I arrived at Vanessa’s room at Mission Memorial Hospital a few minutes before 8:00 a.m. to check on her condition. I asked the doctor who was leaving the room when I stepped inside if he thought she was going to be all right.
“Too early to tell.” He didn’t even look up from his clipboard to see who I was. And then he was gone, and I was alone with her.
I positioned myself in one of the chairs beside a countertop covered with pills and bottles and a Gideon Bible.
I’d called Margaret on my way to the hospital, and the conversation had gone better than I expected. She only swore at me twice. “I’m holding you personally responsible for this debacle last night.” Her voice was as taut as a cable.
“I figured you would.”
“You were the senior agent on-site.”
“Yes, I was.”
“Full report. Do you understand? Then we’ll see what happens from there.”
“Fine.”
Click.
As far as I could tell, the killer had called Vanessa and convinced her to go to the golf course. Maybe he threatened to kill her boyfriend if she didn’t, who knows.
The preliminary blood tests on Grolin’s body indicated that he’d been heavily sedated and then drugged. It looked like the killer had abducted him and then released him at the pro shop in a drug-induced delirium, with his hands taped to those toy weapons.
It seemed like I was chasing a phantom.
I hoped Vanessa might know his name.
She lay still, the monitor beeping soft and regular. Soft and regular. Purring out her heartbeat.
I looked around her hospital room.
The scene looked all too familiar.
A hospital bed. A dying woman. Stiff, ugly chairs in the corners of the room. The only thing missing was a fervent young pastor named Donovan Richman.
Of course, this time the woman wasn’t my wife of just five months; instead she was the only person who might be able to lead us to a maniacal killer. That was all.
For a few minutes I found myself listening to Vanessa’s soft, methodical breathing and smelling the stark antiseptic smell only hospitals seem to have. And with each passing moment another wave of grief went roaring through my chest. I was sitting there lost in thought when I heard Lien-hua’s voice. “Dr. Bowers?”
I turned. “Yeah?”
She stepped softly into the room. “You OK?”
I looked down. I was clutching the Gideon Bible; I hadn’t even realized I’d picked it up. “Just thinking. Remembering.”
“Christie?” she said softly.
I set the Bible down. “A pastor used to come and visit her, toward the end.” I wanted to tell Lien-hua everything and I didn’t want to tell her anything at all.
“Did it help?”
I could feel myself getting tense. Thinking back to my discussions with Reverend Donovan Richman made me frustrated all over again. Christie. The doctors. The questions…
“Patrick?”
I blinked. “Yeah?” I’d done it again, drifted away.
Vanessa lay motionless beside us. Brum, brum. Brum, brum… Lien-hua took a seat in the chair opposite me. “You were telling me about the pastor.” She seemed to have slipped into counseling mode. Maybe she was analyzing me, profiling me. But at that moment I didn’t really care.
I sighed. “I don’t think he really realized how desperate Christie’s condition was because more often than not he ended up arguing with me. ‘Design is evidence of a designer,’ he told me one day, and then recited some of the typical Intelligent Design arguments-irreducible complexity, things like that.”
“And?”
“That was the day the doctors told me they’d given Christie a dose of the wrong medication, and her condition was spiraling downward. So when Reverend Richman said that, I laid into him. ‘OK. Wings and eyeballs, I’ll give you that,’ I said. I was trying to find a way to win at something, it seemed like I was losing everything. ‘But if design is evidence of a designer, Reverend, then let me ask you a question.’ ‘What’s that?’ he said, and I said, ‘What’s chaos evidence of?’”
“And what did he say to that?”
I looked from Lien-hua to Vanessa. “At first he didn’t say anything. I’d stumped him, so finally he says, ‘I don’t know, Dr. Bowers. What is chaos evidence of?’ But then, before I could reply, Benjamin answered.”
“Wait a minute. Who’s Benjamin?”
“One of the deacons at their church. He would come in with the pastor. He usually didn’t say much, just listened. Anyway, that day he answered my question.”
“About chaos?”
“Yeah.”
I walked past Lien-hua and stared out the window at the dirty white clouds scampering across the sky. “He whispered the answer kind of softly. But it was like he read my mind.”
“So what’s the answer? What is chaos evidence of?”
“Us. Human beings.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Well, Benjamin said something about how he knew I’d seen the worst kind of violence humans are capable of, and I mean, he was right. I have. So have you, Lien-hua, its wings and eyeballs, the evil that human beings do to each other…” I let my voice trail off.
Vanessa’s heart monitor hummed.
“What then?”
“He told me he’d seen evil too: the evil we do to ourselves. In people’s confessions and tears and prayers.” I hesitated for a second. “He said souls can be just as bloody and torn up as bodies can. He called it the other kind of violence.”
“The other kind of violence,” she echoed. We both looked at Vanessa. I had the feeling Lien-hua was remembering something, reliving something. “I think I agree with him,” she said at last. Something from the past was haunting her.
I wanted to ask her about it, but the time wasn’t right. I didn’t say anything.
And maybe I should have told her the rest, but I didn’t.
Maybe I should have explained that Donovan quietly reached over and held my hand in both of his. Maybe I should have told her that he prayed the simplest prayer I’d ever heard him say, a prayer for hope, a petition for mercy both for himself and for me, and that I just sat there with nothing to say as those two men tried to pass something along to me that my heart had lost-or maybe never had. And all the while Christie lay dying beside us.
No, living.
She was living beside us.
They were living beside her.
I was the one who was dying.
“You’re right, chaos is evidence of human beings,” Pastor Richman whispered to me after his prayer was over. “But hope is evidence of God. That’s the deeper design behind everything, Patrick. Hope despite the pain.”
Maybe I should have told Lien-hua those things, but I didn’t. All I said was, “Souls can be just as bloody and torn up as bodies… Yeah, I think I agree with him too.”
I glanced at my watch and stood up. I had to get going to pick up Tessa.
“By the way,” said Lien-hua softly, “I checked the cell phone records this morning. The call Vanessa got last night didn’t come from Joseph Grolin’s cell phone.” Back to business. Back to the present.
“Do we know whose?”
“No. The number was untraceable-surprise, surprise. But, when Vanessa was talking on the phone back at her house, she was gesturing with her hand. I think that whoever called her was someone she knew.”
“Hmm. Good point.”
“I wonder why the killer went to all the trouble to set up Grolin, and then sent him in like that just to get shot.”
“Maybe he wanted that explosion yesterday morning to end everything, and when we survived he just adjusted, went to plan B. Maybe he wanted to eliminate someone from our team-he knew that whoever ended up shooting Grolin would be taken off the case for a while. Or maybe he just did it because he could, for the thrill. I don’t know. Listen. I need to go get Tessa; can you see if you can track down that cult guy in New Mexico?”
“I thought Margaret was on that.”
“She is,” I said. “But right now I’m not sure who I can trust. So can you?”
She hesitated. “I’ll see what I can do.”
And with that, I left the hospital to pick up my stepdaughter, the raven who’d been blown onto my doorstep by this chaotic thing called life.