When Carver left the elevator on the fourth floor and hurried down the hall, the first person he saw was McGregor standing outside the door to Beth’s room. The lieutenant’s wrinkled brown suit coat was open and hitched back on one side, as if to allow him to reach his gun, whose checked butt was visible in its leather holster. It was a pose Carver had seen McGregor affect before when he wanted to be especially authoritarian.
McGregor reached out a long arm toward Carver as he approached the door. “Not so fast, asshole.”
Carver avoided the arm, shoved him aside, and continued on his way, expecting McGregor to follow him into the room. His knuckles whitened on the crook of his cane. He was ready to deal with McGregor if he came in.
But McGregor, an expert on the remaining length of burning fuses, stayed outside.
Wicker was in the room, standing at the foot of the bed. So was a uniform from the Del Moray Police Department and a stocky plainclothes cop with acne Carver assumed was FBI.
Beth was standing near the bed, alongside Wicker, tall and elegant in her hospital gown. She was barefoot and looked perfectly all right except for the stitches still in place on the side of her neck.
The woman lying across the foot of the bed was battered and bleeding, and one of her hands was wrapped in a white towel. Someone had done a thorough and skillful job of administering a brutal beating to Officer Lapella.
Everyone other than Lapella stared at Carver. Lapella continued to face the ceiling. Wicker nodded to him. Beth walked over to him and leaned against him, placing a hand on his shoulder near his neck. He felt her fingers squeeze, loosen, squeeze, loosen.
“Beth saw the guy, and a nurse saw him leave,” Wicker said. “He was tall, broad shouldered, well-tailored blue suit, red tie, blond crew cut, black horn-rimmed glasses. Looked like a government official or an accountant, the nurse said.”
“The WASP” Beth said to Carver.
“Why Lapella?” Carver asked. In the corner of his vision he saw McGregor enter the room and slouch against the wall with his arms crossed.
“It seems he was using her as an example,” Wicker said, looking particularly dumpy and disheveled next to Beth. “It was a way to demonstrate what he could just as easily have done to Miss Jackson.”
The door opened and a spoke-wheeled gurney thumped and nosed into the room, followed by a nurse and a male attendant. They worked a backboard beneath Lapella. No one spoke as she was transferred from Beth’s bed onto the gurney. Lapella glanced over at Carver and smiled weakly with split and puffy lips. It looked as if her nose was broken, and both her eyes were almost swollen shut. Carver reached over and gently touched her elbow.
The nurse affixed an IV needle in the back of Lapella’s left hand and hung the clear plastic pouch on a metal stand attached to the gurney, draping the tube so it wasn’t bent or kinked before adjusting the valve for the proper drip rate. She nodded to the attendant, then held the door open while he wheeled the gurney out. McGregor waved a hand at the plainclothes cop with bad skin, who followed the gurney. Apparently he wasn’t FBI after all, but was one of McGregor’s men.
“What do the doctors say?” Carver asked.
“Aside from cuts and contusions,” Wicker said, “all of the fingers on her right hand are broken.”
“They sounded like twigs snapping,” Beth said. She didn’t change expression or sound horrified when she said this, it was simply a statement of fact. McGregor and Wicker looked at her. Only Carver knew how tough she could be.
“Lapella was in the room here when the guy came in,” McGregor said, pushing away from the wall with a lanky, whiplike motion of his long body. “Didn’t have time to get to her gun, she said. I don’t know about that. Gun or not, you’d think she’d have taken him on. Hell, she’s had training.”
“She really didn’t have time,” Beth said. “Not to get her gun out or do anything else. He was smiling and didn’t say anything, and within two seconds after he’d walked in, he slapped her so hard she almost lost consciousness, then he just kept beating on her. When I started to get up, he drew her gun from its holster and pointed it at me, ordered me to lie back down.”
McGregor looked pained. “He took Lapella’s own gun? Where was she and what was she doing when this was happening?”
“She was on the floor then, and he started kicking her. He kept kicking her, all the time looking at me over the barrel of the gun and talking about wanton women and being burned with fire and lightning. I remember one phrase: ‘For fear of her torture, shall they stand crying.’ He repeated it several times all the while he was kicking. He . . . he seemed to relish what he was doing.”
She sat down on the bed.
“Why don’t you lie down,” Wicker suggested.
“No, I’ll just sit.”
“Did he hurt you at all?” Carver asked, controlling his anger with difficulty, He yearned to do something about this, to do something back!
“No, he didn’t even touch me. And while he was . . . doing things to Linda, he was careful to stand so I’d see what was happening. He wanted me to watch. More than that, he wanted to watch me.”
“Why the hell didn’t you ring for the nurse?” McGregor asked. His tone suggested that what had happened was partly Beth’s fault. The fire in Carver’s stomach threatened to spread.
“I started to,” Beth said, “but he reached over and ripped the call button from the wall. He picked up Linda and threw her across the foot of the bed.” Her voice quavered with emotion. “Then he bent back and broke her fingers over the top of the footboard.”
“Did he say why he was doing this?” Wicker asked.
“No. He kept up a stream of casual chatter about God and the Bible and the arm and sword and lightning of the Lord. Some of it was scripture, I’m sure. And when he was finished, he left the room fast, moving quickly for a man that large. I climbed out of bed then, yelled down the hall for a nurse, and went to help Linda.”
“That’s when the nurse saw the man walking toward the stairway,” Wicker said. “She gave the same description as Miss Jackson and Officer Lapella. Said he was taking his time and seemed calm.”
“He was calm all the time he was in here with us,” Beth said. “Calm and in a kind of sadistic daze, but you could tell a part of him was very alert. I’ve seen men like that before. Women, too.”
“I’ll bet you have,” McGregor said.
“He’s the man I asked you about three days ago,” Carver said to Wicker. “The one who came into the room and then turned around and left when he saw a nurse was with Beth.”
“I know,” Wicker said. “We’ll learn his identity.”
“Ask Norton about him,” McGregor said. “Or let me ask Norton.”
“Norton’s under federal jurisdiction,” Wicker reminded him.
“Sure he is, which is what’s gonna fuck up the case. Whoever beat up Lapella was a Bible-thumping shithead just like Norton, so Norton’ll probably know him. These militant religious jerk-offs are a big gang, like the Crips and the Bloods, only they pray.”
“Norton’s not talking,” Wicker said. “He’s got an attorney.”
McGregor smiled. “I know how to cut attorneys out of the loop long enough to get what’s needed here.”
Wicker looked at McGregor with distaste, then at Carver.
“He’s Del Moray’s biggest criminal,” Carver said, glancing at McGregor. “The chamber of commerce would make him a tourist attraction, only the tourists would faint.”
McGregor started toward him, then stopped abruptly and grinned, probing the space between his yellow front teeth with his tongue. “Have your fun now, Carver, but he who laughs last will laugh standing on your fucking throat.”
Wicker stared at McGregor as if he were something that should be stepped on but would make a mess.
“Don’t forget it was my man got beat up,” McGregor reminded them.
“As if you care about your man,” Beth said.
“If it’d been an actual man, this probably wouldn’t have happened. We’d have the assailant in custody right now,” McGregor said disgustedly.
“Or maybe a dead cop,” Carver said.
“Let the nurses know when you feel well enough to make a formal statement,” Wicker said to Beth.
She nodded.
“Make damned sure my department gets a copy of that statement,” McGregor said. “The clinic bombing might be a federal investigation, but there’s no guarantee Lapella’s beating is connected to that.”
“It’s guarantee enough for the U.S. government,” Wicker told him. “It’ll have to be guarantee enough for you.”
McGregor glared at him, then at Carver. Then at Beth, the cause of this latest problem that was spoiling his day.
“We’ll see how it plays out,” he said, then shoved the door open violently and stalked out.
Wicker stared after him and shook his head. “I’ve dealt with locals all over the country, but that one’s as bad as I’ve seen. He’s a cop in name only. How’d he ever get on the Del Moray force in the first place?”
“We think he somehow transferred to the department directly from the Mafia.” Carver saw no point in explaining that McGregor had been forced from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in disgrace and was a Del Moray officer only because he had something on the mayor. Or, more accurately, the mayor’s wife.
“We’ve got agents outside the hospital and on this floor,” Wicker said to Beth with a professionally reassuring smile. “Lapella’s assailant can’t get back in here. No one can without our okay. You’ll be safe.”
Carver knew better. “I think she should check out and go home with me.”
“Why?”
“She’ll be safer there. I can make sure of that.”
“I don’t think so,” Wicker said.
“It isn’t up to you,” Beth told him. “It’s up to me.”
Wicker stared at her. “I’ve talked to your doctor, Miss Jackson. He told me you’d asked about leaving the hospital. He recommends at least another day. So do I.” He looked at Carver. “Can we compromise on this? One more day?”
“Ask her,” Carver said.
Wicker did.
“One more day,” Beth agreed, “then I become an outpatient.”
Wicker smiled at her and left the room.
Beth lay back on the bed and didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Carver sat down in the chair next to the bed and poured some water from the pitcher on the table into a plastic cup and held it out for her. She shook her head, refusing to drink. Carver took a few sips, then put down the cup.
“It was a nightmare, Fred.”
“I figured.”
“He used poor Linda, tortured her and mutilated her for no reason other than to demonstrate that he could do it to me if that was his choice. So why didn’t he simply do it to me?”
“If he’d already done it to you, what he might do would be removed as a threat. Whoever’s behind the clinic bombing-and it appears that someone other than Norton planned it-sees three threats: the FBI, the local law, and a snooping private investigator with a serious grudge. McGregor and the Del Moray police will be content with the conclusion that Norton acted alone. So might the FBI, after a cursory investigation. Those are the two biggest threats, and they have to be dealt with-and maybe they can be, because they’re constricted by the law and are at least somewhat predictable. But I’m a wild card, and they want me out of the deck.”
“So beating up Lapella in front of me was simply a precaution, a message to you.”
“An obvious warning,” Carver said. “They want Norton to go to trial, be convicted, and take the fall. Case closed, news media lose interest.”
“Do you think Operation Alive is behind the bombing, and making sure Norton carries the whole blame is his lawyer’s real assignment?”
“It’s looking more and more likely.”
Beth chewed on her lower lip the way she often did when anger smoldered in her. “They’re underestimating me, Fred.”
“How do you mean?”
“There are two wild cards in the deck.”
He picked up the plastic cup and took another sip of ice water, worrying, thinking maybe one was wilder than the other.