Hush

by Kate White

  Madelyn cocked her head and parted her full lips hopefully, as if she’d just heard a rumor of a sixty-percent-off sale at Saks.

  “Possible concussion. That means we could get this interview postponed. Are you really up to talking to these guys tonight?”

  “I-I don’t know,” Lake said. “Everything-it’s all such a mess. I-”

  “Even if we decide to postpone the interview, you and I need to talk while everything’s fresh in your mind. So why don’t we start and see how you feel as we go.”

  “Okay,” Lake said hesitantly. She still had no clue what she was going to say to Madelyn. If she said that Rory had accused her of having an affair with Keaton and had lured her to the house because of that, all roads would then surely lead back to her reckless night with him. “Is it safe to talk here?”

  “Yes, that’s not a problem. On the way up, Archer filled me in on what you’d uncovered at the clinic. He said you drove to Ms. Deever’s house because she claimed to have evidence to show you.”

  “Yes, some files-and she actually did have them. They’re probably still on the kitchen table, and the police need to get them as evidence.”

  “Okay, we’ll alert them to that.” Madelyn had begun to make notes on the legal pad, using an elegant Mont Blanc pen. With her other hand she pulled the edges of her jacket over her full breasts, as if the fit felt awkward. “Now, why don’t you start from the beginning.”

  Lake just sat there, paralyzed. How much should she say?

  “Can I ask you one question first?” Lake said finally. “Do you know anything about Rory? Was she injured? Has she had a chance to speak to the police yet?”

  Madelyn set down her pen and peered at Lake. The look in her eyes was dark and grave.

  “What is it?” Lake asked weakly.

  “I have some disturbing news that I didn’t want to drop on you the minute I walked in. The police don’t know I know this, but…Rory Deever was killed in the accident. She died instantly.”

  Lake’s heart seemed to stop mid-beat. She could barely believe the words. She felt a surge of relief. At nearly the same moment, she thought of the unborn baby and winced in distress.

  “But she wasn’t driving that fast,” Lake argued.

  “Apparently she wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and her head hit the windshield hard.”

  “How-how did you find this out?”

  “Archer has some contacts up this way in the news media.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?” Lake asked. “The detective who spoke to me-Kabowski-implied that he was about to talk to Rory tonight.”

  “I’m sure he was just playing you. But, look-I don’t want you to worry. This complicates things, I know, but I’m going to make sure you’re okay. Got it?”

  Lake nodded as her mind fully processed the news. This changed everything, she realized. There would be no version of events from Rory. Lake fought the urge to laugh like a crazy person.

  “Got it,” Lake said.

  “Okay, now tell me what happened.”

  Lake started with the call from Rory and took Madelyn through everything that followed. As she relived the terrifying minutes in the basement, her voice choked. For the first time she fully imagined what it would be like to end up in that freezer, lying on top of piles of frozen meat and gasping for air until there was no more.

  “But why?” Madelyn asked. Her eyes were perplexed, not accusatory. “What was the point of trying to kill you?”

  “Because…she thought I’d figured out that she’d killed Dr. Keaton. And she needed to shut me up.”

  “But had you figured it out? How?”

  Lake paused for a moment, her mind racing ahead of her words.

  “She had a slip of the tongue,” she said. “As we were looking at the files in her kitchen, she said that maybe Keaton had also learned the truth about the clinic and he was killed because of that. I said it was a possibility but that Keaton’s death might well have been a coincidence, that it could have been related to, say, a burglary. The nurse who’d watered his plants mentioned he had a terrace and I suggested to Rory that someone could have broken in from there. And then-that’s when she made the slip. She said there was no access to the terrace from anyplace… She’d obviously been there.”

  It had come to Lake in an instant-to turn the slip she’d made with Rory at the piano bar into a lie that could save her. Who could ever know for sure it wasn’t true? And it didn’t connect her to Keaton in any way.

  “That’s when you knew? When she made that slip?” Madelyn looked incredulous now.

  “No. I didn’t make the leap right then. But the comment seemed kind of odd, and that must have shown on my face. I think she thought I knew. After that she gave me the tea. And later in the basement, she started railing on as if I had figured it out. That’s when I knew.”

  Madelyn pinched her jacket closed again and sealed her ragged red lips tightly together. Lake could tell she sensed there was something off kilter about the story but didn’t know what or why.

  “So Rory assumed you were going to expose her?”

  “I guess so. She acted totally crazy then, like she’d started to break. She said she was pregnant with Keaton’s baby and that she’d killed him because he was sleeping around and didn’t take her pregnancy seriously. She clearly had psychological problems-maybe borderline personality disorder.”

  “Okay,” Madelyn said after a moment, as if she’d accepted Lake’s words despite her instincts. “Take me through the rest. How did you escape?”

  Lake told the story exactly as it happened-locking Rory in the basement, being tackled in the yard, Rory giving chase in her car. There were moments when she felt tentative and then had to remind herself: This part is all true.

  “She tried to run me off the road,” Lake said as she came to the end of the story. “The road was slick and she must have lost control of the car.”

  Madelyn leaned back and sighed.

  “Do you feel up to talking to the cops tonight? It will certainly add to your credibility if you do it now.”

  Lake took a deep breath. The idea was scary as hell but she wanted desperately to get it over with, especially while the story was fresh in her mind.

  “Yes,” she said. “I want to do it tonight.”

  Two detectives joined them next-Kabowski and a young female detective with brassy blond hair and a tiny heart-shaped face-though Lake suspected others were in the next room behind the mirror. Madelyn had told her to begin with her work at the clinic and how she’d stumbled onto the embryo stealing. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Starting there would not only calm Lake down but also help undercut the possible nut-job image the cops had of her.

  After she took them through all that, she got to Rory. At the point where she mentioned the patient files that Rory had taken, the female detective slipped out of the room momentarily, and Lake assumed it was to make certain they’d been retrieved from Rory’s kitchen.

  As she reached the part about Rory’s slip, and how it related to the death of a Dr. Mark Keaton in New York, Lake had to force herself to look directly at Kabowski and not flinch. He took notes as she spoke, and yet his eyes rarely left hers.

  The worst moments of the night-Rory drugging and attacking her and confessing to killing Keaton-were actually the easiest to describe. Lake forced herself to remember being thrust over the lip of the freezer and the terror that had gripped her then. She wanted that fear to leak through as she spoke because she knew it would help them believe her. Then, finally, she was done.

  “Well, we certainly appreciate that you took the time to share this with us tonight,” Kabowski said. “I mean, considering what you’ve been through.” His tone sounded sympathetic but Lake knew not to trust it. She smiled weakly, wondering what was next.

  Kabowski looked down at his notes and stroked his mustache. “I’m a little confused, however,” he said after a moment.

  Lake’s heart sank. Was he skeptical about the slip, as M
adelyn had been?

  “Yes?” Lake said softly.

  “Why do you think Ms. Deever was so interested in helping you about the files? If she’d murdered this Dr. Keaton, you’d think she’d want to just lay low. Why suddenly decide to play whistleblower?”

  The question caught her totally off guard. As she’d obsessed about how to spin everything that had happened, she’d never seen this one coming.

  “I’m not sure,” Lake said. She clenched her fist, thinking, trying to make her brain work harder. “But-I could make a guess.”

  “Okay, let’s hear it,” Kabowski said.

  Lake bit her lip instinctively.

  “After she overheard Maggie say that I had suspicions about the clinic-and my theory about the codes in the files-she may have decided that exposing the clinic could throw the police totally off track with the murder investigation. They’d assume someone at the clinic had killed Keaton because he’d learned the truth.”

  Kabowski looked ready to lob another question at her, when someone entered the room with the stack of patient records from Rory’s house. He pushed them toward Lake and instructed her to show him where the notations were. She opened the file on top and pointed to the letters, explaining what she thought they stood for.

  Kabowski’s body language seemed to relax a little, and Lake wondered if he had begun to believe her.

  “Detective, as you indicated earlier, my client has had a very tough night,” Madelyn announced as Kabowski continued to paw through the charts. “She may have even suffered a concussion. I think it’s time I took her home.”

  Kabowski stood up, placed his hands on his hips, and nodded but made a big to-do about Lake needing to be available for further questioning. Madelyn assured him that Lake would return to the area if necessary. Lake suddenly felt drained, completely spent-not just from the ordeal, but from the stress and strain of lying.

  “You handled that very well,” Madelyn said as they headed down the hall. “Let’s find Kit and fill him in.”

  Archer was still in his rumpled tan trench coat, sitting on a metal chair in the waiting area with his long legs thrust out in front of him. He leapt up when he saw them approach and offered Lake a sympathetic hug. In the brief second that his arms were around her, she felt that same rush of calm and safety she’d experienced while lying on his couch.

  “I want to hear everything,” he said, his voice low. “But let’s wait till we’re out of here.”

  Lake glanced at her watch as they hurried across the parking lot, where steam rose from the puddles left behind from the storm. It was well after midnight. Lake’s car was being held so the police could photograph where Rory had rammed it, so she had to ride with Archer and Madelyn back to the city.

  “Do you think I’ll really have to be interviewd by those detectives again?” she asked as Archer maneuvered out of the parking lot.

  “Maybe,” Madelyn said from the backseat. “Maybe not.”

  “Great,” Lake said despairingly.

  “But they are going to be less skeptical at that point because your story will have begun to check out. The tests will confirm that you were drugged. There will be evidence related to the cars. And when they obtain the DNA of the fetus, that will prove the baby was Keaton’s. I think the worst is over.”

  “Great,” Lake said.

  But she knew it wasn’t true. The worst wasn’t over. She still had to face Hull and McCarty-and make them believe her lies.

  31

  SIX DAYS LATER, on a Friday, Lake hurried down the street in Greenwich Village toward a small Italian restaurant. It was in the low eighties again, after two days of cooler weather, but there was something fall-like nudging the outside edges of the heat. She glanced at her watch. Twelve-twenty. She was early, so there was no need to rush, and yet her feet seemed to have a mind of their own.

  She didn’t see him inside the restaurant, but when she gave his name to the hostess, the girl said, “This way,” and led her outside to a garden lined with a wooden stockade fence and pots bursting with pink geraniums. Archer was sitting at an umbrella-shaded table, working his iPhone. He was dressed casually-jeans and a faded purple polo shirt that looked as if it had been left to dry, over the years, on endless docks and porch railings.

  “Hey,” he said, lifting his butt briefly off the chair as she took the seat across from him. He smiled broadly at her. “I barely recognize you without the mud mask you were wearing Saturday night.”

  Lake smiled back at him. “I actually think that did something nice for my pores.”

  “How’s the cut on your head?”

  “Better. I had my own doctor check me out and he said I probably did have a mild concussion.”

  “Well, I hope you’re allowed to drink because I ordered a bottle of rosé for our celebration.”

  Lake nodded enthusiastically. There were indeed a few things to celebrate. As soon as news of Rory’s death got out, the lab supervisor at the clinic had panicked and come forward to the authorities, admitting that some couples’ eggs and embryos had been transferred to other patients without permission. There was now a full-scale inquiry into the clinic. And there had been good news for Lake as well. Preliminary drug tests had revealed the presence of a sedative in the bottom of the teacup she’d drunk from, backing up her story. And Madelyn had learned from a friend in the NYPD that toll records had shown that Rory had driven into Manhattan in her car early on the morning Keaton was murdered and left the city shortly after four a.m.

  Archer pulled the wine bottle from an ice-filled bucket by the table and poured Lake a glass.

  “First and foremost, to your survival,” he said, raising his glass. “I keep thinking you’re going to confess that you’re a former Navy SEAL and that’s why you’ve been able to escape raging rivers and pathological killers and…”

  Lake grinned. “And avoid the world’s worst case of freezer burn?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think I owe it all to pure adrenaline-and to the fear that I’d never see my kids again if I didn’t do something. Of course every time I think about Rory’s baby dying, it makes me so sad.”

  “I’ve got something to take your mind off that-another reason to celebrate. I just heard from my producer that Hoss cut a deal. She obviously saw that it was all coming down around her and decided to save her ass. She admitted that Levin had hired that guy who followed you, the one who attacked you in Dumbo. Melanie apparently let Levin know that you’d called and he sent the guy there after you. Hoss is claiming it was only to scare you. Regardless, this ties up some loose ends-and it also means you’ll be safe. As soon as the police have him in custody, you can make an ID.”

  Lake let out a ragged sigh of relief. It meant that there wouldn’t be lingering questions or suspicions about what she’d told the police. They would have no reason to ask for her DNA.

  “I guess it’s no surprise that Hoss was in the thick of it,” Lake said. “She oversaw everything that went on in the lab. But what about Sherman? Was he in on it, too?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  “And the associates and nurses?” she asked, dreading the answer. “I’ve been worried about the guy who recommended me-Steve Salman.”

  Archer shook his head.

  “No, it doesn’t look like it went that far down. At least from what the cops can tell right now.”

  Though Steve had offered her no support, she couldn’t bear the thought of his life being ruined. He was her friend’s brother, after all.

  “There’s one more person I’m curious about,” she said. “The therapist, Harry Kline. He wasn’t involved, was he?”

  Archer scrunched his mouth. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “If it’s the guy who I think it is, he’s been nothing but cooperative. I hear he was pretty shocked.”

  She thought of the story Rory had told her about Harry and his daughter. On Sunday, as she’d lain in her bed recuperating, she decided that there must have been a grain of truth to the t
ale. Keaton had possibly flirted with Harry’s daughter-rather than the other way around-and Rory most likely saw the daughter as a real threat. She’d probably gone to Harry and claimed Keaton was after the girl. That would have resulted in the daughter being removed. Harry had left a message for Lake this week, but she hadn’t wanted to return it until her own situation was more settled.

  “The bottom line is that the clinic is being closed,” Archer said, interrupting her train of thought. “With the top people implicated, there’s no way it can go on right now.”

  Lake smiled ruefully.

  “Of course, that doesn’t help Alexis Hunt,” she said. “She still has no rights to her child.”

  “I know. And according to what the technician told the cops, embryos from at least thirty other couples were used fraudulently. And a fair number of embryos were sold for research without permission.”

  “Once that news gets out, so many former patients are going to wonder and begin to freak out,” Lake said. “It’s just so awful.”

  “And yet think of what you did, Lake.” Archer said. “You spared countless other people the same fate.”

  “It was hardly heroic. I just sort of stumbled onto the truth.”

  “You did more than that and you know it. Speaking of stumbling, here’s an interesting tidbit. Apparently part of the reason why the lab technician gave it up so quickly was because Keaton had recently asked him a few probing questions about some of the procedures. This lab guy was already worried the lid was about to blow off.”

  That could explain why Melanie Turnbull’s name was in Keaton’s apartment, Lake realized. Something had pointed him in that direction-though Lake would probably never know what it was.

  “Anything new from your end?” Archer asked.

  “I told you about the drug test. The DNA test on Rory’s baby should come back soon.”

  “Madelyn said you handled yourself really well with the New York City cops.”

  Just hearing him reference that meeting made her stomach clench. The session with Hull and McCarty had been terrifying-though at least Madelyn had been at her side, looking ready to bite if either one of them stepped out of line.