Michael Palmer - Oath of Office

She was a spirited woman-a New Yorker, Lou thought he remembered, with a hard edge. He had liked her from the very beginning. In all the time he had dealt with her and Meacham, he had never once seen her cry. Now, her tears flowed liberally. It was impossible to imagine what she must have been experiencing since receiving the news. Her three children were all in their teens.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked before pulling away.

Lou nodded. “Just a couple of minutes ago. I came out here from D.C. to see if I could help, but there was really nothing I could do.”

“He was fine when he left home, Lou. He’s been going to meetings and staying sober, and this morning when he left for the office, he was fine.”

“Where are your kids?”

“At my sister Rosalee’s in Chantilly. When the news broke, I had her pick them up at school and take them to her place to keep them away from reporters.”

“Good move. Do you want to go in to see him?”

Carolyn hesitated, and for a moment Lou thought she was going to decline. Then she nodded and took his arm. Her sobbing had already ceased.

The scene in Meacham’s cubicle had largely been cleaned up when they arrived. Nurses had respectfully not pulled a sheet up over his face, although they had left a bandage in place over the bullet hole. Death, as Lou had often encountered it, even violent death, frequently had a calming effect on a patient’s countenance. To some extent, that was the case here.

Carolyn stood motionless for a time, gazing down at the man she had shared a life with for so many years-the interested, interesting caregiver who would never get the chance to see their daughters into womanhood.

“What happens next?” she asked stonily.

Lou felt himself react to her abrupt change in tone. “Now you have to sign some papers with the nurses and John’s body will need to be autopsied,” he said simply.

Carolyn glanced over at him. “Is that really even necessary? Isn’t it obvious how he died?”

“It’s standard practice for all homicides.”

Carolyn shook her head. “Let’s go,” she said, spinning and heading out the door with Lou rushing to keep up.

There were no final caresses, no request for a minute alone, no more tears. It was as if someone had thrown a switch, making Carolyn Meacham aware of the horribleness of her husband’s crime.

Lou gave passing thought to asking what her husband might have meant by the cryptic remark, no witnesses, but this hardly seemed the time.

“I need to pick up my kids and go home,” Carolyn said with no emotion.

“I’ll drive you.”

“I’m fine to drive.”

It was an order, not a statement.

“Well, you may be fine to drive, but you’re not okay to be alone. I’ll ride with you. We can talk in the car. Then, if need be, I can take a cab back here.”

Carolyn made no attempt to talk him out of it.

Outside, the rain had picked up and the fog had thickened. The unseasonable chill persisted. It was Carolyn who first spotted the crowd of reporters lurking about her silver Volvo SUV. Many were using makeshift plastic tarps to shield their equipment from the rain. Lou, headline news himself when the DEA and police descended on his home and arrested him for writing prescriptions for himself, marveled at the resourcefulness of the vultures-how they already knew this particular car belonged to Carolyn Meacham.

As if underscoring his thoughts, their camera lights lit up as soon as he and Carolyn neared. He wondered how long it would take for them to come up with his name. Calls to Filstrup would be sure to follow.

Oh, happy day.

Lou pulled Carolyn close to him, shielding her from the onslaught. Reporters shoved their microphones in her face like mothers trying to force-feed their children, and shouted out questions that became garbled as they clashed with one another in midair. Carolyn was silent ice, her head high, her intelligent green eyes fixed straight ahead. Through the swarm, she somehow managed to get her door unlocked, and then reached across the seat to open Lou’s side. He tossed his rain-dampened jacket into the backseat and quickly climbed in. Carolyn turned the ignition key. The reporters banged on the windows and doors, and stepped aside only when the car began to move.

“Lou?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Something made him do this. He was not a violent person. Something made him do what he did.”

Lou passed on the urge to remind her that a few years ago, her husband had nearly gotten booted out of medicine for losing control.

“I suppose that’s an understandable feeling,” he said instead.

As she pulled onto the driveway, John Meacham’s widow left rubber on the wet tarmac of the doctors-only parking lot.

“Find out what happened, Lou,” she said. “Find out why John killed those people.”

They drove largely in silence, wipers on intermittent, traveling along a country road that snaked through a hilly landscape. Dusk had passed, and night had settled in quickly, but Carolyn did not appear bothered by the headlights of the vehicles splashing past in the opposite direction. In fact, Lou guessed she might be going as fast as any of them.

“Are you all right to be driving?” he asked.

Carolyn sighed heavily. “I need to be driving,” she said. “Even in this crappy weather, I need to be doing something. Just sitting in that lounge … waiting for news … trying to make sense of it all … hoping he would live, praying he would die. It was so horrible, so lonely, Lou. You couldn’t possibly imagine.”

A beloved husband dead. Hundreds of lives irreparably shattered. Carolyn left to dwell in the aftermath.

Those were Lou’s thoughts before he said, “No, Carolyn, you’re right. I couldn’t imagine.”

They fell back into the heavy silence. The Volvo’s wipers now beat a steady rhythm against the driving rain. Fog transformed the approaching headlights into a hazy glow that stretched across the darkening horizon. Even with bad visibility, the rain-slicked road, and Carolyn’s above-the-limit speed, there were drivers daring enough pass them when permissible.

Carolyn made a disgusted sound when one zipped by. “I’m not going to speed in weather like this,” she said.

Lou reached for his jacket in the backseat and fished out his cell phone. He assumed that Renee had already seen news reports of Meacham’s death, but knew, since she and Emily were there when the call came in from Filstrup, that she’d want to hear directly from him. He began keying in Renee’s number, when he felt the SUV shift hard to the left. His seat belt went from loose to taut in a blink, keeping him from being thrown against Carolyn.

Before Lou could regain his bearings, the car swerved again, this time to the right. The tires lost traction on the rain-soaked road; suddenly the Volvo was fishtailing, lurching violently from side to side. Moments later, Carolyn had calmly regained control. Her speed had, if anything, increased.

Lou flashed on the possibility that she had insisted on driving because of some kind of suicidal urge.

She veered right, then left, then right again.

Lou’s stomach dropped as though he were front seat in a roller coaster. The left wheels of the SUV crossed the solid center lines twice, one of those times coming close to crossing into the oncoming traffic. But in both instances Carolyn pulled the car back just in time. Her expression had grown tense, her eyes narrowed.

She leaned on her car horn and began flashing her lights at the driver in front of them. “Get out of the way! Move over!” she shouted.

“Carolyn! What’s going on?” Lou cried out. “What are you doing?”