Damage Control (4 page)

8

D
ANA GRIPPED THE
edge of the desk, holding on.

“His neighbor found him. She called the police.”

“No,” she said. “I talked to him yesterday.” Her body started to shake. “I did. We were going to have lunch. I had to cancel—”

“—Dana. Dana?”

“Yesterday. I talked to him last night.” Her legs gave way. She collapsed into the chair, dropping the telephone to the floor.

“Dana? Dana, are you there? Dana?”

A hollow ringing echoed in her ears. Her office swirled about her, unfamiliar. The walls collapsed inward, shrinking like a visual effect, sucking the air from the room. She couldn’t breathe. She felt the floor vibrate, and with that came a harsh reality. The door to her office burst open. Crocket stepped in, berating her. “Do you think we can get on with the meeting? This is reflecting very poorly on the entire business…”

She looked at the phone dangling by its cord.

James is dead.

Crocket’s needling voice jabbed at her, and she hated him more at that moment than she ever had. She hated him because Marvin Crocket represented reality. This was not a nightmare. She would not awake. This was real. The pain gripping her chest exploded from her like a shock wave from the center of a blast. In a burst of fury she shot from the chair, flipping the desk as if it were a balsa-wood fake. Clutter and computer equipment slid off its face, crashing to the floor with a resounding thud.

H
OURS AFTER SHE
had rushed from her office in a daze of grief and a fog of disbelief and despair, Dana sat staring at fluorescent light reflecting off the waxed linoleum in the basement of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Next to her sat a female police officer. Despite the harsh reality of the stark white hallway, a part of her still clung to the faint hope that James was not dead—that it was all some horrible error, some egregious mistake to be rectified with profuse apologies. But she had been through this denial before, sitting on the same bench outside the King County medical examiner’s office, waiting to identify her father’s body.

There was no mistake. This was real. Her brother was dead.

“Ms. Hill?”

She looked up. There stood a well-dressed man in a tailored blue suit, white shirt, and diamond-patterned tie. He looked like a lawyer. “I’m Detective Michael Logan,” he said.

She didn’t bother to stand.

“I’m very sorry for your loss. Would you like to get a cup of coffee, something to drink?”

She estimated him to be six feet, with broad shoulders and a young face, freckles sprinkled across his nose and cheeks. His red hair had a light curl and was damp, presumably from the rain. “Do you know anything more?” she asked.

He sat beside her on the bench. “Not for certain. We believe your brother returned home at approximately eleven o’clock last night and walked in during a burglary. He may have been on the telephone, talking to you.”

Dana dropped her hand from her mouth. “Me?”

“That’s the last number on his phone. He called you at eleven-ten.”

She lowered her eyes to the floor, remembering. She had been stressed and anxious after the doctor’s appointment and Crocket’s tirade. She’d been fighting with Grant, then rolled over, exhausted. James’s call woke her. “Yes,” she said.

“You remember the call?” Logan asked.

She nodded. “You mean he was on the phone with me…” Tears streamed down her cheeks with the knowledge that her brother’s final act had been to call and find out if she was okay and tell her that he loved her.

Detective Logan gave her a moment to compose herself. “Do you recall what you and your brother talked about?”

She took a deep breath. “He had called me earlier in the day. I’d forgotten to call him back. He was just checking on me.” She remembered their conversation. “He said he had a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say.” She thought a moment. “We were going to have lunch today.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No. He was just… he didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.” She looked at Logan. “He said he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

“And you have no idea what he was referring to?”

“No. James never had problems.”

“Never?” She heard skepticism in the detective’s voice.

“No,” she repeated.

“So if he called you and wanted to talk in person, it was probably something important.”

“I don’t know,” she said, tired. “I guess so.”

“Could it have been the kind of problem that would lead to something like this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry to have to ask, Ms. Hill, but was your brother into anything—drugs, gambling, anything that might have put him in a situation where someone would have wanted to kill him?”

“You said it was a burglary—that James walked in on a burglary.”

“I did. I’m just following up on what you’ve told me, that your brother called and said he had a problem.”

She shook her head. “No.” She hesitated before becoming more definitive. “No. James didn’t do drugs. He was a vegetarian; he was a fanatic about what he put into his body. And I never knew him to gamble except maybe the college basketball pool at work. My brother was a good man, Detective. Everybody liked James. I never met anyone who didn’t like him.” Her voice became edgy with frustration and anger. “This just doesn’t make any sense. None of it makes any sense.”

Logan nodded. “Senseless acts of violence are difficult to understand and even more difficult to accept, I’m afraid. We have officers taking statements from your brother’s neighbors to determine if anyone saw anything suspicious or out of the ordinary—strangers walking around, a car that appeared out of place. The technicians found fingerprints in the house and shoe prints outside the back door. We’ll check to determine if there have been recent burglaries in the area. We’ll do our best to find out what happened and see if we can make some sense of it.”

“Ms. Hill?” Dana turned to a different voice. A man wearing blue hospital scrubs and a white smock stood in the hallway. “We’re ready for you now.” Dana stood. The man looked past her, down the hallway. “Is there anyone here with you?”

“No,” she said softly. “I’m alone.”

Logan stood from the bench. “I’ll go in with you.”

T
HE
H
ILL FAMILY
home in Medina was a five-bedroom house on an acre of well-manicured lawn, hedges, rhododendrons, and tulips. The backyard sloped gently from a pool to the edge of Lake Washington. Dana parked in front of the three-car garage to the left of the home, where the car could not be seen from the house. She sat undetected and wished she could remain there forever. She couldn’t, of course. Nor could she break down in hysterics or collapse from the pain and agony that felt like someone was standing on her chest. She had a job to do. She had to deliver bad news again. That was her job in life, delivering bad news. She had been the one to tell her mother when her father died. James had been out of town. She had told them both the story that her father’s law partner implored her to tell—that her father collapsed during a racquetball game at the Washington Athletic Club and died on the way to the hospital. That her father had been at his secretary’s condominium drinking his lunch and lying on top of her when he died was deemed irrelevant, a fact that would only serve to hurt her mother.

The image of her brother’s battered and distorted face haunted her, and she knew it would continue to do so for many years. The doctors had done their best to clean him up. She tried not to consider what he’d looked like before they did. His face was swollen and bruised, a strange maroon and purple color. His eyes were thin slits, as if he were peeking out from a deep sleep. His face was so foreign to her that Dana had hoped that it wasn’t her brother after all, though that hope had been fleeting.

“I need to see his hand,” she said.

“Which one?” the medical examiner asked.

“His left.”

She walked around the tray table to the left side. On the pinky finger, at the tip, was the odd-shaped mole, the same mole she bore on the same finger of her left hand. It looked like Saturn, a planet with a ring around it. As kids, she and James would swear secrecy by pushing those two moles together. It was James’s mole. It was her mole. It was their mole.

No mistake. “It’s James,” she said.

Somewhere down the street, the McMillans’ beagle barked the mournful wail of an old, tired dog. Dana remembered when he was a puppy. What would she tell her mother this time to temper the bad news? What would lessen the pain of a mother’s loss of a child? What else to say but “Mom, James is dead. Someone killed him. I don’t know why, and why doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”

“Oh, God.” Dana covered her mouth. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She felt herself coming unglued again and gripped the steering wheel, her body racked with sobs.

Then the infrastructure collapsed, and she cried long, sorrowful heaves.

M
ORNING PASSED.
The blanket of gray gave way to a blue sky with rolling white clouds. A chill remained—spring fighting the lingering winter. Dana stepped along the stone path amid the lambent shadows from the pine and dogwood trees swaying in a light breeze. She passed the Dutch door to the pantry off the kitchen. It had been the only door she and James had ever used growing up. But this was no longer her home, and it hadn’t been for some time. It would send the wrong message to use it now.

A part of her wished her mother wasn’t home, but where else would she be? Her mother had never worked. Not a day in her life. There was no need with a husband earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and who had left her a sizable estate—if not acquaintances. Following his death, her mother maintained few of their friends or hobbies. The law partners and wives who had been such good acquaintances when James Hill, Sr., was making rain for the firm—silent conspirators to his years of infidelity—suddenly disappeared. She canceled the family membership at the Overlake Golf & Country Club, not interested in pulling a golf cart around the course alone, and sold the cabin cruiser. She kept the speedboat, not for herself but for what she hoped would be many grandchildren. Most days she stayed at home knitting, doing needlepoint, and watching the soaps and talk shows.

Dana stepped beneath the peaked pediment supported on two white pillars, and took a moment to control her emotions. Then she raised the horse-head door knocker and rapped three times. After a moment the door pulled open. Her mother stood wearing yellow rubber gloves and holding a blackened sponge that smelled of a powerful chemical. She broke into an uncertain smile. “Dana. What a pleasant surprise. Why didn’t you use the side door? Don’t you still have your key?”

They touched cheeks, her mother careful to avoid getting any of the black grease on Dana’s suit. Voices from the television talked in the background. If Dana’s disheveled appearance and swollen eyes were apparent, her mother did not remark on them. But then the Hills had never been a family to confront the obvious, her father’s twenty-year fling with his secretary being the obvious example.

Dana followed her mother through the formal dining room in to the kitchen. Sliding glass doors overlooked the backyard. A spray of water from the pool sweep whipped through the air like a snake.

“I wish you had called.” Her mother put the sponge in the sink, removed the rubber gloves, and used the back of her arm to push aside a strand of hair that had uncurled from the bun on the back of her head. The oven door hung open, the stove burners in the sink. The room smelled of ammonia and badly burned toast. “I’m just cleaning the oven.”

“It’s a self-cleaning oven, Mom,” Dana said. She walked to the sliding glass door and opened it. A breeze fluttered the curtains. “You need air in here.”

“Are you out on business?” Medina was across Lake Washington, just five miles east of downtown Seattle and accessible by either of the two bridges, though her mother always made it sound like an arduous trek. “How’s Molly? How’s my sweet little angel?” Her mother was flustered, her routine disrupted.

“Molly’s fine.”

Her mother pulled open the refrigerator. “Let me fix you something. How about a glass of lemonade? I have turkey. Or I could defrost some chicken. I think I may have—”

“—Mom.”

Her mother paused.

“I’m not out here by accident. Come sit down.”

Her mother closed the refrigerator. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

She walked cautiously to the round kitchen table; a vase filled with fresh-cut roses from the yard was in the center. She pulled out a chair and sat on the edge of the seat.

“I have bad news,” Dana said, and she knew from her mother’s expression that she had heard the same echo Dana had heard from five years earlier.

“You’re not sick; are you? Molly’s not sick.”

“No, Mom. Molly’s not sick,” she said. “It’s James.” The words caught in Dana’s throat. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “He’s gone. James is gone.”

Her mother’s brow furrowed. Her eyes watered. “Gone?” she asked, the realization registering as it only could in a mother who had just lost a child. Her body collapsed under the weight of her agony.

“He’s dead, Mom. James is dead,” Dana said, and she knew she would hear the echo of those words as well for many years.

9

T
HE DOGWOOD SHADED
the kitchen a parlor gray as the sun dipped below the top of the foliage. Dana stood at the slate kitchen counter filling a teakettle with water and staring out into the backyard. The patio furniture had rust along the legs of the table and chairs. They would need to be cleaned, the seat cushions removed from storage, the white pop-up tents erected. There would be another gathering at the Hill home on the shores of Lake Washington. An Irish Catholic wake. Break out the liquor.

The adrenaline that had fueled her through the initial trauma and given her the strength to identify James’s body, to tell her mother, and to call the appropriate relatives and friends had given way to a dull lassitude. Some friends and relatives had already heard the news. They wanted to talk to her about it and ask her questions, but she had no answers for them and no desire to try to explain. Some offered to come to the house. She politely declined. Reporters called. She told them the family had no comment. Then she unplugged the telephone.

Her mother lay in her bedroom upstairs, behind the closed door at the end of the hall. She had collapsed in the kitchen, toppling from the edge of her chair, and would have crashed to the floor had Dana not caught her. Jack Porter, for years the Hill family doctor, did not hesitate when Dana called him. He came to the house and gave Kathy Hill something to calm her nerves and to lower her blood pressure.

The hot water from the faucet overflowed the top of the teakettle, stinging Dana’s hand. She turned it off, drained water from the top of the kettle, and turned instinctively to where the stove had once been but where now was a tiled counter. Her mother had remodeled the kitchen after her husband died, along with the three bathrooms. The stove, a restaurant-size range with eight burners and a grill big enough to cook for an army, was now located in a center island below a hood from which hung pots and pans. Dana had never understood why her mother had waited to remodel until she was alone in the house. Now Dana thought she understood perfectly. It was the same reason her mother had persisted in cleaning a self-cleaning oven: She needed things to do.

Dana put the kettle on the front burner. It ignited with a small pop and brought the faint odor of gas. Blue-yellow fingers lapped at its copper bottom until Dana adjusted the flame. She heard the sound of car tires turning in to the driveway, and stepped to the Dutch door. The blue BMW rolled to a stop next to her Explorer. Grant emerged carrying Molly, who was eating a chocolate ice cream cone, remnants smeared on her face and down the front of her blue dress. Dana looked at her watch; Molly would never eat her dinner. She shook her head. It suddenly seemed so unimportant.

She opened the door and walked outside. Upon seeing her, Molly ran forward, smiling brightly, the chocolate around her lips giving her a clownish appearance. “Mommy.”

The site of her little girl brought Dana to tears. She crouched and hugged her. When she pulled away, Molly asked, “Why are you crying, Mommy?”

Dana wiped her tears. “Mommy’s sad, honey.”

“Don’t be sad.” Molly held up the melting cone. “Do you want a taste?”

Dana took a small taste.

“Is that my little girl? Is that my Molly?” Kathy Hill came through the Dutch door wearing a white bathrobe and slippers, her hair flowing down her back. Makeup did not hide her puffy red eyes.

“Mom, Dr. Porter told you to stay in bed.”

Her mother walked past Dana and took Molly in her arms. “Is that my baby? Hello, my angel.”

“I got an ice cream, Grandma.”

“Yes, angel, I see that.” Kathy closed her eyes, cradling the little girl.

“Hi, Kathy,” Grant said.

Kathy did not look up. “Hello, Grant.”

“I’m very sorry about James.”

“Thank you.” Kathy swept up Molly in her arms. “Come on, angel, let’s go upstairs and read some books.”

“Grandma’s sad.”

“Yes, angel. Grandma’s very sad,” she said, carrying Molly back through the Dutch door.

Dana stepped forward, burying her face against Grant’s starched white shirt, crying on his chest. He caressed the back of her head as the events of the day cascaded down on her like broken glass, leaving tiny, painful cuts. After a minute she stepped back and wiped her tears. She’d left a smudge of mascara on his shirt. “Thanks for bringing her out here.” Her voice was thick and husky.

“I’d keep her with me if I could.”

Dana cleared her throat, pulled a wad of tissue from her back pocket, and blew her nose. “It’s okay. I want her here with me. She’s good therapy for Mom.”

Grant looked up at the dormer window on the second level. “How’s she doing?”

“As well as can be expected. You could go up and talk with her.”

Grant looked away from the window. “Probably not a good idea. I never seem to be able to say the right thing. You know she has issues with me. Have the police told you anything more?”

She shook her head and closed her eyes. “They beat him to death, Grant.”

“Jesus.”

“For what?” she asked, feeling the anger burn. “James didn’t have anything. He’d given everything away after he quit practicing law. Why would they rob
him
? Why not come here?” She extended her arms. “This is where the money is.”

“People here have walls and gates, Dana. They have security systems.”

“They killed him for nothing, Grant. They killed my brother for nothing.”

“And the police have no idea who it was, no leads of any kind?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “They have fingerprints and shoe prints but nothing confirmed yet.” She sighed. “I’d like you to stay, Grant.”

He stepped forward and held her again. He smelled of Armani cologne. It reminded her of law school and those moments when he had been there for her. But that was before the pressures of billable hours and making partner and finding and keeping clients had changed him. It was before ten years of getting up every morning and going to work to fight with someone had made him confrontational and cynical of people and their motives. It was before his own failures had made him resent her success. Sensitive to this, she rarely discussed her own career and instead focused on encouraging him, even after the second law firm had let him go. But after Molly’s birth, there wasn’t enough time in the day to be a wife, a cook, the family chauffeur, errand girl, lawyer, mommy, and to pacify a grown man’s ego. Grant responded by working more and finding excuses to stay out late.

He spoke with his chin resting on the top of her head. “Your family needs you to be strong.” His hands pressed her shoulder blades, but she felt no warmth. His voice contained no comfort. The wool of his suit jacket itched her cheek. “You’re strong. If anyone can get through this, it’s you.”

“It’s too much,” she said, crying again. “It hurts, Grant. God, it hurts to lose him.”

He held her, and for a moment she thought he might stay. But then his hands slipped from her back. “You know I start the Nelson trial in Chicago on Monday, and the rest of this week is just out of control. Hell broke loose today. They filed thirteen motions in limine and a forty-five-page trial brief. I can’t do anything less.”

“Couldn’t Bergman handle the trial?”

He pulled back with a look of incredulity. “This is my chance. Bergman is giving me Nelson Industries on a silver platter. When I win, I’ll put another thirty million dollars in the shareholders’ pockets—the biggest contingency award in the history of the firm. I’ll be a superstar. It’s my tenure. Nelson Industries will be a guaranteed three-million-dollar client in my column. I’ll be—
we’ll
be set for life. We can get a house on the lake, a boat, everything we’ve wanted.”

At the moment she didn’t want anything. She no longer wanted him. The law had not changed him. It had just defined who he was all along. She studied the moss that had worked its way through the mortar of the stone walkway, undermining its integrity, and thought of her marriage. Removing the moss would not be easy.