“Don’t try to deny it, David. I have a witness who saw you at the Grizzly Motel. You met Mike Halverson there. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it all out.”
“The Grizzly?” Then dawning spreads across his face. “Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
“It’s not what you think,” he says quietly. “You don’t understand.”
“Damn right I don’t. You did know Mike Halverson was HIV positive, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew.” He crosses his arms over his chest and tightens his lips. His calm complacency infuriates me.
“Jesus Christ, David. Wasn’t screwing around with Karen enough for you? Didn’t that pose enough of a risk to me? Not to mention your patients? My God, don’t you realize what you’ve done?”
“Mattie, you’ve got it all wrong.”
“Oh, really? Then pray tell, David. What’s the story? Did you kill Mike Halverson, too?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he says. “Mike Halverson committed suicide.” He pauses a second, looking at me. “Didn’t he?” he adds.
“No. It was staged to look like a suicide, but he was murdered.”
“Christ,” David says, raking his fingers through his hair and staring at the floor. I watch the muscles in his cheeks twitch and leap. When he looks back up again, I see resignation in his face. But I have no idea what he’s resigned to do. “I think you better come and sit down,” he says.
The look in his eyes frightens me and suddenly I remember Dom’s cautionary advice. Have I just made a fatal error in judgment? “If you have something to say to me, say it here,” I tell him. I want to stay close to the door, just in case.
“Fine. Have it your way.” He shifts uncomfortably and stares off into space for a second, seeming to gather his thoughts. “Yes, I knew Mike Halverson,” he says finally. “And yes, I did meet him at the Grizzly one evening. Just once, and he didn’t know I was coming. And it wasn’t for what you think. All I did was talk to them.”
“Them?”
I see a montage of emotion flash across his face: doubt, indecision, fear, and sadness. “Yes, them. Mike and his lover.”
“His lover,” I repeat, thoughts racing through my mind. “His lover? What, were you jealous? Is that it? You wanted him for yourself?”
He groans in frustration, his hands clenched into fists. “Christ, Mattie. Do you seriously think I’m gay? Or a murderer?”
“I don’t know, David. I don’t know what to think anymore.” Hearing the shrill tone in my voice, I take a deep breath and try to calm down. “Everything is so confusing. People are getting killed and I have no idea why or who’s doing it. But it’s hard for me to ignore the facts, David. And an awful lot of the facts point to you.”
“Well, I’m not a killer,” he says, calmer now. “Nor am I gay.” He sucks in a breath and squeezes his eyes closed. “But,” he adds, “Sidney Carrigan is.”
Chapter 31
At first I’m not sure if David means Sidney is gay, a killer, or both. As it turns out, David isn’t sure either about the killer part. That Sidney is gay, he is certain of. That Sidney is a killer, he doesn’t want to believe. Nor do I. No way, I think. But one look at David’s face and I know he has spoken the truth. The tragedy of it is written there, plain to see.
I finally take the seat David offered earlier and sit in stunned silence as he tells me everything he knows. It is a puzzling, sad, and sordid tale, one that makes me wish I’d kept my damnably curious nose out of things.
David explains how he first became aware of something going on when he overheard Sidney and Karen having a heated argument in an on-call room one night a couple of weeks ago. “I couldn’t hear everything they said, but certain words came out quite clearly,” David says. “I understood that Karen was asking Sid for money and threatening to reveal something about him if he didn’t. The next day I confronted Karen and, after first trying to deny it all, she just broke down and sobbed. That was when she told me about Mike, that he was her brother, that he was gay, and that he had AIDS.
“She told me how they were orphaned when Karen was nineteen and Mike was still in high school. She assumed responsibility for him then and has felt she has had it ever since. Apparently, it’s been quite a struggle, emotionally and financially. When Mike was diagnosed with AIDS, things really got bad. They had no health insurance and the cost of the drugs he needed to take to keep the disease under control was astronomical.”
Something clicks into place in my mind. “How long ago was he diagnosed?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. But I gather it was a number of years ago. Karen said he came close to dying once before. That was before the current protease inhibitor treatments became available.”
“That might explain why she took on that nurse’s identity,” I muse. “If she was hurting for money, the difference in pay between an OR nurse and an assistant could have made a significant difference. Plus, it might have given her access to supplies she would have otherwise had to buy for him.”
“I don’t know,” David says. “I suppose it’s possible. I didn’t know Karen wasn’t who she said she was until after she was killed. All I knew was what she told me, that she’d been trying to care for Mike for the last twenty years. She was buying his drugs, paying his rent, and she also set him up in his business.”
“You mean the medical supply company? Karen set that up?”
“So she said. Apparently it’s organized under a fairly convoluted corporate structure that hides the real owners’ names behind a series of dummy companies, with the main one looking like a sole proprietorship owned by Mike Halverson. In truth, the place is owned by Karen. That’s why she was trying to talk some of the docs into investing in the place. She had it set up so that they could become blind owners, their names never appearing anywhere in any official capacity. Then the docs could refer business there and convince their associates to do so, too, profiting from the revenues their referrals generated.”
“Did anyone buy into it?”
“I’m not sure. I know she was upset when I declined to participate, but she seemed to take it in stride. Though to be honest, in retrospect I think my refusal was why she turned her attentions toward me in another way.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning her seduction.”
I give him my best skeptic’s look. “I suppose you’re going to tell me it was all her fault.”
“Of course not. I let myself get caught up in it all. I felt sorry for her at first and simply wanted to help her. Then one thing led to another and…” He shrugs, as if it is no big deal. “Maybe she was hoping to blackmail me. I’m pretty sure that’s what she was doing to Sidney. But your untimely arrival in the OR that night sort of eliminated any hold she had over me.”
“How convenient.”
David lets out a mirthless laugh. “Go ahead. I deserve whatever nastiness you want to dish out. What I did was stupid and thoughtless. I never meant to hurt you, Mattie. You don’t know how many times I’ve come to regret what I did.”
“Did you kill Karen?”
“What do you think?”
I study him a moment, gathering my thoughts. “I think,” I say finally, “that you’re not the man I thought you were. I think that you have betrayed my trust. I think your supposed love for me, or for anyone else for that matter, isn’t nearly as deep as your love for yourself.”
I pause, seeing the misery my words have triggered in him and trying to take pleasure from the fact. But for some reason, all it does is make me feel worse.
“But no,” I conclude somewhat anticlimactically. “I don’t think you are a killer.”