Тесс Герритсен - I Know a Secret

As Maura snapped through the ribs, she felt she was about to open the book containing Earl Devine’s secrets, but when she lifted the breastplate and exposed the thoracic cavity, she found those secrets obscured by a chest full of blood. The three bullets fired by Detective Crowe had devastated their target, puncturing lung and slicing through the aorta. The explosion of blood and leaked air had collapsed the right lung, deforming the usual landmarks. She plunged gloved hands into that cold pudding of blood and blindly ran her fingers across the surface of the left lung.

It did not take long to find what she was searching for.

“How can you see anything in there?” asked Jane.

“I can’t. But I can already tell you this lung is not normal.”

“Maybe because a bullet went through it?”

“A bullet had nothing to do with this.” Maura reached again for the scalpel. It was tempting to take shortcuts and focus immediately on the lung, but that was how mistakes were made, vital details missed. Instead, she proceeded as she always did, first dissecting the tongue and neck, freeing the pharynx and esophagus from the cervical vertebrae. She saw no foreign bodies, nothing to distinguish Earl Devine’s throat structures from those of any other sixty-seven-year-old man. Slow down. Make no mistakes . She felt Jane watching her with growing puzzlement. Yoshima set forceps on the tray, and the clang was as sharp as gunfire. Maura stayed on task, her scalpel slicing through the soft tissue and vessels of the thoracic inlet. With both hands deep in chilled blood, she freed the parietal pleura to separate the lungs from the chest wall.

“Basin,” she requested.

Yoshima held out a stainless-steel basin, waiting for what she was about to drop into it.

She lifted the heart and lungs in a single organ bloc from the chest cavity, and the viscera plopped into the basin with a splash. The smell of cold blood and meat rose with the dripping offal. She carried the bowl to the sink and rinsed a slimy veil of blood from the organs, revealing what she had earlier felt on the surface of the left lung: a lesion that had been obscured on the X-ray by trauma.

Maura sliced out a wedge of lung. Staring at the gray-white specimen glistening in her gloved hand, she knew how this tissue would almost certainly look under the microscope. She imagined dense whorls of keratin and strange, misshapen cells. And she thought of Earl Devine’s house, where the smell of nicotine clung to the drapes, the furniture.

She looked at Jane. “I need a list of his medications. Find out who his doctor was.”

“Why?”

Maura held up the wedge of tissue. “Because this explains his suicide.”

“I had no idea,” said Holly Devine, her hands calmly folded in her lap as she sat on her living-room sofa. “I knew Daddy was losing weight, but he told me he was just getting over pneumonia. He never said he was dying.” She looked across the coffee table at Jane and Frost. “Maybe he didn’t know either.”

“Your father definitely knew,” said Jane. “When we searched his medicine cabinet, we found prescription pills ordered by an oncologist, Dr. Christine Cuddy. Four months ago, your father was diagnosed with lung cancer. It had already spread to his bones, and when Dr. Isles studied the X-rays, she spotted a metastatic lesion in your father’s spine. Your father must have been in a great deal of pain, because there was a recently prescribed bottle of Vicodin in his bathroom.”

“He told me he’d pulled a muscle. He said the pain was getting better.”

“It wasn’t getting better, Holly. His cancer was already in his liver, and that pain was only going to get worse. He was offered chemotherapy but he refused. He told Dr. Cuddy that he wanted to live as fully as he could, while he could, without feeling sick. Because his daughter needed him.”

It had been only two days since her father’s death, yet Holly appeared composed and dry-eyed as she processed this new information. Outside, a truck rumbled by her apartment building, and the three teacups rattled on the flimsy-looking coffee table. Everything in Holly’s apartment seemed cheaply made, the sort of furniture that usually came packed in a box with step-by-step instructions for assembly. This was a bare-bones apartment, for a career girl still perched on the bottom rungs of the ladder, but Holly was almost certainly on her way up. There was a slyness about her, a canny intelligence in her eyes that Jane was only now recognizing.

“I’m sure he didn’t want me to worry. That’s why he never told me about the cancer,” said Holly. She gave a sad shake of the head. “He’d do anything to make me happy.”

“He even killed for you,” said Jane.

“He did what he thought had to be done. Isn’t that what fathers do? They keep the monsters away.”

“That wasn’t his job, Holly. It was ours.”

“But you couldn’t protect me.”

“Because you didn’t let us. Instead, you practically invited the killers to strike. You ignored our advice and went to a bar. Allowed that woman to send you a drink. Were you trying to get yourself killed, or was it all part of the plan?”

“ You weren’t having any luck finding him.”

“So you decided to do it yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What was the plan, Holly?”

“There was no plan. I went for a drink after work, that’s all. I told you, I was supposed to meet a friend.”

“Who never showed up.”

“Do you think I lied about that?”

“I think we haven’t heard the whole story.”

“Which is?”

“That you went to the bar hoping to draw out Stanek and his partner. Instead of letting us find him, you chose to be a vigilante.”

“I chose to fight back.”

“By taking justice into your own hands?”

“Does it really matter how it happens, as long as it does happen?”

Jane stared at her for a moment, suddenly struck by the fact that, on some level, she actually agreed with this woman. She thought of the perps who’d walked free because some cop or attorney made a procedural error, perps that she knew were guilty. She thought of how often she wished there were a shortcut to bringing a killer to justice, a way to kick a monster straight into a prison cell. And she thought of Detective Johnny Tam, who had once resorted to just such a shortcut and delivered his own form of justice. Only Jane knew Tam’s secret, and she would forever protect it.

But Holly’s secrets couldn’t be protected, because Boston PD knew exactly what she and her father had plotted. Holly had to be confronted.

“You drew them out,” said Jane. “Made them reveal themselves.”

“There’s no law against it.”

“There’s a law against murder. You’re an accessory.”

Holly blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The last thing your father did on this earth was to protect his little girl. He was dying of lung cancer, so he had nothing to lose by killing Martin Stanek. And you knew he was going to do it.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course you did.”

“How could I?”

“Because you’re the one who told him where to find Stanek. Moments after we arrested Bonnie Sandridge, you called your father’s cell phone. A two-minute phone call, which is how he learned Bonnie’s name and address. He went to her house armed and prepared to kill the man who threatened his daughter.”

Holly took this accusation with surprising calmness. Jane had laid out the evidence that Holly was an accessory to Martin’s murder, yet none of this seemed to fluster her.

Frost said, “Do you care to respond, Ms. Devine?”

“Yes.” Holly sat up straighter. “I did call my father. Of course I called him. I’d just had an encounter with a woman who’d planned to abduct me, and I wanted to tell him I was safe. Any daughter would make that call. I may have mentioned Bonnie’s name on the phone, but I didn’t tell him to kill her. I just told Daddy not to worry, because you had her in custody. I didn’t know that he’d go to her house. I didn’t know he’d bring his gun.” Holly took a deep breath and dropped her head. When she looked up again, her face was streaked with tears. “He gave his life for me. How can you talk about him as if he’s a cold-blooded killer?”