Pariah

TEN

When he pulls up in front of his apartment building, he sees that Nadine has decided to wait on the front stoop. She is cocooned in an immense fake-fur coat, like she’s just come from Narnia — but still she looks frozen. Doyle scrambles out of the car and heads toward her, hurrying but at the same time trying to appear untroubled. He likes Nadine — she’s a good friend to Rachel — but this is not her concern. He doesn’t want to experience the embarrassment of revealing to her the details of this minor domestic dispute. Because that’s all it is: a tiff. Really.

‘Nadine,’ he says. ‘You should have gone home. No point standing out here like this.’

She stares at him, and he can tell that his cloak of tranquility has a pretty open weave.

‘I was just a little worried, Cal. It’s not like Rachel to arrange something and then just not be there. Has something happened?’

Doyle is fumbling for his door key. He wants to get in there and check out the apartment. Maybe she’s left him a note. Dinner’s in the dog — that type of thing. Something that will confirm that she’s furious with him. Something that will reassure him that she is safe and well, if perhaps a little emotionally unbalanced right now.

‘Honest to God, Nadine. It’s cool, really. Nothing to get worked up about.’

‘Cal.’

His name is delivered in the tone of a mother who is interrogating a chocolate-covered son about missing cookies. A single drawn-out syllable that manages to say, I am not going to leave you alone until you tell me what this is all about.

Doyle can loiter here no longer. And if Nadine is not going to be shaken off, then so be it. Let her suffer the discomfort of being an intruder into a couple’s private affairs.

‘Okay, we had a little falling-out over something, that’s all. I didn’t call her when I was supposed to, and now she’s pissed. Either she’s up there, refusing to answer the door, or else she’s taken Amy out for dinner and turned her cellphone off. She’s trying to get back at me.’

Nadine says nothing for a while, which tells Doyle that she may now finally be satisfied and that he can get on with sorting this mess out.

He puts his key into the lobby door and opens it.

‘So go home, Nadine. Let me fix this. I’ll get Rachel to call you.’

‘Okay,’ she says through a weak smile. ‘If you’re sure.’

He steps into the lobby, is on the verge of shutting the door behind him.

And then he sees it. His mailbox poking its tongue at him.

It’s a white envelope.

For a few seconds he cannot move. Doesn’t dare confirm his worst fears.

‘Cal?’

It’s Nadine. She is still behind him, obviously bemused by his behavior.

He snatches out the envelope, looks at the writing on the front. ‘Detective Doyle.’ Exactly as it appeared on the letter that was left on his car.

Now the ability to breathe has become something of an ambition. This can’t be happening.

He’s been here. The son of a bitch has been here.

Doyle rips open the envelope in one savage motion. Fuck the forensics.

His eyes try to absorb the whole message in one go.

Dear Detective Doyle,

What are you doing here?

Didn’t you understand my previous message?

I said I was cutting you off.

That means from EVERYONE.

Especially your lovely wife and daughter. Rachel and Amy.

After what happened to your partners, did you really think I was kidding?

Big mistake.

Maybe next time you’ll know better.

And then Doyle is bounding up the staircase, ignoring Nadine’s confused cries from below. Adrenalin is surging through his system. He reaches his apartment door, snatches out his Glock. An inner voice quotes his training at him, cautioning him to use the softly-softly approach. He tells it to shut the fuck up. He puts his key into the door, swings it wide open and steps in, gun at the ready.

‘Rachel!’

He moves speedily through his apartment, eyes scanning, finger firmly on the trigger.

‘Rachel!’

He kicks doors open. The bedrooms. The kitchen. The bathroom.

Nothing. There is nobody here.

He stands still in the center of the living room, his chest heaving, his gun still grasped in a two-handed combat stance.

A noise behind him. He whirls, his trigger finger tensing. Nadine jumps back, startled.

‘Cal? What the hell’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. Something. I don’t know. There’s a guy. He wants to hurt me.’

He knows he’s not making much sense. He can see the puzzlement and fear on Nadine’s face. But there’s no time to explain. He has to find Rachel and Amy. But how? Where to start?

He lowers the gun, starts to look at the apartment through different eyes. Searching not for people, but for signs of disturbance. Clues hinting at a struggle. Another note perhaps.

But he sees nothing. The apartment looks exactly as it always does — tidy but not obsessively so.

He holsters the Glock, then takes out his cellphone. He tries Rachel’s number again. This time he gets a ringing tone instead of voicemail.

Nadine says, ‘Cal? Where’s Rachel?’

He raises a hand to silence her while he listens.

Answer. Please God, answer.

‘Hello?’

It’s a woman’s voice, but it doesn’t sound like. .

‘Rachel? Is that you?’

‘Who’s calling, please?’

‘My name is Callum Doyle. I’m trying to get hold of my wife, Rachel Doyle. Is this. . I mean, am I calling. .’

‘Mr Doyle, could you hold on a minute, please?’

No, I can’t fucking hang on, he wants to say, but the sounds from the handset become muted, like the phone has just been smothered. He can hear snatches of a muffled conversation, but cannot make out the words.

‘Cal? Who is that?’

It’s Nadine again, and once more Doyle requests her silence with a raised finger.

The voice comes back on the line.

‘Mr Doyle, my name is Nurse Lynley. I work at Bellevue Hospital. We have your wife here.’

‘At the hospital? Put her on, please. I want to speak with her.’

There is a slight pause. ‘Mr Doyle, your wife can’t talk right now. She’s been badly beaten.’

Doyle feels his legs start to buckle. His breath comes out in a long quiver that he finds difficult to shape into words.

‘Beaten?’

‘Yes. We received an anonymous phone call. Your wife was assaulted and left in a parking lot. An ambulance picked her up and brought her straight to the ER. We’re doing all we can for her.’

‘All you can? How bad is she? She’ll live, won’t she?’

Another pause. ‘Mr Doyle, your wife is in a critical condition. Her injuries are extensive. The doctors are doing everything they can. . Mr Doyle, are you able to come over to the hospital?’

Doyle is almost shaking now. He hears how carefully the nurse is choosing her words. Worse, he knows what she’s leaving unsaid. What it amounts to is that Rachel is clinging to her life by a thread.

‘Yes,’ he answers. ‘I’ll come now. You’re. . you’re sure it’s my wife?’

‘She had this cellphone on her when she was brought in. Also, her driver’s license.’

‘I’ll be right over,’ he says, and then, ‘Wait. My daughter. A little girl. She should have been with my wife. Is she there too?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Doyle, but nobody else was found with your wife.’

He ends the call, turns toward Nadine. She has a hand to her mouth, and her eyes are wide. It’s clear that she has caught the gist of the telephone conversation.

‘What’s happened?’ she says. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’

But Doyle cannot speak. He thunders toward the door. He needs to help his wife, make sure she recovers fully from this vicious attack. He needs to find his beautiful innocent daughter.

And then he needs to track down and kill the son of a bitch who has so savagely ripped into his family.

He takes the stairs two at a time. He hears Nadine’s clatter from above as she struggles to rush down the steps in her heels. She calls for him to wait, but he’s like a train with no brakes. He keeps going until he’s out on the street, seconds away from leaping into his car and launching it like a rocket.

‘Cal! Wait. Please. She’s my friend. She’s the only real friend I’ve got in this damned city.’

That stops him. He is surprised by her words. Although she is fairly new to the city, he has always thought of her as Miss Popular.

And so he pauses for a while, waiting for Nadine to catch up.

‘You should go home, Nadine,’ he says when she is at his shoulder.

‘Open the car. I’ll drive. You’re liable to take out half the traffic in New York.’

He is reluctant, but when she shows him the whiteness of her open palm he finds her difficult to resist. He hands her the key.

‘It’s the ER at Bellevue. You know how to get there?’

‘Head east, turn before we hit the river, right? Get in,’ she says.

She starts the car up and pulls it out into the traffic, then signals at the next turn to take her back toward Central Park West.

‘Why is she in the hospital, Cal? What did they say on the phone?’

‘Somebody beat her up. I think it’s bad. They beat her up and dumped her in a parking lot.’

‘Oh, Jesus. Is she going to be okay?’

‘I. . I don’t know. They wouldn’t say.’

‘She’ll be okay,’ Nadine says. ‘Rachel’s a fighter. All cops’ wives are fighters.’

‘That include you?’

‘I forced you into taking me along now, didn’t I?’

Doyle looks out of the passenger window at the buildings going by. He wishes he hadn’t let Nadine drive at this snail’s pace. He also wishes that he was in a squad car, so that he could put on the lights and sirens, then floor the gas pedal.

Nadine says, ‘You knew, didn’t you? That something might have happened. Even before you went into the apartment you suspected something was up.’

‘I had an inkling. I hoped I was wrong.’

‘Why? The inkling, I mean. What’s going on, Cal?’

Cal opens his mouth to speak, and then something occurs to him. Does this count? Talking to Nadine at the apartment. Getting in a car with her. In the killer’s estimation, does this cross the line regarding close contact?

‘Nadine, pull over.’

‘What? What are you talking about? We’re nowhere near the hospital.’

‘I know. Just pull over and get out of the car. You need to go home. Now!’

She glances across at him. ‘No, Cal. Not until you explain all this to me.’

Doyle thinks, She’s a fighter, all right.

‘I’m in danger. Everyone who gets close to me is in danger too. That means you, Nadine.’

‘Why? What kind of danger?’

‘Mo hasn’t told you about any of this?’

‘No. He hardly ever talks about his work.’

There is a bitter edge to her voice. A suggestion of discord between her and Franklin. It comes as no revelation to Doyle. His view has always been that this marriage contract was a trade of Nadine’s dizzying curves for the lieutenant’s new-found wealth. Body for bucks — an age-old barter. But right now he has too many worries of his own to go diving into that murky pool.

‘You heard about Tony Alvarez though, right?’

She nods. ‘It was on the news. An explosion of some kind. They’re saying it may not have been an accident. That it may have been deliberate, and that there might even be a cop killer on the loose. Are they right, Cal? Is that why you’re in danger?’

‘Yeah, but not in the way you’re thinking. After Joe was killed, Tony took over as my partner. They both died because of me. Somebody’s trying to hurt me through the people I’m close to.’

‘How do you know that?’

He tells her about the two notes he received, and he can see the shock, the disbelief on her face. Which is fair enough, since he’s finding it difficult to accept this himself.

‘So that’s why I think you should go home, Nadine. If this guy’s willing to kill my partners and knock my wife about, then harming you is something he probably won’t think twice about. I don’t want the responsibility of that.’

He watches her as she mulls over his words. When she nods her head he thinks at first that she’s conceding, but her expression tells him she’s merely signaling the end of an internal argument.

‘I have to see that Rachel’s okay. She’d do the same for me.’ If he were not so strung out, Doyle would smile. The belle has balls.

After Nadine has taken a right onto the service road that runs alongside the FDR Drive, she voices another of Doyle’s fears. ‘Cal, did the hospital say anything about Amy?’ Doyle shakes his head. ‘No. They don’t know where she is.’ He stares at the tall gray-brown building looming up ahead of them and wonders what he will find there. He wants to walk in and see Rachel sitting up in bed. A few cuts and bruises, but nothing a little extra make-up won’t mask. She’ll be sipping the insipid brown stuff that hospitals dare to call tea, and telling him how she left Amy playing at a friend’s apartment. She will tell him that she’ll be able to go home soon, and that she needs to be a bit more aware of her surroundings in future, so as not to get caught like that again. She will tell him that she was furious at him for not calling, but only because she loves him so intensely. She will tell him how much Amy loves him too, and that his little girl can’t wait to show him the picture of a dragon she drew today. And everything will be okay again.

On the way to the emergency room, Doyle steps around a man on crutches, dodges a drunk with blood streaming down his face, and keeps on marching until he reaches the reception counter. Behind the counter two nurses are laughing and joking. One of them manages to slot the words ‘donut’ and ‘anus’ into the same sentence, and the other — a redhead — laughs even harder. The redhead’s hair is an alluring auburn rather than shocking ginger, and is formed into soft curls. She has pale skin and a laugh that hints of mischief and adventure in the bedroom. She reminds Doyle of a girl he once knew in Ireland — an older girl who gave the impression of knowing all the secrets of post-pubescence — and so it is her name badge he examines first. Her name is Nurse Lynley.

His first thought is that things can’t be all that bad. Nurse Lynley, the woman he spoke to on the phone, is too filled with joy. She has had a good day. Nobody assaulting or abusing her. No costly mistakes. Nobody in her care dying.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘My name’s Doyle. I spoke with you on the phone.’

And then it is as if a rain cloud has moved across her head, darkening her features. The sudden sobriety shocks Doyle into the realization that, like him, she is a professional who is used to dealing with death and injury on a daily basis, and that, like him, she has to make sure it doesn’t warp her view of life. It’s why cops tell jokes at murder scenes. It’s why nurses tell jokes about the anatomical applications of confectionary. It says nothing about your satisfaction with the day you’re having.

It’s a mirror that Doyle finds unsettling to face.

When the nurse comes around the desk and takes him by the arm and leads him off to a small side room, he is only vaguely aware of Nadine trailing behind. In the room itself he sees a small table and plastic chairs, a coffee machine, a sink with two unwashed mugs. Nurse Lynley is talking to him, but he feels like he’s bobbing up and down in a choppy sea, catching brief snatches of conversation each time he comes up. The isolated fragments make little sense to him. He stares into the sink. The faucet is dripping into one of the mugs: plop. . plop. .

The cry from Nadine breaks the spell. His brain wakens again, and he sees the nurse searching his face. Jesus, she is so like that girl back in Ireland. A real tease she was. Proud of her body and keen to impart its mysteries to all of us grubby boys. What was her name again? Helen something. .

‘Mr Doyle? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?’ He blinks, tries to clear his fogged head. ‘Yes. No.’

So she tells him again, and this time his brain drops its shield and allows the painful arrow of truth to penetrate.

Rachel, his beautiful Rachel, has died of her injuries.