Текст книги "A Fatal Debt"

Автор книги: John Gapper

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

19

Joe’s mood must have been infectious because I slept soundly, and when I woke in the morning, my subconscious had already decided for me. I was tired of keeping secrets, of covering things up out of duty and cowardice. I’d made a mistake with Harry, one that might cost me my job, but I wasn’t prepared to shield him any longer, and nor would I protect Duncan. I’d go to Baer and tell him everything-the gun Nora had brought to the ER, the pressure Duncan had put on me, and what Harry had said to me on the beach. I’d tell him that Harry was a murderer.

As I stepped from the shower I felt relieved, as if a burden that I’d been carrying for weeks had just been lifted. My job was to keep people’s secrets, but Harry had used it against me and I wouldn’t let him anymore. I didn’t know why he’d killed Greene, but that was Baer’s job to discover, not mine. I’ll be a whistle-blower, I thought, and that sounded better than being a fraud. I hummed cheerfully over breakfast, and when it was done, I picked up the phone to make some appointments.

My first stop was the Shapiros’ apartment, and as I rode in the elevator, I wondered if Anna was going to be there. I don’t care, I thought. She’s Harry’s servant and she can suffer the consequences. When I arrived at the thirty-seventh floor, I composed my face for her-mimicking the glare she’d worn when I’d last seen her-but I softened my expression as the door opened on Nora. This was going to be the hardest meeting. I no longer cared about offending Harry, but I still felt for her. She hadn’t done anything wrong, just tried to care for her husband, and she wasn’t going to like what I was about to say.

“Anna’s out at the house cleaning up, so it’s just me here. Come through,” she said, smiling. “Can I get you something?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said briskly.

We walked to her study. It was a sunny morning and I caught a glimpse of Central Park through a window, the soft green blanket of the solid tops of trees stretching toward Harlem, with the line of Fifth Avenue on the far side. It was like sitting in an aircraft and seeing the clouds below-that lofty, detached sensation.

“There’s something I want to ask,” I said as we sat. “Steven Baer, the prosecutor in your husband’s case, called me to testify before a grand jury yesterday. He asked me some difficult questions. He knew a lot about my treatment of Mr. Shapiro after I discharged him-that I’d been flown to East Hampton after visiting my father.”

Nora looked puzzled. “There wasn’t anything wrong with that, was there? I wanted to help.”

“Of course, and I’m grateful, but it doesn’t look good now. You didn’t tell the detectives about it, did you?”

Her mouth opened in shock. If she had been the informant, she was doing as good a job of concealing the truth as Lauren.

“Absolutely not. That would be a terrible thing to do. You believe me, don’t you?” she said, holding a hand to her mouth.

I nodded. “I’m sorry. I needed to be sure.”

I believed her. It wasn’t merely that she seemed innocent. It wouldn’t be good for Harry’s defense to make it look as if he’d manipulated me into letting him out of Episcopal in order to murder Greene. Their lawyer would have briefed her not to volunteer information, just as Joe had briefed me. Nora had done all she could to fulfill Harry’s wishes and had landed me in trouble, but she’d had no reason to betray me.

“Did you speak to Sarah?” Nora said. “Will she help?”

She looked at me eagerly, and I was touched that she cared. She was already embroiled in a desperate effort to save Harry from the disasters into which he’d arrogantly plunged himself, from the failure of his bank to Greene’s death. I wanted to reassure her, but I’d be helping her husband out if I did.

“I don’t think that will make any difference now. I’m likely to lose my license no matter what she does.”

“No!” Nora exclaimed, placing her hand on mine as she’d done in the psych ER at our first meeting. “That’s terrible. After everything you did for Harry, it would be so wrong for you to suffer.”

“Would it?” I said. “I let your husband go and he murdered Mr. Greene. I’d have said I didn’t do my job.”

The word murderedseemed to strike Nora like a body blow. She leaned forward in her chair and I saw the distress in her eyes as she stared at me. It was as if I’d spoken in a foreign tongue and she was struggling to understand.

“How can you say that?” she cried. “You treated him. You saw the state he was in. Harry didn’t murder Marcus. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

I leaned forward in my chair and rested my elbows on my legs with my hands clasped. I didn’t want to distress her further, but I believed she ought to listen for her own good. There were things I couldn’t tell her about Harry’s behavior-Lauren was now my patient-but I wouldn’t lie about what I thought of him. If Harry went to jail for murder, I didn’t want Nora to pine for the rest of her life.

“Mrs. Shapiro,” I said slowly, “everything I’ve learned since the killing has convinced me I misdiagnosed him. I don’t believe he was ever in danger of suicide. He’d always meant to kill Mr. Greene. That’s why he had the gun.”

“No. No. I don’t believe that,” she said, standing and gripping her right elbow with her left hand. “I’ll never believe that. You’re wrong, Doctor. I thought that you understood Harry, but you don’t. You never will.”

As she stood there, I felt ashamed. I’d rushed up there eager to tell her the truth, but the person I should have been confronting was Harry himself, not his wife. It wasn’t her fault that he’d fooled her. What had come over me, acting like an avenger to a woman whose life was already shattered?

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “You’re right. I don’t know your husband as well as you. I think I should leave now.”

Her eyes were closed and she stood rigidly, her muscles tensed, as if still tortured by my outburst. Finally, she relaxed slightly and sat down again, looking more desolate than I’d ever known her, even in her study in East Hampton.

“Perhaps you should,” she said.

She stayed seated as I walked out of the study and unlatched the front door to let myself out. The last sight I had of her was with her hands folded in her lap, gazing blankly at a bright acrylic, no doubt million-dollar, painting.

Once I’d endured the usual wait, Duncan appeared and beckoned me through. I’d never noticed personal touches in her office before, but as I sat down, I saw two photos framed by her desk. One was of a hulk holding an oar and the other of a teenager in braces.

“Yours?” I said, pointing at them.

“Louisa’s mine. That big guy is my stepson. He’s at Stanford,” she said. “You haven’t got children, have you?”

“Not even a wife, I’m afraid.”

There was a pause as we both smiled formally. I realized that she knew that already from having read my personnel file. There was nothing I could tell her about myself in small talk that she didn’t already know. That didn’t bother me, because I’d kept other things from her and was about to bring her up to date. After my shame at the way I’d confronted Nora, this was light relief. I didn’t care about upsetting Duncan.

“You asked to see me?” she said.

“I did. I wanted to let you know that I’ve thought over what you suggested when we last met, and I have an answer.”

“Which is?” she said icily, as if she didn’t appreciate me playing games. She wanted only silent obedience.

“No,” I said.

“No what?”

“No, I’m not going to keep quiet. It’s too late for that. I’ve informed the Suffolk County ADA about what happened when Mr. Shapiro was admitted to Episcopal and why I came to discharge him. I testified yesterday to a grand jury.”

“You did what?” Duncan said incredulously.

“Testified to a grand jury. In Riverhead.”

“What?”

She was all but gasping. Her face had turned puce with shock, and I was happy to have stunned her, even temporarily. She walked to the window with a view of the Queensboro Bridge, standing motionless as if she needed time to think. Then she recovered her bearings, and the rush of surprise turned to a blast of anger.

“This is the first I’ve heard of a grand jury, and you testify without even telling me? What the hell did you say?”

I savored that moment, for I had her fate in my hands and she had to wait for me to tell her. The truth was that I hadn’t told Baer about how she’d forced me to discharge Harry because he hadn’t asked. But I’d already made up my mind that when he did that, I would. I’d ceased to care about Duncan-nothing she did could save me.

“I’m under oath to keep my evidence confidential.”

That was childish, I admit-that’s what the subpoena said, but I could easily have told her if I’d wanted to or if I’d trusted her. Duncan naturally believed I wasn’t telling her because I’d implicated her.

“Dr. Cowper,” she said, “we talked about the importance of sticking together, that the hospital would stand behind you. It seems you have betrayed my trust.”

I’d done pretty well to keep my temper during all of our interactions, I thought, but that made me lose control.

“I didn’t ask to treat Mr. Shapiro. You were the one who wanted me to do it. My mistake was obeying you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said firmly, looking down and pretending to smooth an invisible wrinkle in her skirt.

“Bullshit. You pressured me from the start to do what the Shapiros wanted and then you tried to keep it quiet.”

She stared at me as if unable to understand why I could be behaving this way: Why won’t he do what I say? What’s wrong with him?I didn’t fully understand that myself. All I knew was that I felt better for having defied her.

“All right, if you wish to destroy your career out of stubbornness, there is nothing I can do to prevent it. You may have relayed some fantasy to the grand jury about how you behaved and why. When the time comes, I will protect this institution by telling the truth.”

The purest rage I’ve ever felt erupted inside me. How dared she lecture me about the truth when she’d blatantly lied?

“You’ve never told the truth. You don’t even know the meaning of the word,” I shouted at her.

Duncan ignored my outburst. She walked to her desk and flicked a file shut as if it wasn’t any of my business anymore. In that moment, I knew that although I’d had some fun, I couldn’t defeat her. She ran this place, and Nora wouldn’t make her save me now that I’d turned on Harry. Episcopal would cast me aside just as Seligman had discarded him-the institution would protect itself.

“I await your resignation,” she said.

I hadn’t talked to Rebecca since she’d fixed my skull. I’d seen her in the distance in the hospital hallways, talking to someone or rushing somewhere, a blur of green scrubs and blue cap. Once I’d thought she’d noticed me from the corner of her eye and had turned to avoid a meeting. She finally turned up just after I’d left Duncan and was standing in my office, tallying how many boxes it would take to hold my possessions.

“Hey, you,” she said.

I turned, scanning her face again. Memory is strange: When someone we love leaves for a while, the image fades. Only when they depart forever is it etched permanently in the mind. I can picture my mother’s face more vividly than my father’s.

“Hey,” I said, half pondering a kiss on her cheek but not moving, a safe yard between us. The last time I’d seen her I’d been strapped to a gurney, but this time I had an awkward amount of freedom. “I’m sorting things out.”

“I can see that. You’re really shaking things up in here,” she said, sounding amused. “How’s that head of yours?”

“Pretty good, I think. You did a good job.”

“Sit down. I’ll take a look,” she said firmly.

I lowered myself obediently into my patients’ chair and felt her delicate fingers part my hairline to examine the skin closely. It felt comforting, like a tiny, unobtrusive massage, and my tight shoulder muscles unwound a little.

“Looks like the head’s healing nicely. How’s your mind doing? That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

“Still in bad shape,” I said.

She sat opposite, in the chair I used during therapy. I found it unnerving to be observed from there, especially by her.

“I heard a rumor that the psych department was upset with you. You’re going to be okay, aren’t you? You’re not in trouble?”

For a split second, I thought of confessing the truth to her. It was the end of a long day, one on which I’d started out feeling resolved that I would tell the truth to power but had finished with power setting me straight. I felt alone, and she more than anyone else would understand. But I was lost in a maze of half truths and half secrets that Greene’s death had uncovered, and I couldn’t think of where to start.

“I’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about me. It’s been a bit of a palaver, but it’s all okay now,” I said. “It’s nice to see you. We should have a drink.”

“We should. Let’s do that,” she said as vaguely as I had proposed it, and slipped out of the room again.

I examined my shelves for a bit, pretending to be sorting out books, as if I could deceive myself with appearances in the same way I might fool someone else. Then I gave up and sat at my desk unhappily. Somewhere along the way, she’d let me go.

In the stygian gloom of the subway below Hunter College, I waited for the 6 train to carry me home. I could see the lights of one approaching along the tunnel, glowing dimly in the distance. It arrived with a rattling shudder, crammed with bodies, and I pushed myself on board. As the doors closed, I saw a man stick his arm through them farther down the carriage and lever them apart. As he struggled to gain access, the passengers by me groaned and the announcer cried hopelessly, “Stand clear of the closing doors.”

Finally, he pushed his way through and I looked along the carriage at him. All I could see as he grabbed a pole and the passengers arranged themselves around him was his peaked cap-I couldn’t glimpse his face. The train pulled away and we shot southward under Lexington Avenue. At Fourteenth Street, I escaped from the bodies onto the platform. It wasn’t yet full summer, but the stations were already warm-it was a choice between the air-conditioned crush of the trains or the spacious heat of the platforms. A bundle of people burst out of the train, and the troublemaker hurried ahead to my exit.

I couldn’t see him when I got to the surface. It was dusk, and as I walked down the street toward my apartment building, I glanced behind me twice-my experience in Central Park had made me wary. There was no one in sight. Bob was standing by the front desk and gave me a watchful nod as I entered. Does he have something to tell me?I wondered, but he stayed silent. As I got to the middle of the hallway on my floor, I saw a glint of light under my front door. I waited, with my heart racing, before edging forward.

The door was unlocked and I pushed it ajar, then stood listening.

“Who’s there?” I called.

There was no reply, and I took two paces inside, my heart beating, ready to turn and run. A man was sitting in an armchair, reading my copy of The New York Timeswith a glass of my whiskey at his side and listening to a Mahler symphony.

“Christ,” I said. “You scared me half to death.”

“I thought I’d surprise you,” my father said.

20

I still had a job, at least temporarily, and I turned up to do it the following day, having fixed to meet my father that evening. He hadn’t been forthcoming about why he’d arrived out of the blue, although he’d mentioned that Joe had called him. The day went by unremarkably, with nothing further from Duncan or Jim. It almost felt as if the Shapiro affair had been a dream. I nodded through forty-five minutes of Arthur Logue and then waited for Lauren.

The minute hand clicked around the wall clock. Five minutes after five, ten minutes after five. She’ll be getting out of the Town Car now, I thought. Walking through the lobby and showing her ID to the guards. With two minutes to go, I started listening for the sound of her heels clicking down the hallway. I knew little of her beyond what she’d told me the previous week, but she was the only connection I had left to Harry. Everyone else-Anna, Nora, even Joe-had spurned me. I hadn’t even heard from Felix in a while.

Only when the hand clicked past five fifteen and kept descending did I realize. She wasn’t coming. That shocked me more than it should have. It wasn’t unusual for patients to fail to show up and she’d hardly been entirely truthful with me, yet I’d been so sure that she’d come. Why did I have such faith in her?I wondered as I sat there, feeling spurned. It was because she seemed so unafraid. If she’d decided she didn’t want to see me again, she’d have told me to my face. But when the hand reached five thirty, I knew there was no point in waiting. I gave her two minutes’ grace and then called her cellphone on the off chance she’d been in an accident. She wouldn’t have forgotten.

“Ms. Faulkner, this is Dr. Cowper. I was expecting you for our appointment. I hope nothing is wrong,” I told her voice mail.

I sat for another few minutes, feeling abandoned. “Fuck,” I said softly. I had no one left to talk to except Baer and Pagonis. The previous day, I’d felt elated by my decision to tell the truth about Harry, but now I was desolate. This was it-the end of the line. My last patient of the day was on vacation so that was the end of my duties. I unclipped my red-and-white badge and went to find my father.

He was at a table in a corner of the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel, with a large martini in front of him. Behind the bar, the Maxfield Parrish mural of the monarch grinned as inscrutably as Harry in Riverhead. It’s fine for you, with your pipe and your slippers, and your fiddlers three, I thought. If I had your job, I’d be merry, too. The waiter brought a glass of wine and my father clinked his own, brimming with bulbous green olives, against it.

“Here we are again. Cheers,” he said.

I studied his face as he sipped. It was sallow in the soft bar light, and the lines around his eyes were deeper. The heart attack had aged him-he looked older than the undaunted image I carried in my head. He’d lost some weight and his legs had looked stick thin as he’d padded around my apartment in a dressing gown in the morning. I’d given up my bed for him and slept on a couch. In the early hours of the morning, I’d woken to hear his raspy snores from the bedroom, like a foghorn in the night.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” I said.

“Joe’s worried about you. He says you’ve been under a lot of strain and you haven’t been telling him everything. He thinks you could be in trouble. I’m due in D.C. later in the week so I thought I’d take a detour, see if I could help.”

I looked around the bar, which was filling with an early evening throng. Waiters passed among tables with trays bearing drinks and silver bowls of nuts and snacks. Opposite, a white-haired tycoon sat alongside a pale-faced beauty-perhaps his daughter, perhaps his mistress. I should have been grateful to my father for flying on this mission, but it irritated me-I was too exhausted to be angry. Why play the concerned parent now, when he’d never bothered to do it before? He’d arrived at the exact moment when it was too late.

“You told Joe I was secretive,” I said.

My father sucked one of the olives off his cocktail stick and munched it. He looked at me warily, trying to gauge my mood.

“Even as a kid, you were always a mystery to me,” he said.

“So you’ll remember the secret I kept for you.”

He widened his eyes, taken aback. I routinely confronted my patients with awkward questions about things they had suppressed from their past, but I had never summoned the nerve to do it to him. I could be grateful to Harry for that, at least-he’d battered me into a condition in which I didn’t care anymore.

“I’ll have another. What about you?” he said, signaling to the waiter.

“Is that a good idea?” I said. Then I decided against acting as his heart doctor as well as his psych. “Oh, hell. I’ll join you.”

My father sat silently with his head tipped back as the waiter tidied up the table and brought over new drinks. He gazed at the ceiling of the bar, as if seeking divine inspiration for what to say. By now, the tycoon was resting his hand in a position on his companion’s leg that proved she wasn’t his daughter.

“The thing with Jane,” my father finally said. “When you found us that day. It’s so long ago, isn’t it? I’m surprised you remember.”

“Are you really? It’s not the kind of thing you forget. I was only a child. How could you have done that?”

I forced myself to look at him-not wanting him to escape the force of my outrage-and to my surprise saw weakness and shame. It hadn’t occurred to me that he was capable of feeling guilty. He’d always seemed so adept at moving on rapidly from his emotional failures, leaving others with the aftereffects.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I hurt your mother and I hurt you. I fucked it all up, that’s the truth. I wish I’d never done it.”

“Done what? Made me lie for you?”

He sighed. “Not just that, the whole thing. The affair, breaking up the family like that. I know you think I’m just a selfish bastard, but it crushed me when your mother died. It felt like I was being punished for what I’d done. It hurt Jane, how long it took me to get over it, but she’d been my wife. You don’t forget that.”

“And Jane?”

“Benny, you think what you like about me-God knows I deserve it-but don’t keep blaming her. It’s not her fault.”

He took a gulp and sighed again. I didn’t know what to feel. Part of me thought it was a masterful performance from a man who was good at getting others to pity him-another of his manipulative ploys. But there was a kernel of something genuine in it. Even if it was just a show, I was grateful he’d cared enough to fly here to put it on. An awful lot of people fall apart and end up in therapy or in the psych ER, but thousands of others carry on with their lives. They just bear their burden of guilt or unhappiness as privately as they can. Maybe he’d been one and I hadn’t noticed. What kind of psychiatrist was I?

“You’re right. She doesn’t,” I said.

“Could we talk about something else now?” he said plaintively. “And don’t tell Jane what I just said, will you? Please?”

I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. I felt better that I’d at least managed to voice the resentment I’d bottled up against him for years-it was as if I’d managed to seize back some power over our relationship.

“I’m glad you came, Dad,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, waving his hand magnanimously. “Tell me about this case of yours. What do you think happened?”

“Honestly?” I said. “I think Shapiro planned to kill Greene before I even saw him the first time. He played along with his wife when she found him with the gun because he knew he’d have an excuse if he looked crazy. Then he got himself discharged and did what he’d always planned to do. So now I’m his defense.”

“That’s clever, I’ve got to admit,” my father said, easing seamlessly back into the role of lawyer. “Why did he want to kill the guy in the first place?”

“I don’t know exactly. Something happened between them that I don’t understand, before Seligman got into trouble. It’s not just Greene he blamed. He had a thing about the Treasury and Rosenthal. Greene had worked there and so did Henderson, the Treasury secretary.”

“Those Rosenthal people do stick together. I’ve dealt with one or two of them in London. They’re like the Moonies. What’ll you do now?”

“I’m going to tell the Suffolk County ADA what Shapiro said to me and let him deal with it. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“You can’t give up like that,” my father cried, so loudly that the couple at the next table glanced worriedly at us. “You can’t just sit there. You have to find out what happened, why he did it. That’s your only hope.”

He sounded outraged. All the talk about Harry seemed to have revived him-either that or the two martinis. The color had returned to his cheeks and he talked as animatedly as if it were his own case. He must be tough to face on the stand, I thought. He was just as relentless as Baer.

“That’s not my job, Dad.”

“What the hell is your job, Ben?” he said indignantly. “You sit and listen to what people tell you, but if they feel like lying to you, you let them get away with it? That doesn’t sound very smart. Joe said you wouldn’t even tell him what you know because of a patient.”

“I can’t. You’re a lawyer. You know the rules.”

“I know rules are sometimes made to be broken.”

He drained his martini and glared at me as if only a coward would disagree. I didn’t reply because I was thinking of Anna and how similar their complaints about my profession had been. She didn’t have much faith in me, I thought. I remembered her final words as she’d walked away on the beach: Work it out for yourself. She had flung that at me not believing that I would.

It was time to prove her wrong.

Lauren’s house was beautiful. It must have been mid-nineteenth century, flat-fronted in red brick with what looked like the original brass knocker on a black-painted wooden door. It was off West Fourth Street in the middle of the West Village.

Peering through the windows, I saw wide-planked floors and marble fireplaces that stood out against the chalky walls. All of the furniture and fittings, from the chandeliers to the chairs, looked selected for the space. There was a yard at the back with a crab apple tree, from which a copper lantern hung. It looked almost too perfect-nothing was out of place. It reminded me of the way Nora had decorated the house in East Hampton. They had something of the same aura. Was that why Harry had fallen for both women? I wondered. They both provided some haven from his uncontrollable rage.

Lauren wasn’t home, and I retreated along the street to a cafe to await her return. I knew she’d be back-it was a warm Saturday morning and a copy of The Wall Street Journalrested on a table in the living room, still in its wrapper. She must have retrieved it before going out earlier. I’d called her once more since she’d failed to arrive for her session earlier that week, but there’d been no reply. Whatever she’d wanted from me had taken only two meetings and I knew I’d have to seek her out if I wanted to discover more. Her address was in my records, but I’d had to steel myself to follow my father’s advice.

It was four hours later, after lunchtime, when I saw her walk down the street in a pale overcoat. I let her go inside and gave her five minutes’ grace. Only when I’d climbed her stoop and was at the top about to knock did I have a feeling of hopelessness. I was once again chasing one of Harry’s women, knocking on a closed door. I’d already gone to Nora and Anna and gotten nowhere. It was a hopeless mission-Harry was the only one who knew why he had done it. I’d had one chance to get it from him, and I’d failed. Why am I here?I wondered. I felt like a stalker who can’t forget the object of his obsession.

When Lauren opened the door, something had changed. It wasn’t just her shock at seeing me and her frown of displeasure. It was something else. She wasn’t the same controlled woman who’d come to my office and told her story: she looked despairing and adrift. Her face was blank, like that of a distressed starlet caught by surprise in a paparazzi flashlight, and she hesitated before she could articulate her words.

“Dr. Cowper,” she said.

“Can we talk for a minute? It won’t take long.”

She paused, as if trying to reconcile my presence with what she’d been thinking of before, and looked dazed. Then she stood aside and ushered me through. She led me along the hallway into a living room dominated by a long oak table. Sunshine streamed through the rear windows, with frames that bowed at the top. I could hear the faint sound of traffic from the street outside, but it was a peaceful refuge.

“You’ve got something to say?” she asked.

We were still standing, since she hadn’t offered me a seat and showed no sign of doing so. She gave the impression that she wanted to get me out of there as fast as she could and resume pondering whatever had been on her mind.

“You didn’t keep our appointment,” I said.

“I decided I didn’t want to,” she said crisply, regaining some of her former poise. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your call. I was intending to. Do you always chase your patients like this?”

“I don’t, but you’re an unusual patient.”

She arched her eyebrows. “How so?”

“You know what I mean. You didn’t pick me out of a list in a magazine. You came to me because I’d treated Mr. Shapiro. You wanted to make sure I couldn’t tell anyone about your relationship.”

“That sounds too clever for me,” she said.

“You’re an intelligent woman.”

“What do you want from me?” she said.

“You told me that you didn’t see Mr. Shapiro after you left Seligman, but that wasn’t true. You visited him in East Hampton only a week before he killed Marcus Greene. Why was that?”

Lauren trailed one hand on the table and then tapped it a couple of times, as if coming to a decision. She looked purposeful again, more like the woman I’d known before. She stepped forward and put her hand on my arm, as if trying to ensure that I listened to her, and her eyes were fierce.

“I want you to leave now. You shouldn’t be asking questions like that. It’s not a good idea, believe me. You’ve already been attacked once. Do you want to put yourself in more danger?”

She had started to guide me out of the room and back toward her door, but her question stunned me. How did she know about my assailant in the park? I had only just told Joe of my suspicions.

“What do you mean? Tell me,” I said. I grabbed her arm. “Tell me.”

“I mean what I say. You should take care,” she said.

My father had left for Washington and I was alone in my apartment, thinking of my final glimpse of Lauren as she’d opened her door to usher me out. The moment when she’d warned me not to ask questions had been shocking, but it wasn’t what I remembered most vividly.

The image printed on my mind was her arm reaching past me in the last moments before I’d stepped onto her stoop and walked away. As she’d turned the bolt, I’d noticed a mark on the back of her hand. It was a green circle, faint against her skin, and I might not have seen it if it hadn’t been familiar. It was the same ultraviolet stamp with which I’d been marked before the officer let me through the cage at Riverhead.