by Lee Goldberg
"What good would that do?" Steve asked.
"It would make you rich, for one thing, and give you some financial security," Jesse said. "And it would get your side of the story out."
"But Lacey McClure will still be free," Mark said.
Amanda knocked at the front window. Steve got up, unlocked the door, and let her in. She lumbered up to the counter and sat wearily on the stool beside Mark.
"The press is all over the hospital," she said. "They're parked outside my house, too."
"You went back to the hospital?" Mark asked.
She nodded. "Right after I testified. I had work to do. When I got there, I found the lab sealed. Dent told me the county was firing me. And so was he."
"Dent fired you?" Jesse said. "He can't do that."
"But the board can, citing my unprofessional and unethical conduct," she replied, handing Mark an envelope. "They've fired you, too. Forgive me for peeking."
Mark set the envelope aside without opening it. "You're forgiven."
"Dent must be celebrating tonight," Susan said.
"Looks like you're the only one who's still got a job," Amanda said to Jesse. "You may have to start supporting us."
"Dent will find a way to force me out, too. It's only a matter of time." Jesse glanced at the clock on the wall. "Speaking of time, I've got to get going."
"Early shift in the ER?" Mark asked.
"Late flight at LAX," Jesse said, untying his apron. "I'm taking the red-eye to a friend's wedding. I'll be back in a day or so, unless you'd like me to stay."
"Isn't that a question you should be asking Noah Dent or Steve?" Mark said. "You don't work for me. As far as I'm concerned, you can go anywhere you like whenever you like."
"I was thinking you might need me to do some snooping for you on Lacey McClure or Moira Cole."
"I appreciate that, Jesse," Mark said, genuinely touched by the young doctor's offer. "But there's far too much attention focused on her, and on us, for me to resume my investigation. The last thing I want is for you to get caught up in this scandal, too. Enough of the people close to me have been hurt as it is. So go, have a good time. Try not to think about all this."
"Then I guess I might try to get in a little fishing while I'm there," Jesse said and shared a look with Susan, who knew exactly what he was referring to. What she didn't understand was why he wasn't telling Mark the true reason for his trip. She would have asked him, but Jesse gave her a quick kiss and hurried out the door without pausing to give her the chance.
Amanda stared at Mark. "You can't be serious about going alter Lacey McClure again."
"She can't be allowed to go unpunished for her crimes, Amanda."
"But you can't be the one to go alter her," she said. "No one even remotely connected to the case will talk to you and the press will crucify you the instant they learn you're asking questions again."
"She's right, Dad," Steve said:
"If I don't pursue it," Mark said. "Who will?"
"The press is all over Lacey McClure now; a few of the reporters are bound to be digging," Steve said. "Maybe one of them will turn up some new evidence someday."
"And maybe not," Mark said.
"It's not your responsibility," Steve said. "It never was."
"I don't have a choice," Mark said. "I can't let it go. You know it's just going to keep eating at me until I set things right."
"Making this your cause could ruin you," Amanda said. "You could lose everything."
"Not as much as Cleve Kershaw and Amy Butler lost," Mark said.
Amanda knew there was no point in arguing with Mark about it. His mind was made up, and his course of action was set in stone, the moment he discovered the bodies.
There would be no stopping Mark now until Lacey McClure was in prison, even if it was a goal he couldn't possibly achieve.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a picture of herself on TV. She snatched the remote and turned up the volume on the television, just in time to hear Arthur Tyrell refer to her as "one of Dr. Sloan's ethically corrupt myrmidons."
She flicked off the TV in disgust and turned to Mark.
"There are five hundred channels on TV," she said, "And there's still nothing good on."
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Toronto was a city Jesse had seen a hundred times, only never as Toronto. He'd seen it posing as Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Washington, D.C., and Seattle in scores of TV shows and movies.
As long as cameras avoided capturing the CN Tower—the city's requisite Space Needle-inspired landmark—or the maple-leaf flags and banners in nearly every merchant's window, the place was virtually indistinguishable from any major American city.
What made Toronto so attractive to filmmakers wasn't its malleable sameness. It was the weakness of the Canadian dollar and tax benefits offered by the government to lure movies and TV shows over the border.
None of that meant anything to Jesse, of course, except that it explained the eerie feeling of familiarity he felt in the city, even though he'd never been there before. He was in a foreign country that didn't seem foreign at all.
The subliminal conditioning of cheap television shows and movies was far from the only reason Toronto felt familiar. As he made his way through the airport, rented his Camry, and drove into the city, he couldn't help but notice all the American cars. All the American stores. All the American restaurants. All the American-looking Canadians. And all the American news. The Lacey McClure case was as big a media event in Toronto as it was in LA.
Jesse headed east along the Gardener Expressway, a shoreline freeway that skirted the city center and took him to a residential neighborhood known as The Beaches. He found a parking spot on Queen Street, a strip of quirky store front shops and cafes almost entirely free of franchises and chain stores, then walked down to the beachfront to find the house the Dents lived in.
Because Jesse had been living in California for the last few years, and was an avid viewer of Baywatch, the name of the neighborhood immediately conjured comforting images in his mind of long stretches of golden sand, crashing surf, and bronzed women in bikinis sunning themselves.
But Jesse was thousands of miles northeast, where there was more than one season, where the skies were gray and the temperature was chilly. The only resemblance The Beaches in Toronto had to those in California were the big signs erected in the sand warning people to stay out of the toxic water. There was neither ocean nor waves, just the frigid, calm, and apparently filthy waters of Lake Ontario. The sand had the consistency and the crunch underfoot of fine gravel. A wooden boardwalk ran the length of the broad beach, drawing a line of separation between the sand and the green, tree-lined park that ran parallel to it.
Behind the park was a neighborhood of virtually identical, two-story duplexes, with big front porches under enormous decks. According to the guidebook Jesse bought at the airport, this was supposed to be a very desirable, and quite expensive, area to live in. And yet most of the homes, much to Jesse's surprise, had backyard barbecues strapped securely to the wooden railings of their decks, the propane tank and rubber wheels dangling over the front steps like mistletoe.
They were called backyard barbecues for a reason. Jesse couldn't understand why anyone would want to mount one on the front of their home. The barbecues were hardly stylish or pleasant to look at. He wondered if maybe the size and brand of one's barbeque was a status symbol in Canada, the way the make and model of a car parked in someone's drive way was in LA.
Jesse was still pondering the mystery of the hanging barbecues when a black squirrel darted across his path, startling him. It's not that he was afraid of squirrels, he'd just never seen a black one before. He knew that Mark had, but those poor creatures had been ablaze at the time, running out of the flames of the Malibu fire. Or were those bunnies? Jesse couldn't remember. Either way, it was a chilling image.
This squirrel wasn't on fire, and at first Jesse wasn't even sure if it was real. He thought maybe i
t was his imagination, which wasn't such a stretch. Jesse hadn't slept on the plane and it had left him feeling blurred. He was certain that if he saw his reflection, it would appear as an almost-double image, with his spirit-likeness floating just outside the boundaries of his physical body.
The blurred feeling didn't come simply from sleep deprivation and one too many glasses of cheap white wine during the five-hour flight. It was the unexpected and shockingly sudden destruction of Dr. Mark Sloan, a man he held in higher esteem than anybody else in his life.
No murderer, no lawyer, no hospital administrator, had ever outsmarted Mark before. Jesse never considered the possibility that such a thing could ever happen, and now that it had, his whole life felt unhinged. This was a big reason why he was in Toronto, desperate to restore order to his world by, at the very least, getting Mark his job back.
Noah Dent came from this street, where black squirrels roamed under the shadow of perilously perched barbecues.
Jesse was convinced that the answer to Dent's hatred of Mark Sloan was here somewhere. He wasn't going back to Los Angeles without it.
Jesse found the house he was looking for, dashed under the barbeque, and rang the front doorbell. It was answered almost immediately by a jovial, potbellied man in a checked flannel shirt and corduroy pants.
"May I help you?" the man asked.
"Yes, I'm looking for Grayson Dent," Jesse said.
"That's me!" Grayson replied energetically. "Are you with the Prize Patrol?"
"The Prize Patrol?"
"From Publishers Clearing House," Grayson said, his eyes sparkling with good-natured mischief. "Have I won a million dollars?"
"No, I'm Dr. Jesse Travis and I work with your son Noah at Community General Hospital in Los Angeles," he said. "And I'm the chairperson of his tribute."
"His tribute ?"
"And the gala ball," Jesse added. "It's a surprise. I'm here to get background for my speech and the video we're going to show."
"Come in, come in, I want to hear all about it." Grayson stepped aside and ushered Jesse into the house.
The home was, unlike Noah, very warm and inviting. All the couches and chairs were overstuffed, upholstered in dark fabrics, and adorned with hand-knitted afghans and fluffy pillows. Every inch of available wall space was covered with framed photographs of the Dents with their family and friends.
How could someone as heartless as Noah Dent come from a home like this?
"You didn't come all the way here from Los Angeles just to talk to me, did you?" Grayson said. "You could have called me on the phone."
"It's not the same as meeting the people who shaped his character," Jesse replied. "Noah has only been at Community General a short time, but already he's made a huge impression on all of us. We want this event to show him how we truly feel."
Grayson whistled, impressed. "Like father, like son. Noah's always been a people-person."
"He certainly is," Jesse said. "I can honestly say he's touched a lot of lives. We want to salute him and all his achievements. But we also want to get to know him, to reveal the man behind the consummate administrator."
"I'm so happy to hear that he's established himself in his field. I tried to steer him into being my successor in the family business—to carry on the proud Dent tradition," Grayson said. "I won't lie to you, it was a big disappointment to me when his life took a different path."
"What's the family business?" Jesse asked.
"If you lived in Canada, you wouldn't have to ask that question. You can't take a whiz without doing it on a Dent," Grayson said with a laugh, more at Jesse's bewilderment than at his joke. "Dent Fixtures and Flushometers. We make urinals, toilets, and flushers."
Grayson picked up a thick catalog from the coffee table, and handed it to Jesse, who flipped through it. The catalog was filled with glossy pictures of urinals and toilets with names like the Continental, the Fifth Avenue, the Renaissance and the Evergreen—as well as a variety of stainless steel piston flushometers.
"We patented our first Dent Piston Flushometer in 1928," Grayson said, "and we've been innovators in the field ever since, eventually expanding into restroom fixtures in 1957. Virtually every public and commercial toilet in Canada is a Dent."
"Why didn't Noah go into the family business?" Jesse asked, straying over to the nearest wall and letting his eyes wander over the countless pictures.
Grayson shrugged. "I wish I knew. He seemed destined for it until college, when suddenly he just changed his mind. All he was interested in was hospital administration."
In the pictures, Noah looked like any other kid. Exuberant, happy, friendly, with the same jovial air as his father. Jesse had a hard time reconciling the pictures with the Noah Dent he knew.
"Did he ever say why?"
"Not in so many words," Grayson said. "But he obviously had a passion for it that he didn't have for the toilet trade. And if you're going to succeed in this business and deliver a superior product, you need to be passionate about it."
"Did he ever mention Community General Hospital?" Jesse asked.
"Nope," Grayson said, then pointed to a picture of Noah and an attractive older woman. "That's Noah when he was a teenager, and that's his mother, Beatrice. She left me when Noah was in college for one of those artsy-fartsy urinal designers. You know the type."
"Oh yeah," Jesse said. "They're irresistible to women."
"Twenty-five years of marriage flushed down the drain," Grayson said with a chuckle. "Pun intended."
"Did Noah ever mention Dr. Mark Sloan to you?" Jesse asked, glancing at a photo of Noah Dent in a rowboat, catching a gigantic trout.
"Not that I can recall," Grayson asked. "Why do you ask?"
"They've just come to mean a lot to one another," Jesse said. "Frankly, I'm just trying to figure out why Community General is so special to him."
"It's all about passion," Grayson said. "I have it for toilets and, lucky for you, Noah has it for hospitals."
Noah certainly treated the hospital like his toilet, Jesse thought. His gaze fell on a photo of a teenage Noah and his date that had apparently been taken in the living room before his high school prom. Noah wore an ill-fitting tuxedo and a proud smile on his face, his arm around his girlfriend, an unbearably cute teenager with radiant eyes.
"They look great together," Jesse said, understanding now why Noah wasn't the jovial, happy man his father was, and why he never would be. The hatred Jesse felt for Noah Dent abruptly evaporated, replaced by a profound sadness.
"They were high school sweethearts, madly in love. They went off to separate colleges and I suppose they drifted apart," Grayson said. "She was a cute girl. I wonder what ever happened to her."
Jesse could have told him.
Her radiant smile was gone. Her life was destroyed. And Dr. Mark Sloan was to blame.
The night after the preliminary hearing, Mark was unable to sleep. After leaving BBQ Bob's and braving his way through the throng of reporters outside his house, he planted himself in his recliner in front of the TV, where he remained all night, unable to tear himself away from the continuous coverage of his downfall.
There was some other news related to the case that Mark learned watching TV. Elsie Feikema had accepted an invitation to be one of the housemates in the next edition of Big Brother. The box-office take on Lacey's movie Thrill Kill had already reached $50 million and was projected to crack the $100 million mark domestically, fueled by the intense media coverage of her arrest and release. There were rumors that a bootleg copy of Nick Stryker's surveillance tape would be hitting the Internet as a "pay-per-stream" event that industry observers speculated could generate more revenue than Lacey's illicit sex tape did a few years earlier. And the WB was actively developing both a sitcom and a reality show centered on the Slumberland Motel.
Mark nodded off shortly before dawn, when Steve came up from downstairs, switched off the TV, and draped a blanket over his father before going out for a run.
The media vul
tures weren't dedicated enough to be up at that hour, so Steve had the beach to himself as he jogged through the morning fog. Steve wasn't quite sure what to do to occupy himself in the days ahead. His life was in limbo until he either quit the force or the LAPD decided to fire him.
But he wasn't ready to think about that now. He wasn't ready to think about anything.
When Mark awoke at around noon, Steve was long gone, hiding out from the world, and from his own thoughts, in the kitchen at BBQ Bob's. There was plenty Steve could do to busy himself there, especially with Jesse away.
Mark didn't have such a convenient distraction from his troubles. He was a virtual prisoner in his own home. If he left the house, he would be dogged by the press, eager for fresh footage to chronicle the destruction of his reputation.
So what was there to do? He couldn't engage in his two favorite pursuits—the practice of medicine and the investigation of homicides—and might never be allowed to again.
Perhaps it was time, he thought, to bring out the easel and try his hand at painting once more. The notion brought his thoughts back to the murders of Cleve Kershaw and Amy Butler—not that his mind had drifted far from the subject for more than a few seconds anyway.
The fact was, Mark Sloan was happiest when his mind was occupied with a challenging problem to solve. And there was no problem greater than the one at the source of all his troubles: proving Lacey McClure guilty of murder.
For the rest of the day, Mark reviewed the case and the material he had at hand. He looked over the crime scene photos, read the FBI transcript of their wiretap of Cleve's meeting with Daddy Crofoot, scanned Lacey's magazine interviews, fast-forwarded through her movies, rewatched Lacey and Cleve's infamous sex tape and scrutinized Nick Stryker's Slumberland Motel surveillance film.
Then Mark sat in his recliner and thought about the facts of the case, rejecting all the evidence they'd presented in court to see if there was anything left to work with as starting point for a new investigation.
There was only one thing.