Bodily Harm: A Novel Page 9

  Footsteps sounded in the kitchen. Fitzgerald hid behind the doorjamb. As Sarah slid around the corner, her socks gliding over the freshly waxed floor, he surprised her from behind.

  “Boo!”

  She screamed and jumped.

  Adrienne followed a split second behind her sister, yelling. “You cheated.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t say ‘go.’”

  “I said three.”

  “You still have to say go.”

  “Hey, hey, hey.” Fitzgerald stepped between them, hugging them both. “Why don’t we just call it a tie?”

  “No way,” Sarah said. “She always cries when I win.”

  “That’s because you cheat.”

  “All right,” Fitzgerald said, “no more calling anyone a cheater.”

  He hugged them again, and they followed him through the kitchen into the living room, where Adrienne sat quickly at the piano bench.

  “Want to hear my recital piece?”

  Before he could answer she began to play. Growling like a monster, Fitzgerald chased Sarah from the room and down the hall where she ran past her mother, who stood outside the master bedroom and stepped into his path. “Hold it, Frankenstein.” She pointed to her lips. “Plant one.”

  Fitzgerald did, and she followed him into a bedroom as big as a hotel suite.

  “It’s after nine,” Erin said to Sarah, who had hidden beneath the bed covers. “You should be in your own bed with lights out.”

  The covers muffled her response. “I heard the garage door.”

  “I’ll call someone to get it fixed. I’m afraid it might disturb the neighbors,” Erin said.

  Fitzgerald shook his head. “It’s a garage door. Garage doors make noise, just like kids make noise. Are they going to outlaw kids too?”

  “Don’t start again.” She pulled down the covers on the bed, exposing Sarah. “To bed,” she said, leaving the room. Fitzgerald heard her issue the same orders to Adrienne. He carried Sarah to her room and tucked her in, then returned and pulled off his tie. He threw his shirt in the basket labeled DRY CLEANING, kicked off his shoes, and left them there, a tempered protest against the cubby in his walk-in closet labeled WORK SHOES.

  Erin walked back in. “You get them riled up and I’m the one who has to settle them down again. Did you eat? I saved you a plate.”

  “I grabbed something.”

  “I heard about Galaxy on the six o’clock news. How bad is the fallout?”

  He shrugged. “Tepid. There’s still some shareholders pushing for my head, but the board isn’t too concerned, with the stock climbing.”

  “Anyone pushing to take the offer?”

  Fitzgerald shook his head. “Nobody wants to be the next Larry Reiner.”

  Everyone in the toy business knew the story of Larry Reiner, the twenty-nine-year-old inventor of G.I. Joe, who had rejected a one percent royalty payment on every sale of the toy and taken his agent’s recommendation to split a $100,000 one-time payment. Over the next forty years Reiner had lost an estimated $40 million in income.

  Erin sat on the edge of the bed. “Do you really think Metamorphis could be like that?”

  Fitzgerald shrugged. “It’s always a gamble, but yeah, I do.”

  The tone of her voice changed. “Do you think it’s worth it?”

  “What?”

  “The gamble.”

  Thirty-five-million dollars’ worth of worry lines creased her forehead, which was the amount Fitzgerald stood to make if he sold his stock when it was riding high. Fitzgerald couldn’t do that to Sebastian Kendall, or to himself. His ego wouldn’t allow him to concede defeat.

  “Bolelli has a track record for purging the fat from companies she acquires. She’ll fire all of Kendall’s executives, consolidate manufacturing, and lay off a majority of Kendall’s workforce.”

  And then what would he do, stare at the front of his house all day?

  “I’m just saying nobody wants to be the next Edward John Smith either,” she said, referring to the captain of the Titanic.

  HIGHLINE COMMUNITY HOSPITAL

  BURIEN, WASHINGTON

  CHARLES JENKINS HAD taken the first flight home after Sloane’s secretary, Carolyn, called to deliver the news. When his plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, Jenkins and Alex had driven straight to the hospital and he had maintained a vigil there ever since. For the first four days Sloane had lain in a drug-induced coma intended to limit his pain and prevent him from thrashing about in bed, possibly pulling out the myriad of tubes stuck in his body. Still, Jenkins had refused to leave. When visiting hours ended he took a blanket to the waiting room. The hospital staff gave him a hard time; hospital rules only allowed relatives to spend the night. Jenkins told them he and Sloane were brothers. Since he was black he didn’t expect to convince them, but he hoped to emphasize the strength of the bond between the two men, as well as his conviction to stay. The staff relented. Alex had brought him clothes, food, and reading material, unable to convince him to leave even to take a walk.

  “I need to be the one,” he had told her. “I don’t want him to hear it from anyone else.”

  When the doctor finally removed the breathing tube, Sloane choked uttering his first word.

  “Tina?”

  Jenkins shut his eyes, unable to hold back the tears that spilled down his face. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”

  The words had hit Sloane like the blows of a jackhammer. His chest shuddered, then his back arched, his body becoming rigid as a plank. The doctors and nurses fought to keep him from tearing the IVs from his arms and rupturing the bandages covering his shoulder and leg wounds, but they could not prevent the primal scream of agony and despair that ripped from his soul and rumbled down the hallways. Only a sedative silenced him.

  For the next three weeks, Jenkins remained in the chair beside the bed; Tina’s parents had flown to Seattle and taken Jake back to San Francisco with them, along with their daughter’s ashes for burial. Jenkins didn’t try to talk to Sloane, who spent most of his time staring out the window in his own induced coma, numb to the world and everyone in it. When the doctors and nurses asked Sloane questions, he did not answer them. When they put food in front of him, he did not touch it.

  According to the doctors, the gunshot wound to Sloane’s thigh had broken his femur and caused soft tissue damage to his muscles, but it had missed his femoral vessel. Had it not, Sloane would likely have bled to death, or lost his leg. Surgery on the leg indicated some neurological loss in his foot that the doctors said could cause him to walk with a limp the rest of his life. The bullet to his shoulder had fractured his clavicle, but as with the shot to his leg, the doctor explained that it had missed the subclavian artery, which could have killed him. It had nicked a lung, collapsing it, and the doctors were concerned about pneumonia, particularly if Sloane did not get up and start walking soon.

  His surgeon told Sloane he was lucky to be alive.

  Jenkins knew Sloane didn’t feel that way.

  “DO YOU NEED anything for the pain?”

  Sloane opened his eyes and looked to his friend, who remained in the chair by the bed. He shook his head. There was no point; his physical pain paled in comparison to the ache in his heart. Sloane had never felt such anguish—a sharp pain that caused him to double over in agony with each recollection, each memory.

  • • •

  THE REAL ESTATE agent had called early on a Saturday morning.

  “I have the house for you,” she had said.

  Sloane was pessimistic. He had told the woman he wanted to live on the water, as he had in Pacifica, where he found the sound of the waves comforting. The agent had interpreted that desire to mean Sloane wanted one of the luxurious homes on Lake Washington, along with their matching price tags and her commission. But that was not what he and Tina had been looking for, though neither could express exactly what it was they sought.

  “The owner just passed away,�
�� the agent explained as they descended the winding road into Three Tree Point. “He and his wife raised their family here. They lived in the home for fifty-two years.”

  When they turned the corner she stopped the car so they could gaze at the back of the white clapboard home. It had not been spruced up to sell. It needed a paint job and a new roof. Sloane looked to Tina and could tell she too had a good feeling. That feeling increased when the agent unlocked the door and they stepped inside. This was not a house that came ready made. It was not a monument to wealth and success. It had been functional, serving a purpose, a home for a family that had watched television together and ate meals at the dining room table. The children had slept in the rooms upstairs and bounded down the stairs in their socks and pajamas. They had fought and played and left nicks and scars on the hardwood floors and walls. One of the windows in the kitchen had been pierced by an errant BB, and several tiles on the counter had cracked.

  Sloane knew instantly this was what he wanted and why the others had not been suitable. He didn’t want a house. He wanted a home.

  Tina stood on the enclosed porch, looking out the plate glass windows at the Puget Sound. Jake had already rushed to the water’s edge, skipping stones across the surface.

  When Sloane joined her she rested her head on his shoulder.

  “I think we’re home,” she had said.

  SLOANE HAD NOT seen or spoken with Jake since the night of the shootings. When he tried to call, Bill Larsen told him Jake was seeing a child psychiatrist to deal with his trauma and that the psychiatrist had recommended against Sloane and Jake speaking. Then he hung up. Subsequent attempts by Sloane had been no less productive, and the Larsens had stopped answering the phone. Sloane was in no condition, physically or geographically, to force the issue. He missed Jake terribly, but that battle would come soon enough. He could only imagine what the Larsens had told Jake.

  Jenkins walked into the room carrying a white bag and a cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of cards in the other. “How’re you feeling?”

  Sloane shrugged.

  “I brought you a bagel.” He held out the bag, but when Sloane did not take it Jenkins set it on the tray beside the bed.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  Sloane had asked Jenkins to find out when he could leave the hospital. His leg was no longer in a cast and they had him up doing physical therapy. He suffered through it because he knew it was the only way they would consent to release him.

  “A few more days.” Jenkins sat and sipped his coffee. “People are asking about a service.”

  “I’ll hold a service when I get my son back. I’m not doing it without Jake. Did you call the cemetery?”

  Jenkins nodded. “It takes about six weeks.”

  Tina had wanted to redo the kitchen countertops in a blue marble, but that would never happen. Sloane had been given no say in the Larsens holding his wife’s funeral and burying her ashes, but he would not allow them to choose her headstone. He wanted something that would stand out from the traditional gray and black, as Tina had stood out in life. He wanted her to have her blue marble. Jenkins had handled the arrangements.

  Jenkins handed him the stack of sympathy cards. Sloane put them on the windowsill with the other unopened envelopes. “There’s one more card,” he said. Sloane looked, but Jenkins’s hands were empty. “He wanted to deliver it in person.”

  Sloane shook his head, uninterested in visitors, but Jenkins was already moving toward the hospital room door. Before Sloane could protest further, Jenkins had departed and Detective Tom Molia stepped into the room.

  Sloane smiled at the familiar face. Tears welled in his eyes. “Tom.”

  Molia walked in and handed Sloane a card, then bent and hugged him. Four years earlier the West Virginia police detective had helped Sloane track down the men responsible for killing his mother, but not before they had endured an ordeal together. The experience had bonded them, and the two men had stayed in contact despite living on opposite sides of the country. Sloane still kept the photograph of Molia’s green Chevy—on which the detective had written Does not have air-conditioning—beneath a magnet on his refrigerator door.

  Molia did not try to hide his emotions. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “You know us Italians,” he said stepping back. “We’re criers.”

  “How did you get here?” Sloane asked, knowing that Molia feared flying.

  “I drove. It was time to come out and spend some time with my mother in Oakland,” he said. “I brought Maggie and the kids with me.”

  “You drove the Chevy?”

  “In this heat, without air-conditioning, are you kidding? Maggie would divorce me.”

  The detective pulled up a chair and sat. “I heard about it on the news and called. Charlie filled me in. I thought I’d give you some time. I’m so sorry, David. I’m so damn sorry.”

  Sloane nodded. What was there to say?

  “I ran some checks through the normal channels and asked a friend at the FBI for a favor, but I didn’t find anything useful. Without a name or a fingerprint, something . . .”

  Sloane shook his head. “I appreciate the effort.”

  “I also ran a check on the company, Kendall Toys, and the guy, Malcolm Fitzgerald. Both came up clean too. Not even the hint of cheating on their taxes. And I put out an APB for Kyle Horgan, but so far nothing.”

  Charles Jenkins’s research had also revealed nothing on Horgan’s whereabouts. There was no activity on his bank account and no record of a credit card. Horgan had never gone back to his apartment and Sloane had to presume that the young man was dead, his body someplace where it would never be found.

  “I just wish I had something for you,” Molia said.

  The two men spent an hour together then Molia stood. “I better let you get some rest,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do, you call me, you understand.”

  “I know. Thanks, Tom. It means a lot to me.”

  “You just promise me one thing. When you do find this guy, I want to be there.”

  SLOANE SLEPT MUCH of the afternoon, but it had been fitful, filled with images of Tina in a cream-colored wedding dress, standing on the lawn at Three Tree Point. She slipped the gold ring onto Sloane’s finger, her face radiant, her eyes focused only on him as the minister asked her to repeat her wedding vows. But as she started to speak blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, a small dribble that increased in volume until she began to choke on her words and blood spewed down her chin and the front of her dress. Sloane awoke in a start, gasping, his hospital gown drenched in sweat.

  Charles Jenkins sat in the chair beside the bed, reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and a book in his lap but his focus was on Sloane. Sloane took a moment to catch his breath.

  “The detectives are back,” Jenkins said. “The doctor told them you could talk if you feel up to it. I’ve already sent them away a few times. This time they decided to wait.”

  Sloane knew he could not put off the meeting forever. “Let’s get it over with.”

  When Jenkins returned, a man and a woman dressed in suits followed him. The man, somewhat overweight, introduced himself as Detective Spinelli. The woman was his partner, Detective Adams.

  Spinelli thanked Sloane for taking the time to talk to them and offered his condolences. He spoke from behind a neatly trimmed mustache. Heavy, with jowls, he reminded Sloane of a walrus.

  The detective opened an envelope and handed Sloane black-and-white photographs. When he considered them, Sloane felt an adrenaline rush that caused his jaws to clench. Though the images were grainy, the face was clear enough, one that Sloane would never forget.

  “You recognize him?” Spinelli asked.

  Sloane put the first picture behind the stack and went through the others, studying the face, trying to commit each distinct feature to memory.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the guy.”

  “You’re sure, take your time.”

  “I don’t have to ta
ke my time, detective. That’s him. Who is he?”

  “We don’t know.” Spinelli reached for the photographs.

  Sloane put a hand to his throat. “Could I have a glass of water?”

  Spinelli turned and picked up a plastic pitcher from the tray beside the bed and motioned to Adams to grab him a cup from the counter. She was a good foot shorter than her partner and further dwarfed by Jenkins. Spinelli filled the cup and handed it to Sloane, who exchanged it for the envelope of photographs.

  “Where did you get the photographs?” Sloane asked.

  “Do you know a Kyle Horgan, Mr. Sloane?”

  The question caught Sloane off guard. “Not personally. He came to my office building one morning but I didn’t have time to talk to him. Why?”

  “Was that the only time you met him?”

  “I didn’t meet with him. I had just finished a trial in superior court and I was hurrying because the clerk called to say the jury was back. Judge Rudolph isn’t the patient type.”

  The two detectives shared a look and a grin. “We’ve been there. Rudolph used to be on the criminal calendar. He’s a ballbuster for punctuality. You’d never met Mr. Horgan before he came to your building?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see or talk to him again?”

  Sloane suspected where the conversation was headed, and it raised another question. “Are you investigating my wife’s murder?”

  Spinelli shook his head. “No, Mr. Sloane, that’s being handled by the King County Sheriff’s Office.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re with the Seattle Police Department. Could you answer my question?”

  “No, I never saw him again. But I did go to his apartment building in Pioneer Square.” Sloane wanted to ask if they had found Horgan’s body somewhere, but that would only make the detectives question why Sloane thought Horgan could have been the subject of foul play.

  “Why did you go to his apartment?”

  “When he came to see me, Mr. Horgan said that a doctor I had just tried the case against wasn’t responsible for the death of a young boy. He said he was.”