Mercy

CHAPTER 43

Julie refused to sign any of the paperwork required by HR; not without her lawyer present, she said. She advised Amber to do the same, but the poor girl was utterly shell-shocked, too young and inexperienced to defy authority.

Amber sorrowfully followed Val to her office down the hall, while Julie was stripped of her badge and unceremoniously escorted out of the building by security. Nobody gawked because nobody knew what had gone down, but soon word would spread via social media and Julie’s troubles would become White’s version of a viral video. Julie felt weightless and strange in her own skin, as if this experience was happening to someone else and she somehow had become a detached observer.

From her car, Julie phoned Lucy.

“Please come to the parking garage. I’m on level B2 near the elevator. Let’s talk,” Julie said.

Ten minutes later, Lucy, cocooned inside her warm jacket, opened the passenger-side door of Julie’s Prius with the bent front fender and dent in the hood. As she climbed in, Lucy looked straight ahead in an effort to avoid Julie’s penetrating stare.

“Hey, hey, Lucy, it’s me, it’s Julie, your friend, and I need you now more than ever.” Tears came to Julie’s eyes and blurred her vision. Lucy gave in to the tugging on her arm and turned to meet Julie’s gaze.

“Did you do it?” Lucy asked in a harsh whisper.

Julie could not contain her look of disgust. “How could you even ask me such a thing?”

“Because I know what you believe,” Lucy said. “The articles in that folder weren’t exactly a surprise to me.”

Julie’s mouth fell agape. “I can’t believe you just said that to me.”

“If you did it, you have to own it,” Lucy said.

Julie knew Lucy could be distant, but her icy treatment caught her off guard and hurt deeply.

“If I did it,” Julie said, “I’d have been a hell of a lot smarter than to use heparin. I could have used bupivacaine, for goodness’ sake. I’m not stupid, Lucy, and I’m certainly not a killer.”

Lucy’s eyes narrowed. She knew about the anesthetic drug. “Bupivacaine wouldn’t have been too smart, either,” she said. “I would have noticed the QT prolongation on the EKG and run a tox test for it. I’d still have caught you.”

A slip of a smile came to Lucy’s face and Julie broke into a laugh that sounded like she had stifled a sob. Even under duress, Lucy’s brain worked in overdrive. She simply could not help being the brilliant pathologist she was. It was a moment between them, one that gave Julie hope Lucy was not completely lost to her, hope she could still be an ally in this fight.

They fell into a heavy silence, broken when Lucy asked, “What do you want me to do, Julie?”

The desperation in Lucy’s voice implied they had arrived at some sort of impasse.

“Just be open-minded right now,” Julie said. “I just need you to hear me.”

“I’m listening.”

“While I was waiting for you, I had time to think a little more clearly about things. Isn’t it a bit coincidental that Jordan and I got fired on the same day?”

Lucy’s face turned taut. “Are you suggesting someone killed Shirley Mitchell to get you out of White?”

“I’m saying we can’t stop looking for Sam’s true killer. Whatever it is that caused his heart to stop, it’s killing others at White, maybe elsewhere, and somebody doesn’t want us to find out what’s really going on.”

“Julie, stop. Just stop it.”

“No. I can’t and I won’t.”

“I don’t know what’s happened to you, hell, even me, for getting so involved in this whole affair, but it’s gone too far. I should have turned Jordan in when I found out what he was doing with the patient records. I should never have brought the two of you together.”

“I didn’t kill Shirley.”

“Honestly, I don’t know if that’s true. You’re asking me to swallow an awful lot here. What’s not debatable is that someone injected Shirley with heparin, and by all accounts it appears to have been intentional. You had the means, motive, and opportunity. You don’t have to be a mystery novel enthusiast to know those are three criteria for proving a murder. I might be able to buy some weird drug allergy causing fatal heart attacks. Maybe something we didn’t know about, something we potentially could have uncovered in this investigation of ours. It’s possible, I grant you that. But now you’re saying someone was murdered to throw us off the trail? Think about it for a moment and try to see it through my eyes. Shirley Mitchell was a very sick woman, the kind of woman whose right to die you would have fully supported.”

“Supported only if it was the law.”

“What do you want from me, Julie?”

“I need you to find samples and run some tests. Jordan and I no longer have access to the computer systems, and I don’t believe that’s an unintentional consequence. Someone didn’t want us to find other victims.”

“Do you even hear yourself?”

“Yes, other victims,” Julie repeated with more emphasis. “I hear myself perfectly well, thank you. We need you monitoring the EMR system for patients with hives who later die of a heart attack. The hives will be deleted from the patient’s record postmortem. I promise you this is true. Test the tissue from the corpse for various allergy-causing antigens and foreign substances. Whatever is killing these patients, we’ll find it in that test.”

“Who, Julie? Who is doing this and why?”

Julie shook her head in frustration. “I don’t know. But somehow William Colchester and Gerald Coffey are involved, I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m sure of this: if I do anything to help you, I’ll lose my job, and I sincerely doubt I’ll get another.”

“Please, Lucy. You’re my only hope.”

“My opinion? You need to focus on yourself and your family. Romey is coming after you for Shirley’s death and that’s a fact, not an opinion. Somebody has to take the fall for the heparin and it’s going to be you, not Amber. So please, don’t ask me for any favors right now.”

“Why, Lucy?” Julie’s voice cracked. “Why won’t you help us?”

“Because this job is all I have,” Lucy said. “I don’t have a partner, kids, a pet, anything. I run. I read. I play chess. But what I really love, my life’s purpose, my passion, is pathology. You’re asking me to risk everything for something I don’t fully believe. To put myself on the line to support you when I have doubts about your innocence here. Put yourself in my shoes and see if you would do the same.”

Lucy opened the car door and got out. She had nothing more to say.