The Warning Sign

by Mia Marlowe

  I can make you no promises, the doctor had said before he disappeared into the surgical suite. It was the only sentence she felt confident she’d read accurately.

  The kaleidoscopic effect of the drugs Neville Rede had given her was almost gone. She still experienced light-headedness if she stood too quickly and there was a metallic taste in her mouth. Her memory of the time spent with her would-be killer was spotty and disturbing. She didn’t try to probe for more.

  But her body remembered. All Sara’s joints throbbed from the hours of being trussed up on those beams. She had several nasty gashes on her feet from running through the trashy subbasement. An intern stitched them up and gave her an injection for tetanus and another broad spectrum antibiotic. The nurses directed her to a shower and gave her an old set of scrubs and booties to replace her concrete dust-encrusted clothing. She’d dropped the lantern in the nearest garbage bin, but she kept Neville Rede’s notebook with her. She couldn’t bear to look at it. It was like having a snake in a shoebox. She didn’t dare lift the lid to take a peek, but just holding it seemed to anchor her, sure in the knowledge that she was finally free of the madman.

  So now she was safe and clean with nothing to do but wait. And wonder.

  How was Matt?

  What was taking Ryan so long?

  He should have been able to grab a taxi or even gone back down and taken the T and been here almost as soon as she and Matthew arrived at MGH.

  Movement in her peripheral vision jerked her head up. A man strode into the waiting room, a doctor by his white coat. But he headed toward the family of a teenager who’d wrapped the family car around a telephone poll. From the tears and hugs mixed with smiles, Sara guessed their news was good.

  She closed her eyes and prayed that no news was good news for Matthew.

  At least, she intended to pray. Instead, her life with Matt Kelley rolled across her vision. Their first date. The magic in the first time he’d held her hand. Their guilty adolescent groping in the back seat of his old beater of a car. Their wedding. Decorating their little apartment with family cast-offs and garage sale pieces.

  She saw Matthew’s face clearly, pale and drawn as she battled the meningitis. The isolation. The withdrawal. The day she accused him of unfaithfulness expecting his denial and hearing only silence.

  The weary hope in his eyes when he told her he wanted her back.

  She covered her face with her hands and wept.

  And a hand brushed over her crown. She jerked in surprise.

  ‘Sorry,’ Ryan signed, rubbing his closed fist over his chest in a small circle.

  “Where have you been?” She swiped away the tears.

  “I…” He hesitated, then began signing. ‘I got to thinking that Lulu needed to be let out.’

  “Oh, I completely forgot about her,” Sara said. He realized she might have trouble hearing him and signed without being asked. She blessed his thoughtfulness. “Thank you.”

  He shot her a half-smile. ‘Mr. Kaplan let me in. Lulu was grateful.’ He touched her ear. ‘I see you have one aid. Do you have a spare at home?’

  “No, too expensive,” she said. “I have no idea where the other one is.”

  He pulled a soda from his jacket pocket, popped the top and handed it to her. “What about Matthew?”

  She shook her head, fighting back the press of tears behind her eyes. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her. She didn’t know what to say. Her mouth wouldn’t form the words.

  She loved Ryan. She was sure of it.

  But loving Matt Kelley was still her knee-jerk response, especially now. The man had taken a bullet for her, for pity’s sake. If he died…

  Ryan must have felt her begin to tremble for he pulled her close, cradling her head against his chest.

  Right and wrong, sinned against or sinning, the lines were beginning to blur in her mind. Was it wrong to weep for one man while her tears dampened the shirt of another?

  Sara didn’t know. And she was past caring.

  Chapter 37

  When her sobs subsided, Sara’s breathing became slow and measured. Ryan suspected she’d drifted off to sleep. That was probably for the best. He didn’t want to talk now anyway. He’d only have to tell her the truth if they did and he was content just to hold her as she slept.

  It would be the last time.

  He really had intended not to even see her again, to slip quietly from her life, but then he realized she might need him. Just until Matthew was better, he told himself.

  So Ryan gave himself permission to delay.

  But he still prayed for Matthew.

  A white-coated surgeon came into the waiting room wearing a promising smile. Ryan nudged Sara to wakefulness.

  “Detective Kelley is resting,” the doctor said. “He lost a great deal of blood. One of the bullets was lodged near his heart, but we managed to extract it without causing further damage. He will live. He is a very lucky man.”

  Got that right, Ryan thought as he signed the doctor’s words for Sara and her face bloomed with joy.

  “Can we see him?” she asked.

  The doctor nodded.

  She started toward the swinging doors that led to the recovery area, but stopped when she realized Ryan hadn’t moved. “You coming?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll be here when you’re ready to go home.”

  She flashed him a heart-melting smile and was gone.

  ~

  Matt was attached to monitors she suspected were bleeping regularly. Flashing lights danced on another machine and tubes disappeared beneath his cotton hospital gown. Though his face was pale and his lips nearly white, Sara was comforted by the slow, hitching rise and fall of his chest.

  When she laid a hand on his forearm, his eyes opened, the whites of one of them blood red.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi, yourself,” he answered back with a grimace. “Not catching me at my best, you know.”

  Tears threatened to spill over her lids again. Her nose was probably beet-red. She sniffed. Sara was not a pretty crier, but she didn’t care. This man had nearly died for her. “You look good to me.”

  “Sure you say that now, but will you respect me in the morning?” Matthew managed a weak chuckle and put hand to his chest. “Ow. Where’s Knight?”

  “Waiting for me.”

  Matthew nodded slowly.

  “Better not keep him waiting long. He’s a good man,” Matthew said. “You could do worse.” One corner of his mouth quivered. “What am I saying? You have done worse.”

  “Shut up,” she said, letting the tears fall. “You’re a good man, too, Matt Kelley. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  He reached up to cup her cheek and swipe away her tears with his thumb. “Here I am, making you cry again.” His own eyes welled. “I’m sorry, Sara. I’m sorry for every tear I made you cry. I wish…” He stopped, unable to finish his thought, his lips pressed tight with suppressed emotion.

  “Me, too.” She leaned over and very gently kissed him. “Matt, you are the first man I ever loved. I think there will always be a part of my heart that is yours, whole and untouched by anyone else. Yours alone.” She straightened and smiled sadly at him. “But Ryan is the last man I’ll ever love. And…I have to finally let you go.”

  “I understand. Guess this means I’m gonna live then. You’d never squash the hopes of a dying man.” Matthew’s eyes drifted closed and he sighed. A single tear squeezed from the corner of his eye and slid into his ear. “I’m glad for you, honey. You deserve better than me.”

  “Matthew—”

  “But you tell that lucky SOB I’ll rearrange his face if he gives you a moment’s heartache.” His eyes opened and he fastened his gaze on her face, the trace of a smile hovering around his lips. “Good-bye, Sara.”

  “Good-bye, Matt.”

  She turned and walked away, feeling a strange mix of sadness and hope. The love of her youth was dead and it was right to grieve for it. Her
new love was beginning, like the leaves on April on the trees, no bigger than mouse ears, but just waiting to uncurl into beauty. And the lift in her chest when she pushed through the swinging doors and saw Ryan waiting for her was like that first warm kiss of spring.

  ~

  “What do you mean, you’re not staying?” she asked Ryan once he’d delivered her back to her apartment. Her new left hearing aid buzzed. While she was in with Matthew, Ryan had called in a favor and borrowed a replacement for her from Dr. Tanaki’s stock at the hospital, but it wasn’t quite calibrated for her yet.

  “I can’t stay,” he said, his face unreadable.

  “You mean won’t,” she accused. “This makes no sense. What are you saying?”

  He clasped both her hands in his, almost in a gesture of prayer. “Look, Sara, some things have changed.”

  She blinked hard. “Are you saying you don’t love me?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he shook his head. “If I didn’t love you, this would be easy.”

  Then in halting sentences, he explained the deal he’d made with his uncle to gain Neville Rede’s name and address. “I’d have promised him anything, done anything to see you safe.”

  “But you were under duress. Surely your uncle won’t hold you to this deal.”

  “Uncle Nick has been waiting for this moment for years, for the time when I needed something badly enough that he’d have me.” Ryan released her hands. “And now he does. But I won’t let him have you, too.”

  “Isn’t that up to me?”

  “No. I wasn’t very old when my parents divorced, but even then I was aware that my father’s business had nearly unhinged my mother.” His eyes went unfocused and she could tell he was seeing something other than her and her shabby little apartment. “When he was killed a few months after the divorce was final, she was actually happy.”

  “But she still tends his grave, you said. That doesn’t sound happy.”

  “I guess relieved would be a better way to describe it. Now he’s beyond the family’s grasp. She finally has him to herself.” He rested a hand on the doorknob, preparing to make good his escape. “If we go into the family together, you’ll never be free until you have only my grave to tend. I won’t let that happen.”

  He turned the knob, then a low growl escaped from his throat and he crossed back over to her. Ryan caught her up in a fierce embrace. His kiss was tinged with desperation and she answered it with all her love, leaning into his body, her softness pressed against his hardness.

  When he finally released her, she drew a shaky breath. “There has to be another way.”

  “There isn’t,” he assured her.

  And between one heartbeat and the next, he was gone.

  ~

  Sara sat in one of her old armchairs as the sun sank and the room darkened around her. One of her men had taken a bullet for her. The other had sold his soul. And she couldn’t have either of them. She was still there, puzzling things out when the next day dawned fresh and new.

  She walked Lulu along the banks of the Mystic River, watching the steam rise from the water. Long marsh grass undulated in the tide.

  “Looks like the Monet,” she told Lulu. The Monet she’d seen in Nicholas Garibaldi’s beautiful house had the same eerie calm she saw in the Mystic River.

  A gift from the senator. Thank you for protecting ALICE, the cryptic note had said. She’d all but forgotten about it till now. It was signed by the same senator who was lagging so badly in the polls now.

  Surely the note was still there where she’d shoved it back and she still had Neville Rede’s horrific journal. Last night, she’d finally screwed her courage enough for a peek inside the mind of a killer. Along with some disturbing sketches, she found a litany of cold-blooded cruelty, dates and names, monies paid and shuffled to an off-shore account. A plan began to form in her mind.

  She hurried back to her apartment, showered and dressed in her best skirted suit. Then she stopped by her bank for a few minutes, gathered her courage and walked over to the T station to ride across town to the Federal Building. She hoped Agent Griffith would help her, but even if he didn’t, she was going to have to run this bluff herself.

  To her relief, he jumped at the chance when she told him about the Monet. Valenti’s computer contained enough evidence to charge and probably convict Harold Fortis of attempted election fraud, he said, but there was nothing but Fortis’ frantic word to connect the dots to the bigger fish in this murky little pond of corruption. The threat of Sara’s testimony might be the leverage needed to turn the rest.

  She waited all day at the Federal Building, eating a stale sandwich in the basement cafeteria for lunch, cooling her heels outside Agent Griffith’s office. Finally, just before five that afternoon, a tall, broad man in an impeccably tailored Armani suit was escorted past her. She recognized echoes of Ryan’s firm jaw and straight nose. Even the shape of his eyes was the same, though Ryan’s were a clear deep blue and this man’s were like obsidian.

  She didn’t need anyone to tell her this was Nicholas Garibaldi.

  Even though he was nothing like his underling, Neville Rede, Sara was aware of the same predatory chill wafting about him. If Rede was a rabid dog, this man was a crocodile. Cold, reptilian intelligence that sought out the weakest targets of opportunity and devoured them without a second thought.

  Is this what Ryan fears becoming?

  After a half hour, Agent Griffith appeared, his mouth set in a tight line. “He’s not buying it. We got nothing.”

  “Let me try,” she said. “But, look. Turn off any listening devices. What I have to say to Mr. Garibaldi needs to be off the record.”

  “It’s not protocol.”

  “You want to nail the senator, don’t you?”

  He cast her a doubtful look.

  “Give me a shot,” she said. “If I fail, you’ve lost nothing.”

  The agent shrugged and looked away. “OK. I’ll be right outside the door if you need me.”

  Sara wiped her sweating palms on her skirt and went in to face the biggest crime boss in New England.

  She introduced herself. She’d heard these old school organized crime types placed great stock in politeness.

  “Sara Kelley, huh?” he said, looking from side to side as if sensing a trick. “I believe I know of you, but you’re not what I expected.”

  She was tired, so her speech probably betrayed her loss. “I’m hearing-impaired, Mr. Garibaldi,” she explained. “It’s important that you speak slowly and distinctly and face me squarely when you’re talking to me, but you don’t have to shout. In fact, if you want to whisper that would be ok.”

  He snorted. “Pushy little bitch, aren’t you?”

  So much for politeness. She forced herself to smile at him. “Yes, I am when I need to be.” She leaned forward. “I want you to know Agent Griffith has assured me that our conversation is not being recorded or listened to by anyone else. But just in case, whisper. I can read your lips.”

  “So? What do you have to say to me?”

  “First of all, thank you for your hospitality. Your nephew Ryan and I took shelter at your home in Maine after a particularly harrowing incident.”

  “An incident in which I played no part whatsoever,” he said.

  “I believe you.”

  He nodded as if her belief vindicated him in some way. “You said first of all. I’m a busy man. Don’t make me wait all day for the other shoe to drop. What else ya got?”

  “I also want to thank you for giving me the proof that you were in collusion with the senator to rig the upcoming election.”

  He rolled his eyes. “What proof?”

  “I saw the Monet. There was a note attached signed by the senator thanking you for your assistance with a girl named ALICE. I didn’t know at the time that it referred to ALPHA LEVEL INTERFACE COMPUTER ELECTION, but I do now.”

  “Heresay.”

  “I read the note and shoved it back behind the painting. Have yo
u removed it?”

  The expression on his face told her plainly that he hadn’t.

  “Agent Griffith is procuring a warrant to seize the Monet and its provenance will no doubt show it came from the senator’s collection,” Sara said. “Along with the note, it puts you in the thick of the scheme to rig the upcoming election.”

  “I have an excellent attorney on retainer for just such a situation.”

  “I can also testify to your connection with Neville Rede and his many murders. He expected to kill me, you see, so he boasted about his relationship with you.” Sara was extemporizing, but the point of a good bluff was that it sound convincing. She had only mentioned the painting to Agent Griffith. She held the existence of the journal tight against her heart. “From the raid on his apartment, the police have already catalogued more than twenty killings. How many of those can they connect to you?”

  “None.”

  “There’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “You see, thanks to the time I spent with Mr. Rede, I know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. He kept a detailed journal—names, dates, monies paid.”

  “It’s not admissible.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But it will give the authorities everything they need to start digging and what they find will be admissible.” She hoped her voice didn’t tremor. She was a good judge of when others were lying, but not so accomplished at telling whoppers herself.

  “So why didn’t Agent Griffith mention this journal?”

  “Because he doesn’t have it,” she said. “Yet.”

  Nicholas Garibaldi narrowed his eyes. “You have it.”

  “Before we left Neville Rede in the subbasement of the Chandler Building, I took it from him.”

  He leaned back in his chair and studied her carefully. Sara willed herself not to look away.

  “Possession of such an object might be hazardous to your health, Ms. Kelley,” he said slowly.