Turning Angel

by Greg Iles

  Dad sits on the side of my bed and surveys me from head to toe. “You’re in bad shape, Penn.”

  “How bad?”

  He sighs deeply. “Your heart’s sounding better, but the vasculitis is still a serious problem. If you start moving around, you’re going to have hydrostatic problems with your blood pressure. You could faint very easily.”

  “It’s not my blood vessels that are keeping me in this bed. It’s the withdrawal. I get horrible muscle cramps when I move. If I stand for ten minutes, I fall down and twist into a ball of agony. That’s what I need help with.”

  “The methadone’s not helping?”

  “Not enough.”

  Dad makes a clucking sound with his tongue.

  “Drew saved my life,” I say quietly. “You remember.”

  “I remember, all right.” Dad taps his right fist into his open palm. “There’s one thing I could try. It’s unethical as hell, but…Hang on, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Hospital pharmacy.”

  He’s back in less than five minutes. In his left hand is a bottle of pills, in his right, a mortar and pestle.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oxycontin.”

  “Will that help me?”

  His eyes glint beneath raised brows. “We’re about to find out.”

  He takes out two yellow tablets, drops them into the china vessel, and crushes them to powder. “Abusers crush the tablets because they’re time-release formulas,” he says. “Crushing them gives you the full dose almost instantaneously. It’s a lot more like mainlining heroin.” He takes a white card from the flowers by my bed and carefully brushes three quarters of the powder into the glass of water on my bedside table.

  “Drink it down.”

  I swallow the bitter mixture.

  “That ought to give you some relief.”

  “How long will it last?”

  “I don’t know. But don’t do that yourself. When the pain comes back, just take one pill by mouth.”

  Dad dons his stethoscope and lays its cold bell against the skin beneath my left nipple, over the apex of my heart.

  “What are you listening for?” I ask. “My heart slowing down?”

  “No. With a narcotic dose like this, your respiration will slow down, but your heart may race to try to provide more oxygen. It’s called reflex tachycardia.”

  The rush doesn’t come as quickly as the one from Blue’s syringe, but come it does. After five minutes, I feel the warmth spreading from beneath my heart. “Jesus,” I murmur. “That’s it. The pain is gone.” I flex my arms, then stretch gloriously in the bed. “Talk about a miracle drug.”

  “There’s a reason opium has hung around since Alexander the Great.” After a while, Dad removes his stethoscope and says, “Your heartbeat’s within normal limits.”

  I take several deep breaths, then sit up and hang my feet over the edge of the bed. Dad takes hold of my arms and helps me stand.

  “I feel like a new man. Literally.”

  “Only while the drug lasts,” he says. “Remember that. You’re like Cinderella at the ball.”

  “Right.”

  “Your mother would boil me in oil if she knew about this.”

  “Don’t tell her.” I suddenly feel light-headed, but I mask my difficulty by sitting on the bed again.

  “Are you going to the jail now?” Dad asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “That’s all right. Kelly will take me.”

  “Even better.” Dad looks me from head to toe again. “Let’s get some clothes on you.”

  Chapter

  38

  “Where’s Ellen now?” Drew asks in a voice I can barely hear.

  “At the hospital with my mother.”

  Drew blinks rapidly, then looks down. Even through the bulletproof glass of the visiting window, I can see he’s close to breaking. His skin is so pale that he looks like he’s suffering from severe anemia. With Quentin standing behind my chair, I’ve just recounted what happened between Ellen and Kate at St. Catherine’s Creek. To his credit, Quentin did not interrupt once.

  “Drew, you’ve got a big decision to make,” I say. “And it’s yours alone.”

  He closes his eyes. Quentin lays a hand on my shoulder, but before I can turn, a single, racking sob bursts from Drew’s throat. His mouth makes it appear that he’s laughing, but I’ve seen that effect in many distraught people. I wish I could shatter the glass separating us and hug him, but there’s no way to do that. As I watch helplessly, he starts banging his forehead against the window like an autistic child.

  “Drew? Drew!”

  He doesn’t seem to hear me.

  I rise and put my mouth up to the metal vent in the window.

  “Drew!”

  “Dr. Elliot!” Quentin barks from behind me. “We’ve got to make a decision about this matter!”

  Drew stops banging the glass and stares at Quentin. “Decision?”

  “Your wife wants us to take her confession to the district attorney.”

  He blinks in shock. “Take Ellen to Shad Johnson?”

  “That’s what she wants,” Quentin says. “She’s ready to confess to Shad that she killed your lover.”

  I glare at him, but Drew is already shaking his head. “No,” he says. “Absolutely not. She can’t do that.”

  Quentin looks at me in triumph. “Those are exactly my feelings, Doctor. The D.A. wouldn’t believe her anyway. Neither would Judge Minor. We have to focus on your appeal now.”

  “Drew, listen to me,” I implore. “Right now, Tim is at risk of losing his father. At the very least, you’re about to be sentenced to spend the rest of your life in prison. At worst, you’ll get death by lethal injection. And Timmy will know that. All the time you’re waiting for your appeal, Timmy will be suffering. If you had killed Kate, that would be one thing. But you didn’t. I believed you before, but now I know. All through your trial, you told Quentin that you wanted the jury to know the truth. Well, now we know the real truth. And the jury should know it, too. Don’t you see?”

  Drew is staring at me as though paying close attention, so I press on.

  “If we can prove Ellen’s story, your conviction will be overturned. You’ll be a free man. Free to be the father Tim needs.”

  “What would happen to Ellen?”

  “She’d probably serve a brief sentence for manslaughter.”

  “He can’t guarantee that,” Quentin says. “Your wife could get life for murder.”

  “Manslaughter,” I insist. “No jury’s going to convict Ellen of murder for fighting with a girl who was pregnant by her husband. We could plea-bargain it ahead of time. There wouldn’t even have to be a trial. I’d represent Ellen.”

  Drew stirs at this, but then Quentin says, “You’re forgetting Ellen’s drug habit, Penn. How Kate was used to feed that habit. No jury is going to buy Ellen as a noble wife who lost control just once.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Drew says in a monotone.

  Quentin and I fall silent, waiting for him to explain.

  “If I hadn’t gotten involved with Kate, none of this would have happened. Ellen did what she did because I put her in an impossible position. I won’t have her punished in my place. Not for my weakness.” Drew stares out of the little cubicle with absolute conviction. “I carry my own water, guys.”

  “Drew—”

  “Let it go, Penn. I’ll take my chances on appeal.” He stands and holds his cuffed hands up to the window. “I appreciate you trying. But I want you to forget what Ellen told you. Every word of it.”

  I bow my head, marshaling my strength for further effort. Then I flatten my hands against the window like starfish and lean close to the vent. “You want to punish yourself? Fine. But don’t cheat Timmy out of a father. You owe it to him to be there for him.”

  Drew lifts his eyes to mine, but all I see in them now is resignation. “Tim
will be okay with Ellen. Go home and hug Annie. Don’t worry about me anymore. Let it go.”

  He turns away and knocks for a deputy.

  I search for the right words to make Drew reconsider, but he’s gone before I find them. I turn to Quentin in anger and confusion.

  The old lawyer is looking at the glass where Drew stood just a moment ago. “That’s a man, right there,” he says. “Haven’t met any like him in at least twenty years.”

  I clutch Quentin’s upper arm. “You’d better get him off on appeal. You hear me? He doesn’t belong in a cell.”

  “If it can be done, I’ll do it.”

  “That’s what you said about the last trial.”

  Quentin pats his coat flat, then shoots his cuffs. “Nobody could have got him acquitted for that girl’s murder. Not in this town. Not this week. The deck was stacked, and Elliot’s too goddamn noble to play the game the way he would have had to for us to win. Even with his life at stake.”

  I say nothing. It’s time for me to get back to the hospital, as much as I hate the idea. My jaw muscles are already aching, and the bone pain won’t be far behind.

  Quentin and I take the elevator down together. Doris Avery is sitting with Daniel Kelly on a bench in the lobby, talking quietly. As Quentin and I walk toward them, my cell phone rings. The caller ID says, MIA.

  “Hello? Mia?”

  “Yes! I’ve got to talk to you.” She’s breathing as though she’s just run a hundred-yard dash. “Face-to-face. Where are you?”

  “The county jail. Where are you?”

  “Your hospital room. I thought you’d be here.” Her voice is crackling with energy, but I can’t tell whether that energy is the result of excitement or panic.

  “Hang on.” I shake Quentin’s hand, then motion him onward. “It’s my kid’s babysitter. I’ll call you later at the hotel.”

  Quentin says, “We may head back out to the country tonight. Call me there if you don’t get me at the hotel.”

  I wave to Doris as Quentin makes his way to the bench. Then I turn away and walk back toward the elevators. “These are digital phones, Mia. No one’s going to hear you. Tell me what’s happened.”

  “I can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

  My patience has worn down to nothing. “Mia, stop the melodrama and just tell me what’s going on.”

  The silence that follows tells me I’ve hurt her feelings. I’m sorry for that, but there’s too much at stake now for high school detective games. “Mia…”

  “It’s okay,” she says.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Coach Anders.”

  “Wade? What about him?”

  “He’s been sleeping with a student.”

  My stomach goes hollow. “Who?”

  “Jenny Jenkins. She’s a junior.”

  “How did you find this out?”

  “She told me herself, not fifteen minutes ago. I was up at the school, in a meeting about the senior trip. When I came out, Jenny was waiting for me.”

  “Are you two friends?”

  “Not really. She told me because I’ve been bugging everybody all week about Marko. You know, trying to find you.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This isn’t really about Coach Anders—it’s about Marko.”

  I can hardly contain my frustration. “What about Marko?”

  “His alibi is bullshit.”

  I feel a wave of disorientation, but I’m not sure if it’s Oxycontin or the first hint of true knowledge. “His alibi for which day? The Wilsons or Kate?”

  “Kate!”

  “Wade Anders was Marko’s alibi.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you! Coach Anders’s story was bullshit!”

  I blink in disbelief. “Don’t say another word.”

  Mia laughs. “Told you.”

  I think quickly. “Do you know where Jewish Hill is?”

  “The City Cemetery?”

  “Meet me there as soon as you can.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Daniel Kelly and I stand on the edge of Jewish Hill, waiting for Mia in a softly falling rain. Beyond the twin bridges over the Mississippi, the sun is sliding down the last of its arc; soon it will slip silently into the great river. I turn and look out over the cemetery. Kate’s grave is only a low mound of mud now. The faded green tent that protected it is gone, and there’s been no time to carve a gravestone. That takes weeks in this town.

  Looking down the road that runs along the bluff, I spy a solitary figure in the rain. The Turning Angel. She’s not turning now, but merely standing with her head bowed, trying to weather the coming storm. As I stare, a hundred thoughts sweep through my mind. Ellen told me she killed Kate, and I believed her. But if Ellen killed Kate, why did Marko Bakic get Coach Anders to lie about his whereabouts that day? Could he have been doing a drug deal? If so, and Kate happened to get killed at the same time, then Marko must have improvised the alibi to cover his dope deal, not a murder.

  It’s a plausible theory. But something has been bothering me ever since I heard Ellen’s confession. It’s the sequence of events as she described them. Ellen told me that after she began choking Kate, Kate quickly “went out”—or became unconscious—and then fell and hit her head on the buried wheel rim. But the pathologist who autopsied Kate determined the cause of death to be strangulation, not head trauma. I believe Ellen choked Kate long enough to make her unconscious, but probably not long enough to kill her. In fact, my impression during Ellen’s confession was that she believed Kate died from the blow to her head. Ellen must have read otherwise in the newspaper, but she probably figured Kate was dead before her head hit the wheel.

  But what if Ellen didn’t kill Kate at all? What if Marko—unknown to Kate—was at the crime scene, too? What if the person Ellen heard walking through the woods after Kate fell was not Drew, but Marko Bakic? That would have put Marko with Kate after Ellen left her, but before Drew arrived and discovered her corpse. The more I think about that scenario, the more convinced I become that it might be true.

  But why would Marko have been there?

  The answer comes to me so fast that it leaves me breathless. Marko met Kate there to sell her—or more likely, give her—Lorcet Plus. Cyrus had cut off Kate’s supply of pills; Cyrus’s e-mails to her told me that. Cyrus had warned Kate not to go to Marko in search of Lorcet, but what alternative did she have?

  Because Marko gave me his hair so willingly at the X-rave, I discounted the possibility that he’d raped Kate. But maybe he gave me that hair because he knew he would be long gone before the police could arrest him. No…that would have been stupid. He would only have given me the hair if he was positive it could never come back and bite him on the ass.

  “Oh, God,” I say softly. Marko gave me that hair because he knew I would be dead in a matter of hours—long before I could deliver his DNA to anyone who mattered.

  “What is it?” Kelly asks.

  “Wait a minute.”

  The events of the past two weeks are realigning themselves in my head with nauseating speed. Why is the chain of cause and effect so hard to see sometimes? Sonny Cross sticks his gun into Marko’s mouth to interrogate him. Five hours later, Sonny is dead. Murdered by the Asians. Three days later, I track Marko down at the X-rave and question him about Kate’s murder. Four hours later, the Asians try to kill me in the lobby of the Eola Hotel. Coincidence?

  Not likely.

  Marko and the Asians have been working together all along—probably against Cyrus. That’s why Cyrus didn’t kill me when he had the chance. Cyrus never saw me as a threat. I was after Kate’s killer, and Cyrus knew he was innocent of that crime. But to Marko…I was a genuine threat. Jesus.

  At Drew’s trial, Shad painted the jury a picture of Marko as the “mystery man” who’d left the other semen sample in Kate’s vagina. Shad chose Marko not based on evidence, but because Marko was conveniently missing, and thus offered the mos
t possibilities for exploitation in court. But Shad painted Marko as Kate’s consensual partner—and Drew as the jealous killer. But what if those roles were reversed in reality? The rightness of this logic settles into my soul with the weight of gospel.

  “That’s it,” I whisper. If Marko discovered Kate’s prone body just after Ellen fled, he might well have killed her, and then witnessed Drew finding her body. If so, Marko could have been the blackmailer who extorted money and drugs from Drew on the night of the crime. Was Marko the man on the motorcycle that we chased through the woods behind St. Stephen’s? Or was he the rifleman by the press box, shooting as we tried to get through the fence?

  Another rush of images fills my brain. The lone killer dressed in black who shot so many of Cyrus’s men…who was that but Marko Bakic? What makes me sure is that it was the same night—just hours later—that the Wilsons were brutally murdered. And they weren’t gunned down in the style of the Asian gang, but stabbed dozens of times, as though in uncontrolled fury. What was that attack but retaliation by Cyrus’s crew against the man they believed responsible for the attack on their safe house?

  Marko…

  “There’s your girl,” Kelly says. “Blue Honda Accord?”

  Mia’s car is racing up Cemetery Road. She slows by the second gate, turns in, and speeds along the narrow lane toward the superintendent’s office. I watch her turn and climb the road to Jewish Hill.

  “What do you want me to do?” Kelly asks.

  “Give us some space, but watch us. I have no idea where Marko is, but I have a feeling that kid’s a lot more dangerous than I thought.”

  “You’re covered.”

  As Kelly walks down through the stones on the back side of Jewish Hill, Mia’s car noses onto the grass and drives along beside the wall shielding the graves. When I motion for her to stop, she opens her passenger door and waves me inside. I shake my head and beckon her out.

  “It’s raining!” she calls.