“Looking back, I think Dad and this woman had slept together at the conference and she thought it was love, but he’s tightly wound, and he didn’t know what to do with her when she showed up. What a fuckup all that was. I was practically weeping with the need to get away from it. I haven’t been back to Kansas since, but I’m sorry for the poor polar bear: Stu and I shouldn’t have left her to fend for herself all those years.”

He couldn’t remember the woman’s name or if she’d had gold teeth. When he finished, I curled up on the seat next to Peppy, letting her warmth comfort me. I finally uncoiled myself and returned to the ICU.

Tricia Polanco was still on the ward, but the ICU receptionist paged her for me. Polanco came out to tell me they’d been able to restart Sonia’s heart but had once more put her into a protective coma until her systems became stable.

“That wasn’t either of her brothers who did this,” I said. “I spoke with both of them while you were in with Sonia.”

I’d snapped a picture of AKA Pinsen with Baggetto, Kiel, and Bram when I saw them at the hotel bar last week. The lighting was poor, but you could make out the faces.

“Was the guy one of these?”

She squinted at my phone but shook her head. “Sonia’s brothers are both around fifty, I knew that, and the man who came here was about that age. He did look a little like this one, though—”

She tapped Pinsen’s face with a fingernail. “Bland, I mean, nothing special, but it wasn’t this man. He made me think military—the muscles, the way he walked.”

She fiddled with the edges of my phone, then finally said, “We found a fabric thread in her nose, so it definitely was someone trying to kill her.”

Poor little polar bear indeed.

41
You’re So Ignorant

By the time I finished with Tricia Polanco, I was longing for solitude—so much so that when I saw Sergeant Everard getting out of his car as I was leaving the hospital, I ducked back inside and left through a different exit. Just like Sonia’s assailant.

Bernie’s presence in town made my nerve endings vibrate with the intensity of the Riverside Church organ. I didn’t think I could bear to spend an afternoon with her, but I couldn’t leave her on her own. However, when I called, she said Cady was showing her around and she’d meet me at suppertime.