Mortal Remains (24 page)

“Dr. Mark and I are breaking the law,” she whispered, giving a conspiratorial grin. “Every time I push this,” she added, pointing to the button.

“Mary’s the best teacher you’ll find when it comes to home care and using morphine on demand,” he said. “It’s not so much illegal as controversial outside a hospital, and the law’s a little gray on the matter. Of course, we keep mum about it, so as not to become a test case.”

“But I’m no junkie. Don’t use much more now than I did when Dr. Mark first got this contraption for me.”

“What you are, Mary, is a very brave woman,” Lucy said.

Mary gave a faint laugh. “My sister Betty out there, she’s the brave one, putting up with me like this. Not many let their kin pass on at home these days.”

“Mary, I noticed there were no tracks in the snow today,” Mark said. “Didn’t one of the social workers pass by? I specifically told them to see if you and Betty needed anything every morning.”

“Oh, I said not to bother, since you’d be here. They got far more needy folks than us to worry about.”

After they’d had Betty’s tea and were back outside, climbing into her car, Lucy asked, “How long?”

“A month, maybe more. I doubt she’ll last till the end of your rotation.”

As they picked up speed on the highway, Lucy’s cellular started to ring in her purse, which she’d propped on the console between their seats. One hand on the wheel, she fumbled for it, managing to spill the contents at his feet.

“Merde!”
he heard her mutter as he retrieved the phone from amongst the debris. Dan’s number flashed beside the caller identification icon.

“I found your cellular,” the sheriff announced as soon as Mark answered. “One of my men stepped on it under the snow.”

“Terrific. You got any more useful information?”

“The shot came from behind on the passenger side, then out your front window, just as you thought. We’ll never find the bullet.”

“Shit!”

“It gets worse. After I left your place last night I swung around to the office to pick up my camera and flash. Went out to the wreck to try and get shots of boot impressions in the snow, but the wind had already blown them in.”

“Hey, I told you you shouldn’t-”

“I made some phone calls, and here’s the interesting part. The staff at the Braden estate insist Chaz is in New York.”

“But that’s the sort of crap they would say.”

“I also called his office in New York, and was told he’s home with the flu.”

“Again, figures.”

“I then call him at home and am told Dr. Chaz Braden is so sick he’s in bed.”

“Wall-to-wall alibis.”

“But she’ll see if he’ll take the phone.”

“Oh?”

“On the line he comes, and, sounding gravelly voiced, tells me the same story. I said I was sorry to bother him. He said it was no trouble. I told him we’d had a problem yesterday evening with drunken hunters taking potshots at passing vehicles and described what happened to you. He replied, ‘That’s terrible,’ then asked why I was calling him. ‘Just wanted to check if you were having similar problems near your place,’ I answered. He explained that since he had been ill and left for New York sometime after three in the afternoon, he couldn’t say what happened around his place last night. I thanked him, and we hung up.”

“So what’s so interesting? It’s exactly what I’d expect from the son of a bitch.”

“Oh yeah? That mean-mouthed bastard hasn’t been so cordial to me since the first day he came round after I took office. Even then he made it clear that he saw me as small-time, that he was big-city, and that meant I should stay out of his way. Yet here I am calling his big-city self to check on his whereabouts, and he’s polite as can be. What’s a country boy to think?”

Mark perked up. “He’s worried.”

“Yeah. And coming from a guy who normally scoffs in my face, that’s almost as good as an admission he pulled the trigger.”

“So you’ve tossed out the drunken hunter idea.”

“Let’s say I moved it to the back burner. But I can’t arrest Chaz for suddenly being courteous to me. We still don’t have any evidence he took a shot at you.”

Discouraged, Mark hung up at the end of the call and started to salvage the contents of Lucy’s purse from the car floor. The slush from his boots had left everything soggy. A packet of photos had spilled out, and fanned at his feet like a deck of cards.

“I’m afraid these may be ruined,” he said, picking them up and separating them out in the hope they’d dry. He couldn’t help seeing they were all of her in a group hug with four young men. Everyone had broad smiles, and seemed to be from the four corners of the earth. One had Asian features, another Polynesian, the third appeared to be North American Indian, and the fourth, brown-skinned, could have been from anywhere on the planet. Behind them stood a white wall with a red tile roof.

Could one of them be her fiancé? “I’ll spread these out on the backseat. You might be able to save them.”

“Thanks. We rarely see each other these days. I don’t know when there’ll be another chance for all of us to be in a picture together.”

He twisted around and began to place the shots side by side. When he’d finished and she still hadn’t elaborated on who they were, he arranged the pictures a second time.

“So how do you like our little United Nations?”

“Are they your colleagues from
Médecins du Globe
?” Mark asked.

She laughed. “No! Those are my brothers.”

“Your brothers?”

Her smile widened, and she seemed to enjoy his confusion. “Yeah. We’re all adopted.”

He looked back at the pictures. And at her. “That’s really, cool,” he said.

“Mom couldn’t have kids, but came from a big family and wanted the same, so she and Dad picked us up wherever he was stationed.”

“Amazing,” said Mark, reaching back and carefully picking up one of the photos. “So tell me who’s who.”

5:15 P.M.

Battery Park Towers,

New York City

Earl sank back in a deep, white leather chair, slowly rotating the tapered stem of his martini glass, and looked around him. “This is quite the place, Melanie.”

“I like it.” She occupied a matching sofa across from him, her legs curled beneath a black dress that set her off in stark contrast to the upholstery. Behind her, along the windows facing east, ran a row of attractive oriental silk screens blocking the view. “The residents tell me some tall son of a bitch wearing a visitor’s pass is stalking our hallowed halls and kicking butt whenever he finds a slacker.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“Why not? You never could let anything slide, Earl. I doubt that part of you has changed.” She raised her glass to him in a toast.

Not in the mood for reminiscing about their impressions of one another, he simply shrugged and toasted her back. “Tell me about Bessie McDonald,” he said, without pausing to take a sip. “Did she say anything about Chaz Braden that night you visited her two weeks ago?”

Melanie frowned at him. “And still the same old stickler for getting down to business, I see.” She took the time to drink deeply from her tapered glass, the contents a blue concoction she’d made up before he arrived – crushed ice with curaçao, orange vodka, and white rum according to the bottles still on the counter. She waited for him to join her.

He didn’t.

“You don’t like martinis? I can get you something else.” She started to get up.

“No, Melanie, this is fine. Just tell me if Bessie said anything about Chaz Braden.”

She settled back on the sofa. “Well, actually she did. You see, just that morning she’d read in the paper about Kelly’s body being found, and that got her talking about her admission back in ‘seventy-four.”

He felt a surge of excitement and leaned forward. “Go on.”

But after listening to Melanie describe her conversation with her former patient, he fell back in his chair, deflated. It told him nothing new.

“Bessie was my first big case, Earl,” Melanie continued, her voice earnest. “If there’s a moment when I can say I became a doctor, when all the theory suddenly became clear-cut action, it was the night we resuscitated her. Apart from that, I don’t recall much about her admission. But to this day I’ve had a special place in my heart for late bloomers. You know the kind of residents I mean. Nondescript performers one day, then in comes the patient with a problem that they nail before anyone else, and it sets off a spark.”

Earl remembered Melanie coming out of herself in her fourth year, but not that her emergence centered around any specific case. Yet he’d certainly seen exactly what she described happen with his own residents. Reliving this personal epiphany of hers, however, didn’t offer a clue as to what secret Chaz Braden might have been trying to cover up. And Melanie, along with everyone else at the hospital, seemed unable to explain why Bessie now lay in a coma. “Some transient event” had been the best the neurologists came up with after looking at the tests Dr. Roy arranged.

He glanced to his left. Through the west windows he could see the black water of the Hudson where it splayed out to combine with the East River, then continued to flow toward the ocean. He felt the pull of the current on his mood. Even his calls that afternoon to former classmates who’d worked on the digoxin toxicity cases had yielded nothing but exclamations of surprise at his contacting them and no useful recollections about Chaz’s or anyone else’s competence with the medication. There were a few other people yet to reach, but he doubted they’d be any more helpful.

He raised his glass and took a long sip of Melanie’s creation – a blue lady she’d called it. Not bad, for a martini. He usually found them bitter. This had a refreshing, fruity taste.

“Did you have any part to play in the second case, the man who died?” he asked. “I saw your name on the order sheet there as well.”

The makings of a grin played at the corners of her mouth. “Could be. You see, after my triumph with Bessie, I was the floor’s authority on dig for a while, so likely I stuck my nose into that resuscitation as well, if I was around. But I’d have to look at the chart.”

“Would you mind? And could you take a look at Bessie’s old file as well? Those notes might jog your memory about something that’s not written down.”

“Sure.” She leaned forward to take his half-empty glass, got up, and walked with it toward a stunning kitchen area that he knew Janet would die for. Except it looked so polished, he doubted Melanie did any cooking in it.

“That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it?” Melanie said, opening a refrigerator the size of his minivan and pouring him a refill from a small pitcher of the cocktail that she’d left chilling in the freezer.

“It’s still worth pursuing, given what little we have. Keep this under your hat, but unofficially Mark Roper thinks Chaz Braden somehow got Bessie to slip into a coma so she couldn’t talk about what happened back then.”

She started, looked up from refilling his glass, and the blue slush brimmed over the rim onto her hand. “Now there’s one hell of a big leap,” she said, reaching for a cloth to clean up the spill. “Has he any proof?”

“Just his gut.”

She returned with the drink. “How does he think Chaz could have precipitated a coma?” She stood over him, still holding his glass and wiping its stem.

“First of all it would have to be a drug that couldn’t be traced. He figures a shot of short-acting insulin could have done the trick. Think about it. The onset of profound hypoglycemia would occur in a matter of hours after Chaz gave her the injection. A protracted insulin coma would in itself destroy a pack of neurons. Throw in prolonged convulsions and an extended obstruction of her airway, both of which he could have reasonably anticipated since he may have made sure she couldn’t summon help – they found her call button unplugged – Bessie wouldn’t have much left between the ears. In other words, she’d be exactly the way she is now.”

“I see.” Melanie continued polishing the outside of the glass. “You haven’t told me what you think.”

“Two cases of unexplained digoxin toxicity under Chaz Braden twenty-seven years ago, the year Kelly died, and the survivor now lies in an unexplained coma that occurred less than twenty-four hours after forensic experts identified Kelly’s body. That’s a lot of mystery illnesses clustered around a common set of events. Yeah, I’m beginning to go along with the idea there’s a connection.”

Her caressing action with the cloth slowed to a stop. “But do you believe Chaz is responsible for it all?”

“The man’s such an ass, part of me wants to say, ‘Who else could it be?’ ”

“And the rest of you?”

He shrugged. “It bothers me the police investigated the hell out of him for Kelly’s murder, yet couldn’t nail him. So let’s just say that while he’s still number one in my book, and I think what happened to Bessie McDonald is somehow linked to Kelly’s death, I’m also keeping an open mind as to the possibility of other suspects.” He was thinking of Samantha McShane.

Melanie remained perfectly motionless.

He felt a crick in his neck from looking up at her.

“What about making a case against Chaz regarding Bessie?” she asked after a few seconds.

“Maybe we’ll luck out and someone will remember seeing him on the floor that night. If so, we could connect the dots for the police and point them to him. Then he’d at least have some explaining to do.”

“That army of lawyers his daddy keeps will say otherwise.”

“There’s another potential charge that would make everyone, including those lawyers, look at him in a different light. Someone took a shot at Mark early last night-”

“A shot?”

“Yeah, with a hunting rifle. He skidded into a ditch, and Mark thinks it was Chaz’s work as well. Put a chink like that in his armor – it’s reckless endangerment at the very least, if not attempted murder – Daddy won’t be able to protect him. Maybe then we can tie him to Bessie, and ultimately Kelly.”

“It all sounds flimsy.”

“I know.”

“And if you can’t finger him for taking a shot at Mark?”

“We’re screwed, all the way back to square one. We’d have to get him another way, or go after someone new.”