24 Hours

TWELVE

Karen watched the digital clock beside her bed flash over to 1:00 A.M. She was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the corner, hugging her knees; Hickey lay on the bed, his injured leg propped high on some pillows. The Wild Turkey bottle sat beside him, along with Will’s. 38. His eyes were glued to the television, which was showing the opening credits of The Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March. She was glad he hadn’t yet realized there was a satellite dish connected to the bedroom television; she didn’t want him flipping through to Cinemax and getting more ideas from the T amp;A movies they seemed to run all night.

“Bogey’s good,” Hickey drawled, sounding more than half drunk. “But Mitchum was the greatest. No acting at all, you know? The real deal.”

Karen said nothing. She had never known time to pass so slowly. Not even when she was in labor, screaming for Abby to be born. It was as though the earth itself had slowed on its axis, its sole purpose to torment her family. She had entered that realm of timelessness that exists in certain places, a few of which she had visited herself. Prisons were like that. And monasteries. But the ones she knew most intimately were the waiting rooms of hospitals: bubbles in time where entire families entered a state of temporal suspension, waiting to learn whether the heart of the patriarch would restart after the triple bypass, whether a child would be saved or killed by a wellintentioned gift of marrow. Her bedroom had now become such a bubble. Only her child was not in the hands of a doctor.

“You alive over there?” Hickey asked.

“Barely,” she whispered, her eyes on Fredric March. March reminded her of her father; he was a model of male restraint and dignity, yet he would do whatever was required when the going got tough. She still cried when she saw The Best Years of Our Lives, with March and that poor boy who’d lost both hands in the war trying to learn to play the piano-

“I said, are you alive over there?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then you ought to feel lucky.”

She sensed that Hickey was looking for a fight. She didn’t intend to give him one.

“’Cause a lot of people who ought to be alive aren’t,” he said. “You know?”

She looked over at him, wondering who he was thinking of. “I know.”

“Bullshit you know.”

“I told you, I was a nurse.”

He glanced at her. “You proud of it? People in agony waiting for pain medicine while nurses sit there painting their fucking fingernails, watching the clock, waiting for their shift to end.”

She could not let that pass. “I am proud I was a nurse. I know that happens. But nurses are stuck with doctors’ orders. If they break them, they get fired.”

Hickey scowled and drank from the Wild Turkey bottle. “Don’t get me started on doctors.”

Karen thought she remembered him saying that all the previous kidnappings had involved children of doctors. He’d said something about doctors collecting expensive toys. But that couldn’t be the only reason he targeted them. Lots of people collected expensive things. Somehow, doctors were part of a vein of suffering that ran deep in Hickey’s soul.

“When did your mother pass away?” she asked.

He turned his head far enough to glare at her in the chair. “What the fuck do you care?”

“I am a human being, as you so eloquently pointed out before. And I’m trying to understand what makes you so angry. Angry enough to do this to total strangers.”

He wagged a finger at her. “You’re not trying to understand anything. You’re trying to make me think you actually give a shit, so I might feel enough for you that I won’t hurt your kid.”

“That’s not true.”

“The hell it’s not.” He drank again, then let his eyes burn into her. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Sunshine. You ain’t strangers.”

“What?”

He smiled, and a wicked pleasure came into his face. “The light dawning up there?”

A shadow seemed to pass behind Karen’s eyes, a flickering foreknowledge that made her shudder in the chair. “What do you mean?”

“Your husband works at University Hospital, right?”

“He works at several hospitals.” This was true, but University provided the facilities for Will’s drug research. He also held a faculty position, and did quite a bit of anesthesiology there.

Hickey waved his hand. “He works at University, right?”

“That’s right. That’s where we met.”

“How romantic. But I have a little different feeling about the place. My mother died there.”

The transient fear that made her shudder before now took up residence in her heart.

“She was in for her throat cancer,” he said, almost to himself. “They’d cut on her a bunch of times before. It was no big deal. But they were supposed to put some kind of special panty-hose things on her during the operation. STDs or something.”

“SCDs,” Karen corrected him. “Sequential compression devices. Along with T.E.D. hose, they keep the blood circulating in the legs while the patient is under anesthesia.”

“Supposed to, anyway,” Hickey said. “But they left them off, and she got some kind of clot. Sounds like Efrem Zimbalist.”

“An embolus.”

“That’s it.”

“Will was the anesthesiologist?”

“Fuckin’-A right he was. And my mother died right there on the table. They told me nothing could be done. But I went back later and talked to the surgeon who’d done the operation. And he finally told me. It’s the gas passer’s job to make sure those SCD things are on the patient.”

“But that’s not true!” Karen cried. “The anesthesiologist has nothing to do with that.”

“Oh, yeah. What else are you going to say?”

“That’s the job of the circulating nurse-if the surgeon has written the proper orders. The surgeon himself should check to be sure they’re on.”

“The cutter told me there’s some kind of box under the table, and the gas passer’s supposed to check for it.”

“He was probably scared to death of you! He was shifting the blame wherever he could.”

A dark laugh from Hickey. “He was scared, all right.” He leaned up on his elbow. “Don’t worry. That asshole paid, too. In full.”

“You sued him for malpractice?”

“Sued him?” Hickey laughed. “I said he paid in full.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“You killed him?”

Hickey snapped his fingers. “Just like that. No telling how many people I saved by wasting that butcher.”

Struggling to keep her anxiety hidden, Karen tried to remember Will mentioning a case like the one Hickey had described. But she couldn’t. And it didn’t surprise her. Her resentment about leaving med school made her a poor listener when Will wanted to discuss work. “When exactly did this happen? I mean, when did your mother pass away? Will-”

“She didn’t pass away, okay?” Hickey sat up in the bed. “She was murdered. By doctors who didn’t give a shit. Your old man wasn’t even in the room when she started to go. He was there at the start and the end. Some assistant was in there the rest of the time.”

Nurse anesthetist, Karen thought, her heart sinking. More and more, nurse anesthetists were handling the bulk of routine operations. It lowered the cost to the patient and freed up time for the doctor to concentrate on difficult cases. But the custom had always worried her. In an empirical sense, there was no such thing as a routine operation.

“Probably talking to his fucking stockbroker through most of it,” Hickey said, lying back on the pillows. “Yapping on his cell phone while my mother was croaking. The bottom line is, your husband murdered my mother. And that’s why we’re here tonight, babe. Instant karma.”

Karen tried to think of a way to convince him of Will’s innocence, but it was useless. His mind was made up. She shook her head, trying to resist the change that had already taken place within her, the instant reappraisal of Abby’s chances. Until now, Abby’s kidnapping had seemed a stroke of fate, terrible but random, like being blindsided by a bus. But this was infinitely worse. Because every moment of the crime, from the moment it was born in Hickey’s fevered mind to the conclusion waiting out there in the dark, was suffused with malice, driven by hatred, and focused on revenge.

“How long have you been planning this?” she asked softly. “I mean, you said you’ve done this to other doctors. Were they all involved in your mother’s case?”

“Nah. I picked doctors for the reason I told you. They collect expensive toys, go off to meetings all the time. They’re perfect marks. It’s strange the way it happened, really. Your husband was already on my shortlist when he killed my mother. He just went to the top of the list.”

Karen hugged her knees tighter. Hickey had already returned his attention to the movie. He seemed enthralled by the paranoia and hatred crackling off of Humphrey Bogart, an inchoate anger that quite by chance had found a target in the family of Fredric March, a man whose loving family Bogie’s character had never known and never would. She recalled Hickey’s story of the death of his father. Hickey had ordered his cousin to kill the man who brought him into the world, and Huey had obeyed him. Patricide. A man capable of that was capable of anything.

“You just want the money, right?” she said, watching his face in the light of the television.

Hickey glanced away from the screen. “What?”

“I said, you just want the money, right?”

“Sure.” He smiled, but his eyes were dead. “What else?”

Karen kept her face motionless, but her soul was falling down a dark shaft. Abby wasn’t meant to survive the kidnapping. She would live until Hickey’s wife got the ransom money. Then she would wind up a corpse in a ditch somewhere, waiting for the inevitable deer hunter to stumble across her body. Hickey’s other victims might have lived, but this time was different. This time it was not about money.

He wants to punish Will, she thought. That’s why he wanted to rape me. And how could he be sure Will would know he’d done it? By killing me. Because when the medical examiner performed the required autopsy, he would find Hickey’s semen-

It was hard to believe that a simple chain of thoughts could incapacitate a person, but Karen felt her mind and body shutting down as surely as if Hickey had cracked her skull with a hammer. She had to keep functioning. She had to shed her fear for herself. Hickey meant to kill Abby: that was the critical fact. That alone had to determine her actions from this moment forward. The first thing to do was to warn Will. He had to know that waiting out the night and paying the ransom wasn’t going to bring Abby back to them. She wasn’t sure how to warn him yet, but she knew one thing absolutely: if morning dawned without them any closer to saving Abby, she would have to kill Hickey. If he wasn’t alive to give the death order, the giant in the forest might just falter at the brutality of his appointed task. But first she had to get out of the bedroom.

Alone.

Will lay on the sofa in the sitting room of the suite, a hot towel over his face. He was tired of looking at Cheryl in her bra. Tired of listening to her street analysis of his marriage and his present situation. He had paced out a couple of miles on the sitting room carpet, circling the furniture groups, trying to burn off the desperate energy produced by his inability to help Abby. That exercise, combined with his earlier wrestling match with Cheryl, had aggravated his joints to the point that he had to take a powerful painkiller that he kept for emergency situations. The drug and the hot towel had tamped down the pain, but his brain was humming like an overloaded circuit. The QVC shopping network babbled incessantly from the bedroom, where Cheryl lay drinking her rum and Cokes.

His mind was working strangely, like the jump cuts he saw whenever he flipped through MTV on the way to VH1 or CNBC. He saw himself walking into the bedroom, jamming Cheryl’s gun underneath her jaw, and forcing her to tell him where Abby was, the way Clint Eastwood would do it. But Cheryl had hit the nail on the head before. This was no movie. As long as Abby was under Hickey’s control, Will could yank out Cheryl’s fingernails with pliers and it would get him nowhere. When the thirty-minute check-in call came, Abby would suffer horribly or die.

For a while, he’d tried to view his situation as an exercise in problem-solving. It was like a chess game, with only six pieces. But the stakes were so high that he couldn’t make a move. He couldn’t even see a move. Cheryl claimed she didn’t know where Abby was being held. Will wasn’t sure he believed her, but even if she did know-and he somehow forced her to tell him-she claimed it was impossible for police to reach the location within the thirty-minute window. He did believe that. It only made sense-from Hickey’s point of view-and it dovetailed with what Karen had said about where Abby was being held. So, in order for Will to save Abby, Cheryl would not only have to know where Abby was-and tell him-she would also have to pretend to Hickey that everything was fine while the state police or the FBI raced to rescue her.

What could convince her to do that? Fear? He doubted it. Any torture he was capable of inflicting would almost certainly fall short of what Cheryl believed Hickey would do if she betrayed him. A bribe? It was an option, but one he’d have to be careful with. The previous fathers had undoubtedly tried it. Yet they had failed. Why? Why should Cheryl remain loyal to Hickey? A man who, by her own admission, still beat her? What would it take to erode that perverse loyalty? A million? Will could get a million dollars cash. It would take a few days, though. Which killed the idea. To be effective, bribe money would have to be in his hands before the ransom pickup tomorrow morning. Or simultaneously. Karen was supposed to wire the ransom to a bank on the coast. There were branches of Magnolia Federal-the main state bank-all over Biloxi and Gulfport, and the odds were that Hickey would pick one of them to handle the receipt of a large wire transfer. Most of Will’s money was in the stock market, but he had $150,000 in CDs at Magnolia Fed. But would the promise of $150,000-plus the $200,000 ransom-be enough to turn Cheryl against her husband? Unlikely. The other fathers had probably suffered from the same lack of liquidity.

The towel had gone cold on Will’s face. He got up and went to the bathroom, then ran the tap as hot as it would go and held a washrag under it. The reflection that stared back from the mirror was not the one he saw every morning; it was the face of a lab rat trapped in a maze, forced to jump through hoops laid out for it by an unreachable adversary.

He wrung out the washrag, then returned to the sofa and laid the cloth across his eyes. Images of Abby in pain rose in his mind but he forced them down. Why had he and his family been targeted? Had his art collection really been the determining factor? All Hickey’s victims had supposedly been doctors who collected things, all of them hit on occasions when they left their families for more than forty-eight hours. Cheryl wouldn’t reveal how they knew when these physicians were traveling, but Will assumed Hickey had a mole in one of the hospitals, a nurse or an aide, probably. Someone who heard the chitchat around the ORs and doctors’ lounges. Not that it mattered. They were in the eye of the storm now, and everything hung in the balance. Will had seen enough parents lose children to know what it did to families. The death of a child was an emotional Hiroshima, leaving utter devastation in its wake. The world became a shadow of itself. Marriages failed, and suicide began to look like sweet release, a path back to the one who was lost.

As a doctor, Will had often speculated about the worst disease. Was it ALS? A lingering cancer? Soldiers pondered wounds the same way. Was it a Bouncing Betty in the balls? A disfiguring facial wound? But in truth there was no worst wound, or worst disease. The worst wound was the one you got. The worst disease was the one that got you.

But among all the evils of the world, there was one worst thing, and he had always known what it was. It grew out of a single image: a child hunched in the dark, alone and in pain, whimpering for help where no help would come. That child had a thousand faces, plastered on bulletin boards in the entrances of Wal-Marts, on milk cartons, on desperate flyers in the mail. Have you seen this child? The abandoned. The kidnapped. Runaways. But worse than being that child crying in the dark was being the parent of that child. Pondering forever the moment you let your attention wander in the mall, or that you’d said yes to that out-of-town trip, conjuring scenes of cruelty beyond Goya himself, living and reliving them in the everlasting torment of self-inflicted damnation.

Lying on the couch in his luxury suite, Will knew he was one step away from that eternity of guilt. He could not have known, of course, that someone like Hickey waited in the wings to take away everything he had during a convention weekend. Yet on some level, he had. He had always known. Yeats had said it long ago: things fall apart. It was the human version of the entropy that powered the universe as it ticked down toward cold death. Just as some people always built things, organized, nested, and planned, there were those serving the function of chaos: stealing, tearing down, killing. It was a paranoid worldview, but at the deepest level Will had always embraced it. Only recently had he become soft. Complacent. Lulled by material success. He had let down his guard, and now chaos had ripped into his life like a tornado.

He had to respond, and forcefully. He had never believed that by simply letting events take their course, things would work out for the best. That view was held by people who accepted whatever fate handed them and called it “the best” in a pathetic attempt to cope. Will Jennings made things come out for the best. His father’s failures had taught him the necessity of that attitide.

He had to detach himself from the situation. Karen always said that his instinct was his most valuable asset. But instinct, he believed, was integrally bound up with emotion. And emotion had no place in solving a problem like this one. What he needed now was logic. Pure reason.

Of course, there were situations in which doing nothing was the wisest response. Any doctor could tell you that. But when doctors chose the option of “inaction,” they were actually choosing to get out of the way of an immune system perfected over millions of years. For Will, on this night, doing nothing meant relying on a system created by Joe Hickey, a man he did not know or remember, yet who harbored a deep resentment of him and all he stood for. He could not do that. In spite of Cheryl’s assurances that waiting out the night was the way to get Abby back, he was certain she was wrong. He would trust his instinct that far.

The washrag on his eyes had gone cold again. The QVC hawker’s voice floated in from the bedroom, where Cheryl was watching a presentation on “faux sapphires,” whatever they were. He threw the cloth on the floor and sat up on the sofa. He needed more information. Cheryl claimed this kidnapping was exactly like all the others, but it wasn’t. What made it different? Was it something Cheryl herself did not know? Or something she did not know she knew? With a groan of pain, Will got up and walked into the bedroom.

In downtown Jackson, Dr. James McDill was working his way through police mug books, sliding his hand down each page to isolate the lines of photos. Tired of the claustrophobic interrogation room, he and Margaret had moved out to the squad room, with the late homicide shift. Agent Chalmers had been working the NCIC computer but hadn’t come up with anything yet. The number of “Joes” who had committed crimes in the South was astounding, and most had compound names. Chalmers had shown Margaret photos of Joe-Bobs, Joe-Eds, Joe Dees, Joe Jimmys, Joe Franks, Joe Willies, and even a Joe DiMaggio Smith. But none brought even a flicker of recognition to Margaret’s eyes. McDill had asked his wife to lie down on the Naugahyde sofa by the wall, but she refused. She sat at another empty desk, doggedly searching through book after book. Her eyes had a strange glint, and McDill was glad to see it. Perhaps, after the long year in purgatory, that light signaled a return to the world of the living.

He took a sip of cold coffee and looked down at the book before him. Female offenders, harshly lit. The smug grins of check kiters. The gaunt, pocked faces of coke whores. None was nearly as attractive as “Cheryl.” In his memory, the woman who had forced him to sit all night in the Beau Rivage looked like a high school prom queen. He knew he must be exaggerating her beauty, yet his mental picture was as clear as the room he was sitting in now. He was sure of one thing. If “Cheryl” was in one of these books, she would stand out like a rose in a field of garbage.

He rubbed his eyes and turned another page. As he scanned the photos, Agent Chalmers’s voice intruded into his concentration. The FBI agent was talking to the black JPD detective named Washington about the McDills’ experience. Chalmers had enough tact not to mention the rape with Margaret in the room, but he seemed very impressed by the kidnappers’ plan.

“There is no ransom drop,” he was saying. “Not in the classic sense. See? The ransom is low enough so that it’s liquid. The target can get it without any trouble. Two, the husband’s out of town when it goes down. The kid vanishes, poof, and the mother finds herself stuck with one of the kidnappers for the night. A female member of the team hits the husband on the coast, while the kid’s with a third member at an unknown location. From then on, the thirty-minute check-in calls work like an unbreakable net. It wipes out the classic model. I mean, it neutralizes the risk. In the morning, pretty as you please, the wife goes down to her bank and wires the ransom to her own husband. Ba-da-bing, it’s over. Jackpot.”

Detective Washington nodded thoughtfully. “You’re dealing with a smart son of a bitch. What you gonna do if you find out who he is? That thirty-minute thing has you boxed. Anything you do could kill the hostage before you even figure out where he is.”

“We have to go high-tech, all the way. If we can confirm that this thing is going down, Frank Zwick is going to get a chopper, GPS homers, the works, everything by dawn.”

“Do you think it’s going down?” Washington asked.

Chalmers nodded. “I’ve never known a criminal to stop something that was working for him. They always push it till they get bit. That’s their nature.”

“You’re right about that much.”

“We just need to catch a break. If we still don’t know who they are when that ransom wire hits the coast in the morning, we’ll be way behind the curve.”

McDill closed his eyes and tried to shut out their conversation. In Chalmers’s voice, he recognized the sound of a man who believed he could impose his will on the world. McDill knew how illusory that belief was. Every day he cut into the thoracic cavities of human beings, and it was difficult enough to impose his will on simple human tissue. When you brought large numbers of people into a dangerous situation-each acting independently-the best you could hope for was that nobody would die. McDill didn’t just remember Vietnam, as he’d said before. He had served there as a medical corpsman. And he had seen more situations go to hell in a handbasket because of the good intentions of men like Agent Chalmers than he cared to recall. Chalmers was the classic second lieutenant, green and hungry for action. His faith in technology also struck a dark resonance with Vietnam. McDill hoped that the Special Agent-in-Charge had been tempered by more experience.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the rows of unfamiliar women, then wearily turned another page. His breath caught in his throat. Staring up from the mug book like a graduation portrait was Cheryl’s innocent face.

“Agent Chalmers! This is her!”

The FBI agent stopped in midsentence and looked over. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Chalmers walked over and looked down at the photo beneath McDill’s index finger.

“Who is she?” McDill asked.

Chalmers took the photo out of its plastic sleeve and read from its back. “Cheryl Lynn Tilly. I’ll be damned. She did use her real name. Maybe the others did too. I wonder why she didn’t pop up on NCIC?”

He walked over to the computer he’d been using and began typing in the information off the photo. The JPD detective stood behind him with his arms folded. After several seconds, data from Washington began flashing up onto the CRT.

“She’s got some small-time collars,” Chalmers said. “Passing bad checks, forgery. One prostitution arrest. She did thirty days in a county jail. Nothing violent. You’re positive it’s her?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll make a copy of this photo and fax it down to the Beau Rivage. Maybe someone on staff down there has seen her.”

“What will you do if they have?”

Chalmers raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. “Call in the troops. If she’s down there this weekend, we have to assume you’re right. There’s a kidnapping in progress. And that is a major situation. Right now, we need to see whether known associates can lead us to the man behind all this.”

Chalmers turned to Margaret McDill, who was watching them with a look of apprehension. “Are you awake enough to keep helping us, Mrs. McDill?”

“Whatever you need,” she said softly.

McDill walked over and put his hands on his wife’s shoulders.

Chalmers picked up a telephone, then paused. “These people have some nerve. To repeat the same crime in exactly the same place, a year after the fact?”

“You didn’t talk to them,” McDill said. “They think they’re invincible.”

The FBI agent smiled. “They’re not.”

Karen rocked slowly but ceaselessly in her chair, her arms around her shins, her chin buried between her knees. Hickey was still lying on the bed, his eyes glued to Bogart and Fredric March as they played out the final minutes of The Desperate Hours. Karen sensed that she was close to a breakdown. She had been pulling hairs from her scalp, one at time. Externally, she could maintain calm, but inside she was coming apart. The knowledge that Hickey meant to kill Abby to punish Will was unendurable.

She had to warn him.

Food was her best excuse to get out of the bedroom, but there was no guarantee that Hickey wouldn’t follow her into the kitchen. For a while she had entertained the hope that the whiskey might put him to sleep, but he seemed immune to its effects. He’d gone into the bathroom twice during commercials, once to urinate and once to check his stitches, but she hadn’t felt confident enough to risk using the phone, much less to try to reach the computer in Will’s study.

She stopped rocking. She had the feeling that Hickey had said something to her and that she’d been concentrating so hard that she missed it.

“Did you say something?” she asked.

“I said I’m starving. Go fix something.”

She wanted to jump out of the chair, but she forced herself to sound peeved. “What would you like?”

“What you got?”

“A sandwich?”

Gunshots rang from the television. Bogey fell to the ground. “Goddamn it,” Hickey said. “I don’t know. Something hot.”

“There’s some crawfish etouffee I could heat up.”

“Yeah.” He glanced over at her, his eyes bleary. “Can you put it in an omelet?”

“Sure.”

“What was I thinking? I got Betty Crocker here. Weaned on an Easy-Bake oven, right?”

Karen tried to laugh, but the sound died in her throat. She got up from the chair and walked toward the door. “Anything else?”

“Just hurry it up.”

She nodded and went out.

As soon as she cleared the door, she sped to a silent run. In the kitchen, she slid a skillet onto the Viking’s large burner, switched the gas to HIGH, then opened the refrigerator and took out three eggs, a bottle of Squeeze Parkay, and a Tupperware dish half-filled with seasoned crawfish tails in a roux. The eggs went into the pocket of her housecoat, the etouffee into the microwave, and a glob of margarine into the skillet. Then she grabbed the cordless phone off the wall and punched in the number of Will’s office.

“Anesthesiology Associates,” said the answering service operator.

“This is Karen Jennings. I need to-”

“Could you speak up, please?”

She raised the volume of her whisper. “This is Karen Jennings. I need to get a message to my husband on his SkyTel pager.”

“Go ahead, ma’am.”

“You’ve got to do something. They’re going to…”

“Just a second. Is that the message?”

“Yes-no, wait.” She should have thought this out more carefully. She couldn’t simply state the situation to a stranger. The operator was liable to call the police herself. With shaking hands she broke the three eggs and dropped the yolks into the skillet. “The message is, ‘You’ve got to do something before morning. Abby is going to die no matter what. Karen.’ Do you have that?”

“Yes, ma’am. This sounds like a real emergency.”

“It is. Wait, I want to add something. Add ‘Confirm receipt by e-mail.’ ”

“I don’t take many messages like this, Mrs. Jennings. Shouldn’t you maybe call nine-one-one?”

“No! I mean, that’s not appropriate in this case. This is a little girl with liver cancer. Will’s working with the transplant team, and things are very dicey right now.”

“Lord, lord,” said the operator. “I know about livers. I got a brother with hepatitis C. I’ll get this entered right away.”

“It’s got to go to his SkyTel. It’s a brand-new pager.”

“I’ve got that noted on my screen. Don’t you worry. If he’s got the pager on, he’ll get the message. I think those SkyTels can even access missed messages.”

“Thank you.” Another thought struck Karen. “If he doesn’t call you to confirm that he’s received this message, would you call his room at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi and give it to him?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Beau Rivage. Half our doctors are down there right now.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Karen hung up the phone, her hand shaking. The concern in the operator ’s voice had been like salve on a burn. She’d wanted to pour out the whole horrible story to her, tell her to call the police and-

“That doesn’t smell half bad.”

Karen froze.

Hickey was standing in the kitchen door in his bloody towel. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then past her. His eyes went cold. “What are you doing by that phone?”

She felt a fist crushing her heart. To avoid Hickey’s gaze, she turned and looked at the phone. Tacked and taped around it were greeting cards, photographs, and Post-it notes. She reached into the midst of them and pulled a small photo off the wall.

“I was looking at Abby’s school picture. I still can’t believe this is happening.”

The microwave beeped loudly. She went to it and took out the etouffee, then spooned it into the rapidly firming omelet. She sensed Hickey moving closer, but she didn’t look up. With shaking hands she folded the egg over the crawfish.

His fingers fell on her forearm, sending a shock up her spine. “Look at me,” he said in a hard voice.

She did. His eyes were preternaturally alert, the eyes of a predator studying its prey.

“What?” she said.

Hickey just stared, registering each movement of her facial muscles, every pulse beat in her neck.

“It’s going to burn,” she said, pulling her arm away and reaching for the spatula. As she slid it under the omelet, he slipped his arms around her waist, as though he were a loving husband watching his wife make breakfast. His touch made her light-headed, but she forced herself to continue the motion, lifting the omelet from the pan and turning to drop it onto a plate. Hickey stayed with her as she moved.

After the omelet hit the plate, he said, “You’re a little wildcat, aren’t you?”

She did not reply.

“I still own you. Don’t forget that.”

She looked him full in the face at last. “How can I?”

His expression hardened, and she had a sudden premonition that he was going to push her to her knees. She didn’t know what she would do if he did.

“Bring the food back to the bed,” he said finally. Then he let his hands fall. “And bring a bottle of Tabasco with it.”

He turned and limped up the hallway.

She had no idea how long she’d been holding her breath, but it must have been a while, because after she exhaled, she couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen. Her legs became water. She gripped the counter to hold herself up, but it wasn’t enough. She had to lie across the Corian and grab the top of the splashboard to keep from falling.