“Lou?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Something made him do this. He was not a violent person. Something made him do what he did.”

Lou passed on the urge to remind her that a few years ago, her husband had nearly gotten booted out of medicine for losing control.

“I suppose that’s an understandable feeling,” he said instead.

As she pulled onto the driveway, John Meacham’s widow left rubber on the wet tarmac of the doctors-only parking lot.

“Find out what happened, Lou,” she said. “Find out why John killed those people.”

CHAPTER 9

They drove largely in silence, wipers on intermittent, traveling along a country road that snaked through a hilly landscape. Dusk had passed, and night had settled in quickly, but Carolyn did not appear bothered by the headlights of the vehicles splashing past in the opposite direction. In fact, Lou guessed she might be going as fast as any of them.

“Are you all right to be driving?” he asked.

Carolyn sighed heavily. “I need to be driving,” she said. “Even in this crappy weather, I need to be doing something. Just sitting in that lounge … waiting for news … trying to make sense of it all … hoping he would live, praying he would die. It was so horrible, so lonely, Lou. You couldn’t possibly imagine.”

A beloved husband dead. Hundreds of lives irreparably shattered. Carolyn left to dwell in the aftermath.

Those were Lou’s thoughts before he said, “No, Carolyn, you’re right. I couldn’t imagine.”

They fell back into the heavy silence. The Volvo’s wipers now beat a steady rhythm against the driving rain. Fog transformed the approaching headlights into a hazy glow that stretched across the darkening horizon. Even with bad visibility, the rain-slicked road, and Carolyn’s above-the-limit speed, there were drivers daring enough pass them when permissible.

Carolyn made a disgusted sound when one zipped by. “I’m not going to speed in weather like this,” she said.

Lou reached for his jacket in the backseat and fished out his cell phone. He assumed that Renee had already seen news reports of Meacham’s death, but knew, since she and Emily were there when the call came in from Filstrup, that she’d want to hear directly from him. He began keying in Renee’s number, when he felt the SUV shift hard to the left. His seat belt went from loose to taut in a blink, keeping him from being thrown against Carolyn.

Before Lou could regain his bearings, the car swerved again, this time to the right. The tires lost traction on the rain-soaked road; suddenly the Volvo was fishtailing, lurching violently from side to side. Moments later, Carolyn had calmly regained control. Her speed had, if anything, increased.

Lou flashed on the possibility that she had insisted on driving because of some kind of suicidal urge.

She veered right, then left, then right again.

Lou’s stomach dropped as though he were front seat in a roller coaster. The left wheels of the SUV crossed the solid center lines twice, one of those times coming close to crossing into the oncoming traffic. But in both instances Carolyn pulled the car back just in time. Her expression had grown tense, her eyes narrowed.