waiting room, her head in her hands. She barely looked up when Sally sat beside her.
“Hope it’s…,” Sally started, then stopped.
“He’s dead. I know it,” Hope said. “I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Feel a pulse. Couldn’t feel him take a breath. He was old, but…We shouldn’t have rushed down here. It just happens, you know, you get old and it happens.”
Sally sat and glanced up at the clock. She did not think it would take long for the veterinarian on duty to emerge and tell Hope what she already knew. But to Sally’s surprise, five minutes passed, then ten. At twenty, they were still waiting. At the half-hour mark, a tall young man, wearing a white laboratory jacket over pale green hospital scrubs, emerged. “Miss Frazier?” he said in a quiet, well-modulated voice that Sally knew instantly came from experience at handling bad news. He looked at Hope.
“Yes.” Her voice quivered.
“I am sorry,” he said slowly. “We tried to revive him, but he was already gone by the time you arrived.”
“I know,” Hope said. “I just had to try…”
“There was nothing else you could have done,” the vet said. “And we did our best.”
“Yes. I know that. Thank you.” It was as if each word she spoke had to be pulled out of an icy region deep within her.
“He was not a young dog,” the vet said slowly.
“Fifteen years,” Hope said.
The vet nodded. He seemed to hesitate momentarily, before asking, “And how did you find him tonight?”
“When we came home, he was in the kitchen. On the floor.”
The vet took a deep breath. “Would you care to come in, say a final good-bye? And there’s something I’d like to show you.”
“Yes,” Hope said, trying unsuccessfully to hold back her tears. “I’d like that. I’d like to see him one more time.” She followed the vet through a pair of swinging doors, while Sally trailed a couple of feet behind her.
The exam room was bathed in bright white light from an overhead fixture. It was like any typical emergency room, with ventilators on the wall, blood-pressure monitors, equipment cabinets. In the center of a shiny steel table that remorselessly reflected the light, Nameless was stretched out, his light fur matted. Hope reached out and stroked his side. His eyes were closed, and Hope thought he looked peaceful and merely asleep.
The vet remained silent for a moment, letting Hope run her hands over her dog’s fur. Then he cautiously said, “Was there anything unusual in the house tonight, when you got home?”
Hope turned. “I’m sorry? Unusual?”
“What do you mean?” Sally said.
“Were there any signs of a break-in?”
Hope looked confused. “I’m not sure that I follow.”
The vet stepped to her side. “I’m sorry if this is hard, but when we were examining Nameless, a few things seemed out of place.”
“What are you saying?” Hope asked.
The vet reached down and pulled back the fur around Nameless’s throat. “See the red striations? Bruising marks. We would typically see those from choking. And here, look.” He gently lifted Nameless’s lips, exposing his teeth. “This appears to be flesh. And some blood, as well. We also found what appears to be some cloth strands and blood on his paws. Near the nails.”
Hope looked up at the vet as if she could not quite see what he was driving at.
“When you get home, check your doors and windows for signs of forced entry.” The vet looked over at Sally, then at Hope, and smiled, in a wry, offset manner. “It’s pretty obvious who he thought he needed to protect, no matter how old he was,” the vet said slowly. “I can’t be certain, not without an autopsy, of course, but it seems to me that Nameless died fighting.”
“Who murdered Murphy?” I asked. “Do you believe Michael O’Connell shot him?”
She looked at me oddly, as if the question were somehow out of place. We were at her home, and as she hesitated, I found myself distracted, my eyes sweeping the living room. I realized suddenly that there were no photographs.
She smiled. “I think you should ask yourself, did Michael O’Connell need to kill Murphy? He might have wanted to. He had a weapon. He had the chance. But had he not done enough, already, by mailing all that confidential information to so many different people to achieve the desired end? Could he not be reasonably confident that someone, in that list of people, would react violently? Wasn’t that O’Connell’s style, to act obliquely? To create events and situations? To manipulate the environment? He needed Murphy out of his way. Murphy came from a world that Michael O’Connell knew, and knew intimately. He was well aware of the threat that he posed. Murphy was not unlike O’Connell in his predictable reliance on violence to achieve results. He had to excise Murphy from the situation. And that happened, didn’t it?”
She looked at me and lowered her voice, almost to a whisper. “What do we do? How do we act? It’s not hard to know what to do when the enemy levels his weapon at you. But aren’t we often our own biggest enemies because we do not want to believe what our eyes are telling us? When the storm gathers, do we not just as often think that it won’t thunder? The flood won’t burst the dam, will it? And so, it catches us, doesn’t it?”
She took another deep breath and once again turned to stare out the window.
“And after it catches us, will we drown?”
29
Hi, Michael. I miss you. I love you. Come save me.
He could hear Ashley’s voice speaking to him, almost as if she were sitting in the passenger seat of his car. He replayed the words over and over in his mind, giving them different inflections, one time pleading and desperate, another time sexy and inviting. The words were like caresses.
O’Connell imagined himself on a mission. Like a soldier maneuvering through mine-infested territory, or a rescue swimmer diving into turbulent waters, he was heading north, crossing the Vermont border, drawn inexorably toward Ashley.
In the darkness, he ran his fingers over the gashes on the back of his hand and his forearm. He had managed to staunch the bleeding from the bite in his calf with gauze from a cheap first-aid kit he kept in the glove compartment. He was really goddamn lucky that the dog hadn’t grabbed his Achilles tendon and shredded it. His jeans were ripped, and, he suspected, they were streaked with dried blood. He would have to replace them in the morning. But all in all, he thought, he had come out on top.
O’Connell reached up and flicked on the car’s overhead light.
He looked down at his map and tried to do the calculations in his head. He knew that he was less than ninety minutes away from Ashley. This estimate even allowed for a wrong turn or two when he got onto the rural roads leading to Catherine Frazier’s home.
He smiled inwardly and again heard Ashley calling to him. Hi, Michael. I miss you. I love you. Come save me. He knew her better than she knew herself.
Cracking open the window slightly, he let some crisp air into the car, trying to cool himself down. O’Connell believed there were two Ashleys. The first was the Ashley who had tried to get rid of him, who had seemed so angry, so scared, and so elusive. That was the Ashley that belonged to Scott and Sally and the freak, Hope. He frowned when he thought of them. There was something truly sick and perverted about their relationships, and he knew that Ashley would be far better off when he had rescued her.
