Huey swallowed, his eyes bright.
“Now you say, ‘Thank you, Belle.’”
“Thank you, Belle.”
Abby petted the doll’s hair. “Do you want to brush her hair? Just pretendlike.”
Huey reached out shyly and petted Belle’s hair with his enormous hand.
“Good, Beast,” Abby murmured. “Good Beast.”
TWELVE
Karen watched the digital clock beside her bed flash over to 1:00 A.M. She was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the corner, hugging her knees; Hickey lay on the bed, his injured leg propped high on some pillows. The Wild Turkey bottle sat beside him, along with Will’s. 38. His eyes were glued to the television, which was showing the opening credits of The Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March. She was glad he hadn’t yet realized there was a satellite dish connected to the bedroom television; she didn’t want him flipping through to Cinemax and getting more ideas from the T amp;A movies they seemed to run all night.
“Bogey’s good,” Hickey drawled, sounding more than half drunk. “But Mitchum was the greatest. No acting at all, you know? The real deal.”
Karen said nothing. She had never known time to pass so slowly. Not even when she was in labor, screaming for Abby to be born. It was as though the earth itself had slowed on its axis, its sole purpose to torment her family. She had entered that realm of timelessness that exists in certain places, a few of which she had visited herself. Prisons were like that. And monasteries. But the ones she knew most intimately were the waiting rooms of hospitals: bubbles in time where entire families entered a state of temporal suspension, waiting to learn whether the heart of the patriarch would restart after the triple bypass, whether a child would be saved or killed by a wellintentioned gift of marrow. Her bedroom had now become such a bubble. Only her child was not in the hands of a doctor.
“You alive over there?” Hickey asked.
“Barely,” she whispered, her eyes on Fredric March. March reminded her of her father; he was a model of male restraint and dignity, yet he would do whatever was required when the going got tough. She still cried when she saw The Best Years of Our Lives, with March and that poor boy who’d lost both hands in the war trying to learn to play the piano-
“I said, are you alive over there?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Then you ought to feel lucky.”
She sensed that Hickey was looking for a fight. She didn’t intend to give him one.
“’Cause a lot of people who ought to be alive aren’t,” he said. “You know?”
She looked over at him, wondering who he was thinking of. “I know.”
“Bullshit you know.”
“I told you, I was a nurse.”
He glanced at her. “You proud of it? People in agony waiting for pain medicine while nurses sit there painting their fucking fingernails, watching the clock, waiting for their shift to end.”
She could not let that pass. “I am proud I was a nurse. I know that happens. But nurses are stuck with doctors’ orders. If they break them, they get fired.”
Hickey scowled and drank from the Wild Turkey bottle. “Don’t get me started on doctors.”
Karen thought she remembered him saying that all the previous kidnappings had involved children of doctors. He’d said something about doctors collecting expensive toys. But that couldn’t be the only reason he targeted them. Lots of people collected expensive things. Somehow, doctors were part of a vein of suffering that ran deep in Hickey’s soul.
“When did your mother pass away?” she asked.
He turned his head far enough to glare at her in the chair. “What the fuck do you care?”
“I am a human being, as you so eloquently pointed out before. And I’m trying to understand what makes you so angry. Angry enough to do this to total strangers.”
He wagged a finger at her. “You’re not trying to understand anything. You’re trying to make me think you actually give a shit, so I might feel enough for you that I won’t hurt your kid.”
“That’s not true.”
“The hell it’s not.” He drank again, then let his eyes burn into her. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Sunshine. You ain’t strangers.”
“What?”
He smiled, and a wicked pleasure came into his face. “The light dawning up there?”
A shadow seemed to pass behind Karen’s eyes, a flickering foreknowledge that made her shudder in the chair. “What do you mean?”
“Your husband works at University Hospital, right?”
“He works at several hospitals.” This was true, but University provided the facilities for Will’s drug research. He also held a faculty position, and did quite a bit of anesthesiology there.
Hickey waved his hand. “He works at University, right?”
“That’s right. That’s where we met.”
“How romantic. But I have a little different feeling about the place. My mother died there.”
The transient fear that made her shudder before now took up residence in her heart.
“She was in for her throat cancer,” he said, almost to himself. “They’d cut on her a bunch of times before. It was no big deal. But they were supposed to put some kind of special panty-hose things on her during the operation. STDs or something.”
“SCDs,” Karen corrected him. “Sequential compression devices. Along with T.E.D. hose, they keep the blood circulating in the legs while the patient is under anesthesia.”
“Supposed to, anyway,” Hickey said. “But they left them off, and she got some kind of clot. Sounds like Efrem Zimbalist.”
“An embolus.”
“That’s it.”
“Will was the anesthesiologist?”
“Fuckin’-A right he was. And my mother died right there on the table. They told me nothing could be done. But I went back later and talked to the surgeon who’d done the operation. And he finally told me. It’s the gas passer’s job to make sure those SCD things are on the patient.”
“But that’s not true!” Karen cried. “The anesthesiologist has nothing to do with that.”
“Oh, yeah. What else are you going to say?”
“That’s the job of the circulating nurse-if the surgeon has written the proper orders. The surgeon himself should check to be sure they’re on.”
“The cutter told me there’s some kind of box under the table, and the gas passer’s supposed to check for it.”
“He was probably scared to death of you! He was shifting the blame wherever he could.”
A dark laugh from Hickey. “He was scared, all right.” He leaned up on his elbow. “Don’t worry. That asshole paid, too. In full.”
“You sued him for malpractice?”
“Sued him?” Hickey laughed. “I said he paid in full.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“You killed him?”
Hickey snapped his fingers. “Just like that. No telling how many people I saved by wasting that butcher.”
Struggling to keep her anxiety hidden, Karen tried to remember Will mentioning a case like the one Hickey
