Saving Meghan(110)

CHAPTER 54





BECKY


What should she feel, knowing her husband was dead? Why weren’t there any tears? Where was the ache? The wailing? The flood of grief? When Zach broke the news about Carl, she felt none of those emotions. Instead, a strange sense of relief washed over her. Now the man who had shared her bed, her life, could not hurt her or Meghan ever again. The realization came with a perverse sense of justice. Carl had gotten what he deserved, because Becky now believed, as did Zach, that he had poisoned Meghan. It was entirely possible he could have killed her had Becky not consumed the soup meant for their daughter. The man Zach had found dead in his home office was not the man she had married and once loved. More than a stranger, he was a monster, and his motives were now as clear as the liquids being pumped from the IVs into her veins.

This was not about Munchausen’s, Becky now believed. This was about Carl.

He wanted out of the marriage, out of his obligations, out of his life so that he could start a new one with this Angi person, whoever she was. To do so, he was willing to kill his sick daughter and use Munchausen’s as proof of Becky’s instability when he set her up to take the fall for his crime. With one devilish act, both Carl’s anchors would be cut free so that he could sail away into the glory of his new life. Becky would go to prison and Meghan into the ground, while Carl and Angi would get to live out their days on some tropical beach, brushing each other with suntan lotion and imbibing mango rum smoothies.

But Angi—that whore, that bitch—apparently had a plan of her own. Becky and Zach had a new theory, which they shared with Capshaw and Spence, who had come to the hospital to take a statement. At some point, Angi had decided to do away with Carl, poisoning him the way he had Meghan. Carl was not the type to take his own life, which was why Becky suspected his paramour had staged the suicide, which would be entirely believable, given what he’d been doing to his daughter. In the aftermath, Meghan would live, Becky would avoid jail, and Angi would vanish, along with her reasons for double-crossing her lover.

Maybe Carl had set Angi up financially. Maybe he’d funneled money to her in the same secretive way that she believed he had to Kelly London, using his corporate account as a personal piggy bank. All would be revealed soon enough. Carl had indeed sent a message from the grave, and the police were now out looking for Angi. With such an unusual name, she would not be too hard to track down, Becky believed.

What Becky wanted now was for the tube shoved up her nose to be taken out. She wanted the IVs removed as well. She wanted to be back on her feet so that she could visit with Meghan, to tell her in person that her father was gone before she heard it from someone else. Even though her father had committed an unfathomable act of pure evil, he was still part of her history and an integral part of her. In Meghan’s time of sorrow, she would need the comfort only a mother could provide.

“See if you can get her down here,” Becky said to Zach as he checked the drip flow of her IVs. It was pitch dark out her window, but the ICU bustled with its typical degree of chaos. The sounds from the hall beyond her cubicle, the incessant beeps and buzzes, so hard to ignore at first, had morphed into white noise akin to the dull din of a Vegas casino. Zach’s cell phone rang. He answered, a grave look soon coming to his face.

“Are you sure?” she heard him say. His eyebrows were knitted together, while deep creases stretched across his furrowed brow. Becky’s gut told her the call had been about Carl.

“That was Detective Spence,” Zach said, putting his phone away. “They spoke with the COO at Carl’s company. Apparently, there’s no Angi who works there, and there has never been one.”

“That’s … that’s not possible,” Becky said, stammering. “Carl told me she was someone he worked with.”

“Carl lied about a lot of things, didn’t he?”

“Well, who the hell is Angi, then?”

“I wouldn’t imagine it’s someone’s initials, not with that many letters,” Zach said, thinking it through. “A nickname, perhaps?”

“Maybe.”

“Or it could be a first and last name put together,” Zach said. “The first letters of each.”

“Perhaps,” Becky said. She thought about names that begin with A-n.

Anne … Angela … Anita …

But those were just names, not people she knew. Maybe Carl knew her. Maybe she was someone at work whose identity he was protecting. The police could search every An/Gi name pretty quickly, she thought.

God, how she wanted that tube pulled out. She wanted to stand, to pace, to think clearly without being all doped up. Who the hell is Angi? Because that’s the message Carl had sent, wasn’t it? There was a reason he had ripped open that package and held on to the necklace, the same kind of diamond-encrusted pendant with an engraving on the back that he’d once bought her.

Angi … Angi … Angi …

Becky thought of what Zach had said, that the engraving was a set of initials, first and last names. In her mind, she split the letters again. AN-GI … AN-GI.

A surge of terror raced through her body.

AN-GI.

“What kind of doctor is Amanda Nash?” she asked, knowing the answer already.

“Gastroenterologist,” Zach said. “Why?”

Becky had only to answer with four letters. “AN-GI,” she said.