Taylor Smith - Guilt By Silence

Tucker’s eyes held hers for a second and then his glance shifted away. Mariah flinched. They had known each other too well and for too long.

“Frank!” she said, alarmed. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”

“I’m not sure.”

Her focus moved from Tucker’s face to an invisible point somewhere between them, but she saw nothing. Beyond the office door, the clatter of voices, the tramp of feet and the hum of office machinery faded, replaced by a cottony stillness. Then a wave came out of nowhere, washing over her, and she felt herself drowning. She fumbled for the arms of the chair and gripped them tightly.

She never saw Frank jump up out of his chair and move around the desk, nor did she feel his hand on her shoulder. It was only when he planted himself squarely in front of her and bent down to peer into her eyes that she began to rise again to the surface. Her gaze flitted from side to side, coming finally to rest on Frank’s face when he had called her name for the third time, his voice urgent.

“Mariah! Are you all right?”

“All right?”

She was breathing, she knew—her shoulders rose and fell heavily with the effort of her lungs to grasp oxygen. But all right? No, she definitely was not all right.

“Who was it?” she asked, her voice husky. She clenched her fists, pulling in hard on the reins of self-control. Tucker’s face came into focus and she held his eyes, her voice firm now. “Who did this to my family, Frank?”

He sat back on the desk and studied her for a long time. Then he walked around behind it. He stood, banging his knuckles on the green baize desk pad. “Leave it alone. You can’t change what happened, and you need to concentrate your energies on Lindsay and David. Let somebody else worry about the other stuff.”

Mariah leaped from her chair and leaned across the desk between them. “Don’t patronize me!”

His head snapped up. “I’m not patronizing, goddammit!”

“Then what kind of answer is that?”

“It’s the only answer I can give you.”

“It’s not good enough!”

“It’s the only answer you’re gonna get. This is a closely held file and you have no ‘need to know.”’

He might just as well have slapped her face. She recoiled and stared at him, dumbfounded. His sharp frown held her momentarily, then his eyes shifted away and skimmed across the ceiling before coming to rest on her face again. “Look, I honestly don’t know for certain whether what happened in Vienna was an accident or not. I thought it was at first, but now I’m not sure. If it wasn’t, then your family got caught in the middle of some bloody dangerous business and you don’t want to know about it, believe me.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” Mariah said firmly. “If someone did this deliberately, I definitely do want to know about it.” His expression remained glumly resistant. “Frank! Dammit! Let me in! If I can do something—anything—to make sense of what happened and help bring down whoever did this, at least I won’t feel so helpless. Give me a break, please?”

Tucker shook his head. “I can’t. Even if I wanted to—which I don’t—it’s not my decision. Operations is handling the file and access is severely limited. Besides which—I’m dead serious here—you’ve got Lindsay to think about. You put yourself in the line of fire and she could end up an orphan. Is that what you want?”

“As opposed to what? As opposed to the life of a fatherless cripple that I’ve already managed to give her?”

“Don’t do this. Don’t punish yourself for something you weren’t responsible for.”

“If not me, who? Tell me who—I’d love to punish someone else. I’d like to rip them limb from limb. I’d like to blow their goddamn heads off!”

Tucker dropped into his chair. “And that’s exactly why you’re no good for this case. You’re personally involved. You’ve got no distance or objectivity, and that’s a recipe for getting yourself killed. Now, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Go do your job and let me do mine.”

Mariah watched him as he opened a file in front of him and pointedly ignored her. She stood still, glaring at him, fists clenched. Then she wheeled around and headed for the door, throwing it open with such energy that it bounced back against the wall with a bang.

Pat Bonelli had finally arrived for work and was sitting at her desk when Mariah stormed out of Frank’s office. She jumped as the door crashed. “Mariah! You scared the shit out of me!” She stopped cold as she caught sight of Mariah’s face. “Are you all right?”

It was the second time she’d been asked that question, Mariah thought. What did people think? Of course she wasn’t all right!

Pat arched her neck to look in on Frank, almost as if she expected to see blood on the walls. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Mariah muttered as she stormed into her own office next door.

Even Dieter Pflanz had to smile when he thought back on it later.

There was Angus McCord, billionaire industrialist—one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—wearing a green surgical gown over his suit and a gauze mask over his face. A cotton cap rested heavily on his not-insignificant ears, forcing them to flap even more than usual. He looked like a diminutive cross between Marcus Welby, M.D., and Dumbo the elephant. Only the tiny, wizened baby girl whose hand McCord held through the porthole of an isolette, and the simultaneously proud and anxious expression on the faces of her similarly gowned parents, revealed the serious nature of the business at hand.

The Newborn Intensive Care Unit was a large room, full of high-tech equipment and bustling staff. It had been functioning for several weeks now, even though the neonatal clinic of McCord General Hospital was not yet officially open.

The isolette stood near the unit’s big plate-glass window. To Pflanz, standing with dignitaries in the hall outside, the preemie looked like a baby bird, lying on her back, arms and legs splayed. Her skin hung loose and wrinkled, and her spindly rib cage was protruding—she had been born too soon to have built up any healthy baby fat. Repeated sticking for blood samples had left bruises all over the little body. When McCord arrived at the NICU, the baby was wearing patches over her eyes to protect her retinas from the bili lights set up over the isolette to treat her jaundice. The lights were turned off for now and the patches removed for the benefit of the visitors, but a tangled network of plastic tubes extruded from her minute nose and arms, and several wires were taped to her chest.

Cameras outside the glass enclosure whirred and snapped as McCord gently stroked the frail baby, listening as the neonatal specialist beside him described the prognosis for the three-pound, eight-ounce preemie—iffy, but looking better with each passing day that she managed to cling to life. McCord looked up at the baby’s parents, his eyes smiling over the mask, and then back down at the tiny fighter in the isolette.

“You show ’em, little one,” he whispered.

A few minutes later, he emerged from the NICU, soberly stripping off the hospital garb as he made his way toward the lounge that marked the entry to the McCord Neonatal Unit. His entourage fell in step behind, photographers and television camera retreating before his advance. When he reached the red ribbon strung across the lounge, McCord stopped and the hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Emory, pulled up alongside him. A hush fell over the assembled group of doctors, nurses, local politicians, community activists and media representatives.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Emory began, “this day has been a long time coming. It was almost seven years ago that the city of Fargo first expressed a desire to build an advanced neonatal care unit to serve this region. For the people of this community, it wasn’t enough to say that this is a small city—that we couldn’t afford the ‘luxuries’ of big cities like Boston and San Francisco. Our children deserve nothing less than the best. And so, the people of Fargo set out to acquire the finest neonatal facility that love and dedication—and yes, money—could build. And they did it with the generous support of North Dakota’s most famous offspring—Mr. Angus Ramsay McCord. This fine hospital already stands as a testament to this native son’s boundless commitment to our community.”