Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

“Can he tell us much?” Bert wondered. “Legally, I mean.”

She’d be thinking, he guessed, of the patient-doctor privilege, which allowed a doctor to keep secret the conversations between a patient and his physician. Years ago, when they’d been married, Tate had explained this and other nuances of the law to her. But she often grew offended at these arcane rules. “You mean if you don’t read him his rights, the arrest is no good? Even if he did it?” she’d ask, perplexed. Or: “Excuse me, but why should a mother go to jail if she’s shoplifting food for her hungry child? I don’t get it.”

He expected that same indignation now when he explained that Hanson didn’t have to say anything to them. But Bett just nodded, accepting the rules. She smiled coyly and said, “Then I guess you’ll have to be extra persuasive.”

They turned the corner and the white-frame hospital loomed ahead of them.

‘Well, busy day,” Bert said, assessing the front of the hospital as she flipped up the car’s mirror after refreshing her lipstick. There were three police cars parked in front of the main entrance. The red and white lights atop one of them flashed with urgent brilliance.

“Car wreck?” Bett suggested. Route 15, which led into town, was posted fifty-five but everybody drove it at seventy or eighty.

They parked and walked inside.

Something was wrong, Tate noted. Something serious had happened. Several nurses and orderlies stood in the lobby, looking down a corridor. Their faces were troubled. A receptionist leaned over the main desk, gazing down the same corridor.

‘What is it?” Bett whispered.

“Not a clue,” Tate answered.

“Look, there he is,” somebody said.

“God,’ someone else muttered.

Two policemen were leading a tall, balding man down the corridor toward the main entrance. His hands were cuffed behind him. His face was red. He’d been crying. As he passed, Tate heard him say, “I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it! I wasn’t even there!”

Several of the nurses shook their heads, eyeing him with cold expressions on their faces.

“I didn’t do it!” he shouted.

A moment later he was in a squad car. It made a U-turn in the driveway and sped off.

Tate asked the receptionist, ‘What’s that all about?”

The white-haired woman shook her head, eyes wide, cheeks pale.

Speaking in Tongues / 129

“We nearly had an assisted suicide.” She was very shaken. “I don’t believe it.”

“What happened?”

“We have a patient-an elderly woman with a broken hip. And it looks like he”-she nodded toward where the police car had been- “comes in and talks to her for a while and next thing we know she’s got a syringe in her hands and’s trying to kill herself. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine?”

“But they saved her?” Tate asked.

“The Lord was watching over her.”

Bett blinked. “I’m sorry?”

The receptionist continued, “A nurse just happened by. My goodness. Can you imagine?”

Bett shook her head, very troubled. Tate recalled that she felt the same about euthanasia as she did about the death penalty. He thought briefly of her sister’s husband’s death. Harris. He’d used a shotgun to kill himself. Like Hemingway. Harris had been an artist-a bad one, in Tate’s estimation-and he’d shot himself in his studio, his dark blood covering a canvas that he’d been working on for months.

Absently he asked the receptionist, “That man. Who is he? Somebody like Kevorkian?”

“Who is he?” the woman blurted. “Why, he was the poor woman’s son!”

Tate and Bett looked at each other in shock. She said in a whisper, “Oh, no. It couldn’t be.”

Tate asked the woman, “The patient? Was her name Hanson?”

“Yes, that’s the name.” Shaking her head. “Her own son tried to talk her into killing herself! And I heard he was a therapist too. A doctor! Can you imagine?”

Tate and Bert sat in the hospital cafeteria, brooding silence between them. They’d ordered coffee that neither wanted. They were waiting for a call from Konnie Konstantinatis, whom Tate had called ten minutes ago-though the wait seemed like hours.

Tate’s phone buzzed. He answered it before it could chirp again.

“Lo.”

“Okay, Counselor, made some calls, But this is all unofficial. There’s still no case. Got it? Are you comfortable with that?”

“Got it, Konnie. Go ahead.”

The detective explained that he had called the Leesburg police and spoken to a detective there. “Here’s what happened. This old lady, Greta Hanson, fell and broke her hip last week. Fell down her back stairs. Serious but not too serious. She’s eighty. You know how it is.”

“Right.”

“Okay, today she’s tanked up on painkillers, really out of it, and she hears her son-your Dr. Hanson-hears him telling her that it looks like the end of the road, they found cancer, she only has a few months left. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The pain’s gonna be terrible. Tells her it’s best to just finish herself off, it’s what everybody wants. He’s pretty persuasive, sounds like. Leaves her a syringe of Nembutal. She says she’ll do it. She sticks herself but a nurse finds her in time. Anyway, she’s pretty doped up but tells ‘em what happened and the administrator calls the cops. They find the son in the gift shop buying a box of candy. Supposedly for her. They collar him. He denies it all, of course. What else is he going to say? So. End of story.”

“And this all happens fifteen minutes before Bert and I are going to talk to him about Megan? It’s no coincidence, Konnie. Come on.”

Silence from Fairfax.

“Konnie. You hear me?”

“I’m telling you the facts, Counselor. I don’t comment otherwise.”

“She’s sure it was her son who talked to her?”

“She said.”

“But she was drugged up. So maybe it was somebody else talking to her.”

“Maybe. But-”

“We can talk to Hanson?”

“Nope. Not till the arraignment on Monday. And he’s probably not gonna be in any mood even then.”

“All right. Answer me one question. Can you look up what kind of car he drives?”

“Who? Hanson? Yeah, hold on.”

Tate heard typing as he filled Bett in on what Konnie’d said.

“Oh, my,” she said, hand rising to her mouth.

A moment later the detective came back on the line. “Two cars. A Mazda nine two-nine and a Ford Explorer. Both this year’s models.”

‘What colors?“

“Mazda’s green. The Explorer’s black.”

“It was somebody else, Konnie. Somebody was following Megan.”

“Tate, she took the train to New York. She’s going to see the Statue of Liberty and hang out in Greenwich Village and do whatever kids do in New York and-”

“You know the Bust-er Book?”

“What the hell is a buster book?” the detective grumbled.

“Kids at Jefferson High are supposed to write down anybody who comes up and offers them drugs or candy or flashes them.”

“Oh, that shit. Right.”

“A friend of Megan’s said there’d been a car following her. In the Bust-er Book, some kids reported a gray car parked near the school in the afternoon. And Megan herself reported it last week.”

“Gray car?”

“Right.”

A sigh. “Tate, lemme ask you. Just how many kids go to that school of hers?”

“I’m not saying it’s a good lead, Konnie-”

“And just how many parents in gray cars pick ‘em up?”

“-but it is a lead.”

“Tag number? Make, model, year?”

Tate sighed. “Nothing.”