LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

demanded.

      “The staff’s in with her now,” Leesha answered. “You’ll have to wait.”

      He eyed her frostily from head to toe. He was a fairly slight man and Leesha’s stolid form seemed to nonplus him a bit. He wasn’t used to being thwarted, wasn’t used to anything but complete capitulation. “Then I’ll wait.”

      Claire knew Freeson didn’t give a damn about the patient. This was all about jockeying for position within the hospital, and this patient provided media attention, something Freeson went after like a heat-seeking missile. He seemed to also have made it his personal mission to keep Claire in line.

      It was such utter bullshit. A means for everyone to believe that they were doing everything possible to rectify the fact that Melody Stone had been attacked on their hallowed grounds, in front of one of their own doctors, by another patient whose wealthy parents had coerced his release from those selfsame doctors and therefore helped set up the very events that led to Melody’s death.

      Why was she the only one who saw it?

      She answered her own question: hospital politics and money.

      The nightmare scene of Melody’s death tried to play across Claire’s mind again, but this time she resolutely stuck it inside a box in her mind and tied it tightly. Not now. Not today. She knew grief and shock took their own sweet time in relinquishing their grip, and so she was trying to let nature take its course and heal her. She’d made good strides and was beginning to understand and process Melody’s death. She was also almost managing to forgive Heyward, knowing he was at the mercy of his own disease, though that was happening much slower.

      The team of nurses and Dr. Blount came out of Jane Doe’s room and Leesha hurried over for a quick consult. Freeson breezed past them and entered the room. Claire felt compelled to follow him as he stood over the now peacefully resting patient.

      “Not labor,” Leesha said near her ear. “Some other pain. Maybe mental.”

      “She was attacked,” Claire reminded her.

      They were all silent for a few moments, then all left together. Claire said to Leesha, “Keep me informed.”

      “She’s not your patient,” Freeson told her, but Claire ignored him as she walked rapidly down the hall in the opposite direction that she’d arrived. By design she’d chosen a different exit. She had no interest in speaking to Freeson any more than she had to, and since he was likely to leave by the front, she would hit a side door. If he wanted her to wait for him, he could just go ahead and be pissed off that she’d avoided him.

      “Hey!” He called after her before she could turn the corner.

      Claire increased the length of her strides, pretending she didn’t know he was calling for her. She hit the stairs and hurried down the steps, pushing through a door to a small walkway that circled the building. Turning toward the front of the hospital and the parking lot, she bent her head to the chilly, drizzling rain. The Passat was still parked in a reserved spot. The hovering newspeople barely gave her a passing glance as she climbed into the car. She hadn’t left by the main entrance. She wasn’t wearing a lab coat. They couldn’t connect her to the patient and didn’t know who she was.

      Good.

      She’d had enough of them six months earlier. Oh, brother, had she! As she backed out, she glanced through the window at their news van and the smattering of people milling around. She could see the dark, slickly combed head of Pauline Kirby.

      Claire made a growling sound as she twisted the ignition. That woman had been particularly invasive. Between her insinuations, the accusations from Melody Stone’s family, and the abandonment of her colleagues, Claire had been under lethal assault.

      And when she thought about it—really thought about it without all the underlying sorrow and horror—it really kind of pissed her off.

      Turning the wipers on, she wheeled the Passat out of the lot. The interior was warm and she could smell her own body scent, dampened by rain. Lavender Mist. The body gel she’d washed with that morning in the shower. Today’s flavor, after lemon, apricot, and that horrible sea foam, was a fresh, almost minty scent that had been as ineffective as all the rest. Nothing could wash away the feeling of guilt, though she knew rationally she had nothing to feel guilty about.

      In her rearview she saw Freeson step from the vapor-locked portico in front of the hospital. His gaze searched the parking lot, the impatience on his face a tight mask. But he didn’t focus on her car as the news horde bore down on him.

      “Pretend you know something, Freeson,” she muttered, turning onto the main road. “Like you pretended to know what drove Heyward Marsdon to kill Melody Stone.”

      “Heyward Marsdon killed my sister and nobody did a damn thing about it,” Langdon Stone stated flatly as he tipped up a longnecked beer. He swallowed a third of the bottle, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and added, “I’m not coming back to the department. I’m not doing a damn thing until that sick, privileged bastard is behind bars. Prison bars.”

      “We know,” was the long-suffering response. His ex-partner, Detective Trey Curtis, dark-haired, lean, gruff, and still at the Portland Police Department, waved for the bartender to send over two more longnecks. “I’m not trying to get you to come back. Everything’s been better since you left.”

      Lang snorted.

      “Celek’s been doing a helluva job. I couldn’t ask for a better partner. And he’s better-looking than you are. Gets all the chicks. They swoon.”

      Curtis almost made Lang smile. Almost. He knew Curtis’s new partner, Joshua Celek: a chubby, freckled thirty-year-old with a sunny disposition and a belief in human nature that couldn’t be hammered out of him no matter how much depravity he encountered on the job. He looked and acted like a kid out of a fifties sitcom. He’d been elevated from robbery to homicide after Lang unceremoniously walked away from the job he’d worked for nearly a decade.

      “Swoon,” Lang repeated.

      “Yeah, swoon.”

      “Well, that’s good, then, ’cause I’m not coming back.”

      “Who says there’s a job waiting for you? You’re out. The chief…the captain…Lieutenant Drano…they’re all glad your pain-in-the-butt attitude is gone.”

      “Drano called me yesterday. Offered me more money and a new partner if I had problems with you.”

      “Drano’s on vacation in Mallorca.”

      “Yeah, he got back last night and phoned me as soon as he touched down at PDX.”

      “You’re lying. Good one, though.”

      Lang did smile now, and Curtis reached over and knocked Lang’s baseball cap off his head. They locked their arms around each other’s necks, alarming their waiter, who’d already seemed to want to comment on their choice of beer with breakfast. It was a long-standing rule with Lang and Curtis: whenever they met, whichever one saw the other first, that one would buy the first beer. Lang had spotted Curtis and had ordered two Budweisers and they’d been enjoying them with bacon and eggs.

      Curtis shoved Lang away from him and said to the waiter, “You don’t have to call the cops. I got a badge. Just off duty and trying to knock some sense into my friend here.” The waiter nodded slowly but the consternation on his face didn’t quite leave. “Really,” Curtis said.

      “Okay. Can I get you anything else?”

      Lang said, “Scotch and water, hold the water.”

      “No. Thanks.” Curtis waved the waiter off. “Not until after nine thirty.” As the waiter turned away, he admitted to Lang, “Okay, butthead, Drano does want you back. We all do.”

      Lieutenant Draden was called Drano because his craggy, world-weary face and dispirited manner made him seem drained of life. He was, in fact, savvy, smart, and

Скачать книгу