Every Wickedness (36 page)

Jordan rose to his feet. Kearns saw the effort it took, put a hand on the pilot’s shoulder and guided him back onto the seat. Kearns dragged another chair from its perfectly aligned row and sat across from him.

“Still critical,” Jordan told him. “They’re giving her fresh frozen plasma. The doctors are trying to bring her prothrombin level back to normal, but even if they do, it’ll be at least two weeks before we’ll know if she’s over the worst of it.”

“Son of a bitch.” Kearns didn’t know what the hell a prothrombin level was, but it didn’t take a
Ph.D. to know that Beth was in bad shape. When they had come upon her naked and cuffed to her captor, Beth’s skin had been a perverse patchwork of hues. There were bruises the colour of African violets, blood-red eyes, muddy rust-coloured blotches across her chest, upper lip and chin, and a horrible yellow cast to the parts of her not covered in sand, gravel, and grass.

Kearns had nearly lost his mind in the rescue helicopter, could barely restrain himself in his seat. He felt only a microbe of relief when the sight of the large “H” of the hospital helipad appeared just beyond the windshield.

Only once during the ride did Beth open her eyes, and above the thwacking of the copter’s rotor, she uttered one word.

“Who’s Kay?” Kearns now asked, remembering.

“Not who,” Jordan answered. “What.
Vitamin
K. It’s the primary agent used to clot blood.”

Kearns nodded. “I’ll never forget those red eyes. Her wrist looked pretty bad, too.”

“Imagine her dragging that sicko, the condition she was in.”

“She needed to get outside. She had no way of knowing we were coming for her.”

“Doctor said the handcuffs had a lot of scratches on them,” Jordan told Kearns. “Looks like she tried to break free. Where was the damn key?”

“In the bastard’s shoe.”

Jordan buried his face in his hands. “Shit.”

Kearns clamped a supportive hand on Bailey’s shoulder. “You gonna tell her Petersen was already dead?”

The Spiderman, Kearns had told the ravenous press, had died when the cartilage from his nose was rammed upward into his brain. The city had its hero. Now all she had to do was pull through.

J
im Kearns gave his pants a generous tug. In the six weeks since Brad Petersen’s death, Kearns had shrunk a belt size. He was battling chronic fatigue, his sense of desolation nearly equal to those bleak months following his divorce. The adrenaline bursts and the mental challenge of the Spiderman investigation were replaced by a kind of post-crime depression. A return to the same-old-same-old. Kearns imagined Brad Petersen/ William Prescott bottoming out like this on a month-by-month basis.

When he neared Beth’s home, he noticed changes there, too. There was no Christmas wreath on the door, no coloured lights strung on potted conifers. After being ushered inside, Kearns was struck by the same sense of abandonment. Unread mail littered the top of the desk. Miscellaneous shoes piled up near the door. Purses hung from doorknobs. Still, the air bore the aroma of a simmering
coq au vin
, a dish Beth had promised to cook for him and one he’d looked forward to all day.

She greeted him with a smile, and he wrapped her in a bear hug, summoning every effort to keep his mood light. Kearns presented her with a bag of shortbread cookies from his neighbourhood bakery.
“Pardon the look of the place,” she said. “I just got home.”

“Really?” Kearns inhaled deeply. “Then who’s —”

Jordan Bailey emerged from the kitchen with a tray bearing three mugs of spiced eggnog. “Hi, Jim. Hope you don’t mind me playing chef this evening.”

“Not if it tastes as good as it smells.”

They sat in the living room, Jordan and Beth close together on the loveseat, and Kearns on a chair opposite. Samson wrapped himself possessively around Beth’s ankle.

“It’s Monday,” Kearns said. “Don’t tell me you went in to work?”

Beth shook her head. “I’ve started volunteering. At Sanctuary.”

Sanctuary was a safe haven for battered women. The Victorian house, with its rusty iron fence and peeling paint buried itself among others like itself in Haight-Ashbury, the shelter’s system of passwords, padlocks, and alarms a grim reminder that there were potential killers everywhere.

“I think it will be good for me, Jim,” Beth said. “My adversary is dead. So many others still exist.”

Kearns gave her a smile of encouragement, and the three quietly toasted the season.

“You’ll never guess who volunteers at the shelter with me.”

He shrugged and took a long swallow of eggnog. “I give up. Who?”

“Sondra Devereaux.”

“Well I’ll be damned. Every time I try to hate her, something like this happens.” He set his mug on the table.

They spoke about Ginny Rizzuto, who had sent flowers and phoned daily. Beth had finally agreed to have lunch with her on Friday. “I suppose I’ll have to forgive her,” Beth acknowledged. “But she’s got some changing to do, that’s for sure. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go check on dinner.” Beth rose, gave Samson a gentle nudge, and both cat and owner headed toward the kitchen.

Once she had gone, Kearns quietly asked, “Is she all right?”

Jordan nodded. “Most days are pretty good, but she’s had a few rough nights.” He spoke of Beth’s troubled sleep, when unbidden images would loom up to haunt her, images of a handsome man hovering over her, his deep blue eyes impaling her with their gaze until the eyes became four, then six, then eight. Then he wasn’t a man anymore, but a slavering, grotesque spider. The horrid sensation of mandibles twitching near her face invariably awakened her screaming. “On those nights,” Jordan said, “we pop a comedy into the VCR and stay up until dawn.”

Kearns knew all about bad dreams and those dreadful hours before sunrise that should be tranquil but often were not. “The dreams will go away in time,” he said, avoiding Bailey’s gaze.

“You sound skeptical. She’s doing just fine, Jim. Really.”

“Of course she is. She’s got you.” He paused, felt his cheeks warm, then said, “I never did thank you. I should have.”

“What for?”

“If you hadn’t come back to the station and identified Brad in that picture, Beth might not be with us. She’s pretty special.”

“I know,” Jordan said. “I’m glad you two are friends. And you know I had to go out to Brad’s house. I was the fool who introduced her to him in the first place.”

Kearns hung his head. Seated across from him was a man he’d originally thought to be too pretty to be anything but a lightweight; now he knew Bailey had real guts. He reached into his trouser pocket, took out a small velvet box and flipped open the lid. “You think Beth is strong enough to deal with this?”

Beth re-entered the room carrying a large bowl of salad. Samson followed close at her heels. She looked at Kearns’s hand, then set the bowl on the dining room table and stepped toward him. “What’s that?”

Inside the box was a pair of diamond stud earrings.

“Oh, no,” she gasped. “Not the ones Anne bought.”

Kearns cut her off. “You sure as hell paid for them.”

“What do I do with them? I can’t w —” Her voice caught.

Kearns snapped the lid shut and handed the box to Jordan. “Shove ’em in a drawer someplace. Maybe someday you’ll be able to see them as just a nice pair of earrings.”

Jordan rose to his feet and planted a tender kiss on Beth’s forehead. “You don’t have to decide anything right now, Beth. Why don’t we eat? Jim could use a few pounds.”

Over dinner, the conversation was superficial. They traded commentary about what had made the evening papers—the newest shock-rock group, the crime rate as Christmas approached, a recent political scandal.

It wasn’t until Kearns was preparing to leave that Beth mentioned the earrings again. “I’m going to sell them,” she announced calmly. “The women at Sanctuary can use the money. I think Anne would be pleased, don’t you?”