Mercy by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online

with the stiff body to remove the clothing. In t he end, both Allie and Zandy simply turned away.
    "Not a scratch," Hugo called cheerfully. "No bruises at the neck. Not even a hangnail." Allie could hear the whip of a sheet being snapped open and la id over the body. "My educated guess is death by asphyxiation. Smothering." Allie shook her head, trying to erase the image of James Mac-Donald lung ing for his wife before Zandy could touch her. "Why would you do that to someone you love?" she murmured.
    Hugo touched her arm. "Maybe because they wanted you to." He gently led All ie to the embalming table, pointing to several tiny tattoos that looked lik e the marks of a pen on Maggie's face. "They're for radiation therapy," he said. "The eye's a secondary site for cancer." And then he pulled down a co rner of the sheet, to reveal an angry red zag of weals and scars where Magg ie MacDonald's breast had been.
    "V/^ou ready?"
    JL Jamie turned around at the sound of Cam's voice. He had already signed t he top half of the voluntary statement that acknowledged his right to wait until a lawyer had been provided, but that was not his intent. He knew he w as going to be punished; he just wanted to get it over with. Cam had taken the handcuffs off an hour ago when the secretary offered him a cup of coffe e. He had been waiting for Cam to set up the booking room with a tape recor der. Now he stood in front of the most beautiful array of fall flowers he h ad ever seen.
    They were red and purple and musty yellow, and the different fronds all see med to swoop low, like the trajectory of a leaf from a tree. He kept starin g at the arrangement, thinking how rich and warm the colors seemed to be; a nd then, in the next blink, it seemed their own beauty was dragging them do wn.
    Jamie turned to Cam. "I've never seen a police station with flowers in it." Cam looked at the arrangement. "It's my wife. She owns a shop here. She does one every week." He watched Jamie finger the fragile petals of a lily, rubb ing it gently so that Cam could smell the light rain scent all the way acros s the room.
    "You love her?"
    Cam took a step backward. "My wife? Of course."
    "How much?"
    Cam smiled a little. "Is there a limit?"
    Jamie shrugged. "You tell me. What would you do for her? Would you lie fo r her? Steal? Would you kill for her?"
    "No," Cam said shortly. He turned Jamie away from the flowers abruptly, so t hat the lily fell to the floor and was crushed beneath the heel of his own b oot. "Let's go."
    Jodi Picoult
    // started almost two years ago, when we were ice-skating. Maggie was good a t it; she'd do little axels and toe loops and impress the hell out of the ki ds who came to play pickup hockey on the pond. I was goalie, and feeling eve ry bit of my thirty-four years as I blocked the shots of these high school g uys. When the action was down at the opposite goal, I'd turn to my right to catch what Maggie was doing.
    It was only chance that I happened to see her fall down. Something stupid, s he said when I raced across the ice to her side. A twig sticking out of the surface that caught on the pick of her skate. But she couldn't stand up; tho ught maybe she'd heard something pop when she fell. I pulled her up the hill on a Flexible Flyer we borrowed from a little girl, and even though she was crying with the pain, she managed to make a joke about us trying out for th e Iditarod next year.
    They showed me her X rays, not just the clean break of her ankle, but the lit tle holes in the white spaces, like bone that had been eaten out. Lesions, th ey said. Bone cancer was a secondary site.
    When they found the original tumor, they removed her breast and the lymph nodes. They did CT scans, bone scans, sent for estrogen receptors. It stayed dormant for a while, and then it came back in her brain. She would hold my hand and try to describe the flashing red lights, the soft edges of h er fading vision as this tumor ate away at her optic nerve. The doctor said that