Playing with Fire by Debra Dixon Read Free Book Online

wondered why they couldn’t have picked an office with plump chairs. The chief of surgery’s favorite period for furnishings was early Stonehenge. Uncharitably Maggie decided the austere decor was the chief’s way of discouraging long consultations.
    “Just relax.” The polygraph technician bent over his equipment, totally oblivious to the irony of that statement. His hair was buzzed short in one of those swat team wanna-be cuts, but he was a nice guy. If a bit dense.
    Just relax. Yeah. Right.
    Maggie sucked in a couple of breaths and tried not to think about the pain in her rump or the gizmos and wires that hooked her up to his infernal machine. She’d already taken this test twice. A polygraph, she discovered, was actually a number of tests instead of one. Multiple resultswere better for accuracy, and she was all for that. Even if she hated the idea of the polygraph to begin with.
    She wouldn’t have consented to this witch-hunt if they hadn’t promised her the test was extremely narrow in scope and that results would be sealed and given to Grayson. The hospital got nothing from the tests but the bill. Not even a list of volunteer participants. That seemed fair even to her.
    After a final adjustment, the technician asked, “Are you ready? This’ll be the last one.”
    “Shoot.”
    “Just like before, I’m going to ask you a series of obvious questions to establish a baseline, and I want you to answer with a simple yes or no.”
    He bent back over his machine as he began, marking occasionally on the paper scrolling by. The questions were easy. Was Mary Magdalene St. John her name? Did she live on River Road? Was she employed by Cloister Memorial Hospital? Was her birthday in January? And a number of other simple questions taken from her personnel sheet. Interspersed with the innocent queries were the tricky questions, phrased a little differently each time he gave the test. Maggie knew the drill well enough by now to recite the important ones from memory.
    Do you smoke?
    Do you smoke filter tip menthol?
    Have you ever smoked in the utility room?
    Did you cause the utility room to catch fire?
    She was ready for them. No, no, no, and no. Only this time the last question tripped her up.
    “Have you caused a fire?”
    Maggie froze, her conscience caught between thepast and the present. The heartbeat she waited to answer was too long, and she knew she’d failed the test.
    “No.” It wasn’t really a lie, but it wasn’t really the truth either.
    The technician never looked up, never gave any indication that she’d lied. Instead, he asked another question in the same monotone. It was a variation of the previous question. “Have you caused a fire in the hospital?”
    “No.” Maggie’s answer this time was sure and quick, but she knew it was too little, too late.
    “Do you hold a valid driver’s license?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is nursing your profession?”
    “Yes.”
    He looked up finally and gave her an all-clear smile as he flipped off the machine and reached to help her strip off the bits of electronic hardware. Maggie imagined he’d caught a lot of liars over the years, so many that his poker face never slipped.
    “Thank you.” Maggie didn’t know what else to say. The man knew she was a liar. She knew she was a liar. And pretty soon Grayson would know it too.

FOUR
    Beau swore, first at the attorney who’d held him up in court testifying all day, and then at the black night, which had begun to spit rain at him. The winding road was obstacle enough; he didn’t need a downpour too. There hadn’t been a single streetlight to relieve the darkness since civilization disappeared from his rearview mirror—if the small sewage plant and the flock of apartments on Gardere could be called civilization.
    Finally giving up hope of man-made or moonlight, he flipped his headlights to bright and concentrated on the twisting black ribbon that would eventually lead him to Maggie St. John. For all its age and legend,