He settled himself onto the hospital’s ratty waiting-area sofa, a battered careworn thing probably from the fifties. A hardscrabble urgent care facility like Boston City couldn’t afford even an attempt at luxury, let alone comfort. Most who came here—patients and families and cops and lawyers—were connected to violence in some way. The shootings and stabbings, overdoses and freak-outs, all the blights of a big city, all the casualties arrived here at Boston City, where beleaguered medics tried their best to bandage and stanch, knowing a disquieting number of patients were wearing handcuffs along with their hospital ID bracelets, and many had police guards sitting vigil along with their relatives.
They’d brought DeLuca here because it was closest.
Jake stared at the putrid green wall, in limbo, in purgatory, life on hold. His partner, with tubes and oxygen mask and attentive nurse, hovered on the edge of consciousness.
Heart attack. The scourge of a cop’s existence, the officers who fought a daily battle against relentless pressure and stomach-twisting stress and long hours and fast food and caffeine and sugar and too often, like DeLuca, went down in defeat in middle age, not from a gun or some asshole bad guy, but from shitty diet and bad luck.
Footsteps. A white coat. Jake’s own heart lurched. But the doctor gave him a wan smile and walked on.
Trey Welliver. Jake had sure been on the wrong track about that one. Good thing he’d left a message for that Treasury agent Olive Brennis in California, canceling his trip. Bad thing he’d told her he thought her informant was dead. He’d been cryptic about it, because who knew who listened to Brennis’s messages? But with lovesick—or drugged-up—student Trey Welliver the killer, whether Avery Morgan was an informant had nothing to do with that case.
Random beeps echoed along the tile-walled corridor, some kind of mechanical hiss, and that sinister hospital silence. Avery Morgan had drowned three days ago, her death an open question, with no witnesses, no motives, no slam-dunk clues. Funny how murder investigations worked. The roller coaster first progressing gradually up the hill, agonizingly, tick by tick, before finally, as all the puzzle pieces of the crime slammed into place, blasting downhill to the solution and arrest.
He and D had gotten their man. As they always did. But instead of celebrating a victory for justice, here he sat, alone, exhausted, and worried as hell.
ISABEL RUSSO
Too much information. Isabel understood that phrase now. She stood, framed in her balcony window, clutching her phone and staring at the awakening street below. An irresistible force meeting an immovable object, her mother used to say. Isabel never understood that, not until this very moment, as she struggled to process an avalanche of impossible, unthinkable facts. Fifteen stories below, commuters straggled into Kenmore Station, and a few cars made illegal left turns. She didn’t use her binoculars. Not today. Because Trey wasn’t down there. He was in custody. Jane’s voice, and her news, echoed in her brain. Which now was about to explode.
The first piece of information had come last night after she’d asked Elaine one critical question. “Confidential,” she demanded. Made her promise.
“Sure,” Elaine said.
“Is a Theodore Welliver on your creep list?” Isabel didn’t tell her why.
“Oh, yeah,” Elaine said.
So that was good. Good in a perverse way.
Then, this morning, Jane called, first with her questions, then word of the arrest. Isabel rejoiced, the only appropriate word, because finally Trey Welliver would get what was coming to him, and she’d be free and he’d pay and pay and pay. “Creep list” wasn’t the half of it, she thought, planning to open her window and blast triumphant music from her speakers, Vincerò, and O Fortuna, and thank the universe for karma and comeuppance and revenge and freedom.
Then Isabel asked Jane when Professor Morgan was killed.
She’d burst into tears at the answer.
Because Trey was guilty, he was guilty in the deepest essence of the word, he’d ruined—no, almost ruined—her life, and she’d spent since May, since May twenty-first to be exact, plotting and wishing and scheming and stalking and dreaming, dreaming of the day his life would be ruined, and not just almost ruined, and now her dreams had come true.
Trey would be convicted, go to prison, and rot in hell.
And she would be free.
All she had to do was keep quiet.
“Isabel?”
She heard a voice from the doorway. Jane’s.
“Are you okay?”
50
JANE RYLAND
Jane thought of the fictional Tosca. Thought of this fifteenth-floor apartment, its balcony, and the sorrowing and fearful girl who had imprisoned herself here. How whatever happened to Isabel—and Jane still didn’t exactly know what it was—had almost killed her, sure as a fifteen-story fall.
“Isabel?” Jane heard the apprehension in her own voice. The girl answered her, with that plaintive “no,” so she was not dead. And as long as she wasn’t, this story wasn’t over.
Jane eased open the front door and steeled herself for whatever was to come.
Isabel sat at the kitchen table, the goldfish swimming circles in its bowl beside her.
Jane stopped, planted, not knowing what to say.
“You promised whatever I tell you is confidential, right?” Isabel stood, turning her open laptop toward Jane.
Whatever Isabel was about to show her—and it had to be the identity of her rapist—Jane could not let herself see. No one was jumping off balconies, though. Good.
“I don’t want to know who raped you.” Jane paused as the pieces of a potential puzzle picture clicked into place. Only one chair was near the kitchen table, Isabel’s, so Jane stayed put, relieved the computer screen was too far away to read. “I believe you. But I don’t want to know.”
“But I asked you—”
“Yes, definitely. Confidential.” Jane tried to untangle her responsibilities, and it seemed as if justice was the only one. But justice for who? Jane knew what could happen if you kept your word and kept silent. Next life she would choose an easier career. Like rocket scientist.
“When was Professor Morgan killed?” Isabel asked. Her transformation last night into a hip and attractive college woman had vanished. Now her hair went spiky and wild, a tiny white T-shirt pulled tight over her narrow shoulders, eyes smoky, with exhaustion, maybe. Her dark circles were back. “I know I asked you before. But are you sure? Exactly sure?”
“Well, our sources say between two and four. In the afternoon. Yes, I’m sure as anyone can be.”
“Monday.”
“Monday.”
“And they think Trey…” Isabel swallowed, hard.
Jane could tell she was deciding.
“Trey Welliver killed her then?”
“Yes,” Jane said. “He’s in custody. Charged.”
“He was on the creep list, you know,” Isabel said.
Jane didn’t. “Huh.”
“And we’re all going to see Dean Tarrant today,” Isabel said. “The SAFEs. About it all. They’re going to call me when we get an appointment. That’ll probably be soon.”
“Okay,” Jane said, simply listening. “Sure.” As long as Isabel kept talking, she wasn’t jumping off a balcony. So hurray, Jane wouldn’t have to talk her off the ledge. Literally, at least. The computer screen popped to black.
Jane perched on the arm of the couch, balancing on one pointed toe. “What are you trying to say, Isabel? It’s just me and you, you know that.”
Isabel turned her back, walked to the window, facing outside. Oh, no. Not the window. Jane hurried to her side.
“Isabel?”
“Tarrant’s office is just over there.” Isabel pointed. “You can see his window. He’s on sixteen.”
Jane narrowed her eyes. “Okay.”
“I always look out from here, you know?” Isabel’s voice softened. “Seeing the world. It’s my way of connecting. Staying real, and human, and like, part o
f it.”
“You can’t really see much, though, up here,” Jane said. “Except colors and pavement and cars. Pedestrians, I guess, but not really … faces.”
“That’s why I have these,” Isabel said. Jane turned from the view. Isabel was holding chunky black binoculars to her face. She handed them to Jane. “Now look.”
Jane adjusted the focus wheel as she held the glasses to her eyes. She took a step backward, almost thrown off balance as the world leaped into hard-edged clarity. Office windows precisely visible, some revealing shadowy figures moving behind them. Jane twisted the focus again, riveted. She could read logos on cars, see each cobblestone on one sidewalk path. See people’s faces, even tell who was smiling, almost hear them talking. A pigeon bobbed on a patch of grass, battling with another over scraps in a Dunkin’s wrapper. The lenses were so powerful Jane saw the bird’s individual feathers. She wheeled the lenses toward Tarrant’s office, curious. But she could make out only a snippet of curtain, a fraction of a window. Where was Isabel going with this?
Jane handed the binoculars back. “Okay,” she said. Her phone pinged, a text. At this hour? Jake. It must be. “’Scuse me,” she said. She grabbed her phone, checked it. Kat? Why would the medical examiner be texting her? She read the message, and her eyes began filling with tears.
“Jane?”
Jane’s knees were not working. Nor was her brain. But there was nothing she could do, nothing, and right here right now could not be avoided. Poor D. Poor Kat. Poor Jake.
“Jane?” Isabel persisted. “Look again. You see Colonial Hall, right? Tarrant’s building? Then the coffee shop, Java Jim’s. On the other side is Endicott Library. See?”
Where Jane and Fee had met with SAFE. “Yes,” Jane said.
She tried to focus, tried to be patient. Isabel had asked her to come over, and at seven in the morning, it wasn’t for chitchat. Jane longed to race to the hospital, but first she had to hear this. Nothing she could do there, anyway. Nothing but be with her Jake.
“So, Jane,” Isabel was saying. The rising sun glinted through a little crystal suspended on an almost-invisible wire, rainbowing the girl’s face. “Thing is. I watch out the window all the time. But I am not simply … looking. I watch for the man who raped me. And I see him. All the time. And I keep track. Where he is. How long he stays.”
Jane scratched the side of her nose, watching the shifting prism of colors.
“Why?” was all she could think of to ask. Poor D.
“To stay alive,” Isabel said. “To have … power, I guess. Because he would hate it, and I hate him, and it makes me feel like God.”
If Jane could have heard the fish swimming, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
“I know you don’t want to hear it.” Isabel’s voice grew stronger, each word with an edge. “But the man who raped me is Trey Welliver.”
“Isa—” Jane’s mouth opened, her brain trying to catch up, but failing. “You—”
“Look at this calendar,” Isabel interrupted. “See the red dots? And notations? I know where he was, exactly, between two and four on Monday. In fact, the entire time between one and five. At the library, and Java Jim’s. Trey Welliver could not have been at Avery Morgan’s house.”
“You’re saying…” Jane’s brain went to warp speed. She had to tell Jake. The boundaries of their jobs didn’t matter. Not in a situation like this. “… they arrested an innocent man.”
“No question,” Isabel said. “I saw everything.”
51
JAKE BROGAN
Jake’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket, an insistent burr that might have awakened him, might have, except he certainly wasn’t asleep, would not have fallen asleep.
He blinked, trying to ground himself in time and place. Hospital. DeLuca. He needed to call Jane. His eyes flared open, and he scanned the corridor to the left, the right, and then left again.
What?
He stood, inch by inch, understanding this wasn’t a dream. His mind, groggy and exhausted, struggled to make sense of it. Hospital bells pinged. An unintelligible voice squawked over the PA system, then stopped.
“Hello, Detective Brogan,” Jane was saying. Ten steps away now, holding her cell. And not alone. His cop’s brain catalogued the woman with her. White female, approx. 20, dark hair. Who? Why?
“Hello, Ms. Ryland.” Jake, taking Jane’s cue, played along with using their public personas. His phone stopped buzzing as she put hers away. He understood why she was here, but who was with her?
“How’s Detective DeLuca?” Jane asked.
He could see her eyes narrow, read the sorrow in them, understood that Jane—he adored her—was trying to transmit her concern.
“Hanging in. Last I heard. They just took him upstairs, some specialist.” Jake cleared his throat. “Did you … hear about it from the medical examiner?”
Jane nodded. “Half an hour ago.”
“I didn’t want to wake—”
“It’s okay,” Jane said.
This was impossible, an impossible situation. He wanted to throw his arms around Jane, break into tears, have her comfort him—damn it, it was D. Now he had to pretend, because of whoever this girl was, that he hardly knew her.
“Um, Ja—Detective Brogan?” Jane was saying. “I apologize for doing this now. Forgive me, but it’s important. Is it true you arrested Trey Welliver in the Avery Morgan case?”
“Why?” Welliver? Had the kid’s parents called the television station? Or had his lawyer blown the whistle? Could people never shut up?
“I know.” Jane looked apologetic, waved her hand toward the hospital ward. “The ME told me the whole thing, and I am so, so sorry. But this is—” She turned to the girl.
“Yes,” the girl whispered. Looked like she was about to cry. “I’ll tell him.”
What the hell?
“This is Isabel Russo,” Jane said, putting her arm across the young woman’s shoulders. “She goes to Adams Bay. She’s an acquaintance of Trey Welliver. And at the time you think Avery Morgan was killed at her home … well, she knows Trey Welliver could not have been there.”
A wail of a siren ripped through the silence. A blast of sounds, a chaos of noise, more sirens, and a battery of claxons. Jake’s phone buzzed in his pocket, red lights flashed in the hallway. Footsteps, running, white coats.
“Code red code red code red,” an automated voice blasted through the tinny speakers. “One two three,” the robo-voice announced. “One two three.”
Jake drew his Glock. One two three. Code for active shooter.
“Get down,” Jake commanded. “Under that bench, both of you.”
Two more white coats ran by. Direction of D’s room. Doors slammed down the corridor like gunshots. “No. Into that closet.” He slammed the flat metal plate that opened the solid-looking metal door. “Do not come out till I tell you.”
He saw the look in Jane’s eyes, read it, chilled, but there was nothing else to do or say.
“Shut that door!” He slammed his body at it, closed them inside. He could just make out Jane’s face through a rectangular sliver of wire-meshed window. “Stay down!”
52
WILLOW GALT
“Maybe it’s good that they’re not calling you back,” Willow said.
From her seat at their kitchen table, Tom across from her, Willow could see the tiny path where Avery had pushed through the bushes on that first day. Poor Avery. “Maybe the police have solved it. Without us.”
Willow hoped against hope this was true. After Olive’s phone call earlier this morning, Tom had changed his mind about keeping things secret. They’d decided, together, that they’d face the world, or at least the police, together. And the consequences. Even if they had to start another new life. Secretly she also hoped that if she spoke up, if she told the truth and made the world right, the universe would forgive her. Leave her alone. Leave them alone.
“We’ll wait,” Tom said. “It’s only seven-thirty in the morning. M
aybe it’s not their shift. Maybe they don’t care. They’re cops, after all.”
Willow watched the steam curling from her white mug of coffee, felt Tom’s leg touch hers under the checked tablecloth. Morning was special in The Reserve, with a gently filtered light. Maybe the peace and solitude they’d longed for would follow. Tom had said the right thing, done the honorable thing, in California, told the feds about the financial house of cards at Untitled constructed by the embezzling Roger Hayden. They’d been moved three thousand miles in witness protection because of it.
Now it was her turn. She had witnessed Avery Morgan’s murder—she guessed you could call it “murder.” She would say the right thing, too. If she had to.
And if she needed proof that the world was a calculus of irony? Last night their handler, Olive Brennis, had called Tom, telling him Detective Brogan had left her a message saying her informant was dead. Until Willow called her, Olive—and briefly, Tom—had assumed the detective meant Willow.
Olive had called the Galts again, half an hour ago, having followed up on the detective’s call. “I get it now,” Olive had said. “Brogan probably meant Avery Morgan, can you believe it? Because of her Untitled connection, apparently he thought she was the informant. Close,” she’d scoffed, “but no cigar.”
The feds were now calculating how much they could say to set Brogan straight.
“Tom,” she began.
“Willow,” he said at the same time, and that’s because they loved each other, and why the world would work.
“When I thought about you being dead,” Tom went on, stirring his coffee, “I understood how much I loved you, what you gave up for me. For us. And no matter what happened in the past, I knew you’d forgive me. But part of me worried. That you wouldn’t.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.” Willow felt her heart melt. She loved him, too, and there was nothing he could say or do that would ever change that.
“Here’s the thing. I knew Avery, in California. Uh, pretty well. Before you came,” Tom said. “She was a freelancer at Untitled. But she probably didn’t tell you that, right, as Willow? It was like working at Enron, or some disgraced corporation—everyone touched by it tried to erase it from their past. When you told me her name … well, I didn’t want to tell you. But when she was drowned…” He pressed his lips together, closed his eyes briefly.
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