The detective’s eyes narrowed darkly. “You’d think a man’d want to go to his grave with a clean conscience, wouldn’t you? But not Kraven. Coldest son of a bitch I ever saw.” Silence fell between them again as each retreated to his own thoughts. With Blakemoor’s next question, though, Anne knew at once that his mullings hadn’t been terribly different from her own. “What do you think? Any chance at all that we were wrong?”
“Who are you asking?” Anne countered, a thin smile curling the corners of her mouth. “Anne Jeffers, ace journalist, or Anne Jeffers, private citizen?”
“How about we start with the private citizen?”
“He’s guilty,” Anne stated with no hesitation at all. “Guilty, guilty, guilty, as charged. And guilty of all the others he was never charged with, too.”
“Okay,” Blakemoor said. “Now, what about Anne Jeffers, ace reporter? What does she think?”
Anne spread her fingers wide and wiggled them as if she were typing at an invisible keyboard. “Show me a reporter who wouldn’t like to rip the cover off a conspiracy that sent an innocent man to the electric chair. I mean, we’re talking Pulitzer Prize here, Mark.”
The detective eyed her speculatively, trying to gauge how much of what she’d just said was meant seriously and how much was merely intended to rile him. “Does that mean you’re planning to keep chasing this one?” he asked.
Anne opened her mouth to answer, then realized she didn’t know what she was going to do. Three hours earlier, before she’d heard from Rita Alvarez, it would have been an easy calclass="underline" given what Kraven had said in their last conversation, she’d at least have to give it one more shot. Because if Kraven hadn’t been lying, and she could prove it, there undoubtedly would be a Pulitzer in it for her. Not to mention a huge book contract, probably a movie, and a new job with a salary that would make her current paycheck look like a kid’s allowance. Now, though, everything was different. In just those few minutes she’d talked to Rita, all her priorities had changed. “I don’t know if I’ll chase the story or not,” she finally replied to the detective’s question. “It’s all going to depend on Glen’s situation. It may be that I’ll take a leave of absence.”
An incredulous grin spread over the detective’s face. “You? Give me a break, Anne — when it comes to working a story, you’re no different from me when I have a tough case. The hell with hours, the hell with food, the hell with sleep, and the hell with the family, too.”
Anne’s first reaction to Blakemoor’s words was to mount an immediate and aggressive counterattack: “Maybe that’s why Patsy left you. At least my marriage is still very much intact, thank you.” Blakemoor winced, and Anne immediately regretted her words. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That really wasn’t fair.” As she thought about it, she realized just how unfair it truly was. After all, it wasn’t she who had to hold dinner for Glen every night. Often it was exactly the opposite, or even worse — sometimes during the last few months it was Heather and Kevin waiting for both their parents, or eating alone while both adult Jefferses grabbed a bite in their offices. If she wanted to be completely honest about it, Blakemoor hadn’t been far off the mark at all — she did tend to shut everything else out when she was working on a story. The one that had ended today had occupied nearly all her attention for most of the last five years.
Suddenly she had a chilling thought: If she hadn’t been so consumed with the Kraven case, would she have seen Glen’s heart attack coming? But how could she have? It had simply come out of the blue!
Or had it?
She cast her mind back over the last few days, then the last few weeks and months. How long had it been since she and Glen had simply taken an evening off together, let alone a whole weekend? Usually one or the other — if not both of them — were working. His birthday had gone uncelebrated, as had their anniversary three months ago. If she’d become too engrossed in her work even to celebrate some of the most important landmarks in her life, how could she expect to be aware of her husband’s health?
Should she have seen the heart attack coming? Should she have found signs of it in Glen’s face? Were there stress lines she hadn’t even noticed, or a tiredness she’d ignored? A leaden weight of guilt began to settle over her as more and more questions formed in her mind, questions to which she had no easy answers.
“Hey, Jeffers, come on,” Mark Blakemoor said as if reading her thoughts. “What happened to Glen wasn’t your fault. You haven’t treated him the way I treated Patsy. Jesus, there were times when she didn’t see me for days at a time.”
“And have I been in Seattle the last few days?” Anne asked, her voice edged with self-accusatory sarcasm. “Oh God, Mark, I keep thinking I should have seen it coming, that I should have realized he was working too hard and made him slow down.”
“That would have been the pot calling the kettle black,” Blakemoor remarked. But his face wore a smile.
For the rest of the flight, Mark Blakemoor managed to keep the subject of conversation off both Richard Kraven and Glen Jeffers’s heart attack. The only subject left that came readily to mind was his own divorce, and to his surprise, he found himself telling Anne everything about it. What surprised him most was that by the time the plane landed in Seattle, he’d discovered two things: the divorce had been just as much Patsy’s fault as his own, despite his ex-wife’s insistence that she’d been a wronged woman; and that he could talk to Anne Jeffers about anything that came into his mind. He’d never felt that way about a woman before, and as he followed Anne off the plane at Sea-Tac airport, he wondered what it meant.
He also found himself wondering exactly how strong Anne’s own marriage was. If she should ever be single—
Jerking his own reins up short, Mark Blakemoor tried to banish the thought from his mind. It was already planted, though, and he knew it wasn’t going to go away. So what was he going to do now? Fall in love with another man’s wife?
Swell! Just fucking swell!
CHAPTER 9
The taxi pulled up in front of the Group Health Hospital entrance on Sixteenth East, and Anne, distracted, fished money out of her wallet to cover the fare and a tip.
“Thanks, ma’am,” the driver said in an accent so thick she could barely understand him. “I hope whatever’s wrong will be better real soon.”
Nodding her own thanks, Anne lifted her suitcase, hurried through the main entrance, then asked for the Coronary Unit.
“You want Critical Care,” a man in a red jacket replied. “Down the hall, first elevators on the right, then left on the third floor. You can’t miss it.”
As she stepped off the elevator into the third floor lobby, Anne found herself surrounded by a color she instantly recognized as “flesh,” the long discontinued and totally unmissed hue the crayon people had apparently thought resembled the skin tone of some race of men that neither she nor anyone else had ever seen. The peculiar shade of the walls was set off by a faintly deco white trim, a depressingly institutional decor which Anne knew her husband would detest — if he were well enough even to notice it. Then she was in an anteroom outside the closed double doors to the Critical Care Unit, facing a sign instructing her to use the red phone in the waiting area. Before she could even look around for assistance, she heard Heather’s voice: “Mom? In here!”
A second later Anne was hugged in a three-way embrace with both her children. “How is he?” she asked. “What have they told you?”
“He’s going to be okay,” Heather said. “They’ve got him hooked up to about a billion machines, but the doctor says it’s mostly just to watch him.”