Nothing Lasts Forever
A page-turning novel of desire and broken dreams from the internationally bestselling author of The Other Side of Midnight and If Tomorrow Comes.Three young doctors-their hopes, their dreams, their unexpected desires…Dr.Paige Taylor: She swore it was euthanasia, but when Paige inherited a million dollars from a patient, the D.A. called it murder.Dr. Kat Hunter: She vowed never to let another man too close again-until she accepted the challenge of a deadly bet.Dr. Honey Taft: To make it in medicine, she knew she'd need something more than the brains God gave her.Racing from the life-and-death decisions of a big major hospital to the tension-packed fireworks of a murder trial, Nothing Lasts Forever lays bare the ambitions and fears of healers and killers, lovers and betrayers. And proves once again that no reader can outguess Sidney Sheldon, the master of the unexpected.
Читать Nothing Lasts Forever онлайн беплатно
SIDNEY SHELDON
NOTHING LASTS
FOREVER
HarperFiction
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Copyright © 1994 by Sidney Sheldon
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780006476580
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007383962
Version: 2018-07-31
TO ANASTASIA AND RODERICK MANN, WITH LOVE
Table of Contents
San Francisco Spring 1995
District Attorney Carl Andrews was in a fury. “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded. “We have three doctors living together and working at the same hospital. One of them almost gets an entire hospital closed down, the second one kills a patient for a million dollars, and the third one is murdered.”
Andrews stopped to take a deep breath. “And they’re all women! Three goddam women doctors! The media is treating them like celebrities. They’re all over the tube. 60 Minutes did a segment on them. Barbara Walters did a special on them. I can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing their pictures, or reading about them. Two to one, Hollywood is going to make a movie about them, and they’ll turn the bitches into some kind of heroines! I wouldn’t be surprised if the government put their faces on postage stamps, like Presley. Well, by God, I won’t have it!” He slammed a fist down against the photograph of a woman on the cover of Time magazine. The caption read: “Dr. Paige Taylor—Angel of Mercy or the Devil’s Disciple?”
“Dr. Paige Taylor.” The district attorney’s voice was filled with disgust. He turned to Gus Venable, his chief prosecuting attorney. “I’m handing this trial over to you, Gus. I want a conviction. Murder One. The gas chamber.”
“Don’t worry,” Gus Venable said quietly. “I’ll see to it.”
Sitting in the courtroom watching Dr. Paige Taylor, Gus Venable thought: She’s jury-proof. Then he smiled to himself. No one is jury-proof. She was tall and slender, with eyes that were a startling dark brown in her pale face. A disinterested observer would have dismissed her as an attractive woman. A more observant one would have noticed something else—that all the different phases of her life coexisted in her. There was the happy excitement of the child, superimposed onto the shy uncertainty of the adolescent and the wisdom and pain of the woman. There was a look of innocence about her. She’s the kind of girl, Gus Venable thought cynically, a man would be proud to take home to his mother. If his mother had a taste for cold-blooded killers.
There was an almost eerie sense of remoteness in her eyes, a look that said that Dr. Paige Taylor had retreated deep inside herself to a different place, a different time, far from the cold, sterile courtroom where she was trapped.
The trial was taking place in the venerable old San Francisco Hall of Justice on Bryant Street. The building, which housed the Superior Court and County Jail, was a forbidding-looking edifice, seven stories high, made of square gray stone. Visitors arriving at the courthouse were funneled through electronic security checkpoints. Upstairs, on the third floor, was the Superior Court. In Courtroom 121, where murder trials were held, the judge’s bench stood against the rear wall, with an American flag behind it. To the left of the bench was the jury box, and in the center were two tables separated by an aisle, one for the prosecuting attorney, the other for the defense attorney.
The courtroom was packed with reporters and the type of spectators attracted to fatal highway accidents and murder trials. As murder trials went, this one was spectacular. Gus Venable, the prosecuting attorney, was a show in himself. He was a burly man, larger than life, with a mane of gray hair, a goatee, and the courtly manner of a Southern plantation owner. He had never been to the South. He had an air of vague bewilderment and the brain of a computer. His trademark, summer and winter, was a white suit, with an old-fashioned stiff-collar shirt.
