24 Hours (24 page)

“Bogey’s good,” Hickey drawled, sounding more than half drunk. “But Mitchum was the greatest. No acting at all, you know? The real deal.”

Karen said nothing. She had never known time to pass so slowly. Not even when she was in labor, screaming for Abby to be born. It was as though the earth itself had slowed on its axis, its sole purpose to torment her family. She had entered that realm of timelessness that exists in certain places, a few of which she had visited herself. Prisons were like that. And monasteries. But the ones she knew most intimately were the waiting rooms of hospitals: bubbles in time where entire families entered a state of temporal suspension, waiting to learn whether the heart of the patriarch would restart after the triple bypass, whether a child would be saved or killed by a wellintentioned gift of marrow. Her bedroom had now become such a bubble. Only her child was not in the hands of a doctor.

“You alive over there?” Hickey asked.

“Barely,” she whispered, her eyes on Fredric March. March reminded her of her father; he was a model of male restraint and dignity, yet he would do whatever was required when the going got tough. She still cried when she saw
The Best Years of Our Lives,
with March and that poor boy who’d lost both hands in the war trying to learn to play the piano—

“I said, are you alive over there?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then you ought to feel lucky.”

She sensed that Hickey was looking for a fight. She didn’t intend to give him one.

“’Cause a lot of people who ought to be alive aren’t,” he said. “You know?”

She looked over at him, wondering who he was thinking of. “I know.”

“Bullshit you know.”

“I told you, I was a nurse.”

He glanced at her. “You proud of it? People in agony waiting for pain medicine while nurses sit there painting their fucking fingernails, watching the clock, waiting for their shift to end.”

She could not let that pass. “I am proud I was a nurse. I know that happens. But nurses are stuck with doctors’ orders. If they break them, they get fired.”

Hickey scowled and drank from the Wild Turkey bottle. “Don’t get me started on doctors.”

Karen thought she remembered him saying that all the previous kidnappings had involved children of doctors. He’d said something about doctors collecting expensive toys. But that couldn’t be the only reason he targeted them. Lots of people collected expensive things. Somehow, doctors were part of a vein of suffering that ran deep in Hickey’s soul.

“When did your mother pass away?” she asked.

He turned his head far enough to glare at her in the chair. “What the fuck do you care?”

“I am a human being, as you so eloquently pointed out before. And I’m trying to understand what makes you so angry. Angry enough to do this to total strangers.”

He wagged a finger at her. “You’re not trying to understand anything. You’re trying to make me think you actually give a shit, so I might feel enough for you that I won’t hurt your kid.”

“That’s not true.”

“The hell it’s not.” He drank again, then let his eyes burn into her. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Sunshine. You ain’t strangers.”

“What?”

He smiled, and a wicked pleasure came into his face. “The light dawning up there?”

A shadow seemed to pass behind Karen’s eyes, a flickering foreknowledge that made her shudder in the chair. “What do you mean?”

“Your husband works at University Hospital, right?”

“He works at several hospitals.” This was true, but University provided the facilities for Will’s drug research. He also held a faculty position, and did quite a bit of anesthesiology there.

Hickey waved his hand. “He works at University, right?”

“That’s right. That’s where we met.”

“How romantic. But I have a little different feeling about the place. My mother died there.”

The transient fear that made her shudder before now took up residence in her heart.

“She was in for her throat cancer,” he said, almost to himself. “They’d cut on her a bunch of times before. It was no big deal. But they were supposed to put some kind of special panty-hose things on her during the operation. STDs or something.”

“SCDs,” Karen corrected him. “Sequential compression devices. Along with T.E.D. hose, they keep the blood circulating in the legs while the patient is under anesthesia.”

“Supposed to, anyway,” Hickey said. “But they left them off, and she got some kind of clot. Sounds like Efrem Zimbalist.”

“An embolus.”

“That’s it.”

“Will was the anesthesiologist?”

“Fuckin’-A right he was. And my mother died right there on the table. They told me nothing could be done. But I went back later and talked to the surgeon who’d done the operation. And he finally told me. It’s the gas passer’s job to make sure those SCD things are on the patient.”

“But that’s not true!” Karen cried. “The anesthesiologist has nothing to do with that.”

“Oh, yeah. What else are you going to say?”

“That’s the job of the circulating nurse—
if
the surgeon has written the proper orders. The surgeon himself should check to be sure they’re on.”

“The cutter told me there’s some kind of box under the table, and the gas passer’s supposed to check for it.”

“He was probably scared to death of you! He was shifting the blame wherever he could.”

A dark laugh from Hickey. “He was scared, all right.” He leaned up on his elbow. “Don’t worry. That asshole paid, too. In full.”

“You sued him for malpractice?”

“Sued him?” Hickey laughed. “I said he paid
in full.
”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“You killed him?”

Hickey snapped his fingers. “Just like that. No telling how many people I saved by wasting that butcher.”

Struggling to keep her anxiety hidden, Karen tried to remember Will mentioning a case like the one Hickey had described. But she couldn’t. And it didn’t surprise her. Her resentment about leaving med school made her a poor listener when Will wanted to discuss work. “When exactly did this happen? I mean, when did your mother pass away? Will—”

“She didn’t
pass away,
okay?” Hickey sat up in the bed. “She was murdered. By doctors who didn’t give a shit. Your old man wasn’t even in the room when she started to go. He was there at the start and the end. Some assistant was in there the rest of the time.”

Nurse anesthetist,
Karen thought, her heart sinking. More and more, nurse anesthetists were handling the bulk of routine operations. It lowered the cost to the patient and freed up time for the doctor to concentrate on difficult cases. But the custom had always worried her. In an empirical sense, there was no such thing as a routine operation.

“Probably talking to his fucking stockbroker through most of it,” Hickey said, lying back on the pillows. “Yapping on his cell phone while my mother was croaking. The bottom line is, your husband murdered my mother. And that’s why we’re here tonight, babe. Instant karma.”

Karen tried to think of a way to convince him of Will’s innocence, but it was useless. His mind was made up. She shook her head, trying to resist the change that had already taken place within her, the instant reappraisal of Abby’s chances. Until now, Abby’s kidnapping had seemed a stroke of fate, terrible but random, like being blindsided by a bus. But this was infinitely worse. Because every moment of the crime, from the moment it was born in Hickey’s fevered mind to the conclusion waiting out there in the dark, was suffused with malice, driven by hatred, and focused on revenge.

“How long have you been planning this?” she asked softly. “I mean, you said you’ve done this to other doctors. Were they all involved in your mother’s case?”

“Nah. I picked doctors for the reason I told you. They collect expensive toys, go off to meetings all the time. They’re perfect marks. It’s strange the way it happened, really. Your husband was already on my shortlist when he killed my mother. He just went to the top of the list.”

Karen hugged her knees tighter. Hickey had already returned his attention to the movie. He seemed enthralled by the paranoia and hatred crackling off of Humphrey Bogart, an inchoate anger that quite by chance had found a target in the family of Fredric March, a man whose loving family Bogie’s character had never known and never would. She recalled Hickey’s story of the death of his father. Hickey had ordered his cousin to kill the man who brought him into the world, and Huey had obeyed him. Patricide. A man capable of that was capable of anything.

“You just want the money, right?” she said, watching his face in the light of the television.

Hickey glanced away from the screen. “What?”

“I said, you just want the money, right?”

“Sure.” He smiled, but his eyes were dead. “What else?”

Karen kept her face motionless, but her soul was falling down a dark shaft. Abby wasn’t meant to survive the kidnapping. She would live until Hickey’s wife got the ransom money. Then she would wind up a corpse in a ditch somewhere, waiting for the inevitable deer hunter to stumble across her body. Hickey’s other victims might have lived, but this time was different. This time it was not about money.

He wants to punish Will,
she thought.
That’s why he wanted to rape me. And how could he be sure Will would know he’d done it? By killing me. Because when the medical examiner performed the required autopsy, he would find Hickey’s semen—

It was hard to believe that a simple chain of thoughts could incapacitate a person, but Karen felt her mind and body shutting down as surely as if Hickey had cracked her skull with a hammer. She had to keep functioning. She had to shed her fear for herself. Hickey meant to kill Abby: that was the critical fact. That alone had to determine her actions from this moment forward. The first thing to do was to warn Will. He had to know that waiting out the night and paying the ransom wasn’t going to bring Abby back to them. She wasn’t sure how to warn him yet, but she knew one thing absolutely: if morning dawned without them any closer to saving Abby, she would have to kill Hickey. If he wasn’t alive to give the death order, the giant in the forest might just falter at the brutality of his appointed task. But first she had to get out of the bedroom.

Alone.

Will lay on the sofa in the sitting room of the suite, a hot towel over his face. He was tired of looking at Cheryl in her bra. Tired of listening to her street analysis of his marriage and his present situation. He had paced out a couple of miles on the sitting room carpet, circling the furniture groups, trying to burn off the desperate energy produced by his inability to help Abby. That exercise, combined with his earlier wrestling match with Cheryl, had aggravated his joints to the point that he had to take a powerful painkiller that he kept for emergency situations. The drug and the hot towel had tamped down the pain, but his brain was humming like an overloaded circuit. The QVC shopping network babbled incessantly from the bedroom, where Cheryl lay drinking her rum and Cokes.

His mind was working strangely, like the jump cuts he saw whenever he flipped through MTV on the way to VH1 or CNBC. He saw himself walking into the bedroom, jamming Cheryl’s gun underneath her jaw, and forcing her to tell him where Abby was, the way Clint Eastwood would do it. But Cheryl had hit the nail on the head before. This was no movie. As long as Abby was under Hickey’s control, Will could yank out Cheryl’s fingernails with pliers and it would get him nowhere. When the thirty-minute check-in call came, Abby would suffer horribly or die.

For a while, he’d tried to view his situation as an exercise in problem-solving. It was like a chess game, with only six pieces. But the stakes were so high that he couldn’t make a move. He couldn’t even
see
a move. Cheryl claimed she didn’t know where Abby was being held. Will wasn’t sure he believed her, but even if she did know—and he somehow forced her to tell him—she claimed it was impossible for police to reach the location within the thirty-minute window. He did believe that. It only made sense—from Hickey’s point of view—and it dovetailed with what Karen had said about where Abby was being held. So, in order for Will to save Abby, Cheryl would not only have to know where Abby was—and tell him—she would also have to pretend to Hickey that everything was fine while the state police or the FBI raced to rescue her.

What could convince her to do that? Fear? He doubted it. Any torture he was capable of inflicting would almost certainly fall short of what Cheryl believed Hickey would do if she betrayed him. A bribe? It was an option, but one he’d have to be careful with. The previous fathers had undoubtedly tried it. Yet they had failed. Why? Why should Cheryl remain loyal to Hickey? A man who, by her own admission, still beat her? What would it take to erode that perverse loyalty? A million? Will could get a million dollars cash. It would take a few days, though. Which killed the idea. To be effective, bribe money would have to be in his hands before the ransom pickup tomorrow morning. Or simultaneously. Karen was supposed to wire the ransom to a bank on the coast. There were branches of Magnolia Federal—the main state bank—all over Biloxi and Gulfport, and the odds were that Hickey would pick one of them to handle the receipt of a large wire transfer. Most of Will’s money was in the stock market, but he had $150,000 in CDs at Magnolia Fed. But would the promise of $150,000—plus the $200,000 ransom—be enough to turn Cheryl against her husband? Unlikely. The other fathers had probably suffered from the same lack of liquidity.

The towel had gone cold on Will’s face. He got up and went to the bathroom, then ran the tap as hot as it would go and held a washrag under it. The reflection that stared back from the mirror was not the one he saw every morning; it was the face of a lab rat trapped in a maze, forced to jump through hoops laid out for it by an unreachable adversary.

He wrung out the washrag, then returned to the sofa and laid the cloth across his eyes. Images of Abby in pain rose in his mind but he forced them down. Why had he and his family been targeted? Had his art collection really been the determining factor? All Hickey’s victims had supposedly been doctors who collected things, all of them hit on occasions when they left their families for more than forty-eight hours. Cheryl wouldn’t reveal how they knew when these physicians were traveling, but Will assumed Hickey had a mole in one of the hospitals, a nurse or an aide, probably. Someone who heard the chitchat around the ORs and doctors’ lounges. Not that it mattered. They were in the eye of the storm now, and everything hung in the balance. Will had seen enough parents lose children to know what it did to families. The death of a child was an emotional Hiroshima, leaving utter devastation in its wake. The world became a shadow of itself. Marriages failed, and suicide began to look like sweet release, a path back to the one who was lost.