Free Girl Undercover 4 & 5: Ariel & Financial Devil by Julia Derek Page B

an express train to Philly. I had already placed a call to Hutchkins’ mother to check that she was at home, which she was. Considering that she was on crutches, chances were she’d still be there two hours after I’d called. Hopefully alone.
    Martha Hutchkins lived in a house near the main train station, so it took me only twenty minutes to get there from the time I had left the train and found a cab. Her beige row house was situated in a shabby, low-income neighborhood where questionable characters hung on street corners, smoking cigarettes or panhandling. Making sure I had easy access to my gun that sat in its usual holster under my loose-fitting jacket, I made my way up to her front door and rang the doorbell. When no one came to open, I rang it again. And again and again. Finally, five minutes later, I gave up. The old woman was either not at home or couldn’t open the door. Another possibility was that she didn’t want to open it. She might be scared. Having seen the neighborhood she lived in, I couldn’t blame her. I walked to the sides of the door to see if I could spot her through one of the windows. I couldn’t see her anywhere despite getting good peeks through a couple of tall ones that were covered by the sheerest of white lace curtains. She must not be at home any longer. I sighed. Just my luck. Before leaving, I felt the door knob to check if it might be unlocked. Not so.
    Well, since I had already traveled all the way to Philadelphia, I might as well head to the hospital Hutchkins had taken her to and see if I could find someone who could verify that he had been there with his mother all night. It was no way near as smooth a solution as talking to the old woman, but it was better than nothing. As I kept searching for hospital workers, I’d keep calling Mrs. Hutchkins to see if she was back home and I could have a chat with her at last.
    I found another cab that took me to the emergency room at Pennsylvania Hospital. When I got out, I walked up to the long triage desk, grateful to see there weren’t many people in the waiting room at the moment. It shouldn’t take me too long to find someone who knew Mrs. Hutchkins and was aware what had happened to her. I would begin with the current triage nurse, a ruddy-faced woman with gray hair that reminded me of steel wool.
    “Excuse me,” I said as I went up to her desk. She was writing something on a pad and looked up, revealing eyes as steely gray as her hair.
    “Yes, how may I help you?” she asked in a voice that seemed too young for her face.
    “Hi, my name is Lisa Jones and I’m helping out a woman who was given X rays here for her ankle last week and put on crutches. Her name is Martha Hutchkins. She thinks she lost her wedding ring when she had her X rays taken. Her son thinks so too, but he lives in New York, so he sent me.”
    The woman behind the desk looked at me like I had a screw loose.
    “Why would she have lost her wedding ring if she had X rays taken for her leg? She would not be required to take off a ring for a lower extremity exposure.”
    This nurse was clearly no dummy. I was glad I hadn’t gone with the other option I had in mind—flashing my LAPD badge and telling her I was a detective with the Philly police department investigating a crime regarding Mrs. Hutchkins and her son. Surely, this woman would have asked to take a closer look at my badge and immediately noticed it was an LAPD one.
    I smiled understanding and shrugged. “Yes, I know that, but Mrs. Hutchkins is a bit of a psychosomatic. She’s convinced having any metal on her body while having X rays taken would be harmful for her, so she insisted on taking it off. And then she misplaced it and asked me to go over here and ask around if anyone has seen it.”
    “I haven’t heard anything about a wedding ring being found. What day was she here?”
    “Last Thursday. From around eight p.m. till around one in the morning.”
    “I was off that day. I can refer you to