Johnston - Heartbeat (26 page)

“I’m hungry.”

“You can get that bacon biscuit you like on the way to day care,” Roman said placatingly.

“I want French toast,” Amy whined.

“No French toast today,” Roman said, his patience obviously waning. “Go upstairs, Amy, before I. . . . ” His threats were meaningless, and Amy obviously knew it, because she stayed right where she was. He was clearly at the end of his rope and looked to Lisa for help.

Roman indulged Amy often enough that she was a little spoiled, Lisa conceded. She was almost as bad as he was, but someone had to be firm. Between them, it was Lisa who usually ended up denying their daughter what she wanted. “Go upstairs, Amy,” she said. “Daddy will come and get you soon.”

“I can’t take her, Lisa. I can’t be late,” Ro-man protested angrily. “I’m never late!”

“Then you will be this time!” she retorted.

Amy had paused in the doorway, and Lisa snarled, “Get upstairs!”

Amy scrambled up the stairs, howling at the top of her lungs.

“Now look what you’ve done!” Roman said.

“Me? You’re the one who couldn’t be bothered to dress your daughter.”

“You’re going to have to take care of Amy this morning,” Roman insisted. “I’ve got to meet Isabel—”

“Didn’t you get enough sex last night? If you need another fuck this morning, it’s your own damned fault. I was willing, Roman. You never asked!”

Roman’s face bleached as white as the powdered sugar Lisa had pulled from the cupboard to dust on the French toast when it was done. “What is that supposed to mean? If you’re insinuating—”

“Are you having an affair with Isabel?”

Once the words were out, Lisa wished them back. There was no going back now, no pretending nothing was wrong.

The shock, the hurt, the disbelief on Ro-man’s face should have told her everything she needed to know. But she heard her mother’s voice saying,
“He lied to me for years. He swore there was no one else. Until one day I came home and found he’d taken everything and left.”

“What have I ever done to make you doubt my love?” Roman said.

Lisa swallowed over the lump of pain in her throat. “You’re never home anymore, Roman. We never talk. And you never say the words, Roman. You never say the words.”

“I do . . .” He stared at her, his eyes liquid, his mouth working, but no sound coming out.

“I’ve got to get dressed,” Lisa said, “or I’m going to be late.” She brushed past Roman, afraid he might try to stop her, and raced up the stairs.

“Lisa, we have to talk,” he said, following after her, taking the stairs two at a time. He caught up to her in the bedroom, grabbed her arm, and hauled her around to face him. “I’m at the hospital so much because my patients need me.”

He was angry now, but so was she. “I need you, too!”

“You have me. All of me. Don’t you know that?” Roman cried.

“I don’t know anything!” she said. “Except that the woman you spend all your days with looks at you with eyes that eat you alive. You’ve been acting so strangely. I don’t even know if you want a wife anymore.”

“I do, Lisa. I . . . I . . .”

She watched him struggle to say the words. Struggle and fail. “Am I so unlovable, Roman?” she grated past the knot in her throat.

He was silent too long.

The sudden shrill of the smoke alarm sent them both clambering back downstairs. Clouds of choking smoke rose from the blackened and charred remains of the French toast. Lisa covered her mouth and nose as she pulled the plug on the electric skillet, while Roman crossed to open the sliding glass doors to let in some fresh air.

“When did you open this?” he said as he pushed it wide. And then, “No.
No
!”

Roman’s agonized cry made Lisa’s blood run cold. She turned in time to see him slam open the sliding glass door and race outside.

“Roman? What’s wrong?” She crossed to the open doorway and stepped through to see what had panicked him.

Amy was floating facedown in the pool.

Chapter 16

“Shoot me or put it away, Kittrick,” Isabel said. “The doctor needs me in the ER, and that’s where I’m going.”

Isabel handed the potassium-filled needle to Nurse Cole and gestured to the blond-headed girl in bed three. “This is for Patty. The doctor said we’d do additional surgery if she wasn’t any better this morning, and her potassium level is low. Under the circumstances, Hollander probably won’t do the surgery. See who’s backing him up.”

Jack realized he was seeing exactly why Ro-man Hollander valued Isabel Rojas so much. He had never seen anyone, male or female, react so calmly and capably in a crisis.

“Hold up there a minute,” he said, when Nurse Cole started to follow Isabel’s orders. What Isabel had said sounded perfectly rational, and Jack doubted whether a murderer would have handed over the murder weapon to a substitute and instructed her to go on with the dirty deed . But he had no way of knowing for sure. Maybe that was exactly how Hollander and Rojas were killing kids without getting caught.

“Put the needle down, Nurse Cole,” he ordered.

Facing a Colt .45, Frannie Cole did exactly as she was told. The needle landed on the table beside bed three.

“Wait right here and don’t move a finger—unless one of the kids needs you,” Jack said. “A detective will be here in about thirty seconds to brief you on what’s going on. Meanwhile, don’t say anything to anyone about any of this, do you understand?”

Nurse Cole nodded vigorously.

Jack slipped the Colt .45 into the front of his jeans, where it was hidden by his Levi’s jacket, and gestured Isabel out the door. “Shall we go, Ms. Rojas?”

She marched out ahead of him briskly enough that he figured she probably did wind sprints to stay in shape. Jack was grateful the elevator arrived the first time she punched it, because he had a feeling that otherwise she’d have taken the stairs.

“I’m waiting to hear what this is all about,” Isabel said when the elevator door closed, leaving them alone together.

Jack wasn’t sure what to say. If Isabel was a murderer, she was about the coolest killer he’d ever seen. Because his heart had been in his throat with fear, he’d gone off half-cocked and blown his cover bigtime. He met Isabel’s forthright stare and said, “I’m a Texas Ranger, Isabel.”

“I didn’t figure you were Batman.”

Jack laughed and said, “Don’t make me laugh, Isabel. This is serious.”

“As a heart attack,” Isabel agreed. “What did you think I was going to do to that kid?”

“Kill her,” Jack said.

Isabel’s eyes goggled. “No shit?”

Jack felt the urge to laugh again and stifled it. If Isabel Rojas was a murderer, he’d eat his new Resistol. ’Tm here to find out—”

The elevator doors opened with a chime, and Isabel brushed past him and went whizzing down the hall to the ER. Jack was grateful he’d gotten himself a hospital ID that gave him access everywhere, because a couple of orderlies were serious about keeping unauthorized folks out.

The ER was nowhere near as quiet as the rest of the hospital. Here was the center of the hive, where watchful worker bees guarded the heart of the place and never slept. People and machines were crowded into too small a space, and the cries of the wounded and their families filled the air with an anguished cacophony. Jack stayed close to Isabel, figuring she knew where she was going.

He was unprepared for the sight of three-year-old Amy Hollander lying in the center of a metal hospital gurney, IVs taped grotesquely to the right side of her neck and her wrist, her tiny body hooked up to monstrous machines that beeped and blipped and hissed and hummed.

Roman Hollander stood beside his daughter wearing a white doctor’s coat open over his bare chest. Jack wondered if Hollander was dressed at all and stepped close enough to see the doctor was wearing a pair of zipped but unbuttoned black jeans and mismatched tennis shoes.

Jack was amazed to see Lisa Hollander in the ER, considering the goons at the door, but even more astonished to note that she was standing on the opposite side of the gurney from her husband, glowering at him, instead of at his side, being comforted by and comforting him.

Jack backed up along the wall, close enough to listen to the questions Isabel was asking—
Cardiac monitor? Pulse oximeter? Arterial line? Foley catheter?
—and to hear the answers she was getting—all affirmative—but not close enough to intrude on the family’s anger and grief.

“What’s the prognosis?” Isabel asked Roman.

Trust a nurse to get to the point, Jack thought.

Hollander seemed to be in some kind of trance, and it was the ER physician who answered, “She’s slipped into a coma. We’re keeping her on a respirator—”

“And I want her off,” Hollander said authoritatively.

“Don’t any of you touch her!” Lisa said, dark eyes alert, guarding her daughter like a lioness with her cub. “I won’t let you do this, Roman. I’ve read every word you’ve ever written, and I don’t care what Amy’s like when she wakes up, so long as she does wake up!”

“A breathing apparatus is only prolonging the inevitable, Lisa. I’ve seen cases like this too many times—”

“This isn’t a case,” she hissed, leaning across the gurney to confront him. “This is your daughter. How can you not want to do everything you can to save her?”

“Don’t you understand? There’s nothing I
can
do to save her!” He shoved both hands through his short-cropped hair. “There’s not a goddamned thing I can do for her!”

Jack understood, all right. The almighty Dr. Hollander, who had the precise skill and knowledge to save other people’s children, did not have the precise skill and knowledge to save his own. Whether Amy Hollander came out of the coma hale and hearty depended on how long her brain had gone without oxygen before she was discovered and resuscitated. Five minutes was about the limit before brain cells started to die.

“How long was she underwater?” Isabel asked, apparently having followed the same line of reasoning as Jack.

“I don’t know!” Hollander said. “Lisa and I . . . I don’t know!”

“It couldn’t have been more than five minutes!” Lisa insisted. “It couldn’t! I was watching the time all morning! The smoke alarm went off so quick—”

“Smoke alarm?” Isabel said.

Jack saw the byplay between Hollander and his wife before the doctor said, “It was nothing. Some French toast got burned.”

“How did Amy get outside to the pool without either of you noticing?” Isabel asked, looking from one of them to the other.

“We . . .” Hollander stopped and stared at his wife, his mouth grim. “We were upstairs, and we thought she was, too.”

“She wanted to play with Donald, and I told her no. I never thought . . . I never thought. . . .”

Jack’s heart went out to her.
Why doesn’t Hollander hold his wife? What’s wrong him? Can’t he see how much pain she’s in?

But the two of them seemed very far apart.

“I knew Amy was smart,” Hollander said, brushing tenderly at the dark, still-damp curls on his daughter’s forehead. “But the security lock on the sliding glass door . . . It’s so complicated . . . .”

It was gut-wrenching to watch Hollander battle to control his quivering chin. Jack looked away as the doctor’s features crumpled.

Lisa took a step toward her husband, but stopped when Isabel reached him first.

Jack had never seen a more tortured look than the one on Lisa Hollander’s face as her husband wrapped his arms around Isabel Rojas, pressed his face tight against her shoulder, and sobbed.

Maggie had slept like the dead. It was no wonder after the night she had spent with Jack. She had woken feeling wonderful—until she glanced at her watch and saw that if she didn’t get a move on, she would be late for the Monday morning bioethics committee meeting . . . again.

As she inched out of bed, she realized she was sore in places she had forgotten she had. There were bruises on her inner thighs, her arms, and—she knew from a midnight visit to the bathroom—a hickey high enough on her throat that she was going to have
to
do some creative dressing. She didn’t remember getting any of the marks, only the joy and the passion and the pleasure of the night just past.

When the phone rang, her heart leaped, because she was certain it was Jack. He had told her in the early morning hours—after he had made love to her for the third time—that he would have to leave before she woke up. But he had promised to call her. She picked up the phone expecting to hear his voice.

Instead, Victoria Wainwright said, “You’d better get to the hospital on time this morning. The committee has an important matter to consider.”

“What is it?” Maggie asked, more irritated than interested.

“Amy Hollander drowned. Dr. Hollander wants to take her off the respirator, but his wife is refusing.”

Maggie’s legs buckled, and she ended up on her knees beside the bed. “Oh, my God.”

“Don’t be late, Margaret. You know how Dr. Hollander likes to start on time.”

The phone clicked in Maggie’s ear.

“Nooooo,” Maggie moaned. “Nooooo.” She dropped the phone into the cradle and lowered her face into her hands.
This can’t be happening.
She knew exactly what Lisa and Roman were feeling right now-the guilt and the anguish.

The phone rang again, and Maggie hesitated before she answered it.
Please, not more bad news.

“Maggie? Are you there?”

“Lisa? Where are you?”

“You’ve got to come to the hospital
now,
Maggie. Roman’s threatening to take Amy off the ventilator. He’s petitioning the bioethics committee this morning to get their consent. I need you to argue on my behalf at the meeting, Maggie. I need you to be on my side.”

“Lisa . . . .” It was a clear conflict of interest for Maggie to speak on Lisa’s behalf when she legally represented the hospital-who represented Roman Hollander. But there was no reason why she couldn’t speak up as a friend and a concerned party. “I’m on my way,” she reassured Lisa. “Don’t let them do anything without me.”

“Hurry, Maggie. Hurry!”

Lisa’s plea played constantly in Maggie’s head as she toweled off after a quick shower, grabbed a power suit from her closet—she was going to need it this morning—dragged a brush through her hair, and drove like a wild woman through rush-hour traffic to the hospital. She didn’t bother with the elevator, just hiked up her skirt and took the stairs
to
the second floor two at a time. As she pushed open the stairwell door a voice said, “You’re late.”