Prayers For Rain Part 71

"Okay."

"It gets better. Guess where he worked?"

"I haven't a clue."

Bubba spooned some more cayenne into a metal jacket. "Hospitals."

Angie tossed her pen at his head. "You're stomping my lines again."

"Lucky guess. Back off." Bubba frowned, rubbed his head, went back to his bullets.

"Psych hospitals?" I said.

Angie nodded. "Among others, yeah. He did a summer at McLean. He did a year at Brigham and Women's. A year at Ma.s.s General. Six months at Beth Israel. Apparently, he wasn't very good at his jobs, but his father kept getting him others."

"What departments?"

Bubba raised his head, opened his mouth, caught Angie's glare, and dropped his head again.

"Custodial," Angie said. "Then Records."

I sat at the table, looked down at my notes from the Hall of Records. "Where was he working in '89?"

Angie glanced at her notes. "Brigham and Women's. Records Department."

I nodded, held up my notes so she could see them.

"'Naomi Dawe,'" she read. "'Born, Brigham and Women's, December eleven, 1985. Died, Brigham and Women's, November seventeen, 1989."

I dropped the notes and stood, walked toward the kitchen.

"Where you going?"

"Making a phone call."

"To who?"

"Old girlfriend," I said.

"We're working," Bubba said, "all he's thinking about is getting some."

I met Grace Cole on Francis Street in Brookline, in the heart of the Longwood Hospital district. The rain had stopped and we walked down Francis and crossed Brookline Avenue, worked our way down to the river.

"You look...bad," she said, and tilted her head, considering my jaw. "Still doing the same work, I take it."

"You look stupendous," I said.

She smiled. "Always the flirt."

"Just honest. How's Mae?"

Mae was Grace's daughter. Three years ago, the violence in my life had driven them into an FBI safe house, almost derailed Grace's surgical residency, and pretty much slammed the door on what remained of our relationship. Mae had been four. She'd been smart and pretty and liked to watch the Marx Brothers with me. I couldn't think of her without it eliciting a sc.r.a.ping sensation under my ribs.

"She's good. She's in second grade, doing well. She likes math, hates boys. I saw you on TV last year, when those men were killed near the Quincy Quarries. You were in a crowd shot."

"Mmm."

Water dripped from the weeping willows along the river path, and the river itself was a hard chrome in the wake of the dull rain.

"Still mixing it up with dangerous people?" Grace pointed at my jaw, the sc.r.a.pes on my forehead.

"Me? Nah. Fell in the shower."

"Into a tub full of rocks?"

I smiled, shook my head.

We stepped aside for a pair of joggers, their legs pumping, their cheeks puffing, the air around them filled with fury.

Our elbows touched as we stepped back, and Grace said, "I took a job in Houston. I leave in two weeks."

"Houston," I said.

"Ever been?"

I nodded. "Big," I said. "Hot. Industrial."

"Cutting edge in medical technology," Grace said.

"Congratulations," I said. "I mean it."

Grace chewed her lower lip, looked out at the cars gliding past on slick roads. "I've almost called you a thousand times."

"What stopped you?"

She gave me a small shrug, her eyes on the road. "News footage of you near corpses in the quarries, I guess."

I followed her gaze out onto the road because there was nothing to say.

"You with someone?"

"Not really."

She looked in my eyes, smiled. "But you're hoping?"

"I'm hoping, yeah," I said. "You?"