Act of Darkness Read Online Free

you hang onto Dan Chester,” Victoria said, “but I think that kind of cruelty is probably in violation of labor law.”

[4]
    T HE NEWS OF STEPHEN Fox’s introduction of the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children had been in that morning’s Washington Post, and although Dr. Kevin Debrett had expected it to be there, the actual sight of it, tucked into the bottom right-hand corner of the front page with a headline in twelve-point type, came as something of a shock. Just what was shocking about it, Kevin didn’t know. There was certainly nothing in the particulars to surprise him. The act Stephen had finally introduced had been the same one hammered out over months of late-night meetings in this very building. Its provisions for private clinics, direct billings to the federal government, and extended therapy had been written by Kevin himself. It was just that, seeing it there, he began to think of the entire project as an unacceptable gamble, a slap in the face of fate. Kevin had been a very lucky man. His luck had held, he thought, because he’d always known enough not to strain the limits of it. The Act in Aid of Exceptional Children was going to strain those limits to the point of disintegration. It was as if, having won the lottery, he’d decided to take his money and bet it all on a horse.
    He tapped his fingers against the thick glass top of his desk and sighed. He was a relatively young man, only in his forties, and he was already more of a success than he had ever expected to be. Dan Chester had promised him that, back when they were all at the University of Connecticut, and Dan Chester had delivered. It was funny to think, now, that Kevin had so resisted the idea of becoming a doctor. He hadn’t been all that good at science, and he had hated the sight of blood—he still hated it. God only knew he’d had no interest in Serving His Fellow Man. But Dan had insisted, and when Dan insisted he got what he wanted, maybe because when he insisted he always turned out to be right. Kevin had suffered his way through three years of premed, four years of medical school, and an interminable residency in obstetrics. Dan had vetoed Kevin’s plan to specialize in psychiatry, as being too chancy and not quite scientifically respectable. Kevin had had to get down in the muck and mire, and he had done it. He’d borrowed a lot of money from his mother to outfit his office and set up shop just outside Hartford, in one of those suburbs where insurance company money kept the prices of most things high and the price of obstetrical services astronomical. He’d practiced until he was locally well known and then, on Dan’s suggestion, after Stephanie Fox had been born damaged and then died, had abruptly switched fields, into the study and care of children with Down syndrome. Kevin Debrett had always been an excellent researcher, no matter what the subject, and he liked spending his time among the dry pages of aging books and even more quickly aging journals. The human body was too fluid and inconsistent for him, too wet. Every time he delivered a baby, he found himself appalled that there was so much blood.
    Of course, Dan had had an ulterior motive. Even then, he’d been setting Stephen up to run for the presidency, finding Stephen a cause, giving Stephen an identity. All three of them had known, all the way back there in college, that Stephen was their best shot at producing a media celebrity. Dan looked too foreign, even though he wasn’t, and too much like the popular conception of Machiavelli. Kevin himself was just too damn conventional.
    Still, Kevin thought now, Dan was not only a genius but a loyal genius. He believed in sticking by his friends. First he’d gotten Stephen elected to the U.S. Senate—and right out of the Hartford statehouse, too—and then he’d gotten Kevin down to Washington and shown him how to play the game. In no time at all, Kevin had gone from being a reasonably successful physician to the