by G. H. Ephron
“Gunshot wound to the head,” he said. “No bruising or other signs of force. It was her own gun. Powder residue on her hand.” He was laying out the case, watching my reaction. “So it looks like suicide.”
“They’re doing an autopsy?” I asked.
“It’s been done. We’ll have the results in a couple of days. Tomorrow, maybe.”
“The body?”
“Already transferred to the mortuary.”
My throat constricted. I tried to get my voice, to swallow. I pushed away the image of Channing, cold and still on a metal slab.
“I’m sorry,” MacRae said. “I know she was a friend of yours.”
I nodded, mute. I made a mental note to call Drew and check that he knew the body had been moved.
MacRae pivoted away from me, giving me a moment to collect myself. He picked up a folder from the top of his desk and pivoted back. He opened the folder and spread out some pictures. “I’d like you to look at the photos we took in Dr. Temple’s office—just to be sure that everything is exactly as you remember it.”
There were shots of various parts of the room, the desktop, and, of course, Channing herself. I stared at the eight-by-ten glossies and tried to shut down my insides.
“You noticed a coffee spill?” I asked, the detail floating out of nowhere.
“We analyzed the spill on the carpet and the traces left in the mug. Just coffee.”
“Dr. Temple wasn’t a coffee drinker.”
“You think someone else was with her?”
“Maybe.” The picture closest to me was of Channing. “She was sitting up when I got there,” I said.
“Was she holding the gun?” he asked.
“No,” I said. At least I could answer that question honestly.
He pointed to the next photograph. It was of the top of Channing’s desk. There were the purple folders, the letter opener, the paperweight. “The computer was there, on the desk,” I said, indicating the empty space. “And that’s another thing. Channing was barely computer literate. I very much doubt that she’d know how to program a screen saver with a particular message.”
“Screen saver?”
I glanced at MacRae’s computer screen. “Like that,” I said. His screen saver was hard at work—yellow scene-of the-crime tape crisscrossing the screen. “Only on hers, there were words scrolling across the screen.”
MacRae gave me a blank look.
“It was programmed to say something like ‘I’m sorry. I can’t live with myself,’” I explained. MacRae looked annoyed, scratched a note. “Sorry, I thought you knew.”
“How about you just assume that I know nothing.” He glared at me. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”
Ouch. He was right. I’d underestimated him before. I’d try not to do it again.
“And another thing,” I said. “As someone who knew the devastation suicide leaves behind, Channing Temple was the last person who’d assume that a one-liner was an adequate suicide note.”
“That’s your opinion?”
I just looked at him. He’d underestimated me, as well, during our last encounter. I hoped we weren’t starting a replay.
“Anything else?” he asked.
I stared at the photograph. Something else was missing. I closed my eyes and tried to remember. “There was a cup on the desk,” I said.
“It was on the floor when we got there. Maybe someone knocked it over when the coffee got spilled.”
“No. The mug I saw was empty. And it was on the desk.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was another Acu-Med mug, like this one.”
MacRae looked skeptical. “And you don’t think it’s the one we found on the floor?”
He could be stubborn and myopic when he set his mind to it. “That one had traces of coffee in it. You told me that yourself.” My voice was strident. “Channing didn’t drink coffee.”
MacRae blinked and wrote himself another note.
I stared at the next photograph, a close-up of a small, silver-handled handgun resting on the carpet alongside the chair.
“Anything you neglected to tell us?” he asked, his eyes drilling holes into me.
If I was going to tell him about Olivia holding the gun, this was the time to do it. “Why do you ask?”
He grunted and pressed his thumb down on the gun in the picture. “Just answer the question.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Tampering with evidence is a serious offense,” he said. “The gun is covered with fingerprints, and they’re not all Dr. Temple’s.”
“I didn’t touch the gun.”
“Ri-ight,” MacRae drew the word out. He narrowed his eyes at me. “You sure there’s nothing else you want to tell me?”
I tried not to falter, but I probably responded too quickly. “I spoke with her husband last night. He thinks suicide is unlikely.”
“In my experience, anyone can commit suicide,” MacRae countered.
I shook my head. “In my experience, not.”
He tented his fingers and leaned back in his chair.
I went on, “There are some people whose sense of self is too solid to allow them to kill themselves, and Dr. Temple was one of those people.”
“That’s not what I hear,” MacRae said, raising his finger tent a few inches higher. “Sounds more like she was falling to pieces.”
I felt anger rise out of my chest. “Who told you that?”
“People at the hospital. Didn’t her mother commit suicide?”
“So what if she did?”
“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you think you did.”
I wanted to shout, And maybe you don’t know her at all. Instead, I clenched my teeth and told myself that he was just doing his job. This was nothing personal. “Anything else?” I asked.
He sat forward, put the photographs back in the folder and shoved them into the top desk drawer. “You won’t mind having your prints taken while you’re here?”
“No problem.”
“And Olivia Temple.” He said it as if it were all caps and underlined. “We need to question her. As soon as possible.”
“Give her a few more days. Please. Right now, she’s too fragile. She’s recovering from an overdose of Ritalin, and she’s still in shock from her mother’s death.”
“Peter,” MacRae said, his voice weary, “we could help one another here.”
Or we could just keep butting horns. From our last encounter, I had reason to believe that underneath his policeman’s badge beat the heart of a human being. “How about you come to the hospital next week,” I said. “She should be stabilized by then. I expect the funeral will be over.”
“Next week?” He made it sound as if that were a decade away.
“You’ll get more out of her if you wait.”
Reluctantly, he pulled out an appointment book and slapped it open on the desk. Just then the phone rang. MacRae answered it. He turned away from me, cupped the receiver, and talked quietly into the phone. Listened. Then he stood and took the receiver around to the opposite side of the cubicle wall, stretching the spiral phone cord taut.
The facing pages of his datebook were dense with scribbled appointments. But the writing that jumped out at me was in yesterday’s slot: Annie—8:00. I told myself it wasn’t my Annie, and if it was, it was probably business. She was a PI; he was a detective. And even if it was for pleasure, it was only once.
He was still on the phone. I quietly lifted the page and peeked at last week’s calendar. There Annie’s name was again, a week ago Saturday. Annie and MacRae? Had they become an item while I’d been messing around?
Sure, he and Annie had grown up together. Their families had once been close, but I thought in recent years they’d been estranged. I remembered Annie telling me how her father, a union activist, had been badly beaten while he was in jail after a demonstration. It broke his spirit as well as his body. MacRae’s father was a cop. Annie thought he knew which
cops had done it, but wouldn’t say. Friendship took a backseat to loyalty to the force. The rift between the families had been permanent. Or had it? Perhaps there’d been a reconciliation after all these years. Why not?
I sat back and stared at the wall. There was picture of a boy, maybe ten years old. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, holding a soccer ball, and grinning at the camera. It had never occurred to me that MacRae actually might have a child. An ex-wife somewhere, too? I wondered if he was still dating that nurse from the rehab hospital. And what exactly was his relationship to Annie?
“Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow,” MacRae said as he came back into his cubicle. “Right, right.”
He hung up the phone.
“So you’ll come to the Pearce on Tuesday to interview Olivia Temple,” I said, eyeing him warily.
“What’s wrong with Monday?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Monday. I’ll make the arrangements.”
As I was leaving, I paused to look more closely at the photograph of the young soccer player, as if I’d just noticed. “Your boy?” I asked.
He nodded proudly. “He’s older now.”
“Still playing soccer?”
“Yup.”
“What position?”
“Sweeper. He’s one tough hombre. Gets that from me. That’s one of the few things my ex and I agree on.”
“If you see that nurse from the rehab hospital, send her my regards.” I tried to sound nonchalant, uninterested.
“Haven’t seen her for months,” he said. “But will do, if I run into her.”
As I shook MacRae’s hand, I tried to imagine Annie in the cubicle with us. I knew she was shorter than I was, but was she taller than MacRae? It was a close call. If his handshake was any indication, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to arm wrestle him.
When I got home that night, there was a message from Annie on my machine. “Hey, Peter, it’s me. I heard on the news. Just calling to see if you’re okay. Is there anything I can do? Oh, hell, I know you. You’re going to tell me you’re fine. Everything’s fine. I’ll drop by tonight.” There was a pause. “Don’t eat before I get there.”
I flipped on the porch light. A while later, the doorbell rang. It was Annie. I smelled the pizza before I saw the big, flat box from Il Panino, the best North End pizzeria, which now had an outpost in Cambridge. She had a six-pack of Sam Adams, too.
We sat at my kitchen table, and by the time I was chewing on the final crust, I’d brought Annie up-to-date on the latest.
Annie touched her hand to my face. “I wish there was something I could do or say that would help.”
I covered her hand with mine. “Being here helps,” I said. “Therapists like to say, ‘Knowledge binds depression.’ Talking to you helps me make sense of what’s happened, so it doesn’t feel so much like the world’s spun out of control.” I sighed. “Again.”
After Kate was killed, I would have admitted no friends bearing pizza. Not even Channing. I’d wanted to be alone, where my conscience could eat at me from inside.
Annie pondered in silence. “You don’t think Olivia killed her mother, do you?”
“I don’t. But I don’t much like the alternative.”
“I barely knew her, but sometimes you can have a strong impression of someone. Channing didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d commit suicide.”
“A senior psychiatrist, a woman who’s been her mentor since her residency, told me she thought Channing had developed an unhealthy transference to a suicidal woman patient,” I said.
“Transference?”
“Channing identified so strongly with her patient’s feelings of despair that she experienced them herself.”
“And that’s why she killed herself?”
“That’s what this person was suggesting as a partial explanation.”
Annie hung there with her mouth open. “Wait a minute. Are you telling me that destructive feelings are just floating around and you can catch them?” Annie asked. “Like the flu?” I nodded. “Sounds like an X-File.”
“I guess it sounds pretty out there. But it does happen. A good therapist has to be able to walk in another person’s shoes. When you empathize too much, you can end up with feelings that aren’t your own. Even acting on those feelings.”
Annie put her hands on her hips. “Next thing, you’ll be trying to sell me a bridge.” When she saw I was serious, she downshifted. “Okay, so let’s suppose for a minute you’re right. Why didn’t she leave a note? She’s got a seventeen-year-old daughter and she doesn’t leave an explanation? I mean, a few words on a computer screen explain nothing.”
“I agree. It doesn’t add up. Channing never got over her anger at her own mother for taking the easy way out, as she called it. She’d be furious if people thought she’d committed suicide, too.”
“So you can’t let them think that.”
“But then they’ll think Olivia did it.”
“You can’t let them think that either.”
“Somehow, this has become my problem, hasn’t it?”
“I think that’s how you wanted it,” Annie observed. She had the makings of a fine psychologist.
“But if Channing didn’t kill herself,” I said, “and Olivia didn’t do it …”
“Then someone else did and engineered it to look like suicide. Did she have enemies?”
I barked a laugh. “A few. And I can’t help wondering if all the rumors about her lack of clinical judgment, the drubbing she took in JAMA, if they’re not all connected somehow.”
“A plot,” Annie said.
I knew she was pointing out how far-fetched this was starting to sound. But to me, it was just starting to make sense. “Dr. Smythe-Gooding suggested Channing was taking too much anxiety medication. In high doses, over a long enough period of time, that could have altered her judgment.”
Annie said what I was thinking: “I wonder if they have the autopsy results back yet?”
“I was over talking to MacRae today. He said they might have the final results tomorrow.”
Annie nodded. “I can get them. They probably have preliminary results now, even if they’re not in final format.”
I pictured Annie and MacRae cozy in his office, reading the preliminary report together. Before I could stop myself, I said, “I forgot. You have an in over there.”
Immediately, I wished I could have reeled the words back in. As Gloria would have noted, I sounded like a bull elephant.
Annie recoiled. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I dunno,” I mumbled. “Just that you and he seem to be finding a lot of opportunities to … collaborate.”
Annie shook her head. “I haven’t had anyone else monopolizing my time, exactly,” she said pointedly.
I winced. Bad enough she was seeing someone else. But did it have to be MacRae? It wasn’t just because he’d gotten the better of me in a fistfight—I’d ended up inhaling duck shit, my nose pressed into the boat dock and his foot grinding into my ass.
I said, “I thought you told me you two didn’t have much in common, other than cops in the family.”
“His father died awhile back,” Annie said. “My mother and I went to the funeral. They got together, my mom and Mrs. MacRae, and it was like old times. They’re both widows now. Getting back their friendship at this point in their lives is a gift.”
“And what about you and MacRae?” I heard the words before I’d decided to say them.
Annie crossed her arms over her chest and gazed at me. “He and I go way back,” Annie said. “Though you know the question doesn’t even deserve a response. And it’s also none of your business.” Her eyes flashed with anger.
I couldn’t see it. How could she be attracted to me and be interested in him at the same time? “If you don’t think it’s any of my business, then I guess you’re right. It isn’t.”
“What did you think I was going to do? Wait around, cooling my heels while you make up your mind whether you�
�re ready for someone in your life?” I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Annie stood. “I’d better be going, before one of us says something we’ll regret.” She carried her glass to the sink. “Keep the beer.”
Long after the front door shut, I sat there staring at the pair of unopened bottles of Sam Adams sitting forlorn on my kitchen table, my self-righteousness dissipating like a bad smell in the room. I felt like a jerk.
9
I WAS reviewing charts at the nurses’ station Wednesday morning when Kwan appeared. Then, Jess hurried by, back straight, a tissue in her fist.
“Incompetence,” Kwan growled. “Why is it that nothing gets done around here unless you do it yourself?”
Gloria stalked over to us. “Bully,” she said to Kwan.
“Come on, Gloria, she’s unreliable,” he appealed. Gloria’s mouth tightened, skepticism pulling it down at the corners. “Out of her depth.”
“And what did she do?” I asked.
“It’s what she didn’t do,” Kwan answered. “She was supposed to enroll Lydia Small in the Zerenidine trial,” Kwan said. “Yesterday.”
Grief-stricken over Channing’s death, Jess had left Monday afternoon and called in sick Tuesday. She’d returned today, only to face Kwan’s wrath.
“Can’t she still do it?” I asked.
Gloria answered, “You haven’t heard? Last night Mrs. Small fell and broke her hip. She’s been transferred to the General. Painful for Mrs. Small. Inconvenient for someone who shall go unnamed.”
If we’d been talking about anything else, Kwan would have had a snappy comeback that would have defused the tension. Instead, he lowered his voice. “If she’s not going to do her job, she’s not going to make a good psychiatrist. We can’t allow our emotions to rule. People’s lives are at stake here.”
“People’s lives or your research?” Gloria asked.
“Right now it’s my research that’s keeping this unit in the black.” Kwan gave us both a hard look.
“That may be,” Gloria retorted. “But I know for a fact it doesn’t do squat for patient care. You’re here the same amount of time you always are, only now you’re juggling drug trials along with your patient load. You can’t tell me one thing doesn’t affect the other.”
