Prolonged Exposure (14 page)

“Ten-four, three ten. That’ll be a couple of minutes.”

“Ten-four.” I had nothing but time. I turned west on Hutton and followed it all the way to Twelfth Street, where I turned south, driving past the Don Juan de Oñate Restaurant after a couple of blocks.

I drove past the Guzmans’ home on South Twelfth and noticed that neither Estelle’s county car nor the good doctor’s Isuzu was in the driveway. I knew what that meant, especially since Erma Sedillos’s little worn-out Toyota was parked at the curb. With a sigh, I turned and headed toward Posadas General Hospital.

Just as I was pulling into the parking lot, Ernie Wheeler returned from the computer errand.

“Three ten, PCS. Be advised that New Mexico RV tag Baker Echo zero zero one should appear on a 1991 World Rambler L-Ten, white over silver. That’s registered to a Bruce Elders, Two nine two nine Paseo del Sol Terrace, Corrales, New Mexico. No wants or warrants.”

“Ten-four, PCS. I’ll be ten-seven at Posadas General for a while. Hold that printout for me, if you would.”

I didn’t know who Bruce Elders was, but right then, I didn’t care much. For both Estelle and her husband to be at the hospital at 3:00 A.M., the news couldn’t be good.

Chapter 24

Three A.M. at Posadas General Hospital was a time of muffled noises—things like rubber-soled shoes on polished floors, muted whispers among white-cloaked staff members, and the soft swish of mop on linoleum.

I stepped around the little yellow
CAUTION
sandwich sign, and the custodian smiled at me and avoided slapping my shoes with the mop. Whatever potion was in his mop bucket had the same cloying sweet smell shared by all the other hospital disinfectants, and it was a smell that brought back all the wrong memories.

I’d been there a half dozen times as a patient, and hundreds of times for other reasons. At one time, head nurse Helen Murchison had half-jokingly called Posadas General my “home away from home.” That was a grim notion.

No one was at the reception desk, and I steered around it and walked past the darkened coffee shop. When someone might need coffee the most, the place was closed. No one was in the Financial Services Office, and no one was in the X-ray Department. Where another hallway intersected, the walls gave way to the glass panels of the nurses’ station.

A young man whom I didn’t recognize looked up from his charts and raised an eyebrow. I suppose he didn’t get a lot of walk-in traffic at 3:00 A.M.

“May I help you?” he asked. His voice sounded muffled and distorted behind the glass.

“Is Detective Reyes-Guzman here? Or her husband? Or both?”

“The last time I saw them, they were both down in ICU. If not there, you might try—”

We both saw Dr. Francis Guzman step out of a room at that moment. “Thanks,” I said to the nurse. Francis had taken to sporting a full beard, trimmed short. It filled out his normally lean face and made him look professorial. He saw me and grinned.

“How are you doin’?” he said, and his grip was strong but gentle. He didn’t let go of my hand right away, his black eyes looking out over the tops of his half-glasses, boring deep into mine, as if he could read some truth hidden there. “I haven’t had a chance to welcome you home. Estelle tells me that everything went fine, and that you’re already doing too much.”

“As a matter of fact, I feel next to useless,” I said ruefully.

He nodded sympathetically. He was almost a head taller than I was, his black hair and beard peppered with premature gray. He took off his glasses and slipped them in the breast pocket of his lab coat. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said. “Estelle didn’t know who was monitoring your medications.” The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes deepened. “Or how many you were taking.”

“A shitload,” I said. “Camille bought one of those little boxes to put ’em all in.”

“A medications organizer?”

I nodded.

“Did you happen to request that your records be sent back? If not, I can request them by phone or fax, but it would really be helpful to have the whole background of what they did to you.”

“No, I didn’t do that,” I said. Francis didn’t look surprised. He knew damn well that I was far from the most helpful patient in the world. “And she just mentioned today the bit about Mayo.”

The good doctor looked almost apologetic, and he leaned one shoulder against the polished wall tile. “It’s just too good an opportunity to pass up, Bill.”

“That would be foolish,” I said. “If you turned it down, you’d keep asking yourself what you might have thrown away. Hell, some of the world’s greatest medical advances must come out of that place.” I didn’t want to talk about Minnesota, despite my generous words. “Is Estelle still here? How’s her mother?”

Francis sighed. “She’s sleeping down in room one ten. Estelle, that is. She wouldn’t let me give her a sedative, but she finally just pooped out.” He grimaced and pulled his hands out of his pockets. “She was walking around here like a zombie. She worries so much about her mother that she can’t eat or sleep, and she’s worried about that missing youngster. Any word, by the way?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“She was talking about the case this afternoon, but we got sidetracked. There were some real problems stabilizing Carmina’s condition earlier this evening. It was touch-and-go. We’ve got a real unstable heart activity that’s causing considerable distress.” He shook his head. “That, and her kidney function is less than it should be. That’s worrisome.” He looked at me. “Lump all those things on top of a busted hip and you’ve got a real mess.”

“She was frail even ten years ago,” I said. The last time I had seen Carmina Reyes was at Carlos Guzman’s
bautizo
the previous spring. Eighty-seven years old and shrunken like a raisin, Carmina had held the hand of her other grandson, Francis junior, while his brother’s infant head was doused with holy water. I had thought then the tiny woman wasn’t a whole lot taller than little Francis.

Francis nodded. “If she doesn’t give up, I think she might make it. It’s going to be touch-and-go.”

“Does she know about Minnesota?”

Francis looked down the hall toward the ICU ward. “No. Not yet. I think part of her problem is that she knows perfectly well that she’s never going to be able to go home. Not unless there’s some kind of miracle that we’re not equipped to provide. She wants to be around her family, but not in the same house. To her, Tres Santos is a perfect compromise—in another country, but just thirty miles away.” He chuckled. “She’s never understood the pace of things in the United States.”

“Maybe it’ll all work out,” I said lamely, knowing full well that old age wasn’t something that “worked out,” except in the final sense.

“Estelle mentioned that you were thinking of selling your house.”

I saw no reason to hedge, since the good doctor’s X-ray eyes would see through me anyway. But I didn’t want to end up sounding like a spoiled child, either. “I wasn’t going to sell it,” I said. “I was planning to give it to you and Estelle. There is this other place I’ve had my eye on for a while, and the swap made sense. But Estelle told me about Minnesota, and Camille came up with an alternative, so, as I said before, it’ll all work out, one way or another.”

“Thank you for the thought,” Francis said softly. “If we were staying here, I’d be ready to draw up the papers tomorrow.” He glanced at his watch. “Hell no. Today.”

The door opened behind him, and Estelle Reyes-Guzman appeared, her long black hair tousled and her eyes squinting against the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hallway.

“Wow,” Francis said. “Twenty whole minutes.”

“Just right,” she said. “I zonked right out.” She looked about twelve years old. She let the door close behind her and leaned against the metal door frame. “Any changes?” Francis shook his head.

“You look like twenty hours sleep would be about right,” I said.

She smiled and stood up straight. “And you, of course, are home sleeping soundly yourself.”

“I was, but I got bored. I drove by Tiffany Cole’s place just a few minutes ago. It looks like both she and Andy Browers are down off the mesa for a little bit.” Estelle nodded, and I couldn’t tell if it was a nod indicating that she knew about the exhausted couple or if she just wanted me to continue before she fell back asleep herself.

“I also drove by Browers’s address just a few houses up the street. There’s an enormous RV parked beside the house. It’s even plugged in with an extension cord through what looks like a bathroom window.”

“Bruce Elders,” Estelle said. She covered up an enormous yawn with both hands and then blinked back tears. “Excuse me. I saw that thing, and I ran a check on it earlier this afternoon.”

“Ah,” I said, feeling as if I was about a lap behind. “And who is Bruce Elders?”

Francis held up a hand, and we both stopped and looked at him. “I need to do a few things. But I’ll be within buzzer shot if Carmina needs anything. And there’s a nurse with her all the time. You ought to go home for a while, before you fall on your face.” He looked at me. “You, too.”

“And I don’t even feel tired,” I said after his white-coated figure had disappeared down the hall.

“He gets that way,” Estelle said. “You want to go somewhere for coffee?”

“Sure. And you need to bring me up to speed. Who is Bruce Elders?”

“I have no idea. Let me get my bag.” She ducked back into the room and emerged with her brown purse. “There’s that little staff lounge just past the nurses’ station. They’ve always got something brewing there.”

I had been thinking more along the lines of an early-morning breakfast burrito, but I nodded in dumb agreement.

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to Browers yet,” Estelle continued. “Maybe he’s just storing it for someone. Or planning to buy it. Any number of things. It’s up on jacks, so it’s been there for a while.”

“I saw those,” I said. “I just got curious, is all. I would guess a unit like that one is fairly expensive, although that’s a used one.”

“More interesting to me, though,” Estelle said as she pushed open the white door marked
STAFF ONLY
, “is what Francis said about Mrs. Cole.”

I followed her into the room. The place looked like an advertisement for white plastic garden furniture. The countertop was white. Even the cabinet doors were white. In a blast of independence, the flooring contractor had cut loose and installed a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

“Now this is a cozy nook,” I muttered. The coffee urn was full, its red light on. I poured a cup and offered it to Estelle, even though I knew damn well she wouldn’t take it.

“No thanks,” she said, and we sat at one of the three small white garden tables.

“What did Francis say about Mrs. Cole?” I asked.

Estelle raised one eyebrow and said, “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I think her faint up on the mesa was fake.”

I had started to sip the coffee and stopped with the brim of the cup a half inch from my lips. “Fake? A fake faint?”

Estelle nodded. I placed my cup on the table carefully, lest I slosh a droplet of the brown stuff on the white surface. She remained silent, watching me. I tried to rerun in my mind the scene of Tiffany Cole’s backward topple. I remembered the whites of her eyes and the thud of her skull on the warty-rooted little oak sapling.

“It didn’t look fake to me,” I said. “Her eyes rolled up, and she even smacked her head against a tree trunk.” I frowned and added, “Don’t do that.” Estelle’s beautiful eyes looked as awful as anyone else’s when they were rolled back.

“You close your eyes a little and look up, and that’s all there is to it. Anyway, I happened to be looking directly at her when she fainted, sir. When her head hit the root, she grimaced. Not much, but a little. She caught herself.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“If she had truly fainted, she wouldn’t have felt her head hit the tree. She wouldn’t have grimaced.”

“Thin, Estelle. Thin.”

“That’s why I talked to Francis. It’s called syncope.”

“I know what no blood to the brain is called, sweetheart. I’m an expert in that field.”

“Yes,” Estelle said, and she started to move my coffee cup across the table. “And Francis said that fainting, or syncope, is caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain.”

I retrieved my cup before she had removed it out of my reach. She clasped her hands together and leaned forward. “If her pulse was racing, strong and racing, why would there be insufficient blood supply?”

I looked askance and sipped the coffee. It wasn’t bad for hospital brew.

“How do you know her pulse was strong and racing?” I asked.

“For one thing, I saw it. The way her head was turned, I could see the artery in the side of her neck…”

“The carotid,” I said expertly.

“Right. For another thing, Deputy Pasquale took her pulse right away, and if you recall, he said, “Her pulse is strong. Just get her head down.”

“I don’t recall him saying that, but I’ll take your word for it. So she had a strong pulse.”

“She wasn’t sweaty or pale.”

“She looked pretty awful to me.”

“Sure, because she’d been spending a lot of time doing the same thing as all the rest of us. Combing every square inch of that mesa for her son.” Estelle leaned forward farther and lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “But she wasn’t
sick
-type pale. She wasn’t shocky pale.”

“I wasn’t looking that closely,” I admitted. “So what did Francis say, exactly?”

“He said that syncope in an otherwise-healthy person could be caused by fatigue, shock, severe mental distress—almost anything that lowers the blood pressure suddenly.”

“The vessels dilate,” I said. “Okay. And any of the reasons you’ve listed would qualify. She was so tired, she could hardly see straight, and all of a sudden there’s her son’s coat, all sliced to ribbons. That’s shock and distress in spades.”

“So she faints.”

“She faints. She didn’t faint when she first picked up the jacket.”

“No.”

“And she didn’t faint while you, Dale, and Browers looked at the Forest Service map. She just knelt there, hugging the coat.”

“True.”

“She fainted when you knelt beside her and asked her about the tears in the fabric.”

“I guess so. I don’t have that good a memory, but I’ll take your word for it. If that’s the way it happened, it sounds like a ‘last straw’ thing to me. She’s lost her son, finding his jacket takes away most of her hope, and then she sees ugly tears in the fabric, which can mean only awful things.” I drained the rest of the coffee. “It’s perfectly logical to me. It all built up to a head and, bingo, she faints.”

“With you right there to catch her.”

I laughed. “Estelle, come on. I can’t remember the last time I grabbed a fainting maiden. Sure as hell I’d miss if I tried now.”

“She didn’t know that.” Her dark, finely boned face was expres-sionless, the way she became when she’d turned inward and was perfectly sure of herself. She would have made a terrible cheerleader. Every time the home team scored, the stands in her section would be dead silent, nothing but dark, bottomless eyes watching the game.

“Let’s consider something,” I said finally. I leaned back in the white plastic thing and felt it flex with my weight. Afraid that it might dump me on the floor, I relaxed forward again. “Let’s assume that you are one hundred percent correct with this notion. Let’s assume that Tiffany Cole was faking.” I held my hands up, framing an imaginary marquee. “The Academy Award for best screen faint goes to Tiffany Cole. Why would she do that?”