Hour Seventy-Three

The results came back at the stroke of the seventy-second hour, which struck me even then as an unnecessary piece of theater.

I was in the corridor outside my office. I had gone down from the ninth floor to the fourth by the stairs, one flight at a time, with my hand on the rail, and I stood outside the glass door of my narrow room for a full minute without opening it. Behind me a fax machine began to chatter. Somewhere an air conditioner shuddered on. When I looked at the phone it said 00:00:03, and then, as I watched, the three became a two, and then a one, and then the numbers froze at zero and began to blink in red.

At that moment a young clerk from the Medical Examiner's office came round the corner with a manila envelope.

"Dr. Vaughn? I've got a delivery for the Captain, but Dr. Frost said to give you a copy."

I took it. He went away. I did not open it until I was sitting down.

…

It was two pages long.

The first was a cover sheet, a list of the tests and their codes and the date they had been run, in neat black type. The second was a table.

I read it twice.

Volatile screen: negative. Ethanol, trace, consistent with a single drink. Benzodiazepines: negative. Opiates: negative. Cannabinoids: negative. Sympathomimetic amines: negative. Cyanide: negative. A hundred and forty-three analytes, each in its tidy box, and in every box the same small word. Negative. Negative. Negative. The air sample from the ventilation duct: no organic residue detected above background. The swabs: consistent with ordinary environmental contamination. The histology of the myocardium, which Hannah had dictated herself, in her clipped precise prose, was consistent with catecholamine-mediated contraction band necrosis in the setting of acute emotional stress.

At the bottom, over the signature of Dr. Hannah Frost, Assistant Medical Examiner, was the final finding.

Cause of death: Cardiac arrhythmia secondary to acute stress cardiomyopathy. Manner of death: Natural.

I laid the paper on the desk.

I want to be fair to her. There was not a word in that document that was false. There was not a number in it that she had altered, or a result that she had ignored. She had done her work properly and she had reported what she found, which was nothing, because the thing I had smelled in the elevator had broken down in warm air and left nothing to find. She had said so, in the lobby, to my face. She had told me the lab would find it if it was there, and it had not been there.

I had known, even then, that this was what would happen.

I had known it as I stood in that lift with my pen in my hand. I had known it as I said the word protocol. I had known it in the taxi and in the corridor and in the long gray hours at my desk. I had simply preferred, as one does, to be told by someone else.

Natural.

Outside the window the rain had stopped. It was a perfectly ordinary morning. A pigeon sat on the ledge and looked at me with one orange eye.

…

I do not remember going home.

I remember the lock on my door, which stuck. I remember the stairs, which creaked on the ninth step. I remember the sitting room, with its gray light and its smell of old tea, and the laptop on the desk with its removed camera, and the burned flash drive lying where I had flung it, a crooked black twig. I remember filling a glass at the kitchen tap and drinking half of it and setting it down. I remember that it was twenty past nine in the morning.

And I remember the card.

It was lying on the mat inside the door, face down, where it must have been pushed through the gap. I would have stepped over it if I had not heard the faint paper scrape under my shoe. I bent down and picked it up.

It was black.

It was black as a hat. A thick, heavy, glossy stock that drank the light, with a hair-thin border of silver around the edge. I turned it over. In the middle of the card, written in a hand so fine and so even that for a moment I took it for engraving, someone had put one line in white ink.

Doctor, the clock has struck.

There was no signature. There was no date.

I stood in the little hallway with my coat half off and my hand around that cold smooth card, and I had a very odd experience. I felt nothing. I felt no fear and no outrage and no surprise. What I felt was something much stranger: a kind of vast, quiet, impersonal recognition, as one feels on reaching the last page of a book one has been told the ending of.

The clock has struck.

I looked at my phone.

00:00:00.

It was still blinking, red, in the dim of the hall. I had never turned the alarm off. It would blink all day, I supposed, and all night, until the battery died. A small red heartbeat in the palm of my hand, a countdown that had reached its end and had nowhere left to go.

…

I did not sleep.

I sat in the armchair by the window with the black card on my knee and watched the daylight go over the roofs. I drank tea. I did not drink it. I made it and let it go cold and made more. The harp downstairs started and stopped. At four o'clock a delivery van backed noisily into the lane. At six the streetlamps came on, one by one, all the way down Pine Street, in a long soft orange line.

The news came on at five minutes to seven the following morning.

I was still in the armchair. I had not moved, I think, in about nineteen hours. The television had been switched on at some point, I could not have said when, and the sound was low, and a smooth female voice was reading something about a bond issue. I heard it as one hears the rain. Then the voice changed. It acquired a kind of grave, hushed, professionally regretful tone, and a name came through it, clear as a bell.

"—Dominic Hargrove, the thirty-three-year-old chairman of Hargrove Capital Partners and this year's recipient of the Mayor's Philanthropist of the Year award, was found dead early this morning at his home in Chestnut Hill. His housekeeper discovered him shortly after six. Police say there are no signs of forced entry and no indication of foul play. The cause of death is believed to be cardiac arrest. Mr. Hargrove had no known history of heart disease."

I stood up. I did not decide to. I was simply standing, with the black card in my hand.

"Mr. Hargrove was widely known for his generosity toward children's charities, and his work with orphaned and homeless youth. In a statement, Mayor Alvarez called his death 'an irreplaceable loss for the city we love.'"

An irreplaceable loss.

I turned off the television.

…

I took a taxi. I have said that I do not drive in this country, and it is as true of my conduct that morning as of any other. But I will say this: that taxi ride, from Pine Street to the north-west corner of the city, was the fastest I have ever made. The driver, a large silent Haitian man with a rosary hung from the mirror, took one look at my face and did not speak. We went up the Parkway at fifty miles an hour, past the museum and the long stone lines of the river, and out along Lincoln Drive through dripping trees, and up into the cold green quiet of Chestnut Hill, where the houses sit behind their hedges like old women behind their fans.

The Hargrove house stood at the top of a hill.

It was a large, pale, stately mansion with many chimneys, set back from the road behind a high stone wall and a pair of tall black iron gates. A long gravel drive curved up through lawns to the front door. A line of cypress trees stood motionless against the sky. It was a beautiful house. It looked like the kind of place where, on a summer evening, a band might play on the lawn.

"Stop here," I said.

The driver stopped.

I did not get out. I sat in the back of the cab with my hand on the door handle and looked up the long drive, and I saw what there was to see.

There was no tape. There was no cruiser. There was no ambulance with its lights turning. There was no van from the Medical Examiner's office, and no photographer with a long lens, and no crowd of neighbors at the gates. There was a single dark sedan, parked at the foot of the steps, with its engine off. And as I watched, the front door of the house opened and two men in dark suits came out carrying between them a folded canvas stretcher, with a long shape on it, covered by a gray blanket.

They did not hurry.

They carried it down the steps with a kind of tender, unremarkable efficiency, like men carrying a rolled carpet to a van. A third man held the car door. They slid the stretcher in. They closed the door. One of them took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead, and then, as an afterthought, glanced at the gates, at the cab, at me.

I looked back at him.

He got into the car and drove away.

…

I was back in my flat by noon. I sat on the bed with my coat still on and my hands hanging between my knees. The room was cold. The harp had stopped.

On the desk, in the bottom drawer, under the gold-rimmed spectacle case I never used, lay the yellow folder.

I took it out.

I did not mean to open it to the last page. I had not read the last page in a month. But the folder had a way of falling open, in my hands, at the place where it had been opened most often, and I saw the brittle yellowed sheet folded once down the middle, and the three lines of red ink.

They did not die of natural causes. They did not kill themselves. Someone is behind this.

I read it three times.

And I understood.

I understood it all, at once, in a long dizzy rush, as if a wall had come down: the lights that flickered below the threshold of sight; the air that carried a trace of almonds; the terror that could be made in a closed room out of nothing but a person's own mind; the cases that had been filed, one after another, in the neat gray drawers of the Medical Examiner's office under the one word that nobody would ever question. Natural. I understood how it was done. I understood why. I understood, God help me, the man who did it, in a way I had not wanted to understand anyone since I was a boy of nineteen, with a letter I had never sent.

I had thought of all of it. I had worked it out, in an elevator, in a dead woman's presence, in a matter of minutes.

But I had thought of it three days too late.

…

THE END — Ending 2 of 8: Seventy-Two Hours

The system's permission is not the same as the truth. A man who waits for the world to agree with him may be perfectly right, and perfectly useless.

You were not wrong about the science. You were wrong about the clock. Somewhere in a hillside mansion, a man the whole city called a saint died alone in the dark, and a killer who had never needed anyone's permission went on setting his tables.

There are seven other endings. Go back to Chapter 11 to choose differently.