Angel Interrupted (20 page)

“No.” I smiled. “But I wish she was.”

“Should I tell her it’s from you?”

“No, just tell her the little boy she is looking for lives in that house and that it’s by the lake where we used to get our drinking water.”

The little girl looked puzzled by this, but hopped from her chair and marched across the room, drawing in hand, willing to approach Maggie.

Unfortunately, Serena Holman chose that moment to enter the room in search of her patients. She spotted the girl and beckoned her over. “You were supposed to be in radiation ten minutes ago,” she admonished the child. “We had a deal.”

A nurse had followed Dr. Holman into the room. She looked terrified but risked a comment. “I just thought it would do her good to—”

“Thank you,” Dr. Holman said abruptly. “When I want an opinion from you, I’ll be sure to ask you for it.”

She turned her back on the nurse and reached for the little girl, but the child twisted away and darted over to where Maggie was standing and thrust the drawing at her.

“I drew this for you,” she said. “A little boy who’s lost lives in the house and drinks water from the lake.”

“How nice,” Maggie said uncertainly as she stared at the drawing. She placed the drawing on top of her briefcase, her attention already elsewhere. I had lost my chance.

Serena Holman was examining Maggie suspiciously, having noticed her for the first time. Maggie took the hint. “Maggie Gunn,” she said, showing her badge. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I’m assuming this is about Fiona Harker?” the doctor asked with distaste. Emotions roiled in her—Fiona had definitely pushed some of her buttons, but I could not separate them out. This was one tightly coiled lady.

“Yes. It is.” Maggie looked over at the children, wondering if they could overhear.

“Take her to radiation,” Dr. Holman said, dismissing the little girl and nurse with a wave of her hand. “We can talk over here.” Her voice was cold. Gone was the warm and caring doctor of the donor tour. It appeared the lady had two faces and the nurses, who seemed to loathe her, saw only one of them.

She led Maggie to the same table where I had been sitting. My little friend was gone. The doctor did not sit, but stood by the table, glancing impatiently at her watch.

“I just need a few moments,” Maggie assured her. “Did you know Fiona Harker?”

“In passing,” Holman said. “Our paths seldom crossed. She worked in the emergency room with my husband. Ex-husband,” she corrected herself.

“Were they friends?” Maggie asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Were they friends?” Maggie repeated, more sharply. Uh-oh. Her personal feelings were creeping back in. She did not like Serena Holman.

“I suppose.” The doctor glanced at her watch again. “If you consider coworkers friends. My husband—
exhusband
—has no friends. He has his work and people he knows from work. Otherwise, I’d hardly call him a social animal.”

Translation:
He hated going to all those hospital charity benefits that I dragged him to and, worse, failed to appreciate my utter divineness when I wore my designer ball gowns and showed off my boney shoulder blades. Others worshipped me, why not him? And by the way, I am really pissed that I married this brilliant med student only to find out he’d rather work in an emergency room than become chief of staff at Johns Hopkins.

Oh, yes, I had run into Serena Holman’s type before. And I now understood why Christian Fletcher chose to work all the time. Still, he was the one who had married her. If he had not been smart enough to see beyond her expensive good looks to her self-centeredness, then he had gotten exactly what he deserved.

Maggie was blatantly sizing the doctor up. Holman was returning the favor.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve fallen for his noble-doctor act, too,” Serena Holman finally said, breaking the silence.

“I beg your pardon?” Maggie sounded extremely professional. She was going to ice this lady’s wings but good.

“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.

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.