The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [290]
By now it was almost Christmas and Osborn hadn’t heard so much as a word from him. Yet every time he saw a police car he jumped. He was driving himself crazy with guilt and fear, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He could call a lawyer and prepare a defense but that could make it worse if McVey felt he’d been through enough and decided to let it go at that. Purposely he stopped thinking about it and concentrated on his patients. Three nights a week he spent in physical therapy working his broken leg back to normal. It would be a month before he could get rid of the crutches and two more before he could walk without a limp. But he could live with it, thank you, considering what the alternative might have been.
And daily, time itself was beginning to heal the deeper things. A great deal of the mystery of his father’s death had been answered, though the real why and purpose still drifted. Von Holden’s answer—”Für Übermorgen, for the day after tomorrow”—if, in truth, that part of Osborn’s experience on the Jungfrau had been real and not an hallucination—seemed a meaningless abstract that told him nothing.
For his own sanity, for his future, for Vera, he had to put it, and Merriman and Von Holden and Scholl, in the past. Just as he had to let go of the tragic memory of his father, which, little by little, he was finding himself able to do.
Then, at five minutes to noon, on the day before Vera and her grandmother were to arrive, McVey called.
“I want to show you something. Can you come down?”
“Where—?”
“Headquarters. Parker Center.” McVey was matter-of-fact, as if they talked like this every day.
“—When?”
“An hour.”
Jesus Christ, what does he want? Sweat stood out on Osborn’s forehead. “I’ll be there,” he said. When he hung up, his hand was shaking.
The drive from Santa Monica to downtown took twenty-five minutes. It was hot and smoggy and the city skyline was nonexistent. That Osborn was scared to death didn’t help it any.
McVey met him as he came through the door. They said hello without shaking hands, then went up in an elevator with half a dozen others. Osborn leaned on his crutches arid looked at the floor. McVey had said nothing more than that he wanted to show him something.
“How’s the leg?” McVey said as the elevator doors opened and he led the way down a hallway. The burn on his face was healing well and he seemed rested. He even had a little color, as if he might have been playing some golf.
“Getting there. . . . You look good.” Osborn was trying to sound easy, friendly.
“I’m all right for an old guy.” McVey glanced at him without smiling, then led him through a ganglia of corridors peopled with faces that looked at once tired and confused and angry.
At the end of a hallway, McVey pushed through a door and into a room cut in half by a wire cage. Inside were two uniformed cops and shelf upon shelf of sealed evidence bags. McVey signed a sheet and was given a bag that held what looked like a video cassette. Then they crossed the corridor and went into an empty squad room. McVey closed the door and they were alone.
Osborn had no idea what McVey was doing, but what ever it was, he’d had enough. He wanted it out in the open and now.
“Why am I here?”
McVey walked over and closed the Venetian blinds. “You see the TV this morning? Vietnamese family, out in the valley.”
“Yeah, sort of . . . ,” Osborn said, vacantly. He’d seen something as he was shaving. An entire Vietnamese family in an upscale neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley had been found murdered. Parents, grandparents, children.
“It’s my case. I’m on my way to autopsy so let’s do this fast.” McVey opened the plastic bag and took out the video cassette. “There are only two copies in existence. This is the original. The other is with Remmer in Bad Godesberg. The FBI wants this one yesterday. I told them they could have it tomorrow. It’s why Salettl