The Venus Fix

Sixty-Six

I struggled out of my clothes. Everything took so much time and effort with only one hand. Finally in my robe, I went into the kitchen and tried to get a glass of water from the dispenser, but I couldn’t push down the lever and hold the glass with the same hand. I gave up and used tap water.

Holding the glass in my left hand-which still felt odd- I walked down the hall toward my bedroom, but stopped first at Dulcie’s door.

I missed her. Not the willful teenager who looked at me with determined cold blue eyes and pinched her lips together, but the little girl who curled herself up in my arms, put her head on my shoulder and fell asleep in my lap.

There was something comforting about the small bed. I put the water down on the nightstand, lay back, turned on her television and channel-surfed until I found the news. I wanted to see if anything new had happened with Alan since I’d been hurt.

First up was an international story, about a bombing in the Middle East. Then a national story about a missing corporate jet over the Rockies. Then what I expected: a photograph of Alan Leightman filled the screen. It shouldn’t have surprised me at all, since I was prepared for it, but as I sat in my daughter’s bedroom, my wrist aching, listening to a reporter I didn’t know read the news that would ruin my client, I felt the sting of tears. A man’s whole reputation, after a life dedicated to the law, to doing the just thing, was being destroyed. Nothing, no matter what happened after this, would ever restore his stature, or probably his spirit.

I picked up the phone. I wasn’t going to call Noah to tell him that I missed him, or that I’d fallen, or that I was having second thoughts about Mitch, but to tell him that they had it all wrong: Alan couldn’t have killed anyone. I knew he couldn’t have. And that meant someone else was still out there. Someone dangerous. Someone they had to keep looking for.

I’d already dialed; I heard the first ring.

But what if I did tell Noah all that and he asked me how I knew-what could I say? I still didn’t have Alan’s permission to speak to the police about him.

I heard the second ring.

No, Alan had been insistent that I not tell anyone. Almost to the point of being threatening. And then, for the first time since the accident, I remembered the man in the shadows under the street lamp in the snow. The man who looked like Alan’s bodyguard, Terry Meziac.

“Hello?”

So instead of telling Noah what I called to tell him, I told him how I’d fallen and broken my wrist.

“Are you crying?” he asked.

I nodded, realized he couldn’t see me, and was about to say something when he said, “You shouldn’t have to cry by yourself. I’m on my way out. Would you like me to bring you something? Did you eat?”

I cried harder.