The Last Blue Plate Special (32 page)

“Look,” I said, “I’ll follow you to UCSD in my truck, okay? I’ll be right behind you.”

Without meaning to I reached down to touch her hand, which felt like a frozen glove.

“You won’t be alone,” I told her. “It’s not far to the hospital and I’ll be right behind you all the way.”

Brontë was happy to leave her station on the porch and eyed me curiously as we scrambled into the truck.

“Don’t even ask,” I told her.

But I didn’t feel sick anymore.

F
rom the hospital emergency room I called Rathbone, who was with Roxie and the FBI field agent in charge of the investigation.

“Grecchi’s tried to kill herself,” I told him. “Cut her wrist. I found her, called 911, I’m at UCSD Med Center with her now,
and Rainer’s on the way. He says Grecchi was with him all night last night and so she can’t be Sword.”

“He’s protecting her,” Rathbone said after conveying the information to everyone else. “Stay there until we get there.”

So I stayed with Isadora Grecchi as I’d promised, although they’d run a blood test and then sedated her within five minutes
of our arrival. She now lay stuporous behind a curtain in one of the e.r.’s examining bays. There seemed to be no rush about
sewing up her arm, which was no longer bleeding and was of interest to various medical personnel who drifted in and out muttering
things about “flexors” and “the median nerve.”

“Need a reconstruction consult,” said a young man in scrubs, jotting notes on a chart. “Afraid she’s gonna lose some mobility
in that hand. Get a plastic surgeon down here
now,
please,” he told a nurse.

“A surgeon is on the way,” I announced from my post beside Grecchi’s inert form. “Jennings Rainer. He’ll be here shortly.”

“Rainer?” the young doctor said. “I’ve heard of him. Hear he’s good. Have to clear it, though. He’s not on staff.”

“I’m sure there won’t be any problem,” I said as though I knew what I was talking about.

Even sedated, Isadora Grecchi seemed tense. Her dark, unruly hair stood out from her head in clumps against the pillow, and
her facial muscles moved randomly from time to time, pulling her mouth into eerie, childlike grins that vanished in seconds.
She was shivering and her skin felt cold. Since no one was paying any attention to me I opened every closet and cabinet until
I located some blankets and piled them on top of her.

“It’s Blue McCarron. I’m still here. You’re not alone,” I told her repeatedly even though she couldn’t hear me. “And Dr. Rainer
should arrive any minute.”

I wondered what would happen to her now. She’d be handcuffed to her bed under the eye of an armed guard in the hospital, probably.
Then jail and a long, complicated trial. Then prison. Maybe a sentence of death, although it would never be carried out. The
appeals would last longer than Isadora Grecchi, at fifty-one, would live. And why? Why had she chosen to kill women she herself
had rendered unconscious and vulnerable, with a chemical she herself might have been prescribed? None of it made any sense.

I saw Jennings Rainer enter the e.r. examining area before he saw me. And if he’d been upset before, he wasn’t now. Dressed
impeccably in a black cashmere jacket over a white polo shirt and khakis, he looked as though he’d been summoned from a golf
course.

“Where is Dr. Grecchi?” he inquired politely of a nurse.

“Right over here, Dr. Rainer. Dr. Chattin, our chief of staff, would like to see you after you’ve examined her. She’ll be
prepped for surgery shortly, and it has been suggested that you’d be willing to operate. You’ll need to scrub in about forty-five
minutes if Chattin okays it.”

“Of course,” Rainer answered.

To me he said, “I’m so grateful to you, Dr. McCarron. You may have saved her life. And you can have no idea what your presence
here has meant to Isadora. But why did you come? Why did you extend yourself to a woman you believe to be a murderer?”

“She was frightened, Dr. Rainer, and despite what the paramedics said I wasn’t sure she’d live. There was so much blood. It
was awful. Do you have any idea why she’d kill these people? It’s so strange….”

“Isadora is incapable of harming anyone except herself,” he said dispassionately, removing the bandage at her wrist. “I’d
like to speak with you for a few minutes after I’ve completed my examination of the wound. Would you wait for me in the driveway
outside the emergency room doors? What I have to say is confidential.”

“Of course,” I answered in the same tones he’d used with the nurse, and went outside.

The blood on my skirt had dried to a blackish brown crust, so I turned it backward and sat on the grass to wait. I didn’t
have to worry about grass stains, I thought. As soon as I could get my other clothes from the truck, the skirt would be thrown
in a trash can. I never wanted to see it again. Or Isadora Grecchi, for that matter. Or the bones inside her left arm.

“There you are,” Rainer said minutes later. “I may be able to save the mobility in her hand, but it’s going to be difficult.
Let me just thank you for your help and then tell you what you will find out in any event. After that I must speak with Dr.
Chattin and prepare for the surgery. I’m sure it will be allowed. I’ve known Chattin for twenty years.”

He was standing over me, apparently not in the mood to sit in the grass and chat, so I stood as well.

“Let’s go over here in the shade,” he suggested, moving some distance from the e.r. door to stand near an oleander at the
edge of the hospital property. “You see, Isadora is more to me than just a colleague,” he began. “I’ve known her since she
was very young, a child. It was in Denver. I was doing my residency at a hospital there, and she was brought in. The injuries
were, well, very serious. Isadora was only ten years old. She’d been raped, Dr. McCarron, and not for the first time. The
rapist was her stepfather, a drunken bastard—and I make no apology for my language—who should have been put to death for what
he did to her. I assisted with the surgery. We were able to repair the damage to her spleen and the large bowel, but not the
uterus, which had to be removed. Isadora cannot bear children.

“He’d infected her with syphilis as well, and it was already at the latent stage, which meant she was infected at least a
year prior to that hospitalization. The large doses of penicillin necessary to kill the syphilis spirochetes at that stage
of infection can make an adult very sick. You can imagine what it did to a ten-year-old child already traumatized by near-fatal
internal injuries.”

I was feeling nauseous again. “Where was her mother?” “Isadora’s mother suffered very severe depressive episodes, often requiring
hospitalization. There were no other family members to care for Isadora, so during her mother’s hospitalizations she was left
in the care of her brutish stepfather. After the rape in which he came very close to killing her, her mother committed suicide.”

“God,” I whispered. “The police did turn up the fact that she was made a ward of the court in Denver, but no other information
because juvenile records are sealed. Rathbone said they’d subpoenaed the records, but it would take weeks.”

“As I said, you were going to learn her history anyway,” he went on. “Now that the FBI is involved, those records can be accessed
immediately. The next part of what I have to tell you is quite painful to me, but I want you to know. It’s necessary.

“Marlis and I had been married for four years at that time and had been unable to conceive a child. We were tested; there
was nothing wrong, but it just didn’t happen. Marlis wanted a child so badly. When I came home and told her about Isadora,
she said she wanted to visit the child, cheer her up during her stay in the hospital. In those days doctors’ wives often volunteered
at the hospitals where we were on staff, so it was perfectly normal for Marlis to do that. Then when the time came for Isadora
to be discharged there was some problem with the social services agency. No foster home was available in the area, and she
was to be sent to another town. Mar asked me if we could take the girl in, become foster parents for her until a local placement
could be arranged. Mar wanted to stay in contact with her, you see.”

“So you’re Grecchi’s foster father?”

He stared at the oleander, then said, “No. We did take Isadora to live with us for a time, even considered adopting her, at
first. She was a lively little thing, but so damaged by the abuse she’d endured. Temper tantrums, soiling the bed, lashing
out at us physically, deliberately breaking things. And then Mar became pregnant.”

“With Megan?” I asked, already knowing what had happened next.

“Yes. We were overjoyed, but fearful, too. Mar had a difficult pregnancy in the beginning. There was some bleeding. She was
terribly ill and we were afraid she might lose the baby. After a month it became clear that she couldn’t handle Isadora alone
while pregnant, and I was always at work, of course. We were very young and there wasn’t much information at that time about
the difficulties presented by an abused child. We didn’t know what we’d gotten into, only that we couldn’t go on with it.
We had to take Isadora back to the social services agency, allow her to be placed in a foster home out of town.”

He took a deep breath, tugged a pink oleander blossom from the bush, and regarded it bleakly.

“I did it, I took her away,” he went on. “Marlis was too upset to go along. I took Isadora to the agency offices with her
clothes and all her little things, little toys and a brown corduroy teddy bear Marlis had made for her out of a jacket I wore
in college. Mar used the cuff buttons for its eyes. Isadora loved that bear, wouldn’t be parted from it. Until Mar’s death
two years ago, that was the worst day of my life.”

I watched as he dropped the pink blossom to the grass at our feet, and didn’t mention the brown corduroy bear on the mantel
in Isadora Grecchi’s living room.

“I don’t know what to say, Dr. Rainer,” I replied in a voice I’d heard Roxie use when talking to her patients on the phone.
Quiet and calm. “It was obvious from Isadora’s reaction to my bodyguard that she mistrusts men. I suspected that she might
have been raped, but of course I didn’t imagine anything of this magnitude. It’s beyond imagining.”

“Yes,” he said, “but let me tell you the rest, and then I must go. Isadora needs me. Do you know, Dr. McCarron, that an obligation
to a broken child, once undertaken, cannot end? Isadora is fifty-one years old now, and I am sixty-seven. Forty years have
gone by, Marlis is dead, and Megan has established a life with her own husband and children, and Isadora still needs my care.
Perhaps it would have been different if she hadn’t inherited a genetic proclivity to depression from her mother, but she did.
And given the intolerable stress in her young life, there was no way that proclivity could have remained inactive.”

“What happened after she went into foster care in another town?” I pushed.

“It was in Colorado Springs, a well-meaning family but unfortunately of that ‘Christian’ fundamentalist type who manage to
think the Bible is both historical fact and absolute law despite all reason. Stupid, pathetic people lost in punitive beliefs
they then inflicted on the children in their care. Mar and I tried to visit Isadora every month or so, less often after Megan
was born, of course, but we kept up the contact. We knew things weren’t going well for Isadora there, but there was nothing
we could do. Then one weekend I was in Colorado Springs for a medical conference and happened to have a few free hours in
the afternoon. I went to this foster home unannounced to visit Isadora, who was then almost twelve, and walked in on a scene
that shocked me.”

“What? What happened?”

“The poor girl,” he went on, clenching and unclenching his fists, “was being punished for something. Isadora was always doing
something, was always in trouble both at home and in school. I don’t mean to suggest that she wasn’t a difficult child. But
these people, these foster parents, had made her strip to her panties and stand in the middle of the living room while the
father read aloud from the Bible.”

Of course. The Sword of Heaven.

“That’s what I walked in on—Isadora standing there, not crying but miserable, trying to cover her little breasts with her
arms. There were other children in the home, Dr. McCarron, including three boys, one of them half grown and already shaving.
They were allowed to watch Isadora’s humiliation. Apparently the others were so accustomed to the spectacle they were bored
with it by then, because one of them had made a bowl of popcorn and that seemed of more interest to them than Isadora. I threw
my jacket over her and took her out of there that minute. The father recited something about the ‘Whore of Babylon’ as we
left, but didn’t attempt to stop me.

“I took her back to Denver and insisted that the agency find a better home for her. By then I was on staff at the hospital
and had the community standing granted to doctors. I could throw some weight around, and I did. Isadora went to another placement,
this time in Denver. Later there were two more foster homes, and then when the depressive symptoms began to manifest when
she was about fourteen, she was sent to a facility for emotionally disturbed children. A sort of combination hospital and
orphanage, where she could be monitored. There were a number of suicide attempts during those years, Dr. McCarron, one of
them almost fatal.”

I thought about the bones I’d seen, and a child of fourteen, and tasted bile in the back of my throat. I could not have survived
one week of Isadora Grecchi’s life, and I knew it.

“That facility was the best place for her,” Rainer continued hurriedly. “The staff were trained and for the most part kind.
There was an arts and crafts program taught by someone from a local community college. Isadora was encouraged to paint and
found in that a way to release some of her rage and pain. Marlis and I continued to visit with her, occasionally brought her
to the house for a weekend, although these events were exhausting.”