Broken Promise (44 page)

“Isn’t that kind of strange? I mean, your mother’s in charge of the hospital, and she doesn’t want you to have the baby there?”

“There was a thing going around.
C. diff
or something.”

“But still. It seems odd to go so far away to have the child.”

“It was okay,” Marla said, “because Dr. Sturgess was there. Except . . .” She looked down at the table. “Except it wasn’t okay. The cord got wrapped around the baby’s neck, and they couldn’t save it.”

“It must have been . . . horrific,” he said.

Marla nodded slowly. “Yeah. Although I was kind of out of it when the baby was actually born. Dr. Sturgess gave me stuff to kill the pain.”

“Tell me about that.”

Marla shrugged. “That’s kind of all there is to say. I was in pain. It wasn’t that bad, but Dr. Sturgess and my mom said it would get a lot worse, so they gave me something. And I never felt it when the baby came out.”

“But you saw her after.”

Marla nodded. “I did. I don’t . . . I don’t actually remember it . . . but I did see her. I touched her fingers and kissed her head.”

“But if you don’t remember it, how do you know what happened?”

“My mom helped me to remember. Because it was so foggy for me. But she’s told me what happened over and over again, so it’s like I do remember it.”

“Tell me a little more about that.”

“Well, it’s kind of like . . . when I was a baby myself, about one and a half years old, and we were visiting some friends of my parents, and they had a big dog that ran up to me and knocked me down and was about to bite me, right in the face, when the owner kicked the dog away. I guess I was pretty scared, and cried a lot, but I don’t really remember it happening. But my mom and dad have told that story over the years, and I can see it all like a movie, you know? I see myself getting knocked down, the dog jumping on me. I can picture exactly what the dog looks like, even though I really don’t know. It’s a bit like that. Do you know what I mean?”

Duckworth smiled. “I think maybe I do.”

SIXTY-FOUR

David

I
didn’t have much time to process what Aunt Agnes had to say. Not that she’d said much. But the implications were immense.

By telling me to run, she must have had some idea where I was, and of my situation.

Agnes seemed to know I’d just met up with Dr. Jack Sturgess.

And she wanted me to get away from him as quickly as I could.

A millisecond after Agnes screamed at me, I turned my head left to look at Dr. Sturgess. That arm he’d been keeping close to his side was moving away from his body. I thought I saw something small and cylindrical in his hand. Like a pencil with a metallic point.

No. More like a syringe.

“Shit!” I said, then dropped the phone, threw the column shift into drive, and pressed my foot right to the floor. Mom’s old Taurus was no Ferrari, but it kicked ahead fast enough to push Sarita back in her seat, spray gravel all over the front of Gaynor’s Audi, and make Dr. Sturgess leap backward to keep his feet from getting run over.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop!”

The Taurus fishtailed on the gravel, then lurched and squealed as the left back tire connected with pavement.

“Who was that?” Sarita cried. “Who called you?”

I couldn’t think about answering her question. I glanced back for half a second to make sure we weren’t pulling into the path of a tractor-trailer, and caught a glimpse of Sturgess fiddling with his jacket, possibly reaching into it.

“Get down,” I said to Sarita.

“What?”

“Get down!”

I checked my mirror again, worried that the doctor might be carrying more than a syringe. But he wasn’t standing there with a gun in his hand. He was running back to Bill Gaynor’s Audi.

There was an intersection just ahead. I cut across the lane to make a left, the tires complaining loudly. The car felt as though it had gone up on two wheels for half a second. Sarita threw up her hands, braced herself against the dash as we went around the corner.

“What happened?” she asked. “What did you see?”

“He had some kind of needle,” I said. “He was holding a syringe. Another second and I think he would have jabbed it into my neck.”

There was another cross street only a quarter mile ahead. If I took that, and then the street after that, and even the one after that, I thought I had a good chance of losing them. The Audi could outrun this old clunker, no doubt about it. But if they didn’t know which way we’d gone, it wasn’t going to matter how fast that marvelous piece of German engineering could go.

I reached down beside me, feeling for my cell.

“Where’s my phone?” I shouted.

Sarita looked down between the seats. “I see it!”

“Get it!” I said, keeping up my speed, glancing in the mirror, not seeing any sign of them yet.

The next cross street was too far away. I feared the Audi would round the bend, that Gaynor and Sturgess would catch a glimpse of us before we could make the next turn.

“Hang on,” I said.

I slammed on the brakes, leaving two long strips of rubber on the road. I could smell it, and smoke billowed out from under the wheel wells. I cut the car hard right and sped into the parking lot of a Wendy’s. I drove straight to the back of the property, behind the restaurant, making sure the car was not visible from the street. This fast-food place, and a lot of the other businesses along this stretch, had sprung up to serve spillover customers from Five Mountains, and were probably all feeling the pain, now that the park was toast.

Not that that was a major concern at the moment. I was just glad for a place to hide.

“What are you doing?” Sarita asked. “Are you
hungry
?”

I sat there for maybe five minutes, then slowly drove down the side of the building and approached the road. I nosed up to the edge, looked both ways.

No sign of the Audi.

I headed back in the direction we’d come from.

“The phone,” I said.

Sarita went back to digging between the seat and the transmission hump. “I can’t quite . . . I got it!”

“Okay,” I said. “Go back to the last call and connect me to that number.”

She pressed the screen a couple of times, then handed me the phone. “It should be ringing.”

Agnes picked up immediately. “David?”

“What the hell’s going on, Agnes?” I shouted. “That fucking doctor of yours was ready to jab some needle into me!”

“Did you get away? Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I’m heading back into town. How did you
know
? How did you know what was going to happen?”

“I can’t explain over the phone. I . . . I can’t. I’ll meet you at your parents’ place. I’ll explain. I’ll explain it all. Do you have Sarita with you?”

“Jesus, how did you know
that
?”

Were we on satellite surveillance? How could Agnes be aware of everything and everywhere we—

Unless she’d been talking to Sturgess. Or Gaynor.

“David, listen to me,” Agnes said. “You have to protect Sarita. I can’t explain why now, but—”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “I think I get it. I’ll see you at the house, Agnes. I have to get off the phone. I’m calling Duckworth, whether you like it or not.”

“I can’t stop what you do.” I could hear resignation in her voice.

I ended the call.

“Let me out,” Sarita said. “I’ve told you everything. I have to get away. You can let me out anyplace. I can hitchhike.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Sarita. I really am. There’s no running away from this.”

I glanced down at the phone long enough to hit 911.

“I need to talk to Detective Duckworth,” I said to the operator. “I need to talk to him right fucking now.”

SIXTY-FIVE

SOMETHING
had been nagging at Wanda Therrieult.

The Promise Falls medical examiner had been reviewing the pictures she’d taken during her examination of Rosemary Gaynor. Photos of her entire body, with several close-ups of the marks on her neck and the gash across her abdomen. She had transferred them to the computer and was looking at them shot by shot as she sat at her desk, a cup of specialty coffee—a flavor she could not even pronounce—resting next to the keypad.

She kept coming back to the pictures of the bruising on the woman’s neck. The imprint of the thumb on one side, four fingers on the other.

The knife wound that went from one hip to the other. The slight downward curvature toward the center. What Barry Duckworth had said looked like a smile.

She thought back to her very personal demonstration on the detective of how she believed Rosemary Gaynor had been attacked. She recalled how she’d positioned herself behind him, put one hand on his neck, wrapped her other arm around the front of him to illustrate how the knife went in.

Not that easy to reach around Barry.

They’d known each other a long time—long enough that Wanda could do something like this without it having to mean anything. She loved Barry as a friend and colleague. Sometimes, working where she did, it was just nice to touch a live body once in a while.

The dead bodies she’d always thought of as customers. And she treated them with the utmost respect, because they got to visit her shop only once.

“The customer is always right,” she liked to say, because the dead did not lie. The dead, Wanda believed, desperately wanted to speak to her, and what they wanted to tell her was the truth.

Over the years, she’d accepted invitations from a number of groups—Probus, Rotary, the local chamber of commerce—to talk about her job.

“I like to think that everyone who ends up on that table is an individual. That each and every one is special. You don’t want them all to become a blur, if you know what I mean. Even after all these years, I remember every one of them.”

Sometimes she’d see something on one victim that brought to mind something she’d seen on another. Ten years back, police were looking for someone who was mugging johns after they’d visited prostitutes in the south end of town. Hitting them in the head with a brick, lifting their wallets. Often he came up with nothing, evidently not learning that if you’re going to rob someone who’s visiting a hooker, if you do it prerendezvous, your target’s likely to have a little more money on him.

A couple of these poor bastards ended up dead.

Wanda Therrieult noticed that even though the murders were several weeks apart, the microscopic chips of stone in their skulls were similar. The killer was using the same brick.

One night, police patrolling the south end pulled over a driver for failing to signal. And there, on the front seat, was the brick.

“It was my lucky brick,” the man told the judge before being sentenced to fifteen years.

There was something about Rosemary Gaynor’s death that was making a bell go off, ever so faintly, in the back of her head.

Given Wanda’s photographic memory for these things, she wondered why it wasn’t coming up right away. She could usually close her eyes and call up bludgeonings and gunshot wounds as though they were snapshots from a family album.

What had happened to Rosemary Gaynor reminded her not of something she had seen, but of something she had heard about.

Something three or four years ago.

Another murder.

Three years ago, right around this time, she’d taken a two-month leave of absence. Her sister Gilda, in Duluth, had been dying, and Wanda had gone up there to look after her in those final weeks. It had been a sad time, but also profoundly meaningful. It became one of the most important periods in her life. Wanda still made calls back to Promise Falls, checking in, catching up on what was going on. Gilda had jokingly accused her at one point of being more interested in the fully dead than the aspiring.

Wanda opened another program. Photo files from other cases, arranged by date. She went back to the beginning of her leave, opening one file after another.

A five-year-old girl run over by a car.

A forty-eight-year-old roofer who tripped off the top of a church he was reshingling.

A nineteen-year-old Thackeray student from Burlington, Vermont, who’d brought his father’s Porsche 911 to school for a week, lost control of it, and crashed it into a hundred-year-old oak at eighty miles per hour.

A twenty-two-year-old woman who—

Hang on . . .

Wanda clicked on the file.

Opened up the photos.

Took a sip of her coffee as she studied the images.

“Oh, boy,” she said.

SIXTY-SIX

ONCE
Agnes Pickens was finished talking to her nephew, she went up the stairs to her second-floor home office and closed the door. She sat down at her desk, fired up her computer, opened Word, and selected the letter format.

She wanted the margins just right. What she had to write was short, so she didn’t want the letter to start too high on the page, which would leave acres of white space at the bottom. It would look unbalanced.

So she wrote what she had to say, then selected “print preview” to make sure it looked presentable. It didn’t. She had pushed the message too far down on the page. She deleted a few indents above the text, then looked at the preview again, and was happy with how it looked.

She hit “print.”

The letter came out, and she read it one more time, looking for typos. That would be so embarrassing, to have a typographical error or a spelling mistake in something of this nature.

Agnes had dated it at the top, then written below:

I hereby resign my position as administrator and general manager of the Promise Falls General Hospital, effective immediately.

She had considered, briefly, expanding on it. Perhaps a word about regret. Maybe a line or two about her lifelong commitment to the Promise Falls community and public health. An apology about failing to live up to the high standards she had set for herself. But in the end, a simple, unembellished resignation seemed the way to go.