Threshold

by G. M. Ford

Dolan slid the photograph across the table. “You seen this woman?” he asked.

  Bharat Agnihotri studied the image like there was going to be a test. Mickey could tell right away: this was a guy with an eye for the ladies.

  “Very beautiful,” the cabbie said.

  “Yeah,” Mickey agreed. “Seen her before?”

  “No,” Mr. Agnihotri said. “Very exotic-looking. I surely would remember her.”

  “You’re certain?” Mickey pressed.

  Thayer was leaning against the corner of the room with his hairy arms folded over his chest. The look on his face said, “I told you so.”

  “Oh, I’m quite certain,” Agnihotri said. “That’s not a face a man could forget.”

  Dolan slid his phone over in front of the man. “Seven thirty-three last night. Harmon Road. By the hospital. That’s your cab, isn’t it?”

  He looked over at Thayer. “What does my log say?” he asked.

  “Log says you were signed out for dinner,” Thayer said.

  “They must have gotten the date wrong,” Bharat Agnihotri suggested.

  Dolan kept his mouth shut. Wanted to see what effect the silence had.

  Bharat Agnihotri showed the ceiling his upturned palms. “I wish I could help you sir,” he said. “But, as Mr. Thayer said . . .”

  Mickey looked over at Thayer. “You suppose I could have a few minutes alone with Mr. Agnihotri?” he asked.

  “He’s on shift in ten minutes.”

  “We can do this here in your sandbox, or downtown in mine,” Dolan said.

  Thayer held his ground for a couple of beats and then grudgingly levered himself off the wall. “Okay, okay,” he grumbled on his way out the door.

  Mickey put his elbows on the table, and leaned toward Bharat Agnihotri.

  “This is just between us,” Mickey said in a low voice. “No reason why anybody but the two of us has to know what goes on here.”

  Bharat Agnihotri opened his mouth to protest, but Mickey didn’t give him the chance. “Hard to say no to a good-looking woman,” Mickey said.

  “I don’t understand,” Agnihotri said. “I told you sir, I was—”

  Mickey kept talking. “I know what you told me. And I know it was bullshit.”

  He held up a stiff, restraining hand. “I know you’ve got a family. I understand that you need to make a living. But if you want to keep this just between us, I’m going to need you to stop feeding me that line of crap.”

  Couldn’t have been much over fifty degrees in the room, but Bharat Agnihotri was beginning to sweat. “Please sir . . .” he stammered.

  “Where did you take her?”

  “She gave me sixty dollars,” he said. “I told her this was no place for a lady. I told her—”

  “Where?” Mickey repeated, louder this time.

  “She insisted.”

  “Last time I’m going to ask you,” Mickey promised.

  Bharat Agnihotri released a great breath of air. “Crow Street,” he said. “The lady wanted to go to Crow Street.”

  Indra brought the paperwork up close to her face and began to read aloud: “Diana Lee Thurmond. Twenty-seven years old. Attacked in the street in West Hollywood, California, a little over a year ago, on her way home from church. Police listed it as a mugging.”

  “That’s a long time to be gone,” Grace said.

  “You’ve had way longer,” Indra said.

  It was true. Sierra Abrams had been in a vegetative state for nearly four years when her aunt had contacted Grace. As was usually the case, the longer the patient had been non-responsive, the slower the recovery. People didn’t just sit up in bed and ask for a cheeseburger. In most cases, they had to relearn how to do just about everything. Took years. In Sierra’s case, another two years before she was able to go home. Sometimes it didn’t happen at all. Others initially made great strides and then gradually slipped back into unresponsiveness. Brain trauma care was, in the final offing, really little more than highly educated guesswork, a fact that the medical community was, not surprisingly, loathe to admit.

  “Where’s she on the Glasgow Scale?” Grace asked.

  “Depends on who you ask,” Indra said, shuffling through the pile of paperwork on the desk.

  The Glasgow Coma Scale was a measurement device by which the severity of the head trauma and likelihood of recovery could be numerically represented. It measured the patient’s eye-opening response, verbal response, and motor responses on a scale from one to six. Patients scoring between three and eight were more or less goners. Something like ninety percent of them either remained in a vegetative state or died. At the other end of the spectrum, those scoring between eleven and fifteen could generally be expected to at least partially recover some of their functions.

  “When she was first tested in the ER, right after the injury,” Indra began, “she tested nine.”

  “And then?”

  “Apparently, she was never tested again.”

  “Maybe the original nine was optimistic,” Grace suggested.

  Indra shrugged. “People like to hope,” she said.

  Hope was the mind killer when it came to head trauma. Over the years Grace had been asked to help any number of poor souls whose physiological damage was so great as to preclude any hope of recovery whatsoever. People who’d left half their brains splattered on barroom floors or bridge abutments. But somebody loved them, so somebody held out hope. These days they could keep somebody artificially alive until they grew moss on their north side. Grace had long ago decided that her definition of being alive didn’t include machines.

  “Her vital signs and MRIs are good,” Indra offered. She slid the data across the table to Grace. “No swelling. No visible trauma.” She pulled another page out of the pile and pushed it over to Grace. “Her doctors expected her to come out of it before this.”

  It was true. Her original prognosis was a consensus expectation that she would regain consciousness and at least some of her functions. Hadn’t happened though.

  “I don’t know,” Grace said. “She’s been away quite a while.”

  “Her husband offered—”

  Grace cut her off. “I know. The money.”

  “We could do a great deal of—”

  “You and my mother sound like a tape loop.”

  “The woman is in town,” Indra said.

  Grace frowned. “I thought she lived in Southern California.”

  “She does—she did. Her husband—”

  “I didn’t agree to anything,” Grace said.

  “I couldn’t stop him. We talked once and then he calls and says she’s in town. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Even if I had agreed to try to help his wife . . .” Grace waved an angry hand.

  Indra cleared her throat. “Your mother . . .”

  “My mother what?”

  “Your mother told Mr. Thurmond you’d meet with him tonight.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  As if on cue, Eve rolled herself into the room. Grace was about to light into her, but her anger was quickly dampened by the look on her mother’s face. The face said something was seriously amiss.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “The TV,” Eve stammered. “Joseph . . . You better come and see.”

  Dolan’s desk looked like one of Vince Keenan’s garbage trucks had backed up to it and dumped its load. Dolan smirked at the unruly sight. Usually took him at least a week to trash his desk. This was a new record.

  Nilsson’s secretary Joan must have read his mind. “IT dropped all that stuff off this morning,” she said. “Said it was per your request.”

  Mickey reached out to grab the top folder, but instead knocked the whole pile over. The folders fanned out over the desktop like oversized playing cards. Nearest one was labeled Merl
a Fritchey. Mickey remembered the name. One of the people Grace Pressman supposedly awakened from a coma. They all were. Jesus, Dolan thought. How do you collect this much information on this many people in less than forty-eight hours? Amazing.

  He was still standing there contemplating the death of privacy when Joan put a hand on his shoulder. “His nibs wants a word with you,” she said.

  Dolan raised his eyes toward the C of D’s office, but the blinds were closed.

  “A word to the wise . . .” Joan made it a question.

  “Sure.”

  “Mr. Royster’s already called twice,” Joan said, with a concerned grimace. “The mayor’s been in touch also.”

  Mickey thanked her for the heads-up, took a long minute, pretending to organize the pile of files, and then started across the room.

  He knocked. “Yeah,” rumbled out from under the door. Mickey stepped inside.

  The C of D got to his feet at the sight of Mickey. “Hope you got something,” he said. “That son-of-a-bitch Royster’s been dogging my ass all day.”

  “Well . . .” Mickey began. “I know what the two vics were doing out there on Wentworth Street.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Mickey did. Nilsson was shaking his head disgustedly halfway through.

  “What a way to earn a living,” he grumbled when Mickey finished talking. “Hundred eighty an hour to count garbage trucks.”

  “Times two,” Mickey amended. “They had two more guys in a car watching the other bridge.”

  Nilsson let out a disgusted grunt. He pinned Mickey with a feral glare. “That it?” he asked. “’Cause I need some damn progress I can show to the mayor. Royster’s got the mayor questioning your fitness for this investigation. Hizzonor thinks maybe I threw you into the fire a little too soon after your personal leave. We don’t make some tangible progress here, they’re talking about setting up a task force with the DA’s office and Family Services and going looking for the family themselves.”

  “I’ve got one more thing,” Mickey said.

  Mickey told him about the purported altercation between Grace Pressman and Roberta Reeves at the hospital the previous afternoon. Told him how Joseph Reeves said it didn’t go down the way his mother said it did. How Mickey thought it a bit odd that the kid sided with a relative stranger. “The hospital’s outdoor CC cameras got a good image of the cab that picked up the Pressman woman,” he added.

  “And?”

  “I spoke with the cab driver. He says he took her to Crow Street.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Mickey gave him a thumbnail sketch of his interview with Bharat Agnihotri.

  “He was being straight with me Chief,” Mickey said as he finished up. “I had him by the short hairs. He was in no position to lie.”

  Nilsson opened his mouth just as his phone began to buzz. “Probably the fucking mayor again,” he grumbled as he picked it up. He listened briefly and then held the receiver out to Mickey Dolan. Mickey took it. The C of D pushed a button on the phone and sat down heavily in his chair.

  “Dolan,” he said into the mouthpiece.

  “Sergeant Dolan?” A woman’s voice, vaguely familiar and obviously distraught.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “This is Pamela Prentiss—from Memorial Hospital.”

  The name straightened Dolan’s spine. The unflappable nurse sounded most definitely flapped. “You gave me your card,” she added.

  “I remember,” Mickey said.

  She was welling up; Mickey could hear it in her voice.

  “This afternoon . . .” She swallowed and gathered herself. “Joseph Reeves took his own life,” she blurted.

  The news hit Mickey Dolan like a shovel to the head. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he mumbled, after a moment.

  “Hung himself in the shower. Used the cord from his bathrobe.”

  “Is the body still there?” Mickey asked.

  “Yes. Funeral home’s going to pick him up in an hour or so. They’re burying him this afternoon, out at Holyrood.”

  “Isn’t that kind of quick?” he asked. Dolan came from one of those Irish families where they liked to get hammered for a week or so before actually sticking anybody in the ground.

  “Mrs. Reeves insisted. They had quite a scene about it.”

  “Well—thanks for the info,” Dolan said.

  “Pity,” was her final word.

  If, as tradition dictates, the dead deserve to be shown great respect, then somebody should have made sure the weatherman got the memo, because it was raining buckets as they slid Joseph Reeves’s body down into the sodden ground. Another thirty minutes it would have qualified as a burial at sea.

  The pounding rain was beginning to seep through the shoulders of Mickey’s raincoat as he watched the proceedings. One too many trips through the washer, he figured. He was hunkered down about thirty yards from the hole in the ground, keeping a life-sized statue of Our Lady of Fatima between himself and the other mourners.

  Despite the distance and the shimmering sheets of windblown rain, it would have been difficult to miss the cleft in those paying their respects.

  To the left of the grave was the Paul Reeves contingent. Twelve, fifteen of them, men, women, and children, all looking devastated as they watched the last mortal remains of Joseph Reeves being lowered into the sloppy ground.

  Behind the family, half a dozen young men and women, probably Joseph’s classmates, stood sullen sentinel in the ever-worsening downpour.

  On the other side of the grave, Roberta Reeves stood alone, her hands strangling a small black purse, her face impassive as she watched her only son disappear into the cold, cold ground. Behind her, out on the road, the limo driver who’d brought her to the cemetery had opted to watch the proceedings from the front seat. The flip-flop of the windshield wipers beat staccato rhythm to the service.

  The preacher was offering his final blessing when Dolan first caught a flash of white up among the fir trees. He smiled to himself. God I love being right, he thought.

  Mickey began to back up slowly, keeping the statue between himself and the hillside as he stepped out into the narrow road and disappeared into the thick shrubbery on the far side.

  Unbelievably, the rain picked up a bit. Twenty-three soaking minutes seemed more like a month. Once the service had ended, everybody said hurried goodbyes, and then slogged en masse for the protection of their cars. Mrs. Reeves dispensed with the formalities altogether and headed directly over to the limo and got in. The big black car began to roll the moment she closed the door.

  Took another twenty-five minutes for the cemetery workers to fill in the hole and then load the backhoe onto the truck. And then finally, after they drove off, all that remained was the wind in the trees and snare drum hissing of the rain.

  She had quite a stride for a woman. Her long legs covered a lot of ground, without appearing to hurry. By the time the sound of the cemetery truck had been swallowed by the rush of water, she was standing alone by the graveside.

  Dolan gave her a couple of minutes to pay her respects, and then stepped out of the shrubbery and began to walk slowly in her direction. The deluge absorbed the sounds of his movement. He was no more than ten feet from her when her senses picked up on his approach. She whirled around. Her eyes seemed to have no color.

  Dolan stopped and held up his badge. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said, closing the distance between them.

  She didn’t say anything. Just took him in with those big colorless eyes.

  “Joseph’s mother say I attacked her?” she asked finally.

  Dolan nodded. “Yep,” he said. “She sure did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know,” Mickey said. “Joseph told me what happened.”

  Her eyes bypassed Mickey’s face. Focused back over his shoulder. Dola
n turned his head. Two men had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. They were standing hip to hip on the road, maybe twenty feet from him, their hands folded in front of themselves. The silver rain danced around their boots and dripped from the brims of their hats.

  Dolan showed them his badge. “Detective Sergeant Michael Dolan,” he announced. Neither of them exactly came down with the vapors.

  “It’s okay,” Grace said to them. “I’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  She began to slosh her way slowly around the grave, pulling Dolan along behind like a wagon. Mickey was transfixed, following along in her wake, without having willed himself to do so.

  She was nearly translucent. Whiter than white. Paler than pale. She moved with an economy of motion that made her almost seem to float. Despite the brace of bruisers lurking behind him, Dolan couldn’t pry his eyes from her. When he finally managed to check back over his shoulder, the muscle brothers were gone, melted into the mud, as if they’d never been there at all.

  “He seemed like a nice young man,” Dolan said, above the roar of the rain.

  She looked directly at Mickey now, anger flooding her gin-colored eyes. “Joseph was scared to death is what he was.” She clamped her mouth shut. The muscles along her jawline rippled.

  She had her jeans tucked into a pair of green Hunter boots and was pretty much impervious to the muck. Dolan, on the other hand, was wearing dress shoes, and was sliding around in the slop like a drunken hockey player. He held his arms out for balance. Looked like he was playing airplane.

  “Scared of what?” Mickey asked.

  “I should have left him where he was. He was happy there.”

  “Where was that?”

  “A place where everything is connected to everything else. Where it’s all one piece and has no edges.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mickey said.

  “No,” she assured him, “you don’t.”

  Mercifully, she stopped moving when she reached the head of the grave. Stood still and looked over at Dolan. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “I’m a detective,” Mickey said. Dolan inclined his head in the direction where the muscle brothers had been standing. She picked up on the implied question.