Last Run (16 page)

Cathy made a brief, shrill, terrible sound, and Grace, her own heart pounding so hard she feared she might pass out, looked away from Terri for a moment to check that her daughter was not about
to collapse. Then, struggling for self-control, she returned her gaze to the other young woman, searched the red-rimmed, distraught eyes. The anguish looked true, it looked
real –
and
suddenly pure instinct took over, propelled Grace’s arms up and out, and Terri all but fell into them, allowed herself to be held for a moment before she pulled away again, trembling
violently.

‘You need to sit.’ Grace nodded at a bench to their right.

‘I can’t.’

‘You should,’ Cathy said. ‘You look like hell.’

‘I have to keep
moving.
’

Grace asked the dread question. ‘What about his head?’

Terri shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked from Cathy to Grace again. ‘You two should sit, especially you, Grace.’

What Grace desperately wanted was to be with Sam and David in the ICU, to be with poor, poor Saul, but she also needed, she knew, to stay here with Terri and go on observing her for just a
little longer, to be
certain
that she was what she appeared: Saul’s traumatized, horrified girlfriend.

‘What about you, Terri?’ she asked quietly. ‘They didn’t hurt you?’

Terri shook her head. ‘I wasn’t there.’

‘How come?’ Cathy was bewildered. ‘Where did it happen?’

Finally Terri moved over to the bench, sank down. ‘Saul was walking on the beach.’ Her voice was almost a whisper again. ‘I wasn’t with him.’

‘Why weren’t you?’ Something inside Grace began to chill.

‘We had another fight,’ Terri said.

‘A man found him on the beach near the pier,’ David reported to Sam after he’d talked with one of the ICU team. ‘The paramedics came fast, thank God,
got his airway open, saved his life. The CT scan showed a blood clot, but they got him into surgery, dealt with that.’

‘But all this.’ Sam was staring down at Saul, at the bandages and the plastered shoulder and upper right arm and the awful bruising, at all the tubes and wires, the catheters and
electrode pads on his chest, the ventilator and monitors, the bags of blood and fluid, administering and taking away; the blessed horrors of modern medicine. ‘He looks as if he’s on
life support.’

‘All there to help him through,’ David reassured. ‘The monitors are his friends right now, son. If the machines report a problem, the team can jump on it right away.’ He
didn’t know how he was managing to speak so calmly, didn’t know how he was still upright. ‘They’ve done some preliminary fixing up, too, in his throat. Fragments of
cartilage had to be removed, tiny plates and wires put in to stabilize the area.’

‘And now?’ Sam’s own throat felt constricted, his chest tight.

The emotional agony spreading through him as he looked down at his brother was all too sickeningly familiar. He had experienced it three other times, the first when Sampson had died, the next
when his dad had been in the ICU at Miami General after someone had stabbed him six years back; the third when he’d heard the death knell of Judy’s terminal cancer prognosis.

Not the same
, he told himself, and tried in vain to shove it away. Tried, but failed, to put away the greatest of his fears.

‘How long was it, before they got his airway open?’

One part of the fear. Sam did not, could not, look at his father.

David knew what he was really asking: how long Saul’s brain might have been deprived of oxygen. Two bites of the poisoned cherry, he thought, with a new, silent rush of agony: head trauma
and suffocation.

‘No way of knowing how long.’ He paused. ‘The EEG looks OK.’

Finally Sam dared to look at him, feeling like a boy again, craving reassurance from the man he trusted most in the world.

‘But it’s early days, son.’ David needed to be honest, for all their sakes. ‘He took a hell of a beating. More than a single impact.’

‘Is he in a coma?’

His father shook his head. ‘But they’re going to keep him under heavy sedation for quite a while, to give everything a chance to settle.’ He struggled for a few more crumbs to
throw to his older son. ‘I know it doesn’t seem that way, but we’ve actually been very lucky.’

‘Lucky.’ Sam’s face twisted.

‘He’s alive,’ David said simply. ‘Another few minutes, maybe less, he’d have been gone if the paramedics hadn’t done such a great job. The procedure they used
can be risky, a hollow needle in the perfect spot, but they had no choice, and they got it right, thank God.’

‘So all in all, he could be OK?’ Still like a kid, begging for good news.

‘It’s early, Sam,’ his father told him again. ‘There’s no cervical spine injury—’

‘Jesus.’ That horror hadn’t even occurred to Sam.

‘But however it goes, they’re going to have to do a lot more work on him.’ David’s face was a mass of lines, each seeming more deeply etched than it had been a few hours
ago. ‘More surgery to repair and rebuild, then physio for his shoulder, and speech therapy.’ He looked at his older son’s face. ‘This minute, though, he’s out of
danger.’

‘But things could still go wrong.’ The pleading child had disappeared again, melted back into the core of Sam, the man, filled with fear and a growing, seething rage.

‘They could,’ David said. ‘And he could have died right there on the beach.’ He reached for Sam’s big hand, squeezed it, felt his skin hot against his own cold
fingers. ‘But our boy’s strong, right?’

Sam looked at his father, recalled again his time in ICU, tethered by tubes and wires, remembered him surviving.

‘Like you.’ He squeezed his hand back.

And then, abruptly, his mind started working again, and he let the hand go. ‘Them,’ he said. ‘You said a man found “him” on the beach, but surely you meant
them.
Saul and Terri.’

‘No,’ David said. ‘Just Saul. They said he was alone.’

For the first time, Sam looked around the unit, his gaze passing over the other patients and the vigilant nursing team, searching for another kind of uniform, guessed that the police had been
and gone, figuring there was no point coming back till there was a chance of Saul waking.

The Naples PD officer walked in as if Sam had conjured him up, began to walk across the room, but Sam beckoned him quickly into a corner near the door where no one would overhear, showed his
badge and saw the other man’s expression change from irritated to compassionate.

His own cop’s mind had begun to tick horribly.

‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘if there’s a chance it was a bat?’

‘You mean, like a baseball bat?’ The guy saw Sam nod. ‘I wasn’t at the scene, but word is it could have been something like that, or a club, maybe.’

Something in Sam recoiled.

It made no sense, none at all. Different coast, no possible connection.

Except through
him
, through his involvement in the investigation.

‘Son?’

David was at his side, looking at him with new anxiety.

‘It’s OK, Dad.’

He put an arm around his father’s shoulders, went with him back to the bed.

This had to be random, surely, his mind went on ticking; a brutal, random assault.

Except there was no getting away from the fact that it had all the ingredients of another attack by the same individual who might have already killed three people on the Atlantic coast.

All the ingredients but one, thank the Lord. The most fundamental difference of all: Saul was still clinging to life.

Grace was coming down the corridor, heading for the unit as he came out.

‘How’s he doing?’ Her eyes searched his face. ‘Terri told us what happened.’

Sam looked at the awful strain in her face, and put his arms around her.

‘He’s strong,’ he said. ‘He’ll make it.’

‘I know he will,’ Grace said. ‘I know.’

‘I want to see him.’ Cathy was just a foot away, still white-faced.

‘Sure, sweetheart,’ Sam told her. ‘Dad’s still in there.’ He pulled gently away from Grace, laid a hand on Cathy’s arm. ‘You have to be prepared for all
the tubes and wires and machines, OK?’

Cathy nodded.

‘He’s unconscious because they’re keeping him that way, because it’s the best thing for him.’ He looked at Grace. ‘You holding up?’ Sam asked Grace.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said, tension building in her by the second.

Sam turned away, walked across to where Terri still sat on the bench by the wall.

‘Where were you,’ he asked, ‘when it happened?’

Behind him, Grace remained motionless, let Cathy go into the ICU alone.

Bad mom.

Bad wife, worse sister-in-law.

Terri had stood up slowly, was facing Sam.

‘We had a fight,’ she told him.

‘Another one,’ Sam said, and shook his head.

He began to turn away from her; then swivelled slowly back around.

‘You must have noticed the similarities, too,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ she said.

Grace was watching Terri again. The young woman was wrecked, there seemed no doubt about that, and it was
impossible
to conceive that this horrific crime could have anything whatever to
do with her.

Yet all the outward distress in the world might mean nothing.

Might.

Grace knew she had no choices left.

She took a deep breath. ‘Sam,’ she said. ‘I need to speak to you.’

He was pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, starting to walk away from the ICU, where he might get away with making calls without going outside.

‘Just give me a minute,’ he said.

‘Now,’ Grace told him, and her voice shook just a little. ‘Please.’

Chapter Eighteen

Grace had never seen Sam look at her like that before.

As if he hated her.

It passed swiftly, disbelief taking its place.

‘I don’t believe you could have kept this to yourself.’ He shook his head. ‘Though I have to say I don’t believe in what you’ve been thinking.’

‘Thank God,’ Grace said.

They were in a small room, someone’s nondescript office. They had slipped in there because she had said, softly, that no one else must hear what she had to say.

‘It’s craziness,’ Sam went on now. ‘Based on virtually nothing. The fact that Terri came to see you just after Gregory left that last time.’

‘And the photograph of Maria Rivera,’ Grace reminded him painfully, desperately wanting him to swat that away too. ‘And her obsession, most of all, with the
killings.’

‘The obsession of an ambitious rookie taking all the wrong paths,’ Sam came back. ‘We’ve talked about all this before, Grace.’

‘And you said – ’ she wanted to give way, to drop this, but she had to get it all said so that they could, God willing, leave the awful suspicion behind – ‘that
Terri oughtn’t to have known anything about Pompano Beach.’

‘More obsession, Grace.’ Sam was impatient to get out of the room. ‘She’s had a pretty screwed up life, she’s maybe a little needy because of—’

‘What about the photograph?’ Grace asked doggedly.

Sam was silent.

‘Oh God,’ Grace said. ‘That’s getting to you too, isn’t it?’

‘What’s getting to me is why Saul didn’t tell me about it.’

That look returned; a dagger straight into Grace’s heart.

‘You know why,’ she said weakly.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I can understand that.’ His mouth was set hard. ‘What I can’t, will never, understand is why my own wife kept it from me.’

He stopped then, did not say out loud what Grace knew he had to be thinking.

The same as she was. That if –
if
, heaven forbid – Terri was to blame, then this terrible thing need never have happened.

That if Grace was right, it was her fault that Sam’s brother was lying there now in the ICU with head injuries and a crushed larynx.

Her fault.

‘Sure, we spoke with Officer Suarez,’ the detective told Sam, ‘right after she showed up at the Cove Inn.’

He had only just exited the elevator at the fifth floor, had paused at the nurses’ station for an update, when Sam had jumped right on him.

Detective Joseph Patterson of the Naples PD, a young man with keen blue eyes, a cleft chin and brown hair in early retreat from his forehead, investigating the aggravated battery of Saul Becket;
all available fellow officers – he had swiftly assured Sam – out on the streets doing everything in their power to get the assailant locked up as quickly as possible.

No evidence, meantime, was the word from the crime scene, and nothing on Saul’s body, no fragments under his fingers, though his clothing had been taken away for analysis.

They’d moved out of the corridor into a waiting area, currently empty.

‘We knew about the inn,’ the detective told Sam, ‘because your brother had a note of the reservation in his wallet. Mr and Mrs Saul Becket.’

So old-fashioned and just plain Saul it made Sam want to cry.

The people at the Cove Inn had reported that Saul had been in and out all afternoon and evening looking for Terri, plainly upset, and everyone Patterson had talked to there had been deeply
shocked to hear what had happened, particularly as they had found him such a very nice young man.

‘Anything we should know?’ Patterson asked him.

Sam shook his head. ‘Nothing I can tell you.’

‘Regarding the relationship with Officer Suarez maybe?’

‘She’s told me they’d had an argument – ’ Sam picked his words carefully – ‘and that she’d walked out, that she didn’t come back till . .
.’ He paused. ‘You know when.’

‘That’s what they figured at the inn,’ Patterson said. ‘Lovers’ tiff.’

‘The relationship has been a little up and down.’ Sam kept his tone even.

When Saul woke up –
when –
if he learned that Sam had laid so much as the smallest finger of suspicion on Terri, he’d probably never forgive him. Without real,
realistic
justification there was simply no way on earth Sam was going to risk that. Not with nothing more than his pregnant wife’s almost certainly irrational doubts and a
photograph.