style="font-size:15px;"> “Another woman? Do you know that for a fact?”
Another half-paralyzed smile. “Uh—wife—knowth.”
Alex believed her. During her engagement to Peter Hodges, a feeling very like a sixth sense had told her something was amiss in their relationship. Long before there was any tangible clue, she’d simply known there was betrayal. If she had possessed the same instinct about conventional crimes, she’d already be an SAC instead of a hostage negotiator. Correction, she thought, I’m a common field agent now.
“If Bill wants to be with another woman,” she said, “why doesn’t he just divorce you?”
“Muhn-ey … dum-me. Would coth Biw miw-yens … tuh do that. Five—miwyen … may-be.”
Alex drew back in disbelief. She’d known that Bill had been doing well for some years now, but she’d had no idea he was that wealthy. Why in God’s name was Grace still teaching elementary school? Because she loves it, she answered herself. Because she can’t not work.
Grace had closed her eyes, seemingly drained by her efforts. “Tew … Mom … I tho-we,” she said. “Tew huh … I be waiting fuh hurh … in heaven.” The smile animated the living half of her face again. “If—I—make it.”
“You made it, honey,” Alex said, balling her free hand into a fist and holding it against her mouth.
“Well, look at this, Dr. Andrews!” boomed Bill Fennell. “She looks like she’s ready to get up and out of that bed.”
Grace’s eyes snapped open, and she shrank away from her husband, obviously trying to use Alex as a shield. The terror in her eyes hurt Alex’s heart, and it also thrust her into full-defense mode. She stood up and blocked Bill from coming to the bedside.
“I think it’s better if you don’t come in,” she said, looking hard into her brother-in-law’s eyes.
Bill’s mouth dropped open. He looked past her to Grace, who was literally cowering in the bed. “What are you talking about?” he asked angrily. “What the hell’s going on here? Have you said something about me to Grace?”
Alex glanced at Dr. Andrews, who looked confused. “No. Quite the reverse, I’m afraid.”
Bill shook his head in apparent puzzlement. “I don’t understand.”
Alex probed his brown eyes, searching for some sign of guilt. Grace’s fears and accusations were probably the product of a dying woman’s hallucinations, but there was no doubt about the reality of her terror. “You’re upsetting her, Bill. You can see that. You should go downstairs and wait for Jamie.”
“There’s no way I’m going to leave my wife’s bedside. Not when she might—”
“What?” Alex asked, a note of challenge in her voice.
Bill lowered his voice. “When she might …”
Alex looked at Dr. Andrews.
The neurologist stepped toward Bill and said, “Perhaps we should give Grace and her sister some more time alone.”
“Don’t try to massage me like that,” Bill said irritably. “I’m Grace’s husband. I’m her husband, and I’ll decide who—”
“She’s my blood,” Alex said with bone-deep conviction. “Your presence here is upsetting Grace, and that’s all that matters. We need to keep her as calm as possible. Isn’t that right, Dr. Andrews?”
“Absolutely.” Meredith Andrews walked around Alex and looked down at her patient. “Grace, do you understand me?”
“Yeth.”
“Do you want your husband in this room?”
Grace slowly shook her head. “I wan … my bay … be. Wan Jamie.”
Dr. Andrews looked up at Bill Fennell, who towered over her. “That’s good enough for me. I want you to leave the unit, Mr. Fennell.”
Bill stepped close to the neurologist, his eyes sheened with anger. “I don’t know who you think you are, or who you think you’re talking to, but I give a lot of money to this university. A lot of money. And I—”
“Don’t make me call security,” Dr. Andrews said quietly, lifting the phone beside Grace’s bed.
Bill’s face went white. Alex almost felt sorry for him. The power had clearly passed to Dr. Andrews, but Bill seemed unable to make the decision to leave. He looked, Alex thought, like an actor on a DVD movie after you hit pause. Or that’s what she was thinking when the alarm began to sing.
“She’s coding!” Dr. Andrews shouted through the door, but the shout was unnecessary. Nurses were already running from the station to the cubicle. Alex jumped out of their way, and an instant later Bill did the same.
“Cardiac arrest,” Dr. Andrews said, yanking open a drawer.
Because this was an ICU, there was no crash cart; everything was already here. The quiet cubicle suddenly became a whirlwind of motion, all directed toward a single purpose—to sustain the life fast ebbing from the body on the bed.
“You need to leave,” said a tall male nurse standing behind Dr. Andrews. “Both of you.”
Dr. Andrews glanced up long enough to give Alex a moment of eye contact, then returned to work. Alex backed slowly out of the ICU, watching the final act of her sister’s life unfold without any hope of playing a part herself. Ridiculous regrets about choosing law school over medical school pierced her heart. But what if she had become a doctor? She would be practicing two thousand miles away from Mississippi, and the result would be the same. Grace’s fate was in God’s hands now, and Alex knew how indifferent those hands could be.
She turned away from the cubicle—away from Bill Fennell—and looked at the nurses’ station, where banks of monitors chirped and blinked ceaselessly. How can they focus on all those screens at once? she wondered, recalling how difficult it was to watch multiple surveillance feeds when the Bureau had a TV rig set up on a static post. As she thought about that, she heard Dr. Andrews say, “I’m calling it, guys. Time of death, ten twenty-nine p.m.”
Shock is a funny thing, Alex thought. Like the day she was shot. Two searing chunks of buckshot and a half pound of glass had blasted through the right side of her face, yet she’d felt nothing—just a wave of heat, as if someone had opened an oven beside her.
Time of death, ten twenty-nine p.m. …
Something started to let go in Alex’s chest, but before the release, she heard a little boy say, “Hey! Is my mom in here?”
She turned toward the big wooden door that had brought her to this particular chamber of hell and saw before it a boy about four and a half feet tall. His face was red, as though he had run all the way from wherever he’d started. He was trying to look brave, but Alex saw fear in his wide green eyes.
“Aunt Alex?” said Jamie, finally picking
