Hallam stood back up, tugged at the rack again. This time it swung away from the wall, a four-foot section pivoting soundlessly.
There was a wide metal door on the wall behind, with a recessed handle. Hallam looked at his boss, evidently feeling that Barclay would want to take it from here.
Barclay wasn’t sure he did. He believed, on balance, that he’d rather walk back up the stairs and get into his car and drive somewhere else. Maybe Key West. Or Brazil. He stepped forward, however. That’s what being a cop is about. You’re the guy who has to take that step, who has to open the doors that all the other people don’t even want to know exist.
Behind the door, however, was another door. This was nearly a foot back from the first, suggesting a very thick wall. Barclay turned the handle, and was relieved when it didn’t open.
“Locked,” he said, but he knew that wasn’t going to be enough. He knew they were now into a period where they tried to locate keys for the door, and couldn’t; tried to establish whether the lock was tied into the security system and under its control; and eventually wound up bringing in someone with the equipment to cut through this barrier with brute force.
We’ve all got that door inside. Behind it we keep the things that are personal, and what’s personal to us may not be good. Either way, Warner wasn’t here to stand in the way of this door now.
“Get it open,” Barclay said.
Then he tramped back upstairs toward fresh air and sunlight and somewhere private to make a telephone call to a man he’d met once at one of Warner’s parties, a man who’d taken him to one side and given him a card and told him to call if—and only if—there was a problem that threatened to get out of hand and become public. All the sheriff knew about this man was that his name was Paul, and that he’d have been happy never to speak to him again.
But Barclay figured that if there was ever a day to make that call, this was it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I ran/walked/lurched back into Sarasota, under skies that were beginning to cloud up fast. I took a chance and went to an ATM when I got to downtown, reasoning that if it refused me or set off a siren, I could be long gone before anyone could drive to the area to detain me. In fact, the machine simply gave me two hundred bucks, without backchat or prevarication—the process feeling magical, unforeseen.
I took the money to a nearby Gap and quickly bought new chinos and a shirt, then made another stop at the Walgreens three doors down. I changed in a Starbucks restroom, giving myself a wash-toothbrush-antiperspirant makeover and dropping my old clothes into the trash. I walked straight back out past the baristas without allowing myself to check whether they’d noticed the transformation. People seldom do, too wrapped up in their own concerns and neuroses to even notice yours. That’s the kind of thing the positivity blogs yammer on about all the time, and evidently they’re right. Nobody knows about your hell. They don’t care. They’re too busy cooking in their own.
I hailed a cab and went to St. Armands Circle. I chatted with the driver about property prices on the way like I always did with anyone. After he’d dropped me off I walked over to where I’d left my own car the night before.
I turned the AC on full and waited until it was working. When it finally got cold I started to feel slightly better, despite the fact that from where I was sitting I could see the table outside Bo’s where I’d encountered Cassandra the night before. At some point in the last hour a thin film of protective scar tissue had started to build around what had happened since. Along with this had appeared something else, however: anger. She’d been a nice girl. A good kid. I didn’t yet have any real understanding of what was unfolding or breaking down all around me, but I knew that it had brought about her death. And for that, someone was going to pay.
That was in the future, however. The next step in my plan—and it was a plan that had no aspirations beyond taking one step at a time and hoping I didn’t fall on my face straightaway—was driving to The Breakers and dropping back into my role. Chatting with Karren, getting e-mails done. If I was “just that guy,” then any bad things becoming associated with my life would be judged according to character. The character I wished to project. The real me, whoever that was.
Then I could get on with trying to find out where the hell Steph was, making sure she was okay, and not ungovernably pissed at me.
Before I set off, I tried Deputy Hallam’s number yet again. Still no reply. I didn’t leave a message. Dismissing the idea gave me another, however, and I called our home number. No reply, but I entered the key combination that allowed me to remote-access messages on the machine. I listened again to my previous messages. In the cold light of day I realized they would serve no purpose, and the last few sounded very drunk. The undertone of increasing moral indignation would also not sit well with my own lack of return to base overnight. I deleted them one by one.
But then, right at the end, I found another message. It had been left early that morning, and this time it was for me—but it was not from Steph or Hallam or anyone else I knew.
It was from the hospital.
Sarasota Memorial is a big white modern building with a sweeping approach and nice trees. Without the flag and the signs it could easily be a major condominium development. I ran into the main entrance and established that the ICU was on the third floor. I found an elevator. Stood in it, blinking, twitching.
I burst out into a big waiting area, sparsely occupied and decorated in the colors and shapes of expedience and calm. I went to the desk, said who I was and who I was there to see. The instant recognition this gained me just made me even more scared. The nurse said that someone would be right out, and got on the internal phone.
I pushed back from the counter, breathing deeply, trying to keep it even. I noticed a nervous-looking midtwenties guy on one of the benches, hands clasped. I was suddenly sure that he was waiting to hear about his wife, a pregnancy, an oncoming child. Maybe he had some superbad reason for being here, but I thought not. Probably everything in his life was going okay.
I wanted to be him instead of me.
A man in a white coat appeared at the entrance to a side corridor, and the station nurse pointed me out. I hurried over before he’d started in my direction.
He led me down the corridor and into a further side area, without saying anything. Toward the bottom was a portion where sections of the walls were made of glass, to allow people to see what was happening inside. He led me to one of these. I looked through.
Lying in a bed, eyes closed, and with plastic tubing going into her, was Stephanie.
Her skin was pale and seemed to hang off the bones of her cheeks and wrists. Her eyelids were lilac. She did not look like my wife. She looked like Steph might look like to herself in cracked mirrors glimpsed in bad dreams.
“To be honest,” the doctor said, “we’re not one hundred percent sure what we’re dealing with. She arrived with vomiting, which was not a cinch to diagnose as she’d clearly drunk a lot. But then we discovered there’d been diarrhea, with blood, which switched us to looking at a bacterial infection. It seemed like this was heading into hemolytic uremic syndrome and kidney failure, which kind of made sense, though it’d be unusual given your wife’s age and state of health—and there’s no previous indicators of renal problems, correct? But then we started to see drops in organ function overall, to the point where we’re running a slew of new tests on everything from E. coli to a couple of rare seafood biotoxins.”
He finally left a gap, as if for me to speak. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and with my hand clamped over my mouth as it was, he wouldn’t have heard the words anyway.
“It could be E. coli,” he said, as if that was in some way reassuring. “We’re pumping antibiotics and fluids into her and we’re putting out the other fires as best we can. At the moment that’s all we can do.”
She looked so pale, so broken, and very far away.
“Is she conscious?”
“Intermittently. She w
as awake up until about forty minutes ago, now seems to be drifting in and out.”
“I have to go in there.”
“Not right now.”
“Well, when?”
“I don’t know. Maybe soon. It depends.”
“How long has she been here?”
“Since three A.M.”
“But . . . how come the first I hear of this is a message at eight thirty this morning? Why did nobody call me right away?”
The doctor glanced at his clipboard. “The notes say your wife requested you be contacted as soon as she was admitted. Her brother said he’d get hold of you.”
I turned to look at him. “Her brother?”
“Right,” he said, still reading. “He brought her in. I don’t want to be critical, you’ve got enough to process as it is, but she’d evidently been deteriorating for several hours before the guy thought, okay, there’s a situation here, let’s get to the hospital. You might . . . want to talk to him about that.”
“Oh, I will,” I said. “Though I’ll need to discuss a couple other things with him first.”
“Excuse me?”
“Like the fact that my wife doesn’t have a brother.”
The doctor looked up from his notes. I could see him making a decision that this wasn’t his problem.
“I’ll be ten minutes,” I told him. “And then I’m going to want to talk to my wife.”
When I got back out to the waiting area the guy was already trying to escape. The corner where he’d been sitting was empty. I saw the back of someone heading fast down the corridor toward the bank of elevators.
“Hey,” I shouted.
He started to hurry. I ran faster.
I got to him as he was jumping into the elevator. I shoved him in ahead, turned, and stabbed the button for the basement. He started to say something. I grabbed him by the neck and smacked his face into the wall of the elevator. I’d never done anything like that before, but it came easy and it felt good. His head bounced off the paneling and snapped back hard.
I put my face up close. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Nobody,” he stammered.
I threw him back into the corner. “Are you with them? Are you with that woman? Jane Doe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked scared now—but more than that. Wary, on alert, as if I was the guy in the wrong.
“Look . . . ,” he said, but he had guilty written all over his face, and he didn’t know where to take it from there. I smacked his head into the wall again. There was a loud ping and the elevator doors opened behind me.
I hauled the guy out into a subterranean corridor that was hot and semidark and smelled of chemicals, and shoved him backward, pinning him against the wall.
“Tell me,” I said. “And make it the truth, or I’m going to hurt you as badly as I can.”
“I brought her in. That’s all.”
“Bullshit.”
I pulled my fist back. I hadn’t punched anyone in a long, long time—there’s not a lot of call for it in professional realty—but I figured I could remember the basics if I had to.
He jerked up his hands, started to stammer.
“I don’t know what happened to her. We were at my apartment. We were . . . just talking. Hanging out.”
Suddenly something clicked. “You’re . . . Nick,” I said. “New guy at the magazine, art department. Golson, right? I met you at a party about a month ago.”
“Right. I’m Nick. Exactly.”
He nodded enthusiastically, as if saying his name to the best of his ability was going to get him out of this situation. I smacked him back against the wall again to let him know how wrong he was.
“What the fuck was my wife doing at your apartment?”
“It was, look, seriously, it was nothing. They had this meeting in the morning. Her and Sukey, they went out afterward, celebrating. I ran into them downtown, after work. They were pretty . . . you know, they’d been in the bar quite a while by then. Sukey got a cab. Steph, uh, Stephanie, your wife, she . . . shit, I don’t know. We had another drink. We wound up back at my place. I’ve got a studio in town. It was close.”
“And?”
“We were just talking. Magazine, work stuff. Had a couple more beers. Actually, she was drinking wine, but I only had beers. She brought the wine with her.”
“From the bar?”
“No. It was in her bag.”
“She was carrying a bottle of wine around with her? Are you making this shit up?”
“No! I don’t know why she had it. But she, she got the bottle out as soon as we got to my apartment, seemed psyched about having it. Like it was ‘score to her’ or something. Wanted me to have some, too, but I don’t like wine. And so she just kept knocking it back, and then after a while she started getting sick. I assumed it was because she was so bombed, but then she’s, like, ‘I need a paramedic.’ I figured she’d plane out of it, but after a couple hours . . . fuck, dude, I didn’t know what to do.”
The back of my neck felt cold. “What wine was it?”
He looked at me like I was insane. “I don’t know—I know shit about wine. Like I said, I don’t drink it. It had a fucked-up label. It looked old, I guess.”
“Where is it now?”
“My apartment. But it’s empty. She finished it.”
“This ever happened before?”
He looked confused. “Has what?”
“Have you two had a drink together before? You guys ever ‘hung out’ before? How often? Just how far does the ‘just talking’ go?”
He was absolutely still, and silent, and did not say “dude” or fluster or try to deny anything. It could be a lot of prior hanging out and just talking had happened, it could be not. Either way he evidently realized that the next thing he said had to be right, and phrased carefully, and that was enough for me. I got my face up really close to his. I suspected this guy was too stupid and scared to tell me anything that was worth me knowing, but I didn’t have time to prove that to myself. Maybe he was my wife’s lover, maybe not. I could determine that from her. Right now I had a bigger problem.
“I’ll be back for you,” I said. Then I hit him in the stomach, as hard as I could, and left him sagging down toward the floor as I got back in the elevator. “Go home, get the bottle out of the trash, bring it here, and give it to the doctors,” I told him, as he crashed down onto the floor. “Do it right now, or I’ll come find you. Do you believe me?”
I saw him nod as the elevator doors closed. I stood, hands shaking, as the elevator shot back up.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The doctor didn’t want me to go in. He made that clear. I made it equally clear that this wasn’t an answer that worked for me, and in the end he said fine, but stay back from the bed and you’ve got five minutes max. He wanted to come in with me, but I dissuaded him. I could tell I was one step from having security called, but I didn’t care. In the end the doctor stepped back, hands up, and reminded me about not getting too close.
I went and stood near the bed. I looked down. I didn’t have a clue what to say, or whether she’d even be able to hear. After a minute, something dropped off my cheek and landed on the floor. I reached up and discovered that my cheeks were wet. I was feeling too many things to keep track of, and they were coming in the wrong order and out of sync. Maybe the asshole in the basement was something I should be angry or screwed up about. But for the moment there was just Steph, and she looked very sick.
“Honey,” I said gently. “Babe, can you hear me?”
Something was making a dead, electronic noise near the top of her bed. It didn’t sound like it was going fast enough, or sufficiently regular. I wasn’t sure what was off about it. It just didn’t sound right. It wasn’t a noise you wanted to have marking your time.
“Steph? It’s me.”
One of her fingers moved, and I took half a step closer. I wanted to reach down and hold her hand, but I’d heard
what the doctor said. “I’m here, honey.”
Her eyes flickered, then opened. They only made it halfway, and didn’t do it at the same time or at the same pace. One started to drift back down, but she held herself together and it flipped slowly back up. She looked like a toy whose battery had run down.
“Lo, you,” she said.
Her voice was barely audible. She said something else, but I didn’t hear it.
I bent closer. “Honey—I didn’t hear you.”
“Sorry,” she said. It was a mumble, still, but her voice sounded a little stronger and wetter than it had.
“For what?”
“Fucked up.”
“No you didn’t,” I said, though I didn’t know if this was true or not.
“Did.”
“It’s . . . not a big deal.”
She nodded, or tried to, and now her gaze looked stronger. “Is.”
“What actually happened?”
The corners of her mouth turned down, and she glanced away. She looked miserable, and my heart suddenly felt very heavy.
“Steph, it’s all right. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
“Drank with Sukey. Celebrating, and I was still pissed at you, and . . . I just drank way too much.”
“And?”
“Didn’t sleep with him.”
Somehow this denial made me feel worse. “So what have you done?”
Her shoulders moved up a little, then back down. I guess it had been a shrug. I nodded. She watched me nod.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll talk about it. We’ll . . . we’ll get it worked out. Everything’s always fixable, right? But you’re not well enough right now. And there’s something I have to do.”
She looked worried, and I realized what she thought I had meant, and it hurt that she looked alarmed at the prospect. “Not to do with him,” I said dully. “I don’t care about him. It’s something else.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. Nick doesn’t.”
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