Jesse stopped by Cole’s room, but he was asleep. The nurse at the station reassured him that his son was doing well. Still, he asked to speak to the doctor.
“He’s been called to the ER. Come back in a little while, or I can have him call you.”
Jesse said he’d be back up. That he had to stop by the ICU.
Annette and Ambrose North were seated in the visitors’ lounge down the hall from the ICU. Both looked exhausted and lost. It was amazing, Jesse thought, how violence and tragedy can strip away the veneer and masks people show to the world. He suspected that the Norths had been showing them to the world for so long that they had come to believe their façades were actually who they were.
Annette looked up. “Jesse.”
“Any change?”
“None,” Ambrose said. “You saved her life. Thank you.”
“If you really want to thank me, a little truth would be nice.”
“Anything,” Annette said, glaring at her husband. “Anything.”
“Yes, Chief Stone. As my wife says, anything. Ask your questions.”
He asked and they answered. They had known about Petra’s drug use. They had made the same mistakes that Patti Mackey and Etta Carpenter had made by trying to wean their kid off the drugs and then by being willingly fooled by Petra’s lies. They had figured out it was Petra who had stolen the watch, but by then it was too late to take things back. They had gotten Petra counseling. She had detoxed. But it was no good.
“The drugs she snorted to put her in here,” Jesse said. “I think someone was trying to kill her.”
Annette gasped and Ambrose North’s face twisted in fury.
Jesse continued, “I’ve got her under police guard and I don’t think the person who did this is stupid enough to try something in the hospital. It was an act of desperation.”
Ambrose said, “You think it was the teacher.”
“I do.”
“After the interview at the station,” Ambrose said, “we pleaded with her to give us the name. We explained that it might be used as leverage if you pursued criminal charges against her. But she denied knowing. She is definitely protecting someone.”
“Do you think she wouldn’t tell you because she was afraid?”
Annette spoke up. “No... Well, maybe a little. But it wasn’t that. I’m sure of it. It was as if she was protecting a loved one.”
Ambrose started to speak and then decided the time for pretense had ended several hours ago.
Before heading back to Cole’s room to speak with his doctor, Jesse checked in with Gabe Weathers.
“Boss, good thing you’re here. Saves me the trouble of calling you.”
Jesse was curious. “Call me about what?”
“A little while ago, a woman called up to ICU to check on the girl’s condition. But when the nurse put me on the phone, the phone went dead. I called the front desk. The woman didn’t leave a name but claimed to be the North girl’s sister.”
“How old did this ‘sister’ sound to you, Gabe?”
“In the thirty-to-forty range, but it’s hard to tell with voices over the phone.”
Jesse told Gabe he’d have some food and coffee sent up for him and that he would send someone up to relieve him as soon as he could.
“Was it a sister, Jesse?”
“The teacher,” he said. “She’s scared.”
“Is that good, her being scared?”
“Good, but dangerous.”
“You think she’ll try for the girl again?”
“No, Gabe. She tried to kill the girl and failed. Now she’ll have to try something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “That’s what makes her dangerous.”
Seventy
Millie Lutz was exhausted. Taking care of Wexler was a lot of work, and it wasn’t the kind of work she liked. She had been trained as a surgical nurse and had worked with some of the top surgeons at the best hospitals in Boston. She’d seen hearts, kidneys, and lungs transplanted. She’d seen twins conjoined skull-to-skull separated and made healthy. And she had been reduced to changing the diapers of an old man who was lost inside his own head. Worse, she was risking a lifetime in jail for forging scripts.
She gave the relief nurse instructions about Wexler, who had finally gone to bed after hours of unintelligible babbling and roaming about the house. As she looked in the hallway mirror, she thought about the young doctor who had first turned her on to Oxy. How stupid she had been to believe the bastard was going to leave his wife for her. She hoped he was dead but could not deny the rush of excitement she got thinking about him inside her. The hollow-cheeked zombie who looked back at her from the mirror knew that she would never feel that type of excitement again. That she would have but one love for the rest of her miserable life.
She stepped out into the purplish dawn light, a chill in the air that was a welcome change from the stale air and stink of the old doctor’s house. She noticed the birds singing to one another and realized she hadn’t been conscious of them for many months. She took the paper at the end of the driveway and tossed it toward the front door, then got in her Corolla, backed out of the driveway, and headed past the little guardhouse at the entrance to Brookline Country Club.
About a half-mile from there, a motorcycle rode up behind her, the glare of its headlight in her rearview, blinding her. She slowed, pulled to the side of the road, stopped, and waved for him to pass. But he did not pass. He drove up next to her window. The motorcyclist stared at her through an opaque visor. He raised his right hand. In it was a pistol with a thick metal sound suppressor on its muzzle. There were five flashes, a cloud of gray smoke, and five muted barks. Millie’s brake foot, now lax, fell away from the pedal, and her Corolla rolled into a thicket of trees along the road.
That morning, Molly greeted Jesse by tilting her head at his office door.
“Brian Lundquist is in there waiting for you.”
“He’s up bright and early.”
“How’s Cole?”
“Banged up. Concussion, but they’re probably releasing him from the hospital later. Any change with Petra North?”
“She stirred a little. Not conscious, but the doctors are encouraged.”
“Who’s got ICU duty?”
“Peter.”
“Your girls know about Petra?”
Molly laughed a sad laugh. “I think it was on Twitter before you left the house. There are no secrets anymore, Jesse. No privacy. I’m glad I wasn’t raised in the world my girls have grown up in. A girl needs a safe place for herself where she can live with the little embarrassments and mistakes she makes and grow from them. I would hate to think of the world as a stage I would be forced to live on for everyone to see. It was one thing when I was a girl and came out of the bathroom trailing some toilet paper and having the other girls laugh at me. Now someone would take a photo of it or video with their phone and post it.”
That gave Jesse an idea, but one he wasn’t yet willing to share.
“Your girls will be fine, Molly. Their dad is a good man and they have you for a mom.”
It was strange to see Lundquist standing where Jesse often stood, staring out the window behind his desk and gazing out at Stiles Island or the ocean beyond. It was stranger still when the state Homicide captain spoke without turning to face Jesse.
“There is a Joint Narcotics Task Force,” Lundquist said. “DEA, Boston PD, and my team. They’re working specifically on opioids. Last time we spoke, you mentioned you had something bigger than just the drug ring at the high school. You want to explain that to me now?”
Jesse sat in the seat Cole had sat in the day before, one of the two that faced his desk. “Sit in my seat,” he said. “We need to look each other in the eye for this conversation.”