by Lee Goldberg
“All that matters is that Jack worked with me once, that I cared about him, and that he was the only one left who could help me,” Mark said. “That’s why he had to die.”
“It’s an interesting theory, one that I’ll definitely keep in mind,” Mickey said, rising from his seat. He would call Detective Morales in LA and get the real story on Mark Sloan once the doctor had left. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with me. I’ll have an officer drive you back to your car.”
“I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” Mark said sadly.
“I believe you’ve lost someone you care about and that it happened during a very stressful time in your life,” Mickey said. “You have my sympathies.”
“I don’t want your sympathies,” Mark said. “I want Carter Sweeney back on death row.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The venerable 112-year-old Brown Palace in downtown Denver was a big step up from the Super 8 in Quartzsite and the Ramada Inn that Mark had stayed at on the road somewhere on his way up from Phoenix. For one thing, neither of those hotels employed a full-time historian, though the wino who was urinating into a potted plant in the lobby of the Ramada when Mark arrived might have qualified.
There were seven hundred pieces of ornate wrought-iron grill-work that ringed the grand lobby of the Brown Palace from the first floor up to the seventh. Two of the wrought-iron panels were upside down. One of those panels was installed incorrectly by design, to symbolize the imperfection of man. The other was put in wrong out of spite by an angry worker, thus proving the meaning of the first improperly installed panel.
Mark felt like one of those panels—old, flawed, and spiteful. He was sitting in his dark room, looking out the window at the volcanic granite walls and Gothic spire of the Trinity Methodist Church across the street, when there was a knock at his door.
He looked through the peephole and saw three men standing in the corridor. The one standing closest to the door looked like a male model, the kind who posed as businessmen in magazine ads for European cars, fine suits, and first-class air travel. There were just enough dashes of gray in his hair to make him seem established, respected, and educated but not so many that he seemed old.
The two men standing deferentially behind him at the door were muscular and had faces that had been reshaped over the years by fists. They were clearly his bodyguards.
Mark opened the door. “Yes?”
“Dr. Sloan,” the man said, “I am Elias Stewart, Jack’s uncle. May I come in?”
Mark stepped aside. Elias turned to his men.
“Wait for me in the suite,” Elias said and then came into Mark’s room.
Mark closed the door and faced his guest. “I’m sorry about Jack.”
Elias nodded. “He admired you, Dr. Sloan. You were a major influence on his life.”
“And his death,” Mark said.
“That’s why I am here,” Elias said. “I was in Seattle on business and came here as soon as I got word. They had to use dental records to positively ID him. You understand what that means? He was practically cremated by that bomb. We can’t even give him a decent burial. That isn’t right.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“How much do you know about our family, Doctor?”
“You’re very close,” Mark said.
“I meant about how we earn our living.”
“Your primary interest is in the scrap metal business,” Mark said. “Your other business ventures are varied.”
“That’s a polite way of putting it,” Elias said. “But there is no need for such niceties between us. You know who and what I am. Jack loved his family but wanted no part in scrap metal or our other less legitimate enterprises. We understood that.”
“Even when he was helping me and my son solve homicides?”
Mark sat on the edge of the bed facing Elias, who took a seat in one of the two easy chairs.
“We don’t do a lot of business in California, and we did even less while Jack lived out there, to minimize the potential for conflicts,” Elias said. “I believe Jack felt that by helping you in your investigative pursuits he was doing some kind of penance for the sins of his father. And his uncle. But if he had any resentment towards us, he never expressed it. We respected him for that. We knew where he drew the line and he knew where we did.”
“It’s good that your differences didn’t drive you apart.”
“It wasn’t easy, for him or for us. We were relieved when he left Los Angeles and gave up his detective work for you,” Elias said. “But it was one of those old murder investigations that got him killed, wasn’t it?”
Mark shook his head. “It wasn’t anything he did for me that got him killed. It was what he might do. But most of all, they killed him because they knew it would hurt me.”
“Who are they?”
“If I tell you,” Mark asked, “will you kill them?”
“Eventually,” Elias said. “After they’ve begged me to do it.”
“Then I can’t tell you,” Mark said.
“Don’t you want to see these people punished for what they did to Jack?”
“Punished, yes. Tortured and killed? No. I don’t think Jack would have wanted that either.”
“I could make you tell me,” Elias said.
“You probably could,” Mark said.
“But you were family to him,” Elias said. “I don’t hurt my family. So I will have to do this without your help.”
Elias got up.
“Wait,” Mark said. “Please.”
Elias sat down.
“We both want the same thing, to see that the people who killed Jack are punished,” Mark said. “I’ll help you if you agree to do things my way.”
“Your way got Jack killed,” Elias said.
“I know,” Mark said. “But I need them alive. It’s the only way I can save my son.”
“And live with yourself.”
“I don’t much care about that anymore,” Mark said.
“Then we are more alike than I thought. If that’s how you feel, why reject my methods?” Elias said. “They are very effective in matters of this sort.”
“I’m all for employing your methods,” Mark said. “Within limits.”
“I’m not a man who has ever lived within limits,” Elias said.
“And I’m a man who has lived within them all his life. Maybe we could meet each other halfway and accomplish our goal.”
“I presume you would be the one setting these limits?” Elias said. Mark nodded. “Give me an example of one of your limits.”
“No bloodshed,” Mark said.
“That’s like me asking you to perform surgery without a scalpel.”
Mark shrugged. “Sometimes it’s necessary for me to explore alternative forms of medicine.”
Elias considered Mark’s proposal for a long moment. “If I agree to this arrangement, how do you know that you can trust me not to slit the killer’s throat?”
“Because if you’re anything like Jack,” he said, “you’re an honorable man who stands by his word.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Elias said.
“I’ll take my chances,” Mark said, and then he told Elias everything that had happened, who he believed was involved, and why they had killed Jack.
“It seems to me that there may be more to this than you think,” Elias said.
“What do you mean?”
“Sweeney is out and, presumably, in some debt to the murderers who are still in prison,” Elias said. “Like Malcolm Trainor and the Ganza family.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Mark said.
“Killing Jack may have served two purposes. It may also have been a message to me not to see your downfall as an opportunity to increase our business interests in the Southern California market.”
“This isn’t about you.”
“It is now,” Elias said. “He killed my nephew.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
; “It doesn’t matter why Sweeney did it,” Elias said. “The end result is going to be the same. I can see an easy way to resolve this.”
“But it won’t get my son and Amanda, Jesse, and Susan out of jail.”
“Why should I care?”
“Because Jack did,” Mark said.
Elias grimaced, and Mark saw a flash of anger in his eyes. Mark could see that using the memory of Jack against Elias would have diminishing returns and that he should use such leverage only sparingly.
“Okay, we’ll do it your way.” Elias stood up, took off his jacket, and draped it over the back of his chair. “But it’s only going to work if there’s some blood spilled.”
“I won’t allow you to hurt anyone.”
Elias grinned, like Mark was a child who’d amused him. “It’s not going to be anyone, Doctor. It has to be you.”
It took Mark a moment of thought, but then he saw Elias’s point. Regardless, Mark knew that according to the rules that Elias lived by, at the minimum he deserved to be beaten for the misery he had caused.
In a way, it would almost be cathartic for them both. Mark’s only fear was that once Elias tapped into his rage, he wouldn’t be able to stop. And Mark couldn’t clear Steve, Amanda, Jesse, and Susan from the grave.
Elias studied Mark’s expression and seemed to read Mark’s mind.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Sloan,” Elias said, rolling up his sleeves. “I’m like a surgeon. This is an operation I’ve performed many times and I haven’t lost a patient yet.”
“You might as well call me Mark.”
Elias walked into the bathroom, got a towel, and wrapped it around the knuckles of his right hand.
“You can call me Elias,” he said. “When you’re conscious again.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Noah Dent’s home was tucked up against a barren hillside and surrounded by tall palm trees. It was his oasis in the desert. His yard was landscaped with cactus and rock around a waterfall that spilled into a black-bottom pool.
He was reclining on a chaise longue in his swimsuit under the shade of an umbrella, sipping a Bloody Mary and browsing the Wall Street Journal. It occurred to him, as it often did at times like this, that he’d come a long way from Toronto.
It hadn’t been easy to get where he was, but he never once regretted his decision not to go into his father’s lucrative bathroom fixture business. The ubiquity of Dent toilets and urinals had made Dent the brunt of jokes throughout his childhood (“I piss all over you every day,” “Dent was born pissed off,” “Hey, Noah, you look a little flushed,” etc.).
The idea of hearing those comments for the rest of his life was his vision of hell. But the same comments that embarrassed and stung Noah Dent actually amused and flattered his father, who took tremendous pride in the fact that, in Canada, Dent was a household name. When Noah bought the Scottsdale house, his father shipped him a toilet as a housewarming present. Dent would have smashed it with a sledgehammer but for the fact that his dad came to visit once a year. The last thing Dent wanted was any of his friends making the same tired jokes he’d spent his life running from.
Dent was so preoccupied with basking in his own success that he wasn’t aware of the two men until they showed up on either side of his chaise longue.
At first he thought they were the pool guys. But they weren’t Julio and Eduardo. They were muscled, grim-faced men who wore polo shirts that clung too tightly to their bodybuilder frames and sunglasses that balanced unevenly on their misshapen noses.
They grabbed Dent by the arms and lifted him off the chaise. He opened his mouth to protest, but one of the men slammed a fist into his gut, knocking the wind out of him. He almost passed out. The other man slapped a strip of duct tape over his mouth. They dragged him around the side yard to a black Lincoln Navigator that was idling in his driveway.
They lifted the cargo hatch, flung Dent inside like a piece of luggage, and then rolled him over, binding his wrists behind his back with duct tape. They slammed the hatch closed, and he felt the car start to drive away from his house.
Who were these men? What did they want with him? Was he going to die?
It took a few minutes for the pain to fade and for him to get his breath back. He was on top of plastic sheeting and his head was up against the handle of a shovel.
Plastic sheeting and a shovel. Not very good signs as far as his life expectancy was concerned.
He wanted to cry.
That’s when he became aware of someone else lying in the trunk beside him.
Dent rolled on his side and found himself looking into the bruised and bloody face of another man.
There was duct tape over the man’s mouth and his arms were pinned behind his back. Blood was spattered on his shirt and caked in his hair. The man looked at him with one eye, the other swollen shut. His gaze was unfocused, showing no recognition, no emotion, and barely any spark of awareness.
It was Dr. Mark Sloan.
Dent looked into Mark’s eye and screamed, the sound muffled by the tape over his mouth.
The two musclemen dragged Dent out of the Navigator and let him fall onto the hard, hot asphalt before lifting him to his feet. He could see now that they were at a public storage facility in a desolate area somewhere outside of Phoenix. There was an open unit in front of them, the floor lined with plastic sheeting. There was nothing else in it except for a stool and a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.
They led Dent inside the storage unit, sat him down on the stool, and then walked out, pulling the rolling corrugated-metal door down behind them.
Dent was left in total darkness. He heard the car drive off. He got up off the stool.
“Sit down,” a voice said evenly.
Dent did as he was told.
The lightbulb came on, revealing a man who must have been standing in the dark recesses of the storage unit all along.
The man was casually dressed and leaned on a baseball bat.
“My name is Elias Stewart. I’m a very bad man. I make my living off drugs, gambling, and extortion. And when I get mad, I hurt people. My nephew Jack was a doctor. He chose a different life for himself. I respected him. And I was proud of him. But most of all, I loved him. Jack’s mentor was Dr. Mark Sloan. Because Jack was a stand-up guy, he’d do anything for his friends, especially someone who meant as much to him as Dr. Sloan did. You know what happened to my nephew? He was killed by a car bomb shortly after agreeing to help Dr. Sloan free his friends from prison.”
Elias paced in front of Dent, who was shivering, and not because he was cold.
“When I heard the news, I was so hurt and so angry that I beat my dog to death with my bare hands. Besides crapping all over my yard, my dog never did anything wrong to me. I liked my dog. But I was angry, Noah, and I lashed out. I am still angry. So I found Dr. Sloan and asked him some questions. Dr. Sloan was reluctant to answer them, so I had to use some persuasion.”
Elias swung the bat at Dent’s head, barely missing him. Dent whimpered.
“Dr. Sloan has principles, even when it comes to the people he hates. He knew what I’d do to whoever was responsible for killing my nephew, and he couldn’t live with that. I told him he wouldn’t have to. He wouldn’t have to live with anything anymore. See, I blamed him for what happened to Jack. It’s not very rational, I know. But that’s me.”
Dent shivered again as he considered the meaning of that last statement and realized that the plastic sheeting and shovel probably meant there was a shallow grave in Mark Sloan’s immediate future.
And his own.
“After some persuading, Dr. Sloan told me who he thought killed Jack and why,” Elias said. “I hope you don’t need persuading too. Since I killed my dog and beat Dr. Sloan, my arms are sore.”
Elias ripped the duct tape off of Dent’s mouth. Dent whimpered.
“This is a terrible mistake,” Dent said.
“I have to agree with you there. Whoever thought that killing Jack was a g
ood idea is going to discover just how wrong he was. So tell me, who was that person?”
“I don’t know.”
Elias swung the bat close enough to Dent’s face that he could smell the wood.
“Wrong answer,” Elias said. “Let me try a different approach. How did you meet Mercy Reynolds?”
“If I tell you,” Dent said, “will you promise not to hurt me?”
“I promise that if you don’t tell me I will hurt you. Very badly. I doubt your mother will be able to identify what’s left of you. How’s that?”
Dent couldn’t stop shivering.
“Mercy came to see me and asked for a job. She said that she and I shared something in common, a hatred for Mark Sloan and Community General Hospital,” Dent said. “She told me that Mark was responsible for her boyfriend’s death.”
“What did she want from you?”
“She wanted to work for me long enough to learn our procedures and so that I could recommend her for a nursing position at Community General.”
“Did she tell you that she intended to work with funeral homes to steal body parts and frame Dr. Bentley for it?”
Dent didn’t answer. He just shivered. Elias sighed, stood as if preparing for a pitch, and raised his bat.
“Yes!” Dent shrieked.
Elias lowered his bat. “You went along with the scheme even though it would cost your company millions?”
“It’s not my money,” Dent said. “I’m just a hired hand. Besides, they can afford it.”
“What about infecting organ donors with West Nile virus? Was that your bright idea, too?”
“I didn’t know anything about that,” Dent said. “I would never harm another person.”
“You don’t think sending Dr. Bentley to prison for a crime she didn’t commit is doing her harm?”
“It’s not physical harm,” Dent said. “There’s a difference.”
“Of course there is. Completely destroying someone is much more noble and pure than beating a man to death with a baseball bat. You aren’t a man—you’re a worm. You took the coward’s way. A man faces his enemies.”