Night Sins (36 page)

What?
Megan wanted to ask. The job situation? Their personal situation? She chose the former, knowing that was where their focus needed to be, knowing that damn clock would not stop ticking.

“That means one thing,” she said, her expression grim. “We find Josh.”

CHAPTER 27

D
AY
8
5:39
P.M.
         -27°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: -45°

H
annah stood at the window, staring out at the lake. The final rays of sunlight streaked the far horizon like angry red lines of infection radiating from a wound. Funny how such a hot color was an indication of such a cold sky. As she stood there, she could feel the cold seeping in through the glass, seeping into her body. She wished it would numb her, but it didn't; it simply made her shiver.

Across the lake, lights winked on. The helicopters had been called in again. She could see one in the distance, hanging over Dinkytown like a vulture. In her memory she recalled the thumping of the rotors and how she had lain awake listening to their eerie passing back and forth over the town. Beyond Dinkytown, out toward the flaming horizon, lay Ryan's Bay. On Ryan's Bay a dog had discovered Josh's jacket, discarded like a piece of litter.

She could see the jacket in her mind's eye—bright blue with splashes of green and yellow. She knew the size and the brand name. She knew the pockets where he stashed small treasures and Kleenex and mittens. She knew the smell of it and the feel of it, and all those memories hovered in her mind, intangible and untouchable. Only the second sign of Josh to surface in a week, and she had not been allowed to see it or touch it. The jacket had been whisked off to St. Paul to be studied and analyzed.

“I would have liked to just hold it,” she said quietly. She tried to imagine it in her hands, raising it to her face, brushing it against her cheek.

“I'm sorry, Hannah,” Megan said gently. “We felt it was essential to get it to the lab as soon as possible.”

“Of course. I understand,” she murmured. But she didn't, not outside that logical, practical square of brain that answered by rote.

“You'll get fingerprints off it?” Paul said. He sat by the fireplace in faded black sweatpants and a heavy gray sweatshirt with a University of Minnesota logo. His hair was still damp from the shower he had taken to warm himself. Lily sat on his lap, trying unsuccessfully to interest him in her stuffed Barney.

Megan and Mitch exchanged a look.

“No,” Mitch said. “It's virtually impossible for nylon to hold fingerprints.”

“What then?”

“Do you really want to make them say it?” Hannah said sharply. “What do you think they'll be looking for, Paul? Blood. Blood and semen and any other grisly leftover from whatever this animal has done to Josh. Isn't that right, Agent O'Malley?”

Megan said nothing. The question was rhetorical. Hannah neither needed nor wanted an answer. She stood with her back to the window, defiance and anger a thin mask over the raw terror that consumed her.

“The woman whose dog found the jacket may have seen the man who planted it,” Mitch said. “In fact, she may have had a conversation with him.”

“May have?” Hannah said, puzzled.

Mitch told them the story of Ruth Cooper and the man who had come to her door after she'd seen him through her kitchen window. When he came to the part about the dog's name, Hannah turned ashen and took hold of the wing chair for support.

Paul came to attention. He rose slowly, setting Lily down on the floor. She toddled over to Mitch and offered him her dinosaur. Father Tom rose from the couch and scooped her up, tickling her into giggles as he carried her to the bedroom upstairs.

“So, she can identify this man,” Paul said.

“She's working with a composite artist,” Megan explained. “It's not as easy as we'd like it to be. The man was bundled up to be out in the weather. But she thinks she might be able to pick him out if she sees him again.”

“Might? Maybe?” Pulling a poker from the stand of brass tools, Paul turned his attention to the fire, stabbing at the glowing logs, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney.

“It's better than nothing.”

“It
is
nothing!” He wheeled around, poker in hand, his lean face twisted with bitter rage. “You've got
nothing
! My son is lying dead someplace and you've got nothing! You can't even manage to keep the one suspect you had alive!”

Hannah glared at him. “Stop it!”

He paid no attention to her, his anger directed for the moment at Mitch and Megan. “You're too busy fucking each other to worry about my son—”

“Paul, for God's sake!”

“What's the matter, Hannah?” he demanded, rounding on her, his fingers tightening on the grip of the poker. “Did I offend your sensibilities?”

“You offended everyone.”

“I don't care. They screwed up and my son has to pay the price—”

“He's my son, too—”

“Really? Is that why you left him on the street to be kidnapped and murdered?” he shouted, flinging the poker sideways. It hit the wall with a resounding crack and fell to the floor.

Hannah could barely draw the breath to respond. He could have run the poker through her and not hurt her as badly. “You bastard!” she said, her voice a trembling whisper.

“Paul!” Mitch barked, clamping a hand down on his shoulder, his anger making the grip punishing. “Let's go into your study,” he said through his teeth.

Grimacing, Paul twisted away from him. “So you can lecture me again on how I should give my wife my support?” he sneered. “I don't think so. I'm not interested in anything you have to say.”

“Tough.” Mitch grabbed him again and steered him off in the direction of his office.

Hannah didn't watch them go. Struggling to keep hold of her control, she crossed the room, picked up the fireplace poker, and put it back in its stand. Her hands were shaking so badly, she couldn't remember them ever having been steady enough to hold a scalpel.

“Well,” she said, wiping her palms on her jeans, “that was ugly.”

“Hannah—” Megan started to say.

“The worst part of it is, it's true. It's my fault.”

“No. You were late. That shouldn't have cost you Josh.”

“But it did.”

“Because of the man who chose to take him. You had no control over his decision.”

“No,” she murmured. “And now I have control of nothing. Because of that one moment in time, my life is flying apart. If I had made it out of the hospital before Kathleen rounded that corner to call me back in, Josh would be here. I would be picking him up from hockey today. Josh would be complaining about having to go to religion class at seven.

“One moment. A handful of seconds. A heartbeat.” Staring at the fire, she snapped her fingers. “That much time and that car accident would never have happened. I wouldn't have been called back into the ER, and Josh wouldn't have been left all alone, and we wouldn't be standing here now, feeling awkward because my husband blames me . . .”

She let the thoughts trail off. There was no going back in time, only forward into uncertainty. Drained, she sank down into a chair and curled her legs beneath her. The muffled sound of angry voices came from behind the closed door of Paul's study.

Hannah picked at a dried scab of blue paint on the knee of her jeans. “I'd like to go back and find that moment when Paul changed, too,” she whispered. “He used to be so different. We used to be so happy.”

Megan didn't know how to respond. She had never been much for sharing confidences with other women. Her lack of skill with relationships gave her no expertise to draw upon for sage wisdom. She turned to the one thing she knew. “When did you start to notice a change in him?”

“Oh, I don't know.” Hannah shrugged. “It was so subtle. In little ways, years ago, I suppose. A year or so after we moved here.”

After she had begun to establish herself at the hospital and in the community. Moving here had been Paul's idea, and she often wondered what he had imagined in his heart of hearts. She wondered if he had seen himself as becoming the fixture in the community she had become, becoming someone well known and well liked and well respected. In their early days together he had confided he wanted to be somebody, somebody other than the bookworm son of a blue-collar family. Had he thought he would become someone different here, someone outgoing and gregarious, when he didn't have those qualities in him? She hated to think it was jealousy that had driven this wedge between them and poisoned the love they had shared. It seemed such a pointless emotion, nothing that belonged between people who had pledged to respect and support each other.

“And he's been withdrawing more recently?” Megan asked.

“He resents the time I spend at the hospital since I was promoted to head of the ER.”

“What about his schedule? He was working that night.”

“It's nearly tax season. He'll be putting in a lot of nights.”

“Does he normally ignore his answering machine when you call him at the office at night?”

Hannah sat up a little straighter, her eyes narrowing, something in her chest tightening. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

Megan gave her what she hoped was a convincing sheepish look. “I'm a cop; it's what I do best.”

“You can't possibly think Paul had something to do with this.”

“No, no, of course not. It's just routine,” Megan lied. “We need to know where everyone was—you know, before the lawyers get ahold of the case. They're fanatics for detail. Mother Teresa would need an alibi if she were here. When we catch this guy, his lawyer will probably try to pin it on someone else. He'll try to prove his client was somewhere else at six o'clock this morning. If he's sleazy enough, he'll ask where you were at six o'clock this morning, and where Paul was.”

Hannah blinked at her, her face carefully blank. “I don't know where Paul was. He was gone when I woke up. He said he went out on his own, just driving around town, looking . . . I'm sure that's what he did,” she said, sounding as if she were trying to convince herself as much as Megan.

“I'm sure you're right,” Megan agreed. She was filing everything about this scene in her memory—the facts, Hannah's tone of voice, her expression, the tension that hovered around her like static electricity. “I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just want you to understand how this works, why we have to ask some of these questions. What I really wanted to ask was if any names had come to you—people who might have a grudge against you or Paul. A dissatisfied patient, a disgruntled client, that sort of person.”

“You've already interviewed everyone we know,” Hannah said. “I honestly can't think of any patients who would have felt driven to such horrible lengths. Most of what we see in a small hospital like ours are cases that are either easily curable or instantly fatal. Most critical cases—accident victims and so on—are flown directly to HCMC. Patients with serious illnesses are referred to larger hospitals as well.”

“But you must lose a few here.”

“A few.” Her mouth curved in sad memory. “I remember when I worked in the Cities we used to call little rural hospitals like Deer Lake tag 'em and bag 'em joints. We do the best we can, but we don't have the equipment or the staff of a large hospital. People here understand that.”

“Maybe,” Megan murmured, making a mental note to stop by Deer Lake Community Hospital to feel out the staff in the ER herself.

“As far as Paul's clients go, there are a few who squawk every year about what they have to pay in taxes, but that's hardly his fault.”

“No big catastrophic audits, people sent to prison, that kind of thing?”

“No.” Hannah pushed herself up out of the chair, the nervous restlessness never allowing her more than a few minutes of stillness, regardless of fatigue. “I'm going to make some tea. Would you like some? It's so cold—”

And Josh was out there somewhere without his coat.

Outside the big picture window, night had fallen, cold and black as an anvil.

“Do you think he's alive?” she whispered, staring out at the darkness into which Josh had disappeared eight long days before.

Megan rose to stand beside her. A little over a week ago everyone in town would have said Hannah had it all—the career, the family, the house on the lake. Half the town had looked on her as an icon of modern womanhood. Now she was just a woman, shattered and vulnerable, clinging to a thread of hope as thin as a hair.

“He's alive until someone proves to me he isn't,” Megan said. “That's what I believe. That's what you need to believe, too.”

The door to Paul's office swung open. He stormed out and left the house through the door that led to the garage. Mitch emerged from the study, his face grim and drawn with lines of fatigue.

“I don't know how to get through to him,” he muttered as he walked into the family room.

“Neither do I,” Hannah confessed. “Should we start a support group?”

Mitch mustered half a smile for her stab at humor. He took her hands in his and gave them a squeeze. Her fingers were as cold as death. “I'm sorry, Hannah. I'm so sorry for all of this. I wish there were something more I could do.”

“I know you guys are doing all you can. It's not your fault.”

“It's not yours, either.” He pulled her into his arms and gave her a hug. “Hang in there, honey.”

Hannah walked them to the door and saw them out into the frigid night. On her way back through the family room she stopped for a moment and listened to the silence. Their “watcher,” as she referred to the agent assigned to the house, had gone for dinner when Mitch and Megan had arrived, and had yet to return. She had asked for and received a reprieve from the tag team companions sent from the neighborhood and the far-flung reaches of the missing children's organization. The house was quiet, calm, the tension gone.

She wondered where Paul was, wondered how long she would have until he returned and the hostilities resumed. She wondered how long the rift between them would take to heal. A week, a month, a year. She wondered if they would have Josh back before it happened. She wondered if she really wanted it to heal.

In her mind she saw his jacket lying tangled in the reeds at Ryan's Bay.

As the fear and dread and guilt began another cycle inside her, she went up the stairs and down the hall to Lily's room. Lily would give her comfort and love, unconditional, nonjudgmental, no questions asked.