Fatal Harbor

CHAPTER SIX

After getting dressed the next morning, I went down Porter Avenue and visited a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts. Once upon a time, Dunkin’ Donuts used to make and sell quite a variety of doughnuts; nowadays, they focus on specialty coffees, oddball sandwiches, muffins, and the random tasteless doughnut that gets shipped in from some secretly located bakery. Once upon a time I heard they used to make delicious crullers, but that might just be an urban legend. I got a black coffee with two sugars and a blueberry muffin and went up Alumni Drive to Exonia Hospital. The morning was crisp and bright, and I sat on a park bench, had my breakfast, and watched the stream of people coming to work. Most of them looked happy to be out and about.

Good for them.

When I was finished, I joined the good folks going inside and took the elevator up to the fourth floor, where the ICU and my best friend resided.

I breezed past the nurses’ station at the entrance to the ICU, taking a left down the wide corridors. The rooms were large, with sliding glass doors and drapes. Nurses bustled about, and in front of Diane Woods’s room her fiancée, Kara Miles, was standing, talking to a woman dressed in nurses’ scrubs. Kara was shorter than me, with short dark hair and lots of piercings in her ears. She and Diane had had a semi-secret relationship until last year, when my quirky home state had legalized gay marriage. The two of them had a slight falling out during the anti-nuclear demonstrations at Falconer — Kara had been active in one of the peaceful protest groups, while Diane was doing her job and earning OT as one of the scores of cops at the scene — but engagement rings had been exchanged the day before the last protest.

The last protest, when Diane had been beaten by a steel-pipe-wielding Curt Chesak.

Kara spotted me approaching, excused herself from the nurse, and came my way. She had on jeans and a multi-colored knitted top, and I gave her a big hug as she kissed me on the cheek. “Oh, Lewis, so damn glad to see you.”

I kissed her back. “How’s she doing?”

“Not much has changed, which I guess could be called good news. At least she’s stable.”

“Can I see her?”

“Not for a bit. They’re giving her a sponge bath, checking her dressings, stuff like that. Hey, let’s talk.”

Kara took my hand and led me to a tiny conference room. She moved with the self-confidence of a family member and patient advocate who knew her way around the ward, the staff, and the bureaucracy. The room had a small settee, a phone, and two chairs, and she left the door open as we sat down.

She took a breath. “She’s been stable, and the swelling in her brain has gone down. She’s still in a coma, but… but we’re hopeful. What else can we be, Lewis? Doctor Hanratty said that if the swelling decrease continues, and there are other signs of improvement, you know… ”

Kara choked up, looked away. I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed my hand back. “I’m the first visitor of the day?”

She grabbed a tissue from a nearby box, wiped at her eyes. “You sure are. There’s been a constant stream of cops coming in, day after day. Just to spend a few minutes, of course, but damn, it’s something to see all those cops line up to visit her, even if she doesn’t know they’re in the room.”

“I’ve read that some coma studies say patients can hear what’s going on, no matter how deep the coma.”

“That’d be great.” Then she giggled. “Then Diane heard something naughty the other day.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, two days ago, this woman came in, just before the end of visiting hours. Real pushy woman, had on a dark blue power suit, leather briefcase, took control of the room. Know what I mean?”

“I’ve both met and worked for the type.”

“She said she was from some law enforcement support council, wanted to come in and introduce herself, evaluate Diane. I asked her what for, and she said that her group had financial resources to support Diane once she was either discharged or transferred to another facility. Something to supplement her regular insurance and disability. I said that was great. She said she had some paperwork that needed to be filled out, and would I be a dear and go down to the first-floor cafeteria to retrieve it, since she left it on one of the tables.”

“Really?”

“Truly. You can imagine what I said to that. Then she got huffy and said, well, if the proper paperwork wasn’t filled out, then Diane wouldn’t be eligible for compensation under the plan. And I told her what she could do with the paperwork, and where she could shove it, and then she stalked off. I remember her stiletto heels making a hell of a racket on the tile floor when she left.”

I didn’t like what I was hearing. “Did she tell you her name?”

“Dickerson. Yeah, a Miss Dickerson. Don’t remember her first name.”

“She leave a business card?”

“No.”

“Remember the name of the charity?”

She slowly shook her head, frowning. “No, it was a mouthful. Something like the Blue Line Support Council for Police, or the Badge of Blue Support Agency… Lewis, is something wrong?”

I took a breath. “Did she come back the next day with the paperwork? Or call you to set up an appointment?”

“No. Hey, what’s wrong?”

I was glad that with the open door, I could see the entrance to Diane’s ICU unit. “Tell me, Kara, how friendly are you with the Tyler cops?”

“Those that know me and Diane, pretty good. What’s going on?”

“Bear with me, just for another moment. Who’s the highest ranking cop you know?”

“That’d be Captain Kate Nickerson.”

“All right, this is what I want you to do. When we’re done here, you call Captain Nickerson, and you tell her that you believe somebody came by the other day who wanted to do Diane harm.”

“Shit… ”

“You ask the Captain if she could set up some off-duty Tyler cops to provide guard service for Diane. They’ll have to work with hospital security. But from now on, no more visitors to Diane unless you or a staff member can vouch for his or her identity. Okay?”

Kara leaned out, to also look at Diane’s room. Her voice quavered. “You mean that woman that came in, she was going to… she was going to do something bad to Diane?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps she came in to do what she said she was there for, to get some paperwork signed. Maybe she got ticked off by you, stormed out, and got in a car accident, so she never came back.”

Kara looked back at me. “Or maybe she was here to pull Diane’s plug.”

“Or maybe I’m being paranoid.”

“But why? Why would someone want to kill Diane?”

“Somebody tried to do it at the protest a couple of days ago.”

“But that was part of the protest, random, with all those people coming in and fighting the cops.”

“Surely was,” I said. “But let’s just play along with my paranoia. Make the call, and have Captain Nickerson work with hospital security.”

The door to ICU slid open, and two nurses emerged. Kara stood up and both nurses smiled to Kara, like they were telling her it was all right to go in.

“Won’t that kind of protection… won’t that cost a lot of money?”

“I imagine the Tyler cops will do it for free,” I said. “If not, send the bill to me.”

Kara let me go into Diane’s room first, a courtesy I’m sure so that I could look and react at seeing Diane without being watched by Kara. Something deep and cold burrowed inside of me when I saw her still form on the bed. A white cotton blanket was pulled up almost to her chin. IV tubes ran into her wrists. A tube was taped about her mouth, and a ventilator raised her chest up and down. Her short brown hair was a tangled mess, and her eyes were shut. The wounds on her face were covered with bandages, and the bruises were turning yellow and green. Her face was swollen, like it had been injected with some sort of fluid.

Kara came up behind me, slid her arm into mine. “Hard to believe, but she’s actually looking better.”

“Glad to hear that.”

“Doctor Hanratty said sometime tomorrow they’re going to take the tube out, see if she can breathe on her own.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

“Please do.”

We stood there quietly, listening to the hiss and whir of the ventilation system doing its work, the beeps and buzzes coming from a number of monitors. Kara said, “What are you up to, Lewis?”

“Just visiting a friend, that’s all.”

She squeezed my arm. “You don’t think Diane has told me tales about you over the years? And this is the first time you’ve been by in days? Which means you’ve been busy. And if you’ve been busy, you’ve been up to something.”

“I’ve been working.”

“What kind of work?”

“The work that leads me to Curt Chesak, who did this to Diane.”

She squeezed my arm again. “Hold on. I’ve got something to give you. I’ll be right back.”

Kara bustled her way out, and I was alone with Diane. I stepped forward and rubbed the top of her hand, took in her injuries, her medical support, the whole dreary mess.

I bent over, kissed her cool and dry forehead, then I moved my mouth down to her right ear. “Diane… I’m doing everything I can to make it right. You can count on me. And whatever happens…” and something dry and hard seemed to catch in my throat “… I’ll look after Kara. I promise.”

I stood there, wiped at my eyes, and turned around as Kara came back into the room. We both walked out into the hallway.

“Here, this is for you,” she said, handing over a white business envelope to me. “A state police detective came by and told me to give this to you.”

“Did he leave a name?”

“No, but he said you’d know who it was from.”

“Really?”

“He said unless you’ve had a lot of experience with state police detectives lately, you’d know.”

Of course I’d know. Detective Pete Renzi of the New Hampshire State Police had been the lead investigator in the assassination of Bronson Toles last week, the anti-nuclear activist who had been murdered by his stepson to prevent him from giving away thousands of hours of old tape recordings that could have made millions for Toles, his wife, and his stepson. Instead, Toles wanted to give all the money away, and that charitable thinking had led to his death.

And irony of ironies, most of the tapes had been destroyed in a fire intentionally set by a former columnist for Shoreline magazine.

Renzi had also been the detective who had clued me in to Professor Knowlton and his connection with Curt Chesak of the Nuclear Freedom Front.

I tore open the envelope. Inside was a white sheet of paper, no letterhead, just one line of type, centered in the middle:

Really?

I folded up the sheet of paper, put it back into the envelope, shoved it in my rear pocket.

“Everything okay?” Kara asked.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

She smiled. “You’re a damn slab of granite, Lewis, aren’t you? Able to do everything.”

“Some days more than others. Look, can I ask a favor?”

Her eyes filled up. “Absolutely.”

“Wondering if I could borrow your car. And maybe your condo.”

She stared at me for a moment, retrieved her purse, and came back with a set of keys. She tugged free two keys and passed them over. “Use both as long as you want. I don’t expect to be moving far from here.”

“Thanks.”

Kara took my hand and led me back to the small room we had been in earlier. She turned and said, “You’re still working, right? Still looking for that Curt Chesak?”

“That I am.”

“And what do you plan to do once you find him?”

I let a second or two pass. “I really don’t want to tell you, Kara.”

She nodded in understanding. She kissed me one more time, whispered, “You get him, Lewis. You get him.”