19

North Anderson and I decided to weigh our options over coffee at Brotherhood of Thieves, a favorite haunt of his. We settled on going to the media with the information we had, hoping to bring enough facts to light that Billy would go to court still enjoying a shadow of a doubt as to his guilt. If we were quickly and wildly successful getting our message out, the D.A.'s office might even start worrying about their prospects for a conviction and wait a while before asking a grand jury to indict. That would buy us more time. In any case, I was almost certain Carl Rossetti would agree to represent Billy-pro bono, if necessary. The exposure would pay him back a hundred times over.

The strategy was anything but surefire. Anderson had left his badge with the mayor. That meant I was officially off the case, too. O'Donnell would probably try painting us as exiled, disgruntled former members of his team. And that might be enough to keep our version of the evidence largely out of print and off the airwaves. These days, maverick reporters are as few and far between as maverick investment bankers.

We were waiting for the check when my cell phone rang. The number on the display was for MGH. I thought it might be Julia, apologizing for hanging up. I felt a little uncomfortable answering the call with North at the table, but I didn't want to miss any important news.

Anderson intuited the reason I was hesitating. No doubt Julia was still on his mind a good deal of the time. "If it's her, go ahead," he said. "I'll take a walk, if you want."

"Stay." I picked up. "Frank," I said.

"Frank, it's John." John Karlstein. His voice sounded more solemn than I'd ever heard it.

The background noise in the restaurant seemed to disappear. I could feel, even hear, my galloping heart. Tess was dead, I told myself. I stared at North Anderson, not looking at him as much as looking for him. For more ballast. I felt I had sailed too far into the storm. After bearing witness to Trevor Lucas's butchery, I had barely pieced my psyche back together. Failing to prevent the murder of Julia's baby felt like it might snap the mast of my life once and for all, leaving me adrift forever. That had always been the risk in taking this case. I had spoken the fear to Justine Franza, the Brazilian journalist I'd met at Cafe Positano, who had seen so much beauty in my Bradford Johnson painting of men from one ship trying to save another at risk. What if both ships end up sinking?

Anderson gave me a reassuring nod of his head.

"You there, Frank?" Karlstein asked.

When people use your name while talking to you-especially when they use it two times in as many sentences- it is because they feel the need to reach out to you, to take care of you. "Bad news," I said.

"Afraid so," he said. "This really came out of left field."

I closed my eyes. "Tell me."

"Julia's been hurt," he said.

My eyes opened to a squint. "Julia? What happened to her?"

Anderson looked at me, a lover's worry in his eyes. "Jesus Christ," he said. "Is she all right?"

I looked down, listening to Karlstein. Guilt clawed at my insides. I had left Julia alone, in harm's way.

"Keep in mind, I'm getting this secondhand," he was saying. "I wasn't on the Telemetry floor when the whole thing went down. Long and short of it, her husband came back. I guess he wanted her to sign legal papers of some kind. She did the right thing-reminded him there was a restraining order against him and asked him to leave. He wouldn't budge, so she asked one of the nurses to call the police."

"And…" I said.

"And then he just lost it," Karlstein said. "It took a bunch of staff to drag him off her."

I looked at North. " Darwin beat her up."

"That fucking bastard," Anderson said.

I had a sinking feeling that Karlstein was letting me down easy. "She made it, though? I mean, she's alive?"

"Yes. Yes," he said. "Of course."

"How bad off is she?" I asked.

"She's stable," Karlstein said, "but she took some serious punishment. There's a good deal of facial swelling from a fractured zygomatic arch. She's also got four broken ribs and a liver laceration. I put her in the ICU, just to be cautious. Grabbed a CAT scan of her head, which came back normal. I'll order a repeat before she leaves here, make sure she hasn't started to bleed intracranially. Ophthalmology came by to check out her eye; the right one is swollen shut. Doesn't look like there's any retinal damage." He paused. "She'll heal up, physically. Emotionally, it's got to be a longer mile."

"Is she with it?" I asked.

"I put her on a fair amount of Darvocet, so she's drifting in and out. But when she's awake, she's holding her own. She's completely oriented. She knows who I am, what day it is, where she is, who the president is-all those questions you guys throw at people."

"How about Tess?" I asked. " Darwin didn't hurt her, did he?"

"He didn't go near her," Karlstein said. "I mean, this wasn't one of those things where the father can't stand being away from his kid and goes berserk. The one-to-one sitter said Bishop never even went to Tess's bedside."

"Was he arrested?" I asked.

"Security held him until the police got here. He left in cuffs," Karlstein said. "I'm no lawyer, but I'd say he's gone for a while, even with his connections. There's no shortage of witnesses to what he did. And the way they say he went after her… He was trying to kill her."

"Tell her I'll be there as soon as I can," I said. "Me, and my friend North Anderson."

"I'll tell her right now," Karlstein said.

"Thank you, John," I said. "Thanks again."

"No problem," he said. "See you later."

I hung up.

"Will she be all right?" Anderson asked. "What the hell happened?"

I told him everything Karlstein had told me. "It sounds like Bishop cracked," I said. "I guess he really had the subsoil to lose it. He's looking at charges of violating a restraining order and attempted murder. He could go away twenty years." Saying that made me see more clearly that Darwin Bishop really had been battling to keep parts of himself buried. But marrying a model, accumulating a billion dollars, and buying his way into Manhattan and Nantucket society hadn't freed him of his underlying rage- not any more than alcohol had.

"This makes it a lot harder for O'Donnell to close the investigation," Anderson said. "And even if he does, your friend Rossetti should be able to raise doubt in a jury's mind about whether the D.A. put the wrong person on trial."

Anderson was right. "It's certainly not the way I wanted to score points, but I'll take 'em."

"I wonder what those papers he wanted her to sign were all about." Anderson said.

"I guess we'll find out from the Boston cops who arrested him," I said. "Coming with me?"

"If you'd rather go alone, all you have to do is say so."

"I know that," I said. "That's the biggest reason we should go together."

Even with John Karlstein's description of Julia's injuries, even with his tipping his hand by telling me she needed to be observed in the ICU, I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I visited her there. Maybe it was the fresh memory of her extraordinary beauty, or maybe I had simply summoned a level of denial to make it through my phone conversation with Karlstein, but the swelling and discoloration of Julia's right eye, cheekbones, and lips shocked me. So, too, did the nasogastric tube that ran into one of her nostrils, down her throat, and into her stomach, draining blood-tinged fluid, and preventing her from speaking clearly. Yet, seeing all that, I wanted nothing more than to hold her and stroke her hair and promise her that everything would turn out all right. I tried to keep my smile bright and my voice steady, because I could tell that she was watching North and me for our reactions.