A minute later, Hewitt emerged from the lounge with a bowling-ball bag tucked under his arm-the same bag Merselus had left inside the locker. The excitement on his face quickly turned to fear. Two men stopped him right outside the men’s lounge. One flashed a badge. The other took the bag, zipped it open, and looked inside.
There was no bowling ball in there, of course.
A split second later, Hewitt was up against the wall, feet spread, hands cuffed behind his waist as the FBI read him his rights. The bowler who was working on the perfect game in lane fifteen had suddenly lost his audience. The curious crowd was gravitating toward the men’s lounge. The manager stepped out from behind the counter and pushed toward the center of the commotion.
Merselus finished his beer and headed for the exit. The heat and humidity of another summer night hit him as the doors opened. He was in the parking lot, halfway to his car, when he noticed that someone had followed him out.
“Hey, asshole,” the guy called out.
Merselus kept walking.
The heckler kept coming, now just a few steps behind him. “Hey, you owe my wife an apology.”
Great, the thin-skinned fat chick sent her husband.
Merselus wanted to ignore him, but the footsteps were closing in from behind. Merselus stopped, turned sharply, and cast a laserlike glare that very few people had seen and lived to remember.
The guy nearly screeched to a halt.
“Back off,” said Merselus.
Two simple words and the expression on Merselus’ face were enough to make the guy’s voice shake in response.
“You are, uh, gonna go back in that bowling alley and you’re gonna, uhm, apologize to my wife.”
The fear was audible. Merselus approached slowly, looking him straight in the eye, not stopping until they were nearly nose to nose.
“No. I’m not.” His tone wasn’t agitated or even argumentative-just a simple statement of fact, which made it all the more effective.
The guy was built solid, obviously no stranger to the gym, and there was no question in Merselus’ mind that he’d successfully defended his wife’s honor in the past. This time, however, the knight in shining armor nearly dissolved on the spot, smart enough to sense that he wasn’t dealing with just another bully at a bowling alley. Not even close.
The man took a step back, then turned and started away, walking at first, but nearly at a trot by the time he reached the doors and retreated into the safety of the bowling alley.
Good call, thought Merselus. Really good call.
He reached deep into his pocket and dug out his keys-sans the locker key-and headed toward his car.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jack drove himself to Jackson Memorial Hospital that Thursday night. Rene’s murder made a thing like a civil lawsuit seem trivial, but the Facebook posting was a bona fide legal emergency, and to Jack’s knowledge no judge had ever excused a direct violation of a court order based on the there-are-other-things-in-life-that-are-more-important defense. A frank conversation with his clients was in order.
Jack stopped for the red light at the main entrance to the medical campus. A homeless man working the left-turn lane flashed a cardboard sign that said NO FUCKING JOB OR FAMILY, NEED MONEY TO GET DRUNK. WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE? Jack could relate. He rolled down the window and gave him a couple bucks for being honest.
“Bless you,” the guy said.
Jack’s “You’re welcome” caught in his throat. He’d suddenly noticed the green directional sign posted on the other side of the intersection: MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE, it read. The crushing reality had set in hours earlier, and Jack wasn’t headed back to the ME’s office. But the mere sight of the sign took the pain to another level, and the words just came out.
“Rene, I am so sorry.”
“Who you callin’ Rene?” said the homeless guy.
A horn blasted from behind. The light had turned green, and someone was in a hurry. Jack put the car in gear, followed the street to the parking garage, and walked across the courtyard to the hospital entrance. He met Ben Laramore in the ground-floor cafeteria, seated at the same table where, less than twenty-four hours before-it seemed so much longer-a process server had served them with the judge’s order to file the complaint under seal and keep the allegations confidential.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” said Laramore.
“Thank you for that,” said Jack.
“I feel even worse now that I realize you were trying to call me while all this was going on. I didn’t realize the number I was ignoring was your new phone.”
“Changing my number was the only way to stop the crazy calls I was getting. But don’t worry about it. I was the one who told you not to answer calls from numbers you don’t recognize.”
Laramore sighed deeply. “Is this story on the news yet?”
“So far it’s just local reports about a body found along Tamiami Trail. Once the next of kin is notified, something will need to be said about the fact that she worked here at Jackson. It’s not clear when the media will make the connection between Rene and me, but it doesn’t seem to take BNN long to connect anything to me. That’s not something you need to worry about, though.”
“I am worried. You said Rene was your source. She was the whole reason we knew about BNN’s interference and how it prevented the paramedics from transmitting information from the ambulance to the ER physicians. Don’t we lose that evidence now that she’s dead?”
“No. Rene was our source, not our witness. Everything she told me was hearsay. Even if she were alive, I’d need to subpoena the ER doctors, the paramedics-all the people who were actually involved in treating your daughter. Don’t worry. We’ll get all that. Nothing is lost.”
Laramore did a quick check around the cafeteria, as if to underscore the confidentiality of what he was about to say. “Do you think that’s why she got killed? Because she was the source?”
“No.”
Laramore paused, as if expecting Jack to say more. “That’s it, that’s your answer: ‘No’?”
“BNN is not exactly a model corporate citizen. But I don’t think they kill people to win civil lawsuits.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Laramore. “They probably draw the line at putting young women in comas.”
Jack fully understood the bitterness.
“Sorry,” said Laramore. “Don’t mean to be so sarcastic. This whole thing is just getting. . it’s getting to be too much.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
Laramore sat back in his chair, breathing out. “So, of all things, we now have a social media problem.”
“I had a tech agent from the FBI check out Celeste’s Facebook page. There is no sign of hacking into her account. Which means that whoever posted the allegations of our complaint on Celeste’s Facebook page used her username and password.”
“Well, that puts that person one step ahead of Celeste’s mother and me. We have no idea how to access Celeste’s account. In fact, I don’t know the first damn thing about Facebook.”
Jack spoke while pulling up Celeste’s page on his iPhone. “It has about eight hundred and fifty million users worldwide. It’s especially popular with people your daughter’s age. They constantly update their status, telling their friends that they’re going out for pizza, dumping a boyfriend, getting a zit.”
“Getting a zit?”
“I’m not exaggerating. Most of the stuff is utterly useless, food for online information addicts whose sphere of knowledge is forever shrinking until someday they wake up and realize that they know absolutely nothing about anything except for whatever it is that happens to be going on at the moment.” Jack laid his phone on the table, the screen facing Laramore. It was Celeste’s Facebook page with the sixty-seven status updates that recounted verbatim the allegations of the complaint.