Page 19 of Go Under

Kate could only hope that she’d find the light switch for her father’s past in time to understand what Cox’s latest master plan for her could be.

CHAPTER NINE

Hospitals used to hold fond memories for Kate. Her father’s work typically took him far from home, especially as his career transitioned to a research focus, but when Kate was very young, she’d sometimes visit him at Midland General, the hospital in Chicago where William Valentine got his start.

She used to walk through the cardiology wing, fascinated at the lights and machines, amazed at the dozens of nurses, doctors, orderlies, technicians, surgeons, and pharmacists, all of them dedicated to helping sick people get better. She vividly remembered standing outside of a room while her father talked with one of the other surgeons and watching a nurse, an anesthesiologist, a surgeon, and a primary care physician talking a patient through a coming surgery. She used to think it was wonderful that a sick person could have so many people focused on helping them feel better.

After her father died, those memories soured. Now, walking through the halls of New Castle Regional Hospital, the lights were too bright, the odor the chlorinated rot of half-hidden death, every beep from every machine a mockery. Here goes another one. One more. One more.

“Why don’t you let me take lead on this one, Kate?”

Kate jumped at Marcus’s voice, which was a pretty good sign that Marcus should take lead. “All right. Good idea.”

Among Marcus’s talents was an uncanny ability to make people talk to him. He could intimidate a cagey suspect and convince him through sheer willpower that his best bet was to tell Marcus everything he knew. Or, in situations like these, he could put on a gentle charm that could crack through any shell of shock or grief and cause the subject to lay their soul bare to him.

When Kate saw Carol, she knew they’d need that gentleness and charm.

Carol resembled Donna, no surprise considering they were related. She was older, with a short bob haircut rather than Donna’s tight-sided crewcut but the same amber color that hadn’t entirely ceded its brightness to gray. She had soft hazel eyes, and a build just giving way to the sag of age, though Kate wouldn’t call her overweight.

Where they differed was a certain softness in Carol that had been missing from Donna. Granted, Donna was in rigor, but the lines in her face were more than just the stiffness of death. Carol had lines, but where Donna’s were crevasses at the corners of her eyes and spiderwebs at the corners of her mouth, Carol had a single deep groove underneath each eye and deep canyons that ran almost perfectly straight across her forehead.

She stared vacantly at the agents as they entered the ICU. She wasn’t hooked up to any instruments, and no IV dripped lifesaving fluids into her veins. She’d been brought here as a precaution due to the visible signs of shock she showed when police arrived, but it looked like those had cleared up.

More likely than not, the hospital would release her once Kate and Marcus were finished. In the meantime, she was sitting in a hospital trying to process the reality that if she ever saw her sister again, it would be briefly in a casket before she was lowered forever into the ground, sealed into a crypt, or immolated to ash.

Kate swallowed and looked at Marcus, willing him to start the interview before her own discomfort interfered.

Marcus got the message. He smiled at Carol, a soft, sincere, breathtaking look that communicated, trust me, you’re safe with me, I won’t let anything hurt you. “Good morning, Mrs. Prather. How are you feeling?”

Kate looked at Marcus incredulously, but to her surprise, that question broke through Carol’s fog. She blinked at Marcus and asked in a toneless voice, “How should I be feeling?”

“However, you need to feel,” Marcus replied.

Carol nodded. “Well. Then I feel angry.”

Kate and Marcus both nodded. They could both understand that.

“Were you and your sister close?” Marcus asked.

Carol scoffed. “I wouldn’t say that. I was just the only person she had left in her life.”

“What makes you say that?”

She scoffed again. “Well, because it’s the truth. Donna was a very difficult woman. It wouldn’t be correct to say she had a mean streak. More like a very thin nice streak that revealed itself only on the rarest of occasions.”

“I see. I’m sorry to hear that.”

Carol shrugged. “Everyone has their thing, I suppose. My family in general isn’t composed of the kindest individuals. Heaven knows I’m not always the most pleasant person.”

Marcus smiled again to show her that of course she was pleasant, and it was an honor to be in her presence. “Did you and Donna have any recent difficulties?”

Carol laughed. There was little force to it. “Are you asking me if I killed my sister?”

“No, ma’am,” Marcus said. “You’re not a suspect.”

Strictly speaking, they hadn’t ruled her out, but now wasn’t the time to be hard-nosed with her, and besides, if Carol was their killer, then Kate’s people-reading skills were completely broken. She couldn’t imagine this fragile woman murdering anyone in cold blood, let alone having the strength or steadiness to carve a cipher upside down under a kitchen table immediately after.

“Then why are my difficulties with my sister relevant?”