Live Wire Part 20

"Not me. The club. It's a surveillance video."

"And you tracked it down? You G.o.dd.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Hey," Myron snapped, "I'm not the one going down on a guy in a nightclub so I can shoot up."

She stepped back as though he'd slapped her. Dumb. He had forgotten his own warning. With strangers he knew how to talk, knew how to interrogate. With family, it always goes down the wrong road, doesn't it?

"I didn't mean . . . Look, Kitty, I really do want to help."

"Liar. Tell the truth for once."

"I am telling the truth. I do want to help."

"Not about that."

"What are you talking about?"

Kitty had the eerie, cagey smile of, well, a drug addict looking for a fix. "What would you say if you saw Brad again? Tell the truth."

That made him pull up. What, after all, did he want here? Win always cautioned him to keep his eyes on the prize. Accomplish the goals. One: Suzze had asked him to find Lex. Done. Two: Suzze had wanted to know who posted the "Not His" to her profile. Done.

Didn't Kitty, drug-addled and all, have a point? What would he say if he saw Brad? Sure, he would apologize and try to reconcile. But what then?

Would he just keep what he'd seen on the videotape a secret?

"Just as I thought." Kitty's expression was so smug and triumphant that more than anything in the world, he wanted to wallop her right in the face. "You'd tell him I'm some kind of wh.o.r.e."

"I don't think I'd have to tell him anything, Kitty. The tape kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?"

She slapped him across the face. The drugs hadn't dulled the former great athlete's reflexes. The smack stung, the sound echoing. Kitty started to push past him again. With his cheek reddening, Myron reached out and grabbed her elbow, maybe a little too roughly. She tried to pull away. He tightened the grip, hitting the pressure point. She winced and said, "Ow, that hurts."

"You all right, ma'am?"

Myron turned. Two men from mall security were there. Myron let go of Kitty's elbow. Kitty dashed back into the mall. Myron started to follow, but the security guards stood their ground.

"It's not what it looks like," Myron told them.

They were too young to truly roll their eyes in the world-weary way such a line deserved, but they tried. "I'm sorry, sir, but we-"

No time to explain. Like a halfback, Myron juked right and then ran past them. "Hey! Stop!"

He didn't. He sprinted down the corridor. The security guards gave chase. He stopped by the merry-go-round's cross section, looked left toward Spencer's Gifts, straight ahead toward Macy's, right toward Starbucks.

Nothing.

Kitty was gone. Again. But maybe that was better. Maybe it was time to reevaluate, figure out what he should really do here. The security guards caught up to him. One looked ready to make a flying tackle, but Myron raised his hands in surrender.

"It's over, guys. I'm leaving."

By now, eight other mall security guards had appeared, but none wanted to create a scene. They escorted him outside of the mall. He slipped into his car. Way to go, Myron, he thought. You really handled that so well. But again, when he took a step back, what was left to do here anyway? He wanted to see his brother, but was it right to force the issue? He had waited sixteen years. He could wait a little more. Forget Kitty. He would try to reach out to Brad via that e-mail address maybe or through their father or something.

Myron's phone buzzed. He gave the nice security guards a little wave and reached into his pocket. The caller ID read: LEX RYDER.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Oh G.o.d . . ."

"Lex?"

"Please . . . hurry." He started sobbing. "Wheeling her out."

"Lex, calm down."

"My fault. Oh my G.o.d. Suzze . . ."

"What about Suzze?"

"You should have left it alone."

"Is Suzze okay?"

"Why didn't you just leave it alone?"

More sobbing. Myron felt icy fear in his chest. "Please, Lex, listen to me. I need you to calm down, so you can tell me what's going on."

"Hurry."

"Where are you?"

He started sobbing some more.

"Lex? I need to know where you are."

There was a choking noise, more sobs, and then three words: "In the ambulance."

It was hard to get more out of Lex.

Myron managed to learn that Suzze was being rushed to St. Anne's Medical Center. That was it. Myron texted Win and called Esperanza. "I'm on it," Esperanza said. Myron tried to plug in the hospital on his GPS, but his hand kept shaking and then the GPS kept taking too long, and when he started driving the car, that d.a.m.n safety feature wouldn't let him plug the information in.

He got caught up in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, started laying on the horn and waving people over like a madman. Most drivers just ignored him. Some, he could see, picked up cell phones, probably calling the cops to warn them about the crazy person losing his mind in traffic.

Myron called Esperanza. "Any word?"

"The hospital won't say anything over the phone."

"Okay, call me if you learn anything. I should be there in another ten, fifteen."

It was fifteen. He pulled into the hospital's full and rather complicated lot. He circled a few times and then just figured the h.e.l.l with it. He double-parked, blocking someone in, and left his keys. He ran toward the entrance, past the huddled smokers in the hospital scrubs, and into the ER. He stopped at the front desk, three people back, bouncing from one foot to the other like a six-year-old needing to go potty.

Finally, it was his turn. He told her why he was here. The woman behind the desk gave him the implacable "seen it all" face.

"Are you family?" she asked in a tone that would need technological help to be any flatter.

"I'm her agent and a close friend."

A practiced sigh. This, Myron could see, was going to be a waste of time. His eyes started darting around the room, looking for Lex or Suzze's mother or something. In the far corner, he was surprised to see Loren Muse, head county investigator. Myron had met Muse when a teenager named Aimee Biel vanished a few years back. Muse had her little cop pad out. She was talking to someone hidden behind the corner and taking notes.

"Muse?"

She spun toward him. Myron moved to his right. Whoa. He could see now that she'd been interviewing Lex. Lex looked beyond awful, all color drained from his face, his eyes staring up at nothing, his body leaning limply against the wall. Muse snapped the pad closed and started toward Myron. She was a short woman, barely five feet tall, and Myron was six-four. She stopped in front of him, looked up, and met his eye. Myron did not like what he saw.

"How is Suzze?" Myron asked.

"She's dead," Muse said.

17.

It was a heroin overdose.

Muse explained it to Myron as he stood next to her, vision blurred, shaking his head no over and over again. When he was finally able to speak, he asked, "What about the baby?"

"Alive," Muse said. "Delivered via caesarean. A boy. He seems fine, but he's in the neonatal intensive care unit."

Myron tried to feel some kind of relief at this news, but the stunned and numb still won out. "Suzze wouldn't have killed herself, Muse."

"Might have been accidental."

"She wasn't using."

Muse nodded in that way cops do when they don't want to argue. "We'll investigate."

"She was clean."

Another patronizing nod.

"Muse, I'm telling you."

"What do you want me to say here, Myron? We'll investigate, but right now all signs point to a drug overdose. There was no forced entry. No signs of a struggle. She also had a pretty rich history of drug use."

"History. As in her past. She was having a baby."

"Hormones," Muse said. "They make us do stupid things."

"Come on, Muse. How many women eight months pregnant commit suicide?"

"And how many drug addicts really go clean forever and ever?"

He thought about his darling sister-in-law, Kitty, another addict who couldn't stay clean. Exhaustion started to weigh down his bones. Oddly-or maybe not-he started to think about his fiancee. Beautiful Terese. He suddenly wanted to walk away from this, right now, just give it up. He wanted to chuck it all. Screw the truth. Screw justice. Screw Kitty and Brad and Lex and whoever else and just grab the first flight back to Angola and be with the one person who could make all the madness disappear.

"Myron?"

He focused in on Muse.

"Can I see her?" he asked.

"You mean Suzze?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

He wasn't sure himself. Maybe it was a cla.s.sic case of needing it to be real, of needing-and G.o.d, he hated that word-some sort of closure. He thought about Suzze's bouncing ponytail when she played tennis. He thought about her posing for those hilarious La-La-Latte ads and her easy laugh and the way she chewed gum on the court and the look on her face when she asked him to be the G.o.dfather.

"I owe her," he said.

"Are you going to investigate this?"

He shook his head. "The case is all yours."

"There's no case right now. She's a drug overdose."

They headed back down the corridor and stopped in front of a door in the delivery wing. Muse said, "Wait here."

She slipped inside. When she came back out, she said, "The hospital's pathologist is with her. He, uh, cleaned her up, you know, after the caesarean."

"Okay."

"I'm doing this," Muse said, "because I still owe you a favor."

He nodded. "Consider it paid in full."

"I don't want it paid in full. I want you to be honest with me."

"Okay."

She opened the door and led him into the room. The man standing next to the gurney-Myron a.s.sumed that he was the pathologist-wore scrubs and stood perfectly still. Suzze was laid out on her back. Death does not make you look younger or older or peaceful or agitated. Death makes you look empty, hollow, like everything has fled, like a house suddenly abandoned. Death turns a body into a thing-a chair, a filing cabinet, a rock. Dust to dust, right? Myron wanted to buy all the rationales, all the stuff about life going on, that an echo of Suzze would live on in her child in the nursery down the hall, but right now it wasn't happening.

"So do you know anyone who'd want her dead?" Muse asked.