“Was Natasha there?”
“She killed Mrs. Brockwell with an ice pick.”
“Boyer saw her do it?”
“Yes. She also accompanied them to the woods where Mr. Brockwell was shot. She gave the order.”
“Any chance Boyer told you where Natasha hid the ice pick?”
“I asked him. He said he didn’t know. Don’t you have any other physical evidence?”
“Nothing solid,” I said, “but with what you’ve told me, if you’ll sign a sworn affidavit, I might be able to get a warrant to get a DNA sample from her. We’ve got some hairs from the Brockwells’ place that we haven’t been able to match up with anyone.”
“I’ll have to make an inquiry with the Board of Professional Responsibility first, but I’ll do it no matter what they say,” Beaumont said.
“Screw the BPR. They’re nothing but a waste of space and oxygen.”
“I agree, but I’ll give them the courtesy of a call anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me if they tell me I have to remain silent, even if it allows a murderer to go free.”
“All right, just let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said. “Natasha manipulates Boyer and Barnett into forming a sort of mini-Satanic cult. She shoves the dogma and ritual down their throats in what appears to be a successful effort to gain control of them. They run into the Becks randomly at a rest stop, where Mr. Beck approaches Natasha and wants to talk to her about God. She gets angry and orders her boys to kill them. A couple of weeks later, they decide they liked it and they kill the Brockwells. Is that pretty much it in a nutshell?”
“Almost,” Beaumont said.
“What did I miss?”
“There are two other things I need to tell you. First, Boyer said Natasha took a necklace from Mrs. Brockwell after she killed her. It was a twenty-four-karat-gold cross on a gold chain.”
“We searched her house. Didn’t find it,” I said.
“Maybe she’s wearing it.”
I tried to picture Natasha in my mind the day I confronted her in the courtroom, but I couldn’t remember whether she was wearing a cross. Mrs. Brockwell’s family hadn’t said anything about a missing necklace, which meant it was either new or she didn’t wear it often. If it was relatively new, and if she purchased it with a credit card, we might be able to identify it. If Natasha was wearing it, which I doubted.
“Thanks, we’ll check it out,” I said. “And what’s the last thing?”
“Do you remember the article in the paper after the Brockwells were killed in which you referred to the killers as cowards?”
“There were a lot of articles. I said a lot of things.”
“Well, apparently the comment didn’t sit well with Mr. Barnett. Boyer said the night they were arrested at the motel, Natasha told Barnett it was his turn to pick the victim. They were on their way to your house.”
Monday, November 10
As I was walking back up the steps towards the office my cell phone rang. I looked down and recognized my mother-in-law’s cell phone number.
“Her fever’s getting worse,” Melinda said. “And she’s talking like she doesn’t know where she is. I’m taking her to the emergency room.”
“I’ll be right there.”
I turned and ran back down the stairs and out to my truck. I called Rita Jones on the way to the hospital and told her where I’d be, and I called Fraley and told him everything Jim Beaumont had shared with me. Fraley said he’d get hold of Beaumont, draft an affidavit, and take care of the warrant himself. I was glad to be free of it for a while, because suddenly I didn’t care about Boyer or Barnett or Natasha. All I cared about was Caroline.
I raced to the hospital, breaking nearly every traffic law ever written along the way. I saw Melinda’s car in the emergency room parking lot, got out, and rushed inside. I found Melinda pacing in the waiting room.
“Where is she?”
“They took her back as soon as we got here,” Melinda said. Her face was drained of color, her eyes darting nervously around the room.
“Can’t we go with her?”
“They told me to wait out here. I think it’s serious. They mentioned something about an infection.”
Over the next hour and a half, I paced constantly around the waiting room, to the parking lot, back to the waiting room, to the nurses’ station, where I was told at least five times that a doctor would be out to talk to me as soon as Caroline was stabilized. They wouldn’t give me any information about what was wrong with her or how she was doing. The only thing the nurse would tell me was that they were “treating her.” I didn’t want to call Jack or Lilly until I knew more, and Melinda had turned stone-faced and silent. All I could do was pace and think.
As I paced, thoughts kept flashing through my mind: Sarah being beaten, Lilly being attacked by a Doberman, Boyer dead on the floor. Barnett sitting in the chair: “I’m going to hell with you.” I walked back in from the parking lot and glanced across the emergency room lobby. An elderly man in a long sweater was making his way to a chair with the aid of a wooden cane. He reminded me of the old man who warned me of the curse.
Oh, my God. Caroline… this is my fault. I’m so sorry.
I remembered the old man’s voice as I was walking out of the coffee shop: “One of you has to die.” Had I been wrong to ignore the warning? Had I been too cavalier? Too full of hubris to recognize the threat to my family? And if the old man was right, and the curse was real, what was I going to do? I couldn’t just go to Natasha’s and kill her. What would I tell the police? That I was defending myself from a Satanic curse? Good luck selling that to a jury.
Finally, a doctor I recognized came into the waiting room. Collins Reid was the oncologist who was overseeing Caroline’s chemotherapy program. He wore a white medical coat and had thick, longish black hair and a beard that covered a pale, round face.
“How is she?”
“Let’s go back into the private area,” the doctor said, and he led Melinda and me down a short hallway into a large room that was furnished with three brown overstuffed chairs and a matching couch. As I looked around the room, I realized that it must be a place for families to grieve. There were prints of Jesus with the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm beneath them. My throat tightened.
“I really don’t understand this,” Dr. Reid said when we all sat down. “Her white cell count was fine when we drew blood before her last chemo treatment. Her count has dropped, which is normal with chemotherapy, but the problem is that it dropped so low that she became what we call neutropenic, which in turn made her vulnerable to a variety of infections. She’s now developed a condition known as sepsis, which basically means her bloodstream has become filled with bacteria. I’m afraid it’s quite serious.”
“What does ‘quite serious’ mean?” I asked. “Is this life-threatening?”
He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. I could tell from his demeanor, and from the way he was avoiding eye contact with me, that he was extremely concerned about Caroline.
“I’m afraid it is. She’s going to be in isolation for a while. We’ll treat her with antibiotics. Her survival depends on how she reacts to the antibiotics. And I’ll tell you this up front: patients often develop further complications from the antibiotics.”
“Isolation?” I said. “Does that mean I can’t see her?”
“I’m sorry. She has to be in a sterile environment. We can’t risk having anything, or anyone, around her until we get the infection under control.”
“How long?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“How long before I can see her?”
“Please, Mr. Dillard, take it easy. This type of thing happens rarely, but unfortunately, it happens. I’ve seen patients recover in a short amount of time, and I’ve seen them require months of hospitalization. But Caroline is relatively young and, up until the cancer diagnosis, she’d been healthy. All we can do is follow the treatment plan and hope her youth and strength get her through this.”