Mortal Remains

Chapter 17

The same evening, Friday, November 23, 9:30 P.M.

New York City Hospital

“My potassium’s 2.1?” Earl felt a ripple of fear. At anything below 3.0, heart muscle became so twitchy the slightest stimulation could throw it into various sorts of fibrillation. Just like what happened to Bessie McDonald. Except hers had been limited to the upper chambers. His entire myocardium could end up squirming like a useless sack of worms, in other words, complete cardiac arrest. He broke out in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with his gut.

Instinctively he didn’t want to move. Any exertion at all could tip him over the edge. Already he could feel his pulse start to pound, the effect he’d expect from all the adrenaline that must be surging through his blood. Christ, slow the rate down, he thought, trying to calm himself, but that only made it tick up higher. His intestines kicked in with a snarl, and hinted at sending another wave of cramps his way. “Oh, great,” he muttered, pain being another surefire way to get his heart racing. “Tanya, I need IV potassium fast, maximal dose, sixty milliequivalents in a liter, run it in at ten to twenty milliequivalents an hour.” The rate had to be exact. Too much too fast could also stop a heart cold.

She grabbed two more vials of potassium from the medication bin, having already added one to the new bag of normal saline that she’d brought with her.

“And I’ll need to be on a cardiac monitor, plus you better give me a hundred milligrams of Demerol after all, to at least take the edge off the spasms-”

“Whoa, I’m not even supposed to be here, remember?” She shook up the intravenous solution to mix in the added vials. “What I suggest,” she added, her fingers flying as she got the new bag up and running, “is request the Demerol yourself as already ordered, and complain of palpitations or something so they put you on a monitor while they sort it all out. That ought to just about cover your needs for the moment. Just before shift change in the morning I’ll phone the result to the floor clerk here, pretending I’m a lab tech reporting an error. She’ll tell the nurses, and they’ll order a repeat themselves. That way you’ll know if more potassium’s required.”

He felt sheepish about his previous suspicions of her. “You’re a wonder, Tanya Wozcek. I don’t know how to thank you.”

Her weak smile couldn’t hide the worry in her eyes as she fine-tuned the intravenous rate. She knew as well as he did it would be very touch and go. “Does that burn?” she asked.

The concentrated solution she’d prepared could strip the lining of a vein, sclerosing it. It already felt like fire going up his arm. “I’ll live,” he muttered.

She slowed the rate by two-thirds.

What he wanted to know was how his potassium could have been brought so low so fast. The runs? Not this quickly. Something else had to be depleting it. But what?

He glanced toward the IV bag Tanya had discarded. “Did your friend run any other tests on me?”

“Sure. Your white count’s up, which is to be expected with the infection, but everything else was fine, except for a high CO₂ which probably doesn’t matter.” She anchored the tubing to his skin with tape.

CO₂ was an indicator of his naturally occurring bicarbonate level, the base that balances all naturally occurring acids circulating in the body. It also existed as a pharmaceutical preparation. Though rarely used anymore, it was part of the emergency protocol for dropping critically high serum potassium levels, and large vials of it were common in hospitals. The solution itself looked clear as water, and if someone did do a blood test checking the bicarb level, it would normally be to make sure the reading wasn’t too low. Nobody would make too much out of an unexplained elevation, just as Tanya hadn’t. In other words, it would be a perfect agent to mess up a patient’s potassium without raising suspicions, and anyone could have slipped a dose into his IV while he’d been sleeping. It also had another nasty little property, he remembered, a chill slowly creeping up his spine. It could precipitate digoxin toxicity in patients who were already on the medication. “Tanya, quick, please grab a urine dipstick and hand me the IV bag you just replaced.”

She frowned, but did as he asked.

He released a few drops of the remaining fluid on the test strip.

The portion measuring acid-base should have remained a neutral beige. Instead it turned blue as a sapphire, indicating extreme alkalinity.

Bingo!

A sickening cold sensation filled his chest.

“Who else would know how to play with potassium like that but a doctor?” she said, once Earl told her what had been done to him. “Chaz still has my vote, or someone he ordered to do it. Christ, forget our other plan. We’ve got to get you out of here. If they can get to your IV bottles without you knowing-”

“Not just yet.”

“Are you nuts?”

“I’ll be okay for tonight,” he bluffed. “Whoever did this doesn’t know we’re onto them or that you’ve changed my IVs.”

“But what about telling the nurses, so you get the monitor, and the Demerol?”

“I’ll still ask for the Demerol, and make up enough of a story about fluttering in my chest they’ll wire me to something.”

“Then who’ll replace your intravenous with extra potassium when it’s empty? I can’t keep sneaking in here to do that.”

“This bag is good until morning. By then Melanie will be here, and she’ll handle everything. You forget, I start walking around now, my heart’s primed to break into a jitterbug.”

Scowling, she planted her hands on her hips. “I can arrange a wheelchair. A stretcher even.”

“And where would you put me? I need to be in a hospital. The worst of this damn infection is yet to come.”

“And you could have yourself transferred, by air ambulance if necessary, back to Buffalo, where you’d be a lot safer than you are here. So quit the bullshit and tell me the real reason you refuse to leave. Are you using yourself as bait?”

Damn right, he thought, more determined than ever to carry out his plan now that he knew what to expect. Logically, the person who’d gotten to his IV before would want to pull a repeat performance, but only after the next scheduled change of the intravenous bag. Since the old one would have run out around 5:00 A.M., that’s when Earl expected his would-be killer to come sneaking around. “Of course not,” he answered, giving Tanya his most sincere smile, until a new wave of cramps twisted him in two and sent his pulse into triple digits again.

“You are nuts!” Her voice slid a notch higher, sounding frightened.

No fooling her. Worse, he sensed she was going to blow the whistle on him. “Tanya, now don’t you tell anyone, hear me? I’ll be all right. Whoever added the bicarb probably won’t try to slip me another dose until after I’m due to get a new IV bag in the morning. And I’ll be ready to raise holy hell the second anyone comes near me. If I haven’t got a nibble by tomorrow, I promise you, I’m out of here.”

She stared at him with that odd moonlike face of hers, looking skeptical as hell.

It took some arguing, but he finally convinced her that if she made a fuss now about extra security or tried to keep watch over him herself, it would alert his attacker and only postpone another attempt on his life. She reluctantly agreed not to interfere.

“But it’s guards, an air ambulance, and home to your hospital in Buffalo if this nonsense doesn’t work,” she insisted.

“Agreed.”

Shaking her head, she turned and left.

He pressed the call button and waited for the nurses, trying to keep a grip on his nerve and ratchet down the drubbing that his heart-turned-boxing-glove continued to deliver against the inside of his chest.

10:30 P.M.

Hampton Junction

It was snowing again, the flakes coming at the windshield like tracer bullets. Mark sat hunched forward over the wheel to see better as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “Nell told me recently about a friend of hers who had a baby at the home,” he said.

“Oh?” Lucy paused in her attempt to direct a blast of hot air from the heater so it would defog the glass.

“The woman had said how she and other expectant mothers wanted to make a garden as a way to lessen the dreariness of the place, but were refused. Not only that, she complained they only had a half-finished lawn to walk on, even though the place was big as a park. And when I went out there, it seemed that lawn never did get completed. It had gone to seed of course, but I could make out the shape. It looked irregular, the bordering undergrowth from the forest having intruded on areas where the grass should have been. Hard to imagine fat cats like the Bradens unable to spring for a bag of seed or more than a few rolls of sod at a time. Unless someone needed an area that was constantly in a state of being dug up, so he could bury what he didn’t want found, then cover it with grass so it stayed put.”

Lucy rode with a hand over her mouth, as if trying not to throw up.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“No, I’m not.”

“Do you want me to stop the car?”

“Won’t do any good. I got like this in the camps. All objective when I found the bodies on paper, but ready to upchuck when the reality of them sank in.”

They rode in silence.

“Why would he do it?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Who knows? Money maybe?”

“But I thought he was already richer than God.”

“He is now. But back then? Sometimes these dynasty families have trouble coming up with the inheritance taxes to pass their goodies from one generation to the next.”

She gave a shudder and huddled deeper into her coat.

He thought of the books in Charles’s library that chronicled all the times and ways humankind had attempted to rid itself of others and protect sameness. “Or it could be a new variant of an old disease,” he said.

“An old disease?”

“Think about the atrocities you’ve seen these last seven years. Aren’t they committed so that the position of one tribe or group or race might be enhanced over the rest?”

“Pretty much.”

“The factions always seem to share the same pretenses, right? Protecting culture, spreading religion, getting an economic edge, creating a nation of superior beings, righting old wrongs – then they outshout each other trying to proclaim their unique benefit to the world, thereby justifying their own entitlement.”

“It’s sounds like you’re quoting a sociology text.”

“It’s by one of my favorite journalists. He writes for the Herald, and I spotted some of his articles glancing through one of Braden’s books last night. That particular line came from a series that won a Pulitzer. It always stuck with me.”

“Well, it describes a few drunken warlords I met in Serbia to a T.”

“I probably still have clippings of the piece at home. It suggests that while primitives use genocide to eliminate outside threats, the sophisticated supremacist prefers eugenics, because that offers the possibility of strengthening the desirable traits of the tribe and weeding out its weaknesses all from within. In other words, improving the species.”

“That’s Nazi drivel.”

“ ‘Marry your own kind’ still holds sway among a lot of non-Nazis.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m just trying to crawl inside his head to answer your question, ‘Why?’ ”

“You spend too much time inside that creepy place, and you’re going to have to hose out your own brain.”

“If Braden believes in smotherings, maybe he’s also an advocate of other twisted beliefs in that hall of shame of his. He and his cronies are as arrogant a bunch of elitists who think they are the chosen ones to rule their patch – a sizable chunk of corporate Manhattan – as any tribe you ever came across on your travels, and a hundred times more powerful.”

“So?”

“So maybe Charles Braden made sure they had more than their fair share of healthy offspring.”

“What?”

“Probably some crazy idea to assure their succession – hand off their life works to a generation free of flaws.”

“But that’s nuts. Sick. Loony!”

“Of course it is. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“But if he wanted healthy kids for all his crowd, why not just help the parents adopt? He didn’t have to risk committing murder.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t go the official route, but I’m almost certain he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think the parents knew. At least not the mothers.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not necessarily. I think I may have already talked to a woman who had her baby switched.”

“No way!”

“Someone who gave birth at his maternity center. Nell suggested I get in touch with her. She blew me off – thinks Charles Braden is a god – but a lot of little details add up.”

“Such as?”

“She said the baby ‘wouldn’t breathe when he came out.’ What else might have been wrong, I’ve no idea. But Braden, instead of trying to resuscitate the kid on the spot, ran from the delivery room, giving the infant mouth-to-mouth respirations, and get this, jumped in his car and supposedly raced to the hospital himself.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Except a week later he placed a healthy baby boy back in that mother’s arms.”

“And she thought it was her own?”

“From the description of what happened in the delivery room, I don’t think she or anyone else got a good look at the newborn. And Nell told me how both at the maternity center and the home, they never let the same staff work more than a few days a week. I’ll bet that was so he could ‘return’ babies when different people were on duty, and he also timed it so the mother went home the next day.”

They rode in silence again.

“I can’t believe the parents knew about the smotherings,” she said eventually.

“Neither can I.”

She remained huddled up in the corner of the cab, apparently lost in thought.

He peered into the storm, the downpour having grown so thick he was driving through white streamers.

“Do you think there’ll be too much snow once we get there?” she asked.

“Don’t know. But I doubt this will keep up. It’s too heavy to last long.”

“Why would he bury them on the grounds, and not off in the woods, someplace far from any connection to him?”

“Ever try to dig a hole in the forest floor? Around here it’s full of rocks and roots. Whenever murderers have made that mistake, even if they managed to scratch out a shallow grave for their victim’s body, animals usually dug it up. I know infants are much smaller, but hunters still might spot the remains, or someone’s pet might start bringing in the bones.”

She fell silent again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

He’d certainly sewn up Charles Braden, all right. Taken threads of the man’s life and tied them together into a nice tight story. Even managed to get him with his own words, quoting from that odd book collection of his. Clever, and no holes. He had an answer for every question or objection Lucy could throw at him, coming up with motive, means, and opportunity.

Yet it almost seemed too neat. Other less macabre explanations were possible. Braden could have been switching babies in secret, but not killing the deformed ones. He might have been turning them over to other orphanages farther afield so the paperwork wouldn’t appear locally. That would require documents he wouldn’t have, but maybe he’d simply forged the signatures, given fictitious names for the mother, listed the father as unknown. If Braden had been switching babies, phony paperwork was much more plausible than infanticide. Yet after seeing those books he had, and hearing what he said about smotherings…

All they would need was one trace of human DNA from the soil and they would have him. But they’d have to get it clandestinely. The minute Braden suspected anyone digging soil samples, he’d have lawyers by the carload sealing up the place.

He glanced over at Lucy. She rode with her face turned away from him. He had to hand it to her, she had quite a talent with spreadsheets. Braden must have figured no one would ever notice the discrepancy with the numbers. Certainly he, Mark Roper, coroner, hadn’t, and wouldn’t be planning to head off in the middle of the night with a pick and shovel if she hadn’t pointed the way.

One thing he hadn’t shared with her, had been trying not to think of at all – the similarity in the attack on Nell and – No, he wasn’t going to even consider that. Couldn’t!

They made the rest of the trip without talking.

As they passed the pay phone near his house, she said, “Maybe you should don your coroner’s hat, phone the friendliest judge you know to get a warrant. Violating the rights of a derelict lawn shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for American justice. If we do find anything, we’ll want to be able to use it in court.” She gave him a weak smile. “See, I’m learning. Then you and I are going to have a bowl of soup – something UN soldiers in Bosnia told me was a necessity for this kind of detail.”

He could imagine. Rule number one: Never spend a cold night digging for bodies without something hot on your stomach.

He pulled over and made a call to a semi retired judge living in a cottage nearby who had once known his father.

“Any luck?” Lucy called from the Jeep when he hung up.

“The guy agreed – promised he’d get the paperwork to me tomorrow,” he yelled back to her, holding the door to the booth open as he dialed the nursing desk for Earl’s floor at NYCH. “If anyone bothers us tonight, we’re digging for worms – Oh, hello, it’s Dr. Mark Roper. Is Dr. Garnet awake?”

“Awake! He’s a one-man, all-night vigil.”

“Plug in his phone. I want to call through. It’s urgent.”

In a matter of minutes he’d told Earl everything that had happened – the explosion, Nell, the conversation he’d had with the woman who worked at Nucleus Laboratories, and that what Victor had found seemed mostly to do with the executive health plans of big corporations. “At least that’s what upset the lady who called. Victor had also zeroed in on some genetic screening results he thought were peculiar, but she couldn’t see anything wrong with them.”

“Who were they of?”

“Siblings with a family history of cancer. They apparently were all negative.”

Earl immediately triaged the rest of the information into a series of succinct questions.

“You’ve still no idea who owns Nucleus Laboratories?”

“No.”

“Any ideas about how to track down your caller and this file she has?”

“Not yet. Haven’t had a chance to even think of it.”

“And Nell never said what she’d remembered.”

“No, chances are there never was anything to tell. She could have said that just to get a visit.”

“So we’ve got nothing.”

“Not exactly. I think my phone’s tapped.”

“What?”

“So no more calls to the house, and cell phones are out.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“And I got a pretty good idea what was going on at Braden’s maternity center and the home for unwed mothers.” He spent the next few minutes outlining the implications of the statistics his father had kept, and went on to describe his library encounter with Charles and the hall of shame.

“Mother of God!” Earl muttered at the end of the story. “That’s so monstrous it’s unbelievable.” After a few more seconds, he added, “It could have been why Kelly was murdered, if she found out.”

“Exactly.”

“Unfortunately, that expands the list of suspects,” Earl continued, still sounding incredulous. “We’d have to add Charles, and it could still be Chaz, defending his father. Hell, we might even have to think of Mrs. Charles Braden, wherever she is these days. No one’s brought her up, but I remember a rather fierce woman who, back then, certainly seemed capable of taking extreme measures against anyone who threatened her husband. But it’s astute work, Mark. Excellent, in fact.”

“Oh, it wasn’t me. Lucy figured it out-”

“Who’s Lucy?”

That’s right. Earl didn’t know about her. “The wonderful Lucy? She’s this miracle resident who’s descended into my life and become my right hand at work, who also makes great soup…”

As he heaped praise on her, giving her credit for having cracked the secret of his father’s files, he opened the doors of the booth again to let her hear. Her cheeks flushing crimson, she waved him to keep quiet from the rolled-down window on her side of the Jeep.

The silence at the other end of the line was total.

“What’s the matter, Earl?”

“I hope you didn’t tell her about me and Kelly.”

“No, of course not.”

The silence continued.

“What?” Mark asked.

“Did you check her out?”

“She’s all right, I promise you.”

“The casualty rate among people who might have helped us has tripled in the last twenty-four hours. At best she’s bad luck. You be careful. My advice is turn over everything you’ve found out to the local sheriff and let him handle it. Don’t go doing anything stupid on your own, hear me?”

11:04 P.M.

New York City Hospital

Earl’s pulse leapt to triple digits as he watched the cardiac monitor the nurses had provided. Though at the moment the pattern indicated a fast but normal heartbeat, the result of his own anxiety and responsible for the boxing-glove effect, nasty-looking runs of extra squiggles occasionally popped up. Diagnostic possibilities of what they could be the precursors to ran through his head, and a cold sweat crept over his skin again.

He averted his eyes and settled himself back down. Better keep his imagination in check if he had any hope of toughing this out and catching a killer.

Yet he continued to worry. First about the arrival of this resident, Lucy, on the scene. As much as he liked Mark, the guy jumped to conclusions and rushed to judgment about people, for better or worse. His resentment of Chaz had almost led him to exclude other suspects since the beginning of the case. Then he’d been ready in an instant to label Samantha’s doings with Kelly as Munchausen by proxy syndrome. What if this time he’d gotten it wrong the other way around, and mistaken a serpent for an angel? He was lonely enough to be a mark for any intelligent, half-decent-looking female. From the way he babbled on about her, he’d been smitten, which meant she could lead him by the nose. What if she were in cahoots with someone who wanted to sabotage the investigation, or worse, lure Mark into danger? And now, apparently thanks to this woman’s helpful interpretation of Cam Roper’s old files, Mark was chasing a crazy idea that Charles Braden could have been involved in some bizarre scheme involving mass infanticide. At first, he had to admit, when Mark told him, he’d been shocked into at least considering it, but then when he learned its source… “Jesus!” he said out loud, his bad feeling about her growing worse by the second.

A fluttering sensation in his chest alerted him to a new round of palpitations, and he lay still, inhaling, exhaling, and getting frustrated as hell.

Tanya slipped in to check on him at eleven as promised.

“All’s well,” he lied, grateful that his tracing on the monitor happened to be going through a quiet spell.

She left looking as concerned as ever.

His restlessness became unbearable. He rang for the nurse, asked for a pad of paper, sticky tape, and as many different colored pens as she could spare.

“You should get some sleep, not stay up coloring all night,” the woman said, not at all as jovial, with her red cheeks and granny glasses, as he’d remembered while loaded with morphine. Her name wasn’t much of a yuk either. The tag read MRS. WHITE, as if she’d killed Professor Plum in the library with the pipe wrench.

“What’ll it be next,” she added, “cutting out paper dolls?”

“Sweet!” he told her.

He proceeded to do what he always did when the complexity of a patient’s medical problem overwhelmed him – make a flowchart of all the variables.

At the center he wrote Kelly.

Circling her like malevolent red moons he placed Chaz Braden and Samantha McShane, and in more distant orbits, using a slightly less vibrant orange, Charles Braden III and Walter McShane.

Closer to Kelly he added Earl Garnet, Cam Roper, and Mark Roper, all in green – the men who loved her.

Radiating out from Charles Braden III he drew two lines. On the end of one he wrote Maternity Center, the end of the other Home for Unwed Mothers. He also made a horizontal line connecting the two, in red.

Floating above these, suspended in the middle of nowhere, he added the name Nucleus Laboratories, and joined to it with a hard black line, Corporate Executive Health Plans. With a lighter line, he added, Genetic Screenings: Siblings with a Positive Family History for Cancer.

From these he penciled in a tentative line to Chaz Braden’s name with a ? on it.

Finally, he scribbled Victims with information at the very top of the page, added Victor Feldt as number one with a black line joining him to Nucleus labs, and Nell as number two, her black line leading to Kelly.

And that was it for Hampton Junction.

Or was it? He added Lucy, circled it, and penciled in three faint lines, each marked with a ?, between her name and his principle suspects – Chaz; Charles; Samantha.

Moving to the bottom of the page he wrote NYCH, with four spokes radiating out from it, one to Kelly, one to each of the Bradens, and one to himself. He added a fifth spoke and on it wrote Bessie McDonald-Victim? Finally, he designated a similar Victim? status to himself.

At first he felt a sense of mastery, having condensed everything on one page. A half hour later he seethed with impatience at being no further ahead in sorting it all out.

He couldn’t pull anything into a coherent whole. The diagram seemed to highlight differences between the various parts of the puzzle rather than link them together. Where were the common threads? He couldn’t relate Bessie McDonald to Victor Feldt and Nucleus Labs. He couldn’t connect the labs to Kelly’s murder. There was even a lack of consistency in the attacks on the victims. At NYCH, the person who had silenced Bessie McDonald and infected him operated like a ghost, attempting to leave no trace of foul play. Such stealth suggested a perpetrator determined to escape suspicion altogether, not just evade capture. In Hampton Junction, however, the attempts to remove people, though clever, were crude. The explosion tonight might silence Nell, yet it most certainly would raise suspicions. As for Victor Feldt’s timely heart attack, that, too, could have been achieved with unsophisticated means. Mark had said he was overweight, hypertensive, and diabetic – significant risk factors. Someone with a gun had already chased Mark up a hill. The same thing could have been done to Victor with lethal results. Again, clever, but nowhere in the same league as what had been done to Bessie and him. It was as if whoever carried out these acts felt he or she could withstand doubts on the part of the police and public about there being foul play, so long as the events could also be read as accidental, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise.

He sat scowling at the diagram, wondering how the same scam could include such wildly divergent tolerances to risk.

“Too many players,” he muttered.

Yet surely Kelly’s murder was at the center of everything.

A sudden pain coiled through his abdomen, once more sending him writhing, his insides on fire despite the Demerol. When it passed he lay drenched in sweat and exhausted, warily watching the monitor while trying to control his pulse. The slightest sound out in the hall set it racing again.

He shakily returned to his diagram, but a single answer to explain the events in Hampton Junction and NYCH continued to elude him. On a whim he thought, Maybe that’s what this crazy picture was trying to tell me. If he couldn’t make sense of it as a whole, what if he broke it down and looked at the parts separately?

He slashed a black horizontal line across the middle of the paper, dividing the two locales and the respective players.

Immediately it simplified things.

Now he could run any number of scenarios to explain the Hampton Junction half of things. Chaz Braden could have killed Kelly because he’d found out she was leaving him, and Nell he tried to blow up because he feared she really did have information that would finally convict him. Simple, straightforward – he liked it. But he still had no idea why Victor Feldt had been killed or by whom. Nor would anyone, it seemed, until they tracked down the woman with the file. And he couldn’t even begin to guess how the lab’s secret tied in with Kelly’s murder. As for the infanticide story, he continued to find that beyond belief.

Again, he wondered about Lucy’s role in all this.

Sent to sidetrack Mark?

By whom?

Chaz? But would he incriminate his own father?

No, that didn’t make sense.

And Charles wouldn’t set himself up.

Samantha maybe?

Well, whoever it might have been, weaving a story of murder from old birth records was preposterous.

Except for one detail.

He circled Cam Roper’s name.

The man had been the first to take an interest in the statistics that Mark and this Lucy woman now found so incriminating. Yet he died before he saw fit to do anything about it. Or had his death conveniently stopped him from taking action? He’d have to ask Mark how his father died. In the meantime, he lightly penciled in Victim? beside Cam Roper’s name.

It was probably another absurd idea. Otherwise, Mark would certainly have seen the possibility and said something.

Or would he?

Earl thought a moment, recalling how Mark had avoided all mention of how his father died. A person could spend a lifetime trying to bury that kind of pain, especially after losing his mom just two years before. Well-ingrained defenses might have kept him from looking too closely.

“Shit!” he said, abruptly folding the Hampton Junction part of the paper out of sight, admitting he wasn’t anywhere close to getting a handle on the happenings there.

A faint noise of squeaking wheels filtered through his closed door from somewhere out in the hallway. He stiffened as it drew nearer.

A medication cart? Shouldn’t be at this time of night.

It kept coming, the high-pitched sound like fingernails on a blackboard.

Then it stopped.

The sound of a wet mop slapping onto the linoleum floor echoed along the corridor.

Just the cleaner pushing his pail, he thought. But the tightness in his muscles wouldn’t go away. He sat listening, hearing nothing else at first, then a soft swishing right outside the entrance of his room and an occasional tap as the handle struck the wall. He held his breath, expecting to see the door push open and someone come lunging in at him.

The tapping passed down the corridor and out of earshot.

He went back to his diagram, this time focusing only on the NYCH half of things. He first considered the three suspects again. Beside their names he printed the word GHOST.

If it was either Chaz Braden or Charles, he couldn’t see how either one of them could get close enough to him and pull it off themselves. But again the idea of accomplices grated.

A solitary physician working for Samantha? That would be the only way she could pull it off.

There was also another scenario, yet he was reluctant to consider it because it opened up so many unknowns. But to be complete in assessing all the options, as he was always telling Mark, he had no choice. The disparities in “risk tolerance” that he’d noted between what had happened in NYCH and the more blatant violence of Hampton Junction, demanded he look at it.

What if there were two separate processes going on, each with its own players, those players each having his or her own motives, but both people connected to Kelly and her murder?

Or had he missed someone in lining up the suspects?

Mark sat at the kitchen table, halfheartedly spooning down a bowl of chicken and barley soup as Earl’s words ate at him. Of course the man didn’t know Lucy, so naturally would be suspicious of the way she’d shown up in the middle of everything. Yet as coroner, Mark himself should have been more questioning and checked out her credentials a bit better before taking her so much into his confidence.

As for leaving everything to Dan in the morning, that also would be the smart thing to do. Mark had even spoken briefly with him from the pay phone, but only about Nell and her prognosis. The prospect of slipping out to the home for unwed mothers, grabbing some soil samples from under Braden’s nose, and possibly hitting a home run against the man before anyone else got hurt still seemed awfully tempting. But now he wondered if it wasn’t too tempting. For starters, why would Braden have talked so openly of smotherings if he had something to hide? It didn’t add up.

“You go get the shovels, flashlights, whatever. I’ll make the soup,” Lucy had said when they’d arrived home. Twenty minutes later he’d loaded the Jeep, changed into warm clothing, and dug out some caving headlamps so they could work with their hands free. As she quickly emptied her bowl and helped herself to seconds, he even started to second-guess her willingness to go out there. Shit! I have to stop thinking this way. But once released, his doubts roamed free.

“Why so moody?” she asked.

He filled his spoon and took a small sip. “Like you, I’m drained.” He hoped he sounded casual enough. “And I’m beginning to think we must have been crazy to consider doing this tonight. Tomorrow I’ll call Dan, he’ll provide the men, and we’ll do the search properly.”

She stopped midway through taking another mouthful. “Are you serious? Somebody will spot us, call Braden, then watch the injunctions fly. Believe me, I’ve been in court against the kind of legal might Charles can wield. They’re masters at delays and stalling. The warrant you arranged for tonight will be shredded. Mark, we could be in and out, get the samples, and maybe it’s case closed.”

“That’s what bothers me, Lucy. Everything points us in that direction. Well, I don’t feel like going where I’m pointed anymore. I mean, we almost got killed tonight. Victor’s dead. Nell’s hanging by a thread. It’s time to pause and reflect, wouldn’t you say?”

Her expression turned stony.

He immediately regretted the outburst. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take your head off.”

She surprised him by removing the spoon from his hand and entwining her fingers in his. “Come with me,” she said, and led him to the front room, where she sat him down beside him on the couch.

“What’s up-”

She silenced him with a pair of fingers to his lips. “Remember I said you could do worse than talk to me about how the past can bite you in the butt. Well, now’s as good a time as any.”

“Lucy, what are you-”

Her fingers pressed against his lips again. “Tell me what seeing Nell brought back.”

“What’s the point-”

“I’m as horrified at what happened to Victor and Nell as you are. It’s horrific. Tragic. Shocking. But what you’re feeling goes beyond that.”

“Now wait a minute-”

“The point is you’re obsessed with discovering the secret of Kelly’s murder.”

“No-”

“I’ve watched you, Mark. Even when you’re not working the case you get a faraway stare in your eyes, and I can tell you’re thinking about it. Believe me, I know the look. I’ve seen it in men on a battlefield who get trapped in what they’ve seen and can’t escape reliving the violence even when everything’s over. Except you were a kid-”

“That’s nonsense. You’re talking about post-traumatic stress – it’s something soldiers get-”

“You’ve never been this wrapped up in a coroner’s inquiry before, have you?”

“Well, no-”

“I think you’re tangled up in 1974, both chained and drawn to whatever happened back then. I also get the feeling you don’t know if you’re stuck in this place, mired in some compulsion, or it’s really where you want to be, doing what you do so well.”

He tried to pull his hand away from hers, but she tightened her grip. Its strength surprised him.

“No, you don’t. I’m the best friend you could have right now, Mark Roper, because I’m not afraid to say what you need to hear. Face it! After all these years, you can’t afford to let much more time slide before you shake off whatever has sunk its teeth into you.”

He felt himself grow sweaty, and the images he’d fought against for a lifetime began to reappear.

He’d jumped off his bike, run up to those people standing in the circle, and pushed through their legs – No he wouldn’t do this. He pulled his hand away. “What do you want to hear, Lucy? That I cried, that I felt terrified, that since then I’ve never stopped feeling there’s this cavity inside me I can’t fill, and the only way to numb the hurt is to keep busy. Holding hands isn’t going to help. There, I’ve talked about it. You want to know how this let-it-all-hang-out crap makes me feel? Angry as hell!”

She grabbed his hand again, her grip even stronger than before. “Fine. Of course you’re angry. Now tell me your nightmare.”

Jesus, is there no stopping her? “You really want to hear this? Fine!” Let her have the story with both barrels, he thought, then watch her run for the hills. “I was riding my bike around town one evening, when there was a big explosion. I raced toward the sound, and saw smoke and flames from his office-”

She silenced him with a finger again. “Lose the anger, Mark.” Her pupils pulsed wide, filling her gaze with a soft darkness that sucked the fight right out of him.

He took a breath and continued. “I skidded to a stop, jumped off, and ran toward a crowd standing in a circle. They were looking at something. No one saw me or barred the way, and I managed to push between somebody’s legs. At first I didn’t even realize the black thing in front of me was a body. But then his eyes opened, and they looked right at me. At that instant someone grabbed me, tried to put their arms around me so I couldn’t see, and kept saying it would be all right. I think they started to take me away, and I don’t know what else I actually saw or only thought I did. But I could still hear. The sounds coming out his throat were the same high-pitched squeaks we heard tonight, except they went on and on, and no one did anything about it. I kept looking around for my dad, expecting him to run up and help. It was only when he didn’t come that I realized who…” He felt his throat constrict.

“Go on.”

Her voice came from somewhere outside what he was seeing. He could never tell if he’d actually witnessed this part, or he’d built it up over the years in his imagination, his mind, his nightmares. In front of him lay his father, straining to breathe. Enough of his clothing had burned off that the underlying skin of his chest, already laid raw with the heat, rippled, then split open to the muscle with the effort. The man arched forward and reached toward him, the whites of his eyes bulging out of his carbon face, imploring him for help.

“Go on,” he heard her say again.

“… I started to scream, broke free, and ran. They found me hiding in the basement of this house. I’ve been trying to erase that sound, that smell, those eyes ever since. Tonight just…” He couldn’t talk anymore. The tears he’d fought back while working on Nell met no resistance this time, and a sob, raw and loud as an animal’s bellow, broke free from deep within his chest.

Her arms were around him in a flash.

“No one helped,” he gasped when he got his breath. “They just stood around and watched him die.” He tried to wipe his eyes and stifle his crying, but she kept telling him that it was okay, and her cool fingers stroked the side of his face. She cradled his head so closely that her hair fell around him in a sheltering bower, and the soothing sound of her heartbeat filled his ears.

He looked up and gently cupped his palm over her cheek. She turned her head slightly, brought her lips to his fingertips, and softly kissed them, keeping her eyes locked on his, not allowing him to evade the truth of these seconds. They remained huddled side by side, cocooned in each other’s embrace, straddling a distance far greater than the reach of their arms.

He lay back and drew her on top of him, and kissed her, and was kissed by her, a fearless gentle kiss.

A mile down the road a red car stood parked under a grove of poplar trees, its windows well frosted by the breathing of the three men who waited inside.

A fourth carrying night goggles walked up to the passenger side and got in the front seat. The driver finished talking on his cellular and snapped it shut. “No phone calls, neither on the land line nor his cellular. They may have figured out we’re listening,” he said to the newcomer.

“It doesn’t matter. Roper loaded up the Jeep with shovels. Looks like they’re going digging.”

“He’s coming now?” the man behind him asked, sounding surprised.

“All I can tell you is he’s ready to break ground. That means we need to get there and wait for him to show up.”

The other man in the backseat muttered, “Well, god damn. I didn’t think he’d take the bait to that extent.”

The driver started the motor and turned the defroster on full blast. “I guess this time we played him just about perfectly.”