Hush

that Keaton’s death might well have been a coincidence, that it could have been related to, say, a burglary. The nurse who’d watered his plants mentioned he had a terrace and I suggested to Rory that someone could have broken in from there. And then-that’s when she made the slip. She said there was no access to the terrace from anyplace… She’d obviously been there.”

It had come to Lake in an instant-to turn the slip she’d made with Rory at the piano bar into a lie that could save her. Who could ever know for sure it wasn’t true? And it didn’t connect her to Keaton in any way.

“That’s when you knew? When she made that slip?” Madelyn looked incredulous now.

“No. I didn’t make the leap right then. But the comment seemed kind of odd, and that must have shown on my face. I think she thought I knew. After that she gave me the tea. And later in the basement, she started railing on as if I had figured it out. That’s when I knew.”

Madelyn pinched her jacket closed again and sealed her ragged red lips tightly together. Lake could tell she sensed there was something off kilter about the story but didn’t know what or why.

“So Rory assumed you were going to expose her?”

“I guess so. She acted totally crazy then, like she’d started to break. She said she was pregnant with Keaton’s baby and that she’d killed him because he was sleeping around and didn’t take her pregnancy seriously. She clearly had psychological problems-maybe borderline personality disorder.”

“Okay,” Madelyn said after a moment, as if she’d accepted Lake’s words despite her instincts. “Take me through the rest. How did you escape?”

Lake told the story exactly as it happened-locking Rory in the basement, being tackled in the yard, Rory giving chase in her car. There were moments when she felt tentative and then had to remind herself: This part is all true.

“She tried to run me off the road,” Lake said as she came to the end of the story. “The road was slick and she must have lost control of the car.”

Madelyn leaned back and sighed.

“Do you feel up to talking to the cops tonight? It will certainly add to your credibility if you do it now.”

Lake took a deep breath. The idea was scary as hell but she wanted desperately to get it over with, especially while the story was fresh in her mind.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to do it tonight.”

Two detectives joined them next-Kabowski and a young female detective with brassy blond hair and a tiny heart-shaped face-though Lake suspected others were in the next room behind the mirror. Madelyn had told her to begin with her work at the clinic and how she’d stumbled onto the embryo stealing. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Starting there would not only calm Lake down but also help undercut the possible nut-job image the cops had of her.

After she took them through all that, she got to Rory. At the point where she mentioned the patient files that Rory had taken, the female detective slipped out of the room momentarily, and Lake assumed it was to make certain they’d been retrieved from Rory’s kitchen.

As she reached the part about Rory’s slip, and how it related to the death of a Dr. Mark Keaton in New York, Lake had to force herself to look directly at Kabowski and not flinch. He took notes as she spoke, and yet his eyes rarely left hers.

The worst moments of the night-Rory drugging and attacking her and confessing to killing Keaton-were actually the easiest to describe. Lake forced herself to remember being thrust over the lip of the freezer and the terror that had gripped her then. She wanted that fear to leak through as she spoke because she knew it would help them believe her. Then, finally, she was done.

“Well, we certainly appreciate that you took the time to share this with us tonight,” Kabowski said. “I mean, considering what you’ve been through.” His tone sounded sympathetic but Lake knew not to trust it. She smiled weakly, wondering what was next.

Kabowski looked down at his notes and stroked his mustache. “I’m a little confused, however,” he said after a moment.

Lake’s heart sank. Was he skeptical about the slip, as Madelyn had been?

“Yes?” Lake said softly.

“Why do you think Ms. Deever was so interested in helping you about the files? If she’d murdered this Dr. Keaton, you’d think she’d want to just lay low. Why suddenly decide to play whistleblower?”

The question caught her totally off guard. As she’d obsessed about how to spin everything that had happened, she’d never seen this one coming.

“I’m not sure,” Lake said. She clenched her fist, thinking, trying to make her brain work harder. “But-I could make a guess.”

“Okay, let’s hear it,” Kabowski said.

Lake bit her lip instinctively.

“After she overheard Maggie say that I had suspicions about the clinic-and my theory about the codes in the files-she may have decided that exposing the clinic could throw the police totally off track with the murder investigation. They’d assume someone at the clinic had killed Keaton because he’d learned the truth.”

Kabowski looked ready to lob another question at her, when someone entered the room with the stack of patient records from Rory’s house. He pushed them toward Lake and instructed her to show him where the notations were. She opened the file on top and pointed to the letters, explaining what she thought they stood for.

Kabowski’s body language seemed to relax a little, and Lake wondered if he had begun to believe her.

“Detective, as you indicated earlier, my client has had a very tough night,” Madelyn announced as Kabowski continued to paw through the charts. “She may have even suffered a concussion. I think it’s time I took her home.”

Kabowski stood up, placed his hands on his hips, and nodded but made a big to-do about Lake needing to be available for further questioning. Madelyn assured him that Lake would return to the area if necessary. Lake suddenly felt drained, completely spent-not just from the ordeal, but from the stress and strain of lying.

“You handled that very well,” Madelyn said as they headed down the hall. “Let’s find Kit and fill him in.”

Archer was still in his rumpled tan trench coat, sitting on a metal chair in the waiting area with his long legs thrust out in front of him. He leapt up when he saw them approach and offered Lake a sympathetic hug. In the brief second that his arms were around her, she felt that same rush of calm and safety she’d experienced while lying on his couch.

“I want to hear everything,” he said, his voice low. “But let’s wait till we’re out of here.”

Lake glanced at her watch as they hurried across the parking lot, where steam rose from the puddles left behind from the storm. It was well after midnight. Lake’s car was being held so the police could photograph where Rory had rammed it, so she had to ride with Archer and Madelyn back to the city.

“Do you think I’ll really have to be interviewd by those detectives again?” she asked as Archer maneuvered out of the parking lot.

“Maybe,” Madelyn said from the backseat. “Maybe not.”

“Great,” Lake said despairingly.

“But they are going to be less skeptical at that point because your story will have begun to check out. The tests will confirm that you were drugged. There will be evidence related to the cars. And when they obtain the DNA of the fetus, that will prove the baby was Keaton’s. I think the worst is over.”

“Great,” Lake said.

But she knew it wasn’t true. The worst wasn’t over. She still had to face Hull and McCarty-and make them believe her lies.

31

SIX DAYS LATER, on a Friday, Lake hurried down the street in Greenwich Village toward a small Italian restaurant. It was in the low eighties again, after two days of cooler weather, but there was something fall-like nudging the outside edges of the heat. She glanced at her watch. Twelve-twenty. She was early, so there was no