Third Degree

“Just tell me the truth,” Warren said softly. “Please. I won’t be angry.”

Glancing up at his slitted eyes, she felt she had just heard a rattlesnake hiss, Just step right here on my tail, I promise I won’t bite you.

“I have told you the truth. You don’t want to hear it.” She dropped the letter on the floor. “I got a migraine aura thirty minutes ago. If I don’t get that injection, I’ll be flat on my back all afternoon, unable to speak. You won’t be able to continue this ridiculous interrogation.”

He regarded her coolly. Withstanding his scrutiny as best she could, she tried to make a plan of action. Given the as-yet-unmentioned gun, she should probably get out of the house as fast as possible. But that wasn’t as simple as it sounded. She couldn’t outrun Warren, and no one could outrun a bullet. It seemed inconceivable that he would actually shoot her, but if someone had asked her whether Warren would threaten her with a gun, she would have declared that impossible, too. No … she was going to have to talk her way out of this. Talk and bluff.

“Is that a gun in your hand?” she asked in a neutral voice.

He lifted the pistol into plain sight. “This?”

“Yes, that.”

“It is.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course. An unloaded gun is useless.”

Oh, boy. “Where did you get it?”

“I bought it a couple of months ago. Some punks hassled me one night when I was riding my bike on the south end of town. I carry this in my seat bag now. I’ve got a permit for it.”

Warren was still an obsessive cyclist; he’d won dozens of regional races, and even a couple of nationals a few years ago. He rode countless miles in training, but she’d heard nothing about any gun, or any incident where he’d needed one.

“You keep that in the house, with our children?”

She’d tried to sound suitably shocked, but Warren ignored her apparent concern. “I have a lockbox for it in the storeroom. Top shelf. It’s kidproof, don’t worry.”

It’s not the kids I’m worried about right now. “That doesn’t mean it’s Grant-proof.”

A smile crossed Warren’s face as he thought of his mischievous son.

“Why are you holding it now?” she asked.

“Because I’m very angry. And this makes me feel better.”

Oh, God—

“Apparently,” he went on, “you don’t want to tell me the truth. But you should know this: you’re not leaving this house until I know who wrote that letter.”

“I don’t want to leave the house, Warren. I want a shot of Imitrex.”

He frowned as though he were being greatly inconvenienced. “Give me your cell phone.”

A shiver of panic went through her, until she remembered she was carrying both phones. There had been days when she’d only had her clone phone in her pocket.

“Hand it over! Your car keys, too.”

She slid her hand into her right front pocket and drew out her legitimate Razr. Warren reached out and took it, then laid it on the coffee table.

“I’ve already gone over your cellular records online. I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”

She shrugged. There was no danger there. She had always used her clone phone to call Danny.

“The keys, come on.”

She drew her car keys from her left front pocket and passed them to Warren, who shoved them into his own pocket. She hated to give them up, but she couldn’t risk him searching her and finding the clone phone in her back pocket. Danny was probably trying to call her right now. He would be sitting in the clearing on his four-wheeler, expecting to see her Acura come rolling between the big oak trees. He’d wait awhile, thinking she was only running late. Then he would start to worry. She had to contact him. A sickening wave of nausea hit her, and she tensed against it. As it passed, she got an idea about how to text Danny.

“I want your computer, too,” Warren said. “Where is it? In the kitchen?”

The blood drained from her face. There were things in her computer that could destroy her. Danny, too. “I’m going to throw up,” she groaned.

She ran for the master bathroom.

“Goddamn it!” Warren cursed, jumping up and rushing after her.

She ran all the way to the toilet cubicle, hoping that Warren would stop in the bedroom, but he didn’t. He stood over her as she fell to her knees and put her face in the toilet bowl. She had no choice now. Retching loudly, she stuck her finger down her throat and brought up what remained of her breakfast.

Warren didn’t flinch. He’d seen things in his medical career that made a little vomit look like a picnic. She was terrified that he would notice the flat, rectangular bulge of the second Razr in her back pocket, but he suddenly walked out of the cubicle. She heard him rummaging in the medicine cabinet on his side of the marble-floored bathroom. Could she risk texting Danny now?

“Is the Imitrex in there?” She coughed. “Did you find it?”

“I’ve got it. Come lie on the bed, and I’ll give you the shot. Stay away from the bathroom windows. I noticed Mrs. Elfman nosing around out there this morning.”

Laurel’s throat constricted in terror. She prayed that the e.p.t box still lay behind the hedge beneath the bathroom window.

“Hurry up!” Warren said irritably, suddenly standing above her again. “You’re done, aren’t you?”

“I’m still nauseated.”

“The sooner the better, then.”

He grabbed her pants right above the pocket that held the Razr. As she screamed and tried to protect the phone, he yanked down her waistband and jabbed a needle into her hip. After what seemed a savage twist, he yanked it out again.

“Ow!” she cried. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Me? I’m ‘cold, logical, held-in, almost sterile.’” He slapped the spot where he’d injected her, something nurses did to distract patients from the pain of injections—usually before the needle went in—but his slap was hard enough to bruise. “Tell me who wrote that shit. Tell me who else has been looking at that ass.”

His voice had a proprietary edge. “No one! I told you.”

“When was the last time you fucked him?”

Laurel tried to stand, but Warren seized her neck and pressed her back down. In twelve years of marriage he had never laid a hand on her in anger. Fresh fear twisted her insides. “Warren, that hurts! Please think about what you’re doing.”

“You want to talk about pain? That’s funny. I don’t need to think about this.”

“Yes, you do. I haven’t cheated on you. I’d never do that to you!”

“You’re a liar.” He shoved her against the toilet, then walked away again.

She scrambled to her feet and ran to her side of the bed. There was no point in trying to flee the house unless she could slow him down first. Pulling back the comforter and sheets, she crawled under them and pulled them up to her neck.

“Get up,” Warren said from the foot of the bed. “I want to check your computer.”

“Go get it, then. I’m going to lie here until the aura goes away.”

“If I leave you here, you’ll climb out the window.”

Damn right I will. “Ten minutes in the dark, Warren. Please. If the aura stops, I’ll do whatever you want.” She closed her eyes. “You can lie here with me, if you want to.”

“I don’t,” he said, but he flicked off the light switch. “The windows are locked, by the way. All of them.”

She shifted under the covers, then slid her hand into her back pocket and eased out the clone Razr. In one continuous motion, she opened the phone and slipped it into her front pocket. Warren was a black silhouette in the dark, leaning on his bureau.

“When I read that letter,” he said hoarsely, “I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart.”

She slid her thumb lightly over the Razr’s keypad. Keying in a message was child’s play, but blindly pressing the proper sequence of buttons to put the phone into text mode wasn’t. She turned her head and looked at Warren as she worked her thumb over the faintly tactile buttons, trying to keep his eyes focused on her face.

“I’m not having an affair,” she said softly. “I haven’t had one in the past, either. I would never do that to Grant and Beth.”

Warren flipped out the cylinder of his revolver and spun it. “I wouldn’t have thought you could.” The cylinder snicked home. “But the letter says different.”

“That letter is bullshit.” Laurel had the Razr in text mode. She began keying her message to Danny, her eyes never leaving her husband’s face. “Someone faked it to mess with your head.”

To her surprise, Warren seemed to be considering her suggestion. “Who would fake something like that?” he asked, as though talking to himself.

“Somebody who wants to drive you crazy. And it’s obviously working. Warren, if you lift a hand to me again, I’m calling the police and hiring a divorce lawyer.”

This was pure bravado. Even in near darkness, she could see his neck and jaw muscles tightly flexed. Danny’s letter had utterly transformed him. With an infinitesimal movement of her right thumb, she pressed SEND and slid her hand out of her pocket.

“I still have the aura,” she said with genuine anxiety. “My arms are tingling, and I’m craving ice cream.”

“Imitrex only shortens the headache, you know that.”

She closed her eyes again.

“You’ve got to get up,” Warren said. “I want to see your computer. You can lie on the sofa in the great room.”

Laurel prayed that Danny was already reading her message. She’d risked a lot to send it, and she hadn’t sent the message Danny would have wanted her to. But she still had the phone, and in her heart she still believed she could talk Warren down from this flight of rage—so long as her computer concealed its secrets. At bottom, the idea that Warren Shields, M.D., might shoot the mother of his children was preposterous. But what he might do to a man who had fornicated with and impregnated her was another matter.

“Get up, goddamn it!” Warren snapped, kicking the side of the mattress.

The violence of his anger was what worried her, for it was wholly new. Laurel stood slowly, gathered the comforter around her shoulders, and padded into the hall that led to the kitchen. Run, Danny, she thought. For Michael’s sake, run.

SIX

Danny McDavitt was lying on his back in a sea of clover when his cell phone chirped, signaling the arrival of a text message. He hadn’t heard that sound since the day he’d told Laurel that he couldn’t leave his wife and watched her crumble before him.

Danny didn’t reach straight for his phone. He knew the true worth of lying in sun-drenched clover, waiting for the touch of a woman who loved him. There had been more than a few moments in his life when he’d been certain that he wouldn’t survive into the next minute, much less live to lie in a fragrant bower like this one, waiting for a beauty like Laurel Shields. In the air force, Danny had been known as an even-tempered guy, even among pilots. But falling in love with a woman he could not possess had rewired part of his brain. An emotional volatility was loose in him, and it frightened him sometimes. The chirping phone, for example. Laurel’s reply to the text message he’d sent after their “parent-teacher conference” had lifted him from depression to blissful anticipation in the span of four seconds. But this time the chirp had sent a tremor of fear through him. Laurel was already late, and a new text message was likely to tell him she’d decided not to meet him after all.

He couldn’t blame her. It had been unfair of him even to ask. Nothing had changed in his marital situation. He’d simply reached a point of such desperate longing that he’d been unable to keep from begging. He hated himself for the weakness he’d shown this morning. It was true that Starlette had bailed on the teacher conference; that was par for the course. But the second she’d started making excuses, Danny’s heart had soared. Her avoidance would give him an excuse to see Laurel—in private—and even though he’d known she would be upset, he’d gone to her classroom anyway.

Danny dug his hand into the deep clover and found his phone, but still he didn’t read the text message. He didn’t want to shatter his dream yet. Twenty-one years of military service had taught him to let good things linger while he could, even if they were illusory. Danny had seen the world from the cockpit of an MH-53 Pave Low helicopter, starting with the original bird in antidrug operations out of the Bahamas in 1982 (not the dream duty it sounded like), and winding up in the futuristic Pave Low IV in Afghanistan, where in late 2001 he was shot down and finally retired. In between, he had served on almost every continent, with Bosnia and Sierra Leone proving particularly memorable. Pave Lows from Danny’s group, the elite Twentieth Special Operations Wing, had opened Gulf War One by crossing the desert in pitch blackness and taking out Iraq’s air defenses, opening the skies for the army’s better-known AH-64 Apaches. Danny still remembered the unparalleled rush of flying a massed formation of birds into what everyone knew was going to be the first real war since Vietnam (his own personal Apocalypse Now moment). His sound track, rather disappointingly in hindsight, had been Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” rather than Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Though Desert Storm had ended faster than anyone expected, there’d been no shortage of adrenaline-charged missions to follow. But they paled in comparison to what he’d endured in the hellish mountains of Afghanistan, a land that bred warriors the way America now bred lawyers.

“Give me some good news,” he murmured, raising the cell phone at last. He held the device far enough from his aging eyes to read the tiny letters on the screen and pressed READ. Laurel’s message materialized almost instantly.

WARREN KNOWS GETMICHAEL LEAVETOWNASAP NO HEROICS

Danny stopped breathing. This was the last thing he’d expected. After all the times they might have been caught—and there had been some close calls—he’d thought the danger had finally dropped to zero. He reread the message as he got to his feet, trying to work out what might have happened.

Some sort of confrontation, obviously. But why was she telling him to run? Did she think he was in danger? That was difficult to imagine. Danny had given Warren Shields flying lessons for four months, and he’d come to know the doctor as a quiet, restrained, methodical man, just what you wanted in a physician, and indeed in a pilot. The idea of Warren Shields harming his wife seemed silly, and the possibility of him coming after Danny even more farfetched. And yet … Danny had seen enough men under severe stress to know they were capable of wildly unpredictable behavior. He’d seen soldiers do things in battle zones that no one back home would have believed—some good things, but more of them bad.

There was no question of taking Laurel’s advice. If she was in danger, he wasn’t about to cut and run. The question was, what could he do to help her? If he shed his anonymity as her lover, he would bring about the very thing he was trying to avoid by remaining with Starlette: he would lose custody of Michael. But if Laurel was truly in danger …

He started to text her back and tell her that she wasn’t alone, that he would solve whatever problem had come up. But she was alone, at least in the sense that he wasn’t with her. And fighting with Warren, almost certainly. One call or text message from Danny might give away everything or hurt her in some way that he couldn’t guess at.

He trotted to his four-wheeler, cranked the engine, and wrestled the Honda onto the track that led up to the house. His chest thrummed with nervous energy. The shock of her message had been profound. He’d been dreaming of the moment that Laurel would rush into his arms. After five weeks apart, she would melt under his hands. Hell, she’d started melting in her classroom. To be ripped from that fantasy into this reality had disconcerted him. But Danny knew how to shift neural gears in a hurry. Countless times he’d been roused from dreams by a klaxon calling him to battle, or to rescue men barely clinging to life, their limbs shredded, guts puddled in their laps like bowls of pasta. His ability to adapt quickly was one reason he was still alive.

He jiggered the Honda into his garage, hit the kill switch, and jumped off. First he needed to know where Laurel was. The school? Home? Warren’s office? He started to get his car keys from the kitchen, but stopped at the door. Danny drove a 1969 Dodge Charger he’d restored himself. Warren knew the car well, so it was useless in this context. Climbing back onto the Honda, Danny drove down to the shed where he kept his lawn equipment. He’d bought an ancient Ford pickup to make runs to the hardware store and to the nursery. He and Michael used it to tool around the property together. Michael had steered it from Danny’s lap several times, an experience akin to flying over Baghdad on a bad night. Danny parked the four-wheeler, jumped into the cab of the truck, backed out of the shed, and drove across his lawn toward Deerfield Road. As he passed his house, he considered stopping to get his nine-millimeter from the bedroom. But that would be plain crazy, he decided. Serious overkill.

“Hold on, babe,” he said, pushing the old truck toward the paved road. “I’m coming.”

Laurel lay silently on the great room sofa, her comforter pulled up to her neck. Warren was sitting on the ottoman he’d dragged over to the coffee table and staring at Laurel’s Sony Vaio, which hummed in front of him like a willing informer. His forefinger slid steadily over the computer’s trackpad; he was working methodically through her file tree in Windows Explorer.

Laurel’s computer posed several risks, some minor, others grave. She kept some files on it that, while they would not implicate Danny directly, would certainly make Warren suspicious. There were stored AOL messages that could cause her trouble, but he was unlikely to see them as significant unless he cross-referenced everything he found against a calendar. But there was one thing she absolutely could not afford for him to discover—the digital equivalent of an atomic bomb.

Laurel maintained a secret e-mail account that Warren knew nothing about. Ostensibly, they both used AOL as their mail server, and Laurel did use AOL for her “official” e-mail life: notes to friends, school announcements, and the like. But her correspondence with Danny was run through a free Hotmail account protected by a password. Laurel’s Hotmail username was [e-mail]. Corny, perhaps, cribbing a digital alias from Jane Austen, but what else was she going to choose? Agent 99? Hester Prynne? The Sony was programmed to “forget” her username and password every time she logged off, but she knew that these keys to her secret life must reside somewhere on the hard drive, as did her past e-mail messages. A forensic computer expert would doubtless be able to call up that data like a boy rubbing a genie’s lamp. What Warren could accomplish on his own was open to question. He knew how to operate most mainstream Windows programs, but he was no wizard. He was patient, though. And if he was willing to hack at the Sony for hours, who knew what he might uncover? If he stumbled onto that Hotmail account or, God forbid, somehow guessed her password, her secret life would be served up on a platter—a poisonous platter that would kill Warren even as he devoured it.

His eyes glowed with feral hunger as his fingers flew over the keys, and his orbits, almost black from lack of sleep, gave him a desperate mien. Danny had said Warren would want to believe that she’d been faithful despite evidence to the contrary, but she saw no such desire in his face now. Warren wanted only one thing: the identity of the man with whom she had betrayed him. As he punched at the keys, she noticed how unhealthy he looked. Competitive cycling had sculpted Warren into a figure of toned muscle, prominent veins, and limber tendons, but in the past couple of months, she’d noticed an unusual puffiness in his face, his neck, and even on his body. He still had heroically defined leg muscles, but he was looking soft around the edges, with a womanly sort of fat accruing around his hips and upper back. She’d assumed this was due to age, or maybe even depression, but the truth was, she’d been too self-absorbed to ask about it. Besides, Warren had always been touchy about his body, and a question like that might offend him. Looking at him now, she saw a depth of fatigue that could not be explained by a single night of sleep deprivation.

It’s got to be work, she decided. Kyle Auster must have finally gotten the practice in bad trouble. Kyle was capable of anything, in Laurel’s estimation. He’d made it clear from the outset of the partnership that he would dearly love to sample her physical charms. And Warren stayed so busy with his patients that he might easily be duped into anything. But what exactly? Warren wouldn’t get this bent out of shape over some tax penalties. What was the next step? Prison? Surely that was impossible. You had to commit outright fraud to go to jail, and Warren would never have let Kyle go that far. She wondered, though, if the senior partner could have committed fraud without Warren’s knowledge. If so, then today’s manic persecution made at least some sense. Warren might be displacing the anger he felt at his former mentor and venting it on her. What was Warren looking for when he found Danny’s letter? she wondered. Should I ask him? Or is it safer to lie here with my mouth shut and pray that my digital secrets remain inviolate?

With a giddy rush Laurel realized that the blank spots in her visual field were gone. The Imitrex was working. She still had the dislocated feeling of a migraine aura, but the aura wasn’t metastasizing into a headache. That could still happen, of course, and at any moment. She wondered if the imminent danger, rather than the Imitrex, had shut down her headache. Get back on point, said a voice in her head. You’re drifting. The kids will be home before you know it, and then you’re looking at a real nightmare. Even the thought made her breath go shallow.

It was well after noon already. She couldn’t know exactly how late it was without checking her cell phone, which was what she used for a watch these days, and that was buried in her pocket. She considered asking Warren the time, but asking questions would only emphasize that she wasn’t free to get up and walk into the kitchen. Trying to gauge elapsed time was tricky under stress (she remembered that from her labor with Grant), but she figured that in two hours, more or less, Diane Rivers would drop Grant and Beth off at the end of the sidewalk. The children would race up to the front door, unaware that their father was waiting inside with a loaded gun.

I can’t wait for that, she decided. I can’t bank on talking Warren around to reason before the kids get home. Because I might not be able to talk him down. She stole another look at his eyes, which tracked across her computer screen with laserlike precision, sucking up every character on the screen. He’s not going to stop until he finds out what he wants to know. And he’s not going to accept innocence until he’s turned over every goddamned rock he can find. Even then, will he believe me? Once somebody begins to doubt your honesty, wiping away suspicion is almost impossible. That’s why people never survive public investigations. Some of the mud always sticks, justified or not. And in my case, it is. I’m guilty, and on some level Warren knows that. If he gets deep enough into my Sony, he’ll have the proof he’s starving for. Or what if he doesn’t? What if he finds my Hotmail account but not my password? Would he use the kids as leverage over me? Searching for a crack in the mask of jealousy that was Warren’s face, she began to wish she’d sent Danny a very different message. I should have dialed 911 the second I saw the gun. I’m like one of those stupid babysitters in a slasher movie. TSTL. Too stupid to live.

She still had her clone phone, of course. She could dial 911 right now, if she wanted. But Warren had once explained to her that there was no autolocation system in place for cell phones yet—not in Mississippi, anyway. If you didn’t tell the 911 dispatcher where you were, it could take a long time for help to reach you, if ever. What if she called 911 and simply left the line open? The dispatcher might eventually hear enough of Warren’s threats to realize a dangerous situation was in progress, but again—how would they find her? If she dialed 911, it would have to be from the house phone. They knew where you were the second you dialed in from a landline. Laurel had already taught Grant and Beth this. If she could get close enough to one of the home extensions, she could definitely bring the police to the house, even if she simply opened the line and said nothing. And yet …