“We’re going to miss the deadline.”
“It’ll be the first one we missed. They’ll forgive us. We’ve got the biggest audience on television and we should start acting like it. Call you in a bit.”
Sidney ended the call. It was just past 9:00 a.m. when she walked through the front entrance of Alcove Manor. She headed for the reception desk, where a young woman sat paging through a magazine.
“Hi,” Sidney said as she approached. “I’m visiting.”
“Sign in, please,” the girl said. She pointed to a log for Sidney to print her name, and removed a visitor badge from a sheet of labels.
“I’m not sure of the room number,” Sidney said. “This is my first visit.”
The girl handed Sidney the badge. “What’s the name?”
“Gustavo Morelli.”
The girl typed the name into the computer. “Two thirty-two,” she said. “Take the elevator to the second level. It’ll be to your left.”
Sidney attached the visitors badge to her lapel and rode the elevator to the second floor. When the doors opened a few minutes later, she walked onto the floor of the rehab facility, which shone with unnatural fluorescence and smelled from ammonia. Nurses in rose-red scrubs pushed carts down hallways and sat around computers at the station that occupied the middle of the unit. Two physicians in long white coats scribbled orders while they stood at the counter of the nurses’ station. Sidney walked to room 232 and peered inside. She saw a hospital bed lumpy with an occupant’s feet under the covers. She entered to find the man propped up in bed eating breakfast and reading the newspaper.
“Detective Morelli?” she asked.
The man looked up, folded his paper, and placed it on the table in front of him, covering his half-eaten breakfast. “That was fast,” he said.
“You know how to get someone’s attention.”
“Sorry I sent the kid the way I did. My goal was to track you down myself, but I couldn’t make that happen fast enough.”
He pointed to the crumpled mess of blankets that covered his lower body.
“Sit down,” he said. “We’ve got a lot to discuss.”
* * *
“The brass were convinced it was an accident,” Gus said. “The kid fell off a mountain ridge while he was hiking, end of story. When the pathologist finished his report and determined the cause of death to be internal bleeding from the trauma of the fall, that was the end of it.”
“But not for you.”
“I had my doubts back then. I saw a group of high-school kids that were covering for each other. Something sinister happened to Henry Anderson, and at least a few of those kids knew what it was.”
“What stirred your suspicion?” Sidney asked.
“You conduct enough interviews during your tenure and you learn to pick up a vibe. During the Henry Anderson case, I picked up a bad one. But it was me against the world on that case. I was at the start of my detective career, I didn’t have a ton of clout, and I had to choose my battles. I was stuck out in the sticks, and I wanted into the city. Bottom line—I was in no position to make waves. But those doubts about the Henry Anderson case never left me. Then the Sebold girl was brought to trial eight years later for the death of another boyfriend. I fought with my superiors to convince them that she was involved with Henry’s death, even went over their heads when they told me to forget about Henry Anderson. Nearly lost my job for insubordination. When Grace Sebold was convicted, I was supposed to be satisfied with the fact that she’d spend her life in jail.”
Gus shifted in bed.
“I never was satisfied, though. And my suspicions never died. Since I started watching your documentary, they’ve been rekindled.”
Sidney nodded her head. “For what it’s worth, you’ve got me thinking as well.”
“Listen, I’m a detective. I used to be, anyway. We do a lot of our work on instinct and hunch. But we also do a lot on straightforward common sense, and here’s some for you. If a girl’s boyfriend dies by falling off a mountain bluff once, it’s a sad case of bad luck. If that same girl hastwoboyfriends fall off a mountain in the same lifetime”—Gus looked at her—“that ain’t luck—bad or otherwise. That’s suspicious.”
Sidney took a deep breath. In one, articulate sentence from Gus Morelli, she felt her blockbuster documentary falling to pieces.
“You remember the Henry Anderson case well?” Sidney asked.
“No. It was almost twenty years ago.” Gus pointed to the closet. “But I pulled my old files from that case and read through them. Your girl was hiding something when I interviewed her. I’m certain about that, and I noted it way back when.”
“Grace?”
