned toward him, her eyes full of fear.

“I don’t bring you any bad news,” he said in a softly accented voice. “I came only to tell you that in a few minutes we will take your husband to radiology for another brain-imaging procedure. The neurosurgeon has requested this. It is a normal request, not a cause for worry. If you and your companions wish to see the patient before he is taken to radiology, this must be done now. You understand?”

Heather nodded. “Can you tell if there’s been any change in his condition?”

“No change, but this is not bad. With TBI we must wait and see.”

“TBI?”

“Traumatic brain injury. We wait and monitor intracranial pressure. Because of damage to the temporal bone structure. Perhaps this will not be a problem, since the bullet did not perforate major brain areas. But we wait and watch.”

Heather nodded uncertainly. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Mrs. Loomis. Perhaps not too far away there can be good news. But now, if you wish to see your husband for a few minutes . . .”

“Yes, I understand.”

After he left the room, Madeleine asked Heather, “Do you want us to come with you?”

She blinked in confusion. “Yes. I don’t know. Yes, come.” She stood up and headed out of the room, seemingly unaware of banging her shin on the corner of a low coffee table.

They followed her—Kim, Madeleine, and Gurney in that order—into the corridor and past the nursing station, where the cop and the nurse’s aide had resumed their conversation. Behind the nursing station they came to a row of patient enclosures with sliding glass doors. At the center of each enclosure was a high-tech hospital bed surrounded by monitoring equipment.