Living Proof, стр. 8
“Wow. I wasn’t expecting…” He trailed off, amazed at this turn. “So, um, what do you have in mind?”
“Arianna Drake seems too smart to make any errors in execution. We’ve got to come at her from the side, undercover, where she isn’t expecting it. That’s our in, God willing. I’ll help you devise a strategy to get her to talk. I think you’d be a natural for this kind of work.”
“Thank you, I think,” Trent said, pausing. “Does that mean you think I’d be a good liar?”
Dopp’s lips stretched up, defying the drag of his face. “Only for the sake of the truth. You’re an agent of the DEP, Trent, but really, you’re an agent of God. This is the kind of assignment that you could look back on as your life’s work.”
“Then I’d be mostly out of the office, just coming back to report to you?” No more suit, he thought. No more walls.
“This will be your focus. If you hit it big, I’ll move you out of that little room, closer to me.”
Trent smiled at the irony that only a half hour before, he had been craving his old investigative beat. Not to mention that Dopp’s office was on the side of the building where glass walls were set dramatically against the edge of Central Park.
“I’d love to do it,” Trent said, looking out at the park. From the seventeenth floor, they were practically parachuting over the treetops.
“Good. Now, remember, as an undercover agent, you cannot tell anything to anyone, strictly anyone, under penalty of expulsion and legal action.”
“Of course not.”
Trent glanced at Jed, whose delayed smile betrayed a hint of envy, while Banks looked on with new respect.
“Trent, start brainstorming strategies for how to approach her. You’ve only got one shot.”
Trent nodded, his reporter’s mind already working angles.
Dopp closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he stared directly into Trent’s eyes. “I have faith in you, as does God. He will guide us to the answers.”
Trent nodded again, unsure whether he felt privileged or intimidated, or both.
“Just remember,” Dopp went on, “however you get to the truth will be the right way. Everything happens for a reason.”
THREE
As a doctor, Arianna understood that symptoms do not arise without a cause and that her sudden dizzy spell was significant. Sometimes, in her darkest moments, she saw her medical knowledge as a curse; she knew too much to chalk up her fall to an imbalance of the inner ear or to that catchall diagnosis, stress. At the same time, she knew enough not to be surprised, which allowed for a quicker recovery—she had managed to lift herself off the floor and plunk down into her chair before Megan returned.
She was much less worried about that pesky reporter. Megan had fended him off just right. As she reasoned, he would move on from her clinic after he found no story. There was no crime in having a busy practice.
The next day, Saturday, she preoccupied herself in the kitchen, preparing dinner for two. The problem was that her guest did not know he was invited. Give him much notice, she had learned, and he would find an excuse to decline, so she waited to call until she could smell the food cooking. Years of solitude had left him friendless. She had taken on the task of injecting some happiness into the dead realm once known as his personal life; often, though less and less, he resisted her efforts.
After she prepared the steak in the broiler, she punched a number on her speed dial. It rang several times.
“Hullo,” said a raspy voice.
“Hi, Sam. A little slow getting to the phone,” she teased. “Don’t tell me you have company.”
“No one dates at my age, Arianna.”
“Why not?”
“They’re either widowed or dead. What can I do for you?”
She smiled. “I made too much for dinner.”
“I already ate.”
“Today?”
He sighed. “What did you make?”
“Filet mignon.”
“You don’t have to bribe me with food.”
“Oh, and here I thought a steak would make all the difference.”
He grunted. “I’m too cranky to be company.”
“A cranky genius? I don’t believe it.”
“All right, all right.”
She chuckled as the phone clicked off. He seldom said good-bye. But Sam Lisio’s rancor didn’t faze her anymore; she understood why it had seeped into his persona, like a diseased cell that had multiplied. It was such an inexorable part of him now that it was hard to remember what he used to be like before, when his tone was not married to scorn and when his smile dazzled students and professors alike. Instead of being repelled by his negativity, she knew it was defensiveness: Don’t get too close, said the words behind his words.
He was a reclusive workaholic. When she called, he had probably been poring over his notes. Although they rarely mentioned it, the grim context of their association touched every word they exchanged. As Arianna had come to understand, sarcasm kept that knowledge at a distance and reshaped it into something palatable.
She wondered how his work was going. If he had any news, she would of course find out first, though it was torture to keep from asking. Nor did she want to leave the impression that her goal was to mine him for information; it saddened her to imagine that he might ever suspect an ulterior motivation in her warmth. That was not the case at all—their quest had united them in business, but left them friends.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the buzzer.
“That was fast,” she said as she opened the door.
His lips quivered as he smiled at her, as if those muscles were stretched past their comfort zone. He was an old sixty-seven, with hollow cheeks and a gaunt frame, withered by injustice as much as by time. Strands of white hair lingered on the top of his scalp, too few to comb—not that he ever would. Despite his obvious age, though, she was sometimes surprised by