CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Hospitals had a way of making everything feel provisional. Voices were always a little hushed, as if nothing here was quite finished: the paint on the walls, the sentences, the lives.
Kate followed a green line on the floor to Neuro—left at Radiology, right at a vending machine advertising hot soup—and told herself that the throb in her wrist did not qualify as pain.
It was information. Sprain, day seven, still complaining.
The cuts on her forearm had faded from angry to embarrassed. She could live with that.
Marcus couldn’t say the same. He couldn’t say anything right now.
“Miss Valentine?” a nurse at the station called, glancing up at the chart. “You’re here for Mister Reid?”
“Agent,” Kate said, because Marcus would have corrected it if he could. “Yes.”
“Visitor pass on the right.” The nurse’s tone softened. “He’s stable.”
The word set off a small, disloyal response inside Kate—like a tiny, rebellious sigh. Stable. Not good, not bad. A truce between the two.
Room 412 had a window onto a parking lot and a tree. The tree felt like a kindness.
A woman was already there, perched on the orange visitor chair like a long-legged bird that didn’t trust the branch.
She wore big, pink, plastic hoop earrings and a faux-fur zip-up jacket.
Endless legs in electric-blue lycra were topped off with suede mules, mule-colored, on a chunky heel.
Kate stopped in the doorway. There was only one person this could be.
“Cheryl,” she said.
“Hi.” Cheryl stood too quickly and bumped the chair, then smoothed the skirt that she wasn’t wearing. “Kate, right? I didn’t know if you were coming this morning. I mean, of course you’d come, I just didn’t know if it would be now, or—”
“It’s now,” Kate said. She lifted a hand, then remembered the brace and let it fall. “Can I—?”
“Sure.” Cheryl stepped aside so she could see Marcus.
He looked smaller under the white sheets.
Not diminished exactly, but limited, Marcus-as-travel-size.
Bruise-constellations washed his ribs where the gown gaped; someone had shaved a neat rectangle above his ear for the stitches.
The rest of him was maddeningly familiar: the stubborn line of the jaw, the nose that had never fully forgiven high school basketball, those huge, bear-paw hands.
The monitor traced its green city skyline. The machines purred and breathed and clicked. The effect should have been calming. It was not.
“They extubated him yesterday,” Cheryl said, quietly, as if the words were a secret she had to pass along correctly.
“He was intubated… for most of the week.” She pressed her lips together briefly.
“They had him in a medically-induced coma to let the swelling go down. The last MRI showed normal activity.” A glance at the monitor as though it might agree.
“They’re waiting to see what he’s like when the sedation wears off. They’re… tapering.”
“You’ve got the script down,” Kate said. It came out more gently than it sounded in her head.
“I’ve had a lot of practice.” Cheryl tried a smile, then gave up on it. “His neurosurgeon is younger than me. People shouldn’t be allowed to be geniuses if they still get carded.”
“The guy driving the ambulance didn’t make it,” Cheryl went on. “They told me yesterday.” She swallowed. “This is a horrible, horrible thing to say, but I felt glad. I mean, I don’t now, but in that moment, I did.”
“You don’t need to feel bad about anything you’re thinking and feeling right now,” Kate said. “It’s all natural. Or, at least, it’s no more unnatural than any of the other shit that’s gone on.”
Cheryl looked like she was going to reply to that, but she didn’t. She just stared at the wall and the ceiling.
“What is that color?” she asked, suddenly. “Why is it used in every single hospital?”
“You mean seasick green?”
Cheryl laughed. “Marcus told me once,” she said, “that if the FBI thing didn’t work out, he was gonna start a food truck that only sold breakfast sandwiches. Gonna call it ‘Probable Cause’.”
Kate stared at Marcus a moment longer, and something moved in her chest. “The man has a gift.”
Another machine ticked softly. Cheryl sat, tapping a quiet rhythm on her knee. Kate stood, then sat too, because standing felt like being on patrol.
“I just—” Cheryl started, then stopped. “Look, I don’t know how much he’s told you about me. About us.”
“Enough to make me want to slap him sometimes,” Kate said. “In the loving, professional sense.”
Cheryl’s mouth tugged. “I’ve always suspected that you and he—” She broke off again, palms opening helplessly, then closing. “I’m not saying it out loud. Because what if saying it out loud makes it real.”
“Cheryl,” Kate said. “He talks about you. All the time. He hasn’t been the same since things broke down between you. Whatever else is true, that’s true.”
The stillness in the room altered quality. Cheryl’s shoulders softened a fraction, like someone had released the emergency brake.
“Thank you,” she said. There was a good kind of shine in her eyes, not the brittle kind. “I wanted— I needed to hear that, Kate. I just didn’t want to hear it from him when he was trying to… be… persuasive.”
“He’s very persuasive,” Kate said. “Unfortunately, he’s right about everything except food trucks.”
A tiny, amused breath. “We were kids when we got engaged,” Cheryl said.
“He turned thirty-one and realized he had become a grown-up. I turned thirty and realized I hadn’t.
And then work was work. And I… I always thought if there was a reason he never fought me harder, it might be because he had a partner he didn’t need to marry.
” She flinched as soon as she said it. “God. That came out awful.”
“Not awful. Human.” Kate considered her own hands: the brace, the pink line where a glass shard had wanted to stay. “Marcus and me… we’re good at paperwork and catching bad people and keeping each other out of trouble. That doesn’t mean we’re… anything else.”
Cheryl nodded, eyes on the sheet. “Okay,” she said. Then, as if returning to safe ground: “Two broken ribs, a fractured femur and a head injury. Lucky.”
“Lucky,” Kate echoed, looking at Marcus’s face. Somebody had wiped away the purple from the crash. The rest remained.
“I’m going to get coffee,” she said, after a while, because that was a thing you could always do in a world where outcomes hadn’t arrived yet. “Black? Milk? Sugar?”
“Milky. Too milky,” Cheryl said. “And one sugar because I’m lying to myself.”
“Perfect,” Kate said, and escaped.
The café smelled like boiled coffee beans and bad news.
Kate queued behind a man in scrubs debating the ethics of a cinnamon roll with himself.
She was half-watching a muted TV news segment about a dog that had found a diamond ring in a park when she felt a presence she knew at the edge of her awareness, the way you know when the weather is changing.
“Agent Valentine,” said Victoria Winters, as if Kate was a dog that might not come when called.
The boss was looking especially stark. Dark gray suit, white shirt, hair tied sharply back. No make-up, except for the blunt line of her mouth.
“Boss,” Kate said.
Winters blinked once at the word. Out of the office, she preferred ‘Victoria’, but she’d never say it out loud. “I thought you’d be here,” she said. “I’ve been in the parking lot for fifteen minutes. Practicing walking to the elevator.”
Kate studied her face. There was a fine crack in the lacquer today, not decorative.
“Hospitals,” Kate said, with a shrug.
“I hate the dead ends they represent,” Winters said, which wasn’t what Kate had meant and also exactly what she had meant. She exhaled a laugh with almost no pleasure in it. “I lost someone. A long time ago. Different job, different mess. Tubes. Beeping. I’ve avoided the whole scenario ever since.”
“I can get Cheryl to text you when they… when he’s more himself. If that helps,” Kate said.
“No,” Winters said, and then, softer, surprising herself: “Thank you.” Her gaze flicked to the machines behind the counter, then back to Kate. “Walk with me. I’ll buy you coffee and tell you the part you’ll hate.”
“Only if the coffee is terrible.”
“Of course it is,” Winters said, and ordered two.
They took a table by a fake plant with dust on its leaves. From this angle, the café framed the corridor like a stage set.
“Augustus Crichton made it,” Winters said, not troubling with a preamble. “Second member of the ambulance team. Lost some blood, bullet went in and out without tangling with any of his organs. Frightened out of his wits. The driver, well… you know.”
Kate nodded. “I heard.”
“And the third survivor,” Winters said, “is presumably Elijah Cox.”
“Presumably,” Kate repeated, and let the word lie there like a mousetrap.
Winters’s mouth tipped. “The killer carrying out his instructions was a man named Werner Jakes.”
Kate waited.
“Former marine,” Winters said. “Iraq. IED took out the rest of his unit. Cashiered. Las Vegas for a while, doing muscle and messes for the mob. Then the long slide: homelessness, meth, the whole American Dream. Somewhere along the line he ended up at a street-mission run by Cox. We don’t know the ‘how’ yet. We just know the ‘yes’.”
“So Cox outsourced the killing,” Kate said. ‘Serial-by-proxy. That’s got to be a first.”
“A letter on his person led to an apartment,” Winters went on.
“Inside, surveillance photos. One of Whitfield’s study window.
Another of Harper on his porch. Sister Dorothy buying bread at 6:18 a.m. A tidy little chemistry set—bottles of the paralytics used on all three.
Something that stank bad enough to make your eyes shrivel. ”
“That’ll be the whale oil.”
“Lots to tie him to the three murders.”
“Which leaves us with a puzzle we already knew we had,” Kate said. “How does a man achieve all this from a federal prison cell?”