Chapter 82
MY CELL PHONE RINGS and wakes me up. I’m lying in a hospital bed in a room painted the color of pea soup.
Still half asleep, I answer and say hello.
I bet it’s Cove, calling from the airport to say his plane just landed in New York and he’s rushing to be by my side because his marriage imploded years ago, and after all this time, he can’t wait to see me and he realizes I’m the one—or, more specifically, the one who got away (although, as I intend to point out when he runs into my hospital room with roses and kisses, he was the one who left, for Cleveland).
Nice fantasy, right? Courtesy of my pal Percocet.
The call was in fact from Spectrum. But that’s okay. My arm is hanging in traction over my head. So even if Cove did walk through the door, I couldn’t hug him. Not that he’d want to hug me, if he saw how I looked.
I check my reflection on the small TV screen hanging in front of my bed. I’ve got a nasal cannula sticking out of my nose to help me breathe. A catheter to help me urinate. An IV drip with an antibiotic to reduce infection, mixed with Percocet to keep me happy.
But wait, as they say on all those late-night TV commercials, there’s more. There’s also a surgical drain coming out of the bullet wound and blood on my sheets. Plus I haven’t bathed since—well, I don’t know how long it’s been. I have no idea what day it is.
The phone rings again. This time, it really is Cove.
“How are you feeling?” he asks gently.
“Still in pain,” I say. “I’ve got so many tubes going in and out of me, I look like a traffic roundabout.”
He laughs. “Still the same old Elinor.”
Is he still the same old Cove? Still married? I have no idea.
“Are you well enough to hear the rest of the story?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. Actually I’m a little groggy. But I try to snap to attention.
“Alan Metcalf hasn’t worked for the FBI in years,” he says.
Wow! No wonder we had to meet in a diner and a parking lot. Well, so much for my under-the-radar assignment. “Do you know what happened?” I ask.
“Yes, and you’ll love this,” Cove tells me. “Remember what Metcalf was like with his subordinates? Especially the women?”
“How could I forget? He was nasty, surly, demeaning, sarcastic, and inappropriate. But those traits seemed to serve him well,” I add. For the longest time, the FBI was a real boys’ club. J. Edgar Hoover was never a fan of women in anything. Not even bed.
“True,” Cove says. “But then along came #MeToo. Women suddenly felt empowered. A lot of them complained that Metcalf had harassed and propositioned them for years.”
“Good for them,” I say. I wonder if it’s too late for me to get in on that.
Cove continues his update. “Metcalf was arrogant. He wanted to fight the allegations, until he realized what it would cost him in time and legal fees. And the cases against him were strong. One day, he was gone. Nobody knew where. Ex-FBI folks are much in demand these days.”
“I bet. Especially on the dark side.”
“Right. But here’s the best part.”
“There’s more?”
“Yup. You asked how Amber knew Metcalf? They met when he was a guest lecturer and she was a grad student at NYU.”
“What did he lecture on? Business ethics?”
Cove laughs. “Something about how the FBI spots forgeries.”
“And she remembered him after all this time?”
“It was a bit more complicated than that.”
“Wait. Let me guess. She called him Alan, not Mr. Metcalf. So that means they were…”
My mind whirls through the possibilities. Friends? Mentor and mentee? Surely not lovers? The mind boggles. He’s thirty-plus years older than she is. And in the looks department, he’s barely a three.
“Yup. They dated a couple of times,” Cove confirms.
“I wonder what she saw in him,” I say.
“Who knows? Some women go for that type, I guess.”
“You mean cold, self-involved, and selfish?” As I’m describing Metcalf, I realize I could be describing Ben as well.
“Well, you know what Auden once said,” he adds. “Something like: The ways of the heart are as crooked as a corkscrew.”
Then neither of us says anything. For a moment, we’re both lost in thought. More than a moment. Even this bruised, banged-up postmenopausal woman knows a pregnant pause when she hears one.
“From what I understand,” Cove says at last, breaking the spell, “targeting Ben was all Metcalf’s idea.”
“Was it a revenge thing?”
“Hard to say. When the cartel wanted to get its claws into a new business, Metcalf suggested Ben’s gallery. We think that’s how it went down. We’ll learn more in discovery.”
Amber and Metcalf? I can’t seem to get past that.
A nurse is at my door with a new IV bag. With my good arm I wave her in. She needs to change my sheets too. Cove is still talking and I don’t want to interrupt him so I miss a few words of his narration as I scoot over. Then I tune back in.
“… threatened to go to the authorities,” Cove is saying, “unless they backed off.” I assume he’s talking about Ben. “So he put the money in escrow and hid the painting someplace. We’re not sure where.”
“I know,” I say. I tell him about Hailey’s friend Alison and her mother.
“Great,” Cove says. “Seems it was a painting by Graham Loxton.”
Of course. Loxton! Who threatened Ben at the party, complained about not getting paid, was later found dead.
It’s all falling into place. “Carlos was their liaison guy with the cartel,” Cove says.
“When Metcalf heard someone had approached Ben at home, he and Taggart began to panic.
Was it Carlos, double-crossing them, trying to make them look bad?
Or was the cartel losing patience with them, so they sent someone new?
“Thanks to you, Taggart and Metcalf discovered something they could blackmail Ben with. A possible scandal. Murders don’t sit well in small, affluent communities. Even accidental ones. You told Metcalf, Metcalf told Taggart, and we picked it up in a wiretap I was able to get in place.”
“You set up a wiretap? That quickly? Whatever happened to Title Eighteen US Code Section Twenty-Five Sixteen?” I ask.
“Well, um, I was able to bypass it,” he says in his sweet aw-shucks way.
Wow. The only way he could have bypassed that was to call the attorney general directly.
“Ben must’ve thought the whole sad story was safely hidden away,” I say. “Just like his mother.”
“Right. Until his mother blabbed.”
Blabbed. Is that what they call it in Cleveland? “You sound like a G-man in a 1940s gangster movie,” I tell him. He laughs.
“Yeah. My wife would agree with you.”
Oh, right. His wife. So they’re still together. I should have known. Well, as Charlie Brown once said in an old Peanuts cartoon, “There is nothing more upsetting than the clobbering of a cherished belief.”
Cove tells me he learned about the showdown through the wiretap, so he called the local field office and arranged a CIRG raid.
“They sent an actual Critical Incident Response Group?”
“You know how the FBI hates defectors. And I told them it was a crisis.”
“And when you called on the beach—you urged me to stay away from the Harrisons’ house because…”
“Because I didn’t want you to get killed,” he says. Okay, so it’s not a full-blown declaration of love. But at least he cares that I’m alive.
And I am alive. Thanks to him.
One last question. “Why me?” I ask Cove. “Of all the women Metcalf’s known over the years, why did he tap me for the job?”
“He knew he had set you up to take a fall for him in the past.” That was true. “He figured you’d do just about anything to get your reputation back.” Also true. “And, uh, he wanted to send someone who could slide into a domestic job and keep a low profile. Someone who, well, uh…”
“C’mon, Cove. Spill.”
I hear him take a deep breath. “Someone who wouldn’t be noticed.”
Of course. An Invisible Woman.
“What will they charge him with?” I ask.
“Not sure yet,” Cove says. “But there’s one thing he’s absolutely guilty of.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
I can practically hear him smile as he says, “Underestimating you.”