“What about making a case against Chaz regarding Bessie?” she asked after a few seconds.
“Maybe we’ll luck out and someone will remember seeing him on the floor that night. If so, we could connect the dots for the police and point them to him. Then he’d at least have some explaining to do.”
“That army of lawyers his daddy keeps will say otherwise.”
“There’s another potential charge that would make everyone, including those lawyers, look at him in a different light. Someone took a shot at Mark early last night-”
“A shot?”
“Yeah, with a hunting rifle. He skidded into a ditch, and Mark thinks it was Chaz’s work as well. Put a chink like that in his armor – it’s reckless endangerment at the very least, if not attempted murder – Daddy won’t be able to protect him. Maybe then we can tie him to Bessie, and ultimately Kelly.”
“It all sounds flimsy.”
“I know.”
“And if you can’t finger him for taking a shot at Mark?”
“We’re screwed, all the way back to square one. We’d have to get him another way, or go after someone new.”
She studied him for a few seconds, then seemed to realize she still held his drink. “Oh, how rude of me,” she said, and placed it in front of him. Reentering the kitchen, she stopped at the sink and began to wash her hands, allowing the water to run down her forearms and off her elbows.
Out of habit from scrubbing up, Earl thought. When distracted, he sometimes did the same.
“If you like, I can order some food, and we can reminisce the night away,” she called over her shoulder, actually sounding festive.
Jesus, he thought, starting to feel uncomfortable. Is she coming on to me? “I’m sorry, Melanie, but I only have time for the drink,” he said, attempting to extricate himself as painlessly as possible from any overture she’d just made. “I’ve a ton of e-mails waiting from my department, and will be hours dealing with them. You know how it is, everyone getting the urge to make decisions when the chief’s away, and then no end of sandbox spats.”
She reached for a towel. “You’re sure? There’s some terrific gourmet French I could have here in twenty minutes.”
“Sorry. But this hit the spot.” He picked up the drink, toasted her with it, and took three healthy swallows, enough to make her think he at least appreciated her bartending efforts. Nasty-tasting concoction.
Then he stood.
She walked over and took his hand. “You always were a stubborn man, Earl.” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. When he returned the gesture, she leaned in, her breasts brushing up against him.
She hasn’t changed a bit, he thought. Still making passes at any half-decent-looking guy.
Outside her building, walking toward the pedestrian overpass that crossed the southern tip of West Street, he figured he’d handled the visit smoothly enough. She hadn’t even asked whom he suspected of being Kelly’s lover. Always a lousy liar, he’d been apprehensive about putting on a show of ignorance.
He looked up behind him and saw her backlit like a tiny mannequin in her penthouse window. To the east, piercing as a phantom pain midst the glitter of lower Manhattan, loomed the area she’d screened off – the void where the Twin Towers once stood.
5:45 P.M.
Hampton Junction
Mark had shown Lucy a full menu of how the human body could fester and fail.
At Zackery Abrams’s she’d seen how pressure sores on a forty-year-old paraplegic could crack the skin along a thigh and open it to the bone. IVs, dressing changes, antibiotics, and painkillers simply held the fort. Skin grafts should have been next, but Zak wouldn’t leave his four-year-old daughter, Christina, in the care of a foster home. “Her mother was killed in the same crash that cost me the use of my legs,” he explained to Lucy, his wan face hardened against the sort of wound that no treatment could cure.
In Christina Halprin’s home the sixty-two-year-old woman explained how her heart was so feeble she could go into acute failure, her lungs filling with fluid, just from making love with Mel, her husband. Rejected as a transplant candidate, and already on every known cardiac medication, she insisted Mark prescribe enough diuretics in order that she could take an extra dose now and then, enough to see her through a special evening with Mel. “So far so good,” she told Lucy, her voice lowered and a soft flush spreading across her cheeks. “Think about it, honey. It’s the one moment when my damned body still feels wonderful. You always read about men going in the saddle. Why not me?”
Lucy got them back out on the highway, and they drove in silence for a while.
“It’s not bullets or bugs you’d be afraid of,” she said out of the blue after they’d gone a few miles.
“What do you mean?”
“Before, when we were talking about Médecins du Globe, it’s the having to settle you couldn’t stand, isn’t it? You couldn’t settle for what we do out there, could you?”
“Something like that.”
“I mean, the care you give these people in the middle of nowhere is awesome. And sophisticated. I bet it would kill you to stand by and let a single one of them die a day sooner or suffer a minute longer than they had to for want of medications or equipment.”
“Hey, I’m not some kind of keep-’em-breathing-at-all-costs nut.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just what you do here compared to what we did in the field. Christ, sometimes it was so primitive we were limited to providing little more than food, water, and simple hygiene.”
He said nothing, yet brought his breathing close to a halt, as if her words were about to cut close to a vital organ. The image of his father, a blackened form, the eyes still alive, crept out of the nightmare where he kept it buried. He immediately shoved it away.
“I mean, you really go all out, won’t – no, make that can’t settle for less.”
Again he said nothing, wishing she’d take the hint that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I meant it as a compliment,” she added, his silence obviously making her uneasy.
“Look, if they’re comfortable and want to stay home, and I can swing it, why not? All it takes is I make a nuisance of myself at Saratoga General, borrowing stuff, so don’t make too big a deal of it. Besides, I haven’t many cases like these, and the local medical profession isn’t comfortable about the ones I do. ‘Roper’s specials,’ the doctors in town call them. But they go along because they’d rather lend me what I need than have my Medicaid and Medicare bunch take beds away from their upscale, private-insurance crowd.” He hoped now she’d let it go.
“Well, I for one think it’s cool, and a hell of a lot more useful than having to watch someone die for want of ‘stuff’ as you call it. They haunt you forever, every lost one.”
He stared straight ahead.
She had him pegged, all right, and that left him uncomfortable. She must have heard what had happened to read him so well. He wasn’t used to feeling so exposed, yet he forced himself to meet her gaze.
The hint of sadness that he’d caught a glimpse of in her eyes last night had returned in force, and her face sagged into a bleak look of defeat. She’d been describing her own scars, not his.
“You’re right,” he said, relaxing a little. “When it comes to human misery, I’m a retail kind of guy, good at handling it case by case. But wholesale slaughter…” He shuddered, television images of sick, starving babies and children flooding into his head.
“It takes courage to know your limits, Mark.” Her voice became soft. “Believe me, I didn’t know mine when I went overseas. Waded in naive as a schoolgirl, then had no choice but to cope.”