12th of Never wmc-12

by James Patterson

  He stood about eight feet back from the table as the nurses cut off Mackie’s blue cop uniform while she was still strapped to the board, checked her airway, her breathing, examined her head.

  Conklin saw the great purple bruises on her torso, the angry abrasions on her arms and chest, a seat-belt bruise from shoulder to waist.

  Dr. Bruno flashed a light into one of Mackie’s eyes and said, “Concussion,” but the rest of her words were lost as Morales batted the doctor’s hand away and opened her eyes on her own.

  “What happened?” she said.

  “You were in a car accident,” Bruno said. “Do you remember it?”

  Conklin saw the memory light up Mackie’s eyes. And then the impact of the thought came to her in a rush. She heaved upward and tried to sit up, totally impossible to do, strapped as she was to the board.

  “Where’s my baby?” she screamed.

  Conklin went to her and said, “Mackie, Ben’s okay. I saw him. He’s going to be fine.”

  Did she recognize him?

  “Mackie, it’s Richie. It’s me.”

  “Oh, fuck,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Chapter 105

  CONKLIN TRIED TO keep the shock off his face. Mackie looked feral. She’d been severely traumatized. Maybe she actually didn’t know him.

  He said it again. “Mackie, it’s me. Richie. Conklin.”

  “Where’s Randy?”

  Where’s Randy? The sexual predator? The homicidal maniac? That Randy?

  Morales was highly agitated, trying to release herself from her restraints even as the nurses tried to soothe her, listen to her heart, hook her up to air and fluids.

  “Oh, God,” she screamed out. “Everything hurts. Give me something for the pain.”

  Dr. Bruno was shouting, “I need CTs, stat,” when Conklin interrupted, said, “Emily, before you take her anywhere, give her anything, I need two minutes.”

  “What are you asking me, Conklin? We’re not wasting the golden hour.”

  “I’m asking for two minutes. This woman filled up your ER tonight. We’ve got bodies in the morgue. I need to talk to her while I can.”

  Dr. Bruno said, “I’m walking out of the room to call radiology. When I come back, you’re done.”

  Conklin returned to Morales, who was crying, her voice guttural, unrecognizable. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. Put me out, please, give me something.”

  “Mackie,” Conklin said. “Talk to me.”

  “You’re kidding,” she shouted. “I hurt like a son of a bitch. Tell them to put me out.”

  “Why were you driving that car?”

  “Why? Because I was breaking Randy out. Don’t you get that, you moron? We were running off with Ben. It was finally our time.”

  Conklin muzzled his outrage. He liked this girl, really liked her, but clearly he didn’t know her. Whatever he’d been thinking about her was a reflection of what he wanted her to be.

  She grabbed his wrist. It was like being clapped into an iron wristband.

  “I don’t want to die,” she said.

  “We don’t have a lot of time, Mackie.”

  “Oh, no, oh, no.”

  “Talk to me now. What’s your connection to Randy Fish?”

  “Damn you. You want your dying declaration, Richie? Here’s the whole enchilada. I killed that Whole Foods woman. Harriet Adams.”

  “Say that again?”

  “Yeah, and I killed the streetcar driver, too, okay? It was me. It was a real fucking rush, believe me.”

  Conklin’s bullshit meter was going off. It was impossible to pull off a murder that someone else dreamed. Mackie was delusional. She was concussed and probably had bleeding in her brain.

  He glanced at the corner of the ceiling. Saw the red light on the video camera. It was recording.

  Mackie gave a shrill scream of pain.

  Conklin pulled up a chair so that he was sitting right near her head. “Make me believe you,” he said. “Because what you’re telling me is hard to understand.”

  “Then listen. I watched you interview the professor. I typed your notes, remember that?”

  Her angry expression collapsed. She begged him, “Richie, I need drugs. I hurt so bad.”

  A nurse was at the exam table.

  “We’re going to roll you onto a stretcher, dear. We’ll be very careful.”

  Conklin shook his head, said, “Another minute. We need one more minute.”

  He turned away from the nurse and back to Morales.

  “Who are you protecting, Mackie?”

  Her face changed again, tightened into a scowl, and then she laughed. It was like the bark of a small dog confronting a larger one—manic, hysterical, definitely no mirth in it.

  She said, “You would think I was covering for someone, you jerk. You underestimated me, Inspector. I watched your interviews with Professor Judd, then after I made his dreams come true, I went to the aquarium and shot him.

  “Look at the video. Look at the fucking video. I’m on it. In a baseball cap. We looked at that tape together and you never connected the dots. What a laugh. What? Why are you looking at me that way?

  “Oh. You don’t get me, right? You never did. I was playing you, Richie. I did it for Randy and he is proud of me. Now get me drugs. I want to die in peace.”

  Conklin stood up, attached Mackie’s wrist to the stretcher with a restraint, and said, “MacKenzie Morales, you’re under arrest for murder—”

  She said, “You didn’t read me my rights. You can’t use what I said.”

  “You gave me your dying declaration, and it’s all been recorded on disk. But I hope you don’t die, Mackie. You shouldn’t get off so easy. You shouldn’t get off.”

  Chapter 106

  I WAS SLEEPING in our bed in the oncology wing when a booming voice paging Dr. Sebetic ended in a feedback squeal that rudely woke me. I groaned, reached for Joe, but he wasn’t there.

  I rolled over and saw that the baby’s incubator was no longer at our bedside. Seeing that empty spot dropped me into unadulterated, heart-stopping, blinding terror.

  What had happened while I slept?

  Where was my baby?

  I was on my feet when Joe rounded the doorway to our room. He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and paper slippers, and was holding two containers of coffee.

  “Hey. I’ve got something for you,” he said. “If you want a shower, go now. We’ve got a meeting with Dr. Sebetic in fifteen minutes.”

  “Where’s Julie?”

  “She’s in the baby room. Go. Splash some water on yourself.”

  I stood in the tiny stall under the hot spray, not moving, just letting the water work on me. The baby was in her incubator. We were going to meet with Dr. Sebetic and he was going to give us a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. And whatever he said, we were going to deal with it.

  Still, I didn’t like the freaking odds.

  Joe rapped on the shower door.

  “Let’s go, Lindsay. We don’t want to keep the doctor waiting.”

  I dried off with a towel the size of a dinner napkin, then dressed in yesterday’s smoky jeans and one of Joe’s clean Tshirts. If paper shoes were good enough for Joe, they were good enough for me. I opened a packet and put them on.

  After brushing my teeth and hair, I went out into our room, drank down my coffee in one long gulp, then said to my husband, “Are you ready?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  We went into each other’s arms and held on tight. I gathered strength from my husband and I asked God to please let her live. Joe dropped his head to my shoulder and I put my hand in his hair.

  Then Joe released me. “We’re late,” he said.

  Chapter 107

  DR. SEBETIC WAS in his forties, stood 6 feet 3 inches tall, weighed about 170, had red hair, black-framed glasses, and wore a sporty green plaid tie with his lab coat. He had seemed distracted each time we had met with him, but he was a hematologist and oncologist of distinct
ion, and that was all that mattered.

  The doctor looked up when we entered his office, said hello, and offered us chairs across from him at his desk. He called out to the hallway, “Nurse Kathy, please bring in Baby Girl Molinari.”

  The nurse called back, “Coming right up, Doctor,” then came into the room with our baby. Julie was swaddled in a blanket, wearing a pink stocking cap, and waving her fists.

  “She had a good breakfast,” Nurse Kathy said.

  I stood up, took Julie from the nurse, thanked her, and sat back down. Then I held the baby up so that Joe could kiss her, took her back, kissed her cheek, wiped my tears off her face, nestled her in my arms.

  “So,” said Dr. Sebetic, looking at the space between me and Joe. “I have news.”

  He removed his glasses, polished them with a tissue, then squared them on the bridge of his nose.

  “The test results are back and the blood cell appearance is returning to normal. It’s what’s called a polyclonal lymphocytosis, which is a benign, temporary, self-limiting disorder—”

  “For God’s sake, Doctor,” Joe said. “In English, please.”

  “I’m sorry. Let me say it another way. Julie had abnormal lymphocytes, and that diagnosis is a banana peel that many an experienced specialist has slipped on.

  “You see, the blood cells in mononucleosis look just like the ones that you find in lymphoma.”

  I didn’t see.

  I said, “Mononucleosis? The kissing disease?”

  “Exactly. You didn’t have a sterile delivery room, correct? As I was saying, you can look at two slides and one is malignant lymphoma, the other is mononucleosis, and you can’t tell the two apart. Many a pathologist has made the wrong call.”

  I thought I was tracking him, but I was afraid to hope. I held on to my child and my wits, pictured the two slides, imagined doctors slipping on banana peels.

  Dr. Sebetic said, “The bottom line is that Julie is getting better all by herself.”

  “She’s out of danger?” I asked. “She’s going to live?”

  “She’s perfectly healthy and as cute as ten buttons. I’m sorry, but I have to be in a teleconference with Shanghai, uh, five minutes ago. Nurse Kathy will be happy to help you check Julie out of Saint Francis.”

  Chapter 108

  OH, MAN, TALK about home sweet home.

  A half hour after leaving the hospital, Joe, Julie, and I were safely and joyously back in our nest on Lake Street.

  Joe put the camera on a five-second delay, set it on the TV console, and ran across the room to the big leather sofa, where he flung himself down and swept me and Julie into his arms.

  We grinned, the two of us—nothing contrived about it. This was over-the-moon time. This was what extreme happiness felt like.

  After the shutter clicked, Joe dashed back to the camera and set it again, returned to his girls, and this time, when Julie looked at the lens, she laughed.

  “Did you see that?” I yelled at Joe, way too loudly. “Did you see her smile for the birdie?”

  “What is this?” Joe said, pointing at her left cheek. “Is this a dimple? Who’s your daddy?” he said, showing dimples of his own.

  We took more pictures, laughed like crazy people, and then put the baby to bed and hit the phones.

  I called my sister and the other three members of the Women’s Murder Club. I called Conklin and then Brady and Jacobi, the two guys I called Boss. Last but not least, I called our dogsitter, Karen, and asked her to bring Julie’s big furry sister home in time for dinner.

  Joe made serial calls to people from coast to coast, all of them named Molinari. And when we were ready to stop shouting and dancing, we went to bed.

  We made tender love, quietly, so we didn’t wake the baby in the next room, and it was so sweet that if I had any tears left, I might have cried.

  I slept hard and woke up laughing.

  Joe mumbled, “Tell me the joke.”

  “A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”

  Joe laughed. “You’re giddy,” he said.

  “Yeah? A hamburger and a french fry walk into a bar. The bartender says—”

  “We don’t serve food here.”

  “Nuts.”

  “You know I love you, Blondie.”

  He went across the hall and returned with the baby. She didn’t cry, which was the most amazing thing, something I was going to love getting used to. She put her cheek on her father’s shoulder and he rubbed her back.

  “I know you love me, Joe,” I said. “But do I hear a ‘but’?”

  “No flies on you, honey. I got a job offer. The job is in DC.”

  I wanted to explode. I shouted in a whisper, “No, you don’t. No, Joe, just flat-out no effin’ way.”

  “For a lot of money. Enough to buy a pretty good house.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “But.”

  “But what?” I asked him.

  “I turned it down.”

  “Really?”

  “I didn’t even have to think about it. I couldn’t leave my sweeties, my party girls.”

  Chapter 109

  CINDY THOMAS HAD been obsessed by the Faye Farmer mystery since Farmer’s body disappeared from the morgue and she’d been assigned one of the best stories of her career.

  Fact: Faye Farmer had been murdered.

  Fact: Farmer’s fiancé, 49ers star Jeff Kennedy, was the only suspect and at the same time a dead end. There was no evidence against him.

  Fact: Forensic evidence that might have nailed Farmer’s killer had disappeared with her body, probably forever.

  Other facts: The police were nowhere on the case, but the public and the press still wanted to know the identity of the killer.

  Cindy had used every waking moment to chase rumors, interview Faye Farmer’s friends and enemies, and in so doing had become the Chronicle’s featured headliner in print and on the Web.

  This opportunity was priceless, but in the dark and lonely night, Cindy was not at peace. She replayed her conversations with Richie over and over again, and when she stopped rationalizing, she knew that Richie was right and that she had blown it.

  She had neglected him, had put her work first, and even now was using work to cover up the pain of losing the very excellent man she loved.

  Cindy had expected him to call her, and when it was clear that he wasn’t going to do it, she’d called him.

  And now here she was.

  Richie was staying at the Marina Motel, a cluster of old, two-story, Mediterranean-style structures with red tile roofs and iron railings around the balconies. At 8:15 p.m., Cindy pulled into the motel’s parking lot, nosed her car into a spot between a pickup truck and a station wagon, and turned off the ignition.

  She looked up at the second floor, picked out the room, saw Richie’s silhouette against the curtains. She got out of her car and walked up the outdoor steps, her heart hammering as she walked along the pathway to room 208 and knocked on the door.

  Richie called out, “Hey,” came to the door, and opened it. He had a towel around his waist and his hair was wet. He was backlit by the yellow light coming from the bathroom.

  He looked good.

  He said, “Come in, come in.”

  He pointed the remote control at the TV, switched off the sound.

  “Hi, Rich,” she said.

  She thought he might kiss her hello, but he said, “Have a seat. Give me a second, okay?”

  Cindy looked around at the plain, clean furnishings and at Richie’s familiar clothes draped over the desk chair. He pulled his clothes off the chair, disappeared into the bathroom, and closed the door. That reminded Cindy of the many days, weeks, and months they’d lived together, dressed and undressed in front of each other, feeling neither modest nor inhibited.

  Now all that had changed.

  Cindy swept the remote off the table and boosted the volume, watched the rehash of the crash outside the ballpark, then muted the volume a
gain when Richie came back into the room. He was dressed, barefoot.

  He sat down on the end of the bed. She thought she saw tenderness in his face. She knew that he must miss her as much as she missed him. They’d had the real thing. And she knew that it wasn’t over.

  He said, “You saw reports on this crash, huh? It was brutal.”

  “I miss you, Richie.”

  He looked at her, his eyes soft, and she thought he was going to say, “I miss you, too.”

  But he got up, took some socks out of the dresser, brought them back to the bed, and sat down. He was still mad at her. That’s what it was.

  “I started therapy, Richie. I thought I should get some help, you know? My therapist’s name is Mary. She’s very good. And I was wondering if you’d come and see her, too. With me.”

  There was a pause; maybe it lasted only a couple of seconds, but it felt eternal.

  Rich said, “Ah. I don’t think so, Cindy.”

  Cindy felt sick. Cold and sick. “You don’t want to see if we could work this out?”

  Richie stood up, reached out his hand and pulled her to her feet, took her into his arms and held her.

  He said, “Cindy, it’s not that I didn’t love you.”

  “Don’t say ‘didn’t.’ Don’t say that.”

  “Cin, what’s wrong with us can’t be fixed in therapy. I don’t want to force you to sacrifice what you want. And I don’t want to give up my dreams for a family.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as she shoved him away, turned from him, and started to cry. “I’m sorry it turned out this way.”

  Chapter 110

  WE WERE AT Susie’s Café in the back room, the booth by the window. It was happy hour on a Friday night and “our place” was packed tight to the walls. Conversation was almost impossible, but Cindy, Claire, Yuki, and I really needed to connect with one another, and so we shouted over the noise and gestured wildly with our hands.

  An old dude at the bar had sent over a pitcher of tap, so I guess we looked good enough to go out in public, but Cindy was devastated, Claire was depressed, I still smelled like a fire pit, and I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours.