Critical Conditions

Forty

Merritt and Lucy missed their flight.

But United Airlines officials scrambled to take advantage of the goodwill opportunity and offered to upgrade them to first-class on the next nonstop, which happened to be my flight. Unfortunately for me, only two spare seats were available in front of the curtain, and I was left with my aisle seat in the main cabin.

Merritt and Sam and I spent the time until takeoff talking to Denver cops.

Sam stayed so close to Merritt, it was if he were handcuffed to her. I knew that when the time for boarding came, he had every intention of walking her onto the plane and buckling her seat belt around her waist.

The airport security offices where we were being interviewed were on the sixth level of the main terminal building, not more than fifty feet above the location where Sam had shot Dr. Terence Gusman to death. For almost ten minutes after the siege ended, none of us knew that the man pursuing Merritt had been Dr. Gusman, or that he was dead. It took that long for the tele-car with his body and the car seat to make its way to Concourse B, Gate 28.

Gusman had been carrying an ID and a neatly written note assailing the media for twice destroying his family. He wasn’t naive about his plan; he had apparently anticipated the possibility of not surviving this last attempt at earning some vengeance on the media in general, and Brenda Strait in particular, by making one last assault on Brenda’s family. While Lucy accompanied Merritt to the bathroom, Sam was quiet and showed no signs of regret over shooting Gusman. I wanted to provoke some words from him, so I said, “At least your loose end is tied up now, Sam.”

He looked at me curiously. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been wondering why the harassment against Brenda stopped when it did. Well, Gusman chaired the medical board; he knew about Chaney’s illness through MedExcel. That’s why the harassment stopped before Chaney’s condition became public. He was sure he could keep the protocol from ever being approved for her and he was waiting patiently for her to die. Chaney’s death would be his retribution against Brenda. There was no need to continue the harassment anymore.”

He waved his arm in the direction of the baggage system. “This was what, desperation, then?”

“Don’t you think? He hears that his medical board’s decision to deny additional care for Chaney has been overruled and that Chaney is off to Seattle to get the protocol. He sees on the news that Merritt is going to follow her. Maybe he thought this would be his last chance to get even.”

I expected he would argue with me. Instead he lamented that he’d let Gusman slip. “You know, I should’ve had him picked up. I didn’t figure him for this. I played this too delicate. I should have plowed his head into the boards when I had him in the open. If I had done that, he would have been too timid for this kind of bullshit.”

“Hindsight’s great. Yeah, you probably should’ve had him picked up. And if you did, how long do you think he would have been in custody?”

Sam scoffed, “Eight hours. Maybe a day. Maybe not that long. That’s not the point. I needed to send him a message to leave my family alone. I didn’t.”

“This isn’t hockey, Sam.”

“Hockey is life. This is life.”

“So? What difference would it have made had you gotten in his face? Everyone survives, the way it turned out. Merritt’s going to be okay. Chaney has a chance. No way of telling what would have happened the other way.”

“Yeah,” he said.

He was blowing me off. “Sam, thanks for all you did. You’re a hero today.”

He nodded, acknowledging something. I wasn’t sure what. “You know, you two were great down there. Merritt, what a kid, the way she moved around. And you did good in there, too, you know that? He would have had her without you.”

“I don’t know about that, Sam. I will say it was the oddest ten minutes I’ve ever had in my life.”

“You reach Lauren, tell her what happened?”

“No. I’ll tell her when we get there. She has enough on her mind with her mom. You reach Brenda and John?”

“John. Told him there was a delay. That’s all. They have enough stress too, you know; I didn’t want to go into this on the phone. Chaney is still set to start those new drugs tomorrow. You’ll have to fill them in about Dr. Gusman when you get there. Use your judgment.”

“Fine,” I said.

Lauren was standing with Lucy about thirty feet from John Trent as I exited the plane a long time after the first-class cabin was empty. I kissed her and held her and kissed her again. Over my shoulder, I watched Trent as he embraced Merritt ten yards away.

Her arms still around me, Lauren turned to Lucy as though she were continuing an earlier conversation. She said, “You said you missed the earlier flight? What happened?”

Lucy looked at me, hoping I would field the question. I grinned and glanced once toward Merritt, then back at Lucy before I said, “Oh, you know, just another problem with the baggage system at DIA.”

Sam phoned me at Lauren’s parents’ house that evening. He had already spoken with his wife and learned that early the next morning, Chaney would indeed start receiving the experimental drugs from Japan that would, with luck, arrest the virus that was destroying her heart. A short while later she would be a prime candidate for a donor organ.

And another vigil would begin for Merritt and John and Brenda.

Sam mostly wanted to talk about Madison’s boyfriend, Brad, and Dead Ed’s brother-in-law, Andrew. “We have word from a state trooper in Nevada. It looks like Brad’s been spotted. He’s south of Vegas, camping illegally. They’ll close in on him today and he’ll go down, but I’m still kind of hoping he doesn’t go down in flames. You know?”

“Yeah, I know. Where are things with Andrew?”

“He has a lawyer now, of course. Funny, took him a couple of tries to find one. The first one he called was Cozier Maitlin. How’s that for irony?”

“Has he been charged?”

“Not yet. They’ve collected hair and fingerprints from him. They’ll check out his story, see if it’s consistent with the forensic evidence before they decide what to do. I’m not convinced the DA’s going to press it. What’s it going to be? The charge, I mean. Homicide? Assisted suicide? Mercy killing? Ask Lauren if she wants a piece of this one when she gets back to Boulder. Nobody else on the felony team in her office does. The guys in the detective squad are already calling Andrew ‘Dr. Jack.’”

I smiled. “Merritt and John are in the clear?”

“Not quite. It’s looking brighter for them. Some loose ends are hanging. Trent’s prints are on a bottle of water that we collected in Dead Ed’s mud room. That’s a problem still to be solved. And there’s a whole bunch of people, myself included, who would still like to know how those bloody clothes got under Merritt’s bed and what the gun was doing in her bathroom. She still has some explaining to do about all that.”

I pondered Dead Ed’s butt and the vile videotape I hoped no one would ever see. I said, “I don’t think you really want to know those answers, Sam.”

“Sure I do.”

Firmly, I said, “You don’t. Trust me.”

I heard him swallow once and imagined him narrowing his eyes. I hoped he would take my advice.