Chapter Twenty-Six
City Hospital was not a place Carl liked visiting. He’d stopped liking the place when his mother died in one of its rooms when he was sixteen. She’d suffered a stroke three years earlier from which she’d never recovered. He shuddered at the memory of her last days as he rode the elevator up to the intensive care ward to visit Chief Inspector Rankin.
When Evelyn had rung Carl to tell him the chief had regained consciousness, and the doctors were conducting tests to determine how badly he’d been affected by the stroke, she’d asked him to drop in to the hospital on his way home.
Carl was worried by the severity of the stroke that had knocked down the chief. Thanks to his mother’s experience, he knew more than most people about strokes and their impact. She’d been paralys
