“Julian,” I said. “The storage facility where Kingsman keeps his files uses an online backup service on their security cameras. Julian was able to find Timitz going in and out of the building. He had a key.”
“So Timitz pulled Dr. Bensen’s file and made sure you couldn’t miss it,” said Elizabeth. “He was leading you to Kingsman all along.”
“That’s the part I still don’t understand,” I said. “Did he really need me? He had everything he wanted with Grimes—a guy to tell his story.”
“Grimes was his pawn; you were his challenge,” she said. “You made it interesting for him. He admitted as much.”
“Maybe,” I said. “For sure, Grimes is going to be a busy guy for a while.”
Grimes had a story to write. A bunch of stories, actually. He also had amends to make. He’d been duped by Timitz into thinking Judge Kingsman was the Dealer. The mistake nearly cost Kingsman his life. If it had, it would’ve also cost Grimes his job, if not his entire bank account. Luckily for him, Kingsman hardly seemed like a guy who would file a civil suit. You could almost hear him citing the absence of malice.
Not only did Grimes now have the Dealer’s manifesto, he also had his own eyewitness account of how the man who wrote it died. For the next couple of weeks, his paper would essentially be renamed the Grimes Gazette.
“You’re going to use it, aren’t you?” I asked him on the phone when he called me to check on Elizabeth.
Grimes knew what I meant. The nickname. “You better believe it, Dr. Death,” he said. “Don’t worry. By the time I’m done you’ll probably get a book deal out of it.”
“For the record,” I told him, “I think I’m done writing books for a while.”
The last one was quite the troublemaker.
“All right, that’s enough talking, you two,” came the voice of another ICU nurse. She’d come over to take Elizabeth’s blood pressure. “Our girl needs some rest.”
I watched as the nurse looked me up and down, practically wincing. “Don’t say it,” I told her.
She said it anyway. “You could use some rest yourself, my friend. A shower wouldn’t hurt, either.”
Elizabeth laughed softly, as much as the pain would let her. It was easily the best sound in the world. She was out of the woods.
She was going to be okay.
Chapter 101
TRACY?
I returned to the waiting room. He was gone from his seat. He wasn’t in the hallway, either.
I figured maybe he went to the bathroom or to get some coffee. Perhaps he wanted some privacy somewhere to make a call. It could’ve been anything. Then I thought about it for a moment and realized.
It could only be one thing.
I took the elevator down to the second floor, following the signs on the wall. They were pink and blue.
“There you are,” I said.
I turned to see what Tracy was looking at. He had come to the maternity ward. The two of us were gazing through a large glass window at a roomful of newborns.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he said.
It was his tone. Each word sounded more anguished than the one before it.
“You’ve got to stop blaming yourself, Tracy.”
“How can I? I ruined it for us.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I know you want to believe that,” he said. “You’re trying so hard to convince yourself it wasn’t my fault.”
“I don’t need any convincing. I was there.”
I turned so he could look at me. I wanted him to see my face, my eyes, to know that I was telling the truth. He kept staring straight ahead, though, and in the silence that followed I got the sense that I was missing something. This was about more than our adopting a baby. This was about us.
“You have feelings for her, don’t you?” he asked.
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
“I’m not being silly,” he said. “Be honest.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I was there, too,” he said. “I heard the nurse. Elizabeth wakes up, and you’re her first thought.”
“Tracy, look at me,” I said. He finally did. “Of course I have feelings for her, but it’s different. They’re not the same feelings I have for you, that I’ll always have for you.”
He looked into my eyes. He could see the truth.
“I’m sorry. I guess I just needed to hear you say it.”
“It’s okay,” I assured him.
He smiled. “She is pretty good-looking, I have to admit.”
“Yeah. If I were straight I’d be all over her,” I said.
“Yeah. Me, too,” he said.
It felt good to laugh. It felt even better to hear Tracy laugh. He turned back to the window, pointing. “You see the one in the back row?”
I followed the line of his finger. “Second from the right?”
“Yes,” he said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
A healthy baby boy—very healthy—was fast asleep in his bassinet, his chubby, round face all scrunched up. His little blue cap had slid off his head, revealing not a stitch of hair.
“Uncle Fester from The Addams Family,” I said.
Tracy laughed again. “Totally, right?”
“Another classic TV show, by the way.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
“Because you know me all too well.”
“I do,” said Tracy. “Don’t I?”
“Yes,” I said, taking his hand. “You do.”
Chapter 102
I NEVER understood the expression “sleeping like a baby.” All the babies I’ve ever known or heard about slept like alarm clocks, waking up their parents every few hours without fail.
“How did you sleep?” asked Tracy late the next morning.
“Like a log,” I answered. Logs make much more sense. They lie there and don’t move. That was me. Ten hours of blissful sleep, followed by a shave, a shower, some coffee, a bagel, and some more coffee.
Elizabeth had been moved out of the ICU. I checked in with her briefly. Her mother and sister were with her, and I told her I’d stop by later in the afternoon after I picked up my bike from the Fiftieth Precinct.
“Have you watched any of the news on TV?” she asked.
“No, not yet,” I said.
“What about the Gazette? Have you seen it?”
“Do I want to?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Death. Personally, I think your ego was too big to begin with,” she said.
I hung up and checked out the online edition of the paper on my laptop. Grimes was true to his word on both counts. One, I had a new nickname whether I liked it or not. Two, he made me look good.
Of course, the better I looked, the better he looked. In fact the way he described “hunting down the Dealer,” one would think that Elizabeth and I were attached to him at the hip. Even Brian Williams would’ve snickered at that.
To his credit, though, Grimes took sole responsibility for getting the story wrong about Kingsman. He could’ve hid behind the Gazette and its editors, but he stepped up and shouldered all the blame.
Multiple witnesses had seen a man wearing Kingsman’s fedora and duffle coat—the one with the toggle buttons—in the building where Reginald Hicks lived. He was the supposed contract killer Kingsman had hired and subsequently murdered to cover his tracks.