Compulsion

by Keith Ablow

  I stopped, turned around.

  "Okay," he said. "I'll tell you the whole story. About ten weeks into my… relationship with Julia, Tina told me she wanted a divorce. She didn't know about Julia, but she could see I was getting more and more distant. I didn't want to see the divorce happen, so I tried to stop things cold with Julia, but I found myself thinking about her all the time, wanting to talk with her, to hold her hand. So I kept meeting her." He rolled his eyes. "The most we ever did was kiss, Frank. It must sound childish, but that's all that happened. And you know the strangest part?"

  "What?" I said flatly.

  "Somehow, holding her and kissing her was enough. I didn't even care that we hadn't shacked up. I didn't want to risk what I thought we had." He fell silent.

  I could hear the sadness in Anderson 's voice. "You're not over her," I said.

  He looked straight into my eyes. "No," he said. "I don't expect I ever will be."

  "So your warning to me to steer clear of her-that was… what?" I asked. "Jealousy?"

  "Maybe, a little. Mostly, not." He leaned forward. "I meant what I said. I knew firsthand how my feeling close to her was making it hard to keep my vision clear on the case. I didn't want yours to get cloudy, too."

  "Noble," I said.

  He ignored the comment! "There's something else, too. And this may sound strange. But the way I felt… maybe, still feel about her, I'm not sure it's even normal. I mean, I was on the verge of leaving my wife a week after I sat alone with Julia for the first time. Take it for what it's worth: I was worried for you. That's why I came down on you so hard about your drinking."

  Part of me wanted to tell Anderson he was full of crap, but another part of me resonated with what he had said. It was the same issue I had struggled with in my relationship with Julia: How had my feelings for her grown so strong, so fast? Why was I willing to go out on a limb for her when I wasn't certain who she was? Why had I crossed professional boundaries I would have counseled others to respect?

  I looked at Anderson, trying to decide whether I could ever trust him again. All the questions that had visited me as I had walked down the hall were still in play. He could easily be carrying on a sexual relationship with Julia and secretly be furious at me for doing the same. The two of them could truly be using me to paint Darwin Bishop as the killer. "Was the letter Claire Buckley handed over to us meant for you?" I asked. "Are you the one Julia was going to send it to?"

  "I don't think so," Anderson said.

  "You don't think so," I said.

  "I can't know for sure, but it's just not the tone we used with one another," he said. "It's much more flowery. It would have come out of left field, if you know what I'm saying. Not only that; we hadn't been in touch for weeks before Brooke's murder."

  "So you think there's someone else in her life, besides you and me."

  "I do," Anderson said. "I think that's why I went off a little on Claire back at the Bishop estate, leaning on her about her affair with Darwin." He shrugged. "I was pissed off about what I had just read. I killed the messenger."

  I was split between feeling as if I were with a blood brother who had been through the same war as I or with an enemy caught red-handed sticking a knife in my back. Maybe, literally. "When you asked me to get involved with this case," I said, "did you do it because you wanted to help Julia, because you were in love with her?"

  "She let me know she didn't believe Billy was guilty," he said. "My gut told me the same thing."

  "That doesn't answer my question."

  He hesitated, but only for an instant. "Yes," he said. "I called you because I wanted to help her."

  "And…" I said, prompting him to answer the second part of my question.

  "And because I thought I…" He stopped, corrected himself. "And because I loved her." He shrugged. "You wanted an answer. You got one. It sounds crazy, but I loved her."

  I nodded. That honest response brought me a bit closer to feeling like Anderson was on the level. But it still left me with doubts. I focused intently on Anderson. "If I didn't think Darwin Bishop belonged at the top of the suspect list, would I still be on this case?"

  "What are you asking me, Frank?" Anderson said, struggling to keep his voice steady. "You want to know whether I'd try to jail a man for the rest of his life in order to steal his woman?"

  That was what I was asking, even though it sounded horrible when Anderson said it. I stayed silent.

  "When I told you they'd have to bounce me off the case to get you off the case, I meant it," he said. "It may be hard to believe that now. But if you'd told me Billy had all the traits of a murderer, he'd be at the top of our list, not Darwin. I wouldn't railroad someone into a murder conviction. Not even for Julia Bishop."

  16

  Anderson flew to Nantucket. I took a cab from State Police headquarters to Mass General. While we needed space and time to make sense of how to go forward together, we both knew we had to keep moving. With all the complications in the Bishop case, one thing hadn't changed: Someone had tried to kill five-month-old Tess Bishop-and might well try again.

  As the taxi sped down Storrow Drive, with the Charles River off to my left and the Boston skyline to my right, I began to wonder who had placed the photographic negative in the medicine bottle. The obvious candidate was Garret, given his penchant for island photography and the fact that he had turned the bottle over to Anderson and me. But it was also remotely possible that Darwin Bishop had put it there-storing away part of his motive for attempting to kill Tess right along with the means he had used to try to kill her. The answer was on its way; Leona would be dusting the negative for prints.

  It was after 6:00 p.m. and getting dark when I walked through the hospital's main entrance. I had the fleeting impulse to stop in at the emergency room and grab a Percocet prescription from Colin Bain, to dull the pain from the injuries to my body and psyche-my savaged back, my hurt pride, my broken friendship. Any addictions counselor would forgive me the slip, given the circumstances. Luckily, I realized that staying sober might be one of the few things still within my control. No sense burying a knife in my own back when other people were doing such a good job of it.

  I took an elevator up to the PICU and instinctively walked toward Tess's room. But I stopped short, noticing that a five- or six-year-old Asian child was lying in that bed. I scanned the other rooms around the PICU perimeter, but Tess wasn't in any of them. My mind jumped to the most dire conclusion-that her heart had given out. I stopped a young, female nurse walking by. "I'm a doctor working on the Bishop case," I said. I couldn't bring myself to ask the obvious question. "She was here yesterday," I said.

  "Do you have identification?" the woman asked.

  Her response seemed to confirm my fear. She wanted proof I was a staff member before delivering bad news. I felt lightheaded.

  "Are you all right?" she said. "Do you need to sit down?"

  Before I could answer, John Karlstein strode through the PICU's sliding glass doors. "Frank!" he called out, from behind me.

  I turned quickly, without thinking, and stretched my lacerated muscles. "Jesus," I muttered, between clenched teeth.

  "My mother thought I was," Karlstein said. "Nobody since."

  I straightened up, as best I could.

  "It's good to see you," Karlstein said. "Bain told me what happened in the alleyway out there. You should sue."

  The nurse apparently got the idea I was part of the team. She smiled and walked away.

  "Sue?" I said. "Who? For what?"

  "They've had trouble in that spot before," Karlstein said. "Remember? A mugging less than a year ago. They should have lighted it like day. Sue the hospital, man."

  "I think I'll pass," I said.

  "It's a payday from some goddamn insurance company," he said. "What do you care? They've been sticking it to us pretty good, haven't they? You should give me a finder's fee for suggesting it."

  Karlstein was probably joking, but I could never quite tell with him. M
y mind focused back on Tess. "What happened to the Bishop baby?" I said. I steadied myself for the worst. "Bad news?"

  "Only for my census," he said. "We transferred her to Telemetry. She's out of the woods. Pacemaker's working like a charm."

  Telemetry is a "step-down" cardiac unit where patients' hearts are still monitored, but in a more laid-back setting. "Thank God," I said.

  "We did have a little trouble before she left," Karlstein said.

  "What sort of trouble?"

  "The billionaire. He wanted to see the baby-badly."

  "Who was stopping him?" I asked.

  "Your friend. She turns out to have some real backbone of her own."

  "My friend…"

  "Julia. The mother." Karlstein winked, making it obvious he had intuited she was special to me. "She had already hustled down to Suffolk Superior Court a couple hours before her husband arrived. Picked up a temporary restraining order against him. She had all the paperwork in a neat manila folder. Security showed him and his bodyguards to the door."

  "He came here with his bodyguards?" I said.

  "I assumed that's who they were. They were bigger than I am."

  I knew we hadn't heard the last of that confrontation. "How did Julia handle things?"

  "She was a rock while her husband was here. Then she fell apart. Just wracked with tears. I had Caroline Hallissey visit with her again, just to make sure she would be able to pull it together."

  "And?"

  "Hallissey is her own person," Karlstein said evasively.

  "What did she have to say?" I pressed.

  "Nothing sensible."

  "C'mon, John. Just tell me."

  "She thought Mrs. Bishop was acting upset," he said, "manufacturing her emotions to manipulate us into doting on her."

  "Did you think so?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "If that was an act, she deserves an Academy Award. You know me, I'm no bleeding heart. For me to call in a psych consult, twice, you have to be in pretty bad shape."

  "Well, thanks for letting me know Hallissey's take on things, anyhow," I said. "The more information I have, the better." I paused. "And thanks for helping Tess."

  "Don't thank me. Sue the hospital and cut me in." He smiled in a way that made it clear he was pulling my leg. Then he leaned closer and dropped his voice. "Get some rest," he said. "You look like you're about to collapse. And we really can't afford to lose you around here."

  I took the stairs up to Telemetry, a unit that looks a lot like any other inpatient ward, with private rooms off a central corridor. I stopped at the nurses' station, found Tess Bishop's room number, and walked to the doorway. Julia was seated by Tess's bedside, watching her intently, just as she had been in the PICU. I monitored my internal reaction to seeing her. The expected anxiety was there, along with a flash of anger, but those negative emotions were eclipsed by another feeling, which I hadn't anticipated-an edgy sort of comfort. It was something you might experience arriving home in the midst of a family tragedy, when you know things have gone bad, but you also know they are your things, together. Owning a share of trouble can be an oddly warm and centering experience.

  As for Tess, she looked more like a normal infant than before, with fewer leads and lines emerging from her extremities. Her sleep seemed substantially more restful than in the PICU. Her respirations were less labored and more regular, centered in her chest rather than her abdomen. And her color had moved toward pink from ash.

  Julia turned and saw me in the doorway. She stood up, took her own deep breath, and smiled. "How long have you been standing there?" she asked.

  "I just got here." I walked into the room. I nodded at Tess. "Dr. Karlstein told me she's doing well," I said.

  "He was remarkable," she said. "I couldn't have asked for anything more." She looked down at the ground, then back at me. " Darwin came to the hospital. Luckily, we were the second item on his agenda, as usual. He called before he went into a board meeting at some company headquartered here in Boston. That gave me time to go to court and get a restraining order."

  "Karlstein told me about that, too," I said. "Good for you."

  She started to smile, catching her lower lip between her teeth. "There's no way I would have had the strength to do anything like that if it weren't for you."

  I wanted to believe her, which told me how hard I had fallen for her. I was fresh from learning of at least one other romance of hers, with North Anderson. And there was probably a third man in the mix, assuming the letter Claire Buckley had shown us was intended for someone other than North. Yet I still felt like her relationship with me was of a different order and exponentially more important to her. "Didn't you ever see The Wizard of Oz?” I said. "No one can give you courage-or a heart or a brain. You must have had it all along."

  "Hold me?" she said.

  I walked closer, coming within a few feet of her, then stopped and just stood there.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "We need to talk," I said.

  She tilted her head. "What about?"

  " North Anderson," I said. "For starters."

  She nodded, as if she had known we would eventually arrive at this moment. "He told you we spent some time together," she said.

  "Yes," I said. I held off mentioning the photograph.

  "And I hope he told you that nothing happened," she said. "Because it didn't. I mean, we didn't…"

  "But you got close, emotionally," I said. "And maybe you still are. I don't know."

  "No," she said. "We're not. Not the way you're thinking. I still care for him, but not in a romantic way."

  I shrugged, unconvinced. "All right," I said.

  "Can we sit down, please?" she said.

  I took one of the armchairs by Tess's bed. Julia took the other.

  "You know how difficult my life has been with Win," she started. "I mean, you believe what I've told you-what I've been through?"

  "Yes," I said. "I do." And I did. But I also found myself thinking about Caroline Hallissey's assessment of Julia as someone who manufactured emotions.

  "I met North at a fund-raiser for the Pine Street Inn in Boston," Julia went on. "I thought he might be able to help me with a project I wanted to start-reaching out to kids who were into drugs. There are more of them on the island than anyone will admit, and I thought, with North having come from Baltimore, he would be a lot less naive than his predecessor."

  I noticed how little I liked hearing Julia use North's first name, not much more than I liked her referring to Darwin as her husband. "There's nothing naive about him," I said. "He's seen it all, at least twice." I gestured for her to continue.

  "We started meeting about the drug issue, and I started feeling drawn to him," she said. "But we never connected in anything like the way you and I do." She leaned closer. "You have to believe me. I felt safer with North in my life, and I admired him, but I wasn't in love with him."

  Meaning, she was in love with me. I heard that loud and clear. And I still liked hearing it. "I saw a photograph of the two of you on the beach," I said.

  "On the beach?" she said.

  "You were holding one another," I said. "Kissing." I cringed at my own tone of voice, which reminded me of a jealous high school kid hassling his girl about going parking with someone else.

  She looked at me in disbelief. "Win actually gave you that photograph?" she asked.

  I stayed silent. I wanted to hear Julia's version of where the photograph might have come from, without any prompting from me.

  "I can't believe he'd do that," she said. "He's so sick."

  "Tell me what you mean," I said.

  "One of Darwin 's security guards took that photograph," she said. "Win was having me followed. He actually used it to try to force me to have an abortion."

  "What?"

  "He said if I didn't terminate my pregnancy, he'd turn the photo over to the newspapers and let them have a field day with it," Julia said. "That scared me. Obviously, I didn't want to be embarr
assed myself, but I was also worried North would lose his job or his marriage or both. So I booked an appointment at a family planning center."

  I felt relieved that Julia's story sounded at least remotely credible. "Did Darwin talk about divorce once he knew you had spent time with North?" I asked.

  "Never. I think he actually liked the fact that he had something to hold over my head. It gave him even more control over me," she said. "He feeds on that."

  "And he never turned the photograph over to the press," I said.

  "I should have known that was a bluff," she said. "Advertising my infidelity would have hurt his ego more than it would have fed his need for revenge." Her eyes filled up. "I guess he just waited to get back at me-through Brooke and Tess."

  I hesitated to push Julia further when she was close to tears, but I needed to ask her about the letter Claire had given North and me. "There's something else," I said.

  She wiped her eyes. "What? I'll tell you anything you want."

  That was a disconcerting turn of phrase. Was Julia, I wondered, just telling me what I wanted to hear? "A page of a letter you wrote surfaced," I said.

  "Surfaced?" she said.

  "Maybe when the police searched the house," I lied.

  "Really," she said.

  I didn't feel right lying to her. And I figured turning up the heat between Julia and Claire might not be such a bad idea. "Actually, we got it from Claire Buckley," I said. "She found it-in your closet."

  "A letter I wrote," she said, without any trace of anger.

  "Yes," I said.

  "What did it say?" she asked.

  I had made a photocopy of the letter at State Police headquarters. I reached into the back pocket of my jeans and took out the sheet of paper. I unfolded it and handed it to Julia.

  She looked at it for several seconds, her face a blank. "What did you want to know?" she said finally. There was no anxiety in her voice.

  "It certainly sounds like a letter you would have written to someone you were involved with," I said.

  "It is," she said matter-of-factly. "And I am."