Near Death (5 page)

Avakian squinted at him. “Trephined?”

“Hole made in head,” Himmel said slowly, as if Avakian were a child. Cyrus could tell his partner wanted to sock the guy in the nose.

“Talk to us about the head drilling,” Cyrus said quickly.

“I’ve been at this for a long time and this is unique. It’s more than a trephination, you know. I’m sure you saw it on my report, there was a tract I probed, maybe two to three millimeters in diameter, extending from the hole in the parietal bone through the entire left parietal lobe
into the left lateral ventricle.” Himmel sat back and waited for their murmurs of interest.

“Help me out, Doc,” Cyrus begged.

“The ventricles. The chambers at the middle of the brain where the cerebrospinal fluid is formed then circulates around the outside of the brain and spinal cord. The fluid cushions the brain, like shock absorbers.”

“Is the killer making a deposit or a withdrawal?” Avakian asked.

“Good question.” He seemed surprised. “We’ll need to get our tox samples back and all the fixed tissue sections, but grossly, I didn’t see any dramatic evidence of injection of a foreign substance, like a caustic agent.” “Just like the other cases,” Avakian said.

“What other cases?”

Cyrus thought he’d mentioned the others on the phone but maybe he hadn’t. He got irritated at himself for not remembering; it wasn’t like him.

His mobile rang. He pulled it from his inside pocket and saw it was from Marian. He put it on vibrate, stuffed it back in his pocket and let it hum into his ribs for a few more seconds. “In the past six weeks, two other prostitutes were found in Massachusetts, strangled with eighth-of-an-inch holes drilled through their heads,” he
said, retrieving a folder from his briefcase. “Both of them had what’s been described as needle tracts into the center of their brains. I’ve got pictures from their autopsies if you want to see them.”

Himmel greedily grabbed the photomicrographs and began to pore over them just as the afternoon session broke and his colleagues started pouring from the ballroom. One man walked an arthritic line to their table and sat down without invitation. He was about the same age as Himmel, thinner, a pinched face, another gray-haired relic nearing retirement. “Aren’t you going to get coffee?” Himmel asked him.

The other man reached for one of Himmel’s cookies. “Is Stanley Minot still at the Boston office?”

“He’s our boss,” Cyrus replied.

“Tell him Lennie Adler said hello.”

Himmel said to the agents, “I told him the FBI was going to visit me. He’s already introduced himself in his maladroit way. I’m embarrassed to say he’s my oldest friend. I’m in charge of Merrimack County. Lennie does Rockingham County. Get your own cookies, Lennie.”

Adler ignored him and looked at the scattered photos on the table. “What are these?”

Himmel grinned, showing large coffee-stained teeth. “It looks like I’m in the middle of a very interesting serial killing case,” he bragged. “I got my victim on Friday. These are from the other cases in Massachusetts. Are you jealous?”

Adler snorted, picked up one of the glossies and dug for his reading glasses. He studied a blown-up microscopic view of the cross section of a long slender needle tract plunging through the straw-yellow substance of a human brain. When he tossed the photo down he said, “Tell me there wasn’t a hole drilled through the parietal bone.”

Cyrus stiffened. He felt weirdly disoriented, as if he were the target of a cunning parlor trick. “How could you know that?”

“Because two months ago I had a case just like this.”

“What? A strangled hooker?” Avakian asked, equally startled.

“No, no. It was a young man with a fractured skull, a male nurse. He was found off of I-95, just over the state line. The Seabrook police have nothing. Bupkis.” Adler stole another cookie and smugly looked around the table at the slack mouths. “It looks like you fellows might be interested.”

Cyrus’s phone started buzzing again. He fished it out, glanced at the caller ID and saw it was a repeat from Marian. He thought better of ignoring her for a second time and announced to the table, “Hang on. I’ve got to take this.”

As he listened to her, his breathing got faster, his throat constricted. “Why didn’t you call me when it happened?” Then, an existential
“Damn it.”
Then, “I’m an hour away. I’m coming.”

Six

Cyrus automatically made his way through the twisty corridors like a lab rat that had mastered a complex maze. At the Neurology Ward on the ninth floor he was immediately recognized at the nurse’s station from past visits. He felt his stomach knot, sickened by the all-too-familiar smell of body fluids masked by lemony disinfectants. “Where is she?” he asked.

The nurse wasn’t put off by his brusqueness; she understood and just said, “Nine nineteen.”

Outside her door he recognized it as one of the isolation rooms; in fact, he vividly recalled she’d been in that exact room several months ago. There was a sealed anteroom where one could hang a coat and don a mask, gloves, shoe covers and a paper gown. He began the ritual and tried to sneak a wave through the glass but a gowned woman blocked the head of the bed. The woman was too slight to be Marian—just another in an endless stream of doctors, nurses, med school students.

The woman finished whatever she was doing and when she left Tara’s bedside, the girl spied him through the glass
and weakly waved her hand in a sad little “I’m here again” kind of gesture.

The woman entered the anteroom and removed her mask.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you Tara’s dad?”

He nodded and kept balancing on one leg, sliding on a shoe cover. He didn’t recognize her. He was sure he would have remembered that face.

“I’m Doctor Frost,” she said with a light, faintly musical twang. She was older and more self-confident than a med student or resident but still a young woman. She pulled off her gloves and started to untie her gown as he was tying his. There was something oddly intimate about a man and a woman dressing and undressing together in a small room.

“What are you, neurology? Infectious diseases?” Cyrus asked.

“Psychiatry.”

He was startled. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Well, you know she had a seizure this morning and was readmitted with low blood counts and fever.”

“Mentally,” he pressed. “I mean mentally.”

“Emotionally, nothing beyond the obvious.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’ve seen Tara before. Her mother requested a consult during her last hospitalization.”

“A consult for what?”

She looked at him square on and said, “I’m helping her with her fears.”

With her gown off he could see she was petite and small-waisted. The photo ID hanging off her pocket showed her even younger, a tyro with long hair disappearing behind her shoulders. It was short now, businesslike but the same color as in the picture—of light passing through ancient amber. She had a natural kind of beauty requiring only a dusting of makeup, so unlike Marian, who habitually plastered layer upon layer. She met his now evident fury with luminous blue eyes and a disarming blend of firmness and fragility in the way she set her small jaw.

Still, he angrily towered over her, a threatening presence in the tight confines of the gowning room. He snapped the surgical mask around his face in rage. “What the hell do you mean by fears?” he said too loudly, quickly dialing it back for Tara’s sake. “Are you talking about dying?”

She held her ground and said softly, “Your daughter has end-stage brain cancer. She’s young but she knows the
score. In my experience it helps kids to talk about their feelings and their fears.”

“I’ve got news for you,” he spat through the mask in a whispered shout, “She’s not going to die! I don’t want you seeing her anymore.”

She had shucked and binned the last of her sterile gear, maintaining her composure. She replied evenly, professionally, “I think you and Tara’s mom should talk about this.”

“We’re divorced.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t make a responsible decision about your daughter. You might want to talk to Tara too. My only interest is her well-being.” Her hand was on the door. “By the way, it was nice meeting you. Tara talks about you all the time.”

As soon as he entered her room, his daughter, a sliver of an eight year old, scolded him in a birdlike voice. “Why were you shouting at Emily?”

“Is that her name?”

“Emily Frost,” the small voice replied. “Like Jack Frost.”

“I wasn’t shouting.”

There was an infusion tube dripping blood into her arm and a spent bag of antibiotics. She looked limp. Her skin
was translucent, white and fine as rice paper. But even when she was sick, even without her silky hair, her small pouting angel face looked pretty. Freddy the Teddy, the omnipresent pink bear, was lying beside her, tucked under the sheet. She was a bit old for a stuffed animal but her illness knocked her back a few years. She set Cyrus on his heels by declaring, “She’s my dying doctor.”

He was grateful he was wearing the mask. “You don’t need that kind of doctor!” he exclaimed, stooping to caress her, a frustrating barrier of latex between his fingers and her skin. He started spinning out mundane questions: When did she start feeling ill, how did she feel now—anything to change the subject; but she came back to it with innocent insistence.

“Why did you tell Emily she couldn’t see me anymore?”

“You heard me say that?”

She nodded as emphatically as she could, lifting her head from the pillow.

“I’ll talk about it with Mom. Where is she?”

“She left when Emily came. She said you were coming to stay with me. Do you have your pen?”

He nodded.

“Do you have paper?”

“I can find some. What for?”

“Tic-tac-toe?” Her favorite game and he was happy to shut up and play.

When she finally drifted off to sleep, the page filled with
X
s and
O
s, he crept out and silently shed his gown. At the nurse’s station, he left a message for Tara’s mother to find him in the cafeteria.

He grabbed a tray of food without giving the choices much thought and found an isolated table. He didn’t want to listen to young doctors and nurses talking about their patients or hear the nervous whispers of families in crisis.

What he did hear was the distinctive cadence of Marian’s high heels spiking the cafeteria tiles. He didn’t have to look up. He knew that urgent walk cold. She had always moved fast with self-important small quick steps, the swing of her legs constrained by her hip-hugging skirts. He looked up from his soup and instead of the plaintive eyes of a worried mother he saw a hot anger he had come to expect.

He knew how her mind worked: every time Tara had a relapse or a complication it was
his
fault. There was cancer on
his
side of the family. His cousin’s son had brain cancer. The bad genes were from
his
bloodlines.
Everything he had ever done had consistently fallen short of her expectations and now he was killing their daughter. Many child brain cancers were curable; hers wasn’t. The tumor was too high grade. One debulking operation slowed the inexorable course but the tumor was growing again. Chemotherapy was buying time now, but at a cost. She was sustained by transfusions and antibiotics.
All this horror because of my inferior O’Malley gene pool
.

Of course, if he’d ever vocalized these thoughts she’d accuse him of being delusional and have her lawyer file another motion with the court questioning his fitness to maintain joint custody, but he could tell from those damned eyes of hers burning like little hot coals that
she
was the crazy one.

Marty, the new husband, was dutifully at her side, looking his usual prosperous self, every inch the successful in-town commercial banker. They made a nice couple, Cyrus scornfully noted—both spent a lot of time on personal grooming and wardrobes. Since Tara was often too ill to return to his apartment for custody visits, his lawyer was able to wrest a court-ordered accommodation allowing Cyrus to spend the occasional evening or weekend day staying with Tara at their house while Marian and Marty stepped out for a few hours. While his daughter napped,
Cyrus would wander around their five-bedroom, plush carpeted spread as though he were at a crime scene, prurient, checking out their lives. Marty had a lot of nice clothes, a closet full of Italian suits and cashmere sweaters.

But it was the guy’s sink and bathroom cupboards that really got Cyrus going. Marty certainly used a lot of product! A real metrosexual’s trove: with as many tubes and bottles for his skin and hair as Marian. She’d always been irked by Cyrus’s spare grooming habits—a bar of soap, a stick of deodorant, toothpaste—that was pretty much it. With Marty, she’d landed herself a real spa hound, just what she’d always wanted.

Good for her.

Marty was ten years older than she, graying temples, fairly fit, a good tennis player but Cyrus chuckled the first time he saw a Viagra prescription in his medicine cabinet. He seemed to refill it regularly.

Good for her.

“Care to join me?” Cyrus asked.

Marian shook her head vigorously. She had so much spray, her shiny black hair didn’t rustle. “How can you eat?” she asked contemptuously.

“I could use a bite,” Marty said hopefully but she shot him down with a scowl. Cyrus almost felt sorry for the bastard.

She was clutching her expensive handbag too hard, squashing one of her breasts. “You didn’t tire her out, did you? She was out like a light.”

“Took her roller skating.”

She ignored him. “You left a message. What did you want?”

“I met Doctor Frost. I don’t want Tara to see her again.”

“She’s top notch. Doctor Thorpe recommended her.”

“She doesn’t need that kind of doctor.”

“The experts say otherwise. Are you an expert?”

“I’m her father.”

“And I’m her mother!”

Marty retreated to the safety of his iPhone while the two old adversaries glowered at each other.

“We’re supposed to make joint decisions about these things,” Cyrus insisted.