Not long after that, Eden had started an affair with Dr. D'Anton. It must have been a hot one. She had moved to San Francisco, receiving quite a bit of money from him – along with free cosmetic surgery. It seemed that D'Anton planned to make her into a showpiece.
And Eden was trying to change her life accordingly. She was getting rid of Ray and her connections to his sleazy world. She was upgrading her wardrobe. There was something childishly wistful about it – the belief that by changing her clothes and body, that would change her being, too.
Never mind that the trigger for it all was an affair with a married man, which, given its intensity, seemed likely to end in divorce. Eden may have been sweet and naive, but she obviously had no compunctions about taking D'Anton away from his wife.
Monks wondered if that was why Gwen Bricknell had lied about Eden being "just another patient"-if Gwen had known about the affair and was trying to protect D'Anton. If the news came out, it would make for a juicy scandal.
But while it might be unethical for a physician to have sex with a patient, it was not illegal. And none of the information put Monks any closer to knowing who might have murdered Eden Hale, or why – or even whether that was, in fact, what had happened.
Still, some potential motives were starting to appear, like shapes in fog.
Maybe D' Anton had wanted to end the affair – in spite of what Eden had told her brother Josh – and Eden had blackmailed him.
Or Julia D' Anton, fearing that her marriage was being destroyed, might have decided to remove the threat.
Ray Dreyer – jilted as a lover, and losing his long-term investment – was still on the charts, too.
There were many other possibilities that might or might not ever come to light. Including the damnable one that the salmonella in Eden Hale's bloodstream was what had killed her. That if Monks had recognized it and treated it differently, she might have lived. And all the rest of this was a waste of time and effort, a pathetic attempt at exoneration – an epilogue to a ruined medical career.
He went back inside and poured another drink, noting that the bottle was more than one quarter empty. He took the drink and the cordless phone back outside with him.
Martine answered on the third ring.
"It's me," he said.
"Hi." Her voice sounded remote.
"I just wondered what you're doing."
"Nothing. Fixing dinner."
Monks thought he heard talking in the background. It was probably the TV.
"Any developments?" she said. "On your – situation?"
"Yes," he said, but then stopped, unable or unwilling to continue, at this remove. "Is there somebody there?"
She sighed. "No, Carroll."
"Just asking. It will be good for you to make new friends."
"Are you drinking?"
"Yes." He took a long swallow, clinking the ice close to the phone so she would hear it.
"You really want to know what I'm doing?" she said. "I'm watching movies. The kind you were watching yesterday."
Monks's forehead creased. Martine had occasionally brought a rented video home, but he was pretty sure they had not watched any in the past week or two, and he had not been to a theater in years.
"Yesterday?"
"Porn," she said patiently.
"You're watching porn movies?"
"I never really have before. But – I don't know. I keep thinking about that young woman. What all that's about."
"Are you learning anything?"
"You wish," she said wickedly. Then, serious again: "I'm trying to imagine myself doing those things. Like, with two men at once, or even three."
Monks was not sure he liked where this was going. "So, your interest isn't completely academic?"
"I don't know what it is," she said. "Just looking at a different world. No, that's not all. There's some – prurience – is that the word?"
"One of them. Does it arouse you?"
"Some of it. Not much. It gets repetitious pretty quick."
"There are only so many permutations," Monks said.
"The dialogue's unbelievably bad."
"I expect they improvise a lot."
"Do I make sounds like that?" she said.
"Yes. But they're very musical."
"You're blessed with the blarney, Monks."
"Do you wish you were here?" he said.
"Yes. No. Carroll, I want to make this as easy as possible."
"Of course, Martine. That's the right way to look at it."
"Oh, go away." This time, she sounded like she was starting to cry. The phone clicked off.
Monks thought about calling back. Instead, he finished the drink and poured another one. It occurred to him just how precise was the term heavy heart. When things started to go wrong, they seemed to go like an avalanche – first a few rocks that you might be able to dodge, but then the whole mountainside tearing loose and coming down on your head.
He drank, remembering, unwillingly, the other time in his life when he had been in a similar situation. The year was 1988. Monks was chief of emergency services at Bayview Hospital, in Marin County. He had been losing popularity there for some time: with some other physicians, because he would not look the other way at certain good-old-boy practices, such as uncredentialed procedures; with staff, because he had no tolerance for various forms of slackness that were considered perks in big hospitals.
One night Monks had monitored, by radio, a team of paramedics in the field who were attending an elderly seizure victim. The senior of the medics was certain it was a heart attack and that a shot of adenosine would save the elderly lady's life. Monks, miles away and unable to see the victim, had only pulse rate and blood pressure to go on. These, together, suggested that a heart block might be the only thing keeping her alive. Adenosine would remove it.
He forbade the shot, clearly, twice. Radio contact was then mysteriously lost from the paramedics' end. When it was reestablished, some eight minutes later, the shot had been administered and the patient was dead.
The senior paramedic then claimed that Monks had ordered the shot. His partner, and the hospital staff who had been there in the ER, seemed uncertain.
The radio tape was hard evidence of what had really happened. But the paramedics were well connected to the sheriff's department – and the tape disappeared en route to the evidence room.
Monks, the Emergency Room, and the hospital had been sued. Then, as now, the hospital's administration had wanted to settle out of court. That would have saved money and bad publicity, but Monks would have been left tagged by the tacit verdict of negligence. He had fought it, and eventually won.
Or at least he had won that aspect of it. In between, he had discovered hard and fast that he had been mistaken about many things, and people, that he had taken for granted. It had precipitated a tail-spin that had been building anyway, with him first giving in to it and then pushing it. When it ended, some four years later, he was no longer employed, no longer married, and largely a stranger to the world he had lived in before.
He finished the drink and poured another one, then walked down to the Bronco. He unlocked the safety-deposit box he had bolted under the driver's seat and took out the pistol he carried there, a Model 82 Beretta, 7.65-millimeter, double action, simple blued steel. He carried it back up to the deck.
The Beretta was a little smaller than his open hand and weighed just over a pound. It had a nine-shot clip, with room for another round in the chamber. That was an important thing to remember about automatics. When a revolver's cylinder was empty, so was the pistol. But even when the clip was out of an automatic, the gun had that one more bullet, hidden, right there in firing position. A lot of people had been killed through failure to recognize that.