Mortal Remains

Chapter 16

That same Friday, November 23, 6:55 P.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark’s attempts to reach the doctors on Victor’s list had proved futile. All were gone for the day, and he’d ended up talking to machines or leaving messages with tired-sounding operators at their answering services.

The last thing he felt like doing was eating dinner at Nell’s.

On the other hand, Lucy was adamant they go. “If the woman knows anything about these places,” she said, folding up her spreadsheets of statistics and sticking them in her purse, “I want to talk with her.”

“She’s not going to look at a bunch of numbers.”

“They’re for me to use, like notes, to guide me in what questions to ask.”

“Such as?”

“I won’t know until she talks to me.” She slipped the strap of her purse over her shoulder and walked out the front door.

Mark followed her to the Jeep, once more with the uneasy feeling that she was leaving something out. He took a breath of the crisp air, trying to clear his head. Dealing with Victor all day had occupied his thoughts, but now they roamed freely through all the other unknowns that were piling up, as foreboding as thunderheads. He couldn’t shake his fear about Earl being in danger, so much so that he’d tried to phone Melanie again, figuring she could ensure a security guard would be at his door. But he’d only reached her answering service. Pulling out of the driveway, he started to call Nell on his cellular, then hesitated, his finger suspended over the number pad.

One way someone could have known that Victor had found something suspicious at Nucleus Laboratories might be a phone tap. Mark recalled that on the night of the break-in, he’d found the clock on his phone stand slightly out of position. Someone could have been trying to place a tap on the line. And how would the person who shot at him know when he’d be driving on the road from Nell’s? Maybe those damn clicks weren’t the usual problem with his line.

He’d check when he got home. And forget using the cellular. Anybody determined to listen in on him could buy scanners for them. Shit! Had Nell been overheard saying she had new information about Kelly’s death?

Jesus, he thought, and gunned the car, heading for the nearest pay phone on the edge of town.

“What’s up?” asked Lucy.

“I just realized our phone conversations may no longer be private.” He explained why in the minutes it took to reach the booth.

To his relief, Nell picked up. “Nell, listen-”

“I know. You’re going to be late,” she said without letting him speak.

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes. But maybe we should rethink this.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re going to go somewhere else for dinner.”

“Are you crazy?”

“We’ll pick you up-”

“Just come on over. I can use the extra time to have a bath.” And she hung up.

He tried dialing her back.

Off the hook.

Not this nonsense again.

“Oh, God,” said Lucy when he told her.

As he drove, he figured out how to convince her she needed protection. Hell, maybe she’d even get off on the idea. And he’d call Dan. She might listen to him. But listen she would, because damned if he was going to put anyone else in danger. The entire day he’d agonized over the possibility that he’d gotten Victor killed by encouraging him to play computer detective. He remembered his singing at the piano only two nights ago, and the thought of performing an autopsy on him in the morning became unbearable.

Lucy rode staring out the window.

The quiet between them grew suffocating.

“You know, we could both go deaf in this kind of silence,” he said.

She gave a small, solitary chuckle. “Sorry. I was just thinking how sometimes in the camps, when I felt most overwhelmed and helpless, I’d take care of some small, personal matter, just to get the world back into perspective.”

“Such as?” He welcomed the chance to discuss anything that might get him out of his own head.

“Writing letters home worked best, saying things I hadn’t had the chance to say to the people I loved most. Once I did that with each of my brothers, Mom, and Dad, I usually felt better. At least, it seemed less daunting to face the big problems in front of me.”

“What would you write about?”

“Usually I’d pick something I really liked about the person I wrote to and let them know. And if there were any unresolved quarrels, I’d try to patch them up. That way if something happened to me, I wouldn’t have left precious words unsaid.”

“Sounds like a nice kind of letter to get.”

She grew quiet again, her gaze fixed on the dark blur of forest at the road’s edge. “Would you like me to write one to you?” she asked after a few seconds.

He grew very still. “Yes, I’d like that.”

“Because that’s what I’ve been doing, Mark. Sitting here composing a letter to you.”

“Really?” He drove the next mile without saying anything. “What’s in it?” he finally asked.

“Most I think you already know. How great a doctor I think you are. How much I adore working with your patients and being up here. And how worried I am that I’ve permanently ruined your opinion of me by coming to you under false pretenses.”

She was right. He did know all that. And her failure to be up front with him had stoked his suspicions of her. Once fooled, it was easy to wonder what else she might keep from him. And he still felt a woman as smart as she should have known better, especially about letting her personal issues place evidence at risk.

He was about to tell her so, then suggest they put it behind them and make the best of her time here, when she added, “I don’t know if I can ever win your trust back. I’d like to try, but I won’t stay if my being around makes you feel I compromised you, your practice, or your investigation. Just give the word, and I’ll leave in the morning.”

That surprised him. Her words sounded as if she’d been reading from a carefully written note, with the ring of an ultimatum. But he also knew something else. When this case ended, he’d have to come to grips with the fact his ineptness might have cost a man his life. Measured against that, whatever technical dings his reputation as coroner took in the process would no longer matter. Yet going back to his old existence, living alone in the house where he’d been born and practicing medicine in isolation, would be even lonelier than before, entirely because of her having been here. He realized this without having to think about it or put it into words. It came to him the way an animal senses its terrain is no longer hospitable, through a combination of instinct and intuition that reads a warning to move on and find more fertile ground, yet she’d catalyzed the process. All at once he felt cautious about how to handle the next few minutes with this strange, forceful, and disquieting woman who had entered his life.

“Basically I still think you need me around here, and more than just professionally,” she continued “You’re one lonely bugger.”

He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Any other revelations you’d care to reveal?”

“Yes.”

“Oh?”

She held her head a notch higher. The light from an oncoming car caught the fine lines of her nose and jaw, making him think she looked absolutely regal.

He held his breath, and waited for it.

“I don’t have a fiancé.”

He reacted with a mix of relief, pleasant surprise, and a self-congratulatory he’d-known-something-was-fishy-about-her-engagement-all-along celebration. Where there had been doubt and suspicion seconds before, there was the glimmer of a new possibility here. It had nothing to do with the grim business that seemed to be closing in on them, but a sea change occurred inside his head. As he sometimes did in a tense moment, he laughed. “Why the pretends?”

By the light of the dashboard he could see her face. She pursed her lips, but the corners played at breaking into a smile. “I heard you were a real womanizer and figured it was the best way to avoid trouble.”

“Womanizer? Who told you that?”

“The other residents who’d done a rotation with you. All your patients gabbed to them about the string of women you get up here, and how none of them stay. Let’s see, there was a theater director, a physiotherapist, and a veterinarian-”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Having met you, I personally think they must have been nuts.”

“Well, thank you for that at least. Residents should know better than to believe country gossip-”

“Oh, I don’t mean them. I’m talking about your lady friends, for not wanting to stay, silly.”

He still hadn’t come up with a reply to that when his cell phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Roper, you don’t know me,” a woman’s voice said. “I got your number from the book. You answered the phone when I called Victor’s house this morning.”

“Oh, yes. I recall your voice.” He heard her suck in her breath, but she said nothing. “May I know who I’m talking to?”

He listened to her breathing a few seconds. Finally, she said, “ I have some documents that belong to Victor. I didn’t know what had happened when I tried to reach him. I feel terrible, first the firing, and now…”

He slowed, and pulled over to the side of the road. “Let me call you back-”

“No! I don’t want anyone to know who I am.”

He didn’t want to lose her again.

“Then let me give you another number where to reach me.” He’d take the call at Nell’s. She and Lucy could wait in the Jeep. “In about ten minutes?”

“No. I’m freezing my buns off as it is in a pay phone.”

Oh, God. He’d have to risk being overheard. As long as she didn’t say her name, at least she’d be safe. “What documents?” He motioned Lucy to slide over and listen with him. She responded immediately, a puzzled expression on her face.

“You mustn’t tell anyone about this. We’ve had orders not to talk with you about him.”

“We?”

“The people who worked with Victor at Nucleus Labs.”

Her breathing sounded in his ear a few seconds. He could even hear her shivering. She must have her lips pressed to the mouthpiece.

“What do you want to do?” he asked. “We could meet.”

“No.”

“I could pick these documents up.”

More breathing.

“Tell me what you have then.” He felt cold just listening to her.

“Maybe I better explain how I got them in the first place. I don’t want to get in trouble with the police.”

He opened his mouth to stop her, but she pressed ahead.

“Victor programs his PC at home to forward whatever files he’s working on to both his and my computer at our offices whenever he shuts down-” She stopped and let out a breath that stuttered into a sobbing sound. After a few seconds, she said, “I mean he used to. I still can’t believe he’s dead.”

She may already be saying too much. “Listen, you should call me on a regular phone before saying anything more. I’m on a cell phone,” Mark warned her, all the while worried he might lose her for good.

He thought he heard her swallow. “No, I can hear you okay, and I want to get this over with. He’d set the system up that way so we’d always be sure to have his files the next morning in case he forgot to forward them manually. For a bright man, he sometimes had a mind like a sieve…”

She didn’t understand. But if he spelled it out that someone might be listening in… Christ it was too late anyway.

“He obviously didn’t delete that function, because a folder dated yesterday was on top of my e-mail when I got to work. The first pages were nothing special, results of genetic screenings we’d done on various groups of siblings, mainly for different sorts of cancer genes. You’ve probably seen the type of reports I’m talking about in your own practice.”

He had. They were a bunch of spikes along a horizontal line, each peak representing the amount of a particular sequence of DNA, the building blocks of the gene under investigation, including a peak or peaks for the mutated section, if it’s present. These defective portions stood out like sore thumbs when compared to a similar preparation of a normal strand, even to the untrained eye. “Victor left me a message saying he’d retrieved some test results that he’d found peculiar. Could they be the ones?”

“Peculiar? Not that I could tell. The only thing odd about them was that they’d been flagged for some reason, yet there were no obvious abnormal spikes. I wouldn’t know how to read the finer details well enough to have spotted anything else. Victor could have, though. He had the knack, and the training. In fact I initially thought they were copies he’d been using to practice his interpretation skills on and had simply returned them. It was the next few pages that got me concerned. As soon as I read them, I knew they were nothing anyone at Nucleus Labs had been meant to see. When I phoned his house, it was to ask him what he wanted me to do with the file. But you answered. By midmorning word got around that he’d died, probably from a heart attack, and I was devastated. But when we found out the police were all over his house, I got frightened. After all, I know you don’t bring out the yellow tape for simple coronaries, and after seeing what he’d been doing on the computer, well, my imagination went into overdrive.”

“Just tell me what you have.” He could barely keep his voice steady.

Still more breathing. Then she asked, “Do you know how screening for executive health plans work?”

“Sure. I’ve done my share.”

“He’s managed to get records from some of our biggest clients documenting when executives’ policies were newly issued or terminated,” she continued. “This basically reflects who’s been hired and who’s been fired. I can only guess someone at these companies sent them to him on the QT after he’d twisted their arms. He had that kind of good rapport with the people he dealt with. Word got around like wildfire on the Internet when they learned…”

He thought he heard her sob again.

“Sorry,” she said. “All those e-mails of condolences, yet outside of office hours he seemed so alone.”

Waiting for her to compose herself, he wondered if she knew the half of it.

She sucked in a deep breath. “Dr. Roper, before telling you what he found, I have to know. Did someone kill Victor because of this?”

Mark’s official line that he couldn’t give out confidential information sprung to his lips, but he didn’t speak it, knowing he might spook an already frightened woman. Instead he told her the truth. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, God! So it’s possible.”

“Listen. We can get you protection. I’ll take you to the police myself, right now if you want. And we mustn’t say anything more-”

He was listening to a dial tone again.

As he slowly lowered the phone, he sat staring straight ahead, trying to think what he should do. His gaze swept north, pulled by a glowing orange smudge that pulsed and waned above the trees against the nighttime skyline. It took him a second to realize it must be coming from a huge fire, and a heartbeat more to think it could be near Nell’s cabin.

A wall of flames rose above the back half of the structure; smoke engulfed the front.

She lay in the snow before the door where she’d crawled, naked, the skin on her head and the left side of her torso covered in carbon. But within the blackened face, white eyes glittered, alive, the nightmare from his childhood.

He thought her wrist had a weak pulse. As he reached into the flesh of her neck to palpate her carotid to be sure, that same cloying smell that could send his heart pounding came off her in waves and filled him with terror. Swallowing to keep from gagging, he felt the artery fluttering beneath his fingertips. In the headlights of the Jeep he could see the burns weren’t that deep. The black was mainly soot.

Her darkened lips parted, revealing a slash of creamy teeth, and she screamed.

“Help me get her to the back of the Jeep,” he told Lucy, his voice quivering and barely able to keep from breaking.

Seconds later they careened out of the driveway, Lucy at the wheel as he huddled over Nell’s body, muttering words of encouragement, at the same time punching in the number for the fire department, summoning them to a lost cause. Then he called Dan, briefed him on the details, and dispatched him to the scene.

Her screams continued, and her pulse grew weaker.

“She needs morphine and IV fluids, or she’ll never make it to Saratoga. Go to Mary and Betty Thomson’s,” he yelled at Lucy. Then he called their number, told them he’d be there in five minutes and what to have ready for him.

Betty stood at the door with the vials, bags, needles, and tubing in a plastic bag. “I’m praying for her,” she told Mark as he scooped up the equipment.

“Me too,” he heard Mary call from the back room.

Lucy spun the Jeep back out on the highway and they were off again.

The burns on her head, shoulders, and left trunk were less than he originally thought, first- and second-degree at the most, the same for the side of her face. It puzzled him how she’d protected that part of her body from more severe damage. The mucosal membranes inside her mouth, however, were blackened as well, and he feared most for her airway. The soft tissues there were much more vulnerable, and even with less deep burns, they could swell up to obstruct her breathing. An explosion must have accompanied the flames, as only hot gases would penetrate orifices to damage them like that.

He easily inserted an angiocath needle into her right arm and opened the IV full, to raise her pressure, then adjusted it to replace the bodily fluids that would leak from her charred skin. To quiet her shrieks and cries, he injected half an ampule of Mary’s morphine.

To his astonishment, her eyes fluttered open, she moaned, and said, “Some dinner party, eh, Doc?”

“What happened, Nell?”

“The back of my cabin blew… where propane tank is.”

He reached for her hand, feeling the need to hold it, not just to comfort her, but to keep his own from trembling.

“Was in the tub taking my bath,” she continued. “That’s what saved me.”

Her voice kept fracturing into different pitches, all of them high, as if forced through a strainer. The soft tissues near her vocal cords were swelling closed. She’d need a tube to keep breathing, and fast.

Like a drowning man clinging to a single plank, he focused solely on what he knew best: checking her pulse – weak; assessing her breathing – labored and noisy; fine-tuning her IV – running fine. The routine momentarily kept his larger questions at bay, and all their ramifications. “We’ll soon be at the hospital,” he said, reassuring her and hitting the numbers for ER on his phone.

She began to moan again, and mutter incoherently.

“This is Dr. Mark Roper, and I’m bringing in an eighty-year-old woman who’s been in an explosion and has first- and second-degree burns to the head and trunk, but with more severe airway involvement…”

His own voice sounded far away as he continued to brief the triage nurse, kneeling over Nell and watching Lucy at the wheel as they sped along the deserted road. Riddles and ghosts continued to circle, threatening to come in from the darkness.

He continually had to reposition Nell’s head to prevent her tongue from falling backward where it might obstruct her breathing; only then did he realize she’d finally worn her damn plate.

“Roper’s special,” the triage nurse called into her intercom the minute she saw Mark jump out of the Jeep in the ambulance bay.

Lucy frowned.

Instantly orderlies, nurses, and two doctors arrived to help.

“I thought only doctors who didn’t want your patients called them Roper’s specials,” she said to him as they transferred Nell to a stretcher and raced her down the hall.

One of the physicians, a tall ebony-skinned woman with a long gray braid down to her waist gave her an incredulous look. “Where are you from, gal? In ER it means when Mark sends us someone he can’t handle alone, we better be on our toes.”

“Dr. Lucy O’Connor, meet Dr. Carla Moore, one of the few in this establishment who don’t always consider me and my patients to be a pain in the ass.” He tried to sound calm, yet he still quaked inside, trying to keep memory from intruding on what had to be done now.

Nell’s respirations were already down to a squeak. “Seems like we need to intubate this one,” Carla said, as they skidded into a resuscitation room the size of a shoe box lined with racks of equipment, everything – lines, monitors, IVs – within easy reach.

Carla shoved an anesthetic tray at him. On it were different-sized endotracheal tubes spread out in a semicircle around a laryngoscope. “Will you do the honors? I could use your help.”

He nodded, slipped on a pair of sterile gloves, then positioned Nell’s head and neck as if she were leaning forward to sniff a flower, maximally opening her airway. He reached for a silver suction probe to clear away her saliva, his fingers fumbling the instrument as he worked.

Stepping to his side, Lucy quickly grabbed a ventilation bag and mask. “Let me help you,” she said, handing them to him. For a second, he felt her hands linger on his and give them a squeeze. The orchestrated chaos and noise of a resuscitation swirled about them – people shouting orders, running to draw bloods, sticking in needles, snapping on electrodes.

Her touch steadied him.

He placed the mask on Nell’s face and squeezed a few trial puffs of oxygen into the woman’s lungs. There was a lot of resistance, the effect of her airway closing off. He scissored her mouth open with his fingers, removing the partial plate. But his thoughts finally slipped his control and streaked unchecked toward reckless conclusions he never would have even considered twenty-four hours ago.

The explosion must have been deliberate, to prevent her from telling him anything, just as someone had silenced Victor Feldt and Bessie McDonald. What’s more, he and Lucy would also have been in the blast had they arrived on time. That couldn’t be an accident either.

Lucy handed him the laryngoscope, snapping it open and illuminating the blade.

Taking it with his free hand and keeping Nell’s mouth pried wide apart with his fingers, he slid the instrument along the side of her cracked and swollen tongue. This was going be a difficult intubation. As calculating as a computer, his brain flashed to the alternative, a tracheotomy, or cutting a hole directly into her windpipe.

Nell’s eyes snapped open, her pupils wide with fear, and she grabbed at his hand. Her lips moved around the blade of the scope as if she were trying to say something.

He took it out.

Her attempts to form words continued.

He bent down to hear, once more fighting back his nausea at the terrible smell.

In a high-pitched whisper no louder than a breath, he heard her say, “What’s my chances?”

He involuntarily glanced along a length of her blackened skin where it had split open and glistened in its own juices. The rest remained intact. She might survive the burn, the tub having protected her, but not the ordeal on the respirator that lay ahead, pneumonia being the most likely cause of death. Beyond that, if the burns were truly just second-degree, she’d avoid painful skin grafts and a protracted recovery. Comfort her with a lie, or give her the truth? Or a bit of both. He usually had more time to make such calls.

She seemed to sense his hesitation, widening her eyes and imploring him with her gaze to answer.

Before he hooked her lungs up to a machine, before he submitted her to the indignities of ventilators, catheters, and mind-numbing drugs, before he stole her voice by sticking an tube through it, she’d a right to say “Yes” or “No.”

“The skin doesn’t appear to be too bad, Nell. Your airway, though, needs help.”

“Odds?” she whispered back.

“Four to one against, for most eighty-year-olds. But you’re way better than most. And once the swelling goes down in your throat, they get way better.”

He wasn’t sure she’d heard him as a darkness seemed to gather behind her eyes again. But then she shook her head. “No lingering… on a chest pump… and don’t let me… choke to death.”

The sounds in the resuscitation room seemed to grow very distant.

“You understand what that means-”

Her stare silenced him.

What she wanted was clear as a shout. To be put out of her misery, pure and simple. He imagined Charles Braden leering over his shoulder. “Nell, I can’t do that,” he whispered.

She retreated into the black recesses where such final decisions are made, but not before he saw an unmistakable flash of contempt in her gaze.

“What’s the delay, Mark?” Carla asked.

“She refuses a respirator, but asks us to keep her from choking to death.”

“Wants to go to heaven, but doesn’t want to die,” muttered a young nurse behind him.

He ignored her and, agonizing over the ordeal he was sentencing Nell to, made his decision. “That means I sedate her with midazolam, we intubate to protect her airway, and you keep her topped off with morphine to combat her pain. Remember, she gets the same compassion you would give your own grandmother…”

As he spoke, looks of distaste spread over the faces of Carla and her staff. It was a gray call. No one in ER was ever comfortable with half measures that violated their pull-’em-back-from-the-brink-no-matter-what mentality. Little wonder. They didn’t see what some of their successes had to go through once they got upstairs. At the same time Nell would feel betrayed by his sticking a tube down her throat. Yet he wouldn’t give in to what she asked. He could no more commit active euthanasia than will his heart to a standstill. So he’d do what he could live with, no matter how anybody else in the business might second-guess him, or his patient despise him on her deathbed. And Charles Braden could go to hell.

“Nell, can you hear me? I’m going to make you sleep. Whenever you wake up, they’ll give you more medication to keep you under. But I’ve got to intubate…”

No response. Whether she ignored him, or had gone beyond hearing anything, he couldn’t tell.

He injected the fast-acting tranquilizer, followed by a shot of succinylcholine, a short-duration paralytic. Together they’d make it easier to open her jaw and visualize her vocal cords despite all the boggy swelling in her upper pharynx. Provided this time he could get by her tongue. The paralytic would also stop her breathing. If he bungled the procedure, he’d have precious little time to go in through the trachea, and Nell might end up with what she wanted in the first place.

He navigated around the tongue to where the lining of her throat bulged like a blackened frog belly. Parting the puffy tissues with the laryngoscope, he slid the endotracheal tube through the V of her cords and attached an Ambu bag, pumping hard and sending squeeze after squeeze of oxygen into her lungs until she recovered enough from the injections to breathe on her own.

Now he had Nell in the odd limbo of morality where doctors, himself included, willingly committed euthanasia, albeit the passive kind, withholding heroic treatment if it’s either futile or against the patient’s wishes, yet doing what’s necessary for comfort. If she continued to breathe by herself, she’d survive. If in the name of controlling her pain or sedation they suppressed her respiration, unintentionally hurrying her to her death, so be it. The law, most physicians, and he could live with that as well. Such were medical ethics in the “gray” zone. To the layperson it might sound like word games. To the one faced with pushing in the plunger, that nuance of intent meant being able to sleep at night. The best Mark could tell himself as he walked out of emergency? He’d saved her the agony of asphyxiation, and bought her a bit of time to have a change of mind about dying. As for the weeks and maybe months of suffering he’d imposed on her, that’s what would keep him awake at night. But for now, perhaps for all eternity, she wouldn’t be telling anyone what “tidbits” or “name” she’d claimed to have for him.

“Make sure someone lets me know if she regains consciousness,” he called back to Carla.

“You were great back there,” Lucy told him.

“I don’t think so.”

They sat side by side on a soft leather couch in the doctors’ lounge at Saratoga General, a room outfitted with tastefully upholstered chairs, potted plants, recessed lighting, and an espresso machine that would have done Starbucks proud. “Those were tough calls, and I doubt even an anesthetist could have pulled off that intubation-”

“That was how my father died,” he said, holding a mug of cappuccino with both hands as he took a sip. The warmth didn’t help the icy grip on his stomach any, nor the cold in his fingers, and his insides were still shaking. “Except there was no one there to help him.”

She went very quiet. “How did it happen?”

Unwanted flashbacks flickered to life: the boom that he heard a mile away, racing toward the smoke on his bike, the circle of people standing around something.

“It was an accident,” he said, trying to shut down the images. “And there’s nothing to talk about. I just wanted you to know why I wasn’t exactly a rock tonight.” The darkest notion of all continued to circle him, but he wouldn’t allow it even to take the shape of thought.

She watched him over the white mound of foam while taking small sips from her own cup, her dark gaze giving him the tell-me-your-story look that he’d seen work so magically with his patients.

Well, it wasn’t going to succeed with him.

Using a tone intended to be all business, he told her only what had been tumbling through his head while he’d worked on Nell, that the gas tank explosion had been deliberately set, intended to kill the three of them. Yet as he talked, his mind veered to the woman on the phone tonight. Whatever else Victor had found, it was what he discovered about the big companies and their executive health plans that seemed to be important. At least she seemed to think so, enough to believe someone could kill him over it.

His thoughts shifted to Charles Braden with those silver-spooned friends of his from the business elites of Manhattan. Maybe one had nothing to do with the other, but he found it impossible not to think that their corporations might be involved.

So he shared all this with Lucy as well.

It didn’t sound so outrageous laid it out in words.

He even talked about his turmoil over how to manage Nell in ER, including the way Braden had intruded on his thoughts because of the set-to they’d had over euthanasia while they were in the man’s library. “I thought he played devil’s advocate last night. But I’m not so sure he wouldn’t have granted Nell’s wish and put her out of her misery if he were running the resuscitation just now.”

“How do you mean?”

“He pontificated about how the line between right and wrong, even life and death, blurs with advances in technology and the times. To prove the point, he raised some pretty troubling issues about euthanasia. It was chilling, hearing him talk about how, in the past, country doctors had smothered deformed newborns to save the family the hardship of raising a handicapped child.”

“What?”

“You heard me right. He’s got this weird collection of medical atrocities he calls his ‘hall of shame’ – twisted eugenics, medical war crimes, that kind of thing – and he uses it to proselytize against deviant science.”

Lucy’s jaw fell, her eyes widened, and she dived for her purse. “Mark, I know what’s wrong!”

“What?”

She hauled out the folded spreadsheets of statistics she’d brought with her and spread them out on a nearby coffee table. “All along you’ve been preoccupied with Chaz, but what if it’s Daddy who has a secret?”

“How do you mean?”

She tapped the papers in front of her. “I didn’t want to tell you my suspicions about what I found here, because they seemed to have no context, and…” She stopped speaking, her cheeks flushed.

“Go on.”

She hesitated, then said, “It’s what we fought about earlier. I wasn’t a total klutz when I came here and stuck my nose in your investigation. I actually bent over backwards not to let my issues with Braden cloud your judgment about the man. So when I saw the discrepancy, I figured my own history with him had made me so biased I might be making too much of it, and I didn’t say anything.”

“Making too much of what?”

“Check this out.” She began to draw her finger down the various columns of numbers. “I think I discovered why your father had been interested in Braden Senior’s charitable works.”

He immediately leaned forward to see what she had.

“These are summaries of the births, deaths, and adoptions at the home; these, births and deaths at the center in Saratoga Springs. Like you, I first looked for the usual indicators of something wrong – a higher mortality-morbidity rate, that kind of thing. But as you said, the statistics are right on the norm for the home, and even lower than normal for the maternity center. In both instances, anyone looking at them would quickly conclude all was well.”

“Right.”

“So let’s say we give the guy credit for superb obstetrical skills on his moneyed patients.” Beside the mortality-morbidity numbers she placed yet another paper full of figures in her handwriting. “This is a synopsis of the actual delivery records your father had requisitioned from both places. I totaled all the infants pronounced normal, and here I itemized those with congenital abnormalities – heart defects; urinary tract anomalies; cleft lips and palates; limb aberrations, including club feet; neuronal tube defects of varying severity, some with only nominally open spines, others with fully open cords; and of course twenty-three trisomy where the mongoloid features were recognizable at birth.”

“You were busy!” Mark said with a whistle, realizing she must have stayed up most of the nights he’d left her working on them at the kitchen table.

“As I said, I got used to reading mass records at the camps. Now here’s the point. The guy’s maternity center is short on congenital abnormalities.”

“Short?”

“Yeah. Remember obstetrical statistics. Three percent of all newborns have some defect at birth. Out of the six thousand deliveries documented in these records, he should have recorded about a hundred and eighty with some kind of problem. He had barely a dozen. Good prenatal care can accomplish a lot, but change the rate of defects that much, no way. He had to be fudging his numbers. At least, that’s what I thought initially, but couldn’t see how or why.”

“Well, I’ll be.”

“And I figured your dad couldn’t pin him down, or he’d have done something about the place.”

He never got the chance, Mark thought.

“Which begged the question,” she continued, “why Braden would care about anyone twigging to the discrepancy in his records at this late date, there being no obvious link with Kelly’s murder or anything else. At least it seemed that way, which is why I hesitated to even bring it up…”

As Lucy talked, the number 180 stuck in his mind. He’d found something of that amount when he reviewed the records himself. But what? He recalled it had to do with the home for unwed mothers, not the maternity center.

“… I did spot another connection, but it didn’t mean anything until just now, when you mentioned eugenics. Look at the total number of adoptions. Braden claimed to have made them directly out of the home for unwed mothers.” She flipped back a page and began to scan yet more lists of figures.

Mark reached over and laid his hand on her arm. He knew what the number would be. One hundred and eighty. His breathing slowed.

“Here it is,” she continued, obviously too charged up to heed his touch. “The number of private adoptions arranged from the home – 180! See what he might have been doing? Substituting healthy babies from the home for deformed ones at the maternity center. I mean, my God, can you imagine anything so hideous? It might actually have been legal if done on the up-and-up, couples from the maternity center putting their deformed kids up for immediate adoption, at the same time picking themselves up a healthy child from the home. Odious, but legal. The trouble is, there’s no records of the abnormal kids at either place. It’s as if they disappeared.”