She waited awhile before answering that one, obviously thinking it over. “The papers say it might have been Operation Alive, and that makes sense. Of course, my whole world made sense a few days ago, and now it doesn’t. At least not in any way I can figure out. So I guess the truth is I really don’t know who might have put him up to it, or if anyone did. But the actual planting and blowing up of the bomb-I think Norton did that on his own. Don’t know it, but I think it.”
Carver limped over and lowered himself into the chair next to the bed. It was identical to the chair in Beth’s room. “What did you see the morning of the explosion?”
“I was walking down the hall to see how soon Dr. Grimm would be finished in the operating room, hurrying because I saw your friend Beth entering and had another woman waiting, a patient named Wanda Creighton. There’s a storage room to the right of the hall. Its door was standing open, I remember. Outside the window at the end of the hall, I saw that Norton man running. He glanced in at me and had a horrible grin that I won’t forget. A few seconds later the bomb went off, and I don’t remember anything afterward until I regained consciousness here. The blast came from the storage room, right next to the operating room. It’s a wonder the woman on the operating table wasn’t injured. They say she was protected by the fact that she was prone, and by Dr. Grimm’s body. The storage room has-had a window that might have been open or was broken and provided access for Norton to have planted the bomb.” Tears glistened in her large brown eyes. “He did it, Mr. Carver. I saw him running away. I remember that grin, like it didn’t matter that I saw into his ugly soul because soon I’d be dead.”
“Would he have had to enter the clinic to plant the bomb? Might he have tossed it inside and then run?”
“I think it’s possible that he threw it into the storage room through the window. An organization like Operation Alive, I’m sure they have floor plans of most of the women’s clinics that perform abortions.”
“Were there more than the usual threats to the clinic in the weeks leading up to the bombing?” Carver asked.
“Yes. We always got threats. It was part of what we did. In the last few weeks, they’d become more extreme because most of them came from Operation Alive, even though they deny it. Then there was the bullet hole.”
Carver sat straighter. “Bullet hole?”
“A week before the bombing, someone fired a bullet into Women’s Light during the night, when the building was unoccupied. The next morning, when I arrived early and opened the clinic, I saw that the front door glass was shattered. The police said it was a drive-by shooting. They figured out the angle of the shot, then they found the bullet buried in the wall opposite the door.”
“Did you mention this to the FBI?”
“No, I don’t think so. I just told them about the threats, the letters and phone calls. I’d just finished talking to the police and didn’t tell them about it because they already knew. So I told the FBI pretty much what I’d said to the police but forgot to mention the gunshot last week. I was still shook up from what happened, so maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly. Do you think it’s important?”
Carver wondered how she could doubt its importance. But she’d been in an explosion and lost part of herself. That sort of thing tended to change your priorities in an instant.
There was no point in burdening her with a sin of omission. “It could be important,” Carver said, “but probably isn’t.”
The gunshot was almost surely a piece of information McGregor had kept from Wicker in their competition, to discover who if anyone other than Norton was behind the bombing. More specifically, to gain proof that it was Operation Alive. Norton might know about the drive-by shooting, but he wasn’t talking to the authorities at all now on advice of counsel. If it weren’t for Jefferson Brama, the FBI would be wringing facts out of Norton like water from a wash rag.
But now Brama would be doing the talking, either himself or through Norton, and it would be artful talk that revealed nothing.
“Do you know who Jefferson Brama is?” Carver asked.
“Sure. The lawyer for Operation Alive. He’s been to the clinic to threaten us with murder charges and lawsuits.” Delores twisted up her mouth as if she might spit. “Him I don’t like.”
“Had you seen or met Adam Norton before catching sight of him outside the window?”
“No. The only time I saw him was that day, just before the explosion. I know I shouldn’t, but I want him to die now for what he did.”
“He might,” Carver assured her.
“Probably not, with Brama as his lawyer.”
Carver didn’t argue with her. She might be right.
He gripped his cane and stood up. “Is there anything you need?”
“No,” she said, “my father visits me regularly, brings me things every day. My boyfriend, I don’t know . . . He was here once, said he’d be back, but he hasn’t.”
“Serious boyfriend?”
She smiled sadly. “Maybe not.”
“Don’t give up on life, Delores.”
She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Well, doesn’t that sound simple?”
“It is simple, and it’s good advice, considering the alternative.”
“Why don’t you tell me I’m young and beautiful and have my whole life ahead of me?”
“Is that what you want to hear?”
“No.”
“You know all those things are true, when you’re not feeling sorry for yourself. Not that you don’t have the right, but sometime it’s got to end.”
“I know.” She clutched her hands tightly, forming fists with the thumbs tucked inside her fingers, the way women do. “I’m furious, Mr. Carver, and I’m terrified of the future.”
“You’ll get over both, the fury and the terror. It might be hard at first, but the future can be good for you.”
She looked again unabashedly at his cane and his ruined leg, then up at his face. “I know you’re right.”
She tried a smile, but when he left the room she was crying.
Carver’s own eyes were stinging with tears. Like Delores Bravo, he found himself furious, and afraid of the future.
Not without reason.
Sitting in his office late that afternoon, he got a call from the head nurse on the fourth floor at the hospital. There had been trouble in Beth’s room.
17
When Carver left the elevator on the fourth floor and hurried down the hall, the first person he saw was McGregor standing outside the door to Beth’s room. The lieutenant’s wrinkled brown suit coat was open and hitched back on one side, as if to allow him to reach his gun, whose checked butt was visible in its leather holster. It was a pose Carver had seen McGregor affect before when he wanted to be especially authoritarian.
McGregor reached out a long arm toward Carver as he approached the door. “Not so fast, asshole.”
Carver avoided the arm, shoved him aside, and continued on his way, expecting McGregor to follow him into the room. His knuckles whitened on the crook of his cane. He was ready to deal with McGregor if he came in.
But McGregor, an expert on the remaining length of burning fuses, stayed outside.
Wicker was in the room, standing at the foot of the bed. So was a uniform from the Del Moray Police Department and a stocky plainclothes cop with acne Carver assumed was FBI.
Beth was standing near the bed, alongside Wicker, tall and elegant in her hospital gown. She was barefoot and looked perfectly all right except for the stitches still in place on the side of her neck.
The woman lying across the foot of the bed was battered and bleeding, and one of her hands was wrapped in a white towel. Someone had done a thorough and skillful job of administering a brutal beating to Officer Lapella.
Everyone other than Lapella stared at Carver. Lapella continued to face the ceiling. Wicker nodded to him. Beth walked over to him and leaned against him, placing a hand on his shoulder near his neck. He felt her fingers squeeze, loosen, squeeze, loosen.