The Brea File (33 page)

“Do you?”

“No… no.” It seemed important to deny her knowledge. Because she did recognize him now.

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” he said, in that deep, calm, soothing voice. Then his hand moved, his thumb driving the plunger of the big syringe forward. Too late she saw that what the syringe held was not another liquid so pale as to be invisible to the eye. It held… nothing! Air!

“But you did see me,” he said. “No—don’t try to scream.”

She tried, but it was already too late. She began to pant and struggle for breath. Only seconds had passed and already she was sweating, sucking noisily for air, her heart hammering. Her bulging eyes stared past the broad hand now holding her down, past a hairy wrist with a gold watch, past a white-sleeved arm, directly into his eyes.
My God—why? Why me? I’ve got a daughter—

The first massive blow struck her in the chest. The pain was unbearable. Her heart stopped.

It required all of his considerable strength to hold her when her body convulsed. She rose off the bed, heaving upward. The violent movement tore the tube loose from the IV bottle. The clear fluid from the bottle continued to drip slowly.

Only when she had been still for a full minute did he release her. The bulging eyes no longer saw him.

At the door he turned off the single overhead light, plunging the room into total darkness. Cracking the door open, he peered along the corridor. The nurses’ station was some distance away. The duty nurse was not in sight.

He stepped quickly into the corridor and walked to his right, away from the nurses’ station and toward a stairway exit.

Jan Macimer, who hated pills, had reluctantly accepted the need for a sedative. She fell into an exhausted sleep around midnight. Paul Macimer was in his den, talking on his private line to a night desk clerk at FBI Headquarters about the blue pickup. Tests by the FBI Lab had already identified the vehicle from paint scrapings as a 1976 Chevrolet. The truck had not been found, however, or identified as being on the stolen vehicles list.

Chip Macimer was in the family room watching Johnny Carson on the
Tonight
show when the extension phone rang. He called his father out of his den. “It’s the hospital,” Chip said awkwardly, feeling clumsy with his anxiety. “Someone named Sims. He wouldn’t say what it was—says he has to talk to you.”

Macimer grabbed the phone. Darrell Sims was the assistant night security supervisor at the emergency hospital where Linda and Carole had been taken. Macimer had talked to him briefly that evening. “What is it, Sergeant?”

“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Mr. Macimer. It looks like a fluke thing. I mean, she was alone in her room—”

“For God’s sake, who? Who are you talking about?”

“What… oh Jesus, I’m sorry, Mr. Macimer, it’s not your daughter. It’s the other lady, Ms. Baumgartner.”

“What happened?” Macimer’s heart continued to pound from the massive shot of adrenaline, and the wash of relief left him shaken.

“It’s like her heart just stopped.”

“She’s
dead?
”

“Yes, sir. And the thing is, I heard the night resident, that’s Dr. Lansberg, a real bright young fellow”—there was a hint of disapproval in Sims’s tone, as if a doctor had no business being bright and young—“worrying out loud about maybe there was an accident with the IV feeder. I thought you’d want to know, seeing as how you were looking into that auto accident, and the lady was a friend of yours. Kinda funny,” Sims added. “I mean, you know, two accidents in one day to the same person.”

Macimer felt as if he had been clubbed with a two-by-four. “Do you have any reason to think what happened tonight wasn’t an accident?”

“Well, no, sir. You understand, Mr. Macimer, there could be a question of liability here, and I’m not qualified to say any more than I have. Wouldn’t have said this much if it weren’t… well, you know, special circumstances.” Sims was letting him know that he was doing the FBI man a favor, sticking his own neck out. “If there’s anything else you want me to do, Mr. Macimer…”

“I appreciate your calling me, Sergeant. How late are you on duty?”

“Well, fact is, I just got off at midnight.”

“Would it be possible for you to wait there a little longer? I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Sure, I can do that,” Sims agreed with alacrity. “You think that-”

“I don’t think anything, Sergeant. I’d just like to go over what happened with you. Will Dr. Lansberg be on duty?”

“He’s here until morning.”

“Good. Maybe you could let him know I’d like to talk to him.”

“You’ve got it,” the security man said.

When Macimer hung up he knew that he had to answer the anxious question in Chip’s eyes. “Linda’s fine,” he said. “But there were complications with Carole. Her heart…”

“Geez,” Chip muttered in disbelief. At nineteen, Macimer thought, death was hard to believe.

And it never got easier.

Mitchell Lansberg was thirty, athletic, curly-haired, with dark brown eyes set close to the bridge of a prominent nose. His appraisal of Paul Macimer held the skepticism of his generation’s liberal intellectuals toward America’s intelligence establishment, but he was willing enough to talk about Carole Baumgartner. The case interested him, Macimer thought.

“She had a heart attack,” Lansberg said. “Technically, that’s what killed her.”

“Technically?”

Lansberg hesitated. “Is this official in some way, Mr. Macimer?”

“It could be important.”

“I don’t see how,” the young resident said slowly. “There’s a possibility—it’s only a theory of mine—that she could have been the victim of a freak accident—an air embolism. That air somehow got into the IV tube.”

“That would kill her?”

“If it was a big enough bubble.”

It turned out that Lansberg was specializing in kidney work. When patients were treated using a kidney dialysis unit, where the blood was actually circulated outside the body, the risk of an air embolism was even more life-threatening than would normally be the case. Rarely—very rarely, he said—an accident occurred. Lansberg had been involved in one such incident himself, and it was one he would not soon forget.

“The Nazis did all the early research on air embolisms,” the resident explained, warming to his subject. “Before World War II we didn’t know anything about them. They were simply isolated accidents, without explanation. But the Nazis ran elaborate series of tests, working out just how much air per body weight could be injected into the bloodstream before fatality would occur.” Lansberg paused. “They were human experiments, of course.”

“Does that kind of thing happen often with the IV equipment?”

The resident shook his head emphatically. “It’s a thousand to one. Hell, even less than that.”

“What makes you think it might have happened here?”

Lansberg hesitated. “It’s only a hunch. Her heart stopped suddenly, we know that. The reaction was violent enough for her to tear the IV tube loose. And she was sweating profusely, which is one of the symptoms.”

“If an air embolism did kill her, how long would it take?”

“Seconds,” Lansberg said tersely. “Two or three minutes before there was irreversible brain damage. It’s very, very fast, Mr. Macimer.”

“Would an autopsy show that’s what happened?”

“It could,” the doctor said. “But normally it wouldn’t. I mean, if it was a standard autopsy, you’d be working in the open and you’d never know if there was air trapped in there. The only way you’d know would be if the autopsy was conducted underwater. Then you’d literally see any air bubble escape when you cut into the heart. But that’s only done under special circumstances.” He studied Macimer curiously.

“There would be an autopsy in any event?”

Lansberg nodded. “She died unattended. That calls for an autopsy.”

“But it wouldn’t be an underwater examination?”

“Are you asking for one, Mr. Macimer?”

Macimer understood what Lansberg would not say openly. The hospital would not go out of its way to find evidence for which questions of liability might be raised, not unless there was a compelling reason.

“I am,” Macimer said.

* * * *

Macimer questioned Darrell Sims about security procedures at the hospital on the night shift. All exits were locked after visiting hours except for the main emergency area and fire doors. The latter could only be opened from the inside. Anyone entering the hospital through the emergency section had to pass a security officer in order to reach elevators or stairways. Sims was confident that no unauthorized person or persons had entered the hospital.

Macimer saw little point in asking if any hospital personnel ever used the fire exits to step outside for a smoke, or propped a door open for convenience that should have stayed locked. It happened all too often. And someone who had gained access to the hospital during visiting hours wouldn’t have needed a clandestine entry. He could easily have found a place to hide.

Macimer thanked Sims for staying on after his shift was over. He said nothing to relieve the security man’s curiosity, instead asking him to say nothing about the night’s events to anyone other than his own superiors.

On his way home, driving slowly, Macimer was struck by the strange emptiness of early morning in the suburbs. The surface streets were as deserted as those in a science-fiction movie depicting the world after the Big Bang, silent and empty and unreal.

It was a time of the morning for confronting unanswered questions. Who was Brea? Was he someone Macimer knew? Was he acting on his own, or was he part of a larger conspiracy?

Carole’s murder had answered one question. She had been the intended victim of the accident created by the driver of the blue pickup truck, not Linda. But why had it been necessary to silence Carole? What could she possibly have known or seen? Macimer thought of the incident Jan had described, the stranger Carole had noticed in Adam’s Restaurant. But even if the man in the restaurant had been Brea, why would he feel threatened by Carole seeing him there?

Macimer admitted one possible answer, reluctantly: the man in the restaurant had a public face. And Carole had seen him under circumstances that, for reasons Macimer could not yet divine, might somehow be compromising.

Macimer’s restless thoughts turned to his late-afternoon briefing of Collins and Garvey. Acting on the lead provided by Joseph Gerella, Macimer had instructed the two agents to begin digging into the records of agent assignments on the day of the PRC disaster. Checking all those records meant tedious interviews, backtracking along trails now three years old, sifting and sorting, comparing and corroborating. It was a task that would have proceeded much more swiftly if Macimer had requested massive support from the Sacramento office. Given enough time and manpower, such an investigation would surely unearth whatever it was that Vernon Lippert had stumbled onto, the clue to Brea’s identity. But Macimer’s uncertainty over the ramifications of the Brea cover-up within the Bureau made him more than ever reluctant to ask for the additional help. Collins and Garvey would have to do it on their own, he had told them emphatically when he outlined the new focus of the investigation, stressing that they should report
only to him directly
.

Reason told him his instructions had been valid and correct, but his uneasiness persisted. Limiting the investigative effort carried its own risks, underscored by Carole Baumgartner’s death. There might not be enough time. The murders of Raymond Shoup and Carole on successive nights suggested to Macimer something more than a desperate need on Brea’s part to remove any risk, however remote. They suggested that some final shackle of restraint had broken. If Raymond Shoup’s murder had been coldly calculated, Carole Baumgartner’s had been recklessly dangerous, the act of someone out of control.

It was as if something which had long been carefully caged had broken loose and was running wild, something savage and bloody-fanged, beyond law, beyond moral restraints, beyond reason.

* * * *

Jan was waiting for him in the kitchen when he entered the house from the garage. “I called the hospital,” she said. “When I woke up and found you gone, I was afraid…”

Her eyes were puffy from crying, but in them there was also an unhappy guilt. Macimer guessed what she was feeling. When she put her frantic call through to the hospital, her fear was for Linda, not Carole. Her sorrow over Carole’s death was tainted by the secret knowledge that she had been relieved to learn Linda was all right. Macimer himself had felt the same guilty relief.

“Does Linda know about Carole?” Jan asked anxiously.

“No. I told them under no circumstances should she be told anything, even if she asks about Carole. She’ll find out soon enough.”

“I want to be there.” Jan stared at him thoughtfully, measuring his fatigue. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Do we still have some of that Christmas brandy?”

“I think so.”

They carried the fat crystal glasses into the family room and sat at the dining table. Macimer thought if he sank into the sofa he would tip instantly into sleep.

“Why didn’t you wake me, Paul?”

“You needed the rest.”

“So did you.” She paused, staring into the amber pool of liquid at the bottom of her glass. “What happened?”

“They don’t know for sure. Her heart stopped.” After a moment’s hesitation he told her of the resident’s theory about an air embolism, a bubble that entered the bloodstream and went straight to the heart. “It would have killed her instantly.”

Jan turned away from him. For a moment she had to hide her anguish. Carole had been her friend, not Paul’s. When she faced him again she was in control. “I’m going to cancel that flight to Phoenix. I can’t go now.”

“I don’t want you to cancel it.”

“But it’s impossible! There’ll be Carole’s funeral—and Linda won’t be ready for a cross-country flight so soon.”

“I’ll see that Linda is put on a plane as soon as possible.”

“You mean I’m to go without her?” Jan stared at him for a long time in silence. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”