Speaking in Tongues

saved her?” Tate asked.
    “The Lord was watching over her.”
    Bett blinked. “I’m sorry?”
    The receptionist continued, “A nurse just happened by. My goodness. Can you imagine?”
    Bett shook her head, very troubled. Tate recalled that she felt the same about euthanasia as she did about the death penalty. He thought briefly of her sister’s husband’s death. Harris. He’d used a shotgun to kill himself. Like Hemingway. Harris had been an artist—a bad one, in Tate’s estimation—and he’d shothimself in his studio, his dark blood covering a canvas that he’d been working on for months.
    Absently he asked the receptionist, “That man. Who is he? Somebody like Kevorkian?”
    “Who is he?” the woman blurted. “Why, he was the poor woman’s son!”
    Tate and Bett looked at each other in shock. She said in a whisper, “Oh, no. It couldn’t be.”
    Tate asked the woman, “The patient? Was her name Hanson?”
    “Yes, that’s the name.” Shaking her head. “Her own son tried to talk her into killing herself! And I heard he was a therapist too. A doctor! Can you imagine?”
    •   •   •
    Tate and Bett sat in the hospital cafeteria, brooding silence between them. They’d ordered coffee that neither wanted. They were waiting for a call from Konnie Konstantinatis, whom Tate had called ten minutes ago—though the wait seemed like hours.
    Tate’s phone buzzed. He answered it before it could chirp again.
    “ ’Lo.”
    “Okay, Counselor, made some calls. But this is all unofficial. There’s still no case. Got it? Are you comfortable with that?”
    “Got it, Konnie. Go ahead.”
    The detective explained that he had called the Leesburg police and spoken to a detective there. “Here’s what happened. This old lady, Greta Hanson, fell and broke her hip last week. Fell down her back stairs. Serious but not too serious. She’s eighty. You know how it is.”
    “Right.”
    “Okay, today she’s tanked up on painkillers, really out of it, and she hears her son— your Dr. Hanson—hears him telling her that it looks like the end of the road, they found cancer, she only has a few months left. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The pain’s gonna be terrible. Tells her it’s best to just finish herself off, it’s what everybody wants. He’s pretty persuasive, sounds like. Leaves her a syringe of Nembutal. She says she’ll do it. She sticks herself but a nurse finds her in time. Anyway, she’s pretty doped up but tells ’em what happened and the administrator calls the cops. They find the son in the gift shop buying a box of candy. Supposedly for her. They collar him. He denies it all, of course. What else is he going to say? So. End of story.”
    “And this all happens fifteen minutes before Bett and I are going to talk to him about Megan? It’s no coincidence, Konnie. Come on.”
    Silence from Fairfax.
    “Konnie. You hear me?”
    “I’m telling you the facts, Counselor. I don’t comment otherwise.”
    “She’s sure it was her son who talked to her?”
    “She said.”
    “But she was drugged up. So maybe it was somebody else talking to her.”
    “Maybe. But—”
    “We can talk to Hanson?”
    “Nope. Not till the arraignment on Monday. And he’s probably not gonna be in any mood even then.”
    “All right. Answer me one question. Can you look up what kind of car he drives?”
    “Who? Hanson? Yeah, hold on.”
    Tate heard typing as he filled Bett in on what Konnie’d said.
    “Oh, my,” she said, hand rising to her mouth.
    A moment later the detective came back on the line. “Two cars. A Mazda nine two-nine and a Ford Explorer. Both this year’s models.”
    “What colors?”
    “Mazda’s green. The Explorer’s black.”
    “It was somebody else, Konnie. Somebody was following Megan.”
    “Tate, she took the train to New York. She’s going to see the Statue of Liberty and hang out in Greenwich Village and do whatever kids do in New York and—”
    “You know the Bust-er Book?”
    “What the hell is a buster book?” the detective grumbled.
    “Kids at Jefferson High are supposed to write down anybody who comes up and offers them drugs or candy or flashes them.”
    “Oh, that shit. Right.”
    “A friend of Megan’s said there’d been a car following her. In the Bust-er Book, some kids reported a gray car parked near the school in the afternoon. And Megan herself reported it last week.”
    “Gray car?”
    “Right.”
    A sigh. “Tate, lemme ask you. Just how many kids