Hour Game

by David Baldacci

  “Do you want them now?”

  “Right now.”

  When she returned with them, King had turned to leave but then something made him stop.

  He stared down at the meticulously groomed and attired Remington Battle sitting there in a beautiful old chair, the epitome of the aristocratic southern grande dame.

  She glanced up. “Is there something else?” she asked him coldly.

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Was what worth it?”

  “Being Bobby Battle’s wife. Was it worth losing both your sons?”

  “How dare you!” she said sharply. “Do you realize the hell I’ve been through?”

  “Yeah, it’s really been a piece of cake for me too. Why don’t you try answering my question?”

  “Why should I?” she retorted.

  “Call it a gracious act by a refined and dignified lady.”

  “Your sarcasm is absolutely lost on me.”

  “Then let me lay it straight out for you. Bobby Jr. was your child. How could you just let him die?”

  “It wasn’t like that!” she said, her voice rising. “You think it was an either/or choice? You think I didn’t love my son?”

  “Words are easy, it’s the actions that are hard, Remmy. Like standing up to your husband. Like telling him you didn’t give a shit where he got the disease but that your son was getting treatment for it. It’s not like it’s that hard to diagnose, even back then. You put the kid on penicillin and chances are extremely good you’d have both your sons in your life right now. Did you ever think about it in those terms?”

  Remmy started to say something and then stopped. She set her cup of coffee down and folded her hands in her lap.

  “Maybe I wasn’t as strong back then as I am now.” King saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes. “But I finally did make the right decision. I took Bobby Jr. to all sorts of specialists.”

  “But it was too late.”

  “Yes,” Remmy said quietly. “And then the cancer came. And he just couldn’t fight it off.” She brushed at her tears, reached for her coffee but then stopped and looked up at him.

  “Everyone has to make choices in life, Sean,” she said.

  “And lots of people make the wrong choices.”

  Remmy seemed about to make some biting comment, but King stopped her cold when he took a photo off the shelf and held it up. It was of Eddie and Bobby Jr. as children. She suddenly put a hand to her mouth as though to stifle a sob. She looked at him, the tears sliding down her cheeks now. “Bobby was a very different man when we first married. Maybe that’s the one I was clinging to, hoping he’d come back.”

  King put the photo back. “I think any man who lets his own son die without lifting a hand to save him isn’t a man worth waiting for.”

  He walked out and never looked back.

  As King came outside, he saw a driver was loading Savannah’s bags into a black sedan. Savannah climbed out of the car and approached King.

  She said, “I wanted to see you before I left. I heard some of what you said to my mother. I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was just passing by.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know whether to pity or loathe her.”

  She stared at the house. “She always wanted to be the matriarch of this great southern family. You know, sort of a dynasty.”

  “She didn’t quite make it,” commented King.

  Savannah stared at him. “That’s the thing… I think she made herself believe that she had made it. She hated my father in private and yet idolized him in public. She loved her sons and yet sacrificed them to preserve her marriage. It makes no sense. All I know is I’m getting the hell away. I’ll spend the next ten years trying to figure it out. But I’m going to do it from a distance.”

  They hugged, and King held the car door for her.

  “Best of luck, Savannah.”

  “Oh, Sean, please tell Michelle thanks for everything she did.”

  “I will.”

  “And tell her I took her advice on my tattoo.”

  King looked at her quizzically but said nothing. He waved as the car sped off.

  King drove to the Wrightsburg Gazette and unwittingly sat at the same microfiche machine that Eddie had when he broke in that night.

  King raced through the spool of back issues until he found the date he was looking for, the day Edwards had been let go. He didn’t find what he was searching for. Then it occurred to him that it might have happened too late to make the next day’s edition. He forwarded to the day after that. He didn’t have to read far. It was front-page news. He read the story carefully, sat back and then finally laid his head down on the desk as his mind began to creep into areas that were truly unthinkable.

  When he rose back up, he noted the wall Eddie had written on. It had been cleaned off, but there were still traces of the word he’d written there.

  TEAT

  A few days before, he’d played with various combinations of the word: tent, test, text. Nothing seemed to work. Yet he didn’t believe Eddie would have written that word if it wasn’t important.

  King pulled the cipher disk out of his pocket and played with it. He had taken to carrying it around for some reason. Long ago it was discovered that frequency analysis could break an encryption of fair length. The method was straightforward. Some letters of the alphabet occur far more frequently than others. And the letter that occurs far more often than all others is the letter e. This discovery had put the code-breakers on top for quite some time until the encryption folks once more got the upper hand centuries later.

  King spun the outer ring of the cipher disk around until the letter e was lined up with the letter a. One tick off. He looked at the wall and in his mind’s eye changed one letter, e for an a. Now it read:

  TEET

  That made no sense either. What was a teet? As a long shot he left and went back to his office, went to a search engine on the Internet and typed in the word teet, and for the hell of it, the word crime. He didn’t expect to find anything. However, a long list came up. Probably all garbage, he thought. And yet when he looked at the very first listing, he suddenly sat up.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. He read all that was there and sat back. He felt his forehead: it was damp with sweat, his whole body was. “Oh, my God,” he said again.

  He stood slowly. He was glad Michelle was out. He couldn’t have faced her. Not right now.

  King had some things to track down, just to make sure. And then he was going to have to just face it. He knew it would be one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.

  CHAPTER

  100

  TWO DAYS LATER KING

  pulled up into the parking lot and got out of his car. He went inside the office building, asked for Sylvia and was directed back to her office.

  She was at her desk in her medical office, her left arm in a sling. She looked up and smiled, then came around and gave him a hug.

  “Do you feel halfway human yet?” she asked.

  “I’m getting there,” he said quietly. “How’s the arm?”

  “Almost as good as new.”

  He sat down across from her while she perched on the edge of her desk.

  “I haven’t seen much of you lately.”

  “I’ve been kind of busy,” he answered.

  “I’ve got tickets to a play in D.C. for next Saturday. Would it be too forward to ask if you’d like to join me? Separate hotel rooms, of course. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  King glanced over at the coatrack. The woman’s coat, sweater and shoes were neatly arranged either on or next to the rack.

  “Is something wrong, Sean?”

  He looked back at her. “Sylvia, why do you think Eddie came after us?”

  Her demeanor instantly changed. “He’s crazy. We helped bring him down. Or at least you did. He hated you for it.”

  “But he let me go. And he kept you. He had you bent over a tree stump, about to cut your head off. Like an executioner.”


  Her face twisted angrily. “Sean, the man had killed nine people already, most at random.”

  He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. She sat back behind her desk and slowly read it.

  She looked up. “It’s the newspaper article about my husband’s death.”

  “He was the victim of a hit-and-run driver, case was never solved.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” she said coldly, sliding the paper back across. “So?”

  “So the same night George Diaz was killed Bobby Battle’s Rolls-Royce was damaged. The next day the Rolls was gone, and so was the mechanic who looked after Bobby’s collection.”

  “Are you saying this mechanic person killed my husband?”

  “No, I’m saying Bobby Battle did.”

  She looked at him, stunned. “Why in the hell would he do that?”

  “Because he was avenging you. He was avenging the woman he loved.”

  Sylvia rose, her fingers digging into her desktop. “What the hell are you trying to do here?”

  Now King’s demeanor changed. He sat forward. “Sit down, Sylvia, I have a lot more to say.”

  “I—”

  “Sit!”

  She slowly sank back into her chair, without ever taking her gaze off him.

  “You told me once that you’d seen Lulu Oxley at the gynecologist you both used. You intimated she’d changed docs. But she didn’t change docs. You did.”

  “So is that a crime?”

  “I’m getting to that. I got the name of your new ob-gyn from your old doctor, and then I went to see your new gynecologist. She was way up in D.C. Why so far away, Sylvia?”

  “That’s none of your damn business.”

  “When you had your surgery three and a half years ago, your husband performed it. He was the best, you said. Only he had another agenda when he opened you up. I’ve discovered after talking to a surgeon friend of mine that the procedure to correct a ruptured diverticulum is one of the very few that would allow the surgeon to do something ‘extra’ in the pelvic region that most likely wouldn’t be noticed by anyone assisting him.”

  “Would you please get to the point!” she exclaimed.

  “I know, Sylvia.”

  “You know what?” she said fiercely.

  “That a tubal ligation was performed on you without your knowledge that rendered you infertile.”

  There was a long silence. “You don’t know what you’re talking—”

  King interrupted. “George Diaz corrected your diverticulitis and operated on your colon all right, but at the same time he also stapled your fallopian tubes shut. And he did it on purpose. You couldn’t go to your old ob-gyn with those staples in you: how could you explain them? So you went to a new one, probably with dummy records, and she removed them. I went to see her with a bogus story about my ‘wife’ and her fallopian tube problem. I said you’d recommended her because you said she’d done such a wonderful job on you. Because of confidentiality restrictions she couldn’t tell me much, but it was just enough to confirm my suspicions. And the damage was permanent, wasn’t it? You’d never have children.”

  “You bastard, how dare you—”

  King interrupted her again. “Your husband found out you and Bobby were lovers. You fell for the old man just like hundreds before you. And George took his revenge for your infidelity. And then you took yours.” He picked up the photo of George Diaz off her desk and laid it facedown. “You don’t have to keep up the facade of the poor, pining widow for me.”

  “I was lying flat on my back in the hospital when George was killed!”

  “That’s right. But I’m betting your husband told you what he did. He’d want you to know how he’d avenged himself for your betrayal. And you called Bobby and told him all about it. And he took his Rolls-Royce, went over to your house, saw Diaz out walking, and that was that. At first I thought Bobby had run Roger Canney’s wife off the road and killed her, because her death also occurred around the time George was killed. But hers was a simple car accident. Your husband’s death was murder.”

  “It’s all conjecture. And even if it happened as you say, I did nothing wrong. Nothing.”

  “The wrong comes later. Because you killed Bobby by injecting a lethal dose of potassium chloride into his nutrition bag.”

  “Get out of my office.”

  “I’ll go when I’ve had my say,” he shot back.

  “First you say I’m the man’s lover, and then you say I’m his murderer. What possible motivation would I have for killing him?”

  “You were afraid of being exposed,” King said simply. “On the very day he was killed we saw you at Diane Hinson’s home. Michelle told you Bobby was conscious, but that he was just rambling, calling out people’s names, saying stuff, totally incoherent. You were terrified he’d say your name, talk about your relationship. Then everything might come out. Maybe he’d already thrown you aside by then. So maybe you owed him nothing. I don’t know that for sure, but I do know that you went and killed him. For a doctor it would be easy. You knew the hospital routine. You put the poison in the bag and not the tube, and you left the feather and watch because you wanted the murder attributed to the other killer. You were very quick to support my theory of a family member having killed Bobby. But you made a mistake. You didn’t take anything from his hospital room. Those thefts from the other victims, the St. Christopher’s medal and the like, weren’t revealed to the public or to you. So you didn’t know to copy that detail.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “You’re crazy. You’re as crazy as Eddie, you know that? And to think I was looking forward to rekindling what we had.”

  “Right, me too. Guess I’m really lucky.”

  Her face twisted hideously. “All right, you’ve had your say, now get out. And if you repeat one word of it, I’ll sue you for slander.”

  “I’m not finished yet, Sylvia.”

  “Oh, there’s more insane talk to come?”

  “A lot more. You were also the one who burglarized the Battles’ home.”

  “You just don’t stop, do you?”

  “Bobby had probably given you the access code and a key. Junior had done work for you, you told us that. You got the stuff to frame him easily enough, and who better to forge a print than a medical examiner? I’m not sure how you did that, but I know with a very experienced person that it’s possible.”

  “Why would I burglarize their home? What would I want with Remmy’s wedding ring?”

  “You didn’t care about the ring! There was something else you were after. Battle was in a coma in the hospital. You weren’t sure if Remmy knew about Bobby’s secret cache. You weren’t even sure what you wanted was in there, but you had to look. In Bobby’s closet you knew where the secret drawer was, but you didn’t know how to open it and had to break in. Someone would obviously see that, so you broke into Remmy’s closet to make it look like a burglary and framed Junior for it. You’d probably heard from Bobby that Remmy had a secret cupboard in her closet, but he didn’t know its exact location. That’s why you had to bust everything up, looking for it.”

  “And what exactly was I supposed to have stolen?”

  “A picture of you and Bobby together. Some of the lettering from the back of the Kodak paper had stained the drawer. He might have told you he kept it there. Either way, you had to get it back. Because if he died and the photo was discovered, people might start putting the pieces together about your husband’s death. And even if you weren’t to blame for that, no one would believe you. And maybe it seemed pretty ironic your ending up with Remmy’s wedding ring. Did you ever wear it in the privacy of your home?”

  “Okay, that’s it! Get out! Now!”

  King didn’t budge. “And did you really have to kill Kyle? What, was he trying to blackmail you?”

  “I didn’t kill him. He was stealing from me!”

  King glanced over at the coatrack. “You were doing Hinson’s post the night Battle was killed. You said Kyle
came to the morgue that night, but you didn’t mention that you’d seen or spoken to him, only that he’d accessed the door, and that was recorded on the security log.”

  “I never saw him. I was in the back working on Hinson.”

  “Not around ten o’clock you weren’t. And that’s probably what Kyle saw, or, more to the point, didn’t see.” He pointed at the neatly