Jake couldn’t keep his eyes open. He was bathed in light, warm on his face, and for a minute he didn’t know if he was alive or dead. He squinted around him and realized he was lying in a hospital room. Sunshine poured through the window and fell on his bed, in a glowing shaft of gold. He thanked God he was alive.
The room was empty, and he lay there, feeling horrible, exhausted and weak. His stomach throbbed with pain. He could think only slowly, as if his brain didn’t work. His throat felt raw and dry, it was hard to swallow. An IV shunt was taped to his hand, a plastic clip covered his index finger. Monitors glowed next to his bed, and the door to the room was open. He became aware that the hallway outside sounded busy. People were talking and carts rattled, a metallic sound. He could smell the faint aroma of coffee and eggs, mingling with institutional disinfectants. He wasn’t hungry.
He closed his eyes against the sun. He tried to remember how he had gotten here. He must be snowed under with painkillers. It must’ve been last night. Dave had shot him in the gut. He’d been bleeding, lying on the floor. He remembered Dave pointing the gun down at him, about to fire again. Then Ryan, rushing in. And Pam, crying at his side. His wife and son had saved his life.
Jake thought of something else. The bag of evidence in the trunk of his car. He wondered what Pam and Ryan had done with it, whether they had shown it to the police or gotten rid of it forever. They weren’t around, nobody was, so he figured they must have come clean to the cops and gone to prison.
His heart lurched at the thought, but they had done the right thing, in the end. He prayed that Ryan had been charged as a juvenile, not an adult, so Jake would bear the brunt of their punishment. He could accept going to prison, and he understood why it was necessary. He had lived why it was necessary. He had to take responsibility for Kathleen’s death, and he’d rather live with honesty in prison than live on the outside, in guilt and shame.
Suddenly, there was a commotion at the doorway, and Pam, Ryan, and Detective Zwerling entered the room. Pam closed the curtains against the sunshine, then looked at Jake and did a double-take.
“Babe, are you awake? Thank God!” Pam crossed to his bedside, with Ryan next to her, breaking into a broad grin.
“Dad, how are you?”
“Fine,” Jake answered, hoarse. He assumed Pam and Ryan must have been out on bail. They were wearing the same clothes as yesterday, so they hadn’t even gone home. Or maybe they were released on Detective Zwerling’s recognizance, waiting to see what happened to him. Jake didn’t want to jump to the last possibility, which was that Pam and Ryan had hidden the evidence and hadn’t told the police, and they were all back at square one.
“Good to see you.” Pam smiled down at him, her expression soft, but not completely unguarded.
“You, too,” Jake croaked out, but he knew it didn’t begin to communicate the power of the emotion he felt for her. He thanked God he was still alive and prayed that Pam would stay married to him, but that was a conversation for another time.
Detective Zwerling was almost smiling. “Buckman, you’re tougher than I thought.”
Pam took his hand and held it lightly. “How do you feel?”
“Okay.”
“Honey, do you want some water, or juice? Are you in pain?”
“No.”
“The doctor said you’re going to be fine, in time. They did an ex lap, an exploratory laparotomy, and they removed the bullets from your stomach. There was a lot of internal bleeding, because one went through a major blood vessel, the—”
“Wait, first tell me what’s going on with…” Jake didn’t want to finish the sentence in front of Detective Zwerling, but Pam nodded, reading his mind.
“We told the police about the laptop and phone. They found them in the trunk of your car. Ryan and I agreed to go forward, and we figured that’s what you’d want to do, too.”
“I did, but how did you know?” Jake felt the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders, but he was still confused about what was going on.
“I know you.” Pam’s expression grew grave. “As for what happened next, I’ll leave that to the authorities to explain. Bill?”
“Sure.” Detective Zwerling edged closer to the bed, looking down at Jake, and the folds of his face fell into deep lines. “Pam and Ryan gave us a statement about what happened last Friday night. You’ll have to give us one, too, when you’re feeling well enough. But neither you nor Ryan are being charged with vehicular homicide.”
“Why not?” Jake asked, dumbfounded.
“The autopsy determined that the injuries Kathleen sustained as a result of being hit by your car were postmortem.”
“What?” Jake didn’t understand, struggling through a pharmaceutical fog to think.
“Kathleen was already dead when you hit her. The cause of her death was blunt force trauma to her head. The District Attorney charged Dr. David Tolliver for her murder and the murder of Andrew Voloshin.”
“Are you saying that Dr. Dave killed Kathleen?” Jake couldn’t process it fast enough. All this time, he had thought that he and Ryan were responsible for Kathleen’s death.
“Yes, we believe so.”
“How? Why?”
“This is confidential, but in the circumstances, I’ll fill you in. Kathleen was a patient of Tolliver’s, sent by her mother to help cope with the divorce and custody case. Her parents had no knowledge of any relationship between them, outside the client-doctor. Kathleen’s friend Janine Mae told us that Kathleen had fallen in love with an older man, in secret. Kathleen didn’t tell Janine Mae that the man was Tolliver. She told Janine Mae it was someone she met online.”
Jake couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His stomach was killing him, but he didn’t want to interrupt Detective Zwerling to get more painkillers.
“Janine Mae knew they met sometimes on Dolomite Road, at night. Tolliver probably used his wife’s car because the school teams could have recognized his car.”
Jake realized he’d been right about that much, but he was too astounded to feel any satisfaction.
“We think that Tolliver wanted to break off the relationship, but Kathleen didn’t. We believe that Kathleen threatened to tell her parents if he called it quits, so Tolliver killed her.” Detective Zwerling pursed his thin lips. “Tolliver lawyered up and isn’t talking, but we have hard evidence against him. Again, confidential, but we have his hair and fiber on Kathleen’s body and clothing. We also have her blood in the BMW. We collected DNA and expect it will be corroborative, but the results aren’t back yet. The forensics show that he killed her in the BMW, by slamming her head into the dashboard.”
Jake felt a wave of disgust.
“He left her body by the side of Pike Road. He probably thought she’d look like a victim of a hit-and-run, given the blind curve. You and Ryan came by shortly thereafter, maybe even within ten minutes, according to the best estimate of the pathologist.”
“Pathologists can figure that out? How?”
“By the location and type of her injuries, during the autopsy. It’s about blood loss and so forth.”
Jake tried to understand the implications. “Did you know all along that whoever was guilty of the hit-and-run didn’t actually kill Kathleen?”
“No, we weren’t sure, and the pathologist couldn’t be a hundred percent certain. If there had been more time between the time she was actually killed and when her body was hit, he would have been more sure. But it was our theory, and we liked you.”
Jake blinked, surprised. “I like you, too, Detective Zwerling.”
Pam snorted, with a sly smile. “Jake, in police talk, ‘like’ means ‘suspect.’ The police suspected you.”
Detective Zwerling permitted himself a tight smile. “We didn’t release that information to the newspapers. We were still investigating. Your actions flushed Tolliver out, but we don’t sanction citizen involvement. Law enforcement is for professionals, Jake.” Detective Zwerling’s smile faded, and his jowls deepened with disapproval. “You almost lost your life. You would have, if not for your wife and son.”