John Lescroart - The Motive

"Catherine, stop walking. Please. Just for a second." He patted the concrete bench next to him. "Come on.

Sit. You'll feel better."

She didn't stop walking. "I've been sitting all day."

He sighed, let the words out under his breath. "Christ, you can be a difficult woman!"

She stopped and looked at him. "You're not mad at me, are you?"

"No, Catherine. How could I be mad at you? I make a simple request for you to sit down so you'll feel better and, because I've been working all day every day for eight months already on your behalf, of course you completely ignore what I want and continue to pace. This makes me happy, not mad. And why? Because I need the abuse. I thrive on abuse, if you haven't noticed."

"I'm not abusing you."

Hardy had to chuckle. "And I'm not mad at you. So we're even. You continue pacing and I'll just sit here, not being mad, how's that?"

She stared down at him. "Why are you being this way?"

"What way? Calling you on your behavior? Maybe it's because how you behave in the courtroom is going to have an effect on the jury."

"Okay, but we're not in the courtroom now." Some real anger crept into her tone. "I've been behaving well in there all day and now, if it's all the same to you, Dis-mas Hardy, I'm a little bit frustrated."

"Well, take it out on me, then. I'm a glutton for it. Here." He got to his feet. "I'll stand up, be your punching bag. Go on, hit me."

She squared around on him as though she actually might. Hardy brought a finger up to his chin, touched it a few times. "Right here."

"God, you're being awful."

"I'm not. I'm facilitating getting you in touch with your inner child who wants to hit me. You'll really feel better. I swear. This is a real technique they teach in law school."

In spite of herself, she chuckled, the anger bleaching out of her, her face softening. "I don't want to hit you, Dismas. We can sit down."

"You're sure? I don't want to stem your free expression."

She lowered herself to the concrete bench. "It's just been a long day," she said.

He looked down at her. "I hate to say that it's only the first one of many, but that's the truth. We ought to try to keep from fighting. I'm sorry if I pushed you there."

"No. I deserved it. I pushed you."

"Well, either way." Hardy put his hands in his pockets, leaned against the bars behind him. "This is worse for you, and I'm sorry."

They were in a cell in an otherwise open hallway that ran behind all of the courtrooms. Every minute or so, a uniformed bailiff or two would walk by with another defendant, or sometimes an orange-suited line of them, in tow. The place was lit, of course, but in some fashion Hardy was dimly aware that outside it was close to dark out and still cold. Down the way somewhere, quite possibly in an exact double of the cell in which they sat, but invisible to them, they both could hear someone crying.

"She sounds so sad," Catherine said. "It could be one of my daughters. That's what I'm missing the most. The kids." She took a deep breath. "It's bad enough now, with them having to deal with all that high school nasti-ness, with their mother in jail, what they must be going through day to day. But what I really agonize about is how it's going to affect them in the long run, if I wind up…" She stared at her hands in her lap.

"That's not going to happen," Hardy said. "I'm not going to let that happen."

Down the hall, they heard the crying voice suddenly change pitch and scream, "No! No! No!" and then the clank of metal on metal. From out of nowhere, at the same instant, their bailiff opened the courtroom door at the mouth of their cage. "You want dinner, we better get you changed," he said.

Wordless, Catherine hesitated, let out a long sigh. Then, resigned, she nodded, stood up and held out her hands for the cuffs.

The pediatric heart specialist at Kaiser, Dr. Aaron True-blood, was a short, slightly hunchbacked, soft-spoken man in his mid- to late sixties. Now he was sitting across a table from Glitsky in a small featureless room in the maternity wing, his hands folded in front of him, his kindly face fraught with concern.

Treya had been a trouper. They got to the hospital well before nine o'clock that morning, and after eight hours of labor, Glitsky breathing with her throughout the ordeal, she delivered an eight-pound, two-ounce boy they would call Zachary. Crying lustily after his first breath, he looked perfectly formed in all his parts. Glitsky cut the umbilical cord. Treya's ob-gyn, Joyce Gavelin, gave him Apgar scores of eight and nine, about as good as it gets.

In a bit under an hour, though, the euphoria of the successful delivery gave way to a suddenly urgent con

cern. Dr. Gavelin had the usual postpartum duties-the episiotomy, delivering the placenta and so on-during all of which time Zachary lay cuddled against his mother's stomach in the delivery room. The doctor released mother and baby down to her room in the maternity ward, and Glitsky walked beside the gurney in the hallway while they went and checked into the private room they'd requested, where the hospital would provide a special dinner and where he hoped to spend the night. After making sure that Treya and Zachary were settled- the boy took right to breast-feeding-Glitsky went down the hall to call his father, Nat, to tell him the good news and check up on Rachel, who was staying with him. Everything was as it should have been.

When he came back to Treya's room, though, she was crying and Zachary was gone. Dr. Gavelin had come in for a more formal secondary examination of the newborn. But what began as a routine and cursory procedure changed as soon as she pressed her stethoscope to the baby's chest. Immediately, her normally upbeat, cheerleader demeanor underwent a transformation. "What is it? Joyce, talk to me. Is everything all right?"

But Dr. Gavelin, frowning now, held up a hand to quiet Treya and moved the stethoscope to another location on the baby's chest, then another, another, around to his back. She let out a long breath and closed her eyes briefly, perhaps against the pain she was about to inflict. "I don't want to worry you, Treya, but your little boy's got a heart murmur," she said. "I'd like to have one of my colleagues give a listen and maybe run a couple of tests on him. We'll need to take Zachary away for a while." "Take him away! What for?"

The doctor put what she might have hoped was a comforting hand on Treya's arm. "As I said, to run a few tests, shoot some X-rays. Maybe get a little better sense of the cause of the murmur. We've got a terrific pediatric cardiologist…"

"Couldn't you just do it here? Have somebody come down…?"

"I don't think so. We'll want to do an X-ray and an echo-cardiogram at least. And then maybe some other testing." "What kind of testing?"

"To get a handle on what we might be dealing with, Treya."

"But you just said it was a murmur. Aren't murmurs fairly common?"

"Some kinds, yes." "But not this kind?"

Dr. Gavelin hadn't moved her hand, and now she squeezed Treya's arm. "I don't know," she said gently. "That's why I want to have a specialist look at him."

And then, somehow, by the time Glitsky got back from his phone call, Zachary was gone.

Sometime later, the volunteer maternity staff people wheeled in the special dinner that had been ordered for this room and seemed confused that the baby wasn't with the parents, who were both on the bed, silent, clearly distraught, each holding the other's hands. They didn't even look at the food. Finally, when the orderlies came back to remove the untouched trays, Glitsky decided he had to move. He didn't have any idea how long he and Treya had been sitting together waiting, but suddenly he had to get proactive. He needed to get information. Like, first, where was his son? And what exactly was wrong with him?