Mortal Remains (37 page)

“Do you think there’ll be too much snow once we get there?” she asked.

“Don’t know. But I doubt this will keep up. It’s too heavy to last long.”

“Why would he bury them on the grounds, and not off in the woods, someplace far from any connection to him?”

“Ever try to dig a hole in the forest floor? Around here it’s full of rocks and roots. Whenever murderers have made that mistake, even if they managed to scratch out a shallow grave for their victim’s body, animals usually dug it up. I know infants are much smaller, but hunters still might spot the remains, or someone’s pet might start bringing in the bones.”

She fell silent again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

He’d certainly sewn up Charles Braden, all right. Taken threads of the man’s life and tied them together into a nice tight story. Even managed to get him with his own words, quoting from that odd book collection of his. Clever, and no holes. He had an answer for every question or objection Lucy could throw at him, coming up with motive, means, and opportunity.

Yet it almost seemed too neat. Other less macabre explanations were possible. Braden could have been switching babies in secret, but not killing the deformed ones. He might have been turning them over to other orphanages farther afield so the paperwork wouldn’t appear locally. That would require documents he wouldn’t have, but maybe he’d simply forged the signatures, given fictitious names for the mother, listed the father as unknown. If Braden had been switching babies, phony paperwork was much more plausible than infanticide. Yet after seeing those books he had, and hearing what he said about smotherings…

All they would need was one trace of human DNA from the soil and they would have him. But they’d have to get it clandestinely. The minute Braden suspected anyone digging soil samples, he’d have lawyers by the carload sealing up the place.

He glanced over at Lucy. She rode with her face turned away from him. He had to hand it to her, she had quite a talent with spreadsheets. Braden must have figured no one would ever notice the discrepancy with the numbers. Certainly he, Mark Roper, coroner, hadn’t, and wouldn’t be planning to head off in the middle of the night with a pick and shovel if she hadn’t pointed the way.

One thing he hadn’t shared with her, had been trying not to think of at all – the similarity in the attack on Nell and – No, he wasn’t going to even consider that. Couldn’t!

They made the rest of the trip without talking.

As they passed the pay phone near his house, she said, “Maybe you should don your coroner’s hat, phone the friendliest judge you know to get a warrant. Violating the rights of a derelict lawn shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for American justice. If we do find anything, we’ll want to be able to use it in court.” She gave him a weak smile. “See, I’m learning. Then you and I are going to have a bowl of soup – something UN soldiers in Bosnia told me was a necessity for this kind of detail.”

He could imagine. Rule number one: Never spend a cold night digging for bodies without something hot on your stomach.

He pulled over and made a call to a semi retired judge living in a cottage nearby who had once known his father.

“Any luck?” Lucy called from the Jeep when he hung up.

“The guy agreed – promised he’d get the paperwork to me tomorrow,” he yelled back to her, holding the door to the booth open as he dialed the nursing desk for Earl’s floor at NYCH. “If anyone bothers us tonight, we’re digging for worms – Oh, hello, it’s Dr. Mark Roper. Is Dr. Garnet awake?”

“Awake! He’s a one-man, all-night vigil.”

“Plug in his phone. I want to call through. It’s urgent.”

In a matter of minutes he’d told Earl everything that had happened – the explosion, Nell, the conversation he’d had with the woman who worked at Nucleus Laboratories, and that what Victor had found seemed mostly to do with the executive health plans of big corporations. “At least that’s what upset the lady who called. Victor had also zeroed in on some genetic screening results he thought were peculiar, but she couldn’t see anything wrong with them.”

“Who were they of?”

“Siblings with a family history of cancer. They apparently were all negative.”

Earl immediately triaged the rest of the information into a series of succinct questions.

“You’ve still no idea who owns Nucleus Laboratories?”

“No.”

“Any ideas about how to track down your caller and this file she has?”

“Not yet. Haven’t had a chance to even think of it.”

“And Nell never said what she’d remembered.”

“No, chances are there never was anything to tell. She could have said that just to get a visit.”

“So we’ve got nothing.”

“Not exactly. I think my phone’s tapped.”

“What?”

“So no more calls to the house, and cell phones are out.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“And I got a pretty good idea what was going on at Braden’s maternity center and the home for unwed mothers.” He spent the next few minutes outlining the implications of the statistics his father had kept, and went on to describe his library encounter with Charles and the hall of shame.

“Mother of God!” Earl muttered at the end of the story. “That’s so monstrous it’s unbelievable.” After a few more seconds, he added, “It could have been why Kelly was murdered, if she found out.”

“Exactly.”

“Unfortunately, that expands the list of suspects,” Earl continued, still sounding incredulous. “We’d have to add Charles, and it could still be Chaz, defending his father. Hell, we might even have to think of Mrs. Charles Braden, wherever she is these days. No one’s brought her up, but I remember a rather fierce woman who, back then, certainly seemed capable of taking extreme measures against anyone who threatened her husband. But it’s astute work, Mark. Excellent, in fact.”

“Oh, it wasn’t me. Lucy figured it out-”

“Who’s Lucy?”

That’s right. Earl didn’t know about her. “The wonderful Lucy? She’s this miracle resident who’s descended into my life and become my right hand at work, who also makes great soup…”

As he heaped praise on her, giving her credit for having cracked the secret of his father’s files, he opened the doors of the booth again to let her hear. Her cheeks flushing crimson, she waved him to keep quiet from the rolled-down window on her side of the Jeep.

The silence at the other end of the line was total.

“What’s the matter, Earl?”

“I hope you didn’t tell her about me and Kelly.”

“No, of course not.”

The silence continued.

“What?” Mark asked.

“Did you check her out?”

“She’s all right, I promise you.”

“The casualty rate among people who might have helped us has tripled in the last twenty-four hours. At best she’s bad luck. You be careful. My advice is turn over everything you’ve found out to the local sheriff and let him handle it. Don’t go doing anything stupid on your own, hear me?”

11:04 P.M.

New York City Hospital

Earl’s pulse leapt to triple digits as he watched the cardiac monitor the nurses had provided. Though at the moment the pattern indicated a fast but normal heartbeat, the result of his own anxiety and responsible for the boxing-glove effect, nasty-looking runs of extra squiggles occasionally popped up. Diagnostic possibilities of what they could be the precursors to ran through his head, and a cold sweat crept over his skin again.

He averted his eyes and settled himself back down. Better keep his imagination in check if he had any hope of toughing this out and catching a killer.

Yet he continued to worry. First about the arrival of this resident, Lucy, on the scene. As much as he liked Mark, the guy jumped to conclusions and rushed to judgment about people, for better or worse. His resentment of Chaz had almost led him to exclude other suspects since the beginning of the case. Then he’d been ready in an instant to label Samantha’s doings with Kelly as Munchausen by proxy syndrome. What if this time he’d gotten it wrong the other way around, and mistaken a serpent for an angel? He was lonely enough to be a mark for any intelligent, half-decent-looking female. From the way he babbled on about her, he’d been smitten, which meant she could lead him by the nose. What if she were in cahoots with someone who wanted to sabotage the investigation, or worse, lure Mark into danger? And now, apparently thanks to this woman’s helpful interpretation of Cam Roper’s old files, Mark was chasing a crazy idea that Charles Braden could have been involved in some bizarre scheme involving mass infanticide. At first, he had to admit, when Mark told him, he’d been shocked into at least considering it, but then when he learned its source… “Jesus!” he said out loud, his bad feeling about her growing worse by the second.

A fluttering sensation in his chest alerted him to a new round of palpitations, and he lay still, inhaling, exhaling, and getting frustrated as hell.

Tanya slipped in to check on him at eleven as promised.

“All’s well,” he lied, grateful that his tracing on the monitor happened to be going through a quiet spell.

She left looking as concerned as ever.

His restlessness became unbearable. He rang for the nurse, asked for a pad of paper, sticky tape, and as many different colored pens as she could spare.

“You should get some sleep, not stay up coloring all night,” the woman said, not at all as jovial, with her red cheeks and granny glasses, as he’d remembered while loaded with morphine. Her name wasn’t much of a yuk either. The tag read MRS. WHITE, as if she’d killed Professor Plum in the library with the pipe wrench.

“What’ll it be next,” she added, “cutting out paper dolls?”

“Sweet!” he told her.

He proceeded to do what he always did when the complexity of a patient’s medical problem overwhelmed him – make a flowchart of all the variables.

At the center he wrote
Kelly
.

Circling her like malevolent red moons he placed
Chaz Braden
and
Samantha McShane
, and in more distant orbits, using a slightly less vibrant orange,
Charles Braden III
and
Walter McShane
.

Closer to Kelly he added
Earl Garnet
,
Cam Roper
, and
Mark Roper
, all in green – the men who loved her.

Radiating out from
Charles Braden III
he drew two lines. On the end of one he wrote
Maternity Center
, the end of the other
Home for Unwed Mothers
. He also made a horizontal line connecting the two, in red.

Floating above these, suspended in the middle of nowhere, he added the name
Nucleus Laboratories
, and joined to it with a hard black line,
Corporate Executive Health Plans
. With a lighter line, he added,
Genetic Screenings: Siblings with a Positive Family History for Cancer
.

From these he penciled in a tentative line to Chaz Braden’s name with a
?
on it.

Finally, he scribbled
Victims with information
at the very top of the page, added
Victor Feldt
as number one with a black line joining him to Nucleus labs, and
Nell
as number two, her black line leading to
Kelly
.

And that was it for Hampton Junction.

Or was it? He added
Lucy
, circled it, and penciled in three faint lines, each marked with a
?
, between her name and his principle suspects –
Chaz
;
Charles
;
Samantha
.

Moving to the bottom of the page he wrote
NYCH
, with four spokes radiating out from it, one to
Kelly
, one to each of the
Bradens
, and one to himself. He added a fifth spoke and on it wrote
Bessie McDonald-Victim?
Finally, he designated a similar
Victim?
status to himself.

At first he felt a sense of mastery, having condensed everything on one page. A half hour later he seethed with impatience at being no further ahead in sorting it all out.

He couldn’t pull anything into a coherent whole. The diagram seemed to highlight differences between the various parts of the puzzle rather than link them together. Where were the common threads? He couldn’t relate Bessie McDonald to Victor Feldt and Nucleus Labs. He couldn’t connect the labs to Kelly’s murder. There was even a lack of consistency in the attacks on the victims. At NYCH, the person who had silenced Bessie McDonald and infected him operated like a ghost, attempting to leave no trace of foul play. Such stealth suggested a perpetrator determined to escape suspicion altogether, not just evade capture. In Hampton Junction, however, the attempts to remove people, though clever, were crude. The explosion tonight might silence Nell, yet it most certainly would raise suspicions. As for Victor Feldt’s timely heart attack, that, too, could have been achieved with unsophisticated means. Mark had said he was overweight, hypertensive, and diabetic – significant risk factors. Someone with a gun had already chased Mark up a hill. The same thing could have been done to Victor with lethal results. Again, clever, but nowhere in the same league as what had been done to Bessie and him. It was as if whoever carried out these acts felt he or she could withstand doubts on the part of the police and public about there being foul play, so long as the events could also be read as accidental, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise.

He sat scowling at the diagram, wondering how the same scam could include such wildly divergent tolerances to risk.

“Too many players,” he muttered.

Yet surely Kelly’s murder was at the center of everything.

A sudden pain coiled through his abdomen, once more sending him writhing, his insides on fire despite the Demerol. When it passed he lay drenched in sweat and exhausted, warily watching the monitor while trying to control his pulse. The slightest sound out in the hall set it racing again.

He shakily returned to his diagram, but a single answer to explain the events in Hampton Junction and NYCH continued to elude him. On a whim he thought,
Maybe that’s what this crazy picture was trying to tell me.
If he couldn’t make sense of it as a whole, what if he broke it down and looked at the parts separately?