Under the Knife(48)

Sebastian was good at reading people and wasn’t fooled for a second. The boredom was an act. Each of the questions she lobbed at Montgomery was a feint, designed to draw him out of the shelter of his scripted monologue, a little at a time. Montgomery, no dummy, parried these with a witty remark and the grin of the media-savvy shark, even as her dark eyes, sharp and bright, roamed everywhere, absorbing every detail.

Good-looking, too, he decided (he couldn’t always turn off that part of his brain, either, so why bother?). She was black, with short, stylish hair shorn close to her skull. Well-defined chin. Nice neck without a hint of flab. Svelte, but curvy in the right places. Probably worked out, judging by the well-defined calves. Yeah. She was all right.

The PR man leaned over and whispered in Montgomery’s ear.

“Right!” Montgomery said brightly. He clapped his hands once and rubbed them together. “Right. Well, it’s time to head back. We’re going to have everyone change into scrubs for the operating room, then we have a brief presentation before the actual operation. So let’s go!”

Sebastian and the others followed him back across the bridge.

So far, so good, Sebastian thought, walking behind the Wall Street Journal chick.

Trying, but failing, not to admire her ass.





FINNEY


Dr. Wu had returned to the locker room to clean herself up, and he had let her.

No reason not to. He’d also permitted her to remove her glasses to use the toilet, and to take a shower, in (relative) privacy. Because, why not? He was feeling generous. Overall, everything was proceeding as he’d planned. She wasn’t going anywhere.

Now he was listening to the steady thrum of shower water against her skull, which to him, through his audio feed, sounded like the drone of jet engines in the cabin of a passenger plane.

Finney was sitting in a small, windowless room in an anonymous office building next to Turner—a building that he owned, and which at present was unoccupied. He’d seen to that months ago, quietly clearing out the business tenants through intermediaries and expired leases, so that he’d be far from any prying eyes this morning.

The room was spare but suited his purpose just fine. There was a large desk on which to place the electronic tablet that tethered him to Dr. Wu and a rolling desk chair with padded arms and a high back for reclining.

He pushed himself away from the desk, leaned back in the chair, and stared at the ceiling. The water thrummed in his ear, as if he were standing in the shower with her.

Sebastian.

He assumed the man was climbing the walls right now, wondering what he was doing, suspecting that Finney was holding out on him, perhaps laying plans Sebastian wasn’t privy to. Which, naturally, Finney was.

Plans that involved killing Dr. Wu.

But those would come later. For now, he simply wanted to be alone with her. Because, really, this whole thing was between only the two of them.

Without taking his eyes off the ceiling, he pulled the worn-leather notebook from his front shirt pocket, the same one he’d written in the day of Jenny’s funeral. He held it up to his face. A frayed cloth bookmark, attached to the binding, flagged a page near the back. He opened to that page and studied the name he’d written there in mechanical pencil a year ago.

Dr. Rita Wu.

He replaced the bookmark, closed the book, and hugged it to his chest.

When Jenny had still been alive, people had wondered what she’d seen in him.

Oh, they didn’t come right out and say it to his face. But Finney knew they were thinking it. Talking about him behind his back. He wasn’t stupid.

Most, he knew, thought it was his money. With good reason. He had a lot of it. And he, being careful with his money, had always regarded the women who pursued him with suspicion.

He’d dated before Jenny, of course. Like most men, he had physical needs. Close companionship hadn’t interested him. But satisfying those needs had, and he’d never been one to pay for that kind of thing.

So he’d dated, but never without a thorough background check of the woman in question, during which his investigator invariably turned up material that confirmed his suspicions (at least in his own mind), and prevented the development of a longer-term entanglement. Which was fine. There was always another woman.

And then Jenny.

From the beginning, she’d been different. An accountant by training, she’d worked for one of the smaller biotechs he controlled, one developing new treatments for diabetes. He’d met her at one of the company meetings he occasionally attended, and she’d intrigued him.

It had begun with her hand.

He disliked shaking hands. People’s hands were dirty. Coated with disease and filth. He tolerated hand shaking only because it was good business, and politeness demanded it. But he kept a small bottle of liquid hand sanitizer in his pants pocket at all times; and he would slip his hand in his pocket to surreptitiously cleanse it after each offending, germ-soaked shake without removing the bottle from his pocket.

He hadn’t done that after shaking Jenny’s hand, not one squirt of lemon-scented, bacterial death. He hadn’t felt the urge, hadn’t pictured in his mind, the way he normally did, the millions of microbes teeming across the surfaces of her palm and fingers. He didn’t understand why.

He’d also had no clue as to why he was able to look her straight in the eye when they first met. Looking people in the eye usually made him uncomfortable. Hers had been beautiful eyes. Green, to go with her red hair.