Chương 9
Grace stood between him and the pediatric room.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Mason looked at her as if the words came from far away.
“Did Adrian kill him?”
The question was so quiet that she nearly missed it.
“What?”
“Did Adrian arrange it before he was shot?”
“I don’t know.”
Mason nodded.
He moved toward the ICU.
Ortiz stepped in front of him. “You cannot enter.”
“My son is dead.”
“I know.”
“I need to speak to Adrian.”
“He is sedated and under police protection.”
Mason’s eyes shifted to the glass wall. “He was conscious.”
“He is not available to you.”
“He wrote something.”
Ortiz said nothing.
Mason looked at Grace.
“What did he write?”
She considered lying.
“Mason knows.”
A faint tremor passed through his jaw.
“Nothing else?”
“He said Lily is in danger.”
“How?”
“He nodded.”
Mason stared at Adrian through the glass.
“My son called me fourteen times last night,” he said.
No one answered.
“I silenced the phone because I was standing beside Adrian’s bed.”
Grace thought of the folded charcoal jacket, the absent cuff links, the cedar smell.
“What did Eli know?” Ortiz asked.
Mason turned toward her.
“He knew Nolan’s distribution routes. He knew which drivers were paid. He knew where the money went.”
“Was he helping Nolan?”
“He was using Nolan.”
“For drugs?”
“For access. For protection. For the belief that being my son made consequences temporary.”
His face tightened at the last word.
Ortiz said, “Did Nolan know Eli could testify?”
“Yes.”
“So Nolan had motive to kill him.”
“Yes.”
“And you had motive to silence Adrian before he exposed the transfers.”
Mason looked through the glass again. “Yes.”
The repetition no longer sounded calm. It sounded exhausted.
He left the hospital voluntarily with detectives for another interview.
Grace watched him enter the elevator between two officers.
Lily came to the doorway holding the rabbit by one ear.
“Mr. Reed is sad.”
“Yes.”
“Is he bad?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said that already.”
“I know.”
Lily considered this unacceptable but did not argue.
At seven that evening, hospital security found a maintenance uniform in a trash compactor near the loading dock. The pockets contained a surgical cap, a mask, a pair of gloves, and a visitor badge registered to Eli Reed.
The badge had been used to access Adrian’s floor at four ten in the morning.
Eli’s motel key card showed he had entered his room shortly after five.
The timeline made him a possible intruder.
The physical description matched Lily’s limited observations. He had dark hair on his hands. Photographs showed a silver ring with a broken crescent design, not the Vale compass.
Grace stared at the image on Ortiz’s phone.
“That’s the ring.”
“We need Lily to identify it independently later,” Ortiz said. “Do not show her.”
“Was Eli the man?”
“He may have been.”
“Then Mason didn’t do it.”
“Mason’s cedar product was found in Eli’s motel bathroom.”
“He was his son.”
“Yes.”
“What was on the gloves?”
“Testing is underway.”
Grace sat down.
The truth did not arrive as relief. It arrived as a larger room with more doors.
“Mason knew,” she said.
“Possibly.”
“He knew Eli had access.”
“Possibly.”
“He asked Lily what the man looked like before anyone mentioned Eli.”
“He was investigating.”
“Or measuring what she saw.”
Ortiz put the phone away. “That is also possible.”
Grace pressed her fingers against her eyes.
“Where is Mason now?”
“At the central precinct with counsel.”
“Can he leave?”
“Unless we arrest him.”
“Will you?”
“We do not yet have probable cause for attempted murder.”
“His son’s badge was used. His scent was on the child’s rabbit. He admitted motive.”
“Those facts create suspicion. They do not establish who placed the contaminated material.”
Grace laughed once, bitterly. “You keep building the same sentence in different clothes.”
“Because you keep asking for certainty that does not exist.”
Lily climbed onto the chair beside Grace and leaned against her arm.
Ortiz lowered her voice. “There is another problem. Eli’s phone is missing.”
“Who had it?”
“Not the motel staff. Not paramedics. Not in his car.”
“Nolan?”
“Maybe.”
“Mason?”
“Maybe.”
“Adrian?”
“Unlikely while unconscious.”
Despite herself, Grace smiled.
Ortiz looked tired enough to accept the joke.
“Mr. Vale’s house is being searched tonight under warrant,” the detective said. “Your apartment will be included in a separate protective sweep.”
“Because he owns it.”
“Because the property company is tied to his organization.”
Grace looked at Lily’s rabbit. A small bald spot marked the place where fibers had been clipped.
“Am I going to be arrested?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
This time Ortiz smiled first.
Adrian required a second operation before midnight.
More gray tissue had appeared along the wound margin. Dr. Brooks removed it and replaced the temporary closure. She told Grace the infection was responding, but Adrian’s kidneys had begun to struggle.
“He may survive,” she said. “Survival may not look like returning to the life he had.”
Grace stood beside the ICU window while the rolling bed disappeared toward the operating room again.
“What happens if he wakes and refuses to cooperate with the police?”
“That is not a medical question.”
“What happens if he orders someone killed from this bed?”
Dr. Brooks looked at her.
“You think I’m being dramatic.”
“No. I think you are finally asking questions you postponed because the answers would cost you.”
The words were not cruel. That made them harder to resist.
Grace folded her arms over the pale gray housekeeping dress she had worn for more than thirty hours.
“My daughter saved him.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know whether that was good.”
Dr. Brooks watched the elevator numbers descend.
“Saving a life does not endorse what the person has done with it.”
“That sounds clean.”
“It is not. Nothing in intensive care is clean for long.”
May you like
A housekeeper pushed a mop bucket past them. One wheel squeaked at every rotation. Grace watched the woman steer around Adrian’s security men without looking up.
She had moved that way through his house.
