Rogue Wave (26 page)

She paused in the doorway to the big front room. No longer was it the bedroom/study of the old days, with the big bed in the round corner, Rosten’s old pine desks, two of them lined next to each other under the side windows, and the mismatched collections of chairs strewn like half-read books around the room. They’d designated those chairs: the Chair of Pathology, the one with the weevils in the cushion batting; the Chair of Anatomy, with no cushion at all; the Chair of Radiology, stunning design, but one likely to collapse under weight, merely an image of a chair.

Now the round corner housed a circular couch and the rectangular section of the room a green leather sofa, an antique marble-topped chest, and large empty places that bespoke furniture removed and not replaced. The walls they had covered with anatomical sketches were now a mix of watercolors and oils, all in tones that highlighted the green of the sofa. It was, she thought, a room that would have pleased Dwyer Cummings. A room to which the Rosten she had known would have passed through without offering a glance.

“So,” she said as he walked in, “what was in Delaney’s locker?”

Rosten shook his head. “Nothing worth the expense of sending a man to the wharf. Sweats, rags, sweaters, extra pair of shoes. Just what you’d expect for a deckhand.”

She dropped onto the sofa. “Start from the beginning. You got the body, did the postmort, and then what?”

He strode across the room and stopped in front of her. “Don’t come in here and demand—”

“Marc, it’s too late. You screwed up the autopsy.” She couldn’t restrain the rush of pleasure that it gave her to watch him cringe, the one man who had refused to support her in a similar situation. She said, “I know how that is. It’ll catch up with you. Unless you face it now.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“Marc, I’m not out to get you.”
Well, only incidentally, only briefly.
“I’m here to protect my client.”

He sat in the far corner of the sofa, but he didn’t look at her. A streetcar clattered by. Rosten turned toward the window.

“If you are still the man I knew, Marc, you are thorough, conscientious, responsible. Even in med school, when you were so exhausted you had to force yourself to eat before you fell into bed, you never called in sick and made someone else cover for you. You never shorted your patients when they needed answers. I don’t believe you’d do a slipshod job on an autopsy. But I, of all people, know it’s possible to misconstrue a finding, to miss a clue that someone else might have discovered. With all these people asking about Delaney, it’s easy to see why you’d have second thoughts about the autopsy. What’s worrying you about it?”

He swallowed hard. Suddenly he looked up. “Okay. There were two things, neither of which seemed at all unusual when I wrote the report, and which indeed may not be. The first was a subdural hemorrhage in left anterior, proximal temporalis muscle.”

“The blow to the side of the head. What about contrecoup injury? Were the blood vessels on the right side of the brain broken?”

“There was no contrecoup. Do you think I’d miss something like that?”

“No. But didn’t you expect there would be one? If that subdural hemorrhage had come from a blow Delaney got being bounced around in the boat there
should
have been a contrecoup. But there wasn’t. Delaney wasn’t moving; he was standing still, and something hit him. Somebody struck him hard enough to cause that hemorrhage.” She caught herself before he blurted out:
Didn’t you find that significant?
Obviously, it had slipped by him. “Maybe if we took another look at—”

“You’d love to get a real crack at Delaney’s body, wouldn’t you? Even after five days in the Pacific, it wouldn’t bother you, would it? God, I never saw anyone so fascinated with decay. There were times when you just about made me sick.”

“I did?” she asked, amazed. “You never said that then.”

He laughed uncomfortably. “It would have sounded unmanly, or at least unsuitable for a medical student.”

“And here you are acting coroner.”

“Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm.

She closed her eyes and let her breath out slowly. She could feel the frustration that numbed her body when she’d finished her residency at the San Francisco coroner’s department and moved to a more rural county, knowing that, without the latest electron microscopes, the gas chromatograph to detect chemical elements in the blood, without access to the most sophisticated equipment, there would be conclusions she could never make, findings she would miss. “Once I would have sold two of my limbs for the chance to be coroner of the city of San Francisco. To have the equipment you do, the staff, the variety of cases. It would have been the next thing to being God.”

He shook his head. “God of the dead. You see it all here, all when it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“You save others from the dangers. Your discoveries give other living people a chance. And sometimes, occasionally, you find the truth.” It had been that—the illusion of truth revealed in the body—that had seduced her into forensic pathology, and eventually betrayed her.

Rosten laughed scornfully. “Most of the time you defend the department budget, fight for staff, worry that someone forgot to disinfect a table and left bacteria or a virus that will kill them.”

“Marc,” she said, leaning forward, “these are all facts you knew before you decided to go into forensic pathology. These are very basic objections to the trade. I never had a second thought about forensic pathology, not until I quit. But you? What made you choose it?”

“You.”

“Me? I never urged you into it. You wanted internal medicine. I never—”

“You remember the Salter case? Jesse Salter?”

“Salter? No.”

“I’m not surprised. I probably never mentioned it aloud. I thought about it almost constantly for the three weeks before I left. But maybe I could never bring myself to admit my mistake.”

She waited.

“They brought Jesse Salter into the ER at eleven in the morning. I had an hour to go on my shift. I’d been on thirty-five hours. Thirty-five busy hours. There’d been some kind of demonstration—antisomething, I can’t remember what—and we had a couple of guys banged up pretty bad. A lot of internal injuries. At nine that morning I was seeing double. I lay down in the intern’s room, just hoping I could sleep for a few hours. And then they brought Salter in at eleven. He was an old guy. Bleeding from the lining of the stomach, pancreatitis, esophageal varices from the back pressure of the blood his cirrhotic liver couldn’t handle, kidneys all shot to hell. No family to make his decisions. No history other than what he could tell me. Dialysis? I knew it was too late. I should have taken my stand then. But I was so tired, and tired people are easy cowards. I chose the easy way out. I stuck a catheter into his heart and pumped him full of antibiotics, and plugged him into a respirator. I knew, dammit, that it wouldn’t save him. And it didn’t. He was conscious. For three weeks he suffered with every breath that damned machine forced into his lungs. At first I could hear him scream from the end of the corridor. Then at the end, I couldn’t hear him even from the end of the bed, I could just see his chest move in a kind of dry heave.” He looked over at her. “If I had made the right, the courageous decision, I would never have authorized those machines. He would have died that night, instead of living in agony for twenty more days. But I didn’t, because I had allowed myself to get too exhausted to think.”

He didn’t say it, but the words hung between them:
Because I had spent too many hours, too many nights with you, here.

What he did say was: “I wasn’t responsible enough to be entrusted with living people.”

Kiernan didn’t move. He was still staring at her, and she stared back, unseeing now. Painful thoughts filled her mind: horror that he had wasted these years; distress at his dismissal of forensic pathology; anger, sorrow, amazement that after all these years he still blamed her. It was so appalling … And still it didn’t quite fit the Rosten she had known. Had he changed so much, or had she not known him at all? “And so you just left?”

“I had a lead on the path residency. I didn’t even know if I’d get it. It didn’t matter. I just had to escape. It was all I could do to make it those three weeks till the end of the year.”

She looked intently at him, seeing no traces of the passionate young man who had lived in this flat. Her voice was barely audible as she said, “You’d been planning to leave all along, and never once mentioned it! All that time I was sleeping with an imposter.”

“I couldn’t help it. I blamed us both. I blamed neither of us. I blamed the stupid system that kept me so exhausted that a private life could throw me over the edge.” He turned and walked to the window and looked out into the night. “I was young, I had lots of energy, and enough natural smarts to make decisions with half a brain, or one that was only half awake. Or so I thought. I never misdiagnosed a patient. I never botched a medication. But, dammit, I was too fuzzy to deal with Salter.” He swallowed hard. “You don’t need to tell me I was arrogant. Arrogance, the doctors’ disease. If you had diagnosed me then, I wouldn’t have believed you. And even if I’d suspected, I wouldn’t have known how to deal with it. Arrogance was a big part of what got me where I was. After Salter, all I knew was that I had to get away from patients.” He swallowed again, and wiped his eyes. “I’ve never admitted that, not to anyone.”

Without turning around he said, “There’s never been a day I haven’t regretted my decision.” Suddenly he laughed. “But my patients now aren’t complaining. And, at least, it didn’t change your plans.”

Forcing herself to meet his eyes, she said, “It changed me.” She could have told him of the years it had taken her to trust another man enough to spend more than a night with him. She said, “I’m sorry about Salter, and you, Marc. More sorry than I can say.”

The J-Church car clanged by, iron scraping iron, bursts of sparks flying out into the damp gray sky.

Rosten ambled over to a ficus plant and began examining the leaves, tacitly asking for an end to the painful discussion. It suited her; she needed time to digest his explanation, and to deal with its effects. She said, “What was the other questionable finding in the Delaney autopsy, the one that made you wonder about the subdural hemorrhage?”

“Delaney? The skin by the head of the ulna was pretty well eaten away—”

“Halfway up the ulna.”

“Wasn’t enough left on either wrist for me to base a conclusion, but on the right, there was a linear scratch across the outside of the head of the ulna. But no mark by the styloid process of the radius.”

“But the linear scratch on the outside of the wrist, do you think that could be from a wire? It’s just where a ligature would be if his hands had been crossed and tied behind him at the wrist. Tied up with wire that cut through the flesh into bone.”

Rosten nodded.

“What about the tendon of the supraspinatus muscle?” she said with mounting excitement. The muscle that ran along the inside of the scapula and attached to the top of the arm. “With an internal rotator like that, if Delaney’s hands were jerked behind him and tied, that forced external rotation could pull the tendon.”

“A small tear, but it could have come from anything in a storm like that. Or, coupled with the scratch on the ulna …”

She sighed. She’d hoped for something conclusive. “Not something you’d take to court, right?”

“Yeah, but nothing you’d want to rebut in court, either.”

“When
Early Bird
left the dock there were two people aboard, Matucci and Delaney. No matter what happened later, it was only Matucci who could have tied him up. Knocked him out, tied his wrists, and most likely pushed him overboard. Or maybe she cut him loose before she tossed him over.” The information about the ulna was a gift, Rosten’s way of saying
I’m sorry.
She stood up and smiled at him. “Thanks. I’ll use your information carefully.”

He shrugged. “Use it any way you want.”

But his face seemed lighter, nearer to the Rosten she recalled. Impulsively she kissed him.

He nodded, turning away from her abruptly to one of the desks and picking up some papers.

“D
ID
M
AUREEN CALL
?” Kiernan asked, leaning over the kitchen railing to take a cup of coffee from Tchernak. From the bedroom came congested snores. “I left a message for her two hours ago. I didn’t say to call back, but that’s never stopped her before.”

“I thought she called you every time she got near a phone.”

“The last time I heard from her, she was complaining about hearing noises outside. It could have just been nerves, but still … Tchernak, they’re five miles from the road down there. I wish Big Sur weren’t so far, that I could go—”

“Look, if you need someone to drive to Big Sur—”

“No!”

Tchernak sighed. “Well, if I had a wish, it’d be that Maureen traded places with
him
.” He threw a disgusted glance in the direction of the bedroom.

Kiernan ignored it. She didn’t ask about Olsen’s condition. Tchernak had already given her a blow-by-blow description, which added up to bad cold, occasional fever, and major pain in the ass. “I’ve been here less than six hours and already I’ve thrown out enough tissues to qualify for Bay-fill. I’ve carried the guy to the John so often I ought to be a longshoreman.” He glared down the length of his sharp, often-broken nose. “I even tracked down a grocery that delivered fresh, decent food—not that I got any help finding it from
him,
the local detective. Said he couldn’t hold a thought. Unless that thought was wanting juice, wanting a drink, wanting Ezra to stop barking!”

“He complained about Ezra!” Kiernan asked pulling the wolfhound to her protectively. Ezra let out a low groan and rolled over to present his stomach for rubbing.

“The guy’s a whiner, Kiernan. He’d complain about anything. He bitched about the crab box, he groused about the cops, he even said if you hadn’t made so much noise kicking out the side of the box, the cops wouldn’t have found him.”

“All that and Ez, too?”