Let Me Call You Sweetheart

32

When Dr. Charles Smith hung up the phone after talking to Kerry McGrath, he realized that the faint tremor that came and went in his right hand was beginning again. He closed his left hand over it, but even so, he could feel the vibrations in his fingertips.

He knew that Mrs. Carpenter had looked at him curiously when she told him about the McGrath woman’s phone call. The mention of Suzanne had meant nothing to Carpenter, which no doubt had made her wonder what this mysterious call was all about.

Now he opened Robin Kinellen’s file and studied it. He remembered that her parents were divorced, but he had not studied the personal data Kerry McGrath had submitted along with Robin’s medical history. It said that she was an assistant prosecutor, Bergen County. He paused for a moment. He didn’t remember ever having seen her at the trial…

There was a tap at the door. Mrs. Carpenter stuck her head in the office to remind him that he had a patient waiting in examining room 1.

“I’m aware of that,” he said brusquely, waving her away. He turned back to Robin’s file. She had come in for checkups on the eleventh and the twenty-third. Barbara Tompkins had been in for a checkup on the eleventh and Pamela Worth on the twenty-third. Unfortunate timing, he thought. Kerry McGrath had probably seen both of them, and it had somehow triggered whatever memory she had of Suzanne.

For long minutes he sat at the desk. What did her call really mean? What interest had she in the case? Nothing could have changed. The facts were still the same. Skip Reardon was still in prison, and that’s where he would remain. Smith knew that his testimony had helped to put him there. And I won’t change one word of it, he thought bitterly. Not one word.