Angel Interrupted (36 page)

That changed everything.

Fiona Harker had been in love with Serena Holman, not Christian Fletcher.

It explained why Fiona never talked about her private life, why she told no one else about the affair, why she lived so far away from her family. She was Catholic. She would have felt the need to hide it, and she must have felt so conflicted over her feelings for Serena. It also explained motive. Serena Holman had killed Fiona Harker to protect her reputation as a successful doctor and society queen, the tall blonde every man in the room wanted, the one they all opened up their checkbooks for.

I have seen people kill for many reasons, and I have seen many kinds of people killed. But I wasn’t sure I had ever seen anyone as good as Fiona Harker killed by someone as worthless as Serena Holman, for the pettiest of reasons: social status.

The truth was going to devastate Christian Fletcher. Unless he had known about it.

“If I showed you a photo of the doctor, could you pick her out?” Maggie asked.

“Sure,” the man replied. His voice was growing stronger.

The nurse did not wait for Maggie to ask. “I have something we can use,” she said, and left the room, returning in a minute with a copy of the hospital’s annual report. “We have about ten of these in every waiting room,” she explained. She started to thumb through the brochure for a photo of Serena Holman, but Maggie stopped her.

“He has to be the one to pick her out. We can’t just show him a photo.”

The nurse handed Maggie the glossy booklet, and Maggie flipped through it, choosing several pages of photos taken at gala balls and other donor events. There wasn’t a dearth of thin blondes to choose from. In fact, it was a three-hundred-person lineup of tall blondes. It would be an irrefutable identification if the man in the bed picked out Serena Holman from among them.

He went straight to her. He scanned two pages of photos, shaking his head, but the moment Maggie turned to the next page, his eyes stopped on a photo of Serena dressed in a black designer gown, smiling next to a trio of well-fed men in tuxedos, two of whom were staring at her in admiration.

“That’s her,” he said, pointing to Serena Holman. “I’m sure.”

“You’re sure?” Maggie asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Is his mind medically clear?” Maggie asked the doctor.

The doctor looked at his watch. “I’ll testify to it in court, if need be.”

That was all Maggie needed to hear. “Get some rest,” she told Cody Wells. “I know you’ve been through a lot. Tyler Matthews is back home safe. That’s what counts. What you did today was a good thing. I’ll make sure people know it.”

The man closed his eyes and turned away. I was startled to realize he was crying at being called “good.”
What had he been turned into?

“Don’t move for at least another twenty minutes,” Maggie told the nurse, who nodded her agreement. “And thank you both very much,” she added as she left the room. I was right behind her.

A pair of patrolmen had arrived to relieve the guard outside the room. One was going to take the end of the hall, the other the door. Instead, Maggie told both to come with her.

“Where are we going?” one of the patrolmen asked as they hurried after Maggie. She was walking with such a determined gait, I half expected her to go crashing through the elevator doors. Instead, miraculously, they opened at her approach, as if the universe wanted to escort her upstairs.

“We’re going to arrest a murderer,” Maggie said. “And if she won’t come with us, we’re taking her by force. Got your guns, boys?”

“Huh?” one of them asked, exchanging a glance with his buddy.

Maggie pulled out her cell phone.

“You’re not supposed to use that in the hospital,” a patrolman pointed out.

One glance from Maggie shut him up.

I thought she might call Gonzales. That was the sane thing to do when you had seven messages from him and were about to make a high-profile arrest. Besides, Maggie was by the book. She only made arrests after she had cleared them with Gonzales, who was big on having judges issue warrants first when the people being arrested had money. But Maggie knew enough about his priorities to guess that Gonzales might want to stall so he could milk both cases for maximum publicity, and Maggie was unwilling to wait. She was bringing Serena Holman in on her own. She had probable cause. So instead of calling Gonzales, she called Calvano for an update on Tyler Matthews and the reaction of Gonzales and the feds. But what she heard from him clearly surprised her. “So soon?” she asked. “When does it start?”

Whatever Calvano told her, after she hung up, it caused her thoughts to turn to Serena Holman once again. Maggie was angry, but she was more than just angry. She was determined to make the doctor pay for what she had done. I was pretty sure arresting her was not the only thing Maggie had in mind. She exited the elevator with such speed that the uniforms had to scurry after her to keep up. She greeted the nurse at the pediatric oncology ward station with a terse “Where’s Dr. Holman?”

The nurse mutely pointed to the patient playroom, her eyes lingering on the two patrolmen accompanying Maggie.

The room was empty of patients. Serena Holman was sitting on the couch, an expensive coffee from the stand in the lobby at her elbow, flipping through a patient chart, clearly irritated at having spent Saturday night and into Sunday morning at the hospital. She glanced up, saw Maggie, and dismissed her. “I’m busy,” she said, turning a page.

“Stand up,” Maggie told her. She grabbed one of Serena’s elbows and jerked her upright. The doctor teetered on her heels and tried to pull her arm away.

“How dare you?” she spat at Maggie. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

“Good. You’re going to need one.” Maggie took the patient file from her and tossed it on the table, then twisted both of the doctor’s hands behind her back. She clipped her handcuffs tightly around Serena’s slender wrists. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Fiona Harker,” Maggie said. “You have the right to remain silent.”

As Maggie recited the familiar warning, a white-hot fury started to grow inside Serena Holman. It was a typhoon of outrage—one of titanic proportions. “How dare you?” she hissed at Maggie. “I’ll have your badge for this.”

“Shut up,” Maggie said calmly, shoving the doctor toward one of the uniformed patrolmen. “Just because I’m bringing you in doesn’t mean I have to listen to your bullshit on the way.” Even the patrolmen looked alarmed at the tone of Maggie’s voice.

I don’t think she had ever hated anyone more than she hated Serena Holman. I wasn’t sure why exactly. It wasn’t just what her arrest would do to Christian Fletcher; it ran deeper than that.

“You can’t prove a thing,” Serena snapped. “You’re just doing this for Christian.”

“We have a witness who puts you at Fiona Harker’s house the morning she was killed,” Maggie said. “And many mornings before that. A witness you failed to kill. Did I mention that? He’s still alive. Can’t wait for the lab tests to come back to see what drug you gave him. Or to have a chat with the attending who escorted you into his room. Or to get back the ownership search on the gun that killed her. Or to finish searching every inch of Fiona’s house and locker for the tiniest scrap of your DNA. One single hair, and you’re done. And I don’t just mean because it will prove you’re a bottle blonde.”

I felt a crack in the doctor’s arrogance. She was silent. Maggie shoved her toward the hallway door. “We’re taking the long way out,” she told her escorts. “Follow me.”

By the time she reached the elevator, nurses had started to line the hallway and were madly dialing their cell phones. They stared at Serena Holman, their eyes bright and their anger obvious as she walked past, her heels clicking on the hospital floor and her doctor’s coat hanging open to reveal the expensive dress underneath.

“Move faster,” Maggie said, shoving the doctor into the elevator. Serena stumbled against a railing.

“What’s your problem?” she asked Maggie. Her refined accent had been replaced by the raw vowels of a blue-collar Boston background. Was anything about the doctor real?

“All she did was
love you
,” Maggie said, her contempt so great, her anger so immense, that the patrolmen averted their eyes. “All Fiona Harker wanted was for you to love her back. And she thought that you did. She told her friend that it was the real thing, that she’d finally found someone she could love.”

“And you find that disgusting?” the doctor challenged her.

“What I find disgusting,” Maggie said, anger rising in her voice, “is that someone gave you the gift of love, someone who was private and guarded and not prone to giving her heart away. You had to work for it. And you did. You worked until you had her heart and then you took it. And once you had it, you turned around and you killed her for loving you, all to protect your reputation. What’s the matter with you? Do you even have a soul?”

I wondered that myself. Serena Holman had grown still as Maggie spoke, and her indignation had been replaced by a cold strength. I felt cunning inside her, cunning and selfishness and something darker—
Had she liked taking another person’s life? Had she actually enjoyed making someone love her and then destroying her for it?

I had sympathy then for Christian Fletcher. He still had his career, but she had pretty much devoured him, too.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Serena Holman spat at Maggie.

“I know you’re going away for a long, long time,” Maggie said. “To a place where you will not be able to wear your little ass-high dresses. To a place where no one is going to give a shit about how much you raised for this hospital. To a place you can’t even imagine in your worst nightmares.”

In that, at least, I thought Maggie was wrong. Serena Holman would use her beauty in prison just as she had in her life—to blind others so she could get exactly what she wanted. I was pretty sure she’d end up running the joint. And I was also pretty sure she’d killed Fiona Harker for a lot more than to protect her reputation, even if she didn’t understand those reasons herself. I thought she’d loved Fiona back, maybe for the first time in her life. There was no other explanation for why she took the chance of becoming involved with her in the first place. And she had been driven to kill Fiona because of it, because her own ego would not tolerate the importance of anyone else.

Yes, Serena Holman would love prison. It was the one place where she could be herself.

“Let’s go,” Maggie said, pushing Serena out of the elevator toward the main lobby. For the first time, the doctor lost her poise and balked. No wonder. Word had gone out as swiftly as a call to battle. She had been arrested in the middle of a shift change, and hospital staff members were flooding into the lobby, wanting to see Serena Holman pay the price for killing one of their own. Nurses, aides, janitors, even doctors—all who had worked with Fiona Harker and loved her—were there, Christian Fletcher among them. There were surely a few left behind on the wards to make sure no patients died, but it seemed like every single person on duty in the hospital that morning was there, forming a phalanx of hostile onlookers that Maggie forced Serena Holman to walk through.

No one said a word. They just stood and stared at Serena. The air was thick with hate and sadness and contempt. But no one said a word.

And truth be told, no one seemed all that surprised. I guess beauty can’t hide everything.

Serena Holman sailed through the crowd, head held high, as if she were a queen passing by. All she had left was her self-anointed superiority and she had no intention of giving that up.

No one even noticed Maggie. At least, no one but Christian Fletcher. He was standing toward the back of the crowd, a sympathetic nurse on each side as he absorbed the shock of seeing his ex-wife hauled through the lobby in handcuffs. His face was as easy to read as a billboard. His surprise was genuine. I was certain of that. And, grudgingly, I admitted that his sorrow was not for himself. He grieved for Fiona Harker, whom he had respected and relied on. He grieved for the person who had been his wife but was, apparently, someone he had never really known. And he grieved for Maggie. He knew he would lose her now.

At first, Maggie did not see Fletcher. She was grim but confident. She took no pleasure in what she was doing, but she felt it was her duty to do it. She owed Fiona Harker at least that much. Then Serena Holman stumbled and Maggie tightened her grip on the doctor’s arm, steadying her. She looked over Serena’s head and straight at Christian Fletcher. A look passed between them. It was an acknowledgment of what they had lost, of what they might have had. It had been real, and they had both felt it. Now they felt its loss.

Too late, I wished that I had helped them. I wished that I had brought them together somehow, instead of trying to drive them apart. Apart, they were just two more lonely people who lost themselves in work so they wouldn’t have to think about the rest of their lives. Together, they could have been so much more.