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They told him not to talk about the interview “because it’s a serious ongoing investigation and we don’t want word leaking out.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. I wouldn’t want the guys in the suite to know.”
—
In the car,Virgil made some notes about the interview, with the time and date, and then asked, “What do we do with Hess? Stake him out?”
Lucas nodded, started the car. “Maggie thinks he’ll come after her. If we get a look at him, then tag him to her house... he has to make a move before we grab him.”
“He might still have that gun,” Virgil said.
“That one, or another one, he wouldn’t be going in there with a hammer, like Heath.”
“What are we going to do about Heath?”
“Maybe nothing? Let the other guys do something with him.”
26
Something had broken in Margaret Cooper.
The break hadn’t come at the moment Heath attacked her, but sometime afterward, perhaps during the ambulance ride to Regions Hospital, or the wait in X-ray.
The ball of anger was still there, in her gut, but not so tightly wound: the anger was confused, diffused. She still saw her son’s blue eyeball on the floor next to his shattered head, now pressed against her own face as she imagined it to be—the bandages covered her cheek, and she hadn’t yet seen the wound—mutilated by the broken glass.
Weather had told her she could fix the face, and she apparently had tried: the doctors all seemed pleased by the result, which Cooper had not yet seen, but only imagined. But doctors were also satisfied if a cancer patient got an extra meaningless two weeks of semi-lifebefore dying, so they were not to be trusted, were not even entirely relevant.
She’d been told that she could check out of the hospital in the morning; Melton was there with Chelsea, and Cooper tried to be interested in them and what Melton had to say, but she kept drifting away, back to the eyeball and the ruined face.
She’d asked Melton, “How ugly is it?”
Melton, trying to be cheerful: “It’s not ugly. At all. I’m told that when you’re healed, you won’t even need makeup, and since you use makeup anyway, you’re just fine. These are like shaving cuts. They’re not bad.”
Cooper had turned her face away: she didn’t believe it. Shaving cuts? No.
And she worried: Am I too self-centered? Why am I thinking about cuts on my cheek, when my husband and sons are dead?
She thought about Hess and Heath, arrogant, vicious killers. In what seemed to her to be the cold honesty of her post-attack introspection, she distilled what legal knowledge she’d gotten from Alex, in his role as a judge in criminal cases, and she asked herself, if arrested, would Hess and Heath be convicted of murder, given what was known about them?
She didn’t think so. They could get Hess, if they could find a reason to get the police inside his house. But how could they do that? What if he found the hidden computers and flash drives before then? The downside possibilities piled up in her mind; the upside possibilities didn’t even occur to her.
The world was a bleak, gray place without hope.
Virgil and Lucas had trooped in, a dusting of snow on their shoulders, and Davenport had shown her his shoulder scar, which infact was quite visible. She tried to be appreciative, but she could feel her mind drifting again. She didn’t want them around, any of them, Lucas, Virgil, Melton, Chelsea.
Soon enough, they left, and she fell back on her pillow, not to sleep, or to relax, but to recall.
—
The nurses toldher she should be on her way home by ten o’clock, but she wasn’t. Weather showed up at eleven o’clock, gave her a list of instructions and got her phone number, so her assistant could text the same instructions to her phone.
“You were very lucky, if this had to happen at all,” Weather said. “The cuts were clean, there was a gland that I was worried about, but the cuts didn’t reach it. You might have a bit of numbness for a while, but that will go away. You didn’t lose any major facial nerves. So: go home, take it very easy. Watch television, read. No jerky motions. Take the painkillers: we don’t want you taking aspirin or ibuprofen. Do not work out...”
And so on.
While Weather approved her discharge, Cooper needed another approval, from an emergency room physician who had evaluated her for possible spinal damage. Melton came back by herself, the baby left with Fatima, to wait for her release. The ER doc didn’t show up until almost one o’clock—“Because doctors’ time is more precious than anyone else’s,” Melton said—and took two minutes to sign her out.
A nurse put her in a wheelchair, which she hadn’t needed, and rolled her out to the car, and Melton drove her home. Fatima was there with the baby, Melton was attentive, but Cooper smiled anddrifted past them, climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Melton puffed up a couple of pillows and scurried around making annoying noises, and Cooper finally told her she’d like to be alone to sleep.
