by John Lutz
“Mr. Carver.”
He stopped and turned. Officer Lapella was seated on an orange vinyl chair in a tiny alcove that served as a waiting area for radiology. She had half a sandwich in her hand and a crumpled potato chip bag in her lap.
“I thought you were down in the cafeteria,” Carver said.
“That’s where I told Beth I was going, but I bought some stuff from the vending machine and ate here, where I could see anyone coming or going into her room. I saw you enter about fifteen minutes ago, so I relaxed a little and enjoyed my sandwich.”
Carver smiled. His world made sense again; McGregor, as usual, had misjudged someone under his command.
“No one’s been by except the doctor,” Lapella said. “Nothing unusual’s happened.”
“How does Beth seem to you?”
“She’s a willful woman, Mr. Carver. That’s why I gave up and agreed with her that I had to have something to eat and was going to the cafeteria.”
“She’s a Jezebel,” Carver said.
“I hope not, Mr. Carver. Jezebel was willful, too, but cruel. She was eventually killed and her body was thrown to the dogs.”
Carver was astonished. “What is this? Is everyone but me an expert on the Bible?”
“That’s just Sunday school stuff,” Lapella said. “I used to teach it in my church over in Sarasota.” She raised her eyebrows. “But what did you mean about Beth being a Jezebel?”
He told her about the message on his answering machine.
“I’d say that sounds serious,” Lapella said when he’d finished. She automatically glanced toward the door to Beth’s room, halfway down the hall. “I’ll be here at the hospital the rest of the day.”
“What if McGregor orders otherwise?”
“Hell, Mr. Carver, McGregor’s probably forgotten I exist. I’m just another dumb broad-assed cop, not important to him. That’s why he gave me to you in the first place. It gets me out of the way.”
“He did me a favor.”
“And me,” she said with a slight smile. “I’m finished eating, so I’m going back to Beth’s room. You had lunch?”
“No.”
“So go on down to the cafeteria and eat, then maybe you should come back up and drop in on room three-eleven, talk to Delores Bravo.”
“The nurse who was hurt in the clinic explosion?”
“Right. The one who lost a foot and part of her leg. I talked to a nurse who spent some time with her. She told me about some things she said about the bombing. You go see Delores Bravo, she might be able to shed a little light.”
“You’ve shed more than a little light,” Carver told her, patting her shoulder.
And he did go down to the cafeteria and ate a salad and a roast beef sandwich. But he was preoccupied and ate in a hurry, hardly tasting his food.
Then he took an elevator to the third floor, wanting but not wanting to see what the bomb had left of Delores Bravo.
16
DELORES BRAVO WAS SITTING up in bed the way Beth had been, only the hospital tray had been removed and there was a People magazine folded in her lap. She was a beautiful Latin woman in her twenties, though right now she looked old and drawn and had deep, shadowed circles beneath her eyes. Someone had combed her long, lush hair, and it lay in graceful dark waves over the white surface of her angled pillow. A thin white sheet covered her slender body; there was a tentlike contraption beneath the material where her foot had been amputated.
“Miss Bravo?”
She looked over at Carver with pained dark eyes. Don’t hurt me, they screamed. I’ve had all I can take.
Gently he told her who he was, and that he wanted to talk with her.
“The police have already asked me questions,” she said with a trace of accent, perhaps Cuban. “Lots of them.”
“Mine might be different,” Carver told her. “Besides, the police don’t always share their information with me.”
“The FBI was here, that man Wicker.”
“We know each other,” Carver said.
“But you don’t share confidences?”
He smiled and shook his head no.
She glanced down at his cane. “You get around okay with that?”
“Not bad. My knee’s locked so my leg’s bent at a thirty-degree angle. It’ll be that way for life.”
“You have an accident?”
“Shot. When I was a cop in Orlando.”
“That’s a shame.”
“What happened to you is a shame, too, Delores.”
“You gonna tell me there are worse things than losing your foot and part of your leg?”
“No. You know there are worse things. You’ll develop a new way of looking at yourself and other people. One day you won’t think about your artificial leg and your limp until somebody reminds you of them by glancing at you oddly as you walk past, but the look they give you won’t bother you much anymore. By then you’ll know who and what you are.”
“What if who I become isn’t okay with me?”
“It will be.”
She sighed and scrunched her head back into the pillow. Her black hair caught and held the light. “How’s your friend Beth Jackson?”
“She’s better.”
“The nurses told me about her. She lost her baby.”
“We both did.”
“Dr. Grimm was a fine doctor, a good man. The man who killed him and did this to me, I’ve been reading about him. He’s a religious person, yet he could do something like this and not think it wrong.”
“You believe Norton did it?”
She looked at him, surprised that he had any doubt. “Of course I believe he did.”
“I mean, on his own?” Carver amended.
She waited awhile before answering that one, obviously thinking it over. “The papers say it might have been Operation Alive, and that makes sense. Of course, my whole world made sense a few days ago, and now it doesn’t. At least not in any way I can figure out. So I guess the truth is I really don’t know who might have put him up to it, or if anyone did. But the actual planting and blowing up of the bomb—I think Norton did that on his own. Don’t know it, but I think it.”
Carver limped over and lowered himself into the chair next to the bed. It was identical to the chair in Beth’s room. “What did you see the morning of the explosion?”
“I was walking down the hall to see how soon Dr. Grimm would be finished in the operating room, hurrying because I saw your friend Beth entering and had another woman waiting, a patient named Wanda Creighton. There’s a storage room to the right of the hall. Its door was standing open, I remember. Outside the window at the end of the hall, I saw that Norton man running. He glanced in at me and had a horrible grin that I won’t forget. A few seconds later the bomb went off, and I don’t remember anything afterward until I regained consciousness here. The blast came from the storage room, right next to the operating room. It’s a wonder the woman on the operating table wasn’t injured. They say she was protected by the fact that she was prone, and by Dr. Grimm’s body. The storage room has—had a window that might have been open or was broken and provided access for Norton to have planted the bomb.” Tears glistened in her large brown eyes. “He did it, Mr. Carver. I saw him running away. I remember that grin, like it didn’t matter that I saw into his ugly soul because soon I’d be dead.”
“Would he have had to enter the clinic to plant the bomb? Might he have tossed it inside and then run?”
“I think it’s possible that he threw it into the storage room through the window. An organization like Operation Alive, I’m sure they have floor plans of most of the women’s clinics that perform abortions.”
“Were there more than the usual threats to the clinic in the weeks leading up to the bombing?” Carver asked.
“Yes. We always got threats. It was part of what we did. In the last few weeks, they’d become more extreme because most of them came from Operation Alive, even though they deny it. Then there was the bullet ho
le.”
Carver sat straighter. “Bullet hole?”
“A week before the bombing, someone fired a bullet into Women’s Light during the night, when the building was unoccupied. The next morning, when I arrived early and opened the clinic, I saw that the front door glass was shattered. The police said it was a drive-by shooting. They figured out the angle of the shot, then they found the bullet buried in the wall opposite the door.”
“Did you mention this to the FBI?”
“No, I don’t think so. I just told them about the threats, the letters and phone calls. I’d just finished talking to the police and didn’t tell them about it because they already knew. So I told the FBI pretty much what I’d said to the police but forgot to mention the gunshot last week. I was still shook up from what happened, so maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly. Do you think it’s important?”
Carver wondered how she could doubt its importance. But she’d been in an explosion and lost part of herself. That sort of thing tended to change your priorities in an instant.
There was no point in burdening her with a sin of omission. “It could be important,” Carver said, “but probably isn’t.”
The gunshot was almost surely a piece of information McGregor had kept from Wicker in their competition, to discover who if anyone other than Norton was behind the bombing. More specifically, to gain proof that it was Operation Alive. Norton might know about the drive-by shooting, but he wasn’t talking to the authorities at all now on advice of counsel. If it weren’t for Jefferson Brama, the FBI would be wringing facts out of Norton like water from a wash rag.
But now Brama would be doing the talking, either himself or through Norton, and it would be artful talk that revealed nothing.
“Do you know who Jefferson Brama is?” Carver asked.
“Sure. The lawyer for Operation Alive. He’s been to the clinic to threaten us with murder charges and lawsuits.” Delores twisted up her mouth as if she might spit. “Him I don’t like.”
“Had you seen or met Adam Norton before catching sight of him outside the window?”
“No. The only time I saw him was that day, just before the explosion. I know I shouldn’t, but I want him to die now for what he did.”
“He might,” Carver assured her.
“Probably not, with Brama as his lawyer.”
Carver didn’t argue with her. She might be right.
He gripped his cane and stood up. “Is there anything you need?”
“No,” she said, “my father visits me regularly, brings me things every day. My boyfriend, I don’t know . . . He was here once, said he’d be back, but he hasn’t.”
“Serious boyfriend?”
She smiled sadly. “Maybe not.”
“Don’t give up on life, Delores.”
She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Well, doesn’t that sound simple?”
“It is simple, and it’s good advice, considering the alternative.”
“Why don’t you tell me I’m young and beautiful and have my whole life ahead of me?”
“Is that what you want to hear?”
“No.”
“You know all those things are true, when you’re not feeling sorry for yourself. Not that you don’t have the right, but sometime it’s got to end.”
“I know.” She clutched her hands tightly, forming fists with the thumbs tucked inside her fingers, the way women do. “I’m furious, Mr. Carver, and I’m terrified of the future.”
“You’ll get over both, the fury and the terror. It might be hard at first, but the future can be good for you.”
She looked again unabashedly at his cane and his ruined leg, then up at his face. “I know you’re right.”
She tried a smile, but when he left the room she was crying.
Carver’s own eyes were stinging with tears. Like Delores Bravo, he found himself furious, and afraid of the future.
Not without reason.
Sitting in his office late that afternoon, he got a call from the head nurse on the fourth floor at the hospital. There had been trouble in Beth’s room.
17
WHEN CARVER LEFT THE elevator on the fourth floor and hurried down the hall, the first person he saw was McGregor standing outside the door to Beth’s room. The lieutenant’s wrinkled brown suit coat was open and hitched back on one side, as if to allow him to reach his gun, whose checked butt was visible in its leather holster. It was a pose Carver had seen McGregor affect before when he wanted to be especially authoritarian.
McGregor reached out a long arm toward Carver as he approached the door. “Not so fast, asshole.”
Carver avoided the arm, shoved him aside, and continued on his way, expecting McGregor to follow him into the room. His knuckles whitened on the crook of his cane. He was ready to deal with McGregor if he came in.
But McGregor, an expert on the remaining length of burning fuses, stayed outside.
Wicker was in the room, standing at the foot of the bed. So was a uniform from the Del Moray Police Department and a stocky plainclothes cop with acne Carver assumed was FBI.
Beth was standing near the bed, alongside Wicker, tall and elegant in her hospital gown. She was barefoot and looked perfectly all right except for the stitches still in place on the side of her neck.
The woman lying across the foot of the bed was battered and bleeding, and one of her hands was wrapped in a white towel. Someone had done a thorough and skillful job of administering a brutal beating to Officer Lapella.
Everyone other than Lapella stared at Carver. Lapella continued to face the ceiling. Wicker nodded to him. Beth walked over to him and leaned against him, placing a hand on his shoulder near his neck. He felt her fingers squeeze, loosen, squeeze, loosen.
“Beth saw the guy, and a nurse saw him leave,” Wicker said. “He was tall, broad shouldered, well-tailored blue suit, red tie, blond crew cut, black horn-rimmed glasses. Looked like a government official or an accountant, the nurse said.”
“The WASP” Beth said to Carver.
“Why Lapella?” Carver asked. In the corner of his vision he saw McGregor enter the room and slouch against the wall with his arms crossed.
“It seems he was using her as an example,” Wicker said, looking particularly dumpy and disheveled next to Beth. “It was a way to demonstrate what he could just as easily have done to Miss Jackson.”
The door opened and a spoke-wheeled gurney thumped and nosed into the room, followed by a nurse and a male attendant. They worked a backboard beneath Lapella. No one spoke as she was transferred from Beth’s bed onto the gurney. Lapella glanced over at Carver and smiled weakly with split and puffy lips. It looked as if her nose was broken, and both her eyes were almost swollen shut. Carver reached over and gently touched her elbow.
The nurse affixed an IV needle in the back of Lapella’s left hand and hung the clear plastic pouch on a metal stand attached to the gurney, draping the tube so it wasn’t bent or kinked before adjusting the valve for the proper drip rate. She nodded to the attendant, then held the door open while he wheeled the gurney out. McGregor waved a hand at the plainclothes cop with bad skin, who followed the gurney. Apparently he wasn’t FBI after all, but was one of McGregor’s men.
“What do the doctors say?” Carver asked.
“Aside from cuts and contusions,” Wicker said, “all of the fingers on her right hand are broken.”
“They sounded like twigs snapping,” Beth said. She didn’t change expression or sound horrified when she said this, it was simply a statement of fact. McGregor and Wicker looked at her. Only Carver knew how tough she could be.
“Lapella was in the room here when the guy came in,” McGregor said, pushing away from the wall with a lanky, whiplike motion of his long body. “Didn’t have time to get to her gun, she said. I don’t know about that. Gun or not, you’d think she’d have taken him on. Hell, she’s had training.”
“She really didn’t have time,” Beth said. “Not to get her gun out or
do anything else. He was smiling and didn’t say anything, and within two seconds after he’d walked in, he slapped her so hard she almost lost consciousness, then he just kept beating on her. When I started to get up, he drew her gun from its holster and pointed it at me, ordered me to lie back down.”
McGregor looked pained. “He took Lapella’s own gun? Where was she and what was she doing when this was happening?”
“She was on the floor then, and he started kicking her. He kept kicking her, all the time looking at me over the barrel of the gun and talking about wanton women and being burned with fire and lightning. I remember one phrase: ‘For fear of her torture, shall they stand crying.’ He repeated it several times all the while he was kicking. He . . . he seemed to relish what he was doing.”
She sat down on the bed.
“Why don’t you lie down,” Wicker suggested.
“No, I’ll just sit.”
“Did he hurt you at all?” Carver asked, controlling his anger with difficulty, He yearned to do something about this, to do something back!
“No, he didn’t even touch me. And while he was . . . doing things to Linda, he was careful to stand so I’d see what was happening. He wanted me to watch. More than that, he wanted to watch me.”
“Why the hell didn’t you ring for the nurse?” McGregor asked. His tone suggested that what had happened was partly Beth’s fault. The fire in Carver’s stomach threatened to spread.
“I started to,” Beth said, “but he reached over and ripped the call button from the wall. He picked up Linda and threw her across the foot of the bed.” Her voice quavered with emotion. “Then he bent back and broke her fingers over the top of the footboard.”
“Did he say why he was doing this?” Wicker asked.
“No. He kept up a stream of casual chatter about God and the Bible and the arm and sword and lightning of the Lord. Some of it was scripture, I’m sure. And when he was finished, he left the room fast, moving quickly for a man that large. I climbed out of bed then, yelled down the hall for a nurse, and went to help Linda.”