CHAPTER TWENTY #2
He paused. The TV behind him showed a car chase now, light and movement smearing over his shoulders. Kate kept breathing, slow, steady. Her hands had steadied on the sheet. Listening—really listening—gave her something to anchor to besides fear.
“In the hospital,” Quinn continued, “they said she needed a ventilator. Her lungs were drowning. But the hospital only had one working ventilator that night. The others were broken, on order, or stuck somewhere between here and Canada. One machine. Two women who needed it. My mother, and another.”
He let that sit.
“You can imagine being the doctor in charge,” he said. “Being the one who has to decide. Can’t you?”
“Yes.” Kate met his eyes. “It would have been a terrible position to be in.”
“You’re very diplomatic,” Quinn said. “Terrible. Difficult. Challenging. The kinds of words you people like to use when what you mean is, ‘we played God and killed someone.’”
She didn’t rise to it. “What happened?” she asked instead, though she could guess.
“What happened,” he said, “is that there weren’t enough staff.
Flu had knocked half of them out. Roads were iced over, people stuck at home.
So guess who was the most senior physician on duty that night?
” His gaze sharpened, knife-bright now. “Your father. Second-year resident. Barely out of med school. A kid in a white coat with a God complex waiting to grow.”
Kate’s skin went cold. The room tilted for a second, like she’d stood up too fast, though she hadn’t moved.
“No,” she said, reflexive, automatic.
“Yes,” Quinn snapped. “Yes. Doctor Valentine. Your saintly, martyred father. The hero of a hundred conference presentations. The man the newspapers sobbed over when another man shot him outside a church in Portland, Maine.”
The words slammed into her. She’d read the clippings of course, heard the eulogies. Hearing it poured out in Marsh’s bitter drawl felt like having them fed back through broken glass.
She forced her tone to stay level. “My father did everything he could during that epidemic. I know, because he told me all about that year he spent in Boston. About the winter. The epidemic. All the lost patients. He carried that for the rest of his life.”
“He carried awards,” Quinn said. “He carried funding. He carried the respect of men who never looked my mother in the eye as she cleaned their offices.” His lips peeled back from his teeth.
“He also carried the knowledge that one December night in 1983, he decided who got to live and who got to die.”
She shook her head slowly. “He wouldn’t have taken that lightly.”
“Oh, I agree.” Quinn’s voice dropped, almost intimate.
“I don’t think he shrugged and said eeny meeny miny moe.
I think he weighed up the options like a good scientist. He probably considered age, health, responsibilities.
Maybe he thought: this woman is five months pregnant.
Two lives. My mother? Only one.” He lifted his shoulders in a parody of a shrug, the gun shifting fractionally with the movement.
“Maybe he prayed. Maybe he flipped a coin. Maybe he rolled dice. I’ll never know.
I only know that he picked the other woman. ”
Kate wanted to argue more. To insist her father would never have tossed a coin over a human life. But in the end, the details didn’t change the outcome Marsh was clinging to like scripture.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. And she was, not in the thin, automatic way she used with victims’ families, but in a deeper, more complicated space where personal and professional blurred.
“I’m so sorry your mother died. And I truly believe my father would have agonized over that decision.
He wouldn’t, couldn’t, have made it lightly.
He certainly wouldn’t have… gambled with it. ”
He watched her for a long beat. “You think that makes it better?”
“No,” she said. “But it makes him human. Not a monster.”
“My mother was human,” he shot back. “She worked herself into the ground for us. She cared for her father-in-law like he was her own. Do you know what happened to him after she died?”
Kate shook her head.
“Nothing,” Quinn said flatly. “Nothing good. I tried. Christ, I tried. But I was twelve. I couldn’t keep school, work, and an incontinent old man on three different medications going at once. So he went into a state home. Within months he was dead. Pneumonia. Or heartbreak. Take your pick.”
The silence that followed was heavy.
He filled it before she could. “Meanwhile, the woman your father spared lived another thirty years. I tracked her down.” His mouth twisted.
“She was… not good. Cruel to her kids, cruel to her own parents. A drunk. A bully. Her mother, her own mother ended up in the ER with a cracked rib and a story about falling downstairs.”
A bitter laugh escaped him. “Your father choked a saint and let a monster flourish.”
Kate’s fingers curled into the sheet. “You’re saying he knew all that back then? That he picked someone he thought was a monster?”
“I’m saying,” Marsh replied, “that man in the white coat decided one life was worth more than another, and he got it wrong. Catastrophically wrong. That’s what happens when people forget they’re not God.”
A thought nudged at her, unwelcome but insistent. “Is this… are you telling me you killed my father?”
It came out smaller than she would have liked, but there it was. She knew a man was living out his days in a psychiatric facility, a man who could have done it, a man supremely eager to confess to it, too. She also knew that the whole case was riven with flaws and question marks.
Marsh stared at her, then snorted, a sound edged with contempt. For a moment—blessed, terrifying—he lowered the gun to his lap so he could gesture.
“No,” he said. “That wasn’t me. I’m not interested in vengeance.” His eyes flashed. “ ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ You know your Bible, Agent Valentine?”
“Enough to recognize you’re quoting it at gunpoint,” she said.
“God took care of your father,” Quinn went on, ignoring the jab. “Sent some angry man with a handgun to meet him outside a church. Neat, don’t you think? House of God to house of God. Same with the woman who was spared. Did you know she died in a fire?”
Kate swallowed. “No.”
“Electrical fault, they said. I prefer to think of it as a recalibration.” He smiled faintly. “I didn’t have to touch either of them. That wasn’t my role. I am not an instrument of vengeance.” His voice cooled. “I am an instrument of correction.”
He’d set the gun down as he spoke, resting it on his knee, one big hand lightly over the grip. It wasn’t much, but it was something. She catalogued the angle, the distance from her, the fact that if he turned his head further away—
“Correction,” she repeated, keeping him talking. “Balancing the books.”
"Exactly." Satisfaction warmed his tone. "The Lawgiver showed us the way. When the fifth commandment is broken, when parents are abandoned, betrayed, or discarded, the balance must be restored."
Honor thy father and thy mother.
"Then why me?" Kate asked. "I loved my father. I still love him. I don't dishonor my mother. If anything, I over-honor her if you ask her opinion. So why am I here? Why am I the target?"
His eyes sharpened. “Because you stand in my way.”
“Of what?” Her throat was dry.
“Of the Lawgiver’s plan for humanity.” He said it simply, like naming the weather.
“You and your friends, running around with your badges and your degrees, putting bars and diagnoses and labels between people and the justice they deserve. You caught him”—a small nod, acknowledging her capture of Cox—“but you didn’t stop the commandment.
You just drove it underground. It’s my job to bring it back into the light. ”
“You think the Lawgiver wants you to kill his enemies?” she asked. “Because I talked to him recently, and funnily enough, he didn’t mention hiring a fan club.”
Something flickered in Marsh’s gaze—annoyance, maybe, at the implication he was just a follower.
“He doesn’t have to speak to me like he does to you,” he said tightly.
“He speaks in signs. In opportunities. Like the fact that you came here, alone.” His lip curled.
“Honor, Agent Valentine, starts at home. If you honor your father, why has it been three years since you last visited his grave?”
She felt the sting and flushed. “Because he isn’t there,” she answered, hotly. “He isn’t some patch of earth with a headstone. Only a… a fanatic would think that grief, or longing, or respect, had anything to do with putting down flowers or lighting a candle.”
“You don’t like me pointing out your failings.”
“I’m not going to let a serial killer lecture me on morality. Much less one who clearly pisses on his own mother’s memory with every breath he takes.”
“How?” he snapped, clearly riled now. “How do I do that?”
She caught the anger in his eyes, saw his hand twitching on the revolver and made an urgent note to herself. Dial it down.
“You inherited her talent,” Kate said softly. “I’ve seen your sketches at the scenes. Your composition. Your eye. The detail. That’s hers, living on in you. A gift. And you use it like this. For this.”
She would have gestured towards his gun, but wisely kept her hands still. The faint light of pride moved across his face before he could hide it.
“She used to go without food so I could have new brushes,” he said quietly. “Said it was worth it. ‘You’re my little Michelangelo, Quinny.’” He snorted, the fondness undercut by bitterness. “They should’ve put that on her gravestone.”
“She sounds like a wonderful woman,” Kate said. “Generous. Selfless.”
“She was,” he said, and now there was no hiding the ache.