Lying with Strangers

by James Grippando

  She rushed to the table, but a nurse gently pushed her aside.

  “Please, we need room.”

  “That’s my husband!”

  “We have to get him to surgery.”

  The physicians were calling out orders. “Breathing sounds good, no pneumothorax, thank goodness.”

  “Blood pressure ninety over sixty and falling.”

  “Gotta stop this bleeding!”

  A police officer was standing on the other side of the table, crouched down and talking directly into Kevin’s ear. Kevin was at best half-conscious.

  “Kevin!” shouted Peyton. She squeezed his hand, and his eyes blinked open. For an instant Peyton was sure they’d made a connection.

  The officer leaned closer and put the question to him more loudly. “Who did this to you?”

  Kevin swallowed hard, his eyelids fluttering. His voice was barely audible. “Said…was…Peyton.”

  Peyton’s mouth fell open.

  “Let’s go!” shouted the ER physician.

  Kevin was whisked away on the table, nurses and physicians at his side. The pneumatic doors swung open, then closed, and the room was suddenly quiet, just Peyton and the police officer.

  “Do you know who Peyton is?” he asked.

  She dug her hands into her pocket, her expression falling. “That would be me.”

  66

  PEYTON WAITED OUT THE SURGERY IN THE HOSPITAL LOUNGE, WORried for Kevin, worried for herself.

  She kept telling herself that no news was good news, but as the procedure dragged into its second hour, she found her nerves fraying. This was one of those situations where being a doctor didn’t necessarily help. She knew everything that could possibly go wrong on the operating table, and being alone in the waiting room only fed her wild imagination. In her mind’s eye she saw them frantically working over his body and cursing the ER physicians for having missed obvious pneumothorax. She saw frothy blood spewing from his side with each breath, the doctors frantically feeding a chest tube into his punctured and collapsed lung, the ECG suddenly tripping the alarm as the tracer showed a flat line. She heard the doctors calling a shock trauma code as one of them grabbed the defibrillator pads and gave Kevin a jolt to the chest—once, twice, then up to a full blast at 360 for one final, futile attempt. “Time of death…”

  “Dr. Shields?”

  Her fearful thoughts evaporated. Standing before her was the same officer who’d questioned Kevin in the ER, who’d heard that curious fragmented sentence, and who’d made careful note of his incriminating words. He’d brought a detective with him, and he had a few questions for Peyton.

  The detective quickly introduced himself, very polite—so polite that it made Peyton immediately suspicious. After a couple minutes of what seemed like meaningless banter, Peyton finally said, “What is it you want to know, Detective?”

  He paused, as if taken aback by her directness. “Seems your husband was having coffee with an unidentified woman. Any idea who it would have been?”

  “What did she look like?”

  “So far, we don’t have much. Blond hair. Anywhere from five foot six to five foot ten inches tall. Twenty-five to thirty-five years old.”

  “I would imagine that a lot of people fit that description.”

  “Yes. Including you.”

  “Like I said before, I was at my parents’ house when this happened.”

  “Parents make convenient alibis.”

  Her look was incredulous. “Someone tried to kill my husband. You need to find her.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to do,” he said, eyebrow arching.

  “Are you saying that I’m actually one of the people on your list of possible suspects?”

  “Right now, you’re the only one on our list.”

  “Because of what Kevin said in the ER?”

  “He did mention your name, Doctor.”

  “He also could have been delirious.”

  The detective didn’t answer.

  Peyton said, “We’ll just have to wait and see what he says when he wakes up, won’t we?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s hope he makes it.”

  The insensitivity galled her. “Excuse me,” she said, rising. “I need some air.”

  Jennifer’s information about her client’s condition was thirdhand, but the chain from Peyton to Tony to her seemed reliable enough for her to take action before Kevin regained consciousness. She waited till 5:00 A.M., still an obscene hour on a Saturday morning, to call Charles Ohn.

  He answered on the first ring, which surprised her. The moon was still hanging in the dark sky outside her kitchen window, and she was seated alone at the granite counter in the dim glow of a night-light.

  “Sorry to wake you,” she said, assuming that she had.

  “You didn’t.”

  “There’s been a stabbing.”

  “I’m plugged in already. How is he?”

  “Touch and go. We’re hopeful.”

  “So am I.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. If—I mean when he comes around, no one is to interrogate my client until I’ve talked to him. I want the police out of the waiting room.”

  “I’ve already pulled them out.”

  She was so surprised that she fumbled the phone. “My, how uncharacteristically proactive of you.”

  “Are you kidding? You think I’m going to let husband and wife make up and get all kissy-faced, only to have Stokes retract those beautiful words he uttered in the emergency room? I’m perfectly happy to leave it right where he left it, thank you very much.”

  She’d been awake for all of twenty minutes, and already he had her blood boiling. “So it’s true what they used to say about you, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You are the Ohn-anator,” she said, then hung up.

  “You can see him now,” said the nurse.

  It was almost 6:00 A.M. when those long-awaited words finally hit Peyton’s ears. The police had left about an hour earlier, and she’d waited alone for Kevin to come out of recovery and be moved to intensive care. Peyton rose quickly from her chair and entered the unit.

  The ICU was a large, open area with the administrative staff in the center and one bay after another lining the perimeter. They weren’t so much rooms as three-walled stalls with beige plastic curtains for privacy. The unit was busy this morning, typical for a weekend. Kevin was in the fifth bay. Peyton pulled back the curtain and froze, trying hard not to alarm him with her reaction.

  He looked groggy and weak but very much alive. The electric bed was angled slightly to elevate his torso. Painkillers dripped from an IV, and his heart rate chirped steadily on the monitor at his bedside.

  “How are you?”

  “Tired,” he said, his voice still raspy from the anesthesia. “And lucky, I guess.”

  “Very lucky. The surgeon told me that the blade just missed your pulmonary artery.”

  He smiled weakly. “Actually, I was thinking how lucky I am to have you here with me.”

  She stepped closer and took his hand. Her eyes turned misty as she leaned toward him and kissed him on the lips. He reached to embrace her, then groaned with pain.

  “Try not to move around too much,” she said.

  “What are you, a doctor?”

  They shared a faint smile, then Peyton turned serious. “Who did this to you?”

  He had to pause for breaths, but slowly he managed to tell her about the meeting with the cyber-detective, the eleven o’clock private chat, and his own too late realization that the woman wasn’t what she’d seemed.

  “Obviously she was a he, and I presume he was RG.”

  “Then who’s Ladydoc?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you in the emergency room. He said that Ladydoc was Peyton.”

  “You know it’s not me. Right?”

  “Of course. He had me going for maybe half a second. But your mother summed it up a couple of months ago at dinner, when
she made the point that you couldn’t possibly have been chatting online three and four nights a week while doing your residency at Children’s.”

  “So, RG and Ladydoc are the missing screen names for those chat-room conversations that the prosecutor said were between me and Gary Varne?”

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes. But if RG went to all the trouble of removing the screen names from those other transcripts, why would he have shown them to you?”

  He glanced at the bandages on his chest. “I would imagine that he didn’t think I’d live to tell about it.”

  Peyton tingled with fear. “We need to post a guard here. This guy already killed Gary Varne, and now he’s tried to kill you. If he finds out you’re still alive, he could come back.”

  “You think the hospital will go for a guard in the ICU? Half the patients here have already had one heart attack this weekend.”

  “The doctor says you’re doing great. If I push it, they’ll move you to a private room on the surgical floor. It’ll be better that way. The guard will have a much easier time figuring out who belongs and who doesn’t.”

  “I’m all for a guard, but how will we know if he comes back? We have no idea who he is.”

  “The only thing I can think of is to have Tony subpoena all the Internet carriers. They can tell us who RG and Ladydoc are.”

  “It could take weeks just to identify and serve all the possible carriers, weeks more to resolve the privacy issues.”

  She lowered her head, tormented by the same old question. “So for the rest of our trial, our best argument is that the guy who framed us is some cipher who has a thing for me. That’s all we have.”

  “Maybe we’ve been looking at it from the wrong perspective.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think of it in terms of RG and Ladydoc. We’ve been focusing on RG, and it’s gotten us nowhere.”

  “You think searching for Ladydoc is going to make it any easier?”

  “The only question we’ve really asked so far is who wants to have you. Maybe the real question is this: Who loves, hates, admires, or resents you so much that, in the make-believe world of cyberspace and for God only knows what reason, they might actually want to be you?”

  Peyton felt chills. The way she’d heard the question—the whole bag of conflicting emotions seemingly mixed together in one twisted mind—had sent her thoughts racing in a direction that frightened her to the core.

  “You think it’s Sandra?” said Kevin.

  She looked off to the middle distance and said, “There’s one way to find out.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked as she started away from the bed.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can. With an answer.” She stepped out of the bay, gaining speed and determination as she left the ICU and headed for the elevator.

  Rudy was riding on the subway’s red line. He took a seat in the space reserved for the elderly and the handicapped, scowling as if daring someone to ask him to move. The train was almost empty, too early for most people on a Saturday morning. The dark tunnel was a blur outside the windows, but he was staring without focus, deep in thought.

  He didn’t understand it. He’d seen Ladydoc’s wishes on the computer screen in black and white, and he’d done exactly as she’d desired. He’d gotten rid of that worthless husband, or at least he’d tried. And then she’d promptly raced to the hospital and waited at his side. Did she think that RG wouldn’t learn of her deception? Was she so foolish as to imagine that he wouldn’t follow through on a kill? Of course he’d waited for the ambulance to arrive at the coffee shop. After dumping the disguise in the alley, he’d easily blended into the crowd as just another rubbernecker. He’d followed the ambulance to the hospital. To his dismay, they’d taken Kevin to the ER and not the morgue. He’d seen Peyton sobbing in the waiting room, a look of genuine concern on her face. All this love and affection after she’d told RG in no uncertain terms that she’d wanted Kevin out of the way.

  Two-timing bitch.

  The train stopped. It wasn’t his station, but Rudy got off anyway. He wasn’t going home. If Peyton wanted to be with her beloved Kevin, so be it. Rudy had a job to finish.

  Only now he had twice the work.

  67

  HER MOTHER WAS IN THE KITCHEN WHEN PEYTON ENTERED THE house, and she could smell the coffee. Throughout the night, by telephone, she’d kept her parents posted on Kevin’s condition. Her father had gone back to bed after the last upbeat call, but Mom was dressed and ready for the day.

  Peyton went straight upstairs to her parents’ bedroom and woke her father.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, groggy as he sat up in the bed.

  “I have to talk to you,” she said.

  “Is Kevin still okay?”

  “Yes. He’s going to be fine.”

  He squinted, trying to see the clock on the nightstand. “What time is it?”

  “Early. Daddy, there’s something I need to know. It’s about our family.”

  “Sure. Just ask.”

  “This is so hard, because if there was one person I thought I could always count on to be honest with me, it was you.”

  “You can count on me, darling. Always.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, absolutely. What’s this all about?”

  “Kevin and I have had a breakthrough on who might be stalking me. He’s been chatting over the Internet with someone who is impersonating me. She calls herself Ladydoc.”

  “Impersonating you?”

  “Yes. Which made us ask who would resent me or hate me or in some sick way admire me enough to want to become me on the Internet. And that’s when this image flashed in my mind.”

  Her father propped himself up on one elbow. “An image of what?”

  “Some teenage girl whose life sucks. Who has no existence or meaningful identity except the one she creates on the Internet. And she has no life because her parents didn’t want her and instead put all their energy and resources toward making her older sister a successful doctor. But for this poor kid, there’s no hope of success. Maybe she’s one of the unlucky ones for whom foster care or adoption is a nightmare.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My sister didn’t die, did she?”

  His face went ashen.

  “Answer me, Dad. The baby Mom made with her lover was given up for adoption, wasn’t she?”

  He looked away. For the first time in Peyton’s life, her father couldn’t look her in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “So I’m right? I have a sister out there?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice barely audible. “Somewhere.”

  She nearly punched him in the chest, but she didn’t. “You lied to me. How could you keep this from me all these years?”

  “How could we have explained giving up a child for adoption unless we told everyone that the child wasn’t mine?”

  “I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about me.”

  “You’re right. I regret that. But at the time, your mother and I were in agreement: If we were not going to keep the child, no one could know about the adoption. So we moved to Florida to have the baby, and we told everyone that the baby was stillborn.”

  Peyton closed her eyes, then opened them, her head spinning. “I can’t take any more lies. That’s the worst part of this. If you had just told me the truth, maybe I could have understood. It wasn’t your child. You forgave Mom for her affair and took her back. Maybe it was asking too much to expect you to embrace the child that wasn’t yours.”

  “Well, if you’re going to know the truth, it’s important to get the whole truth.”

  “What am I missing?”

  “It wasn’t my child, and I did forgive your mother. But I wasn’t the one who wanted to give up the baby for adoption.”

  Peyton was silent.

  “That baby was still your sister. I wanted to keep her. But your mother, well, she just didn
’t want to be a mother again.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “She wanted to be…,” he said, his voice quaking, “I don’t know what she wanted to be.”

  Peyton was way ahead of him, thinking once again about Ladydoc. “That’s okay, Daddy. I think I know exactly what she wanted to be.”

  68

  THERE WAS A PIT IN HER STOMACH AS PEYTON WENT TO THE HOME computer in the den and sat in her mother’s chair. She had called Tony before going downstairs. He had some helpful insights, things she hadn’t thought about. Now the execution was all up to her.

  “Mom, can you come here for a minute?”

  Peyton waited anxiously at the computer. Finally her mother was standing in the open doorway. She looked tired, obviously having slept very little all night.

  “What is it?”

  “I have to go online. Can I use your account?”

  “What for?”

  “Kevin saw the screen names last night.”

  “What screen names?”

  “My supposed online lover and alter ego. RG and Ladydoc.”

  Her mother hesitated, as if processing Peyton’s words. “He saw them?”

  “It’s a long story, but I need to check this out right away. Can I use your screen name, please?”

  Peyton gave her an assessing look, but her mother didn’t flinch.

  “Of course you can.” Her mother switched on the computer, entered her password, and logged on to her Internet service.

  “There you go.”

  Peyton checked the screen name. There was only one registered to the account: Valerie51.

  Her mother seemed smug. “What is it that you need to check, dear?”

  “Tony suggested that I send an e-mail to Ladydoc and see what turns up.”

  “You don’t expect an answer, do you?”

  “No. In fact, Tony said Ladydoc is probably a blind screen name.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “It’s for people who go out of their way to keep their online identity a secret.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s take your name, hypothetically speaking. When you log on, the screen name that shows on your computer is Valerie51. If you enter a chat room, that same name should show up on someone else’s computer screen. But if for some reason you’re really paranoid about concealing your identity, then you hire a fifteen-year-old computer whiz to rig it up so that your screen name is converted to something else in cyberspace.”