Let the Devil Out (Maureen Coughlin #4)(75)

Maureen handed Heath back the plastic cup. She couldn’t look at him. She had to get away from him. Talking to him was worse than talking to Gage, because what Heath said made sense to her. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Do yourself a favor,” Heath said, taking the cup from her. “Ask your FBI friend about a man named Leo Freeman and an abortion clinic in Baker, Florida, what happened there in 1993. Ask about the dead doctor. Ask him about the girls’ shelter in Crestview, about the fire there in 1995. The eight bodies pulled from the ruins.”

He offered her the thermos. “Take the rest, bring the thermos back another time. You need all the help you can get.”

“That’s okay,” Maureen said, and she climbed into the cruiser. “I have what I need.”

Before dawn, she decided, she would find proof of who both Solomon Heath and Napoleon Gage really were, one way or another.

She started the car and turned on the headlights. She pulled into Solomon Heath’s driveway, the headlights shining into the first-floor windows. Then she backed out of the driveway, easing the car alongside Solomon. “Good night for now, Mr. Heath. I have things to do tonight. But you’ll see me again. Believe that.”





27

Maureen parked the patrol car at the back of Touro Infirmary, by the loading docks and service entrances, away from the cops and the press crowding the front of the hospital.

As she got out of the car, two security guards came to meet her. Without a word, they escorted her into the bowels of the hospital. Maureen knew they were being overly careful and she let them. She didn’t expect to get shot at tonight. The Watchmen had slunk back into their hiding places, she figured, as is typical of bullies, because they were cowards at their core. Now we know about them. Now we’re on the lookout. Not just me—every one of us cops, Maureen thought, is living under a death threat. And every one of us knows it. Who she’d been avoiding by sneaking around the back was not the Watchmen, but other cops. She didn’t want to talk to them. Maybe later she would, maybe in the morning, but not right then. Every ounce of energy she had left, physical and emotional, was devoted to getting to Preacher’s hospital room.

Once inside the hospital, Maureen’s uniform let her move freely.

She realized as she waited alone for the elevator that no one she had passed as she moved through the building, not doctors, not nurses, not orderlies, not patients, would so much as look at her. Everyone lowered their eyes. Did they know who she was? Maureen wondered. The story of her house getting shot up was in the news again because of the day’s events. Did the people she walked past know that she had been the Watchmen’s first target? That the NOPD had failed to stop them from striking again?

We’d had warning, Maureen thought, and we did nothing. The morning her house was shot up, Skinner had come to the house to speak with her and to survey the damage. To make promises, to her and to the cameras, like a good politician. And maybe he would’ve done more. But then Quinn had gone in the river with a prisoner and neither of them had come out alive, and the department turned its focus to squashing the scandal that had threatened to emerge around Ruiz and Quinn and the Heaths. The feds had only taken an active role in the case several weeks after the incident. Maybe they’d been watching all along, but so what if they had? What mattered was they hadn’t done anything to help until it was too late.

We devoted our energies to covering our asses, Maureen thought, instead of defending ourselves. We played politics. As Preacher would say, we let them get behind us. Even me, she thought. I was too busy running drunk through the downtown streets at night, chasing impossible revenge against a man I’ve already killed, to do the work that would have protected Mays and Bridges and Harrigan and Preacher. The suspension wasn’t my choice, Maureen thought. But the choices I made about how to handle it, giving in to the selfishness and rage and self-pity, that was all me.

The elevator arrived. Maureen let the doors open and close without getting on.

She hadn’t put Preacher in this hospital; she knew that. Her ego wasn’t quite that outsized. But could she have kept him out of it? Could she have found Madison Leary before she ended up dead? Lost to herself and no use to anyone else. Maureen grinned at her warped reflection in the silver elevator doors. I find her, Maureen thought, I keep her alive, and maybe Atkinson learns something. Maybe she shakes loose from Leary’s tangled brain some iota of information about the Watchmen that stops today from happening. She shouldn’t have been drinking while she was out, Maureen thought. She shouldn’t have been distracted by the men, like the one from d.b.a. or even the one from the Irish Garden. She should have stayed focused. She could have worked a lot smarter.

Shit, everything she had ever done since she was about twelve she could’ve done smarter one way or another. Just ask her mother about that.

And now, tonight, she should be out for revenge. She should be on the warpath, along with every other cop in the city. But she felt none of that. She didn’t feel dangerous and frightening. Not like she had when she’d stalked the streets with her ASP. Right then, she felt so exhausted with anger, confusion, and grief that she feared she might fall over. She had no idea what to do. She couldn’t even see the rest of her shift past this visit with Preacher. She felt like the doctors here might not let her out of the hospital, and she wasn’t sure she’d fight them on it.