Mortal Remains (12 page)

“She wouldn’t even trust you enough to tell you where she was headed?”

“Refused, but the issue wasn’t a lack of trust.”

“What then?”

“I told you it was complicated.”

“ ‘Screwy’ is the word I’d use, Earl.”

“Okay, okay! She wouldn’t tell me because she insisted she wasn’t going to ruin my life with all her baggage.”

“Her baggage?”

“Will you just listen? She knew she’d already jumped into Chaz’s arms to escape her parents. As a result, she didn’t entirely trust her feelings about me, wasn’t sure whether she loved me or was just using me to escape again. She promised to contact me if she ever figured it out and the time was right.”

“When the time was right? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“There were other issues, too. Ones that even I hadn’t thought of until she warned me.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how powerful the Braden family was at the hospital and NYCU. If Chaz ever did find out about me and Kelly, not only would he go after her, she was certain he’d get ‘Daddy’ to pull enough strings that I’d never graduate from medical school. So she remained adamant I do nothing to risk that happening, such as trying to follow her, and refused to tell me where she’d be in case I might come anyway.”

Janet mulled that over a few seconds. “But after no word from her at all, you didn’t get suspicious something had happened?”

“Of course! I was frantic. I even took my month’s vacation and went searching for her, despite the promise I made. But just like the police said, there were no leads.”

“Didn’t you ever think then she might have been killed, that her husband had gotten to her after all?”

“At the time I couldn’t think of anything else. Whenever I saw Chaz Braden in the hospital, I could barely keep myself from grabbing him by the throat and demanding to know what he did with Kelly.”

“Yet you still didn’t go to the police.”

He felt his cheeks start to burn again at the thought of how he’d floundered around like a complete wimp – so detestably opposite to the man he’d become. “No, I didn’t. I made a decision to keep quiet and save my ass.”

Janet’s eyebrows quirked.

“I’m not proud of it,” he continued, “but logically, I couldn’t see any point in doing otherwise. The police already suspected Chaz, and were investigating him big-time. Me, Jack, Melanie, and Tommy Leannis – we’d all told the cops everything we knew about her relationship to him, how possessive he could be, and verbally abusive. If I had confessed our affair, it would have taken their attention off him, maybe even shifted it to me, disgraced Kelly, and probably tanked my chances at NYCH. So I kept my mouth shut.”

“But when the police didn’t make a case against Chaz-”

“I again considered taking matters into my own hands. I even began to follow the creep, waiting for a chance to get him alone.”

“My God, Earl-”

“Don’t worry. I came to my senses before anything happened. What I saw, the way he ran around, red-faced, pestering everyone in my class, even me, to find out if we knew where she’d gone, I began to think maybe he hadn’t done anything to her and couldn’t find her either, that she had just run away after all, gotten rid of her ghosts, and didn’t see me as part of her life anymore. It took a long time, but eventually I accepted it…”

As he talked, he realized just how immature his desire to rescue Kelly had been. Yet he let himself be so stupidly vulnerable back then, enamored by a notion as old as Galahad, Lancelot, and Robin Hood – saving damsels in distress. Talk about naive. What’s more, the belief that he’d pulled it off – helped her get away clean from Chaz and freed her from her own ghosts – it was simply the way he needed to see things, the better to sustain himself while he got over her.

Had he learned from his folly? In a way. After all, he went into a career in ER, where he could rescue people from their worst physical catastrophes, after which they’d be whipped out of his department to face their personal demons in the care of others. It was a disconnect that suited him just fine to this day.

He reached for her hand. “I would have helped her differently now. I guess that’s part of what’s got me so tangled up – knowing I might’ve made a difference if I hadn’t been so clueless.”

“You still don’t believe Chaz killed her?”

He sighed deeply, as if to exhale his doubts. “I must have been wrong about him, too. His looking for her was probably a cynical act he put on to throw us off. It obviously worked.”

She slouched in her seat. Anyone looking at her would have thought she was studying the chandeliers and frowning in disapproval.

“So do I go to the police?” he said after what felt like minutes.

She looked directly into his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Earl, you expect the cops to believe a story like this? Let’s see. They couldn’t pin anything on Chaz in 1974. Now they find the body, and you pop up with your tale of being the mystery man, of having been her secret lover, and, what I predict will be their personal favorite, you didn’t tell anyone because you’ve been maintaining a noble silence all these years. They’ll fall down laughing, then have a field day twisting it all around so you look guilty as hell. As for what the press would do to you, don’t even think about it.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Talk to a lawyer.”

He lay wrapped in layer after layer of sleep, the kind that enveloped him only after he and Janet made love.

Yet a ringing drilled into his head.

He felt Janet’s leg draped over his, and opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in his own bed.

Instead, ornate swirls on the ceiling of their hotel suite spun like pinwheels in the ever-changing, neon glow from outside the window. He glanced at his watch and saw it was only 10:00 P.M.

After dinner they’d no sooner gone upstairs and closed the door to their room than Janet pulled him to her. “I want us to forget everything, at least for now,” she whispered, her lips at his ear.

His own desire had swelled to meet hers, displacing all anxiety, and he lost himself in her arms, for a while.

“Dr. Garnet here,” he said, fumbling the receiver to his ear.

“Dr. Garnet, it’s Mark Roper calling. I hope it’s not too late to disturb you, but I wanted to catch you before you left town. I think you’d be interested in seeing my father’s old medical file on Kelly.”

“What?”

“It contains a letter describing a man she met, someone she loved.”

Garnet felt his heart quicken. “Really.”

“I suspect he’s the one she got into the taxi with the night before she disappeared.”

Earl felt a chasm open at his feet. Into it fell Janet, Brendan, his life. “I see.”

“Do you? Shall we have breakfast together to discuss it?”

A dozen floors below, Mark hung up and stared at the ceiling. Garnet’s agreement to meet with him vanquished any doubts he had about him being Kelly’s lover. Not bad for a part-time coroner from the sticks. Twelve hours in New York and already he’d uncovered the secret that had stumped the NYPD for twenty-seven years.

He’d followed Garnet and his wife back to their hotel, then booked a room for himself, dumping his plan to return home that night. After reviewing all his files on Kelly, he went down to the hotel’s business center, where he spent time on the Internet planning what he would do.

Having successfully completed the next step, hooking Garnet into a tête-à-tête, he felt like celebrating.

Grabbing the phone, he called a number he knew by heart.

“Dr. Caterril speaking,” said the woman who answered.

“Hi, Mandy. It’s me.”

“Mark?”

“The one and only. And how’s the most beautiful veterinarian in all of Manhattan?”

“I’m fine, but where are you calling from?” She sounded put out rather than excited.

“The Plaza. I was down here on a coroner’s case, but unexpectedly had to stay the night and wondered if we could get together.”

Her silence gave him a sinking feeling.

“Well, I would have loved to,” she said after a few seconds, “but I can’t tonight.”

He heard a male voice in the background. Mandy lived alone.

“Of course,” he said, immediately casting around for a way to say good-bye without embarrassing either of them. “I just took a chance, never expecting even to find you in on a Saturday night. Stupid of me not to have called before and set something up.”

She laughed. “I won’t argue with that, Mark.”

“Well, next time lots of warning.”

“Yes, I’d like that. Perhaps we could have lunch.”

Ouch! He’d been demoted. From lover to former boyfriend status, all in an instant, suitable for get-togethers in public places, a greeting kiss on the cheek, but the rest of her body arched safely away from him. “Take care, Mandy.”

“You too.”

Definitely taken down a few rungs. Well, what did he expect? He hadn’t exactly broken her door down with return visits or rung her phone off the hook after her last weekend at Hampton Junction. To be honest, he hadn’t bothered because he knew there was no point. Mandy Caterril would never be happy away from her poodle practice in Manhattan. Just like Shauna, the uptown physiotherapist, before her, or Cindy, the TriBeCa theater director, before them.

East Side, West Side, all around the town. The tune popped into his head. Wonderful, beautiful, fun women from every part of the greatest city on earth, and not a hope in hell any one of them could cope with being the mate of a country doctor. As far as they were concerned, he’d made a mistake choosing to practice where he had.

Shit! Enough with the gloomy woulda, shoulda, coulda crap. He didn’t feel like just rolling over and going to sleep either. He grabbed the
New York Magazine
by his bed and flipped through the theater section. But it was long past curtain time, both on and off Broadway. Ought to kick himself in the ass for not having planned ahead and at least given himself a show.

Then he had an idea.

A crazy idea, but one that would be exactly the no-strings-attached, one-night-only encounter he felt in the mood for.

“Could you connect me with the home of Dr. Melanie Collins, please,” he said, having contacted an operator at New York City Hospital. “It’s Dr. Mark Roper.”

“The Chief of Internal Medicine?”

He hadn’t known that about her. “Is there another Melanie Collins?”

“I’ll see if she’ll take your call,” said the man on the other end. He didn’t sound very hopeful.

“Dr. Roper,” Melanie said, when he was plugged through to her. “This is a surprise.”

“It is for me, too. I had to stay over unexpectedly. If you have time, I wondered if we could continue our conversation about Kelly?”

She gave a throaty chuckle that made more than his hopes rise. “Sure, if you like. But I just ordered some Chinese food. Say, why don’t you come on over here and share it with me – they always send too much – and I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

It was so blatant a response to his overture, despite its being exactly what he had in mind, he went briefly dumbstruck. What was his problem? Seconds ago he’d wanted her to say yes. Now he balked. Why? He certainly had no hang-ups about women who took the initiative, in fact, quite enjoyed them. The age difference? No, he’d been there, too. Yet from the place in his stomach that turned when he encountered a bad taste or a foul smell, he once again felt a slight revulsion. This wasn’t right for him. “Oh, thank you, that’s really generous, but I’ve got an early meeting, which is why I’m staying over. I was hoping we could talk on the phone.”

“I see.” Her tone of voice had cooled to about minus twenty. “Of course. What did you want to know?”

Sunday, November 18, 6:55 A.M.

T
he wind buffeted Mark as he jogged across Fifth Avenue toward the side entrance of the Plaza, but he didn’t feel cold. His run up to the reservoir and back had left him hot and sweaty. A funnel of gold leaves spiraled to the ground and swirled around his feet. Looking over his shoulder to the east, a streak of dawn bright as a polished steel blade hurt his eyes. He hurried inside and, when he got to his room, showered for a long time. Needles of steaming hot water pelted his skull as he lost himself in the din. Then he turned the cold on full.

An hour later he was ready, his head buzzing from the cups of black coffee he’d downed thanks to room service. Carrying his briefcase, he arrived at the Palm Court early only to find Earl already seated at a table reading the Sunday
Herald
while sipping a cup of coffee. Earl looked rested, clear-eyed, and calm – everything Mark wasn’t.

He’d been on the Internet until two-thirty, having gone back to learn more about Earl in preparation for their meeting. The man was impressive. Stellar in the field of emergency medicine. A long string of journal publications bearing his name. And a nose for rooting out trouble. More than once he’d made national headlines for his part in exposing deadly malfeasance in the health care field, often at great personal risk. Definitely not the sort to bend under pressure, cow before danger, or compromise to save his own skin. But he might do the right thing on behalf of Kelly.

“Morning,” Earl said, appraising him with the thousand-yard stare Mark would expect from someone who’d survived over twenty years in the pit and thrived on it. Gone was any hint of the sadness he’d seen at Kelly’s wake. This was a guy on full alert.

Mark slid into the chair opposite. “Morning.”

This early on a Sunday the ornate, gold-and-cream room was nearly empty. Waiters in green-striped vests descended on them, handing them menus, filling their water glasses, offering coffee, juice, croissants, jams, and butter, then suggesting a selection of entrées to start.

“I’m fine,” Earl said

Mark ordered tea.

The staff retreated, disappointment etched on their faces.

Before Mark could say a word of his carefully prepared intro that he hoped would ease the tension, Earl spoke. “If you’re here as a cop, Mark, get on with it, and I don’t talk to you without a lawyer present.” His voice was calm, his manner pleasant, but his gaze rock hard.

Shit! “Please, Dr. Garnet. I’d prefer we keep this informal, off the record, and that you simply tell me your take on what I found in my father’s files.”

Earl studied him, eye to eye, but said nothing.

Mark opened the briefcase, retrieved a copy of Kelly’s letter from a manila folder, and placed it in front of him. “To begin with, here’s what she wrote about you.”

Earl regarded it skeptically.

“Just take a look. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about any of it, I go my way and do what I have to do. You do the same. But I think we can avoid that.”

He didn’t make a move.

“Dr. Garnet, I figure there are two possibilities here. Either you’re the good man that letter and your record say you are, or you’ve been a brilliant fraud, and should be made to answer to the police about your affair with Kelly and what part it played in her disappearance. Me, I’m betting on the first.”

Earl picked up the sheet of paper and began to read intently, the tension draining from his face. Within moments, he was trying to fight back tears.

Her words on paper sounded as clearly in Earl’s head as if she spoke them in his ear. From the secret place his memories of her had hidden themselves over half a lifetime ago came a rush of forgotten sensations – the musical sound of her voice, her scent, the electric feel of her fingers on his flesh. And his agony after her disappearance.

I’ve met a man.

A wonderful, caring man who loves me, and I love him.

What a release it is to be cherished, respected, and liked. I feel as if all the other garbage has fallen away, and I’m free, with a new life ahead of me. Whether it will be with him or not, I don’t know, but I’m full of hope. I haven’t decided yet what to do about it all, and look forward to talking over possible strategies with you. But I am ecstatic!

In a scar so hardened with time that he barely knew it was there, something gave. It felt as real to him as if withered bands of connective tissue no longer able to hold their burden had split open, and a release he’d never expected to find spread through him. Decades after the doubts stopped mattering, he finally learned she’d loved him.

Logically he knew that after all these years he shouldn’t have been affected so deeply. Not until he brought his hand to his mouth in a reflex of disbelief and felt his tears did he realize he’d involuntarily begun to cry. “Excuse me,” he said, hastily dabbing his eyes with his napkin. “This took me by surprise.”

“I understand.”

In Mark’s quiet voice Earl recognized the same nonjudgmental tone he’d often used himself to encourage a distraught patient to talk. Damned effective. He found himself wanting to explain his reaction, especially to someone who’d known Kelly. That Mark was also the son of Cam Roper, the man in whom she’d confided, made it seem even more like speaking directly to a link with her. “I thought she just ran out, on me, on medicine, everything. That I loved her more than she loved me. That she simply wanted to disappear…” He wiped his eyes again. “Sorry. The human heart can be a sneaky organ.”

“We both lost a lot that summer.”

Earl tabled the napkin. “Yes, you said she was like a sister to you.”

Mark seemed about to say something, but instead reached into his briefcase and placed a file on the table. “This contains photocopies of everything in my father’s chart on Kelly.” He flipped open the cover. “What do you make of that?”

Earl glanced down at the page and found himself looking at a record of Kelly’s visit to Cam Roper as a little girl. Soon hard clinical logic displaced the emotional quicksand of the last few minutes – ER had trained him to make that kind of quick change with personal feelings – and he studied it with his full concentration. Reaching the end, he flipped the paper over. “No follow-up?”

“Apparently not.”

He needed only a few seconds to piece together his initial opinion. “I’d suspect the symptoms were functional, possibly stress-related, just as your father did. I’d also agree with his insinuation in the margin that the mother played a big part in the problem. Clearly she ran from doctor to doctor, probably needing excessive reassurances that her daughter was okay. Except…” He trailed off, interrupted by the memory of Kelly arching against him, making love with the lights off. Always with the lights off because of the scars. But he could feel them – a bad job by whoever had closed the wounds, both of them being as rough and wide as a small rope. On their first night together when he asked about it, she grew embarrassed. “I had problems when I was a kid. It’s over now. Please, don’t talk about them. They’re so ugly.” But of course he’d eventually seen them, catching glimpses in the ambient light through the window and once by a full moon, when she fell asleep lying on her back with the covers half off. They looked like sterling ridges on a silver tray.

“Except what?” Mark asked.

“Those scars bothered her, even into adulthood. I’d say they were left by a surgeon who could have used some practice.”

He flipped ahead, seeing entries indicating Cam Roper had provided Kelly with support therapy over several years, from 1970 until 1974. “Obviously these sessions involved other kinds of scars. Invisible ones. God knows Chaz gave her enough cause for grief, and Samantha wasn’t exactly a mother of the year.”

Mark nodded.

“What are these doing here?” Earl asked, finding what he immediately recognized from their format as reports from NYCH Death Rounds.

“I don’t know. I didn’t look at them too closely – figured they must have been misfiled.”

Earl riffled through them. After years of auditing his own department, he could read the chart of a resuscitation and run it like a movie in his head. He just didn’t glean information; he could place himself in the middle of the action and sense whether the team had worked together with grace or in utter discord. Most telling was the order sheet. The time entries indicated what drugs they gave in what sequence and revealed not only whether they’d done the right things, but if they’d been fast enough doing them. In minutes he had both cases pegged and more. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Mark.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.” He spread the papers out between them. “First the cases themselves. Both received the right treatment in a timely enough way, but the woman was a close call. Initially, whoever ran the arrest almost fell into the trap of ordering more digoxin. See where the order’s been written, then canceled?” He pointed at the appropriate line. “One person figured out what was really going on in the nick of time. After that, everything went like a charm.”

“Okay, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Kelly-”

“Not so. Look at this signature on one of the orders.”

Mark peered at the paper. “I can’t make it out.”

“Not surprising, given how we all scrawl our names.” said Earl. Doctors’ signatures were always indecipherable. That’s why residents and physicians had to enter their training or license numbers after anything they wrote in a chart. “But some of these stand out to me because we were in a study group together all through med school. I’d recognize them as surely as if I’d gone through a yearbook of old class photos.” He picked up the photocopy of Kelly’s letter, folded it to the bottom third where she’d signed
Kelly
, and shoved it beside the order sheet. “Recognize the handwriting?”

Mark grabbed both papers and held them up together. “My God, it’s her signature!”

“She was there, Mark.” He pushed the order sheet for the man who’d died toward him. “And at this patient’s resuscitation as well. Her name appears several places.”

“My God.” Mark looked up from studying the papers. “But you said they managed this guy fine from the get-go, besides the fact he died.”

“Right. His was the more typical, straightforward presentation of digoxin toxicity, the usual slow heart rate that, when a patient’s on the medication, immediately makes us all think of the right diagnosis. So everybody was on the ball with him.”

“So why would my father keep a copy of either case in her file?”

“Look at the staffman’s initials on both order sheets.”

State regulations demanded that all orders by trainees must be countersigned by their supervising physicians. Most scribbled only their initials and license number.

Mark once more peered at the entries. “C. B. – Chaz Braden?”

“We can check his license number to be sure, but I’d say that’s the reason these files were with your father.”

“Because they were Chaz’s cases?”

Earl leaned back and took a sip of what by now was cold coffee. “Because Kelly feared Chaz,” he said.

Mark stopped midway reaching for his teacup. “Pardon?”

Earl leaned forward. “Think about her preparing to run from a man who might come after her. Maybe she brought his M and M cases to your dad and asked him to check them out, hoping to find if hubby had screwed up, trying to get something that would have given her leverage over him. She might have figured on using it to keep him at bay, making it easier for her to leave.” He picked her letter up from the table and pointed to where she’d written:

Regarding the other two matters, we must discuss those. Whatever I plan for myself, I can’t leave and let them go unresolved.

“She could be referring to something her husband did wrong with these two cases.”

“But you just said, apart from a close call, they were free from screwups.”

“That brings us back to your original question – why your father would bother to hang on to them. He must have still thought something seemed wrong. After all, even a case review can miss mistakes.”

“Not often.”

“They would if the doctor in question was an amoral son of a bitch intent on covering them up and had successfully falsified the records. Maybe Kelly and your father wanted to subject Chaz’s work to a bit more scrutiny.”

Earl knew he’d made spectacular leaps in logic to entertain such an extraordinary set of conclusions. He also knew they’d have to go through the original files in their entirety to ever prove what he’d just suggested. Even then, supposing his hunches were correct, they still might not find anything incriminating if Braden had covered his tracks well enough. But this was the first sign that evidence against Chaz might exist after all – evidence that would show he’d made lethal mistakes, then tried to hide them, and that Kelly found out, perhaps confronted him – he grabbed the order sheet from Mark, his excitement growing.

“I think I can make out a few other names from my class. Two of them, Tommy Leannis and Melanie Collins, attended the memorial service. And check this out. According to her signature here, Melanie seems to be the one who counteracted the order for digoxin and saved the day. With the license numbers of the people I don’t recognize, I could track them down for questioning as well. Maybe a few of them will tell me whether they remember anything screwy about working with Braden on cases involving digoxin. Most of us recall errors by our former professors, though we wouldn’t dare talk about it much at the time.” As he spoke, a sense of exhilaration swept through him. After nearly two weeks of holding his breath, helpless to do anything – the worst kind of agony for someone whose every instinct in a crisis is to act – he had something concrete to pursue.

“Wait a minute,” said Mark. “I’m the one to follow up on that. You and Kelly weren’t as discreet as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the last thing you need is for one of your former classmates to put two and two together the way I did and nail you as the mystery man. Somebody is liable to do exactly that if you show undue interest in solving Kelly’s murder. I can just hear Chaz Braden suggesting the idea that his wife had realized she’d made a mistake having an affair, but you killed her when she tried to break it off. The NYPD would be back in the case and on your ass in a flash.”