Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

She fired back, “Is that the detective or the husband asking?” her skill at twisting things around second only to her ability to keep a straight face.

“I have not.”

“Listen, Lou-”

“Don’t!” he said sharply. “She would have told me. That’s not something she would hide.”

“You have to turn cell phones off in hospitals,” she explained, repeating an argument he’d given Liz earlier that same day. Emotional mirrors. “Things drag out and take twice as long as you thought.”

“She and I went over the arrangements for picking up the kids twice. This is not something she would have forgotten to do. It’s not that it’s just unlike her; it’s impossible.”

“Maybe the first place you should have called was her doctor.”

He checked his watch to see that only a few minutes had passed since his last check. He’d never learned how to wait well. He assigned other people to wait in place of him; he ordered people to wait for him; but he did not wait himself.

“Now it’s midnight, and you’re not going to reach her doctor even if you tried. And you know that,” she said, interpreting his expression.

Busted .

“You did this intentionally , didn’t you? Waited like this?”

“She turns her phone off when she’s praying, too,” he said. “She could have gone to a reading room, a library, any place quiet.”

“And you believe that.” Daphne made it a statement, just to sting him.

When a pair of headlights bumped into the driveway at 12:15, and they both identified Liz’s minivan, Daphne offered to leave by the front door, her car parked out on the curb. She said, “I’ll call off the others,” already moving for the front door. “She won’t be thrilled to discover you called out the bloodhounds. I’ll make sure it’s zipped up on our end, and left between the two of you to handle as you want.” She’d reached the front door, talking softly for the benefit of the sleeping kids. Daphne could juggle a dozen balls at once while riding a unicycle.

“I owe you,” he called out.

“Shut up.” She closed the front door quietly behind her.

Boldt was about to charge out back when he thought better of it, schooling himself to show concern, not anger. Waiting up for her was fine-expected even. Attacking her was unforgivable.

Five long minutes passed and Liz had still not appeared. Boldt finally succumbed and headed outside. On the back steps, he stopped abruptly as the garage door pushed open and Liz staggered out.

As drunk as a skid-row bum.

Liz sputtered as she walked unsteadily forward, unable to enunciate, barely able to walk. “If I don’t pee in about five seconds… ” She looked up, took in Boldt as if just now noticing him, and cocked her head, saying, “Oh, shit.” She crushed a hydrangea on her way to hoisting her skirt and running her panties down to her ankles. She squatted right there and urinated in the garden, then rocked forward, falling onto her knees, and vomited.

He’d nursed her through the evils of chemotherapy, the drain of radiation, the indignities brought on by childbirth, but he’d never seen her stone-cold drunk. Inside the back door he got her out of her suit coat and shirt, both messed with vomit, and left them at the top of the stairs for the basement laundry. He undressed her in the bedroom and placed her sitting up in the tub with a warm shower running. She never said a word, resigned to a dull, stupefied embarrassment. She threw up again in the tub, and yet again into the toilet after he made her drink a full glass of water. When the water finally stayed down, he got three more glasses into her as well, shunning the aspirin that would have helped a good deal but went against her convictions.

She passed out in bed as her head hit the pillow. Boldt stayed awake another forty minutes, adrenalized, making sure she slept on her side in case she vomited in her sleep. He drifted off some time past three.

When Boldt awoke to Miles shaking him at 7 A.M., Liz was already gone from the house, having fled the humiliation.

Flipping pancakes, washing faces, changing clothes, making sandwiches, Boldt worked himself into an angry lather. Isolation. Desertion. Betrayal? Was this about David Hayes? Thirty minutes late for work by the time he’d dropped the kids, he felt he deserved an explanation, believed it up to her to call.

He snatched up the receiver with every incoming call, barking into the phone while expecting to hear Liz’s apologetic voice. Over the past twelve hours, burdened by little sleep and challenged by an emotional abyss, Boldt had traveled through concern, worry, anger and into the depths of infuriation. It now spilled out of his pores as an acrid smell and registered in his bloodshot eyes as venom. Quickly moving silhouettes slipped by the glass wall of his office like shadow puppets, his squad desperately avoiding him.

And then the call came.

LIZ PICKED A SPOT FAMILIARto her, one where she felt safe, comfortable, and emotionally protected, a place where she had come to meditate and pray during her convalescence. The weather-worn bench in Golden Gardens Park aimed toward the Sound, offering a wide-angle view of green water, lush islands, and a steel-wool sky that moved inland swiftly overhead.

Boldt came around and sat down next to her.

“Thank you,” she began, knowing what she had to do, and grateful he would do this on her terms. “I know you’re busy.”

“I don’t need an apology as much as an explanation.”

She heard him holding back as he always did, afraid to expose himself, to speak too quickly and later regret what he said. The trouble was that in trying to play it safe, he didn’t play at all.

The sea breeze blew some stray strands of hair off her face. That wet wind felt surprisingly good to her.

He looked out into the gray. “You and this bench.”

“Yes.” She gathered her strength, knowing she wouldn’t find a way to cozy up to this. She had to inch to the edge and then jump. The only way. “There’s a tape.”

The sounds were the wind and her husband’s breathing.

“Go on.”

She looked up into the gray wash of sky. “I’m on the tape. With David. It’s video, and it’s awful.”

“Awful.”

He would drag it out of her of course, because he couldn’t help himself. Twenty years of questioning people.

“They surprised me in the van. In the underground parking. They taped me to a seat and made me watch.”

He turned and touched her, and she felt a jolt of electricity with the contact. “Are you all right?”

She felt a wash of relief come with his concern. In a rush she described the terror in the van, the fact they’d cut the tape to allow her to fight her way free.

“They?”

“Two of them. But don’t do this, please. Don’t interrogate me. Please, don’t. I need a husband, not a detective right now.”

He pulled closer to her on the bench. She despised herself for everything she’d done to him and the marriage. Briefly, she wished she’d died from her illness and spared them both all of this.

“It’s how I think,” he said.

“Two of them. It happened quickly.” She told it all to him again, hoping he wouldn’t make her go through it for a third time.

“And where’s the tape now?”

“In the van. I haven’t touched it. I don’t want you to see it, Lou.”

“I don’t want to see it,” he said. “But I do want to run it through the lab for fingerprints.”

“No. Someone will play it, and I couldn’t bear that.”

He put his right hand on her leg and threw his left arm around her and pulled her to him. From behind they looked like a pair of lovers, but that was not how it felt to her as she shook in his hold. He said, “Bernie will handle this however I want it handled. Not to worry.”