Line of Fire (2 page)

3

I
considered my options and decided that I didn’t want Sam to be waiting impatiently for me to finish my visit. I would see my patient last, just before I headed home.

To Sam, I said, “I’m here, let’s get it done. Who do you want me to eyeball?”

Sam hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the ICU. I counted six occupied beds out of eight. He said, “He’s the one in this little glass room.”

Inside the isolation room I saw bandages covering many of the parts of a humanoid form that a bedsheet did not. I saw tubes and monitors and drains. I didn’t see much of a patient. Some fingernails, darkened with dried blood, poked out from beneath a thick pad of gauze on one hand. I could see eyebrows, too. Dark. One undamaged cheek and eye, and a little more than half of a chin. The patient’s neck was held rigid in a big plastic collar. What little hair was visible was curly and dark.

I was confident I was seeing man-fingernails and man-eyebrows. The rest of Sam’s guy’s face was obscured by tubes, large and small, and tape. Lots of tape. I counted a central line and a pair of visible IV lines, one in each arm. Two IV pumps. One was flushing a fresh bag of saline—
drip, drip, drip, drip
—as though the pump were keeping time to the Bee Gees anthem I no longer had a prayer of getting out of my head.

A second pump was locked. It was dispensing a measured dose of some narcotic in a fat syringe. Dilaudid or morphine.

Catheters snaked out from beneath the sheet to clear plastic drain bags hung on the side of the bed. One of the collection bags had to be for urine, but none of the fluid in any of the waste bags was even a close approximation of yellow. The absence of yellow fluid in any of the drain bags was not a good leading indicator about the state of the patient’s kidneys or bladder. The deep-brown tones I spotted were not ideal colors for urine.

An EKG monitored the man’s heart rhythm. Other than that flat was bad, I had no idea what the peaks and valleys dancing on an EKG screen indicated. The blood pressure numbers on the monitor were hovering on the low side of very low.

I went with the obvious. “He’s not well. Is there an infection risk?”

“Nah. The iso is for us. Easier from a security point of view. If they get a patient who needs the room, he’ll get bumped. I’m thinking he’s not aware of the upgrade.”

I didn’t argue the point; the guy looked like the definition of unconscious to me. “Is he sleeping? Sedated? Unconscious?”

“The paramedics originally thought he was slizzered. Now? An intensivist told the nurses that she thought this was the initial stage of coma.”

“‘Slizzered’? Is that what you said? That’s a new one for me.”

“Think drunk and simultaneously plastered on energy drinks. The alcohol-and-caffeine thing, or the alcohol-and-Adderall thing, or the meth-and-anything thing that the young and the stupid seem to favor. We round up slizzered kids every weekend on The Hill. Most of them don’t end up looking like this, though.”

“Never thought I’d be taking popular culture lessons from you.”

Sam shook his head. “Right? Guess I have a finger on the pulse of today’s youth.”

I couldn’t tell if he was serious. Prudence told me to live with the ambiguity.

Sam smiled in a wry way that got my attention. “I’m never sure what’s important anymore. Things that seem crucial aren’t. Things that I used to overlook? They come back and nip at my ass.”

I thought Sam might have been offering the beginning notes of a philosophical reflection. Before I could encourage him to continue, a uniformed Boulder cop came through the door with two containers of coffee, one for Sam. She said, “Thanks, Detective. I needed that rest stop.”

Sam asked about the fire. She told him it was “blowing up.” Houses were still burning up Sunshine Canyon. She took a seat about ten feet away, facing the corridor that led to the elevators. Her chosen spot was midway between the entry to the nursing station and the door to the airlock vestibule of the isolation room.

“Guard?” I asked.

“For now.” Sam pulled his phone from his coat pocket. He was a recent smart phone adopter and operated the thing with the fervor of a religious convert. In a matter of a few months—since the day he dragged me with him to Best Buy while he selected a replacement for his dead clamshell—he’d crammed the digital records of his life, both personal and law enforcement, into his new slab. I watched in admiration as he worked the device with the dexterity and assurance of a thirteen-year-old girl. I found it all extremely disconcerting.

Sam had selected a photograph for me to view on his phone. “Recognize that?” he asked as he turned the screen my way. The picture seemed to have been taken by the phone’s camera; it had that sickly lighting that comes with close-up LED flash.

“You couldn’t have just sent this to me?”

“Work with me here. There’s protocol. We got no ID on our vic. Because the crash was in the evacuation zone, we have no forensics. We got no wits to what happened—”

“Are you thinking whatever caused his injuries wasn’t an accident?”

“There was definitely an accident. But as compassionate a guy as I am, I don’t tend to hang at the bedsides of traffic accident John Does.”

“What then? Assault?”

“Assault implies motive. I don’t know from motive. Civilians tend to miss that nuance. Let’s start with battery.”

“You’re really going to diss me while you’re asking for my help?”

“The cop at the scene thought the guy was beat to crap. Before the accident, during the accident, after the accident? Undetermined. If that’s what came down, we’re talking battery. One theory is that he was beat to crap—batterized—in one location, stuffed into the front seat of a car, and then the stuffer tried to rig things so that the car would go over a cliff. That would disguise said battery so that it did not look like assault. But the car found the trunk of a tree before it found the edge of the cliff.”

“Sounds complicated,” I said.

“First part may have worked. The rest? Best-laid plans and all that. I think I told you once that the second rule of criminals”—my ears perked up when Sam mentioned one of his “second rules”; experience told me I found them amusing—“is that they are always either smarter than cops give them credit for, or they’re stupider than cops give them credit for. If the perp responsible for this is stupider than I think, he needs daily assistance figuring out which end of the spoon holds the soup.”

I composed a mental picture. “You’ll catch him?”

He shrugged. “Eh. Sometimes the stupid ones do such unexpected stuff that we end up a step behind ’em because we’re using logic and they’re not. That’s kind of where you come in.” I was thinking I should be offended. Sam went on. “See, the object in this freakin’”—Sam raised his phone—“photo was found near the vic. We don’t have much else. We’re four hours into this case and the trail is going cold.”

I looked at the photo. “You found that on him?”

“Not on. Let’s say it was close by.”

“A car means registration. Registration means a clue. Identity.”

He smiled. “Nice try. Car isn’t currently registered. Possibly not even street legal. Last registered owner is twice this guy’s age.”

“Where is Lucy?” I asked. Lucy was Sam’s partner.

“Even though she hates canvassing like she hates shaving her legs, she hates hospitals more than all that. She’s out talking to people. Trying to find a wit, or a lead.”

I reached out to adjust Sam’s phone to get a better look at the photo. He yanked it back. He was protective of his smart phone. “Humor me, please, Alan. I have to do this the way I have to do this in case someday your wife or one of her DA colleagues or God forbid some member of the defense bar gets around to asking me some pointed questions under oath. So I say to you again: do you recognize any item in that photograph?”

The photograph was a close-up of a business card. Beside the card was a quarter. The quarter, I assumed, had been inserted into the frame to provide scale.

“You know that’s my business card. Don’t think it’s my quarter.”

Sam yawned. He’d had a surprising amount of dental work done in his lifetime.

“Figured,” Sam said. “And, no, it’s not your quarter.”

“If you’re hoping that’s one of my patients sprawled out in there, sorry, but—”

He held up a hand. “I’m praying he’s one of your all-time favs. Are you allowed to have favorites? Anyway—it would be a Vegas jackpot for me if it also turns out that you’re busy formulating some magic exception to the doctor-patient confidentiality crapola that you usually use to tell me you can’t talk to me about your work.”

He smiled in a way that I’d come to recognize always meant something other than that he was happy.

“I want a name, Alan. Age. Phone number. Address. Email. Facebook friends. Twitter feed. Anything? Next of kin? Great. Significant other? I’ll take a girlfriend or even a boyfriend—I’m becoming so damn open-minded, I’m good with either. Hell, I’m even good with both. Or maybe he has an enemies list he shared with you during a truly poignant session. That’d be like a wet dream for me.”

Sam wasn’t one for dramatic soliloquies. I savored what I was hearing. But in reply, I merely shrugged. Odds were that I didn’t know the guy. And if I did know the guy, I knew him clinically, which meant I wouldn’t be able to tell Sam anything due to Sam’s recurring nightmare about my profession—doctor-patient privilege.

As much as Sam didn’t want any of that to be true, Sam knew that it was all, likely, true. Even the fact that the guy in the coma was in treatment with me—if he was in treatment with me—would be privileged. If he was not a patient, if he’d never been a patient, I could tell Sam that fact. The null set was covered neither by my professional ethics nor by my legal responsibilities.

There had been a time, way back when Sam and I had first met over the death of one of my patients, when I didn’t question the ethical mandates of clinical psychology. That day had passed. I wasn’t sure that Sam had recognized the evolution of my ethical thinking. He hadn’t shown any indication he had figured out a way to exploit it.

“The guy?” Sam said. “He’s a mess. Closed head trauma. That’s the biggie. They apparently used a fat bit in some big ass Makita to bore a couple of holes in his skull to relieve pressure from a subdural or two. Internal bleeding in his gut. Something about one of his lungs. Fractures? Plural. Ribs? Yep. Collarbone? Yep. Dislocations, couple. Hip? Ankle? Some concern he may have lost the vision in that eye that’s bandaged.”

“Can I take a closer look? See if I recognize him.”

“I didn’t think you would bother. I’m getting all hopeful.” He patted his chest with his open palm. “Like a little flutter in my heart.” Sam took a step toward the nursing station. He stopped. “Oh, I forgot, he has a tat. You can check that.”

“Tell me.”

“Medium size. Tricep. Left arm.”

“Of?”

Sam shook his head. “You know I don’t get tats—I mean, I don’t understand tats, aesthetically speaking. Exactly what it was he thought was of such enduring value that he had it engraved in indelible ink on his freakin’ arm? Well, I got nothing.”

The tattoo rant was virgin territory, certainly a highlight of my miserable day.

Sam wasn’t done. “It’s some tattoo bullshit—a Siberian carving that represents ice-cold Satan. Or the Saturnian symbol for
namaste
. We uploaded the ink to iTat. We’ll probably even get a hit on the specific parlor and a photo of the artist. Bet you a beer the guy has priors.”

“The victim?”

“I was thinking the artist. Both.”

“iTat?”

He raised his phone. “Latest law enforcement app. Just out in beta. You want a link? For that night when your sweet daughter walks in with her virgin ink.”

My heart skipped a beat. Gracie?
Probably. Jeez.
“Sure. Send me the link.”

Sam guffawed. “Joke, Alan. iTat? Come on.”

I applauded. “Just to be clear, if it turns out I know him, I can’t acknowledge it. You know that.”

“Yeah, but I also know you have wiggle room. Maybe you can’t talk to me, but you can go back to your files and call his emergency contact.” Sam smiled that smile that confused me, the one that didn’t mean he was anything resembling happy. “Then the emergency contact and I can have a chat.”

Sam was a few moves ahead of me, not an unusual occurrence.

He went on. “Come on, I’ll introduce you, or reintroduce you, as the case may be. Need to warn you, though—he’s quiet. Makes no eye contact whatsoever.”

The ward clerk didn’t look up from the
Us Weekly
she was reading as she said, “I told you before, no visitors, Detective. No exceptions.” She put her index finger down to hold her spot. From the photos, I thought the article was about the British royals. She looked up at Sam. Then at me. “Except for law enforcement. Is he law enforcement?”

Sam sighed again. He wasn’t usually much of a sigher. To the clerk, he said, “Dr. Gregory’s with me. He’s an important part of my investigation.”

I was suspicious. Sam rarely called me “doctor” unless there was an obvious pejorative context.

The ward clerk mounted an officious face and cocked her head to display it for Sam. I could tell she liked the officious face; she wore it as though it were a mask she was trying on prior to heading off to a costume party. But she worked the night shift, probably seven
P
to seven
A
. With the docs gone by six and the visitors out at eight, her opportunities to be officious during the quiet hours of her long shift were few.

I suspected that she secretly lived for moments like the one we were having.

I decided to intervene. I held out my hand. “Dr. Alan Gregory. I’m a psychologist. And—here’s the good news—I am on the hospital medical staff.”

She didn’t shake my hand. She was disappointed at the unexpected turn of events. “Got a business card,
Dr.
Gregory? I have to write you down.”

“Sam chuckled at the business card irony. I gave the clerk—her ID told me her name was Imogen—one of my business cards.

Alan Gregory, Ph.D. P.C.