The Narrows - Michael Connelly [138]
“I mean when did you know that Backus didn’t kill him? That he killed himself.”
She put both hands on the railing and looked down into the arroyo. But she wasn’t really looking at anything down there.
“Harry, what are you talking about?”
“I found out who William Bing is. He’s a monkey from the pages of his daughter’s favorite book.”
“So? What’s that mean?”
“It means he checked himself into the hospital in Vegas under a phony name. He had something wrong with him, Rachel. Something inside.”
I touched the center of my chest.
“Maybe he was chasing the case, maybe not. But he knew something was wrong and he went over there to that hospital to have it checked and to keep it quiet. He didn’t want his wife and his family to know. And so they checked him out and gave him the bad news. His second heart was going the way his first one went. Cardio . . . myo . . . whatever it’s called. Bottom line was he was dying. He needed another heart or he was going to die.”
Rachel shook her head like I was a fool.
“I don’t know how you think you know all of this but you can’t possib —”
“Look, I know what I know. And I know he had already burned through his medical insurance and if he was going to get in line for another heart, they would lose everything, the house, the boat, everything. Everything for another heart.”
I paused and then continued in a quiet and calm voice.
“He didn’t want that. He also didn’t want his family to see him waste away and die, on the public dole. And he didn’t like the idea of another person dying so he could live. He had already been through that, too.”
I stopped there to see if she would protest again and try to dissuade me. She remained silent this time.
“The only things he had left were his life insurance and his pension. He wanted them to have that. So he was the one who changed out his pills. There’s a receipt for a health food store under the seat of his car. I called there this morning to see if they sell powdered shark cartilage. They do.
“He changed out his pills and just kept on taking them. He figured as long as he made a show of taking them there’d be no autopsy and everything would work out fine.”
“But it didn’t, did it?”
“No, but he had a backup plan for that, too. That’s why he waited for the long charter. He wanted to die out there on the boat. He wanted it to be in waters that would come under federal jurisdiction. His hope was that if anything came of it, his friends in the bureau would take care of everything for him.
“The only problem with his whole big plan was that he had no idea about the Poet. He had no idea his wife would come to me or that a few lines scribbled in a file would lead to all that happened.”
I shook my head.
“I should have seen it. The med switch wasn’t Backus’s style. Too complicated. The complicated ones are usually inside jobs.”
“What about the threat to his family? Whether or not he knew it was Backus, he knew somebody had threatened his family. He got those photographs—somebody stalking his family. You are saying he checked out and left his family at risk? That’s not the Terry McCaleb I knew.”
“Maybe he thought he was ending the risk. The threat to his family was aimed at him. If he was gone, then so, too, was the threat.”
Rachel nodded, but it wasn’t in any sort of confirmation.
“If nothing else, your fact chain is interesting, Harry. I’ll give you that. But what makes you think we know about this, that I know about it?”
“Oh, you know. The way you dismissed my questions about William Bing for one thing. But the other is what you did in that house the other day. When I had the gun on Backus, he was about to say something about Terry and you cut him off. You jumped all over what he was about to say. I think he was about to say he didn’t kill Terry.”
“Oh, yeah, a killer denying one of his victims. Isn’t that unusual.”
Her sarcasm sounded defensive to me.
“This time it would have been. He was no longer hiding. He was out in the open and he would have taken credit if credit was due him. You knew that and that’s why you cut him off.