Page 27 of The Lie Maker

Lana raised an eyebrow. She’d been picking up the tab for our more recent lunches and dinners out. But U.S. Marshal Gwen Kaminsky had given me a week’s advance—a wired deposit that went straight into my account—and I was more flush than I’d been in a very long time.

I took out my wallet, pulled out my Visa card, and set the wallet on the table. The waiter punched some numbers into the wireless gadget he was holding, then handed it over to me. I inserted the card, added a tip, entered my PIN, withdrew my card, and gave the machine back to the waiter as it printed out a receipt.

“Would you like a copy?” he asked.

“That’s okay,” I said, and the waiter slipped away.

Throughout the entire transaction, Lana had been looking at my wallet with considerable interest.

She said, “If you’re suddenly loaded, might I suggest you finally get a new one of those?”

I slipped the credit card back into my billfold. It was, I had to admit, in tatters. The brown leather was worn and scarred on the outside and inside; the various dividers for bills and cards were in shreds.

“I suppose,” I said. “But I’m kind of attached to this one.”

Fifteen

“Tell me about your wife, Zack,” Lana said. “Tell me about Marie.”

It was the following morning, and the city was starting to become aware, through news reports and social media, that Dr.Marie Sloan, an emergency room physician from Boston Community Hospital, had now been missing for nearly two days.

Lana and the doctor’s husband, Zack Porter, were sitting on a red bench a stone’s throw from the fire station where he worked, a majestic, three-story brick building built nearly a century earlier. It had three bays, with one door raised open, and faced Huntington Avenue in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. Just inside the station, several of Zack’s colleagues watched as Lana interviewed the distraught man.

Zack was sitting with his head in his hands as Lana asked her question. He sat up slowly, eyes bloodshot, and said, “She’s the most wonderful person in the world.”

“Everyone I’ve talked to has nothing but great things to say about her. Do you have any idea where she could be?”

He shook his head. “No idea. It’s not like her. It’s not like her at all.”

What the police knew so far: Dr. Sloan had finished a twelve-hour shift, walked out of the hospital, and that was the last anyone had seen of her. Her car was still in the parking lot. She wasn’t answering her cell phone. Calls went straight to message, suggesting the phone was off. There had been no large cash withdrawals on her bank account. No activity on her various credit cards. She hadn’t summoned an Uber to take her anywhere. Surveillance footage from the hospital’s camera did show her walking out of the emergency entrance but did not provide a good image of the area where she had left her car.

Lana didn’t like conducting these kinds of interviews, writing these kinds of stories. Only a few days after writing about Willard Bentley—whose body had been found floating in Boston Harbor, and who was presumed to have wandered down to the harbor and fallen in—now here she was working a story about a missing doctor.

“She’s the love of my life,” Zack said, brushing a tear from his eye. “This isn’t like her. Except...”

“Except what?” Lana asked.

“She’s just so dedicated,” Zack said. “You can’t find a more caring, dedicated doctor. She’s the best, you know?” He wiped away another tear. “She cares about all her patients. Someone comes into the ER, she’s like, only known them for a few minutes, but she treats them like she’s been looking after them for years. That’s how she is. Everyone matters. I think... I think that’s why the last couple of years have hit her so hard.”

“Tell me about that,” Lana said, holding her phone so that it would pick up everything Zack said.

“Not being able to save everyone. Losing so many patients. How they kept coming and coming and for such a long period, there was no relief. All that heartache. For the people she treated, and her, too. It did something to her. It... changed her.” He paused. “She’s been on a kind of never-ending burnout. You can only deal with something like that for so long.”

“Do you think she might have...” Lana let the question trail off. He would get her meaning.

“I don’t... I can’t let my mind go there. I could never forgive myself if there’ve been signs that somehow I’ve missed.”

He leaned back onto the bench and tipped his head back, as though looking for answers in the clouds that hovered overhead. Lana felt a tickle in her nose and thought, Christ, don’t let me go into a sneezing fit now.

“The thing is,” Zack said, “we hardly even see each other. It’s been that way for years. I’m sleeping when she’s at work and she’s sleeping when I’m here. Sometimes we get shifts that line up. Like planets aligning, you know? So that we’re both off at the same time, but it hasn’t worked out like that much. Christ, I don’t even know why I’m here today. I guess I’m thinking she’s going to show up, walk into the station, have some crazy explanation for where she’s been. So if she’s been upset about anything, if all this work stuff has really been starting to get to her, she’s hardly had a chance to talk to me about it.”

His mood shifted from despair to anger. “How could she not be upset? How could she not feel unappreciated? The kind of shit that people like her have been taking for so long. Working their asses off trying to save people’s lives, trying to get people to do the right thing and take precautions, and being told they didn’t know what they were talking about? What the hell is wrong with people these days?”

He leaned over again and put his head in his hands.

Lana gave him a minute.

He sat up, turned to Lana and said, “She’s a hero. She’s a hero and everyone needs to be looking for her.”

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