“Danger? What kind of danger? Does this have something to do with Hastert?”
“I’m afraid it does,” Blackburn said. “I think there may be a connection between the two, but I’m not sure what it is, at this point. Which is why I asked if Tolan ever treated him.”
Soren thought about this a moment, the new information seeming to compound both his alarm and his befuddlement. “As far as I can remember, Michael never even met the man. He didn’t do much pro bono work. Didn’t have time.”
This wasn’t what Blackburn wanted to hear. “So you don’t know of any threats Hastert may have made against him?”
“No,” Soren said. “None whatsoever.”
“What about the other way around?”
“What?”
“You were his partner, I assume you knew his wife?”
“Yes, of course. But what—”
“How would you characterize their relationship?”
“They were in love,” Soren said. “Probably more than any two people I’ve ever known. They had their share of problems, but—”
“What kind of problems?”
“They fought sometimes, just like anyone else.”
“So is Tolan capable of violence?”
Soren said nothing for a moment, his inebriated brain trying to process the turn in the conversation about four questions too late. “What’s going on here, Officer? Is Michael in danger — or is he in trouble?”
Blackburn shrugged. “Six of one, half a dozen the other.”
Soren’s face hardened. “You fucking asshole.”
“Just doing my job, Doc.”
“You think Michael killed Hastert? Is that what this is all about?”
“Among other things.”
Soren shook his head. “That’s completely preposterous. I’ve known him for years and I’ve never seen him lift a finger against anyone. He doesn’t have it in him.”
“What about his wife? You said they fought.”
“Yes, but…” Soren paused, starting to put it together now. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “This isn’t about Hastert at all. It’s about Abby. You think Michael killed Abby.”
“I’m more interested in what you think. Is it possible Tolan was having an affair? Screwing around on her?”
Soren flicked the cigarette at him. “Fuck you.”
“You don’t want to be assaulting a police officer, Doc.”
“So arrest me.”
“If it comes to that, trust me, I will. But I’d rather hear what you have to say about Tolan. What are you treating him for?”
Soren turned. “This conversation is over.”
Blackburn grabbed his arm. “Did he ever confess to you, Doc?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Let go of me.”
But Blackburn didn’t let go. “What about Todd Hastert? Did he ever brag about his job? Maybe mention something about the Vincent murders? Pass along a little inside information that you turned around and gave to Tolan?”
“I said let go of me.” Soren wrenched his arm free. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. If Hastert was guarding some kind of state secret, then I suggest you go to County General and start slinging your accusations there. That’s where he spent most of his time.” He paused. “As for Michael, there’s nothing you could ever say to convince me he hurt Abby. Not one thing. So do me a favor and fuck off.”
Soren turned again and headed back inside.
This time Blackburn let him go.
45
Kat Pendergast waited what seemed an eternity before the door opened.
She wasn’t quite sure why they were here. After an extended shift this morning, and all the drama on the fourth floor, she had gone home and crawled into bed without even bothering to shower. She’d gone straight to sleep and stayed that way until her alarm clock kicked her awake again.
She was halfway through dinner when her phone rang, the watch commander telling her he was short-handed and needed her and Hogan to start their shift early.
Which meant another long night.
The minute they reported in, they were told about the alert out on Dr. Michael Tolan and were instructed to check out the girlfriend’s place, a two-story beach house in Baycliff.
Kat didn’t know much about Tolan, but she knew the alert had been initiated by Frank Blackburn and that was good enough for her.
Unlike most of her fellow officers — hell, most of the squad, for that matter — Kat liked Frank. She knew that every time she walked away from him he was ogling her ass, but that didn’t bother her. She’d put a lot of time into making it a view worth ogling, so if people weren’t going to appreciate it, what was the point?
Besides, Frank’s backside wasn’t so bad either. And while she might not admit it out loud, she’d thought more than once about what it would be like to grab a couple handfuls while he did whatever he wanted with those nice big hands of his.
They’d been circling each other for over a month now, the circle getting smaller with each pass. Sooner or later, there’d be a head-on collision and Kat was looking forward to it.
But back to reality. While Hogan shone his flashlight into the girlfriend’s car, a sparkling new silver BMW parked in the drive, Kat leaned on the doorbell again.
They knew the girlfriend was inside. Had seen her turn in from down the block, where they’d been waiting for the last half hour. So Kat couldn’t quite understand what was taking so long.
She was about to ring the bell again when the door finally opened a crack and an attractive woman in her early thirties peeked out. Her hair was wet. Looked like she was wearing a bathrobe. She’d obviously been in the shower.
Which reminded Kat that she’d never taken one herself. She suddenly felt sticky and gross.
“Lisa Paymer?”
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but we’re here about a Dr. Michael Tolan.”
Paymer’s face fell and she opened the door wider. “My God, is he hurt?”
Kat realized she should have phrased that differently. “No, ma’am, it isn’t that. We’re looking for him, is all. We were hoping he might be here.”
“Here?” Paymer said. “I haven’t seen him since this morning.”
“At the hospital?”
“Yes, I’ve tried calling him, but he doesn’t answer, and I’ve been worried sick. Why are you looking for him? Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that. Would you mind if we came in and took a look around?”
“I told you, he’s not here.”
“It’s just a formality,” Kat said. “Part of the job. And it’s entirely up to you.”
Paymer hesitated a moment, then gestured them inside. “Be my guest.”
Kat nodded to Hogan and he moved around the BMW and joined her, the two of them stepping into a nicely appointed living room with oriental rugs and off-white furniture. It looked like a photo out of House Beautiful. The kind Kat usually found herself drooling over while she waited her turn at the dental clinic.
She and Hogan took a perfunctory look around, Hogan sticking his head through a doorway that led into the kitchen, then moving down a short hallway to what looked to be an extra bedroom.
Kat glanced toward a set of carpeted steps that led to the second floor, but decided not to bother going upstairs. Paymer had seemed genuinely surprised that they were looking for Tolan, and her willingness to let them search the place was a fair indication that she wasn’t hiding anything.
A moment later, Hogan returned, and Kat knew from his expression that he thought this was as much of a waste of time as she did.
They exchanged a look, then moved back to the front doorway. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am.”
“You don’t want to go upstairs?”
“I think we’re okay,” Kat said. “Sorry for the intrusion.”
As they were about to step outside, Paymer said, “Wait.”
Kat turned to see h
er digging through her purse on the coffee table. She brought out a business card and handed it to Kat.
“If you do find him, please call me right away. Both my home and cell are on there.”
Kat glanced at the card, nodded, then unsnapped her shirt pocket and slipped it in.
“You have a good evening,” she said, then went outside.
When the door closed behind them, Hogan whistled. “Wish they grew ’em like that at my hospital.”
“Keep your voice down, dumbass. She might hear you.”
Hogan waved her off as they headed down the drive to their cruiser. “I’m sure she’s used to it. But I’ll lay odds she didn’t buy that house with the money she earned cleaning up after crazies.”
Kat nodded. “I’m guessing she’s daddy’s little rich girl. She’s got that pampered look.”
“You gotta give her credit for taking a job at Baycliff.”
Kat was about to agree with him when her cell phone bleeped. She dug it out and clicked it on. “Pendergast.”
“Hey, hot stuff, you on duty yet?”
Frank Blackburn.
Kat stifled a smile. “Unfortunately, yes. They called us in early. What’s up?”
“I’ve got a favor to ask you and your partner. Strictly off the books.”
Kat glanced at Hogan. “What do you need?”
“A lookout.”
“For what?”
“What else?” Blackburn said. “A little B and E.”
46
When the front door closed, Tolan let out a breath.
He was pretty sure he’d been holding it ever since the doorbell rang. He hadn’t been able to hear much of what was going on downstairs, but it was enough to let him know that the police were looking for him.
The question was, why?
Did they know about Carmody?
A moment later, Lisa was back upstairs, pulling open the closet door. It was a big walk-in adjacent to her bedroom that provided plenty of room for both Tolan—
— and the body.
Lisa had taken her bathrobe off and was standing there in her bra and panties. As the light spilled inside, illuminating the rolled-up comforter that lay at Tolan’s feet, the absurdity of the situation suddenly hit him.
What the hell were they doing?
Instead of hiding from the police he should have called out to them. Instead of helping to get rid of a body, a cop’s body, no less — a cop he knew—he should have reported the death immediately.
But he hadn’t. Because Lisa was right. They would assume that he, not Vincent, had killed Sue Carmody. And before he had a chance to explain, his arms would be yanked behind him, his wrists cuffed, and he’d be spending the rest of his life in a jail cell.
And how, exactly, would he explain this?
Because, despite his protests, something Vincent had said kept running through his mind:
We had a lot of fun with her this afternoon.
It was the we that got to him. The we, accompanied by his bloodied shirt and his jacked-up memory. He’d had another blackout. Another gap in time. This one bigger than ever.
The image of a blade piercing flesh once again flitted through his mind.
Who, he wondered, was holding that blade?
Lisa stepped into a pair of blue jeans. “We need to get her downstairs.”
“Why are the police looking for me?”
“They wouldn’t elaborate.” She fastened the jeans and grabbed a T-shirt from a hook on the door. “But I guess I could have invited them to dinner. Maybe they would’ve told me all about it.”
It was a pointed jab, and he knew he deserved it.
“Look, I’m sorry. I thought I was protecting you.”
“That’s my job, remember?”
She pulled the T-shirt over her head, the words BEST IN SHOW plastered across her chest.
“What happened at the hospital?” Tolan asked. “After I left?”
She gestured to Carmody’s body. “Apparently this did. Now help me get her downstairs.”
Tolan said nothing, reluctantly doing what he was told, grabbing one end of the blanket as Lisa grabbed the other.
But he could barely concentrate on the task. There was another part of Vincent’s we that concerned him. Another possibility that had been floating on the distant horizon ever since the night Abby was murdered. Ever since that first blackout.
He thought about his mother and those tumultuous days up in their Arrowhead Springs cabin. She was a nasty woman, prone to vicious mood swings, who took her un-happiness out on Tolan and his father. He could remember hiding in the closet as they fought, his mother using his dad as a verbal punching bag, telling him what a loser he was, bragging about the lovers she’d had, men who were so much better at satisfying her than he ever was.
Tolan had later learned that she’d been in the throes of a classic dissociative episode, as clear a case of multiple personalities that anyone had ever seen. Many years later she had described the feeling to him — the loss of time, the conversations she’d had with the “others.”
“Like phone calls from the dead,” she’d told him.
“Phone calls from the dead?”
“That’s right. Talking to me over an invisible telephone line. A line running all through my brain, cutting it into sections, you know? And in each one of those sections, I’ve got a nice little friend just waiting to—”
“Michael? Are you still with me?”
They were halfway down the stairs now, awkwardly carrying the blanket-wrapped body between them, trying not to leak blood on the carpet or bump it against the wall. And though he’d heard Lisa’s question, he said nothing to her, still thinking about Vincent’s phone calls and wondering. Wondering if it was possible — if he should even entertain the notion that the calls he’d gotten…
He could barely bring himself to think it.
That the calls he’d gotten were not real.
What if they were nothing more than a troubled mind’s way of filtering out the truth?
Phone calls in his head.
Phone calls from the dead.
How much of this day, this anniversary of death, was a product of his imagination? Jane Doe saying his name, looking so uncannily like Abby, those haunted hazel eyes, the shifting, undulating facial bones — some of which he knew to be, at least in part, a delusion. So why not the rest of it?
Maybe beneath it all, down in the part of his mind where darkness dwelled, where the animal crouched, watching, waiting… maybe down there he knew the truth, the real explanation.
That he had killed Sue Carmody.
That he had killed Abby.
And, who knows, all those years ago in college, after he’d been spurned by Anna Marie Colson, rejected in favor of a law student — a law student, for godsakes — maybe he’d killed her, too. Shot her and her new boyfriend dead in the street.
Tolan frowned.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about Anna Marie, so why was she suddenly making an appearance now?
Another image flitted through his mind. Not a knife this time, but the penlight, shining in his eyes. Something being shoved into his mouth.
A bite bar?
Then he remembered how much his jaw had ached when he awoke. What the hell was going on here?
“Careful,” Lisa said. “You almost hit her head.”
Her voice brought him back to the here and now, as they cleared the last step. Tolan almost said, “What difference does it make?” but cursed himself the moment he thought it. No matter how Carmody had wound up in this state, she still deserved his respect.
“We’ll take her out the side door,” Lisa said.
They carried her through the living room into the kitchen and laid her on the linoleum.
“Where’s her car?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you bring her here? I saw yours parked in the garage.”
“I don’t know,” Tolan said. “
I don’t remember anything since I left the hospital.”
“We’d better leave yours inside. The police will be looking for it.” She turned then, heading back toward the living room. “Go change your clothes and meet me back here in five minutes.”
Tolan looked down at the blood on his shirt, then shifted his gaze to Carmody’s body, wishing he could teleport to some distant planet.
Beam me up, Scotty.
The side door led from the kitchen to a small, sheltered courtyard. Beyond that was an alleyway that separated Lisa’s house from her neighbor’s. A seasonal resident, the neighbor was rarely here this time of year, leaving the alleyway secluded and quiet, even this early in the night. The only illumination was a distant string of streetlights that didn’t come on until cars passed.
The chances of anyone seeing them were slim. If they were careful, if they timed it right, nobody would ever know that Sue Carmody had been here.
Nobody but Tolan. And Lisa.
And Vincent?
No, Tolan thought. Not even Vincent.
47
Blackburn was waiting in his sedan when the squad car pulled up behind him. A moment later, Kat Pendergast and her partner, Dave Hogan, got out, Kat frowning as she approached his window.
“What happened to your head?”
Blackburn caught himself touching the butterfly bandage. He’d almost forgotten about it.
“A lesson on how not to subdue an armed suspect,” he said. “I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.”
She nodded, then gestured to the row of houses lining the street. It was a cul-de-sac in the middle of Bryant Park, an unassuming, upper-middle-class neighborhood. “So which one is Tolan’s?”
Blackburn pointed to a small three bedroom/two bath in the center of the curve. According to De Mello, Tolan had lived here for six years, four of them with his wife.
There was no car in the drive.
No lights on inside.
“You sure he isn’t hiding in there somewhere?” Kat asked.
“You sure he wasn’t at the girlfriend’s place?”
Whisper in the Dark Page 20