F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 (26 page)

           
"Forensics has been wrong
before."

           
Mooney removed the cigar to sip from
his coffee mug, the contents of which had come from the bottle in his bottom
drawer. Specks of ash fell from the cigar's cold tip onto the manila folder
that held the paperwork of Kelly's case.

           
"I read your report, Harris.
You've got one very disturbed girl here, under psychiatric care, on schnozz,
who jumps naked through a twelfth floor window from a room where Forensics says
there's no sign of a struggle. The M.E. says her body shows no signs of a
fight, except for one love bite on her shoulder. We've got people with their
heads blown off waiting for their perps to be found. Don't waste your time with
this one. Close it!"

           
That was precisely what Rob was
trying to avoid.

           
"I think we're missing
something here, lieu," he said. "I've got a gut feeling that this
psychiatrist is involved somehow."

           
"Anything concrete?"

           
"No, but—"

           
"Then close it."

           
"One more week, lieu. That's
all I want. I'll squeeze it in between the DiGilio and Stern cases."

           
Mooney's eyes narrowed as he looked
at Rob.

           
"You got something personal in
this?"

           
"Nah," Rob said, leaning
back in his chair and hoping he was convincing. Mooney didn't like his cops
getting into cases where they were personally involved. "It just interests
me, you know? Ever have a case that got under your skin and made you
itch?"

           
Mooney's eyes got even narrower. His
whine became more pronounced.

           
"You ain't thinking of writing
a book or any shit like that, are you?"

           
Rob laughed. "Hey, lieu, you've
read my reports! What do you think?"

           
Mooney stuck the cigar back in his
mouth and smiled.

           
"Yeah. You've got a point
there. But Christ, every other guy in the department seems to be writing a
book!"

           
Rob nodded. Ever since Bill Caunitz,
a former detective with Mooney's rank and position, began hitting the
best-seller lists and appearing on
Good
Morning America
, a lot of guys were trying their hand at fiction, but not
with much success.

           
"Give me another week, lieu. If
I can't prove foul play by then I'll close it myself."

           
"You'd better. And don't come
back next week with some sky blue theory. I want hard stuff or we close. Got
it?"

           
"Got it."

           
Rob knew Mooney was hoping he'd find
nothing. The lieutenant liked grounders—open and shut cases. If Kelly Wade's
case remained a suicide it would be closed and forgotten. But if it became
reclassified as a murder it stayed open until solved. Unsolved murders were
never closed, and that could mean filing semiannual DD5 Supplementary Complaint
Reports into eternity.

           
Rob took the file and returned to
his own desk in the squad room. It was the same color and style as Mooney's,
only older and more dented. A few phone message slips on his blotter. None from
Connie. He wondered why he felt relieved. Another love affair down the tubes.
It was getting to be a habit.

           
He picked up the sheet with the
notes he'd made on that lawyer yesterday and tossed it out. Ed Bannion checked
out okay: a tax attorney with no record. Still… one nervous guy. Rob uncrumpled
the sheet and slipped it into the back of Kelly's file, then went over the new
information he'd dug up on Dr. Gates—or rather, Lazlo Gati.

           
It hadn't been easy. Little Lazlo's
immigration papers said he was seven years old when he arrived in the United
States. He took the oath of citizenship at age 21 and had his name changed to
Lawrence Gates that same year. Beyond that, Rob had come up blank. Then he'd
remembered Doc Winters' passing remark about an older brother and sister who'd
died in West Virginia a while back. A department contact at a Wheeling
newspaper faxed him a couple of articles. The first to come through was three
years old and concerned Marta Gati's death in a fire that gutted her house. The
circumstances were deemed suspicious, especially since the young handyman and
the maid had disappeared. Interesting, but it told Rob nothing about Dr. Gates.
Then another article came through, a few years older than the first, concerning
the death of the senior Gati sibling, Karl, an independent mine owner who
suffered a fatal heart attack.

           
Rob hit paydirt in the second
article. It contained an interview with Karl's sister, Marta, wherein she
chronicled the family history. A fascinating story.

           
The Gati family had run one of
Hungary's major mining concerns since the turn of the century. Somehow, through
bribery and political influence, they managed to survive the Nazi occupation
with all six members alive and the family fortune hidden away nearly intact.
When the communists took over, however, they decided to flee. They gathered up
all the gold and jewels they had squirreled away before the war and headed for
the border. Mama and Papa Gati sent the kids across first. They were supposed
to follow soon after but they never showed up. The children later learned that
they had been captured and shot. Karl, the oldest of the three brothers at
twenty, took over as head of the family. There was no opposition. Lazlo was just
a boy at the time, and Marta and the other brother, Gabor, both suffered from
unspecified but apparently disabling birth defects. The article mentioned that
Marta was confined to a wheelchair.)

           
Karl turned the gold and jewels into
cash and brought the family to the United States. He settled them in West
Virginia where he invested their money in the familiar business of mining. He
did very well, moving from comfortably well-off to extremely wealthy. Lazlo was
accepted at NYU premed and moved to New York, taking the sickly Gabor with him.
They all felt Gabor could get the best care in the various New York medical
centers when the need arose, but apparently he died anyway. Marta was proud of
her younger brother, Lazlo—she never referred to him by his American name—who
was now a respected new York psychiatrist. And now that Karl was dead, Marta
was all alone in the big house he had built for her, but she was not afraid.
She had a loyal staff to take care of the place for her.

           
Rob shook his head as he folded the
glossy fax sheets and slipped them back into the folder. Some loyal staff! The
place burned to the ground a few years later, taking her with it.

           
He had one more slip of paper on the
Gati family: a copy of Gabor Gati's death certificate, dated eight years ago.

           
Immediate cause of death:
cardiopulmonary collapse;

           
secondary to:
overwhelming infection;

           
secondary to:
multiple congenital defects
.

           
So, Dr. Lawrence Gates' older sister
and both his brothers had all died suddenly a few years apart, leaving Gates as
the only heir to a considerable fortune. How convenient.

           
This was all a sidebar, though.
There might or might not be something fishy there, but it had no bearing on the
Kelly Wade case, at least none that Rob could see.

           
He had the file cover half closed
when the signature of the attending physician on the death certificate caught
his eye. He looked closer, blinking. No, he was wasn't mistaken. The signature
read:

           
Lawrence
Gates, M.D.

           
Now that might not have been illegal,
but it sure as hell was irregular to have one brother sign the other's death
certificate.

           
Rob decided he'd better have another
talk with Doc Winters about his former resident.

 
 

           
She was awake.

           
And as soon as she realized it, Kara
threw down the quilt and top sheet and felt the soles of her feet. She couldn't
see in the predawn gray, but they seemed okay. She snapped on the bedside lamp
and looked.

           
Clean. Thank God, they were
clean!

           
The sense of relief brought her
close to tears.

           
She'd never paid much attention to
washing her feet, it was just part of her shower routine. But last night she'd
washed them carefully, inspecting them again before she turned out the light.
They'd been clean.

           
Sleep had been a long time coming,
kept at bay by the nightmare possibility that sleep might release another
someone within her, might allow that someone to use her body. No matter how
often Kara dismissed the idea, it crept back. Exhaustion finally overpowered
apprehension and she drifted off.

           
But it was okay, now. Her feet were
clean. They had been spotless last night, and they were spotless now.

           
She hopped out of bed. Her muscles
ached from the aerobic and Nautilus work-out she'd put herself through at the
gym yesterday. But it was good pain. Constructive pain.

           
She took a deep breath. Sunday. This
was going to be a good day. She'd been too tense to do much writing yesterday.
But with the early start she was getting now, she'd make up for that today.

           
She padded to the bathroom to brush
her teeth and throw some water on her face. The medicine cabinet over the sink
was open. Jill must have been up during the night and not pushed it closed
firmly enough. She grabbed the toothpaste tube and slammed the door shut.