Asylum Read Online Free Page A

was everything we knew. It just was.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    As soon as Richard left, I got on the phone. “I need to come over there now,” I told the director’s assistant.
    “Madame LeDuc, we have you scheduled in for your update at two o’clock,” she said smoothly. “I’m afraid monsieur le directeur is busy at present.”
    “Then he will have to be interrupted,” I said. “I have information about the most recent homicide, and I need to speak with him at once.”
    “ Madame —”
    “Never mind,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t matter. I’m on my way over.”
    I opened the small office closet and exchanged heels for flats. Never mind whether or not they went with my suit: comfort will always win out in my book. Life is too short.
    Chantal tapped on the door and put her head in. “Monsieur Petrinko is on line two,” she said cheerfully.
    I picked it up. “Ivan, I haven’t much time—”
    “Hi, babe. I’ll be quick.”
    I relented, told myself to back off, and drew in a deep breath. It wasn’t Ivan’s fault that everything else in Montréal seemed to be falling apart. “Sorry, sweetheart. What’s up?”
    “Just a minor domestic emergency,” he said. “Margery has to be in the hospital. Well, she’s there now, actually. Down in Boston. Gall bladder, or something like that. Something really serious.” Ivan gets a little flustered sometimes.
    I grimaced. Margery is Ivan’s former wife and the mother of his children. Any sentence that begins with her name inevitably ends in something somewhere between inconvenience and disaster. It isn’t Margery’s fault, it’s just the nature of shared parenting. “And?”
    “And the kids are already on their way to Montréal,” Ivan said. “Some neighbor dropped them off at Logan, and their flight will be in—oh, hell, in about half an hour. And I have this meeting—”
    “No,” I interrupted. “I can’t go pick them up at the airport.”
    There was a pause. “Martine, I wouldn’t ask if this wasn’t an important meeting. You know that.”
    “I know that,” I agreed, trying to reach across the room for my briefcase and not disconnect the line in doing so. “And you know that I wouldn’t say no unless this was really important. I’m on my way to police headquarters. I seriously don’t have time.”
    There was a longer pause. “We’re going to have to have them for the weekend anyway, babe, and I’m sorry,” Ivan said, exploring my mood. “I can’t send them back to Boston, not with all this going on with their mom. I don’t want to ask Rob to deal with them, with everything else on his plate.” Rob was Margery’s husband. I didn’t know him well enough to pick him out in a crowd, but he seemed to make her happy, and the kids liked him. “He’s probably at the hospital with her now, anyway. I think she’s at Mass. General.”
    Wherever she was being treated couldn’t figure into my plans. “Ivan, I have to go,” I said.
    “Okay, okay, I’ll manage to get them. Or I’ll send somebody from here. Maybe Sylvie.” He was thinking out loud. “But—well, I thought you should know that they’ll be staying with us for a few days. At least through Sunday night. Sorry, I know it’s not our weekend to have them here, but I couldn’t say no.”
    He was repeating himself, which meant he was nervous. It gave me pause. Was I really that awful, that he needed to feel me out that much? But … yeah, extra time with the kids wasn’t exactly the way I’d planned on spending the weekend.
    I shouldn’t really say that. It’s not so much that I don’t like them—in unguarded moments I’ll even admit to loving them—it’s the fact of giving up our only free time together, of constructing a weekend that centered around Claudia and Lukas. Normally there would have been a conversation here about it. Today, not so much. “Of course you couldn’t,” I said. “I get it, I really do. But listen, Ivan, I really have to run. I’ll see