Chapter 15: The File

I was still kneeling on the study floor when he came down the stairs.

He stopped in the doorway in his trousers and the gauze and nothing else.

He saw the file in my lap.

"Sit in a chair, Brigid. You'll want to throw something."

I held up the first page.

"Three years," I said. "Who took these?"

"My driver."

"The quiet one. The one who drove my grandfather to Mercy."

"Yes."

"He followed me home from work for three years."

"He followed you to your car. He watched the garage. If you went somewhere at night alone, he went too."

"Why?"

He came in and sat on the arm of the old leather chair, so his face was level with mine.

"Four nights after you closed my chest," he said, "a man came into my room in the ICU at four in the morning. He was in scrubs. He had a syringe."

"My driver was asleep in the chair by the door. He woke up because the man's shoes squeaked. Nurses don't wear leather shoes."

"What was in the syringe?"

"I don't know. He dropped it on the floor and ran down the stairwell. Somebody from your hospital picked it up and it went the way of the bullet."

A full syringe of potassium stops a heart and leaves nothing for a coroner.

"I lay there with a tube in my chest," Conall said, "and I thought about who else in that building knew it was a bullet."

"Me."

"You. You'd written it down. You'd held it in your hand."

He reached over and turned two pages in the file for me.

A night two winters ago.

A man in a ball cap standing by my car on the third level of the garage, under the light that buzzes.

I remembered that night.

I'd come off a double and found my tire flat.

A man in a ball cap had offered to help, and then another car had pulled up behind him, slow, and he'd walked away.

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