Fatal Distraction Read online

  “I read about it online,” Mike continued, “while you were in with Vivian Ward. I was just Googling your name, you know, to see what kind of photographs you’ve used before. So I could get the right stuff. The story came up. Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad. Thank you for your sympathy. But let’s just keep our minds on the job at hand, okay? Where in Tampa is this hospital?”

  The dodge seemed to distract him at first. “On Florida Key. I’ll tell you how to get there when the time comes,” Mike said. But then, like the multi-tasker everyone in his generation seemed to be, he kept on. “It must be hard. Being a great investigative journalist, but never able to track down who took your own kid.”

  “I said drop it.” She didn’t mean to snap at him. Normally, she handled questions about Peter much better. The day’s tension must be exacting a toll. She took a deep breath and calmed her voice. “I’m sorry. Let’s not talk about this, okay? I really need to concentrate on what we’re doing here.”

  Again, she thought she’d gotten her message across. He was quiet a few moments before he said, “I was just thinking about what it would be like, following any story for ten years. But instead of a story, it’s your kid.”

  Anger flushed through her. “I said stop it!” The sound of her voice reverberated in the silent car. She felt her arms fatigue with the death grip of her hands on the steering wheel. With force of will, she managed to slow down her racing heart. Her outburst shocked her as much as it had Mike, but it had the desired effect.

  She said nothing for half an hour, and neither did he. During the silence, she examined her uncharacteristic reactions to his guileless questions. The kid meant no harm. She knew him well enough to realize that much.

  Certainly, Peter’s disappearance was not a secret. She’d written about it many times and whenever she was interviewed, the same questions always came up. Her quest to find her son required her to be open about her goals. She’d needed the cooperation of so many people over the years.

  But something about the dark interior of the car, the conversation she’d had with Vivian Ward, the reason she was racing toward Helen Sullivan, the crimes Tommy Taylor had committed against children, even the work she’d been doing on all of the criminal cases before this one, had combined to make her shout at Mike. Which was crazy. She couldn’t lose her grip on her sanity or her mission.

  Without warning, her remorse sent her in an entirely different direction. Almost without volition, she found herself telling Mike about Peter.

  “He was just a toddler when he went missing. Hell, I was a baby myself. I’d gotten pregnant at sixteen and the father took off. I was trying to finish high school and go on to college. Peter was a colicky baby. He cried all the time. And I couldn’t sleep. I was working as a waitress, trying to pay rent on a crappy one-room flat.” She stopped for a moment, recalling the sheer exhaustion in body and soul she’d lived back then.

  “Anyway, he was asleep in our flat, quiet for once, and I didn’t want to wake him, so I left him alone while I ran down to the basement to put the laundry in the dryer. And when I came back, he was gone.” She turned on her left blinker and moved out to pass a slow moving truck in front of them. When she was safely past, she moved back into the right lane. The small effort seemed to anchor her back in the present.

  “At first, I left finding Peter to the authorities until I finished school and finally realized they’d given up. There are so many missing kids and so little they can really do after the first few days. For the past ten years, I’ve been looking for him myself. I took this job with a national magazine so I could travel wherever I need to go and get the national exposure that might allow Peter to find me or anyone with information about him to know how to reach me. I’ve followed every lead, no matter how unlikely. We’ve used age-progression software to create pictures of him as he might appear now and posted them everywhere. I’ve used every ounce of my investigative skills to find him.” Jess heard the weariness in her voice, something she rarely revealed. She wondered why she was telling Mike all this and realized that sharing her frustration was somehow helping her feel better.

  “But no luck at all?” he asked, as if he found the idea curious and perplexing, like quantum physics or time travel.

  Jess put a tone of finality in her words, hoping they could move on to a different subject. She needed her wits about her and this topic wasn’t going to keep her on her game. “That’s right. Like I said, I’m not a lucky person.”

  “Would you maybe want me to try? I’m pretty good with internet searches. I’ve found other missing people a couple of times. I’ve got a wide network.” He sounded like a kid with a game, excited and a little breathless. How she wished finding Peter were only a game of hide and seek, that he might still be a toddler hiding from his mommy so that he could jump out and surprise her when she walked past. The idea brought exhausted tears to her eyes and she blinked them away in the darkness.

  Weary, she gave up trying to distract him. The kid was focused like a dog with a bone. She just wanted to move on. “Sure, Mike. Try to find him if you like. That would be great.”

  “I’ll start tonight. We’ll find him. You’ll see.”

  The flutter of hope his innocent enthusiasm ignited in her surprised Jess. She looked up at the sign overhead before she blew past it. I-275 South. She took the bypass and stepped up her speed.

  “We should be there in about fifteen minutes,” Mike said. “Let me try Lydia again.”

  This time she picked up on the first ring. After a quick talk, Mike said, “Well, the good news is she told me how to get in.”

  “What’s the bad news?” asked Jess.

  He tucked away his phone and sat straighter in his seat. “The vultures are circling.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lake Lois, Florida

  Friday 1:00 a.m.

  WHEN HE SAW THE TELEVISION NEWS STORY about the fire at the Sullivan ranch, Dr. Benjamin Fleming had been working all night, too tense for sleep. Work cured all distress, he believed, often prescribing a return to work for his grief-stricken patients as well.

  He glanced over at the clock on his desk, initially puzzled to realize it was 1:00 a.m. The clock on his computer read 10:00 p.m. He pushed the “save” button on the record he’d just completed, then hobbled into his private bath and splashed cold water on his face, rubbing his eyes with both hands.

  He didn’t often work so late, but he’d fallen behind on the paperwork that seemed to multiply in the dark like roaches. Once he started on the files, he often became engrossed and lost track of the hours, as he had this night.

  A Ph.D. psychologist specializing in grief work, Ben needed to use all of his skill simply to survive the days. He was lucky because his schedule was always full of appointments. He loved his work. Patients needed him and he was supremely qualified for the delicacy of the job. His patients were always hurting, which was difficult enough. But during the various stages of grief recovery, they could become hostile and angry as well, challenges he actually enjoyed taking on.

  On top of his full patient load, he also volunteered at several Florida funeral homes and hospitals, making himself available to survivors of personal and mass disasters. School shootings were the most demanding. All those dead children were survived by devastated families whose grief swamped entire communities. There hadn’t been a school shooting recently, but it seemed there was always another dead child or husband or mother or wife, their dependents unprepared for the magnitude of loss. His patients usually entered a lengthy period of complicated grief that required all of his skill to handle. No one was as good at managing complicated grief as Dr. Ben Fleming.

  Tonight, he’d intended to finish dictating treatment records for his patients no matter how long it took. He was far behind on this essential task. Ben enjoyed completing the paperwork because it meant substantial revenue from the various insurance companies who paid the bills for his services. His financial success was yet another i
ndicator of his expertise, along with the awards and accolades he had received from professional organizations, individual patients, and entire communities. His “ego wall,” as his assistant called it, was filled to capacity with framed tributes.

  As he opened each medical file on the computer and read through the preceding treatment notes, he felt a swell of pride. He documented every treatment as vividly as possible, re-creations that were almost artistic in their quality. He thought of himself like a champion, an athlete competing in his sport with skill, talent and grace. Done right, grief work was, quite simply, beautiful, and it fed him, body and soul.

  Ben moved away from the keyboard and stretched his cramped neck and shoulders. He really needed to get back to doing his yoga regularly. He worked out at the gym every day to relieve stress and keep fit, but sitting at his desk left his body feeling tight and kinky.

  He stood delicately, refilled his coffee cup and flipped through the channels on the small television inside the mahogany book case across from the antique library table he used as a desk, seeking an update on the Tommy Taylor execution. Instead, the governor was the top story.

  The all news channel had the most complete report of the Sullivan fire because of the late hour, and even that was sketchy. Photographs of the extinguished fire in Jake’s barn revealed all that needed to be said. The only thing left of the barn was black rubble. Six horses dead, one reporter said.

  Ben’s thoughts turned to the victims, who were also his patients. Helen Sullivan was a much stronger woman than Ben had realized initially. Her stoic nature, so often remarked upon by the press, was nowhere more evident than in her unnaturally rapid recovery from her son’s death under horrific circumstances. Not only was her son killed, for weeks after his death he’d been accused by the public and media of underage drinking and driving, of causing the death of his best friend, the child of another of Ben’s patients. A lesser woman would have succumbed in those early days. But not Helen. Her strength had certainly been a surprising challenge for Dr. Fleming.

  The other surprise in his treatment of Florida’s First Couple was how easily Oliver Sullivan’s spirit had broken. Many times, Oliver and Ben had conducted their sessions in the recently destroyed barn. During those sessions, Oliver groomed Jake almost the way a father would groom his young son. He lavished attention on Eric’s stallion while tears flowed freely onto the horse’s gleaming black coat.

  In some ways, Ben knew the stallion had become a replacement for Eric. To lose Jake now, too, would be like losing their son all over again to these parents. Of late, although Ben hadn’t revealed his concerns to Oliver or to Helen, he had begun to believe that Oliver would never recover from his severely complicated grief. Losing Jake would probably be the final straw. Oliver would be better off dead, a fact Dr. Fleming sometimes had to acknowledge.

  Ben sipped his coffee and listened to the various television news stations’ coverage of the event seeking new information, but each report only repeated what he already knew.

  “We were lucky that the fire didn’t jump into the trees or get blown over to one of the other buildings out here,” the Thornberry Fire Chief said, in a taped interview replaying on the screen.

  “Was anyone hurt in the fire?”

  He hesitated briefly before he replied, “Fortunately not.”

  “Bullshit,” Ben said, tipping over his cup and spilling coffee on the carpet.

  Then he laughed. Of course, the chief wasn’t telling the whole truth. At the time of the interview, the chief would have had few concrete facts and couldn’t have sifted through them well enough to disclose everything to the public, even if he’d wanted to. Data would be revealed in dribs and drabs over the next few days or weeks. Ben’s own father was killed in a fire. He knew first hand that fire investigations could take years and some were never satisfactorily resolved. The knowledge made him feel better.

  The reporter looked down at her notes. “We’ve heard that Oliver Sullivan was found outside the barn unconscious and taken to Tampa Southern Hospital where he remains in critical condition. Do you know what happened to him?”

  The fire chief looked directly at the camera, his next words an iron-bound vow to uncover the truth. “Not yet. But the doctors have told us we’ll be able to ask him about it in a couple of hours.”

  “Is that true?” Ben wondered aloud. If so, he would face a serious problem when Oliver awoke.

  The news said nothing about Helen’s whereabouts, but Ben knew she wouldn’t be far from Oliver in circumstances like this. In Ben’s experience the death of a beloved child impacted the parents in predictable ways. For some, death drove an emotional chasm between them that could never be bridged. Others, like Helen and Oliver Sullivan, became emotionally fused until death forced them apart.

  He ran through the channels once more, then turned off the television and thought for a few moments about what he should do, what Helen and Oliver would expect him to do.

  The answer was obvious: Any counselor worth his salt would hurry to his patient’s side, especially in the face of fresh grief.

  With luck, he could be at Tampa Southern in about half an hour. Ben reached down and reset the clock on his computer so the back-dated records would not be discovered and then signed off the network. He swiped his keys off the desk, grabbed his jacket, and limped painfully out to his car.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 12:25 a.m.

  THE FIRST THING JESS SAW after crossing the Florida Key bridge was the fleet of news trucks parked in front of the hospital’s valet entrance, satellite dishes and colorful logos representing all the major networks and the local all-news station. With a start, she saw next to the news vans the fully loaded RV belonging to David Manson. From the looks of things, the reporters had already made their way inside the hospital.

  “Now what?” she asked Mike.

  “Drive into the parking structure and follow the staff parking signs,” Mike gestured ahead and to the right. “We can go around to the back entrance.”

  If this worked, it would be a miracle. Without doubt, the governor’s security team would be busy preventing the reporters and David Manson from approaching both governor and her husband. Access through the front of the hospital would be totally restricted. The back-door approach would be the only way in now.

  Jess followed Mike’s directions and found an empty parking space near the stairwell on the second floor.

  He said, “This is physician parking. If security comes by, they’ll boot us.” When she cast him a quizzical look, he explained, “Put a boot, a kind of lock thing, on the wheel of the car so we can’t move until we go to security and get them to release us after we pay a hefty fine.”

  “Swell. Any way we can avoid that?”

  For the first time since she’d met him, Mike looked sheepish. “Uh, not really. I’ve tried.”

  “Well, let’s not worry about it now. Do you know where the ICU is? I’d rather not have to ask directions. We’ll get farther if we at least look like we know where we’re going.”

  “Follow me.”

  When Mike opened the back door to get his camera equipment, Jess told him to leave it. “We’re not going to be doing any shooting.”

  Mike shrugged and led the way past the parked cars, into the deserted stairwell. Jess put her hand up in front of her nose when the stench of urine mixed with vomit wafted down from a higher floor.

  She held her breath while they trotted down two flights and out the little used exit to the back of the garage near an open dumpster emitting a new mixture of odors her nose could not identify.

  A minute later they were near a closed emergency exit door on the west side of the main hospital building. Without hesitation, Mike pulled the heavy door open, pointing to the duct tape that covered the latching mechanism. Jess looked down and saw dozens of cigarette butts scattered around them.

  Yep, this was the place.

  They slipped inside and trotted
up the deserted stairwell, Mike in the lead. When they reached the third floor landing, he pulled the door open and entered the hallway. He continued purposefully as if he had a right to be there and knew exactly where he was going.

  Kid’s still got the innocent confidence of youth, Jess realized. She’d possessed it once, herself. Since meeting Mike, she’d begun to notice how much of that particular trait she’d somehow lost along the way and how much she missed the feeling. She wondered, briefly, if she could ever get it back.

  Jess followed until Mike pushed his way through a set of double swing doors into the area clearly marked ICU.

  “I’ll go find Lydia,” he said. “You wait in the waiting room over there.” He gestured with his head toward a closed door off to the side of the nurse’s station. “No one should bother you as long as they don’t know who you are. Act like a woman with a sick relative.”

  She might have laughed aloud if she’d been less tense about getting caught. As it was, Jess nodded and slid into the compact room provided for families of the hospital’s sickest patients. Three other people were present: an overweight elderly man flanked by two younger overweight women who looked so much like him they had to be his daughters. One of the women cried softly into a wet tissue, but the other one silently held the man’s hand in hers. The trio looked as disheveled and exhausted as Jess felt.

  The absence of reporters confirmed they’d been stopped downstairs by hospital security or, more likely, Frank Temple’s crew. Trying to look innocuous, Jess slumped as best she could in a straight-backed chair with a view of the door and the television mounted on the wall. The clock to the right of the television read a little after one o’clock in the morning. She had no idea when or whether Mike would find Lydia. It could be a long wait. Jess closed her eyes, just to rest for a few moments, and dozed off.