by Chaz McGee
“Everyone always falls for Christian’s saving-lives act,” she said. “Every nurse in this hospital is after him now. The rest of us do good work, too, you know.”
Maggie went for the jugular. “I’ve heard Fiona Harker was having an affair with a married doctor. You hear anything about that?”
Something inside the ice princess definitely flickered. I wondered just how much she knew about having affairs with married doctors. Something told me the answer was plenty. This was a woman who went for power. Her list of bed partners likely started and ended with the hospital’s board of directors.
“My husband doesn’t have enough blood in him to have an affair, if that’s what you are insinuating,” she told Maggie stiffly. “He wouldn’t have dared.”
“You’d be surprised what people do when they’re unhappy,” Maggie countered.
“I’m the one who asked for the divorce,” Holman snapped back.
“Why?”
“Why is that any of your business? It has nothing to do with that dead nurse, and I fail to see how it is any of your concern.”
Maggie snapped her notebook shut and handed Holman her business card. “I can’t give you any more of my time today,” she told the startled doctor, stealing her line right out from underneath her. “But I will be calling you in to the station at a future date to answer more questions.”
Dr. Holman stared at her, too surprised to speak. Maggie retrieved her briefcase, noticed the little girl’s drawing on it, grabbed it, and left the room. A spark of hope flared in me: Maggie still had the drawing.
I breezed right past Serena Holman, too. She was glowering after Maggie—this was one woman who was used to being the alpha female and did not like being outflanked.
I caught several nurses peeking out of patients’ rooms and enjoying the show as I raced past them and caught up with Maggie at the elevator. Just as the doors were about to close, a small redhead in a nurse’s uniform stepped inside and stood silently beside Maggie. She held a brown paper grocery bag.
Maggie’s ire was still up over Serena Holman, so it took her a moment to realize the red-haired nurse was glancing at her. When she realized the woman wanted to say something, Maggie pressed the stop button midfloor. The elevator jerked to a halt. Maggie was in no mood to mess around. “Yes?” she asked the nurse.
“I was a friend of Fiona Harker’s,” the woman said, her voice quavering. “I heard you were looking into her death.”
Maggie’s demeanor changed in an instant. “I’m very sorry about your loss,” she told the nurse.
“Fiona was a really good person,” the red-haired nurse said. “She deserved better than to die that way.”
“Yes, she did,” Maggie agreed firmly.
“She was having an affair,” the nurse told her. “Some of the other girls said you were asking around.”
Maggie hid her surprise. “Who was the affair with?”
“I don’t know,” the nurse said. “She wouldn’t tell me. But it was serious. Fiona changed her schedule on Mondays and Wednesdays so they could spend mornings together. I was the one who swapped with her.”
Maggie and I instantly thought the exact same thing: Fiona Harker had probably been killed on a Wednesday morning.
“You have no idea who it was?”
The nurse shook her head. “I didn’t want to pry. Fiona was so private about her personal life. You just didn’t ask her those kinds of things, not after you got to know her. You learned it was useless. She never talked about herself. I know he was married, but that’s all I know. She said there were complications that would take some time to work out, but she was certain they were meant to be together.”
“People tell me she was a good person, and a smart one,” Maggie said. “But she was having an affair with a married doctor? That’s not smart.”
“It wasn’t like that,” the nurse insisted. “I think they were really, truly in love. The fact that Fiona was doing it told me that. It was very unlike her. And I’d never known Fiona to even go out with anyone before this. I know it makes her look bad, but you mustn’t think ill of her. It must really have been love. True love.”
Maggie looked as if she wasn’t sure she believed in true love. I felt an unexpected sadness for her. She was too young to have given up on love.
“These are her things,” the nurse told Maggie as she handed her the paper bag. “We shared a locker. I don’t know if there’s anything in it that might help, but I put everything in there, just in case.” The nurse pressed the start button again and the car began to descend.
Maggie peered inside the bag. “I need your name,” she told the nurse. “I have to establish a chain of evidence so that—”
The elevator stopped at the next floor and the nurse stepped out. “I’ll find you,” she promised. “Really, I will. But I have to be in surgery right now.”
She scurried off before Maggie could protest. I know my Maggie and I could tell what she was thinking: she had gone off the rails, just a little, and lost her faith, but the moment she became determined to get back on track, the universe had rewarded her with a whole bag of leads. Maggie’s faith in herself had been restored.
I was so absorbed watching the thoughts play over her face that I did not realize where we were going. When the elevator doors opened again, I saw we had ended up in the emergency room—she had not been able to resist another look at the good Dr. Fletcher. But she was not going to get close to Christian Fletcher that day. The sliding doors to the outside flew open and what seemed like stretcher after stretcher pushed through, bringing in a parade of maimed and bloody beings strapped to gurneys. Emergency medical technicians rushed in behind the victims, shouting their statuses at the staff. Fletcher was there in seconds, running from stretcher to stretcher, sorting out the patients who needed treatment first, assessing the situation with a calm competence that had a crystallizing effect on the entire treatment team. From what I could tell, a car accident had taken place involving two families. So far, no one had died, and Fletcher was determined that it stay that way.
Maggie watched as he directed five of the victims to treatment rooms, spoke urgently with a nurse over the head of a sixth, and quickly assigned staff to individual patients. Already his hands were moving over a final victim, the smallest one, evaluating her injuries with a gentle touch as a paramedic reported on her condition. Though he held it at bay so it would not interfere with his judgment, I could feel a remarkable combination of empathy and determination at his core. It was almost as if he could channel the victims’ pain and felt personal outrage that a living creature should suffer so. He lived to stop their pain and reverse the damage at any cost. Yet his ego did not seem to be involved at all. He did it for them, not for himself. I could find no trace of arrogance in his heart, only outrage that the world allowed such anguish.
His soon-to-be-ex-wife had spoken derisively of Christian Fletcher saving lives, but seeing him actually do it told a different tale.
It was a profoundly humbling experience for me. He was ten times the man I had never been.
Chapter 19
Maggie returned to department headquarters, the paper bag of evidence cradled in her arms as she fought through the phalanx of reporters camped outside the front door, there to witness the pathetic parade of suspects being hauled inside one by one to face questioning by the task force in connection with the abduction of Tyler Matthews. Registered sex offenders and online predators flagged by KinderWatch were being brought in for questioning, and it was not a pretty sight. Heads down, eyes averted, they darted into the building like human cockroaches fleeing the light of the cameras. They came in all shapes and sizes and from different economic levels. It seemed the only thing they shared was a willingness to give up their dignity as humans and the respect of others in order to indulge their compulsions.
I did not feel sorry for them. I had seen too many lives destroyed by the selfishness of men like these; I had arrested too many of their victims after they had grown up and
taken their anger out on the world with guns and knives. If I could find a hallway to hell, I’d happily herd the whole lot into the eternal flames.
I guess my newfound compassion had its limits.
Maggie had retreated deep into the Fiona Harker case and did not notice the terrified creature that rode the elevator up with her, flanked by two detectives. He was a desperately ashamed man with rumpled clothes and unkempt hair who loosely fit the description of the man Robert Michael Martin had seen in the park, but his frightened expression and the sense of despair that emanated from him made it plain that, despite whatever urges fought to be satisfied inside him, he was not their man. He did not have the nerve.
The trio got out on the second floor. Dozens of detectives, plainclothesmen, and administrative staff hurried through the halls. Inside the conference room, I could see an immense table stacked high with case files and surrounded by federal agents barking orders or talking into their cell phones. This was the hub of the Tyler Matthews investigation and, from the looks of things, few had been spared duty on the task force.
Maggie had never been more alone.
I rode with her up to the fourth floor, rifling through her memories, searching for a way to let her know that Tyler Matthews was only miles away. I could find no way in.
The squad room was deserted. Every available man and woman had been pulled into the madness two floors below. I felt a twinge of sympathy for anyone burglarized or assaulted over the next few days; justice for them would be delayed as long as Tyler remained missing. The fact that their suffering would not wait meant nothing in the face of reality.
I think Maggie was grateful for the silence. She could work without interruption. She retrieved a diet soda from the break room before clearing her desk of all items. I watched this ritual with delight. Her desk had been my desk and, while once it had been a place of surrender where I waited out hangovers and pushed papers around in lieu of actually working, it was now a battleground where Maggie waged war against those who dared violate the rules that distinguished her world from chaos.
She had two large envelopes waiting for her in her mail slot and she placed these on one side of her desk, along with the slender case file on Fiona Harker. She put the grocery bag directly in the center of her desk, then sat down and stared at it. She was putting off opening it, afraid to risk disappointment if it held little of value. She glanced though the case file once again, fixing the timeline and death scene firmly in her mind, before opening the two envelopes marked to her attention. One was a ballistics report; the other held details on the autopsy. She spread both out across her desk and studied them intently. I perched on the edge of the desk, studying her.
Maggie’s face was plain at first glance, slightly broad with a wide nose and thin mouth that seldom curled in a smile. Her eyes were large and dark, hard to read to those who had nothing but the surface to go on. But it was a mistake to think that Maggie was plain. Those who looked closer, like me, quickly discovered that her face was a mercurial wonder, her expressions constantly flowing from one nuanced expression to another as she processed the world around her. Maggie did not take a single moment for granted. Not one.
She read and reread both reports carefully, making a notation to search purchase records for the gun that had killed Fiona Harker. The autopsy confirmed that the nurse’s death had occurred on a Wednesday morning and that she had been in excellent health before her death. There was no surprise pregnancy, no evidence of sexual assault. The medical examiner had found the carefully nurtured, perfectly healthy body of a thirty-three-year-old woman, cause of death a single gunshot wound to the head. Without that wound, Fiona Harker would probably have lived to be a very, very old woman. Which meant that someone had stolen years from her. I knew Maggie was thinking the same thing as she read through the report—and I could feel the anger in her rising at the fact that someone out there actually thought they had gotten away with it.
When Maggie was done rereading the reports, she picked up the phone and let the medical examiner’s office know it was okay to release Fiona Harker’s body to her family in California. It would take a long and lonely cross-country ride to be welcomed by grieving family and friends, but it was all essentially for show, as I knew that any trace of Fiona Harker had long since moved on. Her family was mourning an empty vessel. I wondered if her friends would hold a memorial service here in town. Had she even had enough friends to warrant holding one? Fiona Harker had been a solitary woman, as alone in life as she was now alone in death. But she’d had coworkers, and they clearly felt her loss keenly. They needed a resolution, an explanation for her death. I hoped her belongings would tell Maggie more.
Before she opened the bag that had been given to her by Fiona’s locker mate, Maggie inserted the ballistics and medical examiner’s reports into the case file. As an afterthought, she folded the drawing the little girl had given her in the hospital and inserted it into the file folder as well. It had been my only hope, but was now likely to be buried in other paperwork. At least it had not gone into the trash. She made a few notes about her interviews with Serena Holman and the nurses in the file, then took a deep breath, moved the paperwork to a side drawer, and opened the grocery bag.
One by one, she placed the items that represented Fiona Harker’s personal life onto her desktop, starting with a single tube of clear lip gloss and a pair of plain gold-hoop earrings. There was no other evidence of makeup or jewelry. Next came a framed photo of Fiona that was at least fifteen years old, showing her with an older couple who had to be her parents and another young woman who looked remarkably like Fiona. A mother, a father, and a sister to miss her. Their lives would never be the same, I knew; there would always be a hole in the place once occupied by Fiona and her love for them. Maggie then lifted spare clothes out of the bag, nothing more provocative than a plain gray T-shirt and a pair of jeans, extra socks, underwear, and black flip-flops. Fiona had not been an athlete, it seems: there were no workout clothes or tennis shoes. And then, finally, a peek into the kind of person Fiona Harker had been—a collection of books, mostly paperbacks, at the bottom of the bag. Maggie lifted the books out one by one and placed them on her desk: the poetry of Walt Whitman; another book of poems, this time by Gary Snyder; a biography of Helen Keller; a short story collection by Doris Lessing; and a hardback book entitled Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin. Whoa. Just seeing Maggie hold it made me want to destroy the book in a cleansing fire. Fiona Harker had not exactly gone in for light reading. She had lived an intense and brooding life, if her taste in books told Maggie anything.
That was it for evidence. There were no scribbled notes written in the margins of the books, no clues that might lead Maggie to her killer. Just more evidence of a solitary life by a very private woman who had spent her days battling death and, apparently, her nights trying to understand why. How had she ended up this way, with so few people and so little light in her life? I would never know, nor would the world ever know. The mystery of Fiona Harker’s heart had died with her.
Maggie did something odd with her disappointment. She spread her arms out over Fiona Harker’s belongings and put her head down on the desk, like a teenager sleeping through study hall. She closed her eyes and weariness swept through her. Maggie was tired, bone tired, but I could not pinpoint why. It had to do with Fiona Harker, I knew, and the sadness that permeated her life, but I did not want to accept the obvious explanation: that Maggie was tired from holding back the realization that her own life, too, lacked both human comfort and human contact. That she, too, was lonely.
I watched Maggie sleep. She fell deeper and deeper away from the waking world. Soon, I was able to follow her dreams as the living might follow a movie. She dreamed of a summer lake surrounded by longleaf pines, of a cedar cabin and a picnic table in the front yard. People sat around it, reading the books Maggie had found among Fiona Harker’s possessions. Noni Bates, the old lady from the neighborhood, was engrossed in the Doris Lessing; a young boy I
did not recognize was plowing through Walt Whitman; and, with amusement, I saw Gonzales moving a finger over the lines in Gary Snyder’s book of poetry, silently mouthing the words as he read. At the far end of the table, an elderly Catholic priest sat reading the book about exorcisms, glancing up every now and then to stare disapprovingly at a dark-haired woman who lay motionless in the middle of the picnic table, as if she were dead or, perhaps, only sleeping. I could not find Maggie in her dream, though I saw it through her eyes—and heard it through her ears. In her dream, the buzz of a distant motor grew louder. A man in a powerboat was speeding toward Maggie from across the lake, plumes of water arcing in his wake. He arrived in a spray of cold water and offered Maggie a ride. His face looked familiar to me somehow. Who was he? Her father as a younger man, or was he a past lover?
I would learn no more from Maggie’s dreams. Her partner, Adrian Calvano, pulled us both abruptly back to reality. He was shaking her shoulder and calling her name.
“Yo, Gunn,” he said. “Wake up. What the hell? I’ve never even seen you close your eyes before.”
“Get off me,” Maggie said, swatting him away automatically. She was momentarily confused, unsure of where she was. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Time for you to wake up before the new shift gets here and you look like a complete loser.”
She yawned and drank deeply from her soda. I touched the can. It was warm. How long had I been wandering through Maggie’s dreams with her?
“You feeling okay?” Calvano asked with concern in his voice. He felt different somehow, I thought, less cocky and more, well, real.
“I’m fine,” Maggie said. “I’m just tired of hitting dead ends. I’ve got nothing. What about you?”
Calvano sat in the chair next to her desk and stretched out his long legs. He stared at his ankles. He was probably thinking, Man, those are sharp shoes. Meanwhile, I was thinking, What kind of an asshole wears argyle socks?