She did that little touch thing on my arm, a practice taught at seminars, one of those body cues to communicate sympathy and compassion while telling somebody to fuck off. “Perhaps tomorrow.”
“Tell you what,” Bobby replied with a grin as sharklike as her determination to get off the ward floor and into the elevator. “How about if I ride down with you and we can talk along the way? McGinnis here can maybe touch base with your grandfather’s doctor and get a better idea about how he’s doing.”
She was too fidgety, and for a moment there I thought she was going to argue, but the elevator doors opened and she practically leaped through them, reaching the relative safety of the lift. Bobby was close on her heels, stabbing at the buttons before Marlena could protest, and I got a wink from him right before the doors shut.
Gambling Arthur Brinkerhoff was in the same room as before, I headed through the small crowd and down the hall. There wasn’t much celebration on this floor. It was mostly filled with anxious tension when most of the conversation revolved around pleas to God or condemning Him. The air was cold enough to hurt my nose, but it was typical for a hospital. They were pretty much cryogenic chambers, possibly preparing the ward’s patients for the steel drawers that awaited them in the morgue downstairs.
The machines in Arthur’s room had multiplied since I’d last been there. Now everything beeped and chimed and sang, loud and cheerful enough that I should’ve looked for a blue hedgehog collecting gold rings, but the man lying in the hospital bed looked even more fragile than he had before. Tubes were plugged in and taped down practically all over his body, and he was motionless, his eyes still beneath his paper-thin lids. I didn’t know if the machines were keeping him alive or if he was breathing on his own. Honestly, considering how many bruises and welts I could see, I was surprised he was still around.
What surprised me more was the stout Teutonic woman sitting on one of the chairs next to his bed. She was perhaps thirty, maybe more, but her age probably would never really matter. She was a block of a woman, staunch and strong, the type of person who could probably build a log cabin if ever she got stuck in a snowstorm, and milk a wandering reindeer so she could make her own cheese. Her light blond hair was cut short, framing her square face, and her skin was lightly freckled, her thin mouth unpainted and set into a stern line. She was dressed in a practical way—a nondescript blouse and black slacks, a pair of no-nonsense loafers on her broad feet. There was something so familiar about her that I could only stare at her, trying to place where we’d met before.
“Who the hell are you?” she snapped, her words a leather whip across my tender skin. I knew that voice. I’d heard it before, only raspier with age.
“Cole McGinnis,” I informed her, not liking the realization digging sharp claws through my guts. “Arthur Brinkerhoff hired me to look into his wife’s murder. Who are you?”
“I am Marlena Brinkerhoff,” she replied, rising up from the chair, a Valkyrie ready to do battle to defend her fallen grandfather. “And I know all about you, Mister McGinnis, so get the hell out of my grandfather’s room before I call security.”
Twelve
“I WAS backpacking through Mongolia when I got the call about Mama,” the real Marlena said, staring at the now empty hospital bed in the room. “I was in the air when he was being attacked, I guess. It’s all a blur. I can’t even tell you what day it is. When I landed in LAX, I had messages from my boss in San Francisco, asking me if my grandfather was all right. Soon as I found out where he was, I headed straight over. The detective on the case left me your name on my voice mail but I already knew it. You’re the man who Poppa hired to catch Mama cheating on him.”
A battalion of scrub-wearing nurses and attendants had bundled the old man off for parts unknown a minute or so before, unwrapping him from his nest of tubing and transferring him to a gurney much like a pit crew servicing a racecar between laps. She’d sat down back into her chair, only the tightness around her mouth and the shadows beneath