Sylvia Kaplan confronted him as they left the hospital room. She acted like she wanted to talk to him, and she motioned for him to follow her down to the waiting room at the end of the hall. He stood there in that room for a second, not knowing what to expect, and then he finally sat down in one of the chairs. Sylvia pulled out a chair and sat opposite him, staring at him for a few moments. There was a time when that might have bothered him, but at the moment he just waited for whatever it was she had to say.
She finally shook her head a bit and settled into a frown.
“Why are you here?”
He’d been asking himself this same question for the last twenty-four hours.
The gun barrel stared at him, and the voice told his trigger finger how easy it would be. Why are you waiting?
Why?
That was the question he couldn’t answer.
Drowning in his failures, that question kept interrupting him. Why?
Why was he alone in that miserable room? Why had things gone so wrong and caused so much harm? Why had he spent his whole life trying to deny what was destroying him? If he ended it now, he’d never know the answers.
Why? It was the detective’s question, and it saved his life.
He dropped the gun and fell back on the bed, sobbing out loud, with no idea of how he would make it through the next few moments. His heart was pumping madly, and he wondered if a heart attack would finish what he had just stopped himself from doing.
He lay there for hours until daylight gave way to evening. Each thought brought with it the same realization—he had no right to be there. The same brain that was contemplating each new speck of an idea could just as easily have been spattered on the walls, leaving those thoughts nowhere to go, no place to be born. As the night wore on, he realized that the images coming into his mind had been reclaimed out of nothingness.
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Why? He couldn’t answer her question.
The only answer he could think of made no real sense—maybe he’d been rejected by death and sent back to live his life.
Sylvia finally dropped her glare. She’d apparently decided she’d get more out of him if she talked to him in a more businesslike tone.
“Well, if you can’t answer that, just tell me why I should trust you.”
“All I can say is that I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to help.”
Sylvia gave a short grunt, seemingly taking at face value what he had just said to her.
“Gina’s kind of taken with you. I can see that. But I just want you to know that I’m not nearly as convinced as she is that you won’t screw things up again. I only have your word that you’re not in touch with those people. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He nodded yes. He didn’t want to get into an argument.
“So let’s just say this—as far as I’m concerned, you’re on probation.”
She pulled out a business card and wrote something on the back. Then she handed it to him.
“That has my cell phone number on it, and I want you to call me if anything comes up—anything at all, okay? Will you promise me that?”
“I’ll do whatever you want.”
Sylvia allowed herself a smile. “Good, then I know we’ll get along.”
“There is one thing I need to tell you, however. Susan Wilder is flying into San Francisco tomorrow. I’m supposed to meet her at the airport. We arranged it a few days ago, and I don’t want to change it.”
The frown was back on Sylvia’s face.
“What’s that all about? Is she working with them on this?”
“No, I’m sure she isn’t. She hasn’t talked to her husband in days, and I doubt if she has talked to Blaiseck at all. She may not even know about the shooting and Alexi’s disappearance. I doubt any of this even made the news in the Midwest. Either way, I need to talk to her.”
He was dreading the prospect. He had no idea how Susan would react to everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
“Maybe you should just tell her to stay home. If she comes here, she’d be in the way. We need to focus on finding Alexi.”
He shook his head no. “I can’t do that to her. I’m worried about what she might do if she’s left alone. She hasn’t told me all the details of what she suspects about her husband, but I know it’s pretty serious.”
“Well, if she suspects something about her husband, she’s very right.”
Sylvia put her notebook computer on the table and faced it toward Davey.
“Let me show you what was going in that house. Alexi kept a journal—it was apparently part of a whole series of journals. She had the current version of it with her when she got here. Here are some pages that I scanned. They’re pretty devastating.”
He looked at the pages until the descriptions became too brutal. “I had no idea this was going on.”
Those pages answered a lot of questions. The last time he had talked to Susan, she had just found some of the earlier journals in Alexi’s guitar case, and they were probably just as sordid as the pages Sylvia just showed him. Those descriptions must have torn her apart. And she was probably even more devastated when she read what else Alexi had been saying. He couldn’t understand why Susan had been telling him, “We failed her.” But now he understood. The explanation was there in Alexi’s own words. In the journal, she kept asking the question, “Why can’t my mother see what’s going on?”
“There’s one other thing you need to see,” Sylvia said. “Gina flew to Indianapolis to get Alexi out of there right after Alexi sent her this. Take a look.”
He thought he was beyond the point of being shocked by anything involved with the case, but the video was making him sick. It was so explicit that he found himself darting his eyes from side to side, hoping that there was no one else in that public waiting room watching him as he looked at something so awful.
“Now do you see why Gina did what she did? You’re an ex-cop. You know the risks she was running. I knew them too, and I told her so. But she just had to do the right thing. I say that, so you’ll know what kind of person you’re dealing with.”
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The nurse came into the waiting area and told them that Gina was awake. She wanted to see them.
As they got back near Gina’s room, Sylvia took him aside one more time. “Okay, I’m going to trust you in all this. So don’t let me down. I love Gina dearly. And if anyone hurts her, I’ll come after them.”
He nodded that he understood.
At the doorway to the room she stopped him again.
“There’s one other thing you need to know so that you won’t make a fool of yourself. Gina is transgender.”