Death Benefit (50 page)

After forty minutes, Burim reached Broadway at the very tip of Manhattan. In the middle of a quiet block, he slowed down and Pia hopped out of the car without saying a word and didn’t look back. Burim stopped the car and watched as Pia walked to an intersection and held out her hand to hail a taxi. A gypsy cab pulled over, and Pia leaned toward the window and told the driver something. Before she got in the car, Burim thought she looked small and vulnerable in her crazy mismatched outfit. But he had a feeling she’d be okay.

 

 

P
ia asked the car to drop her off as close as he could get to her dorm building on Haven Avenue. There was still a police presence with artificial lighting at this location of the abduction and shooting. The fare was $12, and she gave the driver the twenty Burim had given her and didn’t stop for change. On the ride down, Pia had concentrated her thoughts on Will, ignoring her father, who was jabbering away in the front seat. She tried not to think about her ordeal; at least she was safe now. Pia had no thought about whether or not she was going to try to establish a connection with her father, but she did know she’d have nothing at all to do with Drilon. The few things she remembered about him were all painful.

Pia focused. She wasn’t worried about talking to the police—after all, it wouldn’t be the first time. She’d build a wall around what happened at the house and not recount any of it; in all other aspects, she could be truthful. And there were some truths she was still determined that everyone know. There would be no possibility of a cover-up.

Pia walked up to the front desk in the dorm. There were two uniformed cops by the elevator, but Pia hoped that her strange garb and the fact that she’d bunched her hair up under a baseball cap would throw off a casual onlooker. Despite the late hour, students were coming in from studying at the Health Science Center or from a night out. A few others were on their way out, having been called to the hospital for emergencies.

Pia knew the person staffing the front desk and asked him about Will McKinley.

“Pia, is that you?” the young man said. “Cops are looking for you. They said you got
kidnapped
or something crazy.”

“No, I’m fine. Will—tell me about Will.” Pia gestured with her index finger over her lips to silence the man from calling attention to her presence.

“Oh, man, I heard he got shot in the head, but he survived. He was taken over to the Neurological Institute, and he had surgery. One of the other fourth-years said he’s in Intensive Care.”

Without another word, Pia turned and walked away from the desk and made her way over to Neurosurgical Intensive Care. She saw plenty of cops and security guards, but they were on the lookout for a woman with long black hair, not someone wearing a New York Jets sweatshirt to mid-thigh, soccer socks, and a baseball cap. She looked like a cheerleader.

At the doors of Intensive Care, there were more police. Pia was stopped by the nurses, who eyed her less than appropriate clothes and the bruise on her jawline. Pia explained she was a medical student and flashed her student identification with her finger over her name. She hoped that everyone there had been on duty the whole night and hadn’t seen or heard the news. The head nurse said she wouldn’t let Pia into the intensive care unit, but she paged the resident.

When the resident arrived he looked quizzically at Pia. Still, he was considerate after hearing that she was a medical student interested in the case. He assumed she was a girlfriend of the young man.

“Mr. McKinley is being maintained in an induced coma post-surgery,” the resident, Dr. Hill, said. “He received a gunshot to the head, but the bullet made a complete transit through the frontal lobe. It’s an injury that people have recovered from in the past. But I would emphasize that anyone suffering this kind of injury may not be exactly the same person he was before being shot and having brain surgery.”

“He’s a friend of mine,” Pia said. “I was there when he was shot.”

“So it’s very important that you understand he will be different even if there is a seemingly complete recovery.”

“Different how?”

“It would take too long to go into now. Look up the case of Phineas Gage, from 1848, which involved much more severe trauma to the frontal lobe. It was the first recorded case about how penetrating head trauma can affect personality.”

“Can I see him?”

“I don’t see why not. His family is on the way. You have to wear a gown and so on.”

“Of course.”

Pia went off to don her protective garb.

Only then did Dr. Hill remember something about being on the lookout for a young woman.

 

 

I
n Will McKinley’s room, Pia found George standing by Will’s bed.

“Pia, my God!” George said, and grasped her in an embrace. “Are you okay? What happened to you?”

“I’m fine. I’ll tell you later. Will . . . how is he doing?”

“No one knows. I have to go back and talk to some more cops, but I wanted to see him. I saw the whole thing. I saw him get shot and you taken. I can’t believe he’s alive. And you too. Thank God. What happened?”

George stared at Pia as if she were an apparition, but she turned to look at Will. His breathing was being handled by a machine, there were tangles of wires and tubes enveloping him, and he was surrounded by banks of devices with illuminated readouts. Will’s face looked calm and peaceful and his color was normal. Except for all the medical equipment and the beeping and clicking, he might have simply been sleeping. A nurse hovered nearby. Pia looked around the room and caught her reflection in the unit’s large window. She looked terrible, like something the cat dragged in. She turned her attention back to George.

“George, I’m so sorry I got you into this. Please forgive me,” she said. “If I had listened to you, then this would have turned out differently, I know that.”

“Pia, I feel as terrible as you do about this. I was sleeping while you were waiting for me at the station. I slept through your calls. I should have come to you. It should be me lying there.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better. Will had no idea what was going on and I didn’t say anything. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me so there’s a couple of things I want to say while I have the chance.

“I want to say thank you for going out of your way to help me. I don’t really understand why you’d do that for someone without her asking, and without her appreciating what you’re doing. But there are a lot of things I don’t understand.

“I guess the main thing I don’t understand is myself. I think you do know yourself, which is why you’re able to say you love someone, like you did to me. And I’m sorry for not listening then either. I’m jealous that you can do that, and I wonder why I can’t. I think there’s something broken in me or something that was never there, and it’s taken until now for me to see that. For a lot of reasons, I find it very difficult to trust people. As if I need to tell you that.... But I don’t know how to love someone either, or how to accept their love. It’s a big responsibility, being loved, and you should think hard before rejecting someone’s love.

“But you’ve made me want to learn more about myself, to see if I can’t fix that broken part. I think we studied that course together, in first-year psych, the part about people with personality issues who never accept that they’re the ones who are different. So if they’re marching, if they lead with their right foot while everyone else uses their left, they say with unshakable belief that it’s everyone else who’s out of step, not them. I think I’m like that.”

Pia looked around. She hadn’t realized the nurse had left, nor had she seen or heard the man enter the room. He was stocky, in a cap and gown, just like she and George were wearing, over his streetclothes. He was standing at the back of the room as she stood with George by Will’s bed. The man waved his hand as if to say, “Don’t mind me! Go on!”

“I never understood people’s feelings, George. I sneered at people who said they were in love because I never knew what that meant. I don’t know if I can change, and I don’t know if someone can be taught how to love. But I do know I want to try to change.”

Pia reached out and touched George’s cheek with one fingertip.

“Please try to forgive me.”

George closed his eyes.

“Pia, there’s nothing to forgive. I’m just so happy you’re safe.”

Pia stepped back and studied Will’s peaceful face, then turned toward the visitor. She sensed he was there to talk to her.

“Miss, I’m Detective Captain Lou Soldano. You’re Pia Grazdani, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“You have to come with me now.”

“I understand. Do you mind if I use the bathroom first?”

“Of course not,” Lou said.

After Pia told George she’d see him later, she and Lou walked out of the intensive care unit.

“I’m glad to see you,” Lou said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Pia said, before disappearing into the women’s room near the elevators. After locking the door, she took out her smartphone. Quickly she tapped out an e-mail, forwarding a sizable message she’d already written. After making certain it had gone, she used the toilet. She then looked at herself in the mirror over the sink and said: “Now the shit hits the fan.” Taking a deep breath, she composed herself to go out and meet Detective Lou Soldano who represented her old nemesis, the City of New York.

 

 

T
he man was aware of the buzzing of a phone right next to his ear. He went immediately from deep sleep to partial consciousness but it took him a few beats to realize where he was. He picked up the phone, saw his device, didn’t recognize the number but accepted the call just to stop the noise.

“McGovern. This better be good, whoever you are.”

“Is this Chet McGovern?” a female voice said.

“I believe so, ask me tomorrow. What time is it anyway?”

“About two-fifteen, sorry about that.”

“Do I know you?”

“My name is Jemima Meads. I’m calling from the
New York Post
.”

“The
Post
?”

The mention of the paper made McGovern sit up. He looked across at the redhead lying fast asleep on the other side of the bed. Her bed, he remembered, somewhere in the Village. What was
her
name?

“Dr. McGovern, we’re looking at a story that has two researchers at Columbia being killed by the radioactive agent polonium-210, just like the KGB colonel in London. Do you have a comment?”

“It’s two-fifteen in the morning,” McGovern said groggily.

“And I do apologize, but we want to be first and make sure we have the story right.”

“But I thought we weren’t releasing the cause of death,” said McGovern.

“So you can confirm it?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“It kind of is.”

“Look, speak to my colleague, Jack, he did the autopsies. But I recommend it be tomorrow during normal business hours.”

“Jack Stapleton, the ME?”

“Yes, him.”

“Okay, thanks. And sorry for disturbing you.”

The woman ended the call, and Chet lay back in bed. What was that about?

 

 

 

E
ven though it was Saturday, Russell Lefevre had set his alarm for 5:45. He clamped down on the buzzer, before it woke his wife. Lefevre padded into the bathroom and then downstairs to make coffee and to check on events on the Internet. As the coffee was brewing, Lefevre scanned the online headlines of
The New York Times
,
The Wall Street Journal
, and
The Washington Post
. Russell had always been fastidious about keeping up with the news, but in the past few weeks he’d become obsessed, especially since Edmund had become less and less communicative.

Even though Russell had asked him numerous times, Edmund had never told him what he and Jerry Trotter had talked about at Edmund’s house a few weeks before, even though Edmund had looked thoroughly shaken afterward. A week or so later, Jerry Trotter disappeared. When Russell called Max Higgins, Max said Jerry had gone on a fact-finding trip to Asia, and he had no idea when he’d be back. Edmund had nothing to say about that. Then Russell read about Gloria Croft being attacked while out running one morning in Central Park, and Edmund told Russell he had no idea what had happened then, either.

Two days earlier, all the newspapers carried the story about Rothman and Yamamoto, first about their being sick. Then they reported that the pair had died in a tragic accident in the lab. Russell didn’t know what to feel or what to think. First Jerry disappeared, then Gloria was attacked, then Rothman and Yamamoto died. On its own, each of the latter two events was a piece of good fortune, but together, they were surely more than a coincidence. Did Edmund have anything to do with it? Could these events have been what he and Jerry talked about? It seemed impossible to comprehend that Edmund was involved, but Russell couldn’t bring himself to confront his partner.

Russell made coffee and looked for the
New York Post
. When he saw the newly updated headline on the home page he nearly choked:

COLUMBIA MEDS IN KGB COPYCAT SLAY?

Under Jemima Meads’s byline was an exclusive about Rothman and Yamamoto. Hedged with “allegedly” and “reportedly,” the story said that acting on an anonymous tip, the reporter had contacted members of the New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner who were working on the theory that the exotic radioactive agent polonium-210 was involved in the deaths of the two prominent Columbia University researchers. The find was made by the husband-and-wife team of Drs. Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery, who, having been reached by the reporter at their Upper West Side town house, refused to confirm or deny the story, referring the reporter to the OCME’s public relations department.