Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  “Oh, angel, that is good,” the girl said into his shoulder as his lips, his teeth scratched over her neck.

  If the car continues to accelerate—

  “Oh yes, just like that.”

  —and the road begins to slope downward—

  “Oh God, am I close.”

  —the arrival time of the passengers at their final destination—

  “Right there, oh yes yes—”

  The ringing phone cut through her cries.

  He gripped her to his chest to still her and reached out for the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “I am so glad I reached you. Oh God, it’s terrible, terrible. There has been an accident. The car missed a curve and—” On the other end of the line he heard someone take a deep breath. “Your father is dead.”

  He felt the girl tightening around him. He asked only, “When?”

  The voice on the other end of the phone paused. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, when did it happen?”

  “I see. Ah, they are giving the time of death as six-oh-four.”

  “Six-oh-four,” he repeated. “Thank you, Nelson.”

  “Was that important?” the girl asked, pouting slightly as he hung up.

  “Nope. Sorry, babe. Now, where were we?”

  “I don’t think I want—”

  He cut her off and, gripping her bottom to him with adrenaline-strong hands, picked up where he had stopped.

  If the road begins to slope downward—

  Her eyes lit up and she sighed, “Oh yesssss.”

  —and the car’s brakes give out—

  “Right there!”

  —the arrival time of the passengers at their final destination—

  “Oh angel, yes, yes, YES!”

  —would be 6:04 a.m.

  “My God, you are a force of nature,” she whispered to him later when he was inside her again.

  Newton’s first law: an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force.

  He smiled to himself and said, “I sure am.”

  He smiled to himself again, years later, as he sat at his desk and let his fingertips run along the edges of the fragile paper that recorded his triumph that day. There had been several obituaries, but this one from the local paper was the one he liked best. Beloved father, survived by only son, it read, the words like poetry to him. He had been the one to survive. He had won that round.

  Let the games begin.

  Just like he would win this one.

  Gently he closed the album and rested his fingers on the words deeply embossed in the rich leather, letting the shapes of the letters, F-A-M-I-L-Y-R-E-M-E-M-B-R-A-N-C-E-S, seep through his fingertips. For five minutes he sat soaking up their feel and message like a divine incantation.

  Then he put away his scissors and glue, slid his newest creation into an envelope, clicked off his desk light, and locked up. It was time to go.

  Ready or not, here I come!

  CHAPTER 2

  Mayo Clinic Hospice, Rochester, Minnesota

  The long corridor was silent, the bleached pine floor gleaming softly under the new coat of wax the cleaning crew laid down at 10:30. It wasn’t really pine, Imogen Page knew, just a veneer over plastic, peeling up near one corner in front of the door marked Exit. Real wood would make too much noise, and noise was not allowed here. This was a place for quiet. Everything about it was quiet, the pastel walls, the nubbly cotton upholstery. Quiet plants, nothing fancy and tropical, hung in the rooms. Blinds let in only diffused light, telephones hummed rather than rang, doors closed slowly, gently on special hinges, never slamming. Everything was muted, quiet, expectant. Waiting for death.

  The place was so wrong for Sam. Sam had never been quiet in his life. Sam who bubbled with life, with vitality, Sam who yelled rather than talked, guffawed rather than laughed. Sam could fill a room with himself. Big Sam, strong Sam, Sam who had protected her and cared about her. Her brother Sam.

  He could not be dying.

  Imogen turned from the window and looked at the man in the bed surrounded by plants and balloons and silly marker drawings. Hardly a man anymore, just the elements of a man, skin and bones. Like some Renaissance painting of a death’s head. God, he was small. He must have lost fifty pounds in the last three weeks.

  He might live as much as two months, the doctor had said. But there is really nothing we can do for him.

  But he was healthy and strong and alive last month, her mind shouted. Last month in Hawaii they had played in the waves outside the little house they were sharing, like the carefree teenagers they never had been, jumping up and down, chasing sand crabs, watching the palm trees wave at night. They had drinks in pineapples with happy faces attached to the outside by toothpicks, had tucked paper umbrellas behind their ears. One night they had walked so long on the beach—Sam telling stupid jokes, her laughing at them in a way she never laughed with anyone else—that they were too tired to make dinner and they had not even cared.

  She had wanted to pound her fist on the doctor’s desk as he sat there smoothly weighing his words. Dr. Stephen Gold. He was her age, maybe a little older, and looked rich and well fed. He had the forearms of a tennis player, slightly tanned, and Imogen found herself wondering if he’d taken his wife (wedding band on his left hand) or his mistress (no tan line from the wedding band) with him to his most recent medical conference in the tropics. He had not gotten that tan in Minnesota, and she could taste the remnants of his infidelity on the air around him. He was smug, the way someone can be who deals in the great mysteries, in Life and Death, capitalized. Life and death were her business too, but not like this. Not uppercase proper nouns. Not Sam. Not her brother.

  What do you mean nothing? she had wanted to holler at the tanned philandering tennis-playing doctor. Don’t you understand this is impossible? Don’t you understand that while you may leave here with your mistress for a quick fuck, when I leave I have nothing, no one besides Sam? Don’t you understand that he can’t die? He is Sam, strong, the strong, athletic one. The Olympian. I am the one who should die, me, the smart one, the useless one; leave Sam. Please, she had wanted to plead, this is a mistake. Please, she had wanted to scream, this cannot be happening.

  “I see,” she had said quietly.

  “The best thing you can do,” Dr. Stephen Gold continued, looking not at but over her, “would be to get him into a hospice. He needs more care than you can give at home, but he’ll be more comfortable there than in an intensive-care ward. And there is nothing we can do for him here at the Mayo Clinic.”

  “I understand,” she had said. And for the first time in her life, it was a lie.

  Imogen Page was absurdly good at understanding things. It was her job to understand, to make sense of things no one else could explain, interpret inconsequential patterns—codes, riddles, chess patterns, stab wounds—into meaning. But suddenly, listening to the doctor, it had all broken down. From that moment on, she did not understand anything. Every day she understood less and less. Every day from that day she recognized less and less of Sam in the body lying on the bed in front of her.

  Every day he went away a little more, and now there was almost nothing left.

  Moving slowly to remain quiet, she left the hospice room. She did not know why she bothered to tiptoe, why she still bothered to leave when she had to cry. Sam had not opened his eyes in two days. He couldn’t hear them, the nurses assured her as they talked about his condition with her in front of him. He was no longer sentient, the doctors said. But she did not, could not believe them. She turned her steps into the veneer corridor.

  As soon as she got that plastic wood under her feet, she began to run. Gulping for air, she made it to the women’s room and locked the door behind her. Imogen Page would not let anyone see her cry, turned away from the mirror so she wouldn’t have to watch it herself. She backed up against the door, pressed her shoulders to it, and sobbed. Arms crossed over her chest like an ancient phar
aoh’s mummy, she leaned her head against the cold mint green tiles of the walls and screamed with rage, tiny screams that only she could hear in her head. Despair and anger flooded over her in waves and she felt buffeted by them, hurtled against the sides of her empty, lonely being. Just as suddenly as it came, the storm hovered, and disappeared. She found herself huddled in the corner of the tiled room, her hands gripping her thighs, her eyes squeezed shut.

  She cleaned her face with the rough paper towels in the hospice bathroom and that pink powdered soap they used to have in the elementary school locker room the year they lived in Oregon, the year before—

  When she had scrubbed away the signs of her tears, she returned to Sam’s room.

  He was just as she’d left him, but the room tasted different to her. Faintly peppery. She looked around and saw that his hand had moved. She reached out to replace it over his stomach, over the other one, in the proper handshake of death, and his eyes opened.

  “Gigi.” He did not say the word, just mouthed it, but she knew what it was, knew he was saying her name, his name for her. He pinned her with his gaze and lifted his arms slowly, slightly, into the air.

  “Do you want me to prop you up?” she asked, rushing to his side, pushing the button that bent the bed forward.

  She looked at him expectantly. He shook his head and, grasping one of his thin wrists with the other—those gold medal–winning wrists that had been so supple—raised both arms in the air in a circle.

  “The bed is up as high as it will go, love,” she whispered, moving close to him.

  A tear of frustration leaked from his eye. His mouth, lips cracked and dry, was open partway. He smelled like plastic bedclothes and decay. He lifted his joined arms again.

  A circle. Like a glass. Imogen grabbed the cup of ice shards that stood ready on the table beside the bed. He must be thirsty. “They like to suck on the ice when they can’t eat anymore,” the nurse had said. Imogen held a small piece of ice tenderly to his lips.

  Sam jerked his head away, lifted his arms again.

  She was trembling with inadequacy now. “I don’t know what you want, Sammie,” she said, pleading. “I don’t know how to give you what you want. I don’t understand.”

  He looked at her again, right at her, with his eyes clear in a way she hadn’t seen in weeks. They were the eyes she knew again, pure blue eyes like hers, trying to tell her something. There was a plea there, a message. A question she couldn’t read.

  Her eyes stung and there was a lump in her throat. She would never swallow again, she thought.

  She turned the light on over him, adjusted his pillows, tried again with the ice, almost manic now, trying anything, brushing tears out of her eyes before he could see them, but he just kept looking at her, a little sad. Finally he raised his arms in a circle again and mouthed a word.

  Brother and sister stared at each other, for the first time unable to communicate. There was love in his gaze at her, so much love, and fear, but there was something else too, and she could not fathom what it was.

  At last Sam leaned back into the pillows she had arranged, his arms fell down, and his eyes closed. Resting. She listened as he took a breath, shallow, peaceful, and another one. Another. There was a horrible rattling sound, a sound Imogen would dream of forever. It was the sound of death, the last sound, the last breath.

  He was gone.

  In desperation she wrapped her arms around him, cradling the wispy-haired head against her shoulder, holding on to him, holding the life inside him, hugging it in with her body, but it was too late.

  There was no more life. There were no more breaths left. Sam was gone.

  Gone. It was then that Imogen understood. At that moment she understood, that too-late moment, understood what the linked arms had meant. She understood with a crashing clarity. And the understanding, when it came, was worse than death and worse than sadness.

  Too late.

  She sat and held Sam’s hand in her own, rocking back and forth, crying silently, holding on until the fingers were stiff and cold. Then she placed them on his chest and summoned the nurse. That night she walked out of the hospice for the first time in two weeks. She did not notice the weather or the size-twelve footprints outside her brother’s window or the fact that someone had plowed her car out for her. She did not feel sad or angry or any of the things she expected to feel. She tasted, for the first time in her life, nothing.

  The obituary reported that Samuel Page died at 4:54 A.M. on Saturday, of a blood infection. The Olympic gold medalist in fencing, it went on to say, was survived by his sister, Imogen Page, the FBI agent who had solved the Connoisseur killings.

  The obituary was wrong.

  Imogen did not know that yet, would not know it for a long time. But the man reading it in the airport lounge did.

  When he was done with it, he carefully folded the paper and slipped it under the arm of his hand-tailored overcoat. The camel cashmere fabric was great with his tan complexion, and several women turned to look at him as he strolled by. He could feel their gazes on his back. He wore aviator sunglasses so his eyes weren’t visible, but at six foot four he was hard to ignore.

  He played a game in his head, guessing what people were saying about him as he passed. “Isn’t that . . . ?” he guessed the brunette in the tight red sweater sitting at the bar asked the bartender. The bartender would nod. “Sure is. Like to be in his shoes, I tell you.”

  “I’d like to be in his pants,” the brunette would say. “Playing with his you know what.”

  The man in the camel coat worked to keep back a smile. People always said things like that about him. He knew how he looked: rich, powerful, successful, well groomed. A man without a care in the world. And he knew it was true. Or almost.

  Because, as it happened, he was very care-ful. Full of care. Very careful indeed. A bright, boyish chuckle at the pun erupted in his throat, and evaporated as quickly as it had come. No time for that right now, he chastised himself. He was that other man now, the man who did not laugh. And there was still so much to do. So much to see to.

  So many people to take care of.

  CHAPTER 3

  Las Vegas, Nevada. Four days later.

  Benton Walsingham Arbor knew something was wrong the minute he stepped out of the cockpit of his plane. Absent from the tarmac was the light blue 1966 Thunderbird convertible that should have been waiting for him to slide into the driver’s seat; present instead was a brand-new black Arbor Motors X37 with J. D. Eastly behind the wheel. That told the whole story.

  “What happened to Sadie?” Benton asked as he closed the distance at a run. “Which hospital is she in, how bad is it, has someone seen to Eros, and who is flying in from Mass General?”

  J.D. glanced at Benton through the tobacco-colored sunglasses he always wore and said, “Good to see you too, Benton.”

  There was no love between the two men at the best of times, and this wasn’t one of them. He and J.D. usually limited their communication to long, tense silences. Benton said, “Tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “Nothing has happened to your grandmother.”

  “Then why the hell are you driving?” Benton asked, ready to get out of the car. He hated not being in the driver’s seat and J.D. knew it, even knew why. But the man wasn’t budging.

  He said, “Something else has happened,” maneuvering around the plane and out of the airport, turning onto Tropicana. “Something bad.”

  As a veteran cop, Det. Sgt. John Dillinger Eastly had delivered a lot of bad news in his time, but Benton could tell that this time he was struggling. J.D. said, “Rosalind is missing, Benton. Presumed kidnapped.”

  Benton forced himself to breathe. Think. Said, “Ransom demand?”

  “Not yet. We don’t know how long she’s been gone, but the last time anyone spoke to her was yesterday morning. We just found out at eight-thirty this morning, when the spa called because she failed to show up for her massage appointment.”

  �
��Police?”

  “Everyone’s on the case. This should fall under my jurisdiction, since I’m overseeing the Violent Crimes Task Force while the boss is in Texas—”

  “What is she doing there?” Benton asked, thinking maybe he could get her back for this.

  “She’s working on the twelve bodies of those women they found when they were tracking the space shuttle debris. Active serial killer case.”

  Or maybe not.

  J.D. went on, “I called the FBI and told them we at Vegas Metro would prefer it if they let us handle Rosalind’s disappearance ourselves, and I also notified the CIA. Given what she’s been working on it seemed wise.”

  Rosalind Carnow was one of America’s foremost nuclear physicists. She was also Benton’s closest friend and, according to the tabloids, his paramour. That was pressing the truth, but it was true that they had known each other since college and had served as each other’s dates for every important occasion for the past seventeen years, from debutante balls to banquets at the White House. In the past, Benton had asked her to marry him a dozen times at least, and each time she had said no. Each time, he respected her more for it.

  Rosalind had come to Las Vegas a week before Benton to meet with some scientists from the University of Nevada, and have a few days of pampering before the craziness of the Las Vegas Invitational began. After the invitational came a party celebrating Benton’s grandmother Sadie’s recent wedding to Eros, the godlike Greek half her age with whom she had been living (“in sin, glorious, glorious sin,” as she told everyone) for the past three years and whom she had quietly married the week before. Rosalind was supposed to be spending the next few days wrapped in mud and seaweed and covered in hot rocks and cool towels at the hotel spa, while Benton disappeared into the mountains for four days of solo rock climbing. After that, he was supposed to show what the new line of Arbor Motors cars could do on the track at the invitational, and Rosalind was supposed to watch, and make faces at him and chastise him for still racing when he was much too old. And they were supposed to go to dinner and gamble a little and laugh a lot and not dance because Rosalind hated to dance. It was supposed to be a really super ten days.