Hostile Witness

by Leigh Adams

  “Watch out,” somebody said. It took Kate a couple of beats to realize it was Tom’s voice shouting over the rest of the din. “She wasn’t trying to kill the man. She’s got a condition—”

  “She had a weapon,” somebody else said.

  “What in hell was she doing in here?” a third voice said. Kate recognized that one, too: Reggie Evans.

  She was finding it very hard to breathe and impossible to think.

  Her hands were cuffed behind her back now, and the cuffs were so tight, they hurt her wrists. She couldn’t believe how badly they hurt.

  “You’re trying to kill me,” Ozgo kept saying over and over.

  Kate realized he was no longer talking about her. He was talking about everybody. Everybody was trying to kill him.

  Kate felt the throbbing start at the back of her head. Throb. Pulse. Throb. Pulse. Throb. Pulse. The floor underneath her was only inches from her face. It was throbbing, too, pulsing and throbbing. The damned thing looked like it was breathing. Kate could see the diaphragm that wasn’t there expand and contract.

  She felt sick. She felt incredibly sick. She was going to throw up right where she was.

  “What the flying fuck do you think you’re doing?” Evans shouted. “What the fuck is she doing here? I’m going to have your ass for this, Abbott. I’m going to have you off this police force before you can get back to your car. And if I ever see this woman anywhere near this case again, I’m going to—”

  Kate never found out what Evans was going to do. The throbbing was getting bigger and bigger, more and more intense. She wasn’t going to throw up. Whatever she was about to throw up was being pushed down into her throat, making her gag.

  And the lights were getting brighter. The sounds were getting sharper. Every sight and sound had a sharp edge to it. Every detail she could see from the position she was in looked like it had been cut out of its background with a very sharp knife.

  The police officer standing right next to her nose had a frayed edge on the outside of his left shoe. The shoe had a rubber sole but looked like an Oxford.

  There was an old-fashioned steam element on the wall next to the window. It was painted white, but it had once been painted green. Kate could see the chipped white paint at the very bottom and the light-green paint underneath.

  Ozgo was wearing sneakers. Not running shoes. Not trainers. Sneakers, the canvas kind. The canvas of his sneakers was red, and the laces were white. The canvas was completely clean. The sneakers looked brand new. All his clothes looked brand new. Could they have bought him new clothes? Why? Were his old ones gone in the fire? Were they too much of a mess for court?

  She got a sudden flash of Ozgo in the picture outside the house the night of the fire. He was wearing sneakers then, too, but they were high tops and there were deep gullies in the ankles.

  As if something had been tied there, around his ankles, very tightly.

  She tried to think it through and couldn’t.

  Everything was too bright now. Every sound was too sharp.

  Kate closed her eyes to try to make it go away. Ozgo was still screaming. Tom was still bellowing. The police should be doing something to stop all this noise. How long had she been on the floor? How long could she possibly have been on the floor?

  “Will you please let the goddamned woman up?” Tom was saying.

  All of a sudden, the thing she dreaded most was there, coursing through her body like an electrical charge.

  Kate tried to stop it by force of will, but it was too late, and she knew it.

  Her body started to shudder and arch and spasm.

  Sixteen

  Sometimes, when the episodes were over, Kate was calm and almost refreshed. Sometimes she was drained. Sometimes it was worse, and this was one of those times.

  She knew where she was before she opened her eyes. The smell was unmistakable: that wet tang of rubbing alcohol that permeated all hospitals everywhere.

  A hospital meant it had gone terribly wrong, as terribly wrong as it could go. She was lying in a bed. She moved a little in it and felt someone come up close to her.

  “Kate?” Frank said. She couldn’t hide from Frank.

  By the time Kate let her eyes drift open, Frank was standing by the curtains that opened, as far as Kate could tell, on a corridor. The lights were not too bright now and the sounds were not too sharp—everything was normal again.

  Kate had always worried that there would come a time when the episodes ceased to be episodes and became the default mode instead, that she would have to live in a world where everything had too much of an edge to it, a world she couldn’t live in at all.

  But it was all right now. It was over.

  Frank must have noticed that her eyes were open. He came to the side of her bed immediately.

  “Kate?”

  “I’m very tired,” Kate said. Her throat felt raw, as if she’d swallowed glass.

  “Just a minute,” Frank said.

  He left the little curtained cubicle and went into the corridor. Kate closed her eyes again. Having her eyes closed made her feel better. She just wanted to let herself drift here, drift and float.

  Frank came back with a woman in a white coat.

  The woman leaned close. “Ms. Ford? Can you hear me?”

  “I could hear you better if you didn’t shout,” Kate said.

  The woman lowered her voice. “Do you think you can sit up?”

  Kate didn’t want to sit up. But it turned out to be relatively easy. She dragged herself forward and then rested on her elbows.

  “My throat is killing me,” she said. “Can’t I have some water?”

  “In just a moment,” the woman said.

  Kate decided the woman was a doctor, not a nurse. A nurse would have pumped up the bed so Kate didn’t have to go on resting on her elbows. This woman took out her stethoscope and checked Kate’s chest and then her back. Heart and lungs, Kate thought, feeling thoroughly miserable.

  The woman dragged the stethoscope back around her neck and frowned. “You seem to be all right,” she said. “Your father says you’ve had these seizures before?”

  “I’ve had them since I was ten,” Kate said. “Can we put the bed up so I can sit back? And can I please have some water? Or even some ice cream? Something for my throat.”

  The woman frowned. It was Frank who came around to crank the bed up.

  “And you’ve consulted a physician about this problem?” the woman said.

  “I’ve consulted a dozen of them,” Kate said. “And no, none of them has come up with any explanation. And no, it’s not epilepsy. I’ve been tested for that over and over again. And no, it doesn’t happen often, not with episodes big enough to land me in a hospital.”

  “You also have smaller seizures?”

  “I mostly have smaller whatever-they-ares,” Kate said.

  “Do you drive?”

  “Yes.”

  “You probably shouldn’t drive.”

  “They don’t come on all of a sudden. I’d always have time to pull over if I had to.”

  “Can you tell me what happens right before these attacks begin?”

  “Nothing happens,” Kate said. “Not in the way you mean. Lights get brighter and sounds get sharper, but that’s the start of an episode, not what causes it. And nothing in particular happens to set it all off. I’ve been in bars with strobe lights and haven’t felt a thing. I’ve been sitting by myself in a quiet room and found myself in the middle of a bad one. They just happen. Nothing sets them off.”

  “Did anything happen before this one today?”

  “Well,” Kate said, “I was thrown to the floor by a cop and handcuffed, but other than that there wasn’t anything.”

  The woman in the white coat frowned again. Frank coughed loudly. Frank had heard the sarcasm in Kate’s voice.

  “Can’t I have some water?” Kate asked. “My throat feels like hell.”

  “Do you usually want water after one of these . . . ep
isodes?”

  “I usually want water, yes, but I don’t usually have a sore throat as bad as the one I have now. But I would really like some water now. Please.”

  The woman stepped away from the bed. “I’ll see if I can send a nurse in with some ice water,” she said.

  Then she turned away and walked out into the corridor.

  Kate watched her as long as she was visible. “Is Jack here?”

  Frank pulled up the cubicle’s single chair and sat down. “She was only doing her job,” he said mildly.

  “I just get so tired of it,” Kate said. “It’s been decades now, for God’s sake. I think I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there isn’t any answer to this. I just don’t want to do another round of tests and another round of consultations that amount to using a lot of fancy words to say they have no idea what it is. Is Jack here?”

  “It’s only a little after noon,” Frank said. “Jack’s at school.”

  “Does he know about this?”

  “Not yet,” Frank said. “But you’re going to have to tell him.”

  “I wouldn’t not tell him,” Kate said.

  A chipper young woman in bright-pink scrubs came in carrying a pitcher of water and a glass. It was a plastic pitcher, and Kate could hear the ice clinking against its sides.

  “Dr. Arroyan said I should bring you this,” the chipper young woman said. She poured the glass full of water and ice and handed it to Kate. Then she put the pitcher down on the side table Kate hadn’t noticed before then.

  “There’s a buzzer right here,” she said. “If you need anything, just press that.”

  Kate hadn’t noticed the buzzer, either. She really was off her game.

  Frank and Kate watched the young woman walk out. Kate drank half the glass of water in a single gulp. It was very cold.

  “So,” Frank said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?” Kate finished the glass of water in one more gulp. Then she reached across the table for the pitcher.

  “I’ve been thinking that I was wrong,” Frank said. “I was worried about you. You’d been . . . listless, I guess the word is. For weeks. And then there was the suspension from your job. I thought getting you interested in the trial might help pull you out of it. I didn’t expect you to get this involved.”

  “You mean you didn’t expect for me to go talk to people on my own, check the computer stuff out on my own, and—?”

  “It isn’t that. I could handle your doing a little on-site investigating, within reason. It’s this thing I can’t handle. You don’t usually have episodes bad enough to pass out.”

  “And you think getting interested in the trial set off this episode?”

  “It’s not that, exactly. But something set it off.”

  “So you want me to do what?” Kate asked him.

  Frank got out of the chair and started to pace. “I was thinking I’d take you and Jack up to the cabin for a couple of weeks. We could arrange things with his school. It would be nice and quiet up there. You wouldn’t have to hear about the trial, never mind look into it. You could relax.”

  “Because I had an episode.”

  “You had a really bad episode. But also because of the rock through the window. Your rock. Somebody thinks you’re a problem.”

  “Listen to yourself,” Kate said. “I’m supposed to, what? Withdraw from the world? Because I had an episode? What happens to me if I start doing that? What happens to all of us? How do I hold a job? How do I have a life? You were the one who told me I should never give into this, that I should work around it however I could so that I didn’t just become the episodes.”

  “Kate—”

  “And now you want me to give in,” Kate said. “Is that it?”

  Seventeen

  Back at home and after nearly eighteen hours in bed, Kate decided to take a shower. As she finished up and walked out of the bathroom, she heard the sounds of someone in the kitchen. She wondered if it was Jack or Frank who was making the noise. It was just about the time Jack got home. She went through the living room and saw that the glass had been replaced sometime yesterday. She couldn’t remember if it had been replaced when she got home from the hospital yesterday evening. She didn’t remember much about yesterday evening. By the time she’d managed to get back home, she was exhausted both from the episode and from the ER doctor’s hammering insistence that she stay in the hospital for “observation.”

  Kate had spent time in hospitals for “observation” before. It never did any good, and it was always uncomfortable.

  She went into the kitchen and stopped. There, sitting at the kitchen table, was Tom, drinking one of Frank’s Budweisers straight from the bottle.

  He looked up when she came in.

  “There you are,” he said. “I thought you were going to sleep all day. Frank’s gone to the store to get something. Not dinner.”

  Kate sat down at the table. “He wants us to go up to the cabin today,” she said. “How we’re going to do that with Jack in school, I don’t know. And besides—”

  “He told me all about the cabin,” Tom said. He got up and started a pot of coffee. Kate let him. “I think it’s a good idea. I didn’t like the look of that thing yesterday.”

  “That thing?”

  “I didn’t realize your spells could get that severe. I didn’t even realize what they were until Frank and Jack explained them to me,” Tom said. He put a cup of coffee down in front of Kate. “You want something else? You’ve got cold cuts. I could make you a sandwich.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “Not right now. What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at the trial, or doing police work, or something?”

  Tom sat down again. “I am well and truly suspended.”

  Kate blanched. “Was that my fault? Was it because you helped me to get in to see Ozgo yesterday?”

  “I think getting you in to see Ozgo was the last straw in a long parade of straws,” Tom said. “Don’t worry about it. The verdict was announced half an hour ago.”

  “What?”

  “Jury came back. Didn’t take them five hours today. Ozgo is guilty on all counts.”

  Kate took the longest drink of coffee she ever had in her life. “Well,” she said, after what sounded like forever. “That’s that.”

  “Is it?”

  Kate glanced at the wall clock. It was almost quarter to four. She got up and went to the wall calendar Jack was so careful to keep current, but there was no notice on today’s little square of a track meet or club meeting. She looked around a little helplessly.

  “Have you seen my bag?” she asked Tom.

  “If you’re thinking of going somewhere, forget it,” he said. “Frank took your keys.”

  “I don’t need my keys. I need my cell phone to call Jack.”

  Tom sighed, reached into his jacket pocket, and handed over the cell phone. “I retrieved it from Sharon along with mine.”

  She dialed Jack and the phone rang and rang. Then it rang some more. By the time she was back to her coffee, she’d been routed to voice mail.

  Kate put the phone down on the table. “He’s not picking up,” she said.

  “Is that unusual?”

  Kate shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s unusual for him to be late if he doesn’t have anything after school.” She sat down again and tried Jack one more time. This time, her call went directly to voice mail.

  “The thing that interests me,” Tom said, going back to the case, “is who set this all up. And yes, I do still think somebody set this all up. I don’t think Ozgo is guilty of anything. For God’s sake, Kate. You’ve seen him. The kid’s a mess. He couldn’t have planned a picnic, never mind a kidnapping. I think he was just the handiest person around to pin it all on.”

  “To pin what all on?” Kate asked. “Didn’t you ever wonder what it was that happened? Chan Hamilton says she was kidnapped, and maybe she was. But when I think about all this, I get this big, shadowy conspiracy.”


  “I agree,” Tom said. “But maybe we’re making too much of it. Maybe it’s just about the kidnapping. Maybe somebody tried the kidnapping, and then when he saw it wasn’t going to work, he tried putting the blame on Ozgo.”

  “Are we thinking about Jed Paterson again?”

  “Could be,” Tom said.

  “But you think Ozgo was framed,” Kate said, “and Paterson couldn’t make that happen. That would have to be someone with the right kinds of connections.”

  “Richard Hamilton,” Tom said.

  “Why?” Kate asked. “Why would Richard Hamilton want to kidnap his own daughter? And if he did, why would Flanagan and Evans go along with an attempt to frame Ozgo instead?”

  “Flanagan would do just about anything if money was involved,” Tom said. “And as for Evans, maybe Richard Hamilton has been shoving a ton of cash in Reggie’s direction under the guise of campaign funds to make sure that all of this gets pinned on Ozgo.”

  “It’s harder to conceal campaign contributions than you think,” she said. “And Richard Hamilton didn’t conceal some of it. Individual donor lists are public information. I’ve seen newspaper reports about Hamilton’s contributions to Evans’s campaign, and everybody in the office knew Hamilton was endorsing him. I’d think that if there really was some big conspiracy, Hamilton would want to keep himself clear of Evans altogether.”

  Kate picked up her phone again. She tried Jack one more time, but she was not surprised to be sent straight to voice mail. She went back to her contact list and called the school.

  “Would you know where my son Jack Ford is this afternoon? He isn’t answering his cell phone, and I don’t have any information that he has a track meet or a club meeting. I’m getting a little worried.”

  “I’m sorry,” the secretary, Ms. Ryder, said. “You said Jack Ford, right? He left hours ago. I was working the parking lot this afternoon and saw him leave.”

  Kate kept very still. “Leave? Do you mean he went home on the bus?”

  “No, no,” Ms. Ryder said. “He got picked up. By your father, I thought it was. At least by a man of more or less the same size. Well, he was sitting in the car, and I couldn’t see him all that well. Anyway, it must have been your father or somebody he knew, because he hopped right into that car and the car drove away.”