"Grandpa?"
I just smiled.
"He’s quiet and strong. Very religious." She paused. "My father died when I was six. My mother and I moved in with my grandparents."
"Are they still living?"
"Thankfully," she said.
"Do they know about the trouble you’re having?"
She shook her head. "I haven’t told anyone in my family."
"Not even your mother?"
"No."
I felt as though I had found a path into Lilly’s psyche. I could speak of the infection in her leg as a metaphor for her childhood trauma. "Keeping a secret — especially a big one, like this — can add to your level of stress," I said.
"My grandparents are old now. And my mother’s got her own problems to worry about. I don’t want to burden them."
"But they care about you, and you’re in pain."
"I can handle it," she said.
"
After you’ve lost your father
," the voice at the back of my mind said, "
you don’t risk losing your grandfather, no matter what it costs to keep him close. Even if it costs you your innocence. Or your leg
."
I kept speaking in metaphor. "It could be a long haul, getting to the bottom of this infection. You might want someone you can open up to. Someone outside of your family." I glanced at the skin of her thigh where it stretched, tight and shiny, over the inflamed tissues below. "To release some of the pressure."
"They do the incision and drainage tomorrow afternoon," she said.
"Otherwise the infection has nowhere to go but deeper."
She gazed down at her leg. "I guess it’s going to look pretty ugly once they open it up."
"I’ve seen... and heard... just about everything," I said.
She studied the leg a few seconds longer, then looked at me.
"If it’s okay with you, I’ll stop by after the procedure."
She nodded.
"Good." I squeezed her hand, stood up, then headed for the door.
That’s what a little victory in psychiatry looks like. You slip into the shadows, dodging the mind’s defense mechanisms, glad enough to take a half-step toward the truth. Behind the next word or the next glance may lurk the demon you seek, all in flames, desperate to be held, but set to flee.
As I left Lilly’s room I caught the ‘-venger’ part of my name being paged overhead. I stopped at the nurses’ station, picked up the phone, and dialed the hospital operator. "Frank Clevenger," I said.
"Outside call, Doctor. Hold on."
There was dead air, then a deep voice said, "Hello?"
Even after two years I recognized North Anderson’s baritone. He was a forty-two-year-old police officer from Baltimore, a black man as intimate with the dark city streets as with the veins coursing through his perfectly muscled, weight trainer’s body. We had become fast friends working the forensic case I had sworn would be my last. Plumbing the minds of murders had finally worn my own psyche paper-thin. "It’s been too long," I said.
"I would have called sooner, but..."
But we reminded each other of carnage. We reminded one another of Trevor Lucas, a plastic surgeon gone mad who had taken over a locked psychiatric unit, performing grisly surgeries, including amputations, on select patients and staff. Before we could convince him to surrender, which only happened after I went onto that locked unit with him, he harvested a grotesque sampling of body parts that still floated through my nightmares. Anderson couldn’t be sleeping any better himself. "You don’t need to explain," I said.
A few seconds passed. "You’ll never guess where I’m working now."
Anderson was as tough and streetwise a cop as I’d ever met. "Gang unit?"
"Not even close."
"Vice squad," I said.
"Nantucket," he said.
"
Nantucket?
"
"You remember how I like the ocean," he said. "They advertised for a chief of police; I sent in a résumé. Been here sixteen months. I actually sailed
North Star
up here myself."
North Star
was Anderson’s thirty-two-foot Catalina sloop, one of the loves of his life. The only greater ones were his wife, Tina, and his daughter, Kristie.
"I figure I did my time on the front lines, you know?" he said.
I knew. All too well. Anderson had retreated to an island. I had retreated to the halls of Harvard medicine. "You did more than your share," I said.
He cleared his throat. "I could use your help."
His tone made me wonder whether he was battling a depression of his own. "I’ll do anything I can. What’s up?"
"The Bishop family," he said, as if that would explain everything.
"Who are they?"
"Darwin Bishop."
"Never heard of him," I said.
"The billionaire? Consolidated Minerals & Metals — CMM? It’s publicly traded."
"Hey, you may live in that world now, but I don’t hang in Nantucket," I said. "And I don’t play the market. I always liked the track better."
"They made national news last night," he prompted.
"I try to stay away from the news, too."
Anderson got to the point. "One of his little twin girls was found dead in her crib. Five months old."
I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. I had worked with other families stricken with SIDS, an unpredictable condition that cuts off breathing in infants, taking them in their sleep. "Sudden infant death syndrome," I said.
"Maybe... We’re not so sure. There are two older, adopted sons in the family — sixteen and seventeen years old. The younger one has a history of violence. Really ugly stuff, including strangling a few neighborhood cats."
I knew where the discussion was headed. And I knew that Trevor Lucas had left me without the heart to go there. "I don’t do forensic work anymore," I said.
"So I hear. The chief back in Baltimore said he tried you once or twice," he said.
"Four times."
"Can’t blame him. You have a gift."
"That’s one way to look at it," I said.
"I’m not expecting an investigation," he said, "just an evaluation."
"The answer is still no."
"I’ll sign a purchase order for whatever you think is fair."
"Christ, North, you know it’s not about the money."
"Look," he said, "the D.A. here is leaning on me. He wants the younger brother arrested and charged with murder. He’ll try him as an adult and aim for life in prison, no parole."
Few things outrage me more than a judicial system that bends chronology in service to vengeance, and Anderson knew it. I stayed silent.
"He’s only sixteen," Anderson went on. "The Bishops adopted him from a Russian orphanage at six. Who knows what kind of hell he went through before that?"
"I’ve got my work cut out for me right here," I said, half to remind myself.
"I don’t want to push you, but there’s something that bothers me about this family — especially the way the father laid out a red carpet for me to question his son. You’re the best I’ve...
"I’m trying to stay focused." I was also trying to stay sober, not to mention sane. "Why don’t you call Ken Sklar or Bob Caggiano at North Shore Medical Center? They work with Judith David. You know the group. They’re world class."
"One interview with the boy," he pressed. "That’s all I’m asking."
I didn’t want to let Anderson down. But I didn’t know how far into darkness I could walk without losing my way forever. "If you want me to call Sklar myself and ask him the favor, I will."
"I want you."
"No," I said, "you want part of me I left behind two years ago, the part Trevor Lucas took." I didn’t give him the chance to respond. "Listen, I’ve got to finish up rounds."
"Frank..."
"I’ll give you a call some time." I laid the receiver back in its cradle.
I drove my black Ford F-150 truck out of the Mass General parking garage, took a right onto Storrow Drive, and headed toward the Tobin Bridge to Chelsea and East Boston. I wanted to chase North Anderson and the Bishops out of my thoughts, to keep my distance from death. That used to mean half a bottle of scotch and a gram of cocaine, but I knew I would have to settle for my ritual coffee at Café Positano, an unexpected collage of mahogany, marble, and brass in the middle of a run-down row of storefronts, sandwiched between a discount packie and a variety store.
I pulled up in front of the place, went inside, and stepped up to the espresso bar. Mario Graziani, a broad-shouldered, perpetually tanned, fifty-something-year-old, who wore a tattoo of the Coliseum on his forearm, was bantering in Italian with the bricklayers and bookmakers and judges who were his regulars. Without my asking him to, he steamed my milk to a cottony froth, spooned it over a couple ounces of ink black espresso, and dusted the top with cinnamon. He slid the mug across the bar. "
Qualcuna ti vuole
," he said, nodding discreetly over my shoulder.
I had picked up a bit of Italian about five years before, treating an eighty-four-year-old Sicilian man with Alzheimer’s disease. His name was Maurizio Riccio, and his cortex was so full of the tangled neurons of dementia that he had become unshakably convinced he was back in Sicily with his teenage sweetheart. This break with reality was distressing to his children, who wanted their father to know for sure that he wasn’t nineteen and frolicking in the Mediterranean, that he was slowly wasting away from prostate cancer, in the Cohen, Florence, Levine Assisted Living Center, right in Chelsea. They insisted I prescribe him an antipsychotic like Thorazine. I refused, and they took his case away from me. I held on to what I’d learned of his language — and what I’d learned from him about the agelessness of the human soul.
Qualcuna ti vuole
— Someone wants you. I lighted a cigarette, sipped my coffee, then turned slowly and glimpsed Justine Franza sitting alone toward the back of the place, reading a book. She was resting her head on her palm, her elbow on the table, so that her long, golden hair hung to one side, like a curtain. She was a thirty-two-year-old, upper-crust Brazilian photographer touring the United States. I had met her the night before when she’d come in with a few friends. We’d spent twenty minutes talking about the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro and the seaside resort town of Buzios, all of it a pleasant enough cover for what I really had to say.
If I were alone with you on the beach in Rio or in a Cliffside cottage in Buzios or down the street in my loft
...
"
Molta bella
, no?" Mario purred.
I drank enough of my coffee to be able to walk with the mug, then started toward her table.
"Clevenger!" someone shouted.
I stopped and turned toward the door.
Carl Rossetti, a local defense attorney who looked more like a drug dealer, bounded in. He had straight, jet black hair to the small of his back, gold bracelets on both wrists, earrings in both ears. He also had one of the sharpest legal minds in or around Boston. "You think you could analyze
me
, doc?" he announced. "Let me tell you: You ain’t got that kind of time."
Men and women seated at the tables around me looked up at him. He threw waves and smiles back at them.
I
had
analyzed Rossetti, but he could count on my never telling a soul.
He walked up to me, kept shifting foot-to-foot, as if still on the move. "How about that adopted lunatic on Nantucket?"
My heart sank.
"I guess he’s some piece of work. Strangled a couple cats around the island a year or so back. Nearly burned down the Bishop estate. And he’s got a history of breaking and entering every place within walking distance." He grinned. "From Russia with love, huh?"
"The way I heard it," I said, "nobody has any idea whether he’s involved. They haven’t rule out sudden infant death syndrome."
"C’mon. The kid’s got the whole profile. What odds you want to give me he’s a bedwetter?"
Rossetti was referring to the triad of bedwetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals typical of budding psychopaths.
"He’s a juvenile," I said. "And he hasn’t been charged. Who’s leaking his life story?"
"Who else? Harrigan — the D.A. This case is a rocket ship, and he knows it. He could ride the publicity right to the Attorney General’s office."
"So I heard."
He put a hand on my shoulder, looked at the floor. "Listen," he whispered, "if I wanted to come in for a tune-up, like... You know, no major overhaul. I’m basically good. A couple sessions, maybe. That kind of thing."
"No problem," I said automatically. I was having trouble dragging my mind away from Nantucket.
He dropped his voice even lower. "I don’t want to ask any special favors. But I know you been some of the same places I been in life, and I don’t want to go there no more, if you get what I’m saying."
"Give me a call. We’ll set something up right away." Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Justine watching us. She noticed me noticing her and went back to reading her book.
Rossetti slapped me on the shoulder, took a couple steps back. "You look friggin’ fantastic," he half-shouted. "Still got the bike?"
We’d taken our Harleys to the White Mountains after our last session. I nodded.
"They’ll throw mine in the box with me, doc, ‘cause I’m ridin’ till the light turns red for good." He pointed at my head, winked. "What about one of them waves? They’re good now. You can hardly tell." He started toward the bar, where Mario, no doubt, was already steaming his milk.
I walked the rest of the way to Justine. She was reading Angela’s Ashes. "Light reading?" I said.
She lowered the book. "So sad, Frank. What they went through." She pulled out a chair.
I sat down. Her olive skin, full lips, and deep brown eyes steadied me. Something ugly inside me has always retreated in the face of feminine beauty.
"You look tense. What is the matter?" she asked.
"Rough day," I said, and left it at that.
"What? What was rough?"
I’m used to asking questions. Answering for a change felt uncomfortable and inviting at the same time. I pointed at her book. "People. Their suffering. Knowing what you can do for them, and what you can’t."