match!”
Amaia left the bridge and grabbed the deck railing, seeking warmth to counteract her chills. She was shaking hard, even though the temperature had risen almost into the nineties over the course of the morning. Her hands trembled, and the aching void in her belly filled with certainties as she obsessively went over the new revelations.
Johnson followed her on deck, but Dupree lingered in the cabin to study the notebook she’d left behind. A few scrawled words, a rough sketch of a heart that intrigued him. Usually when someone draws a heart, it looks like a valentine heart, two curves that meet in a point. Amaia had drawn an almost anatomical heart with oddly distorted ventricles and a lumpish apex. Dupree folded the sheet and took it with him.
Johnson stood on one side of Amaia. Dupree took the other. The noon sun reflected from the rippling surface of the water, stirred by the bayou current and the backwash of the hurricane tide returning to the Gulf of Mexico. Amaia wondered how many corpses it was carrying to the depths. Dozens? Hundreds? How many had met a horrible fate during the raging storm? How many had been murdered under cover of the tempest? And how many could have been victims of something infinitely worse?
“We have to go back,” Amaia said, looking out into the distance.
“Agent Johnson, please go get Detectives Bull and Charbou. We should all be here,” Dupree said.
Dupree studied Amaia as Johnson stepped, and sometimes leaped, from boat to boat. After concluding the call with Landis, she’d called another number Landis had provided, that of the gynecologist treating Mrs. Davis. It was recorded in documents filed with the company’s health insurance plan.
Steve Owen, MD, hadn’t volunteered any information. He’d insisted on maintaining doctor-patient confidentiality as if his life depended on it. But, even so, his silences and negative answers had given them something to go on.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help you out. I’ve cooperated in the past when the Bureau contacted me about other matters, but I can’t imagine any investigation that would justify revealing medically privileged information. Maybe if you can tell me what sort of crime you’re looking into . . .”
Amaia smiled wryly, wishing she could. Of course, Doctor! I suspect the patient’s husband is a serial killer who murdered his previous family. They’d disappointed him, so he decided they’d be better off in heaven. And since he discovered his current wife was pregnant, he’s been reliving that experience, killing families all across the country. If the baby his wife is carrying turns out to be male, he’ll kill them both. And the rest as well.
“All right, then, let’s attack it a different way,” she’d stubbornly replied. “If I were forty-five years old, the same age as Mrs. Davis, and you were my attending physician, I assume you’d do all sorts of prenatal tests to monitor my health and that of the fetus. Am I right about that? Over.”
“That would be the usual course of treatment.”
“Tests such as amniocentesis, usually done around week sixteen. I assume one was done for Mrs. Davis. Over.”
“You can assume that much. Okay, over.”
“And I also have to assume the results were favorable, because the pregnancy hasn’t been terminated. Over.”
“You may be overstepping your bounds there. Some couples decide to continue a pregnancy, even when amniocentesis results strongly suggest an abnormality. Because of religious beliefs or similar humanitarian concerns. Over.”
“Dr. Owen, I believe an ethical physician such as yourself, concerned above all for the safety of his patients, wouldn’t have submitted Mrs. Davis to a risky test that might have caused a spontaneous abortion if he’d known in advance she was determined not to terminate the pregnancy even in the worst of circumstances. Over.”
Though he gave away nothing in his words, Dr. Owen seemed to soften a bit. “My responsibility is to ensure the safety of both the mother and the developing child, and I did exactly that in this case. As I do with all my patients. Over.”
“Did they want to know the sex of the child?” she demanded bluntly.
She must have taken him off guard, for he gave a direct answer. “Mrs. Davis didn’t want to know. She wants it to be a surprise on the day of the birth.” He covered himself. “I don’t think I’m getting into the realm of confidential information when I say that. Over.”
But he had. He hadn’t said “she wanted” but instead “she wants,” which implied Mrs. Davis hadn’t yet