Read Online The Brahms Deception by Louise Marley - Free Book Online Page A

parking lot and up the sidewalk. The guard opened the door for them to go through, saying, “ Buona sera, dottoressa .”
    â€œBuona sera.” She introduced Kristian in Italian, and he nodded a greeting. She led the way into a wide hallway with a cold linoleum floor. A mural in muted greens and corals filled one wall. There was a leather couch and matching armchair to one side, and a tall, rather droopy houseplant behind them, but no other decoration. The place looked as if it had been rented unfurnished and no one had bothered with extras. Kristian wondered who had left the plant behind.
    Chiara set down the box she was carrying, and beckoned to Kristian. “Leave your bag,” she said. “Someone will put it in your room.”
    Obediently, Kristian dropped his duffel where he stood, and followed her down the corridor. There were several doors, all standing open, all, as far as he could tell, giving onto empty rooms. She walked to the only one that was closed, and opened it quietly, motioning for him to come in after her.
    This room, the heart of the transfer clinic, was as full as the other rooms were bare. It was long and narrow and dim. To one side, amber and white lights blinked on a wall of instruments. Another wall held tubes and tanks and a rolling cabinet full of medical equipment. Three tall windows were blank, white shutters tightly closed. An old, rather elegant mahogany desk sat at the far end of the room, looking anachronistic among the metal and plastic and glass equipment. Several metal folding chairs were scattered around the desk, and a single well-shaded floor lamp glowed behind it. A technician rose from behind the desk, and started down the room to meet them.
    Kristian absorbed all of this with a swift glance, then turned his full attention to the transfer cot. He took a step toward it, struck by her stillness and what it meant.
    She lay motionless, as if in a deep, restful sleep. Her eyes were closed, the lids still. Her lips were a little open. She looked as if she were at peace, despite the tubes and wires bristling all around her.
    Kristian crossed the room with quiet steps to take his first close look at Frederica Bannister.
    He had seen one photo of her. He had retrieved it from the Internet after the crushing telephone call from Gregson, and before he started avoiding news about the Remote Research Foundation. The picture had been a formal, touched-up sort of portrait, showing her at the piano in her parents’ apartment on Lake Shore Drive. He had known from that picture that Frederica was not a pretty girl, but seeing her now, in the flesh, he found himself surprised by a feeling of disappointment.
    Her thin brown hair hung in limp strands from beneath the transfer cap. It had no more body or life than the wires that fell over her shoulders, or the catheter connected to a plastic bag beneath the cot frame. What he could see of her forehead beneath the cap was rather lumpy. Her nose was narrow and too long, her lips thin. She had narrow shoulders, and almost no bosom. Frederica Bannister, his competitor, the lucky girl who had won the chance to observe Brahms, had no beauty at all. He felt a stab of sympathy for her.
    Chiara came up beside him. She scanned the monitors, and he noticed that though the girl’s blood pressure was being tracked on a screen, Chiara put her fingers on Frederica’s wrist, as if she trusted her own touch more than she did the electronic measurement.
    When she released it, she glanced up at Kristian. “You see. She has been this way since Thursday morning. She should have awakened at four o’clock Thursday afternoon.”
    â€œWhat day is it now?”
    She glanced at a wall clock as she began gathering her hair with her hands, stabbing combs into it here and there. “ Domenica mattina. It is Sunday morning.”
    He followed her gaze. The clock read five. He didn’t dare think how little sleep he had had in the last two