16. Nate Breaks the Order
Nate Breaks the Order
He came on a Thursday, at eleven in the morning, in daylight, up the middle of the courtyard, in a jacket and tie, with his badge on his belt and Bear on a lead, and he did not park around the corner.
I know he did not park around the corner because Kayla said, at the front desk, in a voice of naked wonder, "There's a black SUV out front and there's someone still in it."
I came out into the courtyard with a glove still on one hand.
He stopped about eight feet away. There was a moment where neither of us said anything at all, and the fountain didn't work, and Bear made the felled-tree groan and pulled toward me so hard that Nate had to shift his feet, and inside the practice I could hear Floss's nails hit the tile at a dead run.
"Hello," said Nate Corrigan.
"Hi."
"I'm going to say several things very fast," he said, "and then I'm going to have a conversation with my supervisor in that car, and I'd like you to hear all of it before that happens."
"Okay."
"Luminous has been under federal investigation since March.
Healthcare fraud, wire fraud, two other things I'm not going to name.
It's mine; it's been mine since March; I was working it the night we stood under that arch in August and I asked you how much of your business is insurance, and that question was not idle and I am sorry for it.
" He said it fast and level, a man reading out a charge sheet.
"On the sixth of October the Santa Barbara Police Department's homicide file on Preston Hale came into my office, and your name was on the first page, and Diane Kessler ordered me to cease all contact with you, and the order was correct, and I obeyed it, and I have been sitting in a room for five weeks knowing exactly what it looked like from where you were standing. "
The courtyard door banged open behind me and seventy pounds of golden retriever came out of it like weather and hit Bear amidships, and the two of them went into the total, screaming, tail-flailing reunion of dogs who have been separated for five weeks by a chain of command they were never told about, and neither of us moved, and I could not see very well.
"There's more," he said. "Say something first or I'll keep going for ten minutes."
"Why now?" My voice came out ruined. "Why today? Nothing's changed—"
"Serena Locke booked an appointment," said Nate.
"...What?"
"At nine-fifteen this morning a woman called this office and booked a new-patient exam for Tuesday afternoon under the name S.
Locke, and Kessler's office has a pen register on her phones, and I was in the room when it came through.
" He hadn't moved an inch. "So no. Nothing's changed except the single most important thing, which is that the subject of an eighteen-month federal investigation has just made an appointment to be alone in a room with you.
And at that point, Lila, the order and I parted company, and I told Diane Kessler exactly that in front of two other agents, and she said get in the car, and here we are, and she is sitting in it right now watching this, and it will go how it goes. "
Behind him, in the black SUV, a woman in the passenger seat was indeed watching this, with her sunglasses pushed up on her head and an expression I could not read at forty feet.
"You could have left a note," I said, which was not what I meant to say. "Nate, you could have left one word — anything — I'd have understood one word—"
"No," he said. "That's the part I need you to have.
I could not have left one word. Not a note, not a message through Tess, not a look across a street.
Because the entire protection here is that on the night Preston Hale died you did not know Luminous was under investigation, and the second I give you one word, that's gone, and then you're not a witness with twenty-three patient files, you're a woman who was tipped off by a federal agent she sleeps with.
" His jaw was doing something. "There was no version where I got to comfort you and keep you safe.
I picked. I'd pick it again. And I knew — I knew, the whole time — exactly which story you'd be telling yourself, because I know what Grant did to you, and I know what you do with silence. "
I put my hand over my mouth.
"And I want to tell you why I can obey an order like that," said Nate Corrigan, "because you deserve it and because it's the actual answer to the question you've never asked me."
"Nate, not here—"
"Here." He glanced, once, at the SUV. "Here, now, badly, because I have about four minutes and because I have been putting this off for eleven months and it turns out that putting it off cost you five weeks in a courtyard thinking you'd been left.
" He took a breath. "In Washington I had a source.
A man named Arturo Sela. He worked in a shipping brokerage and he came to us on his own and he gave us eleven months of his life, and I told him — I personally told him, in a parking garage, because he asked me directly — that we could protect his family.
And then I broke a protocol. One. A small one.
I met him somewhere I shouldn't have, at his request, because he was frightened and I wanted to reassure him.
" He was very white. "And somebody saw us.
And four days later Arturo Sela's car was found in Anacostia and his wife spent a year being interviewed by people who wanted to know what he'd been doing with the FBI. "
Bear had stopped playing. Bear had come and sat down against Nate's leg, which is a thing that dog does about twice a year.
"So when Diane Kessler tells me not to contact a witness," said Nate, "I don't contact the witness.
That's not obedience, Lila, and it's not carefulness, and it isn't a personality.
It's the only thing I've got. The rules are all that stands between me and doing it again, and the last time I broke one to reassure somebody I cared about, it killed him. "
The courtyard was completely silent. Tess, I found out later, had turned off the espresso grinder at the words *parking garage* and had stood behind her cart with both hands over her mouth for the rest of it.
"That's the whole of it," he said. "That's what's behind the door. It's not a mystery, it's just a thing I did, and it's why I'm like this."
I crossed the eight feet.
I want to be accurate: I did not kiss him.
Not then; not in front of Diane Kessler and a supply of our patients and a courtyard.
What I did was take hold of the lapel of the one jacket he owns with the hand that didn't have a glove on it, and put my forehead against his sternum, and stand there, and feel him exhale about a year and a half.
"Five weeks," I said, into his shirt.
"I know."
"I had a file box. I had twenty-three mouths and a dead man's handwriting and a photograph from Yuma, Arizona, and I couldn't call you." I got a breath in. "Nate, I worked out why you'd gone. In a parking lot in Goleta. I worked it out and then I had to keep doing crowns for eleven days."
"I know." His hand was on the back of my head.
"Kessler knows too. She's read your Saturdays.
" And then, with something that was very nearly a laugh: "Lila, there is a Supervisory Senior Resident Agent in that car who has spent three weeks saying the words 'the dentist' in a tone I cannot describe to you. "
"Is it a good tone?"
"It is not a bad tone."
I stepped back. I wiped my face with my forearm, in the hallway manner, and Marisol appeared at my elbow out of nowhere with a paper towel and a look of profound, unbearable vindication and said one word — "Told you" — to nobody in particular, and went back inside.
"Right," I said. "Come in. Bring her." I nodded at the SUV.
"Tell Kessler there's a file box in my basement with four hundred patients in it, annotated by hand by a dead man, and that I have a photograph of Serena Locke at a ribbon-cutting in Yuma in 2021 standing next to a woman named Dana Kirsch, and that if she wants to know what Preston Hale told his ex-wife at eleven o'clock at night in August, I'll tell her that too. "
Nate Corrigan looked at me for a moment.
"You've been busy," he said.
"I've been *furious*," I said, and went to put the coffee on.