And another when you come back home.
* * *
Manny wasnt in the club chair when he got home. The living room was empty.
Terror filled him like poison.
I cant lose her. Shes too important.
He didnt try to interpret what
important
meant; he was only aware that his breathing was labored, his panic was making him dizzy, and if she were kidnapped or dead he would have to get a new name, a new life. He could not live with the Jacob Rosen he was now.
Manny? he yelled. Manny!
A sound from upstairs.
It took him a moment to identify it: running water.
Shes taking a bath!
He raced up the stairs, laughing. Yes. The bathroom door was closed. It was definitely water he heard. Manny was singing Kurt Weills Mack the Knife at the top of her lungs.
He pounded on the door. The singing stopped.
Who is it?
Jake. How the hell did you get upstairs?
Rocket ship. I needed a bath.
Very funny. If you get water on those bandages, youll rip out the stitches. The wounds probably bleeding now from the climb.
She turned off the water. Actually, no. And Ive got my leg hanging over the side of the tub. If I ever decide to quit lawyering, theres a job for me as a contortionist. She giggled. You should see me.
Id like that very much. He turned the doorknob.
Dont you dare!
It was your suggestion. He stood by the door, listening to the sounds of her bathing. Then he heard water running out of the tub. There are clean towels in the closet, he told her.
Found them.
Need help getting down the stairs?
I got up them, didnt I? She hesitated. Although it might be fun.
* * *
She appeared at the kitchen door wearing his pajama bottoms backward and holding a prescription bottle. Her eyes flashed fire.
Been raiding the medicine cabinet? he asked calmly.
As my mother says, if you want to learn the truth about someone, look in their medicine chest and their refrigerator. And now I know the truth about you. The name on the bottle is Marianna Candler Rosen. Is there a little unscientific detail about your life you forgot to tell me? Like youre
married
? I should have known when you opened my car door for me after the Terrell autopsy. I asked you then if you were married because you werent wearing a ring. Now I know what not quite meant.
Youre angry, he said.
Youre so right, for a change. I should have known better than to get involved with a two-timing lying son of a
Involved with?
I didnt say that.
Of course you did. Dont you listen to yourself?
Then I didnt mean it in the way youre taking it. Were involved in a case, not romantically. You, Dr. Rosen, have a good imagination.
And so, Ms. Manfreda, do you. If you look at the date on the bottle, youll see its at least two years old. It should have been thrown out. Marianna and I were divorced a year ago. We were separated a year before that. Do you want a glass of wine? There was pain in his voice.
Im sorry, she said.
Nothing like making a fool of yourself.
Champagne would be nice. But Ill settle for wine this time.
Our marriage fell apart in less than a year. It was a marriage of opposites, full of battles. She was funny and hotheaded and never reticent. He smiled at her. Like you. She worked for a financial newsletter but didnt like it. I could walk away from my job and never look back, she told me before we were married. Thats a fantasy of mine, too walking away but I know I couldnt do it.
Neither could I, Manny said, entranced.
No opposites here.
No, I suppose not. Anyway, she did walk away from her job after she left me. She met someone in California and lives with him. Cooks dinner, takes his suits to the dry cleaner that sort of thing.
Your
suits could use a trip to the dry cleaner.
He looked down. Some blood from that afternoons autopsy had landed on his cuff. Taking them would be a full-time job.
Maybe we could train Mycroft, she said.
He looked at her hard. Ill open the Pellegrino and put the takeout in the oven. I hope you like souvlaki.
She realized she was famished. The wound, the threat at Turner, Mycrofts fear, the smells of the autopsy: they all retreated in the presence of the man who was responsible for them.
Food, then sleep. For one night, normalcy.
A warmth spread through her that reminded her of childhood.
Im comfortable with him.
Her cell phone rang. She had left it on the table, so she hobbled over to pick it up.
It was her mother, calling from New Jersey, worried. Kenneth had told her what happened and had brought Mycroft over, and of course she didnt mind taking care of him.
Manny was conscious that Jake had returned with their wine and was standing in the doorway, listening. Yes, I can keep food down, she said in answer to her mothers questions. Yes, Im with a doctor. Im spending the night here.
Jake handed her the wine. Of course not! she said. He watched her blush and guessed what her mother had asked.
Manny lowered her voice. Mommy, please, I cant talk about him now. Ill call you first thing tomorrow. Kiss Mycroft good night for me and tell him I love him. I love you, too, Mommy. Sleep well. Your daughters fine. She hung up.
Mommy? was all Jake said.
She wanted to kill him.
SHE SLEPT in a guest bedroom, waking in pain from time to time not wanting to take any more of the painkiller Jake had placed by her bedside. When she hobbled down to the kitchen in the morning, dressed in chinos and a work shirt he had left for her, her heart was buoyant. His expression was grave.
How are you feeling? he asked. He poured her coffee into a mug with fake red blood drops running down its front. Across the blood, black letters blared: CALL THE EXPERTS. SPATTER IS OUR SECOND LANGUAGE.
Refreshed. Invigorated. Ready for action.
He scowled. What can I do to persuade you to drop the case?
Drop it yourself.
He had actually considered doing just that, to keep her safe. But they both knew so much already that, even if they quit, there would be no guarantee against further attacks. Besides, his obligation to Pete was too strong. He would have to protect her as best he could.
I want you to take it easy today, he told her. Go home. Rest. Let your mother stay with you.
She smiled at him. Yessir, boss.
Im serious. I dont know who attacked you at your office, but I have the feeling it was your last warning. Next time theyll strike to kill, particularly if either of us gets closer. So stay home, and for Gods sake be careful.
His intensity sobered her. You be careful, too. Whats your plan for the day?
Ill see you home and then head for the office. Sometime or other, though, Ill take the hair and bone samples to Hans Galts lab in Brooklyn. Maybe they can tell us something.
Will I see you tonight?
He caught the appeal in her tone. Of course, but Im not sure when. Ill call you. Meanwhile, Ill ask Sam to check on you and relieve your mother if she wants to go back to Jersey. I dont want you to move from your apartment.
She bristled. Look, I told you before. I dont like anybody telling me what I can and cant do.
Im not telling you, its an order. If you dont obey, the teams dissolved.
He means it.
She bowed her head. Ill be good. I promise.
* * *
Late that afternoon, Jake went to Galts lab. He could have done the work at the ME office, but he didnt want Pederson to catch him at it. His boss had told him to use a private lab, so Galts it was. He took the bone samples down to the X-ray room.
He put on a lead apron, placed the bones on separate metal X-ray cassettes, and, one at a time, put the cassettes on the examining table, the one usually reserved for cadavers, and x-rayed them: the mandible from Skeleton Four, the metal plate from Skeleton Three, the humerus from Two, and the metacarpal and ulna from One. The metacarpal, he noticed for the first time, had an unusual bulge with a small hole in it.
Funny,
he thought,
how even the best-trained eye mine can overlook something.
Hed seen it happen to others a hundred times.
He shot the X-rays, developed the films, and examined them on the fluorescent viewing box. The bulge on the left metacarpal was an irregular, almost shaggy-lined bone cyst osteomyelitis from which pus would have oozed through the skin of the palm of the left hand during life. Hed have to take a culture some bacteria and fungi stick around for decades and then decalcify it, so it could be cut down and made into a slide for further examination under a microscope.
The X-ray of the humerus was obscured by a white blur.
Damn. Something wrong with the film.
He reshot the X-ray and developed it; the blur remained. Jake remembered Harrigan saying he needed to reshoot the X-rays on one of the skeletons because something had gone wrong.
The same shot? Probably.
He studied the film. With the thousands of X-rays of bodies and bones hed examined over the years, hed never seen a white blur like this from any of his own autopsies.
But Ive seen it before, an X-ray from a bone in the ME museum on the sixth floor.
His heart quickened. The museums X-ray dated from the 1930s and was of the mandible of a woman who had worked at the U.S. Radium Dial factory in New Jersey. She and her fellow workers licked the tips of their brushes to make the fine points they needed to paint the glow-in-the-dark watch dials the company featured.
Yes! That was it!
Many of the women developed jaw necrosis and leukemia. The woman had died of it. But this humerus had been taken out of the ground in rural Turner. Farms were there, not factories.
Very strange.
An idea was forming, one so sinister, so unthinkable, he tried to brush it aside, but it stayed with him.
He dialed Hans Galt in his upstairs office. Hans wasnt there, but his assistant, Amy Fontayne, was.
I need your help, he told her.
Of course.
Got any X-ray film? A new box, unopened?
A whole cabinet full.
Good. And bring me a fresh slide, would you?
Amy came down moments later. She was not yet thirty, he guessed, but there were already lines around her eyes.
Too much staring into microscopes.
He put the humerus on the new cassette and asked Amy to change the settings on the X-ray machine to be more penetrating. He went out of the X-ray room and examined his other specimens, which gave her a chance to take the X-ray, then returned and took the cassette into the darkroom. There he removed the film and put it through the automatic developer and then put the X-ray on the viewing box again.
Weird. Worse than weird.
The same white blur obscured the humerus, only it was more pronounced. Did you change the setting on the X-ray machine? he asked Amy.
I didnt touch it.
Didnt
touch
it?
Did I screw up?
Tell me once more. You didnt push the X-ray button?
No, said Amy. Im sorry, Dr. Rosen. I was waiting for you to tell me to go ahead. When you took the film from me, I thought you wanted to see it before I x-rayed the bone.
My God, he blurted. He pulled the film from the viewing table and held it to the fluorescent ceiling light, praying hed see something different. I cant believe this, he said.
Im so sorry.
Amy, you didnt do anything wrong. Jake felt as if his head would burst. You didnt turn the X-ray machine on, yet here we have an X-ray of the humerus. Can you explain it?
No, sir.
