David Morrell - The Covenant Of The Flame

'Yes.'

'If you don't mind, I have one, no, two more questions.'

Tess felt exhausted. 'What are they?'

'Your home and work addresses. And your telephone numbers, both places.'

Tess wrote them down.

'A day or two, and I'll be in touch.'

That's it? You'll be in touch ?'

Craig coughed again. 'What do you think, I use a crystal ball or a ouija board? For starters, I've got to phone the hospitals, the morgue.'

'Morgue?'

'You mean you never…?'

'I've been trying not to think about…'

'Well, it's always a possibility. That's where we start. Of course, there are other possibilities, other reasons why a man would disappear. You put me in an awkward… Hey, there's always…'

'What?'

'Always hope.' Craig straightened the files on his desk. 'But in conscience, I ought to warn you…'

'About?'

'A man who keeps checking behind him?' Craig stood. 'Never mind. We'll talk.'

'All of a sudden' – Tess stood as well – 'I don't want to.' 'Yes, that's what my former wife used to say. But you and I will talk. Soon. I promise. In the meantime, I suggest you see a movie, get drunk, whatever'll help you relax enough to sleep.'

Tess seldom drank, and this hardly seemed a good time to start to rely on alcohol, but a long swim and a fifteen-minute sauna did relax her, loosening her tension-knotted muscles. At nine, when she returned to her loft, she felt exhausted enough that, after a salad, she went to bed. But her mind wouldn't shut down. She kept recalling, re-experiencing the troubling events of the day. Joseph? What had happened to him?

Why had he guarded his privacy so much?

When would Lieutenant Craig phone?

Tense again, she tried to read but couldn't concentrate on the new Ann Beattie novel. She turned on the TV and frequently switched channels, impatient with the forced cheery conversations on what seemed an endless stream of talk shows. It wasn't until after two that she finally managed to sleep, but her dreams weren't restful.

At work Wednesday morning, she had a headache that aspirins did nothing to soothe. Regardless, she strained to focus her thoughts on her new assignment, an article about the overuse of herbicides and pesticides on Midwestern farms and the recent discovery that those poisons had passed through the soil and now were present in alarming quantity in the water supply of various cities. Each time the phone rang, she lunged to pick it up, hoping to hear Joseph's voice, simultaneously dreading what she might be told if the voice wasn't Joseph's but instead belonged to -

'Ms Drake?'

'Speaking.' Tess winced, recognizing the gravelly voice.

'This is Lieutenant Craig.'

'Yes?' She squeezed the phone with one hand while using the other to massage her throbbing forehead.

'I promised I'd call as soon as possible,' the lieutenant said. 'Are you free to take off work and go for a drive?'

Tess felt dizzy and closed her eyes.

'Ms Drake?'

'Call me Tess, please.' Yesterday, Craig hadn't commented on her last name, apparently not associating it with her father. To simplify matters, she didn't want him to make the connection, which he might if he repeated Drake often enough. 'Have you found something?'

'Why don't we talk about it in the car? Is fifteen minutes too soon? I'll pick you up outside your building.'

'Fine.' Tess's throat cramped. 'Sure. That's fine.'

'Don't look for a cruiser. To keep you from feeling self-conscious, I'll use an unmarked car. Just wait at the curb.'

Tess set down the phone and shuddered.

Outside, on the busy, noisy, exhaust-acrid sidewalk, she paced. Ten minutes later, exactly when promised, a brown Chrysler sedan stopped in front of her, the lieutenant waving for her to get in.

The moment she sat beside him and buckled her seatbelt, Craig steered out expertly into a small break in traffic.

Tess studied his face, trying to read his thoughts. 'Well?'

The husky lieutenant coughed. 'Rotten throat. My doctor says I might have asthma. No wonder, this crummy air.'

'You're avoiding my question.'

'Just making conversation. It never hurts to be pleasant. Okay, here's the thing. What I've got is good news and maybe bad news.'

'I believe,' Tess said, 'that my line's supposed to be I'll take the good news first.'

'Right. That never hurts either.' Craig turned off Broadway, heading east on Thirtieth Street. 'I checked all the hospitals. You never know – your friend might have had an accident, been hit by a car, maybe had a stroke, a heart attack, whatever, and be in a coma. If he wasn't carrying a wallet at the time, the hospital personnel wouldn't be able to identify him.'

'And since this is supposed to be the good news,' Tess said, 'I gather you didn't find my friend at any hospital.'

'Plenty of coma patients, but not anyone who matches your description of him.'

'Well, that's some reassurance, at least.'

Craig raised a hand from the steering wheel. 'Not necessarily. I checked only the hospitals in the metropolitan area. If your friend took a trip this weekend, to New Jersey, let's say, or Pennsylvania, or up to Connecticut, and if he did have an accident that put him into a coma, I wouldn't know about it yet. These days, almost everything's in computers, but it still takes a while to get access to those other states' hospital records. I've got someone working on that, incidentally. But my hunch is, gut-feeling, we'll come up negative. That's not a promise, mind you. Just a-'

'Hunch. I note and appreciate your qualification.'

'Simply being cautious,' Craig said. 'Long ago, I learned the hard way: seldom affirm, seldom deny. People often don't pay attention to what I'm telling them. They hear what they want to hear, and later they claim I was more positive than I…'

'This reporter understands cautious statements. Please, get on with it,' Tess said. 'I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. The possible bad news.'

'Yes, well…' Craig stopped the sedan in a blocked line of traffic on the narrow confines of Thirtieth Street. Ahead, at the crowded intersection of Lexington Avenue, a policeman waved cars around a stalled pizza truck. 'My next choice was the morgue.'

'Is that why we seem to be heading toward First Avenue?'

Craig frowned in apparent confusion.

'If we keep going in this direction,' Tess said, 'we'll reach the New York University Medical Center, and next to it, across from Thirtieth Street, is the Medical Examiner's office.'

'So. I was hoping to prepare you. Yes, that's where we're going. Over the weekend, then Monday and Tuesday, there were several unidentified guests of the Medical Examiner.' Craig peered ahead and resumed driving as the traffic cop on Lexington Avenue supervised the removal of the stalled pizza truck. 'Most of the corpses didn't match your description of your friend. But a few, though…"

'What about them?'

'A floater in the Hudson River. Same height. Same apparent age. Same body type, with allowance for bloating. I hate to add graphic details.'

'I don't shock easily, Lieutenant. I was in Ethiopia during the recent famine. I've seen my share of… too many… corpses.'

'Sure. No doubt that was bad. I'm just trying to prepare you. It's possible you haven't seen corpses like these. The problem with floaters is the water clouds their eyes, so we can't tell whether the color was green or blue or in this case what we're looking for, gray. There's also a junkie we found in an alley. Overdosed on heroin.'

'Joseph isn't a drug addict.' To keep her hopes up, Tess insisted on using the present tense.

'That might be, but it's not always easy to tell, and as you explained, your friend has a habit of keeping secrets. The point is, this junkie's description is the same as your friend's. Except for his eyes. No help there, either. Rats ate them out.'