by Linda Barnes
I pretended I hadn’t seen her move. I could see the ease flow into her eyes then, the idea that she was going to walk away, that she’d found herself another sucker.
“Fifteen percent of kids in this country are fat, for Chrissakes, and that’s just kids. You know what people will pay to look good? You know what women pay for Botox shots, poison shots? In this country, weight loss is a fifty-billion-dollar-a-year thing. Imagine what they’ll pay for this. Imagine. Chaney did. Chaney said, Why should Harvard get all that money when I did all the work? Why shouldn’t I walk away with the giant’s share? Why shouldn’t I be able to leave my bitch wife, go off with my girlfriend? Have all the money in the world?”
“There’s a problem, Denali. If Chaney were gone, if he’d disappeared with his drug formula, well, then people might believe it, but here he is, and you shot him.”
Her eyes blazed. “It was a fucking accident. It should have happened like I said.”
“‘Should have’ isn’t going to cut it.”
“If he hadn’t been so fucking slow, everything would have been fine. He kept saying it would only be a little longer, a little longer. He had to be able to replicate his results, make sure he could duplicate every little thing. I needed him to fill out the damned patent application.” She waved at the papers scattered on the floor. “It’s all done now. We could walk away with it, you and me. There’s plenty for two, plenty for three. You can have Wilson’s share, for doing nothing, for walking away. I know a man in Switzerland who knows people at drug companies. I could really use some help. I hurt my shoulder and—”
Yes. Which shoulder? How much would it slow her down?
“If I hadn’t hurt my damn shoulder, Harvard wouldn’t have given a damn about my grades. They would have had their fucking rower. They wouldn’t have asked questions, wouldn’t have—”
The situation was finally getting to her, the gun pointed at her heart, the man bleeding beneath her, her whole easy-money paradise going up in smoke. She heard the desperation in her own voice, paused, and tried a smile.
“But that’s water under the bridge,” she said. “The question is, What could you do with a cool million?”
“You shot Chaney. The cops are going to want somebody for that.”
“We can fix it. There’s nothing we can’t fix. There’s a can of gas in the trunk of my car. I can write a note, forge his signature. From Wilson, saying his wife was driving him batty, saying he killed her first, then decided he couldn’t live with it.”
“Shot himself and then burned the house down?”
“Started the fire before he killed himself. Who’s to say he didn’t? The house burns, nobody will be looking for any patent applications, that’s for sure. They went up in smoke. And when some firm in Europe comes up with the same drug, well, things like that happen all the time.” Her voice was soothing and persuasive.
I let myself look interested. “You shoot the wife, somebody might hear.”
Her laugh was easy, like she didn’t have a care in the world, much less a gun pointed at her heart. “You hear any sirens? Nobody called the cops on the first shot. People like this, people who live in houses like this, they don’t hear anything. And if they do, they don’t do anything. They don’t want to get involved.” Her hand slipped half an inch farther under Chaney’s waist. “If you’re worried, we can forget about using a gun. I’ve got some pills I can give the wife.”
“The same pills you gave Helen Orza?”
Her hand came out from under Chaney’s lab coat so fast, I only registered metal, not a weapon, just metal, a dull metallic gleam. I shot her, low on the right shoulder, stepped close, and clubbed her with my gun to bring her down. She was unconscious when I wrestled Chaney’s .22 out of her hand.
CHAPTER 37
Mount Auburn Hospital: ivory walls, machine-chilled air, antiseptic smell. I sat at Wilson Chaney’s bedside and wondered whether Dorothy Boyd/Donna Barnette/Denali Brinkman would make it through surgery. A clock ticked, a round schoolroom clock with a sweep second hand. Chaney’s small room looked so much like the New Hampshire hospital room in which I’d awakened this very morning, I felt as though time had slipped a gear, as though I ought to be lying in the narrow bed instead of my client. I couldn’t get Denali Brinkman out of my head, couldn’t stop seeing those cornflower-colored eyes. I wasn’t glad I’d shot her. I wasn’t sorry I’d shot her. I was glad she hadn’t shot me.
Chaney slept, a drug-induced slumber, his temple heavily bandaged. Tubes ran from his arm to an IV-drip stand that held two plastic bags of colorless fluid aloft.
How much of Denali’s tale was true? Had Chaney found some wonder drug, tried to cheat Harvard out of it? I eyed the clock and wished someone would relieve me. Margo Chaney was being treated on another floor, for bruising, superficial cuts, and a panic attack. She’d begged me: “Could you please, please stay with Wilson?” She didn’t want him to be left alone. She would send someone soon, she’d said.
Footsteps hammered down the hall, sharp steps, not the rubber-soled swish of the medical staff. Please, I thought, not another cop. There’d been too many of them, demanding, accusing, taking notes for my statement, revising my statement. All in all, not so bad. They seemed to believe my account of the events leading up to the shooting. Just like they’d believed Benjy Dowling about the fire.
Then there’d been Leon, to whom I’d passed on the harried doctor’s words: Wilson would recover. He’d been lucky. Fired at an angle, the small .22-caliber bullet had glanced off his skull. No brain damage. Leon had been anxious, relieved, angry. We’d started another quarrel, stopped only because I couldn’t sustain it. He’d told me next time to back out the door and yell for help.
“Sure,” I’d said sarcastically. That’s my style; that’s my nature.
We’d agreed to call it quits, stay friends, whatever the hell that means. He’d asked whether it had anything to do with him being black. I’d told him no, maybe it had to do with him being in law enforcement. I hadn’t mentioned Sam, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before he heard, long before he knew.
Knew what? What did I know? A brief moment, a few caresses, and what?
The footsteps tapped past my door, down another corridor, and I thought again about Denali Brinkman, Dorothy Boyd, somewhere in the same hospital, beautiful body under harsh white lights, behind metal doors.
Dorothy Boyd, Dorothy Louise Boyd, a dull, stolid name for someone who’d christened herself for a soaring Alaskan peak. Brinkman … Why Brinkman? Living on the brink? I put aside speculation and read facts, as delivered by Roz, along with a merciful sandwich, an hour earlier. The pages were photocopies of faxes, blurry, or maybe there was something wrong with my eyes. I stared at the wavery print.
Dorothy Louise Boyd, born December 12, 1972. Twenty-seven years old, not nineteen. What an advantage that must have given her, competing against kids eight years her junior. She’d made it into the criminal justice system as a juvenile, but that record was sealed, and the earliest offense Roz, working with Danny Burkett at the Cambridge cop house, had been able to find was August 1988, for soliciting an undercover officer in Cleveland. Sixteen years old. I wondered why she hadn’t been treated as a juvie. Maybe she’d pretended to be older, or had so many offenses on her sheet by then that they’d bumped this one up. Sentenced to juvenile detention, so the judge hadn’t gone for her as an adult. Probably an older man, I thought. Next stop, Denver, Colorado, selling drug-related paraphernalia. She’d given her place of birth as Alaska, and been sent to a girl’s rehabilitation school.
The machine at the side of Chaney’s bed traced his heartbeat. It was mesmerizing, hypnotic. My shoulder throbbed and my head hurt. The colored line on the chart blurred and I thought about pressing the buzzer on Chaney’s bed, calling the nurse, requesting a couple of aspirin. I went back to the file instead.
The rehab school hadn’t changed Dorothy’s ways. By 1990, she’d worked her way back into the system, this time for writing c
hecks on the account of a gentleman in Provo, Utah, where she’d been sporadically attending high school. There was a change in the quality of the paper, a few sheets of lined loose-leaf stuff tossed in with the faxes, handwritten notes from Roz, who’d tracked down and spoken to an old high school teacher, a Harvard alum, no less. Had he filled Denali’s head with college memories? I struggled to read Roz’s scrawl. Good grades. Captain of the rowing squad. Living on her own. Only after she’d left school had the teacher discovered that lovely Dorothy had been supporting herself via prostitution.
She’d landed a less sympathetic judge, spent three months in the county lockup. She’d been taken in by a deputy sheriff and his wife after completing her sentence, repaid them by leaving town in the middle of the night with $780 and the wife’s gold jewelry.
That warrant was still outstanding when Desiree Brent was picked up in October ’92 in Des Moines, Iowa, arrested for grand theft auto. Working with a man. He got the big years; she pleaded down. Spent eighteen months at the state pen in Fort Madison. I tried to square the black-and-white words with the images of Denali Brinkman offered by her roommate, her resident adviser, her lover, with the fallen angel bent over Chaney’s prone body.
She was smart, knew how to row, but she couldn’t stay out of trouble. She’d started out working alone, but later in her criminal career, she’d worked with a partner. Or a stooge. There were gaps in her history. I wondered if she’d filled them in with honest jobs, rowing, traveling to Europe, Switzerland, any of the fantastic places she’d rhapsodized about to Chaney.
If she’d done her crimes in California, she’d have been a lifer, a three-times-and-out loser. But she’d moved around, committed her offenses in different jurisdictions. She’d been nailed six times; I wondered how many other crimes she’d walked away from clean.
Roz had also spoken to the Iowa prison psychologist. Good for her. I squinted my eyes, pored over her notes. Bits and pieces of the story Denali had told Harvard and Chaney were part of the tale she’d told the shrink, but she aimed to please—she’d altered the facts to suit the occasion. She was an orphan with Chaney, the abandoned daughter of alcoholics for the shrink. Her American Indian heritage showed up in both tales. The shrink had termed Dorothy an exceptionally gifted manipulator. She’d also used the term narcisisstic personality disorder. Roz had underlined the words borderline personality and placed a string of question marks after them.
She’d labored in the prison infirmary as an orderly, in the library as a trustee. A perfect prisoner inside, but outside, she couldn’t keep away from the Benjy Dowlings, the get-rich-quick schemes. Her last prison release was in ’98. Royal Oak, Michigan. She’d been involved in a bar fight. Hit a man with a broken bottle. Aggravated assault. And now, if she came out alive from the room with metal doors, she’d go back to prison. A waste of beauty, a waste of intelligence, a necessary jailing. I recalled those icy, calculating eyes.
“Time to delve for deeper shades of meaning,” she’d written in her supposed suicide note. Time to delve for deeper pockets than Harvard’s, that’s what she should have written. What was a hundred-thousand-dollar education, what were any damages she could win by claiming she’d been raped by a professor, compared to the millions the pharmaceutical industry might pay for a quick and easy weight-loss drug with no side effects?
I didn’t hear George Fording’s footsteps, just the rasp of his subtle cough as he stood in the doorway. He wore a dark blue suit, a maroon tie, a shirt so relentlessly white, I blinked. He wasn’t alone. The man beside him was a stranger, wearing an elegant suit as well, carrying a briefcase.
“Is he—” Fording whispered the words, as though afraid to wake Chaney.
“He’ll be fine.”
“Good of you to stay. Margo is frantic, but I’ll take over now.”
The second man stared at his watch pointedly. His small slit of a mouth curled, as though he’d just tasted something unpleasant. Fording introduced him as Mr. Hitchens, from Legal Services.
“With a writ?” My tone was sharp. I felt seriously underdressed in dirty jeans and a men’s T-shirt purchased that morning at a hospital shop. Underdressing makes me defensive.
“A friendly visit,” Hitchens assured me, his voice like butter. “Just to stress that we would appreciate it if all statements to the press concerning this unfortunate matter were to come from one source, so as not to confuse the issues. And as these matters are likely to become the focus of legal proceedings, it would be best if nothing appeared in the press that might prejudice a jury at some point down the road.”
“In other words, you don’t want anybody to know Harvard admitted an ex-con. Well, I can understand that. What I’d like to know is how long you’ve known about it.”
He moistened his thin lips but didn’t respond.
“I mean, did you know before she supposedly killed herself, or did you just suspect? Were you actively pursuing her? Did you let her know you were on her trail, hoping she’d do something, like leave of her own accord?”
“None of these questions is likely to lead to a productive line of inquiry, Ms. Carlyle,” he said smoothly. “If I have to get a writ to keep you from asking them in the press, I can have one in ten minutes.”
“Yeah? Well, I can talk to a reporter in five.”
Fording said, “Mr. Hitchens, perhaps you’d let me speak to her.”
“Be my guest,” snapped the attorney.
“Alone, please.”
Hitchens pursed his small mouth, then turned and left.
“He’s too late,” I told Fording. “I already talked to the cops.”
Fording’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. “I shouldn’t imagine Mr. Hitchens is terribly concerned about the police.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Loose lips sink endowments. The fix is in. Why am I not surprised?”
“You look tired.”
“I am tired. I wonder if Chaney can hear all this, if he’s tracking it on some subconscious level.”
Fording eyed the sleeping Chaney as though considering the possibility. “What are you reading?”
“Criminal record. Denali Brinkman’s.”
“Poor girl.”
“Save it. You want to talk about a poor girl, talk about Helen Orza.”
His brow furrowed. “I don’t believe I know the name.”
“She’s the one who fried in the boathouse fire. Guilty of looking like Denali Brinkman, guilty of having a crummy job. And you can feel sorry for Benjy Dowling, an ex-con she ran down like a dog in the street, because he got too ambitious, got in her way. Feel sorry for them.”
He glanced around the room. There was no other chair and I wasn’t about to relinquish mine.
He said, “I feel sorry for Wilson Chaney, as well. Wilson’s a decent man and a fine scientist, a civilized human being. Possibly a weakness in times like these.”
I raised an eyebrow. “He thinks you despise him.”
“That’s a strong word, despise.”
“He told me that if you had any evidence he’d slept with a student, you’d toss him to the wolves.”
There was no change in the little man’s demeanor, no alteration in his dry tone. “Intriguing. Of course, it’s in my interest to keep my department members on their toes. I try not to show favoritism, like a father with his children.”
“Would you have fired him if you’d known?”
“You think I didn’t know?” He gave a tiny half smile, a tilt of the corners of his mouth. “People in my department belch during class in the morning, I know it by noon.”
“How about this? Did you know he was trying to cheat your precious department? Cheat the university?”
“Ah,” he said softly.
“I suppose you know all about the magic weight-loss drug? The unintended consequence?”
“Ah,” he repeated. “That.”
“Yes, that.”
“It’s an interesting development certainly, really quite a promi
sing possible therapy. Why do you inquire? What does—”
“Then why not file for a patent immediately? Why wait?”
He glanced around again, but no chair had materialized. “What did Wilson tell you?”
“Not Wilson. The girl.” I told him what she’d said, just what she’d said, but all the while I was remembering the feel of the pistol in my hands, the cool blue eyes assessing me, evaluating me, trying to read my mind.
“A fantasy,” Fording said in his dry academic tone. “An utter fantasy.”
“You’re saying there is no drug?”
“Not at all. There is—there may be a drug.”
“You’re saying it wouldn’t be valuable?”
“Oh, it would be. It might very well be. Wilson and I discussed it. We discussed filing sooner rather than later. We agreed to delay.”
I raised an eyebrow. My head was starting to ache again. Maybe I should call down the hallway, forget about the aspirin, inquire about the availability of a bed.
“Why?” I asked. “Why delay?”
“For a number of reasons. Wilson is a scientist, and he knows the value of being first. But he also wanted to be completely confident of replicable results. He needed to make sure it wasn’t some sort of fluke. Often, when results can’t be duplicated, reputations are jeopardized. And he wished, as any scientist would, to comprehend the phenomenon, not simply report it. That’s understandable, surely.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not to mention the money. You’re a member of the the Scientific Advisory Group at Improvisational Technologies, right?”
The little man took a step toward me. “Ms. Carlyle, don’t jeopardize Wilson’s reputation or mine. Don’t do it. Not on the word of a girl like that.”
“She was good enough for Harvard,” I said.