“That would be a hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?”
“Not if they knew who he was. Besides, it only takes reasonable doubt to get him off.”
I shrugged. “All the more reason I should talk to him.”
Mason said, “Your ESP isn’t admissible in court, Rache.”
“NFP. And it should be.”
“Whether it should be is irrelevant.”
“But if I talk to him, maybe I can get more. A clue that will lead us to better evidence or—”
“Rachel, stay away from this guy.”
He pointed at me with a forefinger, something I didn’t remember him ever doing before. Like he was telling Josh to eat his vegetables. I did not like it. I sent him a look, my eyebrows arching, my gaze on that finger, and he lowered it and shook his head.
“He’s dangerous, Rache.”
The door opened, and Dr. Earl came in. I thought his photo was probably next to the word stately in the dictionary. Tall, lean, silver-white hair so neat it looked plastic, and the face of an aging GQ model. He looked up from the chart in his hands and flashed us a cheerful white smile. “Good morning, you two. You beat me here again, Rachel. I must be slowing down in my old age.”
“Well, you know, I couldn’t have a doughnut until I got here, so I was highly motivated.”
He laughed softly, turned his attention to Mason. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I don’t need to be here. Like I need to be home and back on the job, building a case against the guy who put me here.”
“Well, we just might be able to make that happen today. The home part, not the back on the job part.”
“Today?” Mason’s brows rose, and he looked at me, then back at the doctor. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
“Ah, not so fast now,” said the AARP poster boy. “There are going to be some conditions.”
“Anything, Doc. Anything you say, I promise. Tell me, and I’ll do it. To the letter.”
“You are such a liar,” I muttered, but under my breath, so Dr. Earl could pretend not to hear.
He winked at me, though, so I knew he’d heard just fine. Then he started ticking off conditions on his immaculately manicured fingers. “You need to hire a nurse to come in and change your dressing twice a day to prevent infection. You need to come back if there’s any sign of any problem whatsoever. Any trouble breathing, or if that cough comes back. And you need to take another week at home before returning to work. And then only after I’ve examined and cleared you.”
“Yes. Yes, I agree to all of it. Anything just to get out of here. Rache, my clothes?”
Dr. Earl shook his head. “You know better, Detective. Let’s proceed with your morning exam, and then I’ll get started on the paperwork as soon as I finish my rounds. You should be out of here by—” he looked at the clock “—midday, if all goes well.”
Mason shot me a bug-eyed “my head’s gonna explode” expression, and I had to clap a hand over my mouth to keep the laugh from busting out. I refilled my coffee cup from the box. “I’ll get out of here to give you some privacy, then. Help yourself to coffee, Dr. Earl.”
Then I left the room, shaking my head. Thank God he was okay and heading home today. Thank God. I think it was the first time I really allowed the full brunt of the danger to hit me, and it made my knees a little weak. It was a constant battle to keep my mind from going to what could’ve happened.
And, oh man, was I ever going to have a talk with probable arsonist Mr. Rouse the Louse, whether my detective liked it or not. I just wouldn’t tell him. Not until after the fact, anyway.
For now, though, my main challenge was how I was going to convince him to come home to my house instead of to his own. I paced the hallway, tried to stay out of the way of the rush-hour nurse traffic and wished I knew how Mason was going to react to my suggestion.
* * *
Marie Rivette Brown’s life wasn’t pleasant. The doctors at Riverside Maximum Security Psychiatric Hospital kept her medicated. Heavily medicated. She didn’t hear her husband’s voice anymore. Once in a while he came through, but it was rare and usually only if she was stressed out about something else.
They even let her use the community room. They hadn’t for the first few months, but now they did. It was a big room, with small round tables and plenty of chairs, lots of games like checkers and Trouble, and several decks of cards. A TV set was always playing some happy family movie with no violence or death or ghosts or voices. Nothing that might upset the inmates.
She knew what she’d done. She’d tried to retrieve her dead husband’s donated organs. Eric had been a serial killer. Finding that out had been like a mortar round hitting her world. No one else knew. No one ever would. But she knew. She’d known for more than a year and had done nothing about it, unable to destroy her sons by letting it come out. Then, after his suicide, she’d lost the little baby girl she’d been carrying, and that seemed to make the walls of her sanity come crumbling down completely.
She didn’t feel remorse. She figured the drugs kept her from feeling much of anything, so she couldn’t feel sorry for what she’d done, the lives she’d taken. Without the drugs, though, she knew she wouldn’t feel it, either. Without the drugs, she was convinced that what she had done was completely rational.
She missed her boys, though. That was the one thing she seemed capable of feeling, on her meds or off, completely insane or doped into a state of zombie-like calm. She missed her sons. Jeremy would be graduating from high school soon. A couple of weeks, if that. She so wished she could be there for him.
“Hi, sweetie. How are you doing today?”
Blinking out of her thoughts, Marie looked up from the table where she sat alone, an untouched meal in front of her, at the nurse. She’d seen her around before, a stunningly beautiful blue-eyed blonde with a figure her tight-fitting white dress did nothing to hide. But she wasn’t anyone Marie interacted with very often.
“Fine.” That was always her answer.
“You should let me take you outside. It’s such a beautiful day. Lots of people are out enjoying the yard today.”
Marie shrugged. “Okay.”
The nurse smiled and took her arm, helped her up and held on to her gently as they walked together toward the doors, then she used her keycard to unlock them. Marie didn’t think it made any sense keeping them locked, because they only led out to a fenced-in lawn, with several patches of flowers and quite a few big shade trees. Marie scuffed across the soft grass in her foam slippers toward a pair of lawn chairs underneath a pretty red maple. The nurse was right. The fresh air was nice. It smelled like summer and sunshine, and reminded Marie of picnics at the lake house up north and the kids playing on the tire swing and jumping into the water. Skinny and shirtless in baggy shorts she used to say would fall right off in the lake one of these days.
She sank into a chair, closing her eyes and breathing the air, and trying to grab hold of the joy of the memory. But there wasn’t any. It was just a picture. It elicited no emotion.
Marie wasn’t aware that the nurse had sat down in the other chair until she spoke, breaking into the memory and bringing her back to the miserable present.
“I wanted to show you something. I’m not really allowed, but sometimes I think