Mortal Remains (14 page)

It didn’t make any sense. “Why would Chaz risk so many people being able to expose him?”

“The key lie would be his insistence that he hadn’t spoken with her since she left the estate bound for New York the day before.”

“Any theory about why he wouldn’t want the police to know something so mundane?”

“You tell me. But if she talked to him, at last we’d have a chink in that prick’s story.”

2:30 P.M.

LaGuardia Airport,

New York City

“Hope you don’t have stinky feet,” Earl said to Janet, watching the security officers make a lineup of passengers take off their shoes. The roar of a departing plane blistered the air, making him raise his voice.

“Smart-ass!” She stepped in close to him, took his face between her hands, and gave him a long soft kiss on the lips. “You be careful,” she whispered in his ear.

“I love you, and give Brendan a hug for me.”

“You bet. And you call to give me an update every night.”

He grinned at her. “Sure.”

“It’s not funny, Earl. You make your poking around too obvious, and I’ll end up reading your name in the
Herald
.
Mystery Lover Found.
”

“Come on.”

“Come on, yourself. Chaz Braden looked like a big vulture, hanging around at the memorial, eavesdropping on everyone. He’d love to find out whom she met in that taxi and shift suspicion from himself. And from the angry expression on his face whenever he glanced in your direction, I’d be afraid he already suspects that you were having an affair with his wife.”

“If you asked me, he looked pissed off at all Kelly’s old friends. He probably thinks it could be any of them. Otherwise, he would have served me up to the cops by now.”

“My, aren’t you reassuring?”

He grinned down at her, tightening his embrace. “You look beautiful.”

“What I am is frustrated. There are leads Mark Roper should be following that have nothing to do with her old friends and needn’t put you in danger.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve been thinking about Kelly, and there’s a piece missing. The first thing a woman in her predicament would do is arrange a divorce. Back then, God knows where she’d have had to go. Reno, maybe? Mexico? The Dominican Republic? Did you try that angle when you looked for her?”

“No, I never thought of it.”

“A man wouldn’t. You tell that Mark Roper he should see if she got that far. It might help him piece together her movements before she died. He has to do that, at least, if he hopes to find new evidence to prove hubby or mommy or whoever killed her.”

“I’ll tell Mark.”

The boarding call for her plane came over the PA.

“Good-bye, love,” she said, giving him a second kiss even softer than the first. “And don’t forget. Call me every night, be careful of Chaz Braden, and talk to Mark about what I said.”

He pressed her to him, savoring how slight and yielding she felt beneath her coat. “Yes! Now go.”

She stepped into the inspection area, slipped off her shoes, and stood with her arms wide, ready to be electronically frisked. On the outside she looked remarkably calm. But he knew otherwise. Whenever she felt really scared, she started giving him instructions.

4:00 P.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark knew someone had been in his house the minute he stepped in the door.

Little things were out of place.

The separation between coats and jackets in the front hall closet had changed. A week ago he’d moved the summer ones to the back and the winter gear to the front, so the positions of those items remained fresh in his mind.

Someone also appeared to have gone though the pockets, the material of a few being pulled almost inside out.

In the former living room, where he’d set up his waiting area, the phone and clock on an end table weren’t in their usual positions. He kept the face of the latter at an angle so everyone could see the time from any chair in the room, the phone placed off to one side so as not to obstruct the view. Instead they were placed one in front of the other.

Growing increasingly alarmed, he rushed into his office, which had once been the dining room.

All his computer equipment remained in place. The usual stack of unopened mail alongside a pile of unsent billings and recent test results that needed to be put in their proper files – he was weeks behind in his paperwork – were where he’d left them. Turning to the steel cabinets in which he kept patient records, he found them locked. No marks on the metal casings suggested an attempt to force them open.

Thank God,
he thought, looking around the room, unable to see anything missing. The adjacent examining room also seemed undisturbed.
The drug cabinet,
he thought, and ran to the back room, where he’d installed a medium-sized safe to store a supply of narcotics – codeine, percodan, and morphine – along with other controlled medications such as tranquilizers.

He found it intact.

Nor had there been any obvious attempt to tamper with it.

So what could an intruder have been after if it wasn’t computer equipment or drugs?

A third possibility crept to mind as insidiously as a chill. What if anything of interest was still here because the thief hadn’t finished robbing him?

He went very still.

The house itself didn’t creak tonight since the wind was light. He heard nothing else.

Had the person escaped?

Either the kitchen’s back door or the basement door could have been forced? Or one of the ground-floor windows could have been broken.

He pulled out his cellular and called Dan. He’d just left him at the White House, having already picked up the boxes of birth records.

“Someone’s been in my house,” he whispered as soon as the sheriff answered.

“Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus, is anything missing?”

“Not that I can tell in my office or living room. I haven’t checked the rest.”

“Why are you whispering – Jesus Christ! Is the person still there?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m on my way. Get out of there, Mark! Wait in your Jeep with the doors locked. Better still, drive to a neighbor’s.” He hung up.

Good idea.

Except it would take Dan at least ten minutes to get here. That might let whoever it was get away, free to try again.

Tiptoeing back into his examining room, he looked around for a weapon. He kept hammers and axes in the basement. All he could think of to defend himself with was his largest syringe and needle.

So armed, he crept out of his office and silently made his way to the kitchen. Peeking through the swing door, he saw nothing.

He stepped through.

Nobody.

He made his way to the stairs and started up to the second floor, trying not to recall old black-and-white movies where the killer lurked in the dark at the top of the landing. He raised his needle, holding it out in front of him at arm’s length.

No one jumped him.

One by one he checked the bedrooms.

Empty.

That left one other possibility.

At the same time he heard the distant wail of Dan’s siren.

He quickly descended to the first floor, ran back into the kitchen, and threw open the door to the basement. Figuring Dan would be here any moment, he went on the offensive.

Flipping up the switch, he flooded the darkness below with light, and yelled, “Okay, you! The cops are at the door, and I’m armed. Identify yourself now!”

The only sound was Dan’s siren getting closer.

“Do you hear that? Now give up and come out.”

Still no response.

Emboldened, he started down into the single big room. Within seconds he’d checked out the few nooks and crannies where someone could hide.

Not a soul.

Beginning to wonder if he’d been mistaken about an intruder, he turned to go back upstairs.

And saw the coat he’d laid across the bottom of the basement door over a week ago.

It lay pushed to one side, the way it would have been if someone had come in, and, it being dark, not realized it was there. He walked over and tried the door. It was locked, but the mechanism had to be a half century old and could have been easily picked, then locked again on the way out.

He stood there wondering what his uninvited visitor might have wanted and found himself staring at a wall of boxes – his father’s old files.

Oh, shit,
he thought, quickly crossing over to check. They appeared just as he’d left them, but with a queasy feeling he pulled open the one containing the original records on Kelly. Chaz Braden could have overheard his conversation with Earl Garnet at the reception about having found old files on her. Had he thought it might contain something incriminating and tried to steal it?

Almost to his surprise he located the folder exactly where he’d left it. He flipped through the contents to verify nothing had been taken. The record of Kelly’s first visit as a little girl – check; Kelly’s letter – check; notations of psychological counseling – check; two dig toxicity case reviews – check; newspaper articles – check. Nothing missing.

Crazy idea anyway, he chided himself. It would have been too obvious a move, even for a klutz like Chaz.

He was returning the folder to its slot when he thought,
Wait a minute
. He’d kept the contents in the same chronological order he’d found them. Done it out of habit. Doctors always kept the contents in each section of a file, from clinical notes through consults and special entries to test results, in the sequence they were received. It made it easier to review and follow a case that way. His father would have done things the same. It was no accident Kelly’s letter had followed after the entries for psychological counseling, because that would have been the order his father received it. And after photocopying the file Mark had put it back in that same place. Yet just now he’d found it in front of the entries for psychological counseling.

Someone had definitely gone through Kelly’s file.

D
an sipped at his coffee. “You’re sure nothing’s missing?”

“Nothing.” Mark downed his tea in a gulp and refilled the cup from a blue pot big enough for ten. Seated at the kitchen table, he grew impatient with Dan. “He checked to see what information I had on her.”

“But I can’t just accuse Chaz Braden of looking at your files because you think one piece of paper was out of order.”

“I know it was out of order, Dan. I’m meticulous about not mixing up the pages of a medical file. Of course Chaz did it. Who else would care?”

“I don’t know. But if someone busted in here, he did the neatest job of breaking and entering I’ve ever seen.”

“He came in here. That coat on the basement floor didn’t move itself.”

“But the locks haven’t a mark on them. No forced windows. Not so much as a missing pane of glass. If you weren’t obsessive about your papers, we’d have never suspected anyone was here. I doubt Chaz Braden has those kinds of skills.”

Mark’s stomach muscles tightened. “Maybe he hired somebody. Besides, anyone could have picked that basement lock.”

“It would take a real expert not to leave at least a scratch or two. And how would Chaz even know you had Kelly’s old medical file?”

“He must have overheard me telling Earl Garnet.”

Dan sighed and took another sip from the mug with the caption SLOWLY APPROACHING FORTY written on the side. Mark always reserved it for his visits. “If you made better coffee,” he said, pulling a sour face and pushing out of his chair, “I’d stick around. As it stands, I figure the ghost who broke in here is long gone. But I do suggest you get a better lock on the basement door.”

He thanked Dan for coming and saw him to the door. As for his assertion the intruder was long gone, that could be, but Mark dug out his old baseball bat from the basement and put it in the front closet, just in case.

He laid out the contents of Kelly’s file on his kitchen table sheet by sheet, like a deck of cards in a game of solitaire. Then he went over and over them. He still couldn’t see any patterns or sequences by which he could connect one to the other.

Only guesses.

Such as the reason his father saw Kelly for therapy. The logical assumption – she’d been working through her problems with Chaz, or maybe even her unresolved issues with her parents. But why five years? Most support therapy interventions went on for twelve months, sometimes twenty-four, unlike psychoanalysis, in which the progress got measured in decades.

Or how
the other two matters
she’d mentioned in her letter –
I can’t leave and let them go unresolved
– might tie in with the discrepancies in her phone bill. Suppose she actually reached Chaz at the maternity center and threatened to go public about the M and M cases if he didn’t let her go. That call could have been what got her killed. It would certainly be a conversation Chaz would not want revealed. If that were the case, however, wouldn’t it have been simpler for him just to admit she’d contacted him, then make up some benign story about what was said? He shouldn’t have had to risk an elaborate lie and claim he never even spoke with her. No, there had to be some other explanation.

But empty theorizing wouldn’t get him anywhere. He needed some way to check out his hunches.

He shifted his gaze to the morbidity-mortality reports that seemed to be so in order and looked at where Melanie Collins’s signature appeared.

Last night over the phone she’d gone on at length about Chaz. A lot of what she said was, “Kelly told me he berated her night and day… Kelly said his rages frightened her… Kelly felt repulsed when he wanted sex.” Maybe Kelly also confided how Chaz mismanaged his patients. Or perhaps Melanie had seen for herself.

But would Earl mind if he called her, after being so explicit about dealing with his former classmates himself? Surely not. That was for people like Tommy Leannis, who clammed up to outsiders.

He dialed her number and got a busy signal.

Try again later.

In the meantime he went back out to the Jeep and carted in the boxes that Dan had discovered in the White House. Now why the hell had his father collected all these? he wondered, first unpacking what amounted to stacks of birth records from the home and laying them out in piles on the floor. At least they were already in chronological order, spanning the years from 1955 to 1975. He made a quick estimate of the total by counting out one hundred of the documents, then using the height of them as a measure. Approximately thirty-two hundred women delivered their babies over the twenty-year period, a good two-thirds of them in the first decade of operation. Each record had a six-digit number, same as a hospital chart, but carried no identifying information about the mother other than her age and area code. The personal data, he figured, must have been kept separate for confidentiality reasons. Flipping through them, he saw that most of the women had been young, some lived in upstate New York, but the majority came from New York City. The specifics as to the infants – sex, physical status at birth, the presence of any congenital defects – was standard. The death certificates – he’d thumbed through only twenty-one of those for the home – were in keeping with the number of babies he would have expected to die, given the perinatal mortality rate of seven per thousand that prevailed at the time. The papers also indicated that a great majority of the infants became wards of the state in public orphanages, yet in a separate pile, the records showed that the home arranged private adoptions for 180 of the babies. The bottom line – everything seemed in impeccable order.

Next he laid out the birth records for the maternity center in Saratoga Springs. There’d be no site to visit there. Dan had stuck in a note saying the building had been torn down in the 1980s, replaced by a health spa.

The height of this pile reflected nearly double the number of births at the maternity center as compared to the home, six thousand by his estimate. But the place had approximately the same number of infant deaths, only twenty to be exact. Money and good prenatal care halved the going rate for mortalities.

He spent the next few hours meticulously studying the documents but still couldn’t find anything wrong. Another time, perhaps, when he wasn’t so tired, and he began to gather up the papers, wondering if for now he shouldn’t lock everything in the White House for safekeeping. But having had virtually no sleep for thirty-six hours, he settled on putting the records in his drug safe instead.

His gut started to burn like an overused muscle, the result of too much tea, no supper, and a whole lot of frustration. He made himself a sandwich and poured a glass of milk.

This time when he called Melanie, she answered on the first ring.

“Hello?”

She sounded tired.

“Hi.”

“Mark! Are you still in New York?”

“No, I’ve retreated back to the woods.”

“Ahhh – that’s a waste.”

“I know.” He laughed.

“I’d like to see you,” she replied.

“Next time I’m in town.”

“Mark, I could use some country air.” It sounded like an order.

Whoops! “Great. Let’s arrange it sometime. But after hunting season’s over. It’s like a remake of
Deliverance
around here right now.” What were white lies for but to let everyone back out of embarrassing corners with feelings intact?

She gave her throaty chuckle. “How about a couple of weeks from now?” she persisted.

Oh, brother.
On second thought, why not just have her come? Like nuts to the squirrels, it would give Nell and company enough to chew on the whole damn winter. “Melanie, I have to ask you something. Do you mind if we talk business a sec?”

“Shoot!” Her voice had snapped to attention.

“I’ve been going over old records related to Kelly’s death, specifically my father’s old medical chart on her. In it I found photocopies of M and M reports on two cases of dig toxicity in 1974, the year of her disappearance. Her name was on the order sheets, as well as yours. And get this, the staff person initialing the orders was hubby Chaz.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what to make of them or why they’d be there. I wondered if maybe Kelly asked my father to review the cases because she thought there was wrongdoing somewhere.”

“On the part of whom?” She sounded astonished.

“Her husband. I thought perhaps she’d been looking for something to hold over his head in order to keep him at bay, as part of her plan to leave him.”

Silence reigned for a few seconds. “I see. I suppose that makes sense.”

“What I wanted to know, Melanie, was if you can recall anything suspect about Chaz Braden’s clinical work that year. In particular, do you remember any issues around his management of patients on digoxin?”

“Not generally. Do you know the patient names?”

“Not yet. I only have chart numbers.”

She chuckled yet again, the tone a pitch higher this time. “Sorry. You’ll pardon me if I don’t recall all the cases I wrote orders on. Will you be looking up the original charts?”

“No, Earl Garnet’s getting those-” He could have kicked himself. Blurting out to the likes of Melanie Collins that Earl was helping him – what an asshole move. More than anyone, with her intuition about Kelly being in love, she could nail Earl as the man. God, he sucked like an amateur at this sleuthing stuff. “I needed someone who’d been in her class to question her contemporaries,” he quickly added. “Had to twist his arm, yet he finally agreed.”

“But Mark, I could have helped you.”

Yikes. “Oh, I knew you would, Melanie. The thing is, since I’m basically questioning if Chaz’s competency was an issue back then, the inquiry could get nasty, and I thought it better to ask someone well beyond the long arm of the Bradens.” Amazing how quickly he could come up with a credible lie when he had to.

“Chaz isn’t the brilliant man his father is,” Melanie said, after a long silence. “But he makes up for it by being fastidious. Drives people nuts, the way he always double-checks and micromanages things, yet by putting in long hours does get things done. A real workaholic. So let’s just say he wouldn’t be chief without ‘Daddy’ pulling the strings. But out and out negligence? No way. Not even ‘Daddy’ could cover that up these days.”

“What about in ‘seventy-four?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Those days he was only a few years out of a cardiac residency and up-to-date in his training, so he appeared to do pretty well. As son of the big man, he certainly got the benefit of any doubts over his clinical abilities. I don’t think anyone in the hospital besides his father and friends of Kelly knew about his weekend drinking then. We only learned of it through her and what we saw for ourselves at parties up there. The truth is, most people at NYCH didn’t even realize what a bastard he was until much later.”

“So there could have been more chance of an error by him going undetected in ‘seventy-four?”

“It’s worth a thought, isn’t it? Certainly no one would have been keeping a suspicious eye on him. Listen, Mark, I have to go. Rounds start at seven, and Monday’s always a monster for consults in the ER. When you know the names of those patients, give me a call. And I’m penciling in a visit with you for two weeks from now.”

He thanked her and said good night. The first thing that came to mind after hanging up had nothing to do with the case.

If he kept picking the Melanies of the world, he told himself, he might turn into another Collins – a middle-aged physician coming on to horny, lonely thirtysomethings for sex and company. The thought gave him the creeps. Yet if someone as successful and good-looking as she could end up that way…

He eyed his desk. Paperwork and unopened mail, never something he attended to promptly in the best of times, had piled up more than usual since Kelly’s body had been found. And he had his own monster day tomorrow, the weeks before the snow flew always being a busy period, his elderly patients needing flu shots and final checkups before they tucked themselves in for the winter. Tucking in… exactly what he needed to do for himself. He was beat. He detoured by the closet, then took himself and his trusty bat to bed.

Monday, November 19, 8:30 A.M.

New York City

The rhythmic electricity in the streets of Manhattan never changed for Earl. Even in old thirties movies Fred Astaire could be dancing along Times Square, and in the background there would be the purring motors, strident horns, thousands of teeming footsteps and bobbing heads, all syncopated to the buzz of chattering voices and leaving little doubt where Busby Berkeley or Gershwin got their inspiration. These days, he figured, those same rhythms spawned the beat to hip-hop, but the sound remained the same, and it washed over him as he walked down Second Avenue toward New York City Hospital.

Standing in the building’s shadow, waiting for the red to change at the intersection of Thirty-third, he closed his eyes. The familiar cacophony carried him back in time, to the point he imagined he would open his eyes again to find Kelly, Melanie, Tommy, and Jack at his side, impatiently waiting at that same stoplight, fretting about morning rounds.

He blinked and was alone. The two who were dearest to him in those days were dead – Jack, his closest friend, who’d sacrificed his life for him, and Kelly. Tommy had parlayed his B-student vexations into the stuff of a grade-A whine-ass, and Melanie, always a coquette, had apparently become the female counterpart to a roué.

The light changed, and he started across, huddled in his raincoat as wind and drizzle gusted up Thirty-third from the East River.

The cement-and-glass structure where he’d been forged into a doctor loomed over him, its upper stories lost in fog. For an instant it reclaimed the hold it used to exert on his nerve, jacking up his heartbeat and giving the acid in his stomach a stir before it just as quickly became simply another hospital, no different from the hundreds he’d visited in various official capacities throughout his long career.

Still, when the sliding doors opened to receive him, and hospital smells assaulted his nose, he felt caught in the crosscurrents of then and now.