Mortal Remains (33 page)

As Melanie went on and on, Earl felt like a specimen laid out in front of her and began to resent the gleeful way she talked about her probable diagnostic coup, oblivious to the agony he was in. It’s not all about you, Melanie, he wanted to yell at her, figuring she must have used the word
I
over two dozen times. He remembered when no one, including her, thought she’d make it through medical school. Well, she might have gotten smarter, but her bedside manner remained the pits.

He curled up on his side again, as red-hot spasms did laps from one end of his gut to the other.

She finished her spiel, told him she’d be back, and was out the door with her posse before he could stop her.

But she had to increase his IVs. Check his potassium. Listen to him lie about not being Kelly’s lover. “Melanie!”

No reply.

Son of a bitch!

Minutes later she whisked back into the room, all smiles and shaking a new IV bag with a big sticker on it indicating she’d added a twenty milliequivalents dose of potassium. In seconds she’d replaced the old with the new and had it running into him at a good clip. Turning to his other arm, she produced a rubber tourniquet from her pocket and tied it snugly around his biceps, then gave his veins a swipe with a cold alcohol swab. They bulged, glistening blue, and he shivered, thinking of the toxins coursing through them.

“You always draw bloods and start IVs on your own patients?” he said, trying to make small talk in the face of knowing too damn well the assault that his intestines, kidneys, pancreas, and brain were under. Even if he didn’t die, he could still end up with seizures or diabetes or be on dialysis.

“Yeah, I’m known for it,” Melanie said, taking yet another tube of his blood. “What the hell, nurses being busy as they are. Treat ‘em right by giving them one less thing to do, and they’re on your side for life, right, Earl?”

He tried to grin at her in agreement, but it felt more like a grimace. Flippant banter between physicians was how they normally coped with the life-and-death tensions that went with the job – a kind of whistling past the graveyard. But when that grave might be his, the schtick grew a little thin.

She leaned closer. “And in your case, given your suspicions about the cause of Bessie McDonald’s coma, I think it best I handle as many procedures on you as is humanly possible. I mean, after our drink the other night, I started to think. Do you know how many ways a doctor could secretly do away with a hospitalized patient, yet never get caught? It’s unreal.”

With that, she bade him good-bye, and left.

Thanks for the comforting words, Melanie, he wanted to call after her. Instead, he simply lay there, trying to put what she’d said out of mind. Only to end up thinking instead about the surface of his gut shredding itself raw as the
E. coli
bacteria deepened their hold and even more toxins flooded into his bloodstream. He tried to prepare mentally for the hemorrhages that were bound to follow. What lay ahead wasn’t hard to imagine. He’d seen too many patients lying in their crimson waste to have any illusions about it. He started to regret having lied to Janet about the seriousness of it all. He wanted to see her, to see Brendan. Especially if – No, he mustn’t think that way. Wouldn’t, dammit. But another round of pain skewered him so hard he couldn’t help but think the worst.

That same morning, Friday, November 23, 8:05 A.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark navigated the red Jeep by following the loom of the road under a foot of fresh snow.

“Still not answering,” Lucy said, snapping her cellular shut.

They’d been trying to raise Victor since seven.

The coffee he’d gulped down before leaving the house seemed to repercolate itself at the back of his throat. Let him be getting wood. Or be gone for a walk. Maybe off on a drive.

But the Victor he knew would not only have been by the phone, eagerly awaiting Mark’s call, ready to divulge whatever he’d discovered, but also would have called Mark by now, perhaps a dozen times over.

Ice coated everything, and the frozen world seemed metal hard, cast in silver, gray, and black. Even the shiny surface of the snow had a jaggedness to it.

Mark’s grip tightened on the wheel.

Victor’s car stood in the driveway.

A Tiffany lamp glowed warmly behind the front window.

No smoke rose from the chimney.

They walked up the unshoveled steps and knocked on the front door.

No sounds came from inside.

Mark reached for the handle, turned, and shoved the door open.

It revealed a long, dim, central hallway leading toward the back of the house.

Empty.

“Victor?” he called.

No answer.

“It’s Mark Roper and Lucy.”

Still no reply.

Mark stepped inside, making his way between the antique tables and shelves loaded with porcelain figures that lined the walls. The place seemed cold. “Stay here,” he said, continuing down the corridor. A peek through the door on his right revealed a magnificent mahogany dining room table and china cupboard, but no Victor. The door on the left opened into a small living room dominated by a baby grand but otherwise empty.

He followed the hallway toward the back, coming to a swinging door at the end that he presumed led to the kitchen. “Victor?” he repeated, the floorboards creaking under his boots. The air here felt cooler still.

He pushed his way through.

The back door was open. Halfway across the threshold lay Victor, facedown, his legs covered with drifted snow. A half dozen logs lay scattered on the floor in front of him.

Mark swallowed once, walked in, and knelt by his head. The skin was ice-cold. He felt for a carotid pulse, knowing he wouldn’t find any.

Whenever Mark found himself alone with a dead body, the absolute silence of the corpse unnerved him the most. No soft sounds of air moving in and out of the lungs, no brush of clothing against the skin with each inhalation or expiration, no tiny
cricks
that tendons sometimes make when a person moves, not even a gurgle from the stomach. He instinctively slowed his own breathing, so as not to disturb that stillness, and the world around him seemed to go quiet as well. It was as if all that dead flesh, like a black hole, sucked the sounds of life from the room.

What had happened appeared obvious. An overweight, hypertensive, diabetic man had gone out to get wood in the snow, and the exertion had brought on a heart attack. Except he must have initially fallen outside, Mark thought, noticing recent scratches on Victor’s wrists. They were identical to the ones he himself had received the other night while running from his pursuer, his wrists plunging through the icy crust of the snow each time he slipped.

Maybe that outside fall had been a simple slip, or due to the initial symptoms of what killed him, and he’d been able to pick up the logs and continue to the back porch.

He looked around at the once-cozy room where Victor had prepared meals, mostly to dine alone. Brightly embroidered wall hangings offered homespun encouragement for the future, confidently predicting: MY PRINCE WILL COME; A KITCHEN IS THE HEARTH OF A FAMILY’S HOME; A COUPLE’S LOVE IS A FEAST FOR LIFE. Beside these were photos of a young man whom Victor had told him about. His first name was Brad, and he had died the year before Victor moved here. They’d been lovers for over a decade. Victor thought a period of time in the country would make it easier to get over his grief and move on. It never happened.

Mark snapped open his phone to call Dan. Only when he saw the blurry numbers did he realize his eyes were full of tears. He stayed kneeling, wiping them clear, whipsawed between sad and angry, not really understanding why. After all, he’d seen patients die before, even people who had called him friend.

He heard the floorboards creaking. “Did you find him?” Lucy asked from out in the corridor.

He tried to warn her back, but she stepped through the door.

“Oh, no!” Her hands flew to her mouth as she sank to her knees by his head. “The dear, dear man.” She reached out and ran her fingers along the side of Victor’s face, brushing the tip of his magnificent mustache.

Mark quickly turned away. Victor would never feel her simple gesture, just as in his last years he’d so rarely felt the caress of someone who loved him.

“Let’s wait in the car,” he said to Lucy. “I’m going to call Dan and treat this place as a crime scene, so don’t touch anything on the way out.”

“A crime scene?”

Mark nodded. If there was anything to Victor’s last message, his death had been damn convenient to someone.

“No forced entry, nothing broken, no suggestive marks on the body. Suspicious as hell, right?” Dan asked when Mark told him to treat the death as a possible homicide.

“I know it sounds crazy, Dan, but humor me. Too many timely illnesses have happened on this case.” Mark filled him in on what Victor had been up to and how Earl had to be admitted to NYCH.

As Dan listened, his scowl deepened, but in the end, he pulled out the yellow tape. “You realize I’m on thin ice here,” he muttered, cordoning off the driveway.

Within half an hour men and women in dark blue jumpsuits, SARATOGA SPRINGS P.D. written on the back, were crawling all over the house using Ziploc evidence bags and tweezers to collect every stray hair, thread, or broken nail they could find. A pretty blond woman, her regulation peaked cap worn backward, hunched over Victor’s computer and carefully covered the keys with a fine white powder. “Look at this, Chief,” she said, summoning Dan to her side. “Most of his prints have been partially smudged out.”

“Wiped?” Mark asked, leaning in to see.

Dan shook his head. “More like someone’s used it while wearing gloves.”

“Can I try and turn it on?”

The woman stood aside. “I’m all finished. Be my guest.”

Mark pushed the ON button, and the screen flickered to life. Against a background of tropical fish, it requested an access code. “Have you got someone who can hack into these things?”

Dan chuckled. “Yeah. They’re called kids.”

“Seriously.”

“There’s a white-collar crime unit in Albany. They’ve done a few favors for me from time to time.”

“Anything quicker?”

“We’ve got some floppies and CD-ROMs back at headquarters programmed to search for passwords,” the woman said as she packed away her supplies. “I could give them a try. But we’d need a warrant.”

The prospect of learning what Victor had found out, like scent to a hound, unleashed a rush of adrenaline in Mark. “Great. I’ll come with you-”

Victor’s phone beside the computer started to ring. They all looked at each other. Mark took the initiative, and picked up the receiver. “Victor Feldt’s residence.”

“Victor?” It was a woman’s voice. She sounded young, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Who’s speaking, please?”

“I need to speak with Victor.”

“I’m Dr. Mark Roper. Can I know who’s speaking?”

“Dr. Roper? Is Victor all right?” She sounded alarmed.

“Can I know who’s speaking, please?”

“Oh, God, what’s happened?”

“Are you family-”

He was cut off by a dial tone.

He tried *69 to get the caller’s number.

It had been blocked.

“Don’t get too excited about our CD program helping you,” the technician said on her way out the door. “Whoever was at the keyboard after Victor might have gotten in and already trashed everything, or worse, substituted new data for old, which means the original is really gone.”

3:40 P.M.

Hampton Junction

A low gray sky had slid over the valley, as oppressive as a slab of cement.

“Earl, it’s Mark. How are you feeling?” He’d asked Lucy to drive so he could use the phone.

“Mark? Frankly, I don’t feel too good.”

He sounded groggy as hell. “I’m not surprised. Melanie told me what happened to you. Are you able to talk? It’s urgent.”

“Talk’s about all I can do.”

“You’re sure you’re able? I could call back.”

“Now you’ve got me dying of curiosity. Shoot!”

Mark briefly explained who Victor was and everything that had happened to him.

“You think he was killed because of what he discovered?” Earl asked at the finish. His voice had become hard-edged, with none of its previous languor.

“If so, it was very cleverly staged. Even the lividity matched how we found him.” The purplish discoloration where venous blood pooled, then clotted in the lowest points of the body during the first hours after death was an indelible record of the person’s position when he died. A pattern that didn’t conform to how the body lay would indicate someone had subsequently moved or repositioned the corpse. “I’ve arranged to do an autopsy on him tomorrow morning at Saratoga General, so I’ll be able to pick up obvious signs of foul play. And I’m going to screen his blood for every drug I can think of that could precipitate an MI. The lab people are going to scream, but I’m on my way there now to make sure I’ll have everything I’ll need. But there may be no signs or drugs to find.”

“And you’ve no idea what he turned up?”

“Nope.”

Earl exhaled into the phone. “How can your man and whatever he found have anything to do with Kelly’s murder?”

“I’ve no idea yet. We’re going to try and get into his computer.”

Silence reigned on the line.

“Earl?”

“I’m here. Just thinking, to see if I can put any of this together.”

“What you ought to be thinking about, with opportune comas and heart attacks going around, is if someone made you sick as well.”

More silence.

Finally, Earl said, “To be honest, I’ve started to wonder the same thing. My end of the investigation has sure as hell been sidelined, if that’s the motive.”

“I’m afraid it might not end at that.”

Again more silence.

“Anyone try to get near you who shouldn’t?”

“You mean like Braden? No.”

“Earl, get somebody you can trust to stay in your room. Can Janet join you?”