by Susan Dunlap
“You save others from the dangers. Your discoveries give other living people a chance. And sometimes, occasionally, you find the truth.” It had been that—the illusion of truth revealed in the body—that had seduced her into forensic pathology, and eventually betrayed her.
Rosten laughed scornfully. “Most of the time you defend the department budget, fight for staff, worry that someone forgot to disinfect a table and left bacteria or a virus that will kill them.”
“Marc,” she said, leaning forward, “these are all facts you knew before you decided to go into forensic pathology. These are very basic objections to the trade. I never had a second thought about forensic pathology, not until I quit. But you? What made you choose it?”
“You.”
“Me? I never urged you into it. You wanted internal medicine. I never—”
“You remember the Salter case? Jesse Salter?”
“Salter? No.”
“I’m not surprised. I probably never mentioned it aloud. I thought about it almost constantly for the three weeks before I left. But maybe I could never bring myself to admit my mistake.”
She waited.
“They brought Jesse Salter into the ER at eleven in the morning. I had an hour to go on my shift. I’d been on thirty-five hours. Thirty-five busy hours. There’d been some kind of demonstration—antisomething, I can’t remember what—and we had a couple of guys banged up pretty bad. A lot of internal injuries. At nine that morning I was seeing double. I lay down in the intern’s room, just hoping I could sleep for a few hours. And then they brought Salter in at eleven. He was an old guy. Bleeding from the lining of the stomach, pancreatitis, esophageal varices from the back pressure of the blood his cirrhotic liver couldn’t handle, kidneys all shot to hell. No family to make his decisions. No history other than what he could tell me. Dialysis? I knew it was too late. I should have taken my stand then. But I was so tired, and tired people are easy cowards. I chose the easy way out. I stuck a catheter into his heart and pumped him full of antibiotics, and plugged him into a respirator. I knew, dammit, that it wouldn’t save him. And it didn’t. He was conscious. For three weeks he suffered with every breath that damned machine forced into his lungs. At first I could hear him scream from the end of the corridor. Then at the end, I couldn’t hear him even from the end of the bed, I could just see his chest move in a kind of dry heave.” He looked over at her. “If I had made the right, the courageous decision, I would never have authorized those machines. He would have died that night, instead of living in agony for twenty more days. But I didn’t, because I had allowed myself to get too exhausted to think.”
He didn’t say it, but the words hung between them: Because I had spent too many hours, too many nights with you, here.
What he did say was: “I wasn’t responsible enough to be entrusted with living people.”
Kiernan didn’t move. He was still staring at her, and she stared back, unseeing now. Painful thoughts filled her mind: horror that he had wasted these years; distress at his dismissal of forensic pathology; anger, sorrow, amazement that after all these years he still blamed her. It was so appalling … And still it didn’t quite fit the Rosten she had known. Had he changed so much, or had she not known him at all? “And so you just left?”
“I had a lead on the path residency. I didn’t even know if I’d get it. It didn’t matter. I just had to escape. It was all I could do to make it those three weeks till the end of the year.”
She looked intently at him, seeing no traces of the passionate young man who had lived in this flat. Her voice was barely audible as she said, “You’d been planning to leave all along, and never once mentioned it! All that time I was sleeping with an imposter.”
“I couldn’t help it. I blamed us both. I blamed neither of us. I blamed the stupid system that kept me so exhausted that a private life could throw me over the edge.” He turned and walked to the window and looked out into the night. “I was young, I had lots of energy, and enough natural smarts to make decisions with half a brain, or one that was only half awake. Or so I thought. I never misdiagnosed a patient. I never botched a medication. But, dammit, I was too fuzzy to deal with Salter.” He swallowed hard. “You don’t need to tell me I was arrogant. Arrogance, the doctors’ disease. If you had diagnosed me then, I wouldn’t have believed you. And even if I’d suspected, I wouldn’t have known how to deal with it. Arrogance was a big part of what got me where I was. After Salter, all I knew was that I had to get away from patients.” He swallowed again, and wiped his eyes. “I’ve never admitted that, not to anyone.”
Without turning around he said, “There’s never been a day I haven’t regretted my decision.” Suddenly he laughed. “But my patients now aren’t complaining. And, at least, it didn’t change your plans.”
Forcing herself to meet his eyes, she said, “It changed me.” She could have told him of the years it had taken her to trust another man enough to spend more than a night with him. She said, “I’m sorry about Salter, and you, Marc. More sorry than I can say.”
The J-Church car clanged by, iron scraping iron, bursts of sparks flying out into the damp gray sky.
Rosten ambled over to a ficus plant and began examining the leaves, tacitly asking for an end to the painful discussion. It suited her; she needed time to digest his explanation, and to deal with its effects. She said, “What was the other questionable finding in the Delaney autopsy, the one that made you wonder about the subdural hemorrhage?”
“Delaney? The skin by the head of the ulna was pretty well eaten away—”
“Halfway up the ulna.”
“Wasn’t enough left on either wrist for me to base a conclusion, but on the right, there was a linear scratch across the outside of the head of the ulna. But no mark by the styloid process of the radius.”
“But the linear scratch on the outside of the wrist, do you think that could be from a wire? It’s just where a ligature would be if his hands had been crossed and tied behind him at the wrist. Tied up with wire that cut through the flesh into bone.”
Rosten nodded.
“What about the tendon of the supraspinatus muscle?” she said with mounting excitement. The muscle that ran along the inside of the scapula and attached to the top of the arm. “With an internal rotator like that, if Delaney’s hands were jerked behind him and tied, that forced external rotation could pull the tendon.”
“A small tear, but it could have come from anything in a storm like that. Or, coupled with the scratch on the ulna …”
She sighed. She’d hoped for something conclusive. “Not something you’d take to court, right?”
“Yeah, but nothing you’d want to rebut in court, either.”
“When Early Bird left the dock there were two people aboard, Matucci and Delaney. No matter what happened later, it was only Matucci who could have tied him up. Knocked him out, tied his wrists, and most likely pushed him overboard. Or maybe she cut him loose before she tossed him over.” The information about the ulna was a gift, Rosten’s way of saying I’m sorry. She stood up and smiled at him. “Thanks. I’ll use your information carefully.”
He shrugged. “Use it any way you want.”
But his face seemed lighter, nearer to the Rosten she recalled. Impulsively she kissed him.
He nodded, turning away from her abruptly to one of the desks and picking up some papers.
35
“DID MAUREEN CALL?” Kiernan asked, leaning over the kitchen railing to take a cup of coffee from Tchernak. From the bedroom came congested snores. “I left a message for her two hours ago. I didn’t say to call back, but that’s never stopped her before.”
“I thought she called you every time she got near a phone.”
“The last time I heard from her, she was complaining about hearing noises outside. It could have just been nerves, but still … Tchernak, they’re five miles from the road down there. I wish Big Sur weren’t so far, that I could go—”
“Look, if you need someone to drive to Big S
ur—”
“No!”
Tchernak sighed. “Well, if I had a wish, it’d be that Maureen traded places with him.” He threw a disgusted glance in the direction of the bedroom.
Kiernan ignored it. She didn’t ask about Olsen’s condition. Tchernak had already given her a blow-by-blow description, which added up to bad cold, occasional fever, and major pain in the ass. “I’ve been here less than six hours and already I’ve thrown out enough tissues to qualify for Bay-fill. I’ve carried the guy to the John so often I ought to be a longshoreman.” He glared down the length of his sharp, often-broken nose. “I even tracked down a grocery that delivered fresh, decent food—not that I got any help finding it from him, the local detective. Said he couldn’t hold a thought. Unless that thought was wanting juice, wanting a drink, wanting Ezra to stop barking!”
“He complained about Ezra!” Kiernan asked pulling the wolfhound to her protectively. Ezra let out a low groan and rolled over to present his stomach for rubbing.
“The guy’s a whiner, Kiernan. He’d complain about anything. He bitched about the crab box, he groused about the cops, he even said if you hadn’t made so much noise kicking out the side of the box, the cops wouldn’t have found him.”
“All that and Ez, too?”
Tchernak was not amused. “That’s not the worst of it.”
“It has to be the worst. What could be worse than speaking ill of this best of all possible dogs? A dog who’s bark is worthy of the San Diego Men’s Chorus.”
“I made the man chicken soup. Homemade. Cornfed chicken. Vegetables that came with the roots intact.”
“That for a man who complained about Ezra?”
“Olsen turned up his stuffed-up nose at it. He’ll only eat Lipton’s!”
Kiernan threw her head back and guffawed. Ezra bayed. From the bedroom Olsen yelled, “Hey, what the hell”—and dissolved into a paroxysm of coughing.
“Congratulations, Tchernak,” Kiernan after she’d got control of herself. “You are about to be inducted into a very exclusive club.”
“What’s involved in this induction?” he asked, his hazel eyes narrowing in mock suspicion.
“Nothing, you’ve already proved your worthiness.” She lifted her glass. “To Bradley Walka Tchernak, second member of the No Bedside Manner Club.”
Tchernak leaned forward and kissed her. “That is the initiation ritual, isn’t it?”
The bedroom door burst open. “Jeez,” Olsen growled. Dank brown hair clumped on his forehead, hanging halfway over his eyes. His face was a pale yellow, the fleshy cheeks drawn. He leaned heavily on the door frame, listing to his right as if to keep the weight off the left hip.
“Get back in bed,” Kiernan ordered.
“I don’t—”
“Do as I tell you or we leave you here on your own.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me. Look, Skip, it’s only your miserable condition that’s kept me from talking to you longer before. Now get back in bed and get ready to answer a few questions. And then, dammit, you can eat your dehydrated sodium-packed packaged chicken soup while Brad and I have the real stuff for lunch.”
Olsen hesitated, then turned and slowly limped back to bed.
As Kiernan started to follow, Tchernak whispered, “You’ll always be number one in the club!”
Olsen lay amidst a tangle of sweat-damp sheets and blankets. The pillow was clumped under one side of his head. It needed fluffing. Ignoring this, she said, “Okay. Answer some questions for me. You hired Delaney six weeks ago. How did you know about Robin then?”
“The car.” Olsen shoved the pillow behind him. “I tracked down the red convertible,” he said proudly.
And on the strength of that he put Delaney on the boat, and then Delaney was killed. Now it was clearer why he wasn’t willing to take the chance of Kiernan turning down the case. By this point Olsen had nearly as much of himself invested as Maureen. Kiernan smiled grimly. Obsession was something she understood. “Tell me about the wire. Delaney didn’t install that, did he? Robin put it in.”
Olsen raised an eyebrow. “How’d you”—He tensed, grabbed for the sheet, and let out a sneeze of hurricane proportions.
Kiernan glanced away. “Hartoonian said Cummings had told her business secrets unintentionally. Quite a scam Robin had there, overhearing the business get-togethers Cummings set up. He gets guys from different oil companies together. They’re all swapping ideas, admittedly carefully, but still one or two tidbits must have fallen every so often. Did she take out other oil company groups?”
“Specialized in them. She was the favored one with the oil guys.” Olsen reached for a tissue and blew.
“So all Robin had to do was keep abreast of moves in the industry—no big deal when she heard men talking about it all day on her boat. She’d recognize the slip of the tongue that could mean money when passed on to the right party. When did Delaney realize Robin was on to him?”
Still holding the tissue in front of his nose, he mumbled, “Not what you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“She didn’t uncover him one day and kill him the next. Look, Delaney was the first operative I had to hire. I should have checked up on him more. But I got it on good authority he was honest. And it didn’t seem like too tough a job. I thought he could handle it. I never would have …” A series of coughs shook him. He grabbed the sheet again, coughed into it. When he had got his breath back, he said, “Delaney screwed up looking for the wire. Two weeks before he died he told me he’d marked up the woodwork around the windows when he’d found the wires and he was afraid Robin would notice.”
Kiernan didn’t ask how Olsen had handled that. Judgment calls, they were part of the trade. She said, “We both know how fussy Robin was about that boat. Something like that she’d notice right off.”
“But, Kiernan, he scuffed the woodwork two weeks before he died.”
“Maybe she had to wait for bad enough weather to cover his drowning.”
“In those two weeks we had enough small-craft warnings to sink a navy. Maybe it had something to do with her argument with Jessica.”
“Argument with Jessica! Skip, is this another little fact you haven’t bothered to tell me? How long have you known about this?”
“Hey, wait!” He held up a quivering hand. “This is the info I got on the dock day before yesterday. I paid a big price for this lead. It’s not like I’ve been lying in the sun, you know. I’ve—”
“Skip, for Chrissakes, tell me about the argument!”
“I just did. That’s all I know. What I got, from one of the deckhands, was that the two ladies were staring daggers at each other. There were words, but he was too far away to hear.”
Kiernan sighed irritably.
Olsen waited a beat, then said, “This argument, Kiernan, it was two days before Matucci went under.”
She would have expected to find a smug smile on his face, but he was still clutching the sheet in front of his mouth, uneasily, guiltily. Why? She leaned back against the wall and said, “What is it you can’t talk about this time?”
“Nothing. They—Nothing.”
“They? Who?”
Involuntarily Olsen glanced at his hip.
“The guys who kidnapped you. What did they want to know?”
“About Delaney,” he muttered half into the sheet.
“So they knew he was an investigator.”
“Yeah, they knew.”
“What did you tell them?” Getting information out of Olsen was like pulling out pubic hairs, a painful proposition with ugly results.
“I told them nothing. I said Delaney hadn’t reported his findings to me.”
“Surely they didn’t believe that.”
Olsen snorted, then gagged in response to the snort. “No. That was when they said they were going to break my good hip. You know what that would do to me?”
Kiernan winced. “I can see why you’d talk.”
�
��I didn’t tell them everything,” Olsen insisted indignantly. “I said it had taken Delaney a long time to learn the job and so he hadn’t come up with anything except that Robin took out oil company guys.”
“Surely they didn’t accept that either. How long could it take a bright guy to learn to bait hooks and clean fish? So what did you give them?”
“Well, I had to tell them something, right?”
“If someone were going to break my one good hip, I’d talk.”
Olsen was sweating. “I just told them that Delaney hadn’t been able to report in ten days.”
What was the man avoiding? What could he have told his captors that he was so afraid of admitting, to her. What would she— “Delaney’s address, you gave them that, right?”
“Had to. They were going to break my hip.” He slid lower under the covers.
He was still protecting himself; his whole posture screamed it. So what else had he told them? Delaney’s address and … Blood heated her face; her hands clenched into fists. Very slowly she said, “You told them I would be breaking into Delaney’s apartment, didn’t you?”
Olsen coughed weakly.
“Skip, admit it!”
“Well, Kiernan,” he spoke from a mouth half hidden by sheet. “What choice did I have? I didn’t tell them when you’d be there.”
“You didn’t know that. And what difference did that make? They wouldn’t expect me to break in in the middle of the day. So it meant that all they had to do was watch the place after dark—watch me go in, give me enough time to find what was important, and break in and take it from me!”
“Kiernan, I didn’t know—”
“Forget it,” she snapped.
“But—”
“I said forget it. You wanted to sleep. Sleep.” She strode out of the room and slammed the door.
Tchernak was standing in the kitchen, half-sliced loaf of sourdough on a cutting board on the counter behind him, serrated knife clutched daggerlike in his hand. “So, I take it we’re leaving?”
Kiernan shook her head.
Ezra hoisted himself up and walked over, shoving his head against her ribs.