Karin Slaughter - A Faint Cold Fear

“His wife?” Sara asked, wondering how anyone could be so self-destructive.

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said, and she could tell he agreed with her. “I can’t hold him without a charge.”

“He stole Sibyl’s research.”

“I’m meeting with the DA and the school’s attorney in the morning to see exactly what we can charge him with. I guess we’ll go with theft of intellectual property, maybe fraud. It’s going to be complicated, but we’ll get him in jail somehow. He’s going to pay for this.” He sighed. “I’m used to cops and robbers. These white-collar crimes are way over my head.”

“You can’t prove he was an accomplice to the murders?”

“That’s the thing. I’m not sure if he is,” Jeffrey told her. “The way Lena tells it, Richard copped to all of them: Andy, Ellen Schaffer, Chuck.”

“Why Chuck?”

“Richard didn’t exactly spell it out. He was just trying to get her on his side. I think he liked her. I think he thought he could help her.”

Sara knew that Richard Carter would not be the first man who tried to save Lena Adams and failed spectacularly. She asked, “What about William Dickson?”

“Accidental death, unless you can figure out a way to pin it on Richard.”

“No,” Sara told him. “He never implicated Keller?”

“Never.”

“Why did he make up that lie about the affair, then?”

Jeffrey sighed again, clearly exasperated. “Just to stir up more shit, I guess. Or maybe he thought it would make Brian come to him for help. Who knows?”

“Succynilcholine would be kept under lock and key at the lab,” Sara offered. “There should be a log to account for its usage. You could check to see who had access.”

“I’ll follow up on it,” he said. “But if both of them had access, it’ll be hard to prove the case.” Jeffrey paused. “I have to say, Sara, if Keller was going to kill one of his sons, it would have been Richard, and not with a needle.”

“It’s a nasty way to die,” she told him, imagining the last few minutes of Andy Rosen’s life. “His limbs would have been paralyzed first, then his heart and lungs. It doesn’t affect the brain, so he would have been completely cognizant of what was happening right up until the last minute.”

“How long would it take?”

“Depending on the dosage, twenty, thirty seconds.”

“Jesus.”

“I know,” she agreed. “And it’s nearly impossible to find postmortem. The body breaks it down too quickly. They didn’t even have a way to test for it until about five years ago.”

“Sounds like it’d be expensive to find.”

“If you can put the succynilcholine in Keller’s hands, I’ll find money in the budget to run the test. I’ll pay for it myself if I have to.”

“I’ll do everything I can,” Jeffrey said, but he did not sound hopeful. “I know you’ll give your folks the news, but do you want to wait until I get there to tell Tessa?”

“Sure,” Sara said, but she had hesitated a second too long.

He paused before saying, “You know what? I’ve got a lot of work to do here anyway. I’ll see you around.”

“Jeffrey—”

“No,” he said. “You stay up there with your family. That’s what you need right now, to be with your family.”

“That’s not—”

“Come on, Sara,” he said, and she could hear the hurt in his voice. “What are we doing here?”

“I don’t know. I just . . .” Sara searched for something to tell him but came up blank. “I told you I need time.”

“Time’s not going to change anything,” he said. “If we can’t get past this, past what I did five years ago—”

“You make it sound like I’m being unreasonable.”

“You’re not,” he said. “And I’m not trying to push you, I just . . .” He groaned. “I love you, Sara. I’m tired of you sneaking out every morning. I’m tired of this damn hokeypokey where you’re half in and half out of my life. I want to be with you. I want to marry you.”

“Marry me?” She laughed, as if he had asked her to go for a walk on the moon.

“You don’t have to sound so shocked.”

“I’m not shocked. I’m just . . .” Again she was at a loss for words. “Jeff, we were married before. It wasn’t exactly successful.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was there, remember?”

“Why can’t we just go on how we are now?”

“I want something more than that,” he told her. “I want to have a really shitty day at work and come home to you asking me what’s for dinner. I want to knock over Bubba’s water bowl in the middle of the night. I want to wake up in the morning to the sound of you cussing because I left my jockstrap on the doorknob.”

She smiled despite herself. “You make it all sound so romantic.”

“I love you.”

“I know you do,” she said, and even though she loved him, too, Sara could not bring herself to say the words. “When can you get up here?”

“That’s okay.”

“I want you to tell her,” she said. When he did not respond, she told him, “They’re going to have questions I can’t answer.”

“You know everything I do.”

“I don’t think I can tell them,” she said. “I don’t think I have the strength right now.”

He waited a beat before saying, “This time of day it’ll be about four and a half hours.”

“Okay.” Sara gave him Tessa’s room number. She was about to hang up but said, “Hey, Jeff?”

“Yeah?”

Now that she had stopped him, Sara did not know what to say. “Nothing,” she told him. “I’ll see you when you get here.”

He gave her a few seconds to add more, but when she did not, he said, “All right. I’ll see you then.”

Sara hung up the phone feeling as if she had just walked a tightrope over a lake of alligators. So much had happened this week that she could not even process what Jeffrey had said to her. Part of her wanted to pick the phone back up and tell him she was sorry, that she loved him, but another part of her wanted to call him and tell him to stay home.

Outside the door she could hear doctors being paged and codes being called. Shadowy figures walked by the glass, their images flashing like strobe lights as they ran to help patients. It felt as though a hundred years had passed since Sara had been an intern. Everything seemed more complicated now, and though she was certain that life had been just as overwhelming when she was younger, Sara could only think of those days with nostalgia. Learning to be a surgeon, treating critical cases that took every ounce of her discipline, had been as addictive as heroin. She still got a rush when she thought about working at Grady. At one time in her life, the hospital had been more important than air. Even her family had paled in comparison.

Making the decision to return to Grant had seemed so easy at the time. Sara had wanted—needed—to be with her family, to get back to her roots and feel safe, to be a daughter and a sister again. The role of town pediatrician had been a comfortable one to slip into, and she knew that it had given her some amount of peace to be able to give back to the town that had given her so much growing up. Still, not a week had gone by since Sara had left Atlanta that she did not find herself wondering what her life would have been like if she had stayed on. She had not realized until this moment how much she missed it.

Sara glanced around Mason’s office, wondering what it would be like to work with him again. As an intern, Mason had been incredibly meticulous, which made him a very good surgeon. Unlike Sara, he let this trait spill over into his personal life. He was the sort of man who could not leave a plate unwashed in the sink or a load of clothes wrinkling in the dryer. The first time Mason had visited her apartment, he had nearly gone into apoplexy over the basket of unfolded clothes that had been sitting on her kitchen table for two weeks. When Sara had awakened the next morning, Mason had folded all the clothes before starting his 5:00 A.M. shift.