Mortal Remains (39 page)

M
ark woke and felt for Lucy in the darkness. His hand patted nothing but a wrinkled sheet.

He sat up. “Lucy?”

The house was silent.

What the hell?

He threw on his robe and ran downstairs. “Lucy-” Through the front door window he saw that her car was gone. So was the warm clothing she’d laid out earlier on the coatrack, and where he’d hung two caving headlamps there remained only one.

His insides turned to ice. In less than a minute he dressed and headed out the door. The headlamp, he remembered, and grabbed it. He also took his bat, just in case. His watch read
4:36.

Sure enough, all the tools were gone from his Jeep.

He turned the ignition, hit the wiper switch for front and rear to clear away the snow, and accelerated down his driveway. Christ it felt slippery. He braked for the turn onto the road, but too late. He started to skid across it, right into a two-foot bank the graders had left from previous plowings. “Shit, shit, shit!” he muttered as he jockeyed the vehicle back and forth, delicately working the accelerator so as not to spin his wheels.

She’s probably perfectly okay,
he had to keep telling himself.

By the time he got free, the dash clock read
4:42
.

He forced himself to drive more slowly, peering through the dazzling swirls of flakes highlighted in his low beams. What time she’d gone out there, he’d no idea, but already the storm had filled in her tire tracks.

After five minutes of crawling along, he turned on the radio to keep from screaming in frustration at the slow pace. Normally he would there by now.

“I’m gonna be all right…”
Jennifer Lopez sang.

He had less than two miles to go when he spotted the glow from the high beams of an oncoming car.

Lucy careened once off the stone sides before the anchor crashed through a thin layer of ice and pulled her into the frigid darkness.

The descent accelerated. Water streamed up her nostrils and through the back of her throat. She started to choke and heard bubbles pouring out her nose but couldn’t see them, couldn’t see anything now. The pressure on her head and ears squeezed in until she thought the end would come when her brain burst. Even greater weight crushed her chest and expelled more bubbles, those in a deafening gargle from where the tape tore free of her mouth. Searing pain burned through her limbs and her mind issued frantic alerts that they were in flames; that lactic acid bathed the tissues inside and out, that she had the metabolic consequence of no oxygen – the sorts of clinical snippets she might have used to save another, but not herself.

Yet her superb condition prolonged her dying. Her heart, trained to endure on near anoxic blood, continued to beat, her brain to think.

And down she went.

Finally, the inky darkness from without seemed to spill into her mind, and she knew her ordeal would soon end. She felt her entire body stiffen against its restraints and begin to undulate in the jackknife movements of a tonic-clonic seizure, the last bequest from a nervous system gone mad for want of air.

No white light awaited her. No final flash of memories comforted her. Rather the hurt subsided, and she seemed to take leave of her body. But instead of rising peacefully upward, she stayed suspended in the water looking down at herself, watching her remains continue to jerk through the dark in a desperate, never-ending dance.

The white glare hung just over the horizon, the way extraterrestrial events are portrayed in movies, then became very ordinary as the headlamps crested a low hill, and the dark shape of the vehicle drove slowly toward Mark at a cautious speed equal to his own.

Let it be her.

He hadn’t met any other vehicle on the road.

Sure enough, as they closed the gap between them, he made out the familiar shape of her station wagon.

Thank God,
he thought, relief flooding through him.

He flicked his high beams at her.

And saw two men driving.

“What the hell!” he yelled.

He must have taken them by surprise as well; the night immediately lit up with the red illumination of brake lights, and the station wagon skidded out of control.

Caught in the glare of his lights, they both gaped at him, their features coarse, white, and garish as they glided closer.

He saw the man on the passenger side reach down and come up with a gun.

Mark floored the accelerator. The much-heavier Jeep rocketed forward and smashed into them head-on. For the second time in a week he was surrounded by the impact of crumpling fenders and exploding air bags, but this time he was ready. Gripping the steering wheel, he’d pushed himself well back in his seat and barely felt the blow against his chest. Better still, his windshield stayed intact.

He held his foot on the accelerator. His tires whined, the Jeep shook, but shuddered ahead, pushing the lighter car before it. Not that its two occupants were about to cause him much trouble. They must have been the kind not to wear seat belts. Both looked to be slumped on the dash, asleep on big white pillows. One had blood pouring out his nose.

Mark kept the pedal to the floor, aimed for the ditch, and, continuing to shove Lucy’s car until its rear end lifted up over a snowbank, stranded it so nothing short of a tow truck would set it free. Throwing the Jeep into reverse, he shot back to the right side of the highway. Despite the body damage, it still drove fine. Sick with fright over what they’d done to Lucy, he slammed the gearshift into drive, ready to speed away and find her at the home. But wait. She might be in the back of the car tied up on the floor. Or they could have already taken her somewhere else.

Shit!

Grabbing his bat, he jumped out of the cab, ran to the driver’s side of the car. A quick glance in the back, and he knew they didn’t have Lucy with them. He wrenched open the door. Neither man moved, but both were still breathing. The gun he’d seen before lay on the floor between them. He didn’t know what type, but its stubby silencer on the end of the barrel made it look like something James Bond would carry.

He reached across the knees of the one closest to him and grabbed it. Then he went through their pockets. No more weapons, but the roll of duct tape he found would be useful. And in the second man’s pockets he’d found what he wanted most of all – a cell phone from the bad guys. It at least wouldn’t have a tap on it.

In the minutes it took to bind their hands and feet, the driver started to moan and come around. The passenger hadn’t budged, his respirations growing increasingly gurgly, and from the lie of his head, the neck looked a little twisted.

Mark grabbed the driver by the collar of his ski suit, pinched him hard on the earlobe to speed his ascent from the depths, and yelled, “What have you done to Lucy?”

The guy opened an eyelid. “Go see for yourself, asshole.”

Mark balled his fists and yanked the creep forward, as close to killing someone as he’d ever been. But Lucy mattered more. He threw the scum back, picked up the cell phone, and roused a very sleepy Dan Evans. “Don’t ask questions. Bring the cavalry-”

“Mark?”

“I’m east of the entrance to the home for unwed mothers. You’ll find two of Braden’s killers bound and gagged in Lucy’s car. One’s alive, the other – handle his neck with care if you ever want to question him.”

“Wha’-”

“Hurry! They’ve done something to Lucy.” He hesitated. Should he assume the worst? Better safe than sorry. “Get an air ambulance to the grounds of the building, pronto!”

“My God! Right!” He finally sounded fully awake.

Two minutes later Mark pulled his battered Jeep up in front of the gate, slipped the gun into his pocket, and yanked the headlamp over his ski hat. Quietly, he climbed the gate and started to run, entering the darkness of the forest. He didn’t turn on his light in case he’d give himself away. His insides seized with dread at what he’d find up ahead. Glancing at the luminous dial of his watch, he read
5:01
.

New York City Hospital

Earl awoke with a jump, and immediately realized he’d dozed off. “Damn Demerol,” he muttered, glancing at his watch. Christ, he’d been asleep well over three hours.

Had someone slipped in here during that time?

He quickly eyed his IV bottle and did the calculation to estimate the amount that should remain. The fluid was at the line marked
250 ccs
. Exactly where it should be. But anybody could have injected a needleful of God knows what into him or the bag. Yet he felt the same as before.

His stomach sent a shard of pain from his belly button through to his spine. No change there. Wait a minute. His arms and legs weren’t quite so listless. The potassium was kicking in.

He glanced over at his monitor.

The extra beats were less frequent.

If he’d been given something, it hadn’t hit him yet.

To keep his mind off doomsday scenarios, he fetched his diagram from where it had slid off the bed and got back to work. Just before he’d conked out, he’d started adding to his list of existing suspects all the people, especially doctors, who either had offered him food or drink between Saturday and Tuesday or come near enough in the hospital to have tampered with his IV, or both. Though he’d accepted the possibility of accomplices being involved, he still didn’t buy the idea of his having been contaminated at the funeral or in the cafeteria by rogue waiters or kitchen staff. Too messy.

That meant he started with Lena Downie. She’d brought tea to him a few times on Monday. The woman had no medical knowledge other than what she read in charts, and talked way too much ever to be chosen as an accomplice. Nevertheless, he wrote down her name at the side of the page.

Next there was Tanya, who’d made him coffee Tuesday morning. Of course he’d since put his life in her hands, but he put her down as well.

There were only two doctors he could specifically pinpoint. Again he felt there wasn’t much point, but wrote
Melanie Collins
and
Tommy Leannis
.

Except he’d already pegged his drink with Tommy as taking place after he’d been infected.

He added
Samantha McShane
to the list because of the coffee she’d served him when he’d been at her apartment on Wednesday morning. But that, too, had been outside the time frame for the organism to incubate. Besides, he’d already dismissed her as lacking the skills to be The Ghost on her own.

Which left Melanie and her martinis.

Great. He’d landed his own physician.

He pulled the covers around him, finding the air in the room clammy. Whether he was getting a fever, or the heating normally reached its nadir at this hour, he didn’t know. It was the quietest he’d ever heard the building, the usual rush of air through the ventilation system having been shut down. Out in the hallway a distant click echoed as if someone had closed a mausoleum door, and the squeak of rubber soles rushed by his room, then silence returned except for his own breathing and the occasional snarl of his intestines.

He doodled on his sheet of paper, making certain he hadn’t forgotten somebody who’d slipped him a nibble of food or sip of a drink. He couldn’t come up with a single other person. Only Melanie fit all the criteria.

“Yeah, right,” he muttered, his sarcasm venting the frustration of having drawn such a blank. She probably infected him with that blue lady she served at her penthouse. Fixed his IV herself, too, so she could add the bicarb. And the bloods, what better way to falsify his results than draw them herself, then substitute them with someone else’s.

He liked indulging in irony. It was often the most direct way to show up the absurdity of a bullshit idea and dispense with it – a valuable exercise in a busy ER where fuzzy thinking could be deadly.

Except this idea didn’t succumb. Instead of wilting under ridicule, it stayed in his head, nagging at him.

“Don’t be absurd,” he said out loud, trying to clear his mind and think straight, figuring the combination of pain, weakness, and Demerol were taking their toll.

Yet the notion stuck. Like a bad tune caught in a loop of memory, it kept going round and round. Because none of the other players he’d listed had the means and opportunity to do what had been done to him.

His little ditty didn’t ring so ironic all of a sudden.

No, he told himself. To think Melanie could be The Ghost was nuts. Insane. Had to be. For starters, what about motive? Why would she try to kill him? His investigation into Kelly’s murder didn’t have anything to do with her.

Besides, the reason she had means and opportunity wasn’t of her doing. She’d served him drinks on Tuesday because he’d wanted to see her then. She had access to his IV and took his bloods because he’d insisted in ER that she take care of him. To make anything more of it was plain paranoid.

Unless she’d used the situations he’d given her to her own advantage, suggested a perverse voice from the insolent part of his mind that had first played devil’s advocate by questioning the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, and Santa Claus when he was aged five. It had been getting him to the bottom of things ever since, and he ignored it at his peril.

Melanie had offered him that blue drink, topping his glass off from a separate pitcher, then washed her hands as thoroughly as if she were preparing for surgery. She’d arrived in his hospital room, carrying his IV bag that she’d already prepared elsewhere, despite everything she’d needed, including potassium vials, being in the medication bins at his beside. She took his bloods, slipping the full tubes into her lab coat pocket without labeling them first. All little details, none of which proved anything, but every one of them giving his suspicions free rein.

He sat huddled in the bedclothes, stunned by all the unthinkable things that swept so easily to mind, now that his normal checks against imagining the worst about her were breached.

What about motive – a motive that would make her commit murder to stop his investigation?