12th of Never (Women's Murder Club 12)

I was sputtering, still dumbfounded by what Joe had said, when a nurse opened the door and told us, “I have a little girl here who wants to be held.”

Joe and I both put out our arms.

“You two, flip a coin,” the nurse said with a smile.

Joe stood up, took Julie from the nurse, thanked her, and handed our baby to me.

Oh, my God. I almost swooned again at the smell of her, at the sight of her sweet face.

Julie couldn’t die. She just couldn’t die.

Chapter 77

I HELD JULIE and tried not to crush her with my maternal love. She fussed, and so I cooed and cradled her, pushed her dark curls back from her face. Her skin was warm but not overheated. She opened her beautiful dark eyes and looked at me.

I don’t know how much a four-week-old baby can sense, but I didn’t want her to know how scared I was. How scared we were.

I said, “Hi, sweetie. How’s my girl?” “I want a second opinion,” said Joe.

“What do you mean, Joe? We shouldn’t do the chemo?”

“I want someone else to see her, to do the tests again, see if we get the same results.”

“But that could waste valuable time. Maybe that loss of time would just tilt the odds from fifty–fifty to sixty–forty against her. I like Dr. Dwy. I like this hospital.”

Joe said, “May I hold her?”

I gave the baby to my husband and he held her against his shoulder the way he likes to. He walked around the small room with her, rubbed her back. She closed her eyes and started to breathe rhythmically until she was in a deep sleep.

I thought about my mother’s cancer, what a tenacious bitch it was, and how, despite the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, and my mother’s strong will to live, she had died.

I heard Dr. Dwy in my mind saying, “These acute leukemias move very quickly.”

“I want to take her to Saint Francis,” Joe said. “I’ve done a lot of research. There’s a very highly regarded hem-onc there.”

“A what did you say?”

“Hematologist-oncologist. I want to bring Julie to Mark Sebetic. He’s busy. He’s famous. He’s well guarded by his staff. I’m going to knock down whatever doors I have to. I won’t accept ‘no’ for an answer. I’ll sleep outside his office if that’s what it takes.”

I was torn right down the middle of my heart. I didn’t want Julie to go through the sickness and discomfort of chemotherapy, but I also didn’t want to delay treatment that could save her life.

My husband is older than me, has been uncle to more than a dozen children, and has made life-and-death decisions for other people his entire professional life. But we loved Julie equally. We had to agree on the best course of treatment for our baby.

We had to decide together what was best for her.

Chapter 78

CONKLIN TURNED AWAY from the dead man’s partially submerged body and saw Claire Washburn coming toward him in the watery gloom. Her scene kit was in hand and three techs trailed in her wake.

“Hey, cowboy,” she called out. “Where’s your partner?”

Conklin said, “You got me. She’s a mom first these days. I keep getting her voice mail. So what happened, Claire? You ducked out the back door and Dr. Morse doesn’t know you’re missing?”

“If we didn’t have a ten-car smashup on the freeway, he’d be here instead of me. Hey, Charlie,” she said. “How goes it?”

“What I love about this job is that it’s always different. Take a look at that.” Charlie Clapper pointed to the hole in the wall, six feet off the ground, water flowing through it as though it were a fire hose. He said, “Could be that the shot went wild, or could be it was deliberate, so that everyone’s mind would go to the six hundred million gallons of water coming into the tunnel, not to the vic or the shooter.”

“I hope someone’s going to put their finger in the dike,” Claire said, looking at the stream. “Meanwhile, I need to get a look at the DB.”