by Lee Goldberg
"It's so good to see you," she said. "Nobody told me you'd regained consciousness."
"I'm sorry," Emily said. "That's my fault. You were going through so much yesterday, I didn't want to intrude."
"I sat here alone, crying. I would have welcomed any intrusion at all."
"But you sent us all away," Emily said. "You said you wanted to be left alone."
"Dumb move on my part," Susan said.
Mark took a big step back from her and looked her over.
"You're pregnant," he said in astonishment.
"How did you notice?" She smiled and motioned them inside. "Sometimes I feel like all I am is a belly with legs and blond hair."
The house was decorated with an eclectic mix of comfortable-looking furniture in traditional styles and of varying ages. None of the pieces matched, which indicated to Mark that the couple had bought each item one by one, getting what they needed when they could afford it.
"I had no idea," he said, shaking his head and looking at her belly again.
Her smile waned as she realized he wasn't joking. "You were the first person we told."
He nodded, reading her expression. "The blow to my head has caused some amnesia. I don't remember anything that's happened for the last two years."
Susan gasped, glanced at Emily, then looked back to Mark. "Not even your wife?"
"We're working on that," Mark said.
"I hope so," Susan said, waddling over to an easy chair and taking a seat.
"So do I," Emily said.
"In the meantime, I'm working on something more immediate," Mark said as he and Emily sat down on the couch opposite Susan. "I'm going to find Jesse's killer."
Susan swallowed hard. "I'd prefer that Steve did that."
Mark furrowed his brow. "You know what I can do. If you've lost confidence in me because of my injury, I can assure you that although I've misplaced a few years, I'm still as sharp mentally as before and—"
Susan held up her hand, stopping him. "I haven't lost any confidence in you, Mark. You're probably the best detective in the country."
"Then I don't understand."
"You don't carry a gun," Susan said.
"I'll watch out for myself," he said.
"No, I'll watch out for you," Emily said.
"I want Steve to catch him," Susan said. "And I want the miserable sonofabitch to try to escape. Steve will kill him. You won't."
"I know how you feel, Susan. But I don't believe in revenge and neither does Steve. We both want justice."
"Call it what you want, revenge or justice, just as long as ends up with Jesse's killer planted in the ground."
Mark wasn't going to argue with her. There was no point. Her anger and pain were justified. She was a pregnant widow whose husband had been murdered while saving the life of another man.
"I didn't come here to upset you," Mark said. "I want to tell you how sorry I am about Jesse and that I won't rest until his killer is caught. You know how much he meant to me."
"I know what you meant to him," Susan said. "All he wanted was your love and respect, to be a part of your family."
"He had all of that. So do you. You are family, Susan. So is your baby. My home—" Mark glanced at Emily. "Our home is your home."
"Then I need to ask you something." Susan took Mark's hand and put it on her swollen belly. "It's a boy. His name was going to be Mark. That's what Jesse and I both decided. But after—after what happened to his father, I'd like to name him Jesse. Do you think that's wrong?"
Mark shook his head. "It's wonderful."
"But it's not what Jesse wanted." Susan looked at Emily. "What do you think?"
Emily smiled. "I think Jesse would understand. And I think Jesse Junior will, too."
Susan nodded, her decision made. "Thank you."
She struggled to her feet. "I suppose you want the boxes."
"The boxes?" Mark said, rising.
"All the stuff you had Jesse working on," she said, hobbling over to the kitchen, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as she went. "You asked him to go through insurance company records and hospital admittance forms to see if all those people who died might have shared the same insurer, insurance agent, admittance clerk, nurse, doctor, whatever."
Mark and Emily followed Susan. "That was a pretty tall order."
"You were going to help him with it once he gathered it all together," Susan said, stopping beside the kitchen table, which was covered with papers. "I haven't touched the stuff."
"Do you know if he found anything?"
She shook her head. "He was waiting for some direction from you. He said you were real close to something."
"How did Jesse know that?" Emily asked.
"He always knew." Susan smiled and looked at Mark. "He said you get a sparkle in your eyes when things are about to fall into place. And they were."
Jesse wasn't the only one who knew it. So did whoever was driving the car that ran him down.
To fit the boxes in the trunk, Emily had to create some space by putting the top back up. Mark felt cramped now in the tiny car. Perhaps he wouldn't have felt that way if he hadn't known that the top could come down. Feelings, he decided, depend a great deal on what you know and what you don't. Feelings can't exist without a foundation of previous experience. If he didn't know he'd loved Emily Noble, would he be attracted to her now? Would he even be making an effort?
"What?" Emily said, taking her eyes off the road to give tun a quick, appraising glance.
"Nothing."
"You're staring at me."
"Sorry," he said.
"It's okay. You're wondering if you can love me again," she said, returning her gaze to the traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway.
It was his turn to give her an appraising look. "How did you know?"
"I'm wondering it, too," Emily said. "But I have more grounds for hope. I know you better than you know me."
I don't know you at all, Mark thought. But he wanted to get off this subject and he wasn't graceful about how he did it.
"When is Susan's baby due?" he asked.
"Six weeks."
"Those first few weeks after the child is bom are going to be hard."
"More like the first few months," Emily said.
"I don't see how Susan can do it alone."
"Neither do I."
"I'd like her to stay with us," Mark proposed tentatively.
"I've already ordered the baby furniture," she said.
Maybe, Mark thought, I could love her again after all. She was a remarkable woman, and they were on the same wavelength much of the time. There were worse relationships he could be in.
The beach house where Mark Sloan lived was two stories. The second floor, on the street level, was the main house, with living room, family room, kitchen, and master bedroom. A large deck faced the ocean and had stairs down to the sand. The first floor was on the beach, and for as long as Mark had lived in the house it had been Steve's apartment, with its own private entrance.
With Steve gone, there was more than enough room for Susan and her baby to stay as long as they liked.
Emily parked in front of the house and, after arguing over whether Mark was healthy enough to carry a box, they each lugged in one of Jesse's boxes. They went in the front door, and the moment Mark stepped into the foyer he felt disoriented. It wasn't a symptom of his concussion—at least not directly.
Everything about the house had changed. While the place was still recognizable as his home, all the furnishings were different. He saw some of his artwork on the walls, but in new places and sharing space with paintings and photographs he'd never seen before—at least not that he remembered. The bookshelves in the den had been reorganized and now held a mix of his collection and hers. Judging by the book spines, she enjoyed contemporary fiction as opposed to nonfiction, which was what Mark tended to read.
Emily set her box down on the kitchen table, the only piece of furniture that was still his and still exa
ctly where he'd left it. It was the table where he, Steve, Amanda, and Jesse had spent so many hours sharing meals, discussing cases, and solving problems. Each scratch and nick on the table was a memory.
He set his box down and ran his hand over the tabletop, feeling the uneven surface of the distressed wood.
"It's a good table," Mark said.
"It was the one piece of furniture you were adamant about keeping."
"What was wrong with everything else?"
"Nothing if you're two men living in a hunting lodge," she said.
"I suppose it's all at Steve's house."
"Most of it," she said.
"Amanda gave me a report of patient deaths," Mark said. "Do you know where it is?"
"You were just released from the hospital after suffering a head injury."
"So?" Mark said.
"So slow down. Don't you want to have some lunch? Maybe relax for a few minutes?"
"I won't be able to rest until I know where the report is."
She sighed. "It's downstairs."
"Downstairs?"
She tipped her head towards the staircase in the entry hall. "Go see for yourself."
He did.
As the staircase curved down, the room below was slowly revealed to him. It seemed that he'd taken over the first floor and made it his investigation command center, where he gathered data and coordinated the efforts of his troops, who were Amanda and Jesse.
The walls were lined with enormous dry-erase boards, which were covered with lists of names and dates, hospitals and doctors, illnesses and accidents, arrows and lines drawn back and forth and all around until it looked like he'd scribbled out what he'd written. It was an unintelligible mess.
The scrawl represented his desperate efforts to reveal a pattern in the data he'd culled from the piles of papers and files that were scattered over his desk, his laptop, and his former living room couch.
The papers were everywhere and looked as if they'd simply been dropped on the room from above. It was pure chaos.
But he knew better. Each section of the room represented a different category. Every paper was where he'd wanted it to be. The disarray was actually an organizational system that only he understood—just not anymore. That knowledge had been lost along with the last two years of his life.
Standing there amidst his notes on the walls and papers on the floor was like being in the center of a diorama of his mind, a graphic representation of exactly what he was thinking three days ago, frozen in time.
The first step towards solving Jesse's murder was solving the mystery of this room. Mark had to discover whatever it was that he knew, whatever knowledge made someone want him dead...
Before the killer tried again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mark spent the rest of the day in his office, reading each sheet of paper and comparing it to his notes on the boards. He tried to map out the piles on the floor and compare them to the columns of names and dates he'd copied to the boards. He struggled to make sense of the multicolored lines, arrows, and circles he'd drawn in the various columns.
What did it all mean?
He squinted at a board, looking at it from various angles, trying to see any patterns within the scribbling.
Hour after frustrating hour ticked by. Emily came in once with sandwiches and juice and tried to convince Mark to take a break, but he couldn't tear himself away.
All he had to go on was that the death of Grover Dawson by fatal drug interaction had made him suspect foul play. His vague uneasiness was apparently exacerbated by Amanda's casual remark about the tragic irony of fatally ill people rebounding from preexisting medical conditions only to die a short time later from some other cause.
There were so many patient histories, formatted by the same database software, that they all began to blur together. The only differences between the documents were the names and causes of death.
It seemed like a lot of deaths, but these were very sick and often elderly people. The sad truth was that their deaths were expected.
While there was an increase in those deaths this year, Mark didn't see evidence that anything was criminally amiss. If he had found anything, he wouldn't have had Amanda and Jesse doing such a broad, unfocused search for information.
He'd apparently gone through Amanda's report of patient deaths and organized them by cause of death, whether illness or accident. Then he subdivided those groups by age, race, and sex. Then he divided them again by the doctors who treated them and the hospitals they went to.
Still no pattern emerged.
The only thing Mark could see that the patients had in common was that they all had come close to death at least once before succumbing to natural causes or accidents. But even the accidents were, in most cases, directly related to their afflictions and not surprising.
Over the last three years, one hundred sixteen people had died within three months of a near-death experience. Forty-eight of those deaths had occurred within the last twelve months, representing a forty-five percent increase in the number of such deaths annually.
While this seemed to Mark like an extraordinary surge, when he looked at each case individually, he saw that few of the deaths were unexpected considering the medical conditions of the patients.
There had to be a key to crunching the data, to figuring out if something was truly wrong or if the sense of uneasiness that had sparked his investigation was baseless. Until he found that elusive key, he was lost.
He must have found it once; otherwise nobody would have tried to kill him. There was no question that his instincts were right.
Unless the attempt on his life had nothing to do with his investigation.
No, he didn't believe that. His work in this room and what had happened in the parking garage at Community General were linked.
He could feel it.
Mark slogged through the box of hospital records that Jesse had collected for the forty-eight dead patients. From what Mark could tell, Jesse had dug through the computer systems of Community General Hospital as well as several other LA-area hospitals. Jesse must have called in a lot of favors to gain password access to those other systems. Once inside, though, he wouldn't have had much trouble finding his way around. They all used the same Enable database software.
Strictly speaking, what Jesse had done was illegal and a gross violation of patient privacy—if he'd been caught by any administrator besides Mark, he would have been fired. But the patients were dead. It wasn't as if they had any privacy to lose at this point. That was Mark's rationalization, anyway.
He continued to pick through the forty-eight patient files as the evening wore on. It wasn't until about ten thirty that he finally referred back to the notes he'd taken in his office at Community General. This time, when he looked at the unfamiliar names of those three doctors, he understood what they meant and where at least two copies of Amanda's report had gone.
And if he wasn't mistaken, it was one of those doctors who had given him the focus his investigation so desperately needed.
He turned to see Emily standing in the doorway.
"Hey, remember me?" she said.
"Is that a trick question?"
"We've barely spoken since you got home. It would be nice if we could talk sometime."
"We will," Mark said.
She nodded, though it seemed to be with defeat rather than agreement.
"It's getting late, and you've had a long day," she said.
"Just a little while longer," Mark said.
"You won't do yourself or your investigation any good by pushing yourself too hard too soon. Come to bed, Mark."
He looked at her. The truth was, there was nothing more he could do here, not until he talked to those two doctors tomorrow. But he wanted to put off the awkwardness of going to bed as long as he could.
It wasn't bashfulness or prudishness. Katherine had died a long time ago. It wasn't as if he'd taken a vow of celibacy over the decades that followed. But he'd
never shared his bed with a complete stranger.
Intellectually, he knew Emily Noble was his wife. But emotionally, she was nobody to him, just a skilled doctor and a pleasant person. Even so, he didn't want to hurt her by suggesting they sleep apart until he felt comfortable with her again. It seemed too cruel.
He rose from his chair at the desk and without a word followed her upstairs.
While Emily was in the bathroom, Mark searched for his pajamas and changed. Then he stood at the foot of the unfamiliar bed, uncertain where he was supposed to sleep. He liked the left side, but what if she did, too? What arrangement had they worked out?
He tried to guess on the basis of what was on the night-stands, but there were no easy clues like books or magazines. The phone was on the left side, and since she was more likely to be responding to an emergency call late at night, he thought she might have chosen to sleep within easy reach of the receiver. He opened the nightstand drawer and saw ChapStick, nail clippers, and some paperback novels.
She slept on the left side.
Mark slipped into bed on the right side, lay on his back, and stared up at the ceiling. He felt like he was sleeping in someone else's bed. His eyes blurred and he blinked hard, trying to sharpen the world around him as if it was merely a picture on a TV screen. His vision cleared, but he still felt blurry. Perhaps it was his entire being, not his eyesight, that was out of focus.
You're just tired, he thought. But it was more than fatigue. It was the effort of trying to adjust to how dramatically his life had changed in just three days.
Only that wasn't what had happened. He was experiencing two years' worth of changes all at once, with no memory of the events that had led to them.
It would take more than a day to cope, especially to adjust to the idea that he was married again after decades of life on his own. Although Steve had lived in the same house, they still managed to live mostly separate lives. It was a fine arrangement that he realized now he'd been in no hurry at all to change.
He glanced at the closed bathroom door, heard the sound of water running behind it. Emily had changed all that. He apparently loved her enough to make seismic shifts in his life for her.
At that moment, Emily came out of the bathroom, opening the door as if his gaze had been knocking. She was in a thin nightgown, but she didn't seem any more comfortable in it than he did in the bed. He wondered if she ordinarily slept in the nude and was wearing the nightgown to make him feel more at ease.
