Robin Cook: Cure

“I don’t like it either,” Carlo admitted. “I don’t like being any part of this.” He glanced at his watch. “Five minutes, then we’re outta here. They can find their own way back to the city.”

Both men fidgeted, keeping their eyes on the ostensibly peaceful little house. A few minutes later there was the muted sound of a gunshot followed quickly by several others. Both men jumped at each of the reports, guessing what each meant: a person was being killed in cold blood, and they, Brennan and Carlo, were accomplices.

During the next minute there were three more shots, for a total of six, causing Brennan and Carlo’s fears and anxieties to skyrocket. The problem was that neither knew what they should do, meaning exactly what would their boss, Louie Barbera, want them to do. Would he want them to stay and risk getting caught and charged as accomplices, or should they get the hell away from there to avoid putting the whole Vaccarro organization in jeopardy? Since there was no way of knowing the answer to this question, they stayed frozen in place until Carlo suddenly had the idea of putting in an emergency call to Barbera.

With the sudden movement of getting out his phone, Carlo caused Brennan to start anew. “Jesus!” Brennan complained. “Give me some warning!”

“Sorry,” Carlo said. “I’ve got to talk to Louie. He has to know what’s going down here. This is crazy.” Intent on dialing, Carlo didn’t even feel Brennan tapping on his shoulder until Brennan increased the force to a near punch.

“They’re coming out!” Brennan said anxiously, pointing out his side window.

Carlo looked. Both Susumu and Yoshiaki were charging down the porch steps and running toward the idling Denali, carrying loaded pillowcases over their shoulders. Carlo flipped his phone shut just as the men reached the vehicle and piled into the backseat. Without anyone speaking, Brennan put the SUV into gear and pulled away. He waited almost a block to turn on the headlights.

Brennan and Carlo didn’t speak for about ten minutes, whereas the two Japanese men had been carrying on a progressively animated conversation in Japanese. It was obvious they were not pleased with their accomplishments inside the house. By the time they reached the George Washington Bridge, Carlo had relaxed enough to talk.

“Did something go wrong?” Carlo questioned. He made it a point to sound disinterested.

“We were looking for some lab books, which we didn’t find,” Yoshiaki said.

“I’m sorry,” Carlo responded. “We heard what sounded like a number of gunshots. Were they?”

“Yes. There were six people in the house, more than we expected.”

Carlo and Brennan exchanged worried glances. Their intuitions told them that Louie was going to be surprised, and it wasn’t going to be in a good way.

March 25, 2010

Thursday, 5:25 a.m.

Laurie Montgomery rolled over onto her side to look at her alarm clock. It wasn’t quite five-thirty in the morning, and the alarm wouldn’t go off for almost another half-hour. Under normal circumstances she would have been pleased to be able to roll over and go back to sleep. All her life she’d been an incurable night person who couldn’t fall asleep and had even more difficulty waking up in the morning. But this was not going to be a normal day. It was going to be the first day back to work after an unexpectedly long maternity leave of nearly twenty months.

After glancing briefly at her husband, Jack Stapleton, who was sound asleep, Laurie gently slid her legs out from beneath the down comforter and placed her bare feet on the ice-cold wood floor. She thought briefly about changing her mind and climbing back under the warm covers. But she resisted and instead clutched Jack’s T-shirt more tightly around her midsection and ran silently into the bathroom. The problem was that there was no way she’d be able to go back to sleep, as her mind was already going a mile a minute. She felt great turmoil stemming from her ambivalence about going back to work. Her main worry was for her just-over-one-and-a-half-year-old son, John Junior, and whether it was appropriate to leave him with a nanny for what would often be long days. But there was also a personal issue concerning a real fear of competence after such an unexpectedly long break: Would she still be able to handle her job as a medical examiner at what she thought was the most prestigious ME office in the country, if not the world?

Laurie had been working at OCME, or Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, in the city of New York for almost two decades. Self-confidence had always been an issue with her, going back to her teenage years. When she’d first started work at OCME, she’d worried about her competence at such an extremely challenging and demanding position, and she’d not overcome the concern for years, far past the time that her colleagues had dealt with similar fears. Forensic pathology was a field where book learning was not enough. Intuition played a major role in being good at practicing it, and intuition came from constant experience. Every day a good forensic pathologist was confronted with something he or she had never seen before.

Laurie studied herself in the mirror and groaned. From her perspective she looked terrible, with dark circles under her eyes and a pallor that was more suited to one of her patients. Motherhood had been more difficult and exhausting physically and mentally than she had ever imagined, particularly having had to deal with a serious, often fatal illness. At the same time, it had also been more rewarding.

Taking her robe from its hook on the back of the door and pulling it on, she slipped her feet into her mules with the pink puffs over the toes. She smiled at the slippers. They were the sole reminder of the time when she could feel sexy with lingerie and enjoy the feeling. Vaguely she wondered if that feeling would ever come back. Becoming a mother had changed her sense of self in a number of domains.

Back out in the hall, Laurie padded down to JJ’s room. The door was ajar, and she walked into the room, which was bright enough for her to see. Dawn was approaching, but more important there were a number of night-lights conveniently spaced along the baseboards. Thanks to her mother, the room was decorated with riotous blue wallpaper and matching curtains covered with images of airplanes and trucks.

The furniture consisted only of a rocking chair, which Laurie had used for breast-feeding, a bassinet swathed in eyelet, and a crib. The bassinet was still there for sentimental reasons, as was the rocking chair, although she used the rocker occasionally when JJ was fussy and needed her presence to fall asleep.

Moving over to the crib, Laurie gazed in at her son, thankful for his healthy complexion. With a shudder she could remember distinctly when it hadn’t been so. At the age of two months JJ had been diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma, a very serious and often deadly childhood cancer. But Laurie had been able to thank the lucky stars, or God, or whomever or whatever, that the cancer had disappeared. Whether it had been through the divine intervention of a faith healer in Jerusalem, the dedication of the doctors at Sloan-Kettering, or the fact that neuroblastoma can, on occasion, spontaneously resolve, Laurie would never know — nor care, if truth be told. The only thing that mattered to her was that JJ was now a normal one-and-a-half-year-old boy whose growth and development, despite chemotherapy and what was called monoclonal antibody therapy, had reached normal percentiles in all aspects, enough for Laurie to consider returning to work.

Glancing in at the peacefully sleeping child, a smile spread across Laurie’s face despite the concerns and ambivalence she was suffering about going to work. JJ’s angelic face reminded her of a conversation she’d had with Jack just the previous evening. It had started when they had both gone into JJ’s bedroom to check on the baby before going to bed themselves. As they gazed at the boy, she admitted something she’d never mentioned before to anyone: She was so certain that JJ was the most beautiful child in the world that whenever she chatted with the other neighborhood mothers at the playground across the street, she couldn’t help but wonder why someone had never remarked about it. “It’s so obvious,” she’d said to Jack.