Three days later he woke up in a hospital bed.
As he emerged from unconsciousness, he noticed three things: the whiteness of the hospital room, Lila’s crying, and the horrible pain that throbbed at the front of his head.
“Oh, thank you, sweet Jesus!” Lila said, and kissed the large gold crucifix that she wore, then leaned over and smothered his chest and neck with kisses, saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
His face was bruised and his eyes were puffy. A dressing covered his forehead where he had smashed into the windshield. His hands were also bandaged from glass cuts. Lila had had her seat belt on and had sustained only minor injuries. Tormented with guilt, she sobbed with apologies that she had nearly killed him. But when the nurses left to call Kirk with the good news that his son had woken up, she asked him, “Wasn’t it scary how that big truck pulled in front of us like that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“We were just driving along minding our own business, both hands on the wheel, all eyes on the road, and suddenly he’s right there in front of us and no signal light on. Remember? What an idiot!”
He nodded.
And she hugged him and gave him a big kiss. “My poor Beauty Boy. I’ll take care of you.”
When Kirk showed up, the nurses and doctors came in to witness the reunion. Kirk was all smiles and gave his son a hug and laid a package on his belly. “So, how you feeling, big guy?”
“Pretty good, but my head hurts.”
“We can live with that.”
He looked over to Lila, and instantly he could see how anxious she was about Kirk’s presence, fearing he’d know it was her fault. She took the package and helped him unwrap it because his hands were bandaged.
“Oh, neat,” he said. It was a model airplane kit.
“What is it?” one of the nurses asked.
“Boeing 747,” Kirk said. The plane he piloted.
Standing there at the side of the bed, he went on to explain how it was a new generation of jumbo jets, the fastest commercial airliner in the sky, traveling at 575 miles per hour, and how it had a wingspan of 210 feet and was 230 feet long and 63 feet high and could carry upwards of four hundred passengers.
While Kirk held forth, he could see Lila getting fidgety, casting nervous glances at him in bed. When Kirk finished, he turned to his son again. “So, you remember how it happened?” And he sat at the edge of the bed and looked down at him for a response.
“A little.”
Kirk nodded and waited.
“Well, we were just driving along minding our own business and the stupid truck turned right in front of us and slammed on his brakes and we couldn’t help it, and we crashed right into it. The idiot.”
Lila looked at him and he felt her approval. It was their first secret. And Kirk bought it.
“Well, we’re just glad you’re alive.” As an afterthought, he looked at Lila and said, “Both of you.”
When he looked the other way, Lila gave her stepson a secret wink.
Over the next few days the doctors had done a lot of tests and decided that his memory was intact, as were his reasoning powers. For his cuts and bruises, they gave Lila some ointments and pills. For the swelling, she said she had her own Georgia home remedy—a bag of frozen peas to use as a cold compress. Because Kirk was flying that week, Lila brought him home on the morning of the third day following his emergence from the coma.
That’s when the headaches began. That’s also when Lila said he should sleep with her.
6
“Let’s talk strangulation.”
Dr. Paul Ottoman, chief medical examiner assistant, was a thickset man in his fifties with an exuberant rubber face, thick graying hair, and the demeanor of a professor addressing students in a medical lecture rather than standing with Steve and Neil in the autopsy room, the woeful cadaver of Terry Farina laid out before them.
It was a little before nine the next morning, an hour after Steve received the call from the D.A.’s office that the M.E. had confirmed Steve’s suspicions that Terry Farina did not die by accident. The autopsy room was a clean well-lighted place in white porcelain and stainless steel. A butcher’s scale hung above the cadaver table.
Out of respect, a drape had been folded across Terry Farina’s waist. Her skin looked like gray Naugahyde and her face was still swollen and blue, her mouth opened as if in mid-sentence, her neck ringed with purple from the ligature. The large Y incision from the shoulders down across the sternum to the pubis had been roughly sewn up. It was not cosmetic surgery, merely stitching to hold in her organs. An incision transecting her throat had been made and stitched closed. She looked less like a human being than something assembled from a Halloween kit.
Steve had to look away. That sensation was back—like a half-glimpsed memory or afterimage of an old TV set that’s been turned off. But it eluded him again.
From their few interludes during coffee breaks, he had found Terry pleasant, bright, and attractive. Because he had begun to think of himself as a man at the end of his marriage, the thought had flitted across his mind that she was the kind of woman he could be interested in if he and Dana did not make it—more of a survival impulse than a plan. So maybe it was something she had said or a mannerism of hers or some vague association. Whatever, some memory would flutter like a night bird out of the shadows, then at the last moment it would flick back before he could clap his eyes on it.
“Strangulation occurs with the compression of the jugular veins and/ or the carotid arteries, which leads to a reduction of oxygen to the brain, the loss of consciousness, and, if sustained longer than three minutes, death.”
Neil flashed Steve a look. “I think we know that.” He was holding a Styrofoam magnum of coffee, the stirrer clenched in his molars. The sight of Terry’s body had affected him also. Like combat soldiers, homicide cops were exposed to some of the worst images in life. Images that they’d rather not have in their heads—bodies in various stages of decomposition, the reduction of someone’s face to raw meat and bone, teenagers lying dead in the street in a pool of blood. Autopsies. Images like mental land mines you were required to negotiate and still remain sane. You did your best to be detached and stoical, throwing yourself into cool dry stuff like reports, paper chases, and lab analyses to help distance yourself from both victim and victimizer. But this was different. They knew Terry Farina.
“I’m sure, but you may not know that the time interval from compression to loss of consciousness is about ten seconds if both carotid arteries are compressed. And that’s what I believe we have here, which leaves us with three possibilities, at the top of which is suicide.”
Ottoman did not speak like a man jaded by what he saw on a daily basis. On the contrary, he held forth with the eerie enthusiasm of someone intellectually titillated by his work, like a math teacher explaining the Pythagorean theorem. But he had a disconcerting habit of flashing grins at dramatic moments as if repressing ghoulish delight.
“Most tourniquet suicides are by hanging with a slipknot noose fastened directly above the head so that full gravity quickens the loss of consciousness. Even when the body isn’t completely pendant—that is, the victim is partially resting on feet or knees—there’s enough pressure on the neck to cause unconsciousness in seconds. That’s not the case here. The stocking was at a thirty-degree angle with the horizontal.”
“So what are you saying?” Neil asked.