What if he had been in California? And all this had happened? Jake couldn’t face another cup of coffee, but this time of night—morning—and in this situation, waiting helplessly in Boston City Hospital, what else was he gonna drink? He’d had zero sleep. But he wasn’t dead.
And neither was DeLuca. Yet, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking. Though that reality was inconceivable. An array of white-coated doctors had shown up, grim-faced and talking jargon, but Jake decided he could translate their doctorese into cautious optimism. Emphasis on “cautious,” Jake realized, and wondered again whether he might have done anything more. Better. Lifesaving.
“You did all you could,” the receiving ER doc had assured him. DeLuca’s cell produced a raft of texts from doctors, and from Kat, urging him to take it easy, cut back, slow down. That’s what his partner had been hiding. Jake had called Kat, woke her up, tried to break the news without terrifying her. She, privilege of a doctor, was already in D’s room.
Jake zipped his jacket up, then down. He smiled, even now, remembering how Jane always teased him about his nervous habit. He’d call her, too, soon as it was halfway appropriate. She slept with the phone by her bed, like he did, so she’d awaken if he texted. For now, six A.M.? Let her sleep.
Down the hall Grady dozed, groggy but coming out of his drugged haze. With Trey Welliver under arrest, Grady was no longer even a marginal suspect in the Morgan murder. As for his connection to Violet Sholto’s death, that verdict was still out.
Had Grady gone back, over to the dark side? And if so—Jake tried to replay their supposedly private conversations—when?
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?”