Angel Interrupted

Chapter 31

For thirty-three long minutes, no one spoke. The doctor sat in a chair and closed his eyes, taking the opportunity to enjoy a catnap. The nurse fussed over Cody Wells, constantly adjusting his pillows and checking the monitoring devices. Maggie leaned against a wall and lost herself in her thoughts. She was thinking of Christian Fletcher, I knew, thinking of him a floor below, knowing that he was probably feeling betrayed now that she had chosen Dr. Verrett to stand guard instead of him. She was wondering if he would ever get over what he was sure to see as a betrayal.
Ah, the job. I remembered it all too well. It always forced you to choose between the people in your life and life on the job. For a woman like Maggie it would be even worse. She’d dealt with it before by having no life outside the job. I’d dealt with it by having neither.
Somewhere during those thirty-three minutes, the little boy who had been standing watch over Cody Wells faded from view. One moment he was there; the next he was gone. Does that mean the man’s life is out of danger?
“He’s coming out of it,” the nurse finally announced.
Maggie moved to his bedside.
“Not so fast, hotshot,” the doctor told her. He bent over Cody Wells and checked his pulse and pupils, then made adjustments in the IV solution. “It’s going to take him a while to regain full consciousness.”
“Will he remember who took his breathing tube out?” Maggie asked.
“No.” The doctor shook his head. “You’ll be lucky if he remembers anything about the last forty-eight hours before he was admitted. Trauma can do that to you.”
“But he’ll remember four or five days ago?” Maggie asked, alarmed.
The doctor stared at her. “This is medicine. I don’t give guarantees.”
But the man remembered. Slowly he gained consciousness, his eyes clearing, his face regaining animation, his breathing strong enough for the doctor to remove the breathing tube. It was as if he were emerging from the bottom of a deep, deep sea. Maggie had to be patient, and she didn’t do patient well. She fidgeted and kept darting toward the bed before being sent back to her corner by a look from the doctor or nurse. If so much hadn’t been riding on the outcome, I’d almost have enjoyed her discomfort.
At last, Cody Wells was lying slightly elevated in bed, breathing under his own power, sipping at a cup of water the nurse held to his lips.
His first words were simple: “The boy?”
Maggie was at his side in an instant. “He’s okay,” she said. “We found him. He’s with his mother now.”
Something in the man let go. He seemed to melt into the pillows, as if he could drift back to a twilight world again.
“Wait,” Maggie said. “I need to ask you some questions.”
“I would never have hurt him,” the man whispered to her. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
“We saw the video,” Maggie said. “I saw you taking good care of him. It’s okay. I understand.”
“I should never have taken him from the playground in the first place,” the man whispered. “I was afraid if I didn’t, I’d lose everything.” Suddenly his eyes widened. He looked alarmed. “Where’s the colonel? Does he know he’s lost the boy?”
“The colonel is upstairs in the burn unit,” the nurse interrupted. Her voice was tight. “He’ll probably never regain consciousness. If fate is kind to him.”
Maggie looked up at her, startled. The look the nurse gave her right back was very clear: I’m sorry, it said, but I am a nurse, and this man hurt someone. No one should have to go through the agony that man is going through upstairs in the burn unit. No one. I don’t care what he did.
Well, I wasn’t sure I agreed with her. The colonel had caused greater and more lasting agony in how many young souls? But that difference between us was why I had been a detective and why the gray-haired woman was a nurse. I wasn’t going to fault her for it.
“Do you remember anything about the fire?” Maggie asked the man gently.
He shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” Maggie assured him. “I’m not here about that.”
The man relaxed again, but I knew what Maggie was thinking: as soon as Howard McGrew’s charred body gave up the fight, it was very likely this man lying in bed before her, so concerned about the boy, would be charged with his murder. And go to prison for a very long time because of it.
“Did you know the colonel’s real name?” Maggie asked him.
The man stared at her with vacant eyes strangely reminiscent of those of the little boy apparition. “I called him Daddy,” he explained. “I don’t know his real name.”
“What’s your real name?” Maggie asked. “We know it’s not Cody Wells.”
Tears filled the man’s eyes. His pulse raced and Dr. Verrett glared a warning at Maggie. She ignored him. “What’s your real name?” she asked again.
He shook his head weakly. “No,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want people to know.”
“You’re going to lose him,” the doctor warned her. “If you push him too hard, he’ll just drop back down under. People’s bodies take care of their minds.”
Maggie did not want that to happen. Not until she knew what he’d seen from his vantage point in the park, when he’d sat on the bench right across from Fiona Harker’s house, keeping track of everyone and everything around him.
“Right before you went into surgery, you told two people ‘I know who killed the nurse,’ ” she explained to the man. “Do you remember?”
“No,” he whispered back. “I don’t remember saying any of that.”
Maggie looked panicked “But do you know who killed Fiona Harker?”
“Yes. It was the doctor. I saw the doctor leaving her house the morning the newspapers say she died,” he explained weakly.
“What did he look like?” Maggie asked.
The man looked confused.
“What did he look like?” she asked again.
“It was a woman,” the man said. “It was a tall woman with long, blonde hair wearing a doctor’s coat and high heels.”
“Why do you assume she was a doctor?”
“She drove a red Lamborghini, that’s why. And she acted like she thought she was hot shit, like doctors always do. Like they’re too good for the rest of us.”
Dr. Verrett looked amused at this. I had to give him credit for having a sense of humor.
But Maggie looked stunned. I knew what she was thinking: Serena Holman had killed Fiona Harker for having an affair with her husband. Simply divorcing Christian Fletcher had not been good enough. No one crossed Serena Holman like that. Not without paying. No one.
Which made Christian Fletcher a big, fat liar. It meant he had, indeed, been having an affair with Fiona Harker.
“Are you sure?” Maggie asked. “Did you get a good look?”
“I’m sure,” he said. “It was the third or fourth time I’d seen her. I recognized her from a few days before, and the week before that, too, when I was sitting in my car, watching the park, trying to decide if I . . .” He did not want to continue in that direction and returned to what he had seen. “One day, she walked right past me and didn’t even give me a glance. Each time I saw her, it was always midmorning. She’d come on Mondays and Wednesdays, stay for a few hours, and then leave. It was always the same lady doctor. I just figured someone who was sick lived there.”
That changed everything.
Fiona Harker had been in love with Serena Holman, not Christian Fletcher.
It explained why Fiona never talked about her private life, why she told no one else about the affair, why she lived so far away from her family. She was Catholic. She would have felt the need to hide it, and she must have felt so conflicted over her feelings for Serena. It also explained motive. Serena Holman had killed Fiona Harker to protect her reputation as a successful doctor and society queen, the tall blonde every man in the room wanted, the one they all opened up their checkbooks for.
I have seen people kill for many reasons, and I have seen many kinds of people killed. But I wasn’t sure I had ever seen anyone as good as Fiona Harker killed by someone as worthless as Serena Holman, for the pettiest of reasons: social status.
The truth was going to devastate Christian Fletcher. Unless he had known about it.
“If I showed you a photo of the doctor, could you pick her out?” Maggie asked.
“Sure,” the man replied. His voice was growing stronger.
The nurse did not wait for Maggie to ask. “I have something we can use,” she said, and left the room, returning in a minute with a copy of the hospital’s annual report. “We have about ten of these in every waiting room,” she explained. She started to thumb through the brochure for a photo of Serena Holman, but Maggie stopped her.
“He has to be the one to pick her out. We can’t just show him a photo.”
The nurse handed Maggie the glossy booklet, and Maggie flipped through it, choosing several pages of photos taken at gala balls and other donor events. There wasn’t a dearth of thin blondes to choose from. In fact, it was a three-hundred-person lineup of tall blondes. It would be an irrefutable identification if the man in the bed picked out Serena Holman from among them.
He went straight to her. He scanned two pages of photos, shaking his head, but the moment Maggie turned to the next page, his eyes stopped on a photo of Serena dressed in a black designer gown, smiling next to a trio of well-fed men in tuxedos, two of whom were staring at her in admiration.
“That’s her,” he said, pointing to Serena Holman. “I’m sure.”
“You’re sure?” Maggie asked.
“I’m sure.”
“Is his mind medically clear?” Maggie asked the doctor.
The doctor looked at his watch. “I’ll testify to it in court, if need be.”
That was all Maggie needed to hear. “Get some rest,” she told Cody Wells. “I know you’ve been through a lot. Tyler Matthews is back home safe. That’s what counts. What you did today was a good thing. I’ll make sure people know it.”
The man closed his eyes and turned away. I was startled to realize he was crying at being called “good.” What had he been turned into?
“Don’t move for at least another twenty minutes,” Maggie told the nurse, who nodded her agreement. “And thank you both very much,” she added as she left the room. I was right behind her.
A pair of patrolmen had arrived to relieve the guard outside the room. One was going to take the end of the hall, the other the door. Instead, Maggie told both to come with her.
“Where are we going?” one of the patrolmen asked as they hurried after Maggie. She was walking with such a determined gait, I half expected her to go crashing through the elevator doors. Instead, miraculously, they opened at her approach, as if the universe wanted to escort her upstairs.
“We’re going to arrest a murderer,” Maggie said. “And if she won’t come with us, we’re taking her by force. Got your guns, boys?”
“Huh?” one of them asked, exchanging a glance with his buddy.
Maggie pulled out her cell phone.
“You’re not supposed to use that in the hospital,” a patrolman pointed out.
One glance from Maggie shut him up.
I thought she might call Gonzales. That was the sane thing to do when you had seven messages from him and were about to make a high-profile arrest. Besides, Maggie was by the book. She only made arrests after she had cleared them with Gonzales, who was big on having judges issue warrants first when the people being arrested had money. But Maggie knew enough about his priorities to guess that Gonzales might want to stall so he could milk both cases for maximum publicity, and Maggie was unwilling to wait. She was bringing Serena Holman in on her own. She had probable cause. So instead of calling Gonzales, she called Calvano for an update on Tyler Matthews and the reaction of Gonzales and the feds. But what she heard from him clearly surprised her. “So soon?” she asked. “When does it start?”
Whatever Calvano told her, after she hung up, it caused her thoughts to turn to Serena Holman once again. Maggie was angry, but she was more than just angry. She was determined to make the doctor pay for what she had done. I was pretty sure arresting her was not the only thing Maggie had in mind. She exited the elevator with such speed that the uniforms had to scurry after her to keep up. She greeted the nurse at the pediatric oncology ward station with a terse “Where’s Dr. Holman?”
The nurse mutely pointed to the patient playroom, her eyes lingering on the two patrolmen accompanying Maggie.
The room was empty of patients. Serena Holman was sitting on the couch, an expensive coffee from the stand in the lobby at her elbow, flipping through a patient chart, clearly irritated at having spent Saturday night and into Sunday morning at the hospital. She glanced up, saw Maggie, and dismissed her. “I’m busy,” she said, turning a page.
“Stand up,” Maggie told her. She grabbed one of Serena’s elbows and jerked her upright. The doctor teetered on her heels and tried to pull her arm away.
“How dare you?” she spat at Maggie. “I’m calling my lawyer.”
“Good. You’re going to need one.” Maggie took the patient file from her and tossed it on the table, then twisted both of the doctor’s hands behind her back. She clipped her handcuffs tightly around Serena’s slender wrists. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Fiona Harker,” Maggie said. “You have the right to remain silent.”
As Maggie recited the familiar warning, a white-hot fury started to grow inside Serena Holman. It was a typhoon of outrage—one of titanic proportions. “How dare you?” she hissed at Maggie. “I’ll have your badge for this.”
“Shut up,” Maggie said calmly, shoving the doctor toward one of the uniformed patrolmen. “Just because I’m bringing you in doesn’t mean I have to listen to your bullshit on the way.” Even the patrolmen looked alarmed at the tone of Maggie’s voice.
I don’t think she had ever hated anyone more than she hated Serena Holman. I wasn’t sure why exactly. It wasn’t just what her arrest would do to Christian Fletcher; it ran deeper than that.
“You can’t prove a thing,” Serena snapped. “You’re just doing this for Christian.”
“We have a witness who puts you at Fiona Harker’s house the morning she was killed,” Maggie said. “And many mornings before that. A witness you failed to kill. Did I mention that? He’s still alive. Can’t wait for the lab tests to come back to see what drug you gave him. Or to have a chat with the attending who escorted you into his room. Or to get back the ownership search on the gun that killed her. Or to finish searching every inch of Fiona’s house and locker for the tiniest scrap of your DNA. One single hair, and you’re done. And I don’t just mean because it will prove you’re a bottle blonde.”
I felt a crack in the doctor’s arrogance. She was silent. Maggie shoved her toward the hallway door. “We’re taking the long way out,” she told her escorts. “Follow me.”
By the time she reached the elevator, nurses had started to line the hallway and were madly dialing their cell phones. They stared at Serena Holman, their eyes bright and their anger obvious as she walked past, her heels clicking on the hospital floor and her doctor’s coat hanging open to reveal the expensive dress underneath.
“Move faster,” Maggie said, shoving the doctor into the elevator. Serena stumbled against a railing.
“What’s your problem?” she asked Maggie. Her refined accent had been replaced by the raw vowels of a blue-collar Boston background. Was anything about the doctor real?
“All she did was love you,” Maggie said, her contempt so great, her anger so immense, that the patrolmen averted their eyes. “All Fiona Harker wanted was for you to love her back. And she thought that you did. She told her friend that it was the real thing, that she’d finally found someone she could love.”
“And you find that disgusting?” the doctor challenged her.
“What I find disgusting,” Maggie said, anger rising in her voice, “is that someone gave you the gift of love, someone who was private and guarded and not prone to giving her heart away. You had to work for it. And you did. You worked until you had her heart and then you took it. And once you had it, you turned around and you killed her for loving you, all to protect your reputation. What’s the matter with you? Do you even have a soul?”
I wondered that myself. Serena Holman had grown still as Maggie spoke, and her indignation had been replaced by a cold strength. I felt cunning inside her, cunning and selfishness and something darker—Had she liked taking another person’s life? Had she actually enjoyed making someone love her and then destroying her for it?
Yes, I think she had.
I had sympathy then for Christian Fletcher. He still had his career, but she had pretty much devoured him, too.
“You don’t know anything about me,” Serena Holman spat at Maggie.
“I know you’re going away for a long, long time,” Maggie said. “To a place where you will not be able to wear your little ass-high dresses. To a place where no one is going to give a shit about how much you raised for this hospital. To a place you can’t even imagine in your worst nightmares.”
In that, at least, I thought Maggie was wrong. Serena Holman would use her beauty in prison just as she had in her life—to blind others so she could get exactly what she wanted. I was pretty sure she’d end up running the joint. And I was also pretty sure she’d killed Fiona Harker for a lot more than to protect her reputation, even if she didn’t understand those reasons herself. I thought she’d loved Fiona back, maybe for the first time in her life. There was no other explanation for why she took the chance of becoming involved with her in the first place. And she had been driven to kill Fiona because of it, because her own ego would not tolerate the importance of anyone else.
Yes, Serena Holman would love prison. It was the one place where she could be herself.
“Let’s go,” Maggie said, pushing Serena out of the elevator toward the main lobby. For the first time, the doctor lost her poise and balked. No wonder. Word had gone out as swiftly as a call to battle. She had been arrested in the middle of a shift change, and hospital staff members were flooding into the lobby, wanting to see Serena Holman pay the price for killing one of their own. Nurses, aides, janitors, even doctors—all who had worked with Fiona Harker and loved her—were there, Christian Fletcher among them. There were surely a few left behind on the wards to make sure no patients died, but it seemed like every single person on duty in the hospital that morning was there, forming a phalanx of hostile onlookers that Maggie forced Serena Holman to walk through.
No one said a word. They just stood and stared at Serena. The air was thick with hate and sadness and contempt. But no one said a word.
And truth be told, no one seemed all that surprised. I guess beauty can’t hide everything.
Serena Holman sailed through the crowd, head held high, as if she were a queen passing by. All she had left was her self-anointed superiority and she had no intention of giving that up.
No one even noticed Maggie. At least, no one but Christian Fletcher. He was standing toward the back of the crowd, a sympathetic nurse on each side as he absorbed the shock of seeing his ex-wife hauled through the lobby in handcuffs. His face was as easy to read as a billboard. His surprise was genuine. I was certain of that. And, grudgingly, I admitted that his sorrow was not for himself. He grieved for Fiona Harker, whom he had respected and relied on. He grieved for the person who had been his wife but was, apparently, someone he had never really known. And he grieved for Maggie. He knew he would lose her now.
At first, Maggie did not see Fletcher. She was grim but confident. She took no pleasure in what she was doing, but she felt it was her duty to do it. She owed Fiona Harker at least that much. Then Serena Holman stumbled and Maggie tightened her grip on the doctor’s arm, steadying her. She looked over Serena’s head and straight at Christian Fletcher. A look passed between them. It was an acknowledgment of what they had lost, of what they might have had. It had been real, and they had both felt it. Now they felt its loss.
Too late, I wished that I had helped them. I wished that I had brought them together somehow, instead of trying to drive them apart. Apart, they were just two more lonely people who lost themselves in work so they wouldn’t have to think about the rest of their lives. Together, they could have been so much more.