The Abortionist's Daughter (18 page)

And then, within the minute, she fell asleep.

—————

“Get her out of there,” said Ernie.

“She’s asleep.”

“So wake her! Are you nuts? You want to write your ticket out of the department?”

Huck looked at Megan, who was lying on his sofa, curled up with her head in the crook of her elbow. The topknot of hair left her long neck exposed, smooth and mapley. He knew this was against everything he’d been taught, but something told him it was going to be necessary to break the rules here.

“I’ll come over,” said Ernie. “I’ll wake her up.”

“No, you won’t. She’s exhausted.”

“Does Frank know she’s there?”

“No.”

Ernie groaned. “He’ll fucking hit the roof, Arthur! Call him. Now. Call him and tell him to come get her.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because if we start passing her around like a kid, she’s going to bolt, and she’s got some good information. Hey. Do you remember a guy named Bill?”

“I know a lot of guys named Bill,” said Ernie.

“A guy her age,” said Huck. “Wasn’t there somebody up at the house that night? Telling us about Diana doing drugs?”

“Oh.”

“Did we ever talk to him again?” asked Huck.

“No, but he’s been calling. He keeps wanting to set up a meeting.”

“What for?”

“He says he knows somebody who might be upset with Diana for owing him money.”

“You think he’s credible?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“He’s looking for attention,” said Ernie. “Trying to cash in on the excitement. Why are you bringing him up, anyway?”

“He’s the one who took the pictures.”

Ernie was silent.

“I’m going to give his name to Peter,” Huck went on, referring to a colleague who had been working with the FBI on the child-porn case.

“Fine,” said Ernie, “although I wouldn’t waste much time on it. Is she awake yet?”

“No, she’s not awake! She’s sound asleep, and that’s how she’s going to stay until she wakes up on her own.”

“We’ve got a meeting with the chief at ten,” Ernie said. “What are you going to do with her then?”

“I don’t know. I’ll cross that bridge when it’s time. And you don’t need to go blabbing about this,” said Huck. “In fact nobody at the department needs to know about this.”

Ernie groaned again.

“Agreed?”

“Fine. I’m only doing this, you know, because—actually I don’t know why.”

“You’re my friend.”

“No, I’m not. You’re such a fuckup. I can’t believe what a fuckup you are.”

“Love the trust,” said Huck.

“I’m older than you.”

“Age before beauty,” said Huck.

“Speaking of which, are you going by Griffin’s?”

“What do you want?”

“Toasted sesame with lite cream cheese.”

“Getting serious about the weight?”

“Oh, leave me alone,” said Ernie.

—————

At nine o’clock Megan remained tightly curled on her side, drooling a little into the crook of her elbow. Huck draped a light blanket over her. In the kitchen he wrote out a note telling her where he had gone, instructing her once again to call her father when she woke up. Then he left.

The chief of police wanted an update on Steven O’Connell: mainly, why did he visit Diana’s clinic the morning of December 17? Why did he and Diana go over to the hospital? Huck let Ernie answer this one; he didn’t like to be the one to tell a superior that they didn’t have much. Steven O’Connell had taken his family to Costa Rica right after Christmas. All they’d gotten from him before he left was that as a minister he’d simply had a few things to say to Diana that morning about one of his constituents. Yes, they had gone over to the hospital together later that morning. No, he would not disclose what it was about. No, he would not give names.

“I want more. Get a warrant if you have to. In the meantime go talk to the hospital,” said Stan.

“Without a warrant they won’t give us dipshit,” said Ernie.

“Just talk to the nurses. Ask them if they saw Steven and Diana together. Ask them what they were talking about. What’s happening with the e-mails?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Ernie, “because just this morning Frank forwarded a new one.” He told the chief about the message Megan had received from allgodschildren. Huck perked up. He didn’t know about this.

“Who wrote it?” asked Stan.

“We’re checking,” said Ernie.

“That would be nice,” Stan mused.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” said Ernie. “There are probably hundreds of messages out there, and without anything else it’s going to be hard to link one particular message writer to whoever took a swim with Diana Duprey on December seventeenth.”

“What about that woman who used to picket the house?”

“Eve Kelly. She’s got an alibi,” said Ernie.

“And the housecleaner?”

“Alibi.”

The chief of police shook his head. “So what we’ve got are the fingerprints—”

“Which are Frank and Megan’s,” said Ernie.

“And the fingernail scrapings—”

“Which are Frank’s.”

“And the testimony of the neighbor that Frank came home pissed off—”

“—ballistic—”

“—in the context of his having just seen some fairly disturbing images a few minutes earlier.”

“Correct.”

“And Frank won’t give us an alibi.”

“No.”

“What’s he holding out for?”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Ernie agreed. “The guy knows he’s at the top of our list, but he won’t say where he was.”

Huck cleared his throat. Ernie and Stan both looked at him. Up until now he’d kept quiet.

“So?” said Stan.

“Am I the only one who thinks we’re jumping on Frank too quickly?”

“Want to elaborate?”

“It just seems too easy,” said Huck. “For instance, nobody’s talked to Piper McMahon.”

“The coroner? Why her? Oh. Right. That was ages ago,” Stan said.

“I think Huck has a point,” Ernie said. “We should at least eliminate the possibility that she harbored some deep-down resentment.”

Stan Wolfowitz shrugged. “You want to talk to Piper, it’s fine with me. Listen,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “I’m not looking to pin this thing on Frank. I don’t hold grudges, and I don’t want to see a good man go down on a murder rap. But we’re three blind men with an elephant right here in front of us, and it’s not the time to go off chasing moonbeams. But hey, talk to Piper if you want. Keep looking into those e-mails. And go to the hospital, pronto. Talk to the staff. Find out why Steven O’Connell was at the hospital with Diana that morning.” He swiveled in his seat and tossed the remains of a muffin into the trash. Huck and Ernie stood to leave.

“I’m not looking to nail Frank,” said Stan as they left. “But I am looking to nail somebody.”

After the meeting Huck went back to his desk and checked his messages. As he feared, there was nothing from Megan, and when he called home, he was reminded that his phone had been disconnected. There was, however, a message on his office line from Bill Branson, wanting to set up a meeting. Huck told his secretary to arrange a time for Bill to come in, and then he and Ernie headed over to the hospital.

Huck wasn’t sure if it was the smell or the bluish glare or simply the banal signs of everyday commerce—balloons, flowers, teddy bears—that made him uncomfortable in hospitals. All he knew for sure was that every time he walked through the doors—and it wasn’t infrequent; you couldn’t be a cop without being in and out of the emergency room—he wanted to walk right out again.

They did not learn very much from the emergency room staff. One of the nurses acknowledged that Diana and Steven had been in the morning of Diana’s death, looking for one of Diana’s patients, but when Huck asked who, the nurse reminded him she could not disclose names.

“Where’d they go?”

“We sent them up to Surgery,” she said priggishly. “Don’t use my name.”

The nurse in Surgery was equally reticent. “All I can say is that yes, they were here,” she finally allowed. She was a middle-aged woman, with hooded eyes that made her look older and sadder than she probably was.

“Was Diana doing the surgery?” asked Huck.

The nurse pursed her lips. Huck glanced at Ernie.

“You don’t have to get specific, ma’am,” Ernie said, “but did something go wrong?”

“I can’t say that,” said the nurse.

“But a lot of things can go wrong, can’t they?”

“They can, but they don’t,” said the nurse. “Not when Dr. Duprey is handling things.”

“But if something does go wrong, I guess it can be pretty serious?”

“It can be.”

“As in what?”

The nurse looked impatient. “Most often the woman begins to hemorrhage.”

“From what?”

The nurse shrugged. “Lots of things. Of course, a perforated uterus is a good place to start.”

“And what happens to a patient with a perforated uterus?”

“That depends. At best you recover. At worst you die. In between you might need a hysterectomy.”

“Which would make you infertile?”

The nurse smiled bemusedly, as though Ernie hadn’t learned eighth-grade biology. Ernie began to nod. “Which would be very upsetting,” he said. “Right? And not just for the woman but for her husband as well?”

“Was the woman’s husband there?” Huck asked.

The nurse held up her hands and shook her head. “If you want this kind of detail, you’ll have to go through our lawyers.”

“We’re not asking you to tell us who the woman was,” Huck said. “But people can get very emotional in an emergency. We’re just wondering if this was the case with Dr. Duprey that morning.”

“I have no idea.”

“But you were there, weren’t you?” said Ernie.

The nurse hesitated, then glanced over her shoulder and motioned for them to step out of the central recovery area and into the hallway. “Look,” she said in a low voice, “who do you think most of Dr. Duprey’s patients are? They’re babies themselves. If they don’t have husbands or boyfriends, they’ve got parents. Do you see where I’m going?”

Mentally Huck began to draft a search warrant.

“Frankly, I was wondering why no one had come by to talk to us,” the nurse said. “This has been in the back of my mind for an entire month.”

“So the parents were upset,” said Huck. “Are we talking verbal exchanges here? Physical?”

The nurse checked her watch and said she had to get back to work. But she hesitated, clutching herself as if cold.

“The father was upset,” she said. “That’s all I’ll say.”

—————

That afternoon, while Ernie drafted search warrants to get access to hospital records, Huck drove downtown to the coroner’s office. They were taking too long with the full autopsy report, and Huck hoped his presence might inspire them to hurry up. In view of Megan’s comment that morning, he also wanted to simply shoot the breeze with Piper. While he doubted Piper was the type to explode with jealousy years after an affair, he felt obliged to substantiate that hunch, if only to be able to assure Megan they’d checked things out.

At two-fifteen Huck walked into Piper’s office, only to find Piper leaning face-first into the wall, pushing with all her strength as though holding back a dam. Warm-up jacket, tights, running shoes: she was stretching, and Huck wondered if there was anybody in this town besides Ernie who didn’t consider a noontime jog up a mountain a normal way to spend a lunch hour. He pitied outsiders when they visited. If ever there was a way to feel out of shape!

Piper glanced over her shoulder at Huck, then pushed ferociously. “Talk to John,” she said to her navel. “It’s not my case.”

“When is he going to be finished?”

“Any day now.”

“Anything new?”

Piper pushed off the wall and dropped her head between her knees. “No. Cause of death was a subdural hematoma, same as always.” She stood up, her face beet red, and went over to her desk, where she pulled open the bottom drawer and removed a water bottle and a funnel and a little Baggie of white powder.

“Chief’s getting antsy,” Huck offered.

Piper funneled the powder into the water bottle. “If he wants a report that’ll hold up in court, he’s going to have to chill.”

“Actually, I didn’t just come about the autopsy,” he said, watching her shake the bottle. “Can I ask you something?”

“Ask whatever you want. I don’t know if I’ll answer, though.”

“You were friends with Frank,” Huck began.

“Yes, I was,” she declared.

“Pretty good friends,” Huck added.

Piper held his gaze.

“What’s your take on his temper? Think he was capable?”

“Any man’s capable.”

“Help me out, Piper.”

Piper sat down in her desk chair and bent over and unlaced her shoes. Huck was afraid she was going to take them off with him right there in the room, and take them off she did, and yes, a woman’s feet could smell as bad as a man’s.

Then Piper sat up and placed her hands squarely on her thighs. “Let me tell you about the kind of family Frank came from. You know what a Boston Brahmin is? His father was a state senator. His mother ran the Junior Service League. They lived in a town house on Beacon Hill, and when his father came home at five o’clock, his mother had a pitcher of martinis waiting for him. When one of them got angry, they smiled and walked out of the room. When Frank moved out here, they smiled and never spoke to him again.”

“How do you know all this?”

Piper sighed. “Frank and I were lovers, Huck. Okay? Is that really news to you? It was a long time ago. Right after his son died. He didn’t know how to grieve and was keeping it all inside, and with me he was able to let some of it out. It’s water over the dam, though,” she said.
“Capisce?”

“Did Diana know?”

“Of course she knew. She didn’t care, though. Now
there’s
a person who could grieve. Boy, could she grieve. Unlike Frank, who just lost weight. Speaking of which.” She opened up a foil-wrapped burrito and took an enormous bite, saturating the room with the smell of onion.

“How did it end, if I may ask?”

“No fanfare,” she said with her mouth full. “We just stopped seeing each other. And we stayed friends. Good friends. Ever have that?”