Tess Gerritsen - Bloodstream

“Let me see if I can help him!”

“There’s nothing you can do.” He looked at her, his eyes glistening with tears.

She reached down for the boy’s wrist and felt no pulse. Then Lincoln opened his arms and she saw the boy’s head. What was left of it.

That night he needed her. After Barry Knowlton’s body had been removed, after the ordeal of meeting the shattered parents, Lincoln had found himself trapped in the bright glare of reporters’ flashbulbs. Twice he’d broken down and cried in front of the TV cameras. He was not ashamed of his tears, nor was he stinting in his angry condemnation of how the crisis had been resolved. He knew he was laying the groundwork for a wrongful death suit against his own employer, the Town of Tranquility He didn’t care. All he knew was that a boy had been shot down like a deer in November, and someone should have to pay.

Driving through a galaxy of falling snow, he realized he could not bear the thought of going home, of spending this night, like so many other nights, alone.

He drove instead to Claire’s house.

Stumbling from his car through the calf-deep snow, he felt like some wretched pilgrim struggling toward sanctuary. He climbed to her porch and knocked again and again on the door, and when there was no response, he was suddenly gripped by despair at the thought she was not home, that this house was empty. That he faced the rest of the night without her.

Then above, a light came on, its warm halo filtering down through the falling snow. A moment later the door opened and she stood before him.

He stepped inside. Neither one of them said a word. She simply opened her arms to him, accepted him. He was dusted with snow, and it melted against her heat, trickling in cold rivulets to soak the flannel of her gown. She just kept holding him. even as melted snow puddled on the floor around her bare feet. waited for you,’ she said.

“I couldn’t stand the thought of going home.”

Then stay here. Stay with me.”

Upstairs they shed their clothes and slid between sheets still warm from her sleeping body. He had not come to make love, had come seeking only comfort. She gave him both. granting him the welcome exhaustion that eased him into sleep.

He awakened to a view through the window of a sky so sharply blue it hurt his eyes. Claire lay curled up asleep beside him, her hair an unruly tangle of curls off the pillow. He could see strands of gray mingled among the brown, and that first silvering of age in her hair was so unexpectedly touching that he found himself blinking back tears. Half a lifetime of’ not knowing YOU, he thought.

Half a lifetime wasted, until now.

He kissed her softly on the head, hut she didn’t awaken.

He got dressed while gazing out the window, at a world transformed by the night’s storm. A fluffy mantle of snow had buried his car, turning it into an indistinct mound of white. The snow-covered branches of trees drooped under their heavy cloaks, and where once there’d been the front lawn, now there seemed to be a bright field of diamonds, glittering in the sunlight.

A pickup truck came up the road and turned onto Claire’s property. It had a winter plow mounted in front, and Lincoln assumed at first that this was someone Claire had hired to clear her driveway. Then the driver stepped out, and Lincoln saw the Tranquility police department uniform. It was Floyd Spear.

Floyd waded over to the mound that was Lincoln’s vehicle and brushed away the snow from the license plate. Then he looked up, questioningly, at the house. Now the whole town will know where I spent the night.

Lincoln went downstairs and opened the front door just as Floyd raised his gloved hand to knock. “Morning,” said Lincoln.

“Uh… morning.”

“You looking for me?”

“Yeah, I-I drove over to your house, but you weren’t home.”

“My pager’s been on.”

“I know. But I-well, I didn’t want to break the news over the phone.”

“What news?”

Floyd looked down at his own boots, crusted with snow. “It’s bad news, Lincoln.

I’m real sorry. It’s about Doreen.”

Lincoln said nothing. And strangely enough, he felt nothing, as if the cold air he was breathing in had somehow numbed his heart, and his brain as well. Floyd’s voice seemed to be speaking to him from across a great distance, the words fading in and out of hearing.

“…found her body over on Slocum Road. Don’t know how she got all the way out there. We think it must’ve happened early last night, ‘round the same time as that trouble over at the school. But it’s up to the ME to determine.”

Lincoln could barely force words from his throat. “How… how did it happen?”

Floyd hesitated, his gaze rising, then dropping again to his boots. “It looks like a hit-and-run to me. The state police are heading out to the scene.”

By Floyd’s prolonged silence, Lincoln understood there was still more that hadn’t been said. When Floyd looked up at last, his next words came out with painful reluctance. “Last night, around nine, the dispatcher got a call about a drunken driver, weaving all over Slocum Road. Same vicinity where we found Doreen. That call came in while we were all over at the high school, so no one managed to follow up on it-”

“Did the witness get a license number?”

Floyd nodded. And added miserably: “The vehicle was registered to Dr. Elliot.”

Lincoln felt the blood drain from his face. Claire’s car?

“According to the registration, it’s a brown Chevy pickup.”

“But she wasn’t driving the pickup! I saw her last night at the school. She was driving that old Subaru sedan.”

“All I’m saying, Lincoln, is that the witness gave Dr. Effiot’s license number.

So maybe-maybe I should take a look at the pickup?”

Lincoln stepped outside in his shirtsleeves, but scarcely felt the cold as he waded across to the barn. He reached elbow deep into the snow, found the handle, and raised the door.

Inside, both of Claire’s vehicles were parked side by side, the pickup on the right. The first thing Lincoln noticed was the snowmelt puddled beneath both vehicles. Both of them had been driven sometime in the last day or two, recently enough so that the puddles had not yet evaporated.

His numbness was quickly giving way to a nauseating sense of dread. He circled around to the front of the pickup truck. At his first glimpse of the blood smeared across the fender, the world seemed to drop away from under his feet, to collapse beneath him.

Without a word, he turned and walked out of the barn.

Halting in calf-deep snow, he looked up at the house where Claire and her son now slept. He could think of no way to avoid the ordeal to come, no way to spare her from the pain he himself would now have to inflict. He had no choice in the matter. Surely she would understand. Perhaps some day she would even forgive him.

But today-today she would hate him.

“You know you’re gonna have to step away from this,” said Floyd, softly. “Hell, you’re gonna have to stay miles away. Doreen was your wife. And you just spent the night with His voice faded. “It’s a state police case, Lincoln. They’ll be wanting to talk to you. To both of you.”

Lincoln took a deep breath and welcomed the punishing sharpness of cold air in his lungs. Welcomed the physical pain. “Then you get them on the radio,” he said. And he started, reluctantly, toward the house. “I have to talk to Noah.”

She didn’t understand how this could have happened. She had awakened to a parallel universe where people she knew, people she loved, were behaving in ways she did not recognize. There was Noah slouched in the kitchen chair, his whole body so electric with rage the air around him seemed to hum. There was Lincoln, grim and distant as he asked another question, and another. Neither one of them looked at her; clearly they both preferred she be out of the room, but they hadn’t asked her to leave. She would not leave in any event; she saw the direction Lincoln’s questions were taking, and she understood the dangerous nature of this drama now being played out in her kitchen.