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“Yes. The father who was murdered six weeks ago, by those guys who attacked us, I assume. Or whatever organization hired them.”
“Ah.” He got up, rummaged on the shelves. He found a plastic box, and knelt in front of her, pushing the robe open over her knees.
She shrank away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Disinfecting the scrapes on your legs. While I do that, you talk.”
“I’ll do it myself! Just give me the stuff! I can take care of it!”
“Shhh.” He batted her hands away. “Let me.”
Lily stared down at the top of his dark head, and fished around for a starting point. “I guess I’ll start when my dad fell apart,” she said, hesitantly. “I was ten.”
His eyes flicked up when she mentioned the year that his mother had died. “Fell apart how?”
She clenched her teeth as he swabbed with the alcohol soaked wad of cotton. “Like I said, he started drinking heavily. Out of nowhere, very suddenly. Then he started in on the opiates. Heroin, mostly, I think, although one white powder looks pretty much like another to me. Ouch, goddamnit, that hurts!”
“Hold still.” He leaned in with the tweezers. “There’s grit in here.”
She hissed and cursed as he tortured her with tweezers. He was unmoved, intent upon his task. “What work did he do?” he asked.
“He was a fertility specialist,” she said. “A researcher, in IVF technology. He got early retirement not long after his breakdown. He was barely fifty, but he got a pension. A good one, but not generous enough to fund a drug habit. I started sneaking the checks away before he saw them. I paid the bills so they wouldn’t turn off the lights, the gas. So we could eat. Not that he was that interested in food anymore.”
He nodded, frowning in concentration as he taped gauze over her knees. His eyes flicked up, waiting while she struggled for words.
It sounded so sad, and flat, when she laid the facts out. Howard’s string of suicide attempts. The decision to commit him to an institution. The search for the perfect clinic that would keep him alive. And then, that last, awful visit. Howard’s cryptic warning, and his message, about Magda Ranieri and her son. The mysterious thing that needed to be locked, whatever it might be. Miriam’s interruption.
Then the call from Dr. Stark, and Howard’s so-called suicide. And the guys waiting outside Nina’s apartment with knives. And that was it.
It wasn’t enough for him. She could feel that in the air. Strongly.
“I tried to research you, while I was on the run,” she told him. “I tried to find out more about the nurse, Miriam Vargas, too, but she seemed to check out. At least, I found records of her going to nursing school in Baltimore. I tried to find out more about Magda, but I got nowhere with that. Just statistics, the newspaper articles, the obit. The only next step was to talk to you. So, um. I made my way here.”
He placed his big, warm hands gently over her knees. The soothing warmth felt good, over the stings and scrapes and boo-boos.
So, at last. Here it was. The question that had been burning in her mind for six weeks. The one she’d almost given up hope of asking.
“Do you have any information?” she asked. “Any insights?”
He met her eyes. Her heart tumbled, thudded. Three stories down.
“Babe, I haven’t got a fucking clue,” he said.
She shivered, and tugged the robe tighter. “But I…didn’t you—”
“It was exactly like I told you,” he said. “I didn’t misrepresent what happened at all. My mamma was killed. It was a banal incident of domestic violence. She had bad taste in men. She didn’t give me instructions to lock anything. She didn’t give me anything, or tell me anything. She put me on a bus to Portland one night, to keep me from getting killed. That’s all there is to that story.”
Lily nodded. Her throat was too tight to speak.
Bruno went on. “The only big question is why she didn’t climb on that bus with me. That’s what I will never understand.”
She brightened. “Well, maybe that’s it. Maybe this is the answer to that question. If we could figure out what she was—”
“No.” His voice cut her off. “Don’t do it, Lily.”
“Do what? I’m just speculating—”
“Don’t speculate,” he said. “Don’t try and lay your crazy agenda over what happened to my mamma. It won’t hold the weight.”
