Pete grins. “I won’t tell him you said that.”
A NURSE WAKES ME at three o’clock in the morning.
I experience an instant wave of panic, which is just as quickly relieved by the fact that the nurse looks excited and pleased. “Mr. Carpenter, come with me. Your wife is responding to stimuli.”
I throw off the covers and rush out into the hall before the laughing nurse makes me realize that I’m in my underwear. I go back to the room and put on my pants, since the last thing I need is a floorful of sexually aroused nurses, ogling me. I’m still zipping up as I go back into the hall.
They let me in Laurie’s room for the first time, and I am disappointed to see that she is still unconscious. The head nurse is there, and she tells me that they put patients like Laurie through a regimen of stimuli four times a day, things like pressing a sharp item onto her feet, legs, and arms. For the first time since she’s been there, she has had a slight reaction.
“Talk to her,” the nurse says. “Take her hand and talk to her. If she’s going to respond to verbal stimuli, it will most likely be a voice she knows.”
I take Laurie’s left hand. It feels warm but lifeless, and I have to fight off a need to cry. That’s been happening to me a lot lately, if I’m not careful I could forfeit my membership in Macho Men International.
“Laurie, it’s me, Andy. Laurie can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”
She doesn’t squeeze my hand, doesn’t react at all. I try it again, and again there’s nothing. I squeeze her hand, gently, as if I’m showing her how to do it.
Nothing.
I talk to her until about four thirty. I talk about Findlay, and Paterson, and movies, and baseball, and politics, and anything else I can think of. I keep asking her to squeeze my hand, and she keeps refusing.
I doze off until about a quarter to six, then wake up and start the process again. I’ve given a lot of closing arguments, and tried to convince a lot of juries, but I’ve never wanted to get through to anyone as much as I want to get through to Laurie right now.
“Laurie, squeeze my hand. Please. It’s me, Andy. I love you, and I want you to squeeze my hand.”
And she does. At least I think she does; it’s slight and almost imperceptible, so slight that I almost can’t tell if it’s me squeezing or her. So I try it again, and this time I know for sure.
Laurie can hear me.
I run out in the hall yelling to the nurses, and three of them come running. I get Laurie to repeat her performance for them, and they confirm for me that it’s real. And that it’s a damn good sign.
They send me out so that they can run some tests, and I head back to the room, my feet barely touching the floor. For the first time since this began, I’m feeling some optimism.
I take a shower, dress, and check back with the nurses. Laurie is still upstairs, so I go back to my room. Kevin has arrived and is of course thrilled to hear about Laurie’s progress.
“That is fantastic,” he says. “Beyond fantastic.”
“She’s a fighter,” I say.
Kevin brings me up to date on his meeting with Steven Timmerman. Steven is understanding and sympathetic to a point; he expressed his concern for Laurie and me, and will accept whatever decision I reach. He just wants it to be fast. He wants his trial to take place as quickly as possible. It’s a reasonable position for him to take.
Dr. Norville comes in for the daily update on Laurie’s condition. I basically understand about every fifth word he says, but the gist of it is that the brain scans they performed do not show damage, but that I shouldn’t take too much encouragement from that, because they are notoriously unreliable at this early stage.
He is pleased by her responses to the stimuli, but again cautions me in doctor-talk not to read too much into it. Laurie is not out of the woods, and won’t be until she wakes up. Ever willing to grasp on to straws with both hands, I like the fact that he doesn’t say “if ” she wakes up.
Kevin, whose favorite place in the entire world is a hospital, seizes upon the occasion to ask Dr. Norville about his own “unresponsive congestion.”
“How long have you been experiencing it?” Norville asks.
“About three weeks,” says Kevin.
“Do you have an internist?”
“Of course,” says Kevin, slightly miffed. You name the type of doctor, and Kevin has one.
“You might want to see him,” Dr. Norville says, and extricates himself from the conversation and the room.
Kevin is obviously not pleased with the interaction. “Does he really think it’s possible I haven’t consulted with my internist about this?”
I shake my head in feigned sympathy. “What planet is that guy living on?”
Sam Willis drops by to ask if I want an update on his progress in digging into the now concluded life of Walter Timmerman. The truth is that I don’t, but he’s worked hard and quickly on it, so I agree.
It is truly amazing how much of a person’s life is available on computers if you know where to look, have the expertise to do so, and are willing to skirt all applicable federal and local laws. Sam fits the bill on all those counts, and he brings me a treasure trove of information on Timmerman, he says-far too much to go through now. And he’ll have much more later on, when he really has time to get into it.
“Can you give me an overview?” I ask.
“Well, the guy was as rich as the media reports made him out to be; I would estimate his net worth at between four hundred and four hundred fifty million. And he didn’t spend much of it; he had the nice house, spent a lot on jewelry for the current wife…”
“Was Steven’s mother his first wife?”
Sam nods. “Yes. Died about six years ago. Cancer.”
“No recent unusual transactions?” I ask.
“Could be; I’m not sure. At this point I was more into gathering the information than analyzing it,” he says. “I’ve also got copies of the e-mails he sent and received for the last three months from his private and business addresses, but I didn’t read most of them.”
“How did you get that?” I ask.
“You don’t want to know,” he says, and he’s right about that. “By the way, I did happen to see one strange e-mail.”
“What was that?”
Rather than tell me about it, he searches through the reams of paper and finds a copy of it. It is from Robert Jacoby, whose e-mail sign-off identifies him as the director of laboratory operations at the Crescent Hills Forensics Laboratory.
The e-mail conveys what seems to be an annoyance on Jacoby’s part with Timmerman, though it is expressed rather gently:
I won’t be able to place this in any kind of context until I go through everything Sam has brought, though he says he didn’t see a reply to Jacoby’s questions. Certainly the fact that a man who was soon to be a murder victim was experimenting in any way with his own DNA is at least curious, and something for me to look into carefully if I stay on the case.
