He stared at me, brown eyes visible under the strip of gauze across his head. I was on an adjustable bed, I had determined, cranked up at an angle. The straps that held me down were familiar from visiting my mother. They were the kind used to tie down dementia patients.
“You were out for a half hour,” he said. “If anyone knew you were here, they’d have raided the place. This is why people call for backup, Agent Camden. But you didn’t call, did you?”
I strained my head to look around. To see where I was. Was Amber Isiah here, too?
“Your phone will show a GPS signal at the Olive. But after you arrived, you went for a jog, remember? They’ll find your cell down the beach.”
I tried to move my legs, but they were strapped down, just like my arms.
“I have a question,” he said then. “I’m curious. Do you know the average life expectancy of a male in Florida?”
“What county?” I asked.
“What?”
“What county?” I repeated.
“Here,” he said. “Volusia.”
“Seventy-four-point-six-nine,” I said.
He blinked, the strip of visible forehead showing lines across it. “I didn’t expect you to have that so… readily available.”
“Why did you ask?”
“Well, half of seventy-four is thirty-seven,” he said. “The age I am today.”
I wondered how long he’d been staying in this house, making himself look like Edward Burrows.
“So you’re Edward’s older brother,” I said.
“By eight months. Don’t get me started on primogeniture.”
When he spoke, he overarticulated every syllable, a forced formality of the type Amber Isiah had described. Putting on the affect of someone well educated.
Outside, the rain slapped the windows, and I turned my head. Trying to see where he’d disappeared to.
“I imagine you were the smarter brother,” I said, trying to build rapport.
“Sure,” he said. “But who got to grow up on the beach? I lived above a restaurant as a kid.”
In the distance, lightning cracked across the horizon, brightening the churn of the dark water.
“He went to a good school?”
“Yale,” he replied. “While I went to a state school.”
But Donnie Dom knew how to talk to Araceli Alvarez about her nose. How to spot the defect in Julie Gilliam’s cleft surgery.
“But you went to medical school?”
In the distance, I heard the acoustic energy of thunder cracking.
“The only one I could afford was in the islands, Agent Camden. When I came back, there were no residencies that would take me for the specialty I wanted. Not based onthatschool.”
This was how El Médico had learned Spanish. And why he had a skill set well above that of the average vet tech.
“Edward, though.” His voice dropped, becoming angrier. “He moved to Boston. Got a master’s in architecture. But I’m a patient man. So I waited. All that time.”
