To The Bone

Chapter 20

This evening, Martine was not there when Monks got home. He knew it before he pulled up the driveway and saw the empty spot where she usually parked her car, before the edge of his vision caught the disappearing tail of the black cat, Cesare Borgia, no doubt plotting revenge against his truant humans.

But then, there was no reason she should be.

There was a single message on his answering machine. He had a feeling he knew who it was going to be, and he was right.

"Carroll!" Baird Necker's voice roared. 'That girl's father called up screaming that you'd come by, talking about murder. Are you fucking crazy? If you pull anything else like that, I'll kill you with my own hands!"

Monks put away the groceries. Then he opened a fresh bottle of the Finlandia vodka and sliced a lemon into wedges. He poured the liquor into an old-fashioned glass, watching it smoke slightly over the ice. He gave it a minute to chill, then raised the glass to his lips. The first taste brought goose bumps.

Ordinarily, he would have worked out first, but tonight he was not even going to pretend. He had been scheduled to work the day after tomorrow, but he had called Vernon Dickhaut and arranged for Vernon to take over for him. Monks had not given a reason – just said something had come up. He had not wanted to explain that he might not be coming back to work ever again.

It had been a long time since he had felt like this.

He finished the drink in three strong swallows and poured another one to take with him to the shower. He stayed in for a long time, as if the almost scalding water could wash away the past two days. Then he dressed in clean jeans and a sweatshirt, poured a third drink, and took it out onto the deck.

Pacing, drinking steadily, he went through the story in his head, piecing together the information that he and Larrabee had coaxed out of Josh Hale.

Eden and Ray Dreyer had been living together in Los Angeles until several months ago. On a visit to San Francisco, through some connection, they had attended a party at the home of Dr. D. Welles D' Anton. There, Eden had caught the eye of Julia D' Anton, the doctor's wife.

Julia was a sculptress – Monks recalled her strong hands, work clothes, and the stone chips he had seen in the back of her SUV – and a patroness of the arts. She had asked Eden to pose for her.

Not long after that, Eden had started an affair with Dr. D'Anton. It must have been a hot one. She had moved to San Francisco, receiving quite a bit of money from him – along with free cosmetic surgery. It seemed that D'Anton planned to make her into a showpiece.

And Eden was trying to change her life accordingly. She was getting rid of Ray and her connections to his sleazy world. She was upgrading her wardrobe. There was something childishly wistful about it – the belief that by changing her clothes and body, that would change her being, too.

Never mind that the trigger for it all was an affair with a married man, which, given its intensity, seemed likely to end in divorce. Eden may have been sweet and naive, but she obviously had no compunctions about taking D'Anton away from his wife.

Monks wondered if that was why Gwen Bricknell had lied about Eden being "just another patient"-if Gwen had known about the affair and was trying to protect D'Anton. If the news came out, it would make for a juicy scandal.

But while it might be unethical for a physician to have sex with a patient, it was not illegal. And none of the information put Monks any closer to knowing who might have murdered Eden Hale, or why – or even whether that was, in fact, what had happened.

Still, some potential motives were starting to appear, like shapes in fog.

Maybe D' Anton had wanted to end the affair – in spite of what Eden had told her brother Josh – and Eden had blackmailed him.

Or Julia D' Anton, fearing that her marriage was being destroyed, might have decided to remove the threat.

Ray Dreyer – jilted as a lover, and losing his long-term investment – was still on the charts, too.

There were many other possibilities that might or might not ever come to light. Including the damnable one that the salmonella in Eden Hale's bloodstream was what had killed her. That if Monks had recognized it and treated it differently, she might have lived. And all the rest of this was a waste of time and effort, a pathetic attempt at exoneration – an epilogue to a ruined medical career.

He went back inside and poured another drink, noting that the bottle was more than one quarter empty. He took the drink and the cordless phone back outside with him.

Martine answered on the third ring.

"It's me," he said.

"Hi." Her voice sounded remote.

"I just wondered what you're doing."

"Nothing. Fixing dinner."

Monks thought he heard talking in the background. It was probably the TV.

"Any developments?" she said. "On your – situation?"

"Yes," he said, but then stopped, unable or unwilling to continue, at this remove. "Is there somebody there?"

She sighed. "No, Carroll."

"Just asking. It will be good for you to make new friends."

"Are you drinking?"

"Yes." He took a long swallow, clinking the ice close to the phone so she would hear it.

"You really want to know what I'm doing?" she said. "I'm watching movies. The kind you were watching yesterday."

Monks's forehead creased. Martine had occasionally brought a rented video home, but he was pretty sure they had not watched any in the past week or two, and he had not been to a theater in years.

"Yesterday?"

"Porn," she said patiently.

"You're watching porn movies?"

"I never really have before. But – I don't know. I keep thinking about that young woman. What all that's about."

"Are you learning anything?"

"You wish," she said wickedly. Then, serious again: "I'm trying to imagine myself doing those things. Like, with two men at once, or even three."

Monks was not sure he liked where this was going. "So, your interest isn't completely academic?"

"I don't know what it is," she said. "Just looking at a different world. No, that's not all. There's some – prurience – is that the word?"

"One of them. Does it arouse you?"

"Some of it. Not much. It gets repetitious pretty quick."

"There are only so many permutations," Monks said.

"The dialogue's unbelievably bad."

"I expect they improvise a lot."

"Do I make sounds like that?" she said.

"Yes. But they're very musical."

"You're blessed with the blarney, Monks."

"Do you wish you were here?" he said.

"Yes. No. Carroll, I want to make this as easy as possible."

"Of course, Martine. That's the right way to look at it."

"Oh, go away." This time, she sounded like she was starting to cry. The phone clicked off.

Monks thought about calling back. Instead, he finished the drink and poured another one. It occurred to him just how precise was the term heavy heart. When things started to go wrong, they seemed to go like an avalanche – first a few rocks that you might be able to dodge, but then the whole mountainside tearing loose and coming down on your head.

He drank, remembering, unwillingly, the other time in his life when he had been in a similar situation. The year was 1988. Monks was chief of emergency services at Bayview Hospital, in Marin County. He had been losing popularity there for some time: with some other physicians, because he would not look the other way at certain good-old-boy practices, such as uncredentialed procedures; with staff, because he had no tolerance for various forms of slackness that were considered perks in big hospitals.

One night Monks had monitored, by radio, a team of paramedics in the field who were attending an elderly seizure victim. The senior of the medics was certain it was a heart attack and that a shot of adenosine would save the elderly lady's life. Monks, miles away and unable to see the victim, had only pulse rate and blood pressure to go on. These, together, suggested that a heart block might be the only thing keeping her alive. Adenosine would remove it.

He forbade the shot, clearly, twice. Radio contact was then mysteriously lost from the paramedics' end. When it was reestablished, some eight minutes later, the shot had been administered and the patient was dead.

The senior paramedic then claimed that Monks had ordered the shot. His partner, and the hospital staff who had been there in the ER, seemed uncertain.

The radio tape was hard evidence of what had really happened. But the paramedics were well connected to the sheriff's department – and the tape disappeared en route to the evidence room.

Monks, the Emergency Room, and the hospital had been sued. Then, as now, the hospital's administration had wanted to settle out of court. That would have saved money and bad publicity, but Monks would have been left tagged by the tacit verdict of negligence. He had fought it, and eventually won.

Or at least he had won that aspect of it. In between, he had discovered hard and fast that he had been mistaken about many things, and people, that he had taken for granted. It had precipitated a tail-spin that had been building anyway, with him first giving in to it and then pushing it. When it ended, some four years later, he was no longer employed, no longer married, and largely a stranger to the world he had lived in before.

He finished the drink and poured another one, then walked down to the Bronco. He unlocked the safety-deposit box he had bolted under the driver's seat and took out the pistol he carried there, a Model 82 Beretta, 7.65-millimeter, double action, simple blued steel. He carried it back up to the deck.

The Beretta was a little smaller than his open hand and weighed just over a pound. It had a nine-shot clip, with room for another round in the chamber. That was an important thing to remember about automatics. When a revolver's cylinder was empty, so was the pistol. But even when the clip was out of an automatic, the gun had that one more bullet, hidden, right there in firing position. A lot of people had been killed through failure to recognize that.

The 7.65's weakness was that it did not have much stopping power. The trade-off was that he could slip it in his back pants pocket. He kept a.357 Colt Python in his house safe, which would blow a hole in a car engine, but it was heavy and bulky. There were some higher-caliber automatics available that were not much bigger than the Model 82, and from time to time he thought about moving up to one of those.

But then, he had never fired a weapon at a living thing, and never intended to.

The pistol still had a light sheen of oil from the last time he had cleaned it. That had been more than a year ago, after the last time he had actually carried it and the closest he had ever come to using it, against a pair of junkie muggers deep in the Mission District.

The next dawn was when he and Martine had first become lovers, right here on this deck.

The pistol had a good weight, a feel, and when he chambered a round, there was a satisfying metallic click. Monks could see why guns were so popular. When you had one of these in your hand, you were somebody.

He made sure there were no cats around and aimed at a dead tree about thirty feet away, downhill toward the creek, away from neighbors. In the past, he had been a surprisingly good shot. Larrabee claimed it was the same steady nerves and hands that made him solid in the ER.

The gun cracked with a sharp little sound like the pop of a whip, jerking slightly in his hand. He fired the rest of the clip, then walked down to the tree. He could see that several of the slugs were imbedded in the wood, but probably not all. It was hard to hit anything more than a few yards away with a barrel this short.

The.357, with a six-inch barrel, was a lot more accurate.

He went inside and got it out of the safe. His glass was empty again. He poured another drink on his way back out.

The.357 made a lot more noise than the Beretta, too, a big hollow boom that echoed up and down the canyon through the evening air. Monks squeezed off the rest of the cylinder's six shots, blowing fist-sized chunks of dead wood out of the tree. This time, there was no need to go down there and see if he had hit.

But if you really wanted to get down to business, a 12-gauge shotgun was your man. Monks got out the Remington from its hiding place, behind a panel in the hall closet. He stepped back out onto the deck, raised it to his shoulder, and blasted off the four rounds in the magazine.

When the last echoes died, the tree was cut almost in half and the forest was very still. Monks was breathing hard. He laid the shotgun on a table beside the pistols and drained his glass again. He went inside and poured another.

Dusk was verging on night by now. In the thick woods that stretched down to the creek, moonlight glowed off the sinuous trunks of the smooth-barked madrones. The chorus of tree frogs was rising toward full swing, a soothing singsong pulse that would last until dawn. Monks could hear the rushing wings of bats, welcome because they cleared the air of mosquitoes, although at times they crawled inside the house's walls and talked in whispers that sounded eerily human. Somewhere, a dog barked, a sudden baying of alarm. It was picked up by another dog a quarter mile farther away, and then another, a canine telegraph that might stretch all the way to the Mississippi River, a dogless barrier too wide for sound to cross.

He knew that he had come to that long-gone but so familiar edge, where too much of what lay behind was pain and nothing ahead mattered, where black rage ruled him, and one little step would put him over. The last time he had been there was the night he had almost strangled Alison Chapley with her own scarf. He had never let himself get that close since.

He realized that the phone was ringing. He picked it up and said hello.

"Hello," a woman's voice said. For those first seconds, he assumed it was Martine's. Then she said, "You probably don't remember me. It's Gwen Bricknell."

Monks was more than surprised. He made a hard effort to change realities.

"Indeed I do, Ms. Bricknell," he said.

"Gwen. Please." Her voice had a confiding tone.

"All right. Gwen. I'm Carroll."

"Am I interrupting you?"

"Not at all," Monks said. "Glad to chat. Or is there something I can do for you?"

"Maybe. Maybe I can do something for you, too."

"Oh?"

"I have a soft spot for men in pain."

Monks blinked, taken off balance again.

"Am I in pain?"

"Oh, yes," she said gently.

"How do you know?"

"Sometimes I can just feel things. Sort of like reading minds."

"Really? What am I thinking right now?"

"You're wondering what I'm wearing."

This was not true, but Monks said, "Well? What?"

"Not very much. Let's leave it at that." Several interesting images of the superb Gwen appeared in his mind. "But before, a minute ago – you were thinking something very different," she said. "Dark, dangerous. There was someone in the past, that you had a terrible moment with."

Monks held the phone away and stared at it, trying to be sure he had just heard what he thought he had. Hairs had lifted on his neck.

"Am I right?" she said.

"Yes," he said shakily.

"That's why I called. To help you out of that."

"Thank you."

"I can do more, much more. But there is something I want to ask you."

"Of course," Monks said. He was still trying to get grounded.

She hesitated. "This is confidential, in terms of the clinic."

"I'll do my best with that."

"We got a phone call this afternoon. It was Eden Hale's father. He said you'd come to his house, claiming she'd been murdered."

This time, Monks was not entirely surprised. Tom Hale had called Baird Necker to complain, too. Apparently, he had grabbed the phone and broad-sided his outrage.

"That's somewhat distorted," Monks said.

"He wanted to know what we knew about it. I told him it was the first we'd heard of it."

"Sorry to put you in an awkward spot."

"Will you tell me why you think that, about Eden?" she said.

"I don't think it. It's just a possibility."

"What if I told you – this sounds crazy – what if I said I've been thinking about it, too? It won't go away."

Monks pushed aside everything else that was running through his head.

"You must have a reason," he said.

"It's one of those things I feel."

"Like you just did with me?"

"Like that, yes. But – I don't know exactly how to put it. It's almost like it's a different color, except it's not a color at all. With you, it was pain and anger. This is hate. Someone who wanted her gone."

Monks was not as skeptical as he would have been a few minutes earlier.

"Who?" he said.

"I don't want to plant anything in your mind. I'd rather have you come watch – this person – for yourself. If you notice something, too, then I won't think I'm crazy."

"I'm the farthest thing from psychic, Gwen." Although Monks had often noticed that he had an uncanny ability to make stoplights turn red just as he got to them.

"You don't need to be," she said. "I'm talking about a possessiveness you can see. It's creepy."

Possessiveness of whom? Monks wanted to ask. Why did you tell me that Julia didn't know Eden? Did you know about Eden's affair with D'Anton?

But she had gone from hostile to friendly to offering information. He decided to let her keep moving at her own pace, at least until the time came when it might be necessary to push.

"All right," he said. "Where do I see it?"

"Welles and Julia host events." She pronounced the word like it began with a capital E. "Like parties, but more – focused. There's going to be one tomorrow night. Will you be my date?"

It seemed that there was not going to be any mourning period for Eden at the D'Anton household.

"I'd be honored," Monks said.

"Will it feel awkward to you? Being with a woman who's – well, you know. Been exposed a lot."

"My guess is I'll like it fine."

"You do say the right things," she said, and now her tone was sultry. "Let me give you directions."

He got a pen and wrote them down. The place was near the Marin coast, south of him – a private, very choice area of real estate.

"My God, I hope it cools down," she said. "I'm beaded all over with sweat. What about you?"

"It's actually not bad here. I'm up in the redwoods."

"I meant, is there anyone you suspect?"

"Everyone," Monks said.

She laughed. "You must stay very busy. I'll see you tomorrow, Carroll."

Monks put down the phone, still trying to process what had just happened. The guns lying on the picnic table brought back the enormously different reality of a few minutes before. He felt like he had been walking down the hall to a familiar room, but suddenly found himself in another city. Abruptly, he feared it might be the onset of a malaria attack. But they almost never came anymore, and he had not felt any warning symptoms.

He tasted his drink. It had gotten watered from melting ice. He dumped it over the railing, went inside, and poured another one. The vodka bottle was past the half-empty point.

When he walked back out, a man's voice said, "Doc?"

Monks jerked around, spilling the drink.

"Hold your fire," the voice said. "It's Emil."

"Emil," Monks said, opening his arms expansively. "Come on up."

The voice's owner came into view, a thickset grizzled man in his late sixties. This was Emil Zukich, a neighbor from a couple of miles up the road, the master mechanic who had given Monks the Bronco, then rebuilt it when it had been savaged by gunshots.

"I didn't see your lights," Monks said.

"Mrs. Fetzer called me about some shooting down here. Thought maybe I'd better come in quiet."

Shame touched Monks. Mrs. Fetzer was his closest neighbor, a reclusive middle-aged widow. He had not considered that the shooting might alarm her or drag Emil out to check on him.

"Everything's fine," Monks said. "Just a little target practice."

"Target practice? This time of night?"

"I've got some fine vodka."

I can't stay. How about if I help you put those away?" Emil nodded toward the guns.

Monks was suddenly very tired. He walked to a chair and sat down heavily. "I'm sorry, Emil," he said.

"I ain't going to ask if you're all right, 'cause I can see you're not. That's a bad mix, Doc. Booze and guns."

"I know."

"Maybe I should take them with me."

"I'm all right now."

I'll just check them, then."

Emil cleared the weapons one at a time, making sure they were unloaded, not forgetting to open the Beretta's chamber. A Korean War vet, he had fought at Pork Chop Hill. When he finished, he put them back on the table.

"Anything I can do?" Emil said.

"No. I just need some sleep. Sorry again."

"Not to worry. Things can get that way, I know." Emil faded into the night like a bandit.

It came home to Monks, with force, that he was alone again.

He went into the kitchen and swilled vodka from the bottle. It was warm and its fine flavor was lost to his taste, but he drank it anyway. He pulled food from the refrigerator, salami and cheese and bread, and tore off chunks with his teeth, aware as he bolted it down that he was ravenous.

When his belly was quiet, he made his way down the hall, lurching a little. He stopped in the bathroom to urinate and brush his teeth. Then he fell into bed.

As he reached to turn out the light, his gaze was caught by an illustration in an open book on his nightstand, a work of medieval history. Martine had probably read in it last night, while her deadbeat lover slept on the couch. The picture was an old woodcut by Durer. Several women in a rustic kitchen, surrounded by leering imps and familiars, were brewing a cauldron of magical potion, then flying up the chimney to join the hordes of their sisters, riding their broomsticks through the turbulent moonlit sky to a Walpurgisnacht orgy.

The witchcraft terror had exercised a tremendous hold on the medieval imagination. In Europe, between about 1300 and 1700, tens of thousands, almost all women – some estimates put the number at over a million – were executed for this ultimate heresy, selling their souls to the powers of evil, joining forces with the enemy of mankind.

In practice, beneath the genuine superstition of the times, there were far more tawdry motivations at work: misogyny, cruelty, and greed. The elderly, eccentric, and deformed – offensive to righteous citizens and helpless to defend themselves – were often targeted. But being young and pretty could be dangerous, too. A man suffering from unrequited lust might decide that this could only be because the desired one had cast a spell on him, and have the revenge of seeing her punished for rejecting him. Someone who coveted a neighbor's property might swear that they had seen that neighbor make unexplained trips into the forest at night; the victim's possessions would be confiscated, and given or sold cheaply to the accuser. Many suffered, as at Salem, from the lies of spiteful children.

Once the victims were accused, they were guilty until proven innocent, which almost never happened. Typically, they were tortured into confessing whatever lurid scenarios their inquisitors dreamed up, then burned alive. They were also forced to implicate others, so the process mushroomed. Villages were decimated; victims' entire families were considered contaminated; children were tortured into accusing their parents, then burned along with them. It was all done with the utmost piety.

There was evil in the world, Monks had no doubt of that – pervading human life, in different guises, in every era. During the witch-hunts, it had worn the judges' robes.

The oblivion of sleep came to him with merciful swiftness.