Crisis

21

For almost five minutes Jack had watched the hands of the institutional wall clock as they implacably jumped staccato-fashion toward one thirty a.m. With the final leap of the minute hand, Jack took a breath. He hadn't realized he'd not been breathing for the final seconds, since the time was a mini-milestone. Exactly twelve hours hence he would be married, and all the years he'd avoided the issue would be history. It seemed inconceivable. Except for the relatively recent past, he'd practically institutionalized being by himself. Was he capable of marriage and thinking of two people instead of one? He didn't really know.

"Are you all right?" Latasha asked, yanking Jack back to reality by reaching out and briefly gripping his forearm.

"Fine. I'm fine!" Jack blurted. She'd startled him.

"I thought you were having an absence seizure. You didn't move a muscle for the last few minutes. You didn't even blink. What on earth were you thinking that had you so mesmerized?"

Despite being an intensely private person, Jack almost told Latasha what had been on his mind to get a fresh viewpoint. Such a reaction surprised him, even though he acknowledged having developed a strong affinity toward the woman. Except for his detour to the Newton Memorial Hospital, they had been closely working together for some six hours and had fallen into a natural familiarity. When Jack had arrived at the Boston medical examiner's office, they'd taken over what was supposed to be the library, but the shelves were mostly empty, in hope of future funding. The room's major asset was a large library table, onto which Jack had spread the contents of Craig's malpractice file and organized them so he'd be able to find anything in particular if there was a need. At the far end of the table were several open pizza boxes, paper plates, and large cups. Neither had eaten much. Both had been consumed by the conundrum of Patience Stanhope.

They had also carried in the dual-headed stereo-dissecting microscope and, sitting on opposite sides of the table, had spent several hours opening and tracing all the coronary arteries. Like their larger and more proximal brethren, all the distal vessels were normal and clear. Jack and Latasha had paid particular attention to those branches serving the heart's conduction system.

The last stage of examining the heart was to be the microscopic. They'd taken specimens from all areas of the heart but again concentrated in and around the conduction system. Before Jack had arrived, Latasha had made a series of frozen sections from a small sampling, and the very first thing they had done on his arrival was to stain them and then put them out to dry. At the moment, they were in the wings waiting for their cue.

Just after they'd finished staining the slides, Allan Smitham had called. He apparently had been pleased to hear from Latasha, at least it seemed so to Jack from the side of the rather personal conversation he was forced to hear even though he was trying not to. He felt uncomfortable that he was intruding, but the good news was that Allan was eager to help and would run the toxicology screen immediately.

"I didn't come up with any new ideas," Jack said in response to Latasha's question about what was on his mind. Back when his eyes had strayed to the clock and its staccato movement had hypnotized him into thoughts of his intimidatingly imminent marriage, he was supposed to have been trying to think up new theories about Patience. He'd related to Latasha all his old theories by essentially repeating what he'd told Alexis on the phone en route to the hospital. Throwing all pretenses of self-respect to the wind, he included the drug overdose/wrong drug idea even though in hindsight it sounded inane, almost dim-witted, and Latasha had responded appropriately.

"I didn't have any eureka moment, either," Latasha admitted. "I might have laughed at some of your ideas, but I have to give you credit for creativity. I can't come up with nothing, you know what I'm saying?"

Jack smiled. "Maybe if you combined what I've told you with some of this material, you would," Jack said. He gestured at the case-file material on the table. "There's quite a cast of characters. There's depositions here of four times the number of witnesses actually called."

"I'd be happy to read some if you could tell me which you think would be potentially the most helpful."

"If you were to read any, read Craig Bowman's and Jordan Stanhope's. As defendant and plaintiff, they occupy center stage. Actually, I want to reread both their recollections of Patience's symptoms. For sake of argument, if she had been poisoned as we're considering, subtle symptoms would be crucial. You know, as well as I, that some poisons are nigh impossible to find in the complicated soup of chemicals that make up a human being. More than likely, we'll have to tell Allan what to look for in order for him to find it."

"Where are Dr. Bowman's and Mr. Stanhope's depositions?"

Jack picked them up. He had placed them in their own stack. Both were thick. He reached across and gave them to Latasha.

"Holy shit!" she exclaimed, feeling their weight. "What is this, War and Peace? How many pages do we have here?"

"Craig Bowman's deposition went on for days. The court reporter has to take down every word."

"I'm not sure I'm up to this at nearly two a.m.," Latasha said. She let the volumes thump down on the table in front of her.

"It's all dialogue with lots of spacing. It's actually easy to breeze through them for the most part."

"What are these scientific reprints doing here?" Latasha said, picking up the small stack of scientific publications.

"Dr. Bowman is the lead author in most of them and a contributing author in the rest. Craig's lawyer had considered introducing them as supporting evidence of Craig's commitment to medicine as a way of blunting the plaintiff's stratagem of character assassination."

"I remember this one when it came out in the Journal," Latasha said, holding up Craig's seminal article in the New EnglandJournal of Medicine.

Once again, Jack was duly impressed. "You find time to read such esoterica?"

"This isn't esoteric stuff," Latasha said with a disapproving chuckle. "Membrane physiology is key in just about every field of medicine these days, particularly pharmacology and immunology even infectious disease and cancer."

"Okay, okay!" Jack said, holding up his hands as if to protect himself. "I take back what I said. My problem is that I went to medical school in the last century."

"That's a lame excuse," Latasha said. She flipped through the pages of Craig's paper. "Sodium channel function is the basis of muscle and nerve function. If they don't work, nothing works."

"All right already," Jack said. "You made your point. I'll bone up on it."

Latasha's cell phone suddenly sprang to life. In the silence, it made both of them jump.

Latasha snatched it up, glanced at the LCD screen, and then flipped it open. "What's happening?" she said without preamble, pressing the phone to her ear.

Jack tried to hear the voice on the other end but couldn't. He assumed and hoped it was Allan.

The conversation was pointedly short. Latasha merely said, "You got it," and flipped her phone shut. She stood up.

"Who was it?" Jack asked.

"Allan," Latasha said. "He wants us to pay him a visit in his lab, which is just around the corner. I believe it's worth the effort if we're thinking of keeping him busy with our stuff. Are you game?"

"Are you kidding?" Jack questioned rhetorically. He pushed his chair back and got to his feet.

Jack hadn't realized that the Boston medical examiner's office was on the periphery of the vast Boston City Hospital Medical Center complex. Despite the hour, they passed a number of medical-center employees, including several medical students, walking between various buildings. No one seemed in a hurry, despite the hour. Everyone was enjoying the warmth and silky texture of the air. Although technically still spring, it felt like a summer night.

The toxicology lab was a mere two short blocks' walk in a new, eight-story glass-and-steel structure.

In the elevator on the way up to the sixth floor, Jack looked over at Latasha. Her dark eyes were riveted on the floor indicator display, and her face was reflecting her rightful fatigue.

"I apologize in advance if I say anything inappropriate," Jack said, "but I have the sense that this special effort Allan Smitham is willing to devote to this case is because of unrequited feelings he has for you."

"Maybe," Latasha said equivocally.

"I hope that accepting his aid doesn't put you in an uncomfortable position."

"I think I can handle it," Latasha said in a tone that proclaimed: End of discussion.

The lab was state-of-the-art and almost deserted. In addition to Allan, there were only two other people there, both lab technicians who were busily engaged at the far side of the generous-sized room. There were three aisles of benches groaning under the weight of gleaming new equipment.

Allan was a striking-looking African American with a closely trimmed mustache and goatee that gave him an intimidatingly Mephistophelean air. Adding to his imposing appearance was a heavily muscular frame barely concealed by a white lab coat with rolled-up sleeves over a form-fitting black T-shirt. His skin was a burnished mahogany, a shade or two darker than Latasha's. His eyes were bright and fixated on his old college friend.

Latasha introduced Jack, who rated only a quick but firm handshake and a rapid, appraising glance. Allan was unabashedly interested in Latasha, whom he lavished with a broad smile filled with startlingly white teeth.

"You shouldn't make yourself such a stranger, girl," Allan said as he gestured toward his tiny, utilitarian office. He ended up sitting at his desk while Latasha and Jack took two straight chairs in his line of sight.

"You have an impressive lab," Jack said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. "Seems lean on staff, though."

"Just for this shift," Allan said. He was still smiling at Latasha. "In terms of the number of employees, the difference between us and the day shift is like night and day." He laughed at his own joke. Jack had the feeling he wasn't lacking self-esteem or humor.

"What did you find with our samples?" Latasha asked, cutting to the chase.

"Ah, yes," Allan said, steepling his fingers while his elbows rested on the desk. "You gave me a little background in your note, which I'd like to go over to make sure I understand. The patient died of a heart attack approximately eight months ago. She was embalmed, interred, and recently exhumed. What you want to do is rule out drug involvement."

"Let's put it more succinctly," Latasha said. "Her manner of death was assumed to be natural. We want to be sure it wasn't homicide."

"Okay," Allan intoned as if mulling over what he wanted to say next.

"What was the result of the screen?" Latasha asked impatiently. "Why are you dragging this out?"

Jack inwardly cringed at Latasha's tone. It made him uncomfortable that she was being less than gracious with Allan, who was doing them an enormous favor. For Jack, it was becoming progressively clear there was something between them that he didn't know and didn't want to know.

"I want to be sure you interpret the findings correctly," Allan said defensively.

"We're both medical examiners," Latasha shot back. "I think we are relatively informed about the limitations of a toxicology screen."

"Informed enough to know the predictive value of a negative test is only about forty percent?" Allan questioned, eyebrows raised. "And that is with a recently deceased, not embalmed, corpse."

"So you are saying the toxicology screen was negative."

"I am," Allan said. "It was definitely negative."

"My God, it's like pulling teeth," Latasha complained. She rolled her eyes and flapped her arms impetuously.

"What drugs constitute your screen?" Jack asked. "Is digitalis included?"

"Digitalis is included," Allan said as he half-stood to hand Jack the lab's toxicology screen drug list.

Jack scanned the sheet. He was impressed with the number of drugs included. "What methods do you use?"

"We use a combination of chromatography and enzyme immunoassay for our screens."

"Do you have gas chromatography-mass spectrometry?" Jack asked.

"Bet your ass we got mass-spec," Allan said proudly. "But if you want me to use the artillery, you're going to have to give me an idea of what I'm looking for."

"We can give you only a general idea at the moment," Jack said. "According to the symptoms the patient was reported to have had if drugs or poisons were involved, we would be looking for something capable of producing a markedly slow heart rate unresponsive to all attempts at pacing and a respiratory depressant, since she was also described as being cyanotic."

"You're still talking about a shitload of potential drugs and poisons," Allan said. "Without more specifics, you're asking me for a miracle!"

"I know," Jack admitted. "But Latasha and I are going to go back and brainstorm to see if we can come up with some likely candidates."

"You'd better," Allan said. "Otherwise, this is probably going to be a fruitless exercise. First, I have to figure out what to ignore with all the embalming fluid on board."

"I know," Jack repeated.

"Why are you even considering homicide?" Allan asked. "If you don't mind my asking."

Jack and Latasha exchanged a glance, unsure of how much to say.

"We just did the post a few hours ago!" Latasha said. "We didn't find diddly-squat. There was no cardiac pathology, which doesn't make sense, considering the history."

"Interesting," Allan said pensively. He locked eyes with Latasha. "Let me get this straight. You want me to do all this work, take up my whole night, and do it on the sly to boot. Is that what you are saying?"

"Of course we want you to do it!" Latasha snapped. "What's the matter with you? Why else would we be sitting here?"

"I don't mean you and the doc here," Allan said, gesturing toward Jack. He then pointed at Latasha. "I mean you personally."

"Yeah, I want you to do it, okay," Latasha said. She stood up.

"Okay," Allan said. There was a trace of a satisfied smile on his face.

Latasha walked out of the office.

Surprised at the sudden ending of the meeting, Jack got up and fumbled for one of his cards. "Just in case you want to ask me something," he said as he put it on Allan's desk. He helped himself to one of Allan's from a small Plexiglas holder. "I appreciate your help. Thank you."

"No problem," Allan said. The lingering smirk was still apparent.

Jack caught up to Latasha at the elevator. He didn't say anything until they were on their way down.

"That was a rather precipitous ending," Jack said. He pretended not to look at Latasha by watching the floor indicator.

"Yeah, well, he was getting on my nerves. He's such a cocky bastard."

"I sensed he didn't have a self-esteem problem."

Latasha laughed and perceptively relaxed a degree.

They walked out into the night. It was going on three, but there were still people on the street. As they neared the medical examiner's office, Latasha spoke up: "I suppose you wondered why I appeared somewhat rude."

"It crossed my mind," Jack admitted.

"Allan and I were tight the last year of college, but then something happened that gave me insight into his personality that I didn't like." She keyed open the front door and waved to the security person. As they started up the single flight of stairs, she continued: "I got a scare that I was pregnant. When I told him, his response was to ditch me. I couldn't even get a call back, so I wrote him off. The irony is that I wasn't pregnant. During the last year or so when he found out I was here at the ME office, he's tried to get us to connect up, but I'm not interested. I'm sorry if it was uncomfortable back there in his office."

"No need to apologize," Jack said. "As I said on the way over, I hope accepting his help won't cause a problem."

"With as many years as there have been, I'd thought I'd handle myself better than I did. But just seeing him made me pissed about the episode all over again. You'd think I would have gotten over it."

They walked into the library. The clutter was exactly as they'd left it.

"How about we take a look at the slides we stained?" Latasha suggested.

"Maybe you should go home and get some shut-eye," Jack said. "There's no reason for you to pull an all-nighter. I mean I love the help and the company, but this is asking way too much."

"You're not getting rid of me that easy," Latasha said with a coy smile. "I learned back in medical school that for me, when it's this late, it's better to just stay up. Plus, I'd love to solve this case."

"Well, I think I'm going to take a drive out to Newton."

"Back to the hospital?"

"Nope. Back to the Bowmans' house. I told my sister I'd look in on her husband to make sure he's not in a coma. Thanks to his depression, he's been mixing alcohol in the form of a single-malt scotch with some sort of sleeping pill."

"Yikes!" Latasha said. "I've had to post several people like that."

"Truthfully, with him I don't think it's much of a worry," Jack said. "He thinks far too much of himself. I doubt I'd even go if checking on him was the only reason. What I'm also going to do is check the biomarker assay kit he used with Patience to see if there is any reasonable reason to suspect he got a false positive. If it were a false positive, the possibility goes way up that the manner of death was not natural."

"What about suicide?" Latasha questioned. "You've never mentioned suicide even as a wildly remote possibility. How come?"

Jack absently scratched the back of his head. It was true that he'd not thought about suicide, and he wondered why. He let out a small chuckle, remembering how many cases he'd been involved with over the years where the apparent manner of death was ultimately not the correct manner. The last such case had involved the wife of the Iranian diplomat that was supposed to be suicide but had been homicide.

"I don't know why I haven't given even a passing thought about suicide," Jack said, "especially considering some of my other equally unlikely ideas."

"The little you've told me about the woman suggests she wasn't terribly happy."

"That's probably true," Jack admitted, "but that's the only thing the idea of suicide has going for it. We'll keep it in mind along with my hospital conspiracy idea. But now I'm going to head out to Newton. Of course, you're welcome to come, but I can't imagine why you'd want to."

"I'll stay," Latasha said. She pulled over Craig's and Jordan's deposition transcripts to a position in front of one of the chairs and sat down. "I'll do some background reading while you're gone. Where are the medical records?"

Jack reached for the correct pile and pushed it over against Craig's and Jordan's depositions.

Latasha picked up a short run of ECG that was sticking out of the stack. "What's this?"

"It's a recording Dr. Bowman made when he first got to Patience's house. Unfortunately it's almost useless. He couldn't even remember the lead. He had to give up doing the ECG because she was in such dire straits and rapidly worsening."

"Has anyone looked at it?"

"All the experts looked at it, but without knowing the lead and not being able to figure it out, they couldn't say much. They all agreed the marked bradycardia suggested an AV block. With that and other suggestive conduction abnormalities, they all felt it was at least consistent with a heart attack someplace in the heart."

"Too bad there's not more," Latasha said.

"I'm out of here so I can get back," Jack said. "My cell phone is on if you have a eureka moment or if Allan is able to pull off a miracle."

"See you when you get back," Latasha said. She was already speed-reading Craig's deposition.

AT THREE O'CLOCK in the morning, it was finally easy for Jack to drive in Boston. At some of the traffic lights on Massachusetts Avenue, Jack's Accent was the only vehicle waiting. On several occasions he debated ignoring the light when there also wasn't any cross-traffic, but he never did. Jack didn't have a problem breaking rules he judged ridiculous, but traffic lights didn't fall into that category.

The Massachusetts Turnpike was another story. It wasn't crowded, but there was more traffic than he expected, and it wasn't all trucks. It made him wonder with amazement what so many people were doing out and about at such an hour.

The short drive to Newton gave Jack a chance to calm down from the near mania Latasha had unleashed when she said she had access to a toxicologist just at the point Jack was ready to throw in the towel. In a more relaxed state of mind, he was able to think about the whole situation considerably more rationally, and when he did so, it was clear what the most probable outcome was going to be. First, he was going to decide from lack of proof to the contrary that Patience Stanhope most likely died of a massive heart attack despite there being no obvious pathology; and second, that Fasano et al. were most likely behind the despicable assault on Craig and Alexis's children for trite economic reasons. Fasano had been unambiguously clear about the rationale when he directly threatened Jack.

Jack's mild mania had devolved into a tepid despondency by the time he arrived at the Bowmans' house. He found himself again wondering if the reason he was still in Boston and imagining out-of-the-box conspiracies had more to do with half-conscious fears of getting married in ten hours than trying to help his sister and brother-in-law.

Jack climbed out of the car clutching the umbrella he had the presence of mind to rescue from the backseat. He was parked next to Craig's Lexus. Walking back to the street, he looked up and down for the police cruiser that had been there that morning. It was nowhere to be seen. So much for the surveillance. Turning back to the house, Jack trudged up the front walk. His fatigue was catching up to him.

The house was dark, save for a little light filtering through the sidelights bordering the front door. Tilting his head back as he approached the front stoop, Jack checked the second-floor dormer windows. There were as black as onyx, reflecting back the light from a distant streetlamp.

Being relatively quiet, Jack slipped the key into the lock. He wasn't trying to be secretive, but at the same time, he preferred not to wake Craig if at all possible. It was at that point Jack remembered the alarm system. With the key in the lock, he tried to remember the code. As tired as his mind was, it took him a minute to recall it. Then he wondered if he was supposed to hit another button after the code. He didn't know. When he was as prepared as possible, he turned the key. The mechanism seemed loud in the nighttime stillness.

Quickly stepping inside in a minor panic, Jack gazed at the alarm keypad. Luckily, the warning buzz he'd been expecting didn't sound, but he waited to be certain. The alarm was disarmed. A bright green dot of light suggested all was well. Jack closed the front door quietly. It was then that he became aware of the muted sound of the television coming from the direction of the great room. From the same direction came a small amount of light, spilling down the otherwise dark, main hallway.

Imagining that Craig might still be up or possibly asleep in front of the TV, Jack descended the corridor and walked into the great room. There was no Craig. The TV over the fireplace was turned to a cable news network, and the lights were on in that section, whereas the kitchen and the dining area were both dark.

On the coffee table in front of the couch stood Craig's nearly empty scotch bottle, an old-fashioned glass, and the TV remote. By force of habit, Jack walked over, picked up the remote, and turned the TV off. He then went back out in the hall. He looked up the stairs into the darkness and then down the length of the corridor to the study. A tiny bit of light was coming through the study's bow window from the streetlights, so it wasn't completely dark.

Jack debated what to do first: check Craig or check the biomarker assay kit. It wasn't a hard decision. When faced with a choice, Jack generally did the less desirable chore or errand first, and in this instance that was certainly the one involving Craig. It wasn't that he thought it would be difficult, but he knew by going to his room he risked waking the man, which he did not want to do for a variety of reasons. The most important one was that he was convinced Craig would not consider Jack's presence a favor. In fact, the implication of neediness would most likely offend and irritate him.

Jack looked back up into the darkness. He'd never been on the second floor and had no idea where the master bedroom would be. Not willing to turn on any lights, Jack retreated to the kitchen. It was his experience that most families had a gadget drawer, and most gadget drawers had flashlights.

As it turned out, he was half-right. There was a flashlight in the gadget drawer, but the Bowmans' gadget drawer was in the laundry, not the kitchen. In keeping with the rest of the house and its contents, the flashlight was an impressive foot-long Maglite that cast a serious and concentrated beam when Jack turned it on. Believing he could put his hand over the lens and vary the amount of light, Jack returned with it to the stairs and started up.

Reaching the top, Jack let enough light escape through his fingers to see down the upstairs hallway, first in one direction and then the other. Multiple doors led off the hall on both sides and, as luck would have it, most of them were closed. Trying to decide where to start, Jack checked both directions again and determined the right hallway was half the length of the left. Unsure of why, Jack started to his right. Picking a door at random, he silently opened it and pushed it ajar enough to step across the threshold. Slowly, he let light spread around the room. It certainly wasn't the master. It was one of the girls' bedrooms, and from the posters, photos, knick-knacks, and clothes strewn about, Jack could tell it was Tracy 's. Back in the hall, Jack proceeded to the next door. He was about to open it when he noticed the doors at the very end of the hall facing him were double. Since all the other doors were single, it seemed a good bet that he'd found the master.

Keeping the flashlight mostly covered, Jack walked down to the double doors. He pressed the flashlight lens against his abdomen to block the light as he opened the right-hand door. It swung inward. As he slipped into the room, he could tell he was in the master suite for certain. He had stepped into deep-pile wall-to-wall carpet. For a moment, he didn't move. He strained to hear Craig's breathing, but the room was silent.

Slowly angling the flashlight, progressively more light extended deeper into the room. Out of the gloom emerged a king-size bed. Craig was lying on the side of the bed farthest from Jack.

For a moment Jack stood still, debating what he was going to do to make sure Craig was not comatose. Up until that moment, he hadn't given it much thought, but now that he was in the room, he had to. Although waking Craig would be definitive, it was not an option. Ultimately Jack thought he'd just walk over and listen to Craig's breathing. If that sounded normal, Jack was willing to accept it as positive proof the man was okay, despite it being far from scientific.

Reducing the light again, Jack started across the room, moving more from memory than visually. A meager amount of ambient light was managing to finger its way through the dormer window from the street. It was enough to give Jack a vague outline of the larger pieces of furniture. Reaching the foot of the bed, Jack stopped and strained to hear the intermittent sibilant sounds of sleep. The room was deathly quiet. Jack felt a rush of adrenaline. To his horror, there was no sound of respiration. Craig was not breathing!