Pied Piper

CHAPTER 25

Boldt reached his wife’s hospital room, but stopped at the door. For these last weeks of her treatment and the complications surrounding it, his single greatest responsibility had been their children. Time and again she had offered him options, from Marina moving in with him and the kids to parking the kids with various family members until Liz was home again. But Boldt had taken these as a test, both from her and from himself: Could he handle the kids alone? With a few hours from Marina-which he could afford on his lieutenant’s salary-could he make the family work? The larger, unspoken question had to do with his abilities if he lost Liz, if the cancer claimed her as the doctors suggested it would. He needed to know, and so he had repeatedly declined her proposals, reassuring her he had everything under control.

But now at the hospital room door, tears were stealing his vision for the umpteenth time, because nothing was in control. In one moment his life had become a runaway train. Nurses passing by took him as a grieving husband. Here on the C ward beds emptied quickly and forever; images like the one of Boldt weeping at his wife’s door were not at all uncommon.

Despite his rehearsal on the way over, what did he hope to say to her? How would he explain the loss of their child? What effect might it have on her health? Could he live with the responsibility of knocking her out of remission and back into the hell of her disease?

Racked by ill conscience, he allowed himself the lie that he might recover Sarah in a matter of a day or two. He had every key player in the task force under wire surveillance. He had Kay Kalidja working on the victims’ financials. He had Millie Wiggins’ statement from the day care center about calling 911 and being put through to Boldt: an impossibility that required further investigation. Leads, the cop in him convinced the father and husband. Somewhere, something would break. And when it did, Sarah would be home again, the incident in past tense, an acceptable scenario.

“Lou?” her voice called out from the other side of the door. “Honey?”

Had she recognized the sound of her husband’s tears or had her uncanny prescience of late detected his presence there?

He stepped back and away and into the center of the hall, afraid.

“Honey?” he heard her voice again.

He turned and walked as fast as his feet would carry him, tempted toward an all-out run. He might have been paged; he might have been called or summoned back to the office. It happened all the time. What of it? A dozen excuses hung there in the offering, awaiting him, memorized from decades of use. But useless because he knew the truth.

“Lies,” his own voice echoed in his head. A voice unfamiliar to him. A voice he was learning to live with.

Once begun, there was no turning back. The infection was rampant. Of the two of them, Liz was no longer the terminally ill, he was.