Driscoll carried his height with a forceful stride that made his 6’2” stature seem intimidating. There was a swagger to his walk, not unlike that of Gary Cooper’s in High Noon. Precinct women found him irresistible, but Driscoll was impervious to feminine adulation.
Another remarkable feature of Driscoll’s face was his expressive lips-lips that were kind and generous, that did not belong to his Celtic jawline but were more Mediterranean, almost Latin. They responded to his emotional states, dilating when contented, contracting under stress, vibrating when anxious. There was a nonverbal language his lips communicated. Colette had learned to read his heart and transcribe his thoughts by observing his lips’ tremors. Because of those lips, Driscoll couldn’t boast a poker face that, in his profession, would have been an asset.
And now, his lips thin, he walked the deserted shoreline, heading for the bungalow and Colette. Arriving on the porch, he turned the key in the lock of their front door. Oil paintings that once seemed to have lived and breathed welcomed him. They too had become lifeless, a silent salute to their creator, who lay motionless in the center of the loft. The scent of fresh-cut peonies and artist’s turpentine had been replaced by the sharpness of Betadine antiseptic and the sterile smell of bleached hospital linen.
Colette lay with her eyelids closed and her lips parted, inhaling pure air brought to her lungs through plastic tubes that invaded her nasal cavity. Her skin was ashen, lusterless. Her once radiant hair was matted, flattened on her scalp.
“Bon soir, ma cherie,” he murmured, kissing her forehead.
“We had a lovely day,” sang Colette’s Jamaican nurse, Lucinda, who was busy massaging his wife’s feet.
Driscoll unpocketed the jar of emollient, and Lucinda’s eyes widened.
“I haven’t seen that since I was a little girl in Kingston,” she said, unscrewing the jar’s lid and inhaling the fragrance. “Ain’t nothin’ better for the skin.” She began to apply the cream to Colette’s ankles.
“You can take a break when you’re done, Lucinda. I’ll fill in for you,” said Driscoll.
The nurse replaced the cap on the jar of emollient and placed the jar on Colette’s nightstand. She excused herself and headed for her room.
Driscoll was alone with his wife. He reclined in the armchair next to her bed, where electronic instruments monitored life signs, supervising the maintenance of her existence.
“Let me tell you about my day,” he said. “I visited the dock at Sullivan’s. Remember, honey, the time we launched the catamaran from there? Your face went ashen when we hit the water, and whiter still when the first wave nearly toppled us over.”
Colette’s breathing faltered. The respirator displayed a quavering line. After ten seconds, an alarm would ring. Driscoll leaped from his chair and watched the digital chronometer showing the passing of seconds. Three…four…five. Panic seized him. Was she going to die right here and now with him watching, powerless to keep her alive? Seven…eight. My God, he was losing her.
No. Her breathing returned to normal. The line showed her lungs were working again, ventilating her body.
What had just happened? Had she been dreaming? Was he in her dream? What had taken her breath away?
Driscoll loosened his tie and collapsed back into the chair. He flicked on the room’s Sony receiver and loaded a new CD into its feed. The sound of Jean-Pierre Rampal’s flute filled the loft. He rambled to the kitchen, retrieved a bag of frozen scallops from the Frigidaire, and placed them into the microwave to defrost. It was Colette who had introduced him to French cooking, and he had relinquished his diet of Quarter Pounders and fries for the nuances of coq au vin, agneau a l’estragon, escalopes a la colonnade, and tranche de boeuf au madere.
Tonight’s dinner would be coquilles chambrette, a combination of sea scallops, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, cognac, and wine. It took him fifteen minutes to prepare the dish. He brought his meal to the easy chair beside Colette’s bed.
Suddenly the heart monitor beeped. The pattern of electronic zigzagging had changed. The rhythm seemed more agitated.
“Lucinda!” he shouted.
The nurse came running in, dressed in a robe.
“There’s a change in her heartbeat! It’s up to 98!”
“I see that,” Lucinda said, eyeing the monitor. “But, she’s not in any danger, sir. It would have to climb above 110 for there to be a problem.”
“Why did it change?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
She turned a knob on the monitor that darkened the screen, then turned the knob back to its original position. The agitated pattern returned.
“Machine’s working fine,” she reported.
The music stopped. It was the last selection on the Rampal CD. The zigzagging of the heart monitor returned to its original pattern.
“She’s back to 62,” Lucinda announced. “It dropped when the music stopped.”
Driscoll hurried over to the wall unit that held his stereo system and hit play on the CD player. He then depressed the right arrow button eleven times until he had recalled the last selection that had played. The sound of Rampal’s melodious flute filled the loft again.
“That’s La Ronde des Lutins, from Bazzini,” said Driscoll, his eyes riveted to his wife’s chalky face.
“Her heart rate is climbing again. It’s up to 99!” gasped the nurse. “She’s reacting to the music. But that would be impossible.”
“That was Nicole’s favorite flute piece,” said Driscoll, absently. “She used to practice it over and over again.”
“Lord Almighty,” breathed Lucinda.
Sadness and despair filled Driscoll as the musician’s crystalline notes played on. He knew there was no chance Colette would awaken from her coma. He placed no hope in that. There was only one unresolved question rolling around in his head. He knew it would go unanswered, but he wondered nonetheless. Was it his daughter or his wife that was now speaking to him from the grave?
Chapter 6
To Driscoll, Sergeant Margaret Aligante was a looker. Five-feet-seven, and a figure that would rival any of Veronese’s models. She carried her High Renaissance body with confidence, using her physical charisma to her advantage. Driscoll knew that suspects she interrogated were often distracted by her curvaceousness and sensuality. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised in Red Hook, an Italian neighborhood where the men worked as firemen, cops, and truck drivers. It surprised Driscoll that, as a teen, she had run with the Pagano Persuaders, a street gang that intimidated ten city blocks. But that had soon ended. She had decided to become a police officer. She had registered at John Jay College, completing the four-year curriculum with a 3.96 grade-point average; complemented her education with a smattering of courses in criminal behavioral science, forensic psychology, and profiling methodology; and studied the martial arts of aikido and tae kwon do.
Margaret graduated from the Police Academy in 1991. Her first assignment as a patrolman had her monitoring the arteries of the 72nd Precinct, between Third and Fifteenth Streets in Brooklyn. In six years, she had earned her gold shield, passed the Sergeant’s test, and was working undercover with Vice. After that, it was Homicide with Lieutenant Driscoll for the past four years.
Driscoll had asked Margaret to sit in as he conferred with Gerard McCabe, the murder victim’s husband. A somber silence filled Driscoll’s office. The two police officers waited compassionately for McCabe to pull himself together. Then Driscoll said, “You should know we don’t have a DNA profile yet, but it is your wife’s license.”