Mortal Remains

Chapter 7

Sunday, November 18, 6:55 A.M.

The wind buffeted Mark as he jogged across Fifth Avenue toward the side entrance of the Plaza, but he didn’t feel cold. His run up to the reservoir and back had left him hot and sweaty. A funnel of gold leaves spiraled to the ground and swirled around his feet. Looking over his shoulder to the east, a streak of dawn bright as a polished steel blade hurt his eyes. He hurried inside and, when he got to his room, showered for a long time. Needles of steaming hot water pelted his skull as he lost himself in the din. Then he turned the cold on full.

An hour later he was ready, his head buzzing from the cups of black coffee he’d downed thanks to room service. Carrying his briefcase, he arrived at the Palm Court early only to find Earl already seated at a table reading the Sunday Herald while sipping a cup of coffee. Earl looked rested, clear-eyed, and calm – everything Mark wasn’t.

He’d been on the Internet until two-thirty, having gone back to learn more about Earl in preparation for their meeting. The man was impressive. Stellar in the field of emergency medicine. A long string of journal publications bearing his name. And a nose for rooting out trouble. More than once he’d made national headlines for his part in exposing deadly malfeasance in the health care field, often at great personal risk. Definitely not the sort to bend under pressure, cow before danger, or compromise to save his own skin. But he might do the right thing on behalf of Kelly.

“Morning,” Earl said, appraising him with the thousand-yard stare Mark would expect from someone who’d survived over twenty years in the pit and thrived on it. Gone was any hint of the sadness he’d seen at Kelly’s wake. This was a guy on full alert.

Mark slid into the chair opposite. “Morning.”

This early on a Sunday the ornate, gold-and-cream room was nearly empty. Waiters in green-striped vests descended on them, handing them menus, filling their water glasses, offering coffee, juice, croissants, jams, and butter, then suggesting a selection of entrées to start.

“I’m fine,” Earl said

Mark ordered tea.

The staff retreated, disappointment etched on their faces.

Before Mark could say a word of his carefully prepared intro that he hoped would ease the tension, Earl spoke. “If you’re here as a cop, Mark, get on with it, and I don’t talk to you without a lawyer present.” His voice was calm, his manner pleasant, but his gaze rock hard.

Shit! “Please, Dr. Garnet. I’d prefer we keep this informal, off the record, and that you simply tell me your take on what I found in my father’s files.”

Earl studied him, eye to eye, but said nothing.

Mark opened the briefcase, retrieved a copy of Kelly’s letter from a manila folder, and placed it in front of him. “To begin with, here’s what she wrote about you.”

Earl regarded it skeptically.

“Just take a look. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about any of it, I go my way and do what I have to do. You do the same. But I think we can avoid that.”

He didn’t make a move.

“Dr. Garnet, I figure there are two possibilities here. Either you’re the good man that letter and your record say you are, or you’ve been a brilliant fraud, and should be made to answer to the police about your affair with Kelly and what part it played in her disappearance. Me, I’m betting on the first.”

Earl picked up the sheet of paper and began to read intently, the tension draining from his face. Within moments, he was trying to fight back tears.

Her words on paper sounded as clearly in Earl’s head as if she spoke them in his ear. From the secret place his memories of her had hidden themselves over half a lifetime ago came a rush of forgotten sensations – the musical sound of her voice, her scent, the electric feel of her fingers on his flesh. And his agony after her disappearance.

I’ve met a man.

A wonderful, caring man who loves me, and I love him.

What a release it is to be cherished, respected, and liked. I feel as if all the other garbage has fallen away, and I’m free, with a new life ahead of me. Whether it will be with him or not, I don’t know, but I’m full of hope. I haven’t decided yet what to do about it all, and look forward to talking over possible strategies with you. But I am ecstatic!

In a scar so hardened with time that he barely knew it was there, something gave. It felt as real to him as if withered bands of connective tissue no longer able to hold their burden had split open, and a release he’d never expected to find spread through him. Decades after the doubts stopped mattering, he finally learned she’d loved him.

Logically he knew that after all these years he shouldn’t have been affected so deeply. Not until he brought his hand to his mouth in a reflex of disbelief and felt his tears did he realize he’d involuntarily begun to cry. “Excuse me,” he said, hastily dabbing his eyes with his napkin. “This took me by surprise.”

“I understand.”

In Mark’s quiet voice Earl recognized the same nonjudgmental tone he’d often used himself to encourage a distraught patient to talk. Damned effective. He found himself wanting to explain his reaction, especially to someone who’d known Kelly. That Mark was also the son of Cam Roper, the man in whom she’d confided, made it seem even more like speaking directly to a link with her. “I thought she just ran out, on me, on medicine, everything. That I loved her more than she loved me. That she simply wanted to disappear…” He wiped his eyes again. “Sorry. The human heart can be a sneaky organ.”

“We both lost a lot that summer.”

Earl tabled the napkin. “Yes, you said she was like a sister to you.”

Mark seemed about to say something, but instead reached into his briefcase and placed a file on the table. “This contains photocopies of everything in my father’s chart on Kelly.” He flipped open the cover. “What do you make of that?”

Earl glanced down at the page and found himself looking at a record of Kelly’s visit to Cam Roper as a little girl. Soon hard clinical logic displaced the emotional quicksand of the last few minutes – ER had trained him to make that kind of quick change with personal feelings – and he studied it with his full concentration. Reaching the end, he flipped the paper over. “No follow-up?”

“Apparently not.”

He needed only a few seconds to piece together his initial opinion. “I’d suspect the symptoms were functional, possibly stress-related, just as your father did. I’d also agree with his insinuation in the margin that the mother played a big part in the problem. Clearly she ran from doctor to doctor, probably needing excessive reassurances that her daughter was okay. Except…” He trailed off, interrupted by the memory of Kelly arching against him, making love with the lights off. Always with the lights off because of the scars. But he could feel them – a bad job by whoever had closed the wounds, both of them being as rough and wide as a small rope. On their first night together when he asked about it, she grew embarrassed. “I had problems when I was a kid. It’s over now. Please, don’t talk about them. They’re so ugly.” But of course he’d eventually seen them, catching glimpses in the ambient light through the window and once by a full moon, when she fell asleep lying on her back with the covers half off. They looked like sterling ridges on a silver tray.

“Except what?” Mark asked.

“Those scars bothered her, even into adulthood. I’d say they were left by a surgeon who could have used some practice.”

He flipped ahead, seeing entries indicating Cam Roper had provided Kelly with support therapy over several years, from 1970 until 1974. “Obviously these sessions involved other kinds of scars. Invisible ones. God knows Chaz gave her enough cause for grief, and Samantha wasn’t exactly a mother of the year.”

Mark nodded.

“What are these doing here?” Earl asked, finding what he immediately recognized from their format as reports from NYCH Death Rounds.

“I don’t know. I didn’t look at them too closely – figured they must have been misfiled.”

Earl riffled through them. After years of auditing his own department, he could read the chart of a resuscitation and run it like a movie in his head. He just didn’t glean information; he could place himself in the middle of the action and sense whether the team had worked together with grace or in utter discord. Most telling was the order sheet. The time entries indicated what drugs they gave in what sequence and revealed not only whether they’d done the right things, but if they’d been fast enough doing them. In minutes he had both cases pegged and more. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Mark.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.” He spread the papers out between them. “First the cases themselves. Both received the right treatment in a timely enough way, but the woman was a close call. Initially, whoever ran the arrest almost fell into the trap of ordering more digoxin. See where the order’s been written, then canceled?” He pointed at the appropriate line. “One person figured out what was really going on in the nick of time. After that, everything went like a charm.”

“Okay, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Kelly-”

“Not so. Look at this signature on one of the orders.”

Mark peered at the paper. “I can’t make it out.”

“Not surprising, given how we all scrawl our names.” said Earl. Doctors’ signatures were always indecipherable. That’s why residents and physicians had to enter their training or license numbers after anything they wrote in a chart. “But some of these stand out to me because we were in a study group together all through med school. I’d recognize them as surely as if I’d gone through a yearbook of old class photos.” He picked up the photocopy of Kelly’s letter, folded it to the bottom third where she’d signed Kelly, and shoved it beside the order sheet. “Recognize the handwriting?”

Mark grabbed both papers and held them up together. “My God, it’s her signature!”

“She was there, Mark.” He pushed the order sheet for the man who’d died toward him. “And at this patient’s resuscitation as well. Her name appears several places.”

“My God.” Mark looked up from studying the papers. “But you said they managed this guy fine from the get-go, besides the fact he died.”

“Right. His was the more typical, straightforward presentation of digoxin toxicity, the usual slow heart rate that, when a patient’s on the medication, immediately makes us all think of the right diagnosis. So everybody was on the ball with him.”

“So why would my father keep a copy of either case in her file?”

“Look at the staffman’s initials on both order sheets.”

State regulations demanded that all orders by trainees must be countersigned by their supervising physicians. Most scribbled only their initials and license number.

Mark once more peered at the entries. “C. B. – Chaz Braden?”

“We can check his license number to be sure, but I’d say that’s the reason these files were with your father.”

“Because they were Chaz’s cases?”

Earl leaned back and took a sip of what by now was cold coffee. “Because Kelly feared Chaz,” he said.

Mark stopped midway reaching for his teacup. “Pardon?”

Earl leaned forward. “Think about her preparing to run from a man who might come after her. Maybe she brought his M and M cases to your dad and asked him to check them out, hoping to find if hubby had screwed up, trying to get something that would have given her leverage over him. She might have figured on using it to keep him at bay, making it easier for her to leave.” He picked her letter up from the table and pointed to where she’d written:

Regarding the other two matters, we must discuss those. Whatever I plan for myself, I can’t leave and let them go unresolved.

“She could be referring to something her husband did wrong with these two cases.”

“But you just said, apart from a close call, they were free from screwups.”

“That brings us back to your original question – why your father would bother to hang on to them. He must have still thought something seemed wrong. After all, even a case review can miss mistakes.”

“Not often.”

“They would if the doctor in question was an amoral son of a bitch intent on covering them up and had successfully falsified the records. Maybe Kelly and your father wanted to subject Chaz’s work to a bit more scrutiny.”

Earl knew he’d made spectacular leaps in logic to entertain such an extraordinary set of conclusions. He also knew they’d have to go through the original files in their entirety to ever prove what he’d just suggested. Even then, supposing his hunches were correct, they still might not find anything incriminating if Braden had covered his tracks well enough. But this was the first sign that evidence against Chaz might exist after all – evidence that would show he’d made lethal mistakes, then tried to hide them, and that Kelly found out, perhaps confronted him – he grabbed the order sheet from Mark, his excitement growing.

“I think I can make out a few other names from my class. Two of them, Tommy Leannis and Melanie Collins, attended the memorial service. And check this out. According to her signature here, Melanie seems to be the one who counteracted the order for digoxin and saved the day. With the license numbers of the people I don’t recognize, I could track them down for questioning as well. Maybe a few of them will tell me whether they remember anything screwy about working with Braden on cases involving digoxin. Most of us recall errors by our former professors, though we wouldn’t dare talk about it much at the time.” As he spoke, a sense of exhilaration swept through him. After nearly two weeks of holding his breath, helpless to do anything – the worst kind of agony for someone whose every instinct in a crisis is to act – he had something concrete to pursue.

“Wait a minute,” said Mark. “I’m the one to follow up on that. You and Kelly weren’t as discreet as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the last thing you need is for one of your former classmates to put two and two together the way I did and nail you as the mystery man. Somebody is liable to do exactly that if you show undue interest in solving Kelly’s murder. I can just hear Chaz Braden suggesting the idea that his wife had realized she’d made a mistake having an affair, but you killed her when she tried to break it off. The NYPD would be back in the case and on your ass in a flash.”

“And I’ll say the mistake she made was to tell Braden she intended to leave him, and he killed her for it.”

“Terrific. The cops will throw you both in jail-”

“Mark, I’m doing it, and that’s that. The only hope I have of ever getting free of this mess before it destroys my whole fucking life is to catch the real killer, presumably Chaz Braden. The people we need to talk with at NYCH – classmates, nurses, and doctors – they’re all of the era when I did my training there. Chances are they’ll still consider me one of them and will open up, despite pressure from the Bradens on everyone to keep their mouths shut. Even the ones who think they don’t have any information, if I can get them reminiscing, might spill something useful.” He turned back to Kelly’s file. Nothing but a bunch of newspaper clippings remained. “Now what the hell are these?” he said, picking them up. Unaccustomed to being opposed or explaining his actions once he’d made up his mind, he considered the issue of who would do what closed. The sooner Mark realized that asking Earl Garnet to stay hands off and lay low was tantamount to telling him not to breathe, the better the two of them would work together.

“Articles about the good works of the Braden bunch,” Mark said in a quiet voice, the argumentative tone from seconds ago vanished.

Obviously a fast learner.

Earl skimmed through them as best he could, the faded cuttings not having reproduced well in the photocopier. They seemed unremarkable. “Mean anything to you?” he asked.

Mark shook his head. “Nothing, other than my father saw fit to keep them.”

Earl laid them aside. “That’s it?”

Mark didn’t answer immediately. He still seemed subdued by their little dustup.

Get over it, Earl thought, watching him take another sip of tea.

“Not quite,” he said, putting down his cup. “I want to know if Kelly ever talked to you about her relationship with her mother.”

“No. She was estranged from her parents, but never seemed to want to talk about it. Why?”

“Twice now Charles Braden has given the impression that he thinks Samantha had a pretty sick relationship with Kelly. At first I thought he was just being manipulative, subtly blowing smoke, trying to take the heat off his son by making us go after her, but seeing the woman’s behavior this afternoon, maybe she does bear looking at.”

An image of scars the size of ropes popped back into Earl’s mind. “After Kelly’s disappearance, what did your father say?”

“As I told you after the memorial service, only that she’d gone away.”

“Did you ever overhear him suggest Samantha might have harmed her?”

“No.”

“What about later, when there was no word from her? Any show of worry from him that maybe something had happened to her, and she didn’t run off after all? In other words, was he less blind than the rest of us?”

“There was no later, not for him. As I said before, after Kelly’s service, he died that September.”

Earl immediately regretted being so curt with the Q &A. “I’m so sorry, Mark.”

The younger man’s muscular physique seemed to shrink in on itself. “Yeah. I missed him a lot.”

Earl instinctively sensed it was his turn to encourage talk. But not by asking questions. Simply by listening.

Mark took another sip of tea. “My mother died two years earlier, meningitis – an accidental stick with a needle from an infected patient – so after his death, my aunt Margaret moved in to raise me.” He paused and smiled. “Crotchety, rough as sandpaper on the outside, but someone real special where it counted. I sure knew I was loved…”

As Mark talked about his childhood, he noticeably skirted how his father had died, and Earl didn’t ask. Losing both parents so close together had to have scarred the boy. Yet here he was, apparently tough-minded, certainly personable, and, Earl suspected, a dedicated doctor. He’d have to be, choosing to work solo in such an isolated place that held so many devastating memories for him. Or maybe keeping to himself was the legacy of what he’d been through.

“… I didn’t take over my father’s practice so much as resurrect it. Aunt Margaret, like my mother, had also been a nurse, so when he died, she advertised for a new doctor to come in and replace him. It never happened. His patients ended up going all the way into Saratoga Springs. But as my residency neared the finish, just about everybody in the community besieged me to pick up where he left off.” Mark leaned back in his chair and studied the bottom of his cup, momentarily lost in his own thoughts.

“And why did you?” Years of eliciting painful histories from reluctant patients also taught when a nonthreatening prompt or two would keep a person talking.

“Drawn to it, or maybe lured is the word. The shrinks would say I was probably looking for the dad I lost by trying to be like him. And for happiness. I had it there, until everything changed.”

“Did Aunt Margaret have anything to do with it?”

“I know what you’re thinking. That she encouraged me to follow in Dad’s footsteps. In fact, she did just the opposite. To her dying breath she made me promise to get out of Hampton Junction. ‘Anybody living in hills by choice wants to keep the world out,’ she used to say. ‘Go and doctor people where they want to let the world in, and you’ll be happier.’ ”

“Was she right?”

He shrugged, still cradling the empty cup. “Depends on what day you ask me. I get to do more in the boonies than I ever would in Manhattan. That makes me strong clinically, and I love that. But I do crave my trips out. It’s conferences, ski trips, diving, and theater, whenever I can swing it.”

Earl smiled. Mark’s openness, even about what must be painful for him, suggested someone rock solid despite his childhood trauma. It also probably meant he didn’t get much of a chance to talk about himself. He’d have to be lonely up there, intellectually as well as emotionally, with no colleagues to rub elbows with day to day. “I bet you’d put a lot of us city docs to shame,” he said.

“I hold my own. And I do get to teach. Residents often come to me from NYCH for their rural rotation. In fact, one’s due in another week or so. That part I love. But sometimes, lately, while I can look straight up at the stars to the end of the universe, the trees and hills close in from the sides so heavily it’s like nothing else exists.”

Earl never wanted to feel that trapped.

Later that same Sunday,

11:55 A.M.

Amtrak’s Empire for Albany rolled out of Penn Station and up the shores of the Hudson, first stop Yonkers. Mark managed to find a window seat on the side overlooking the river. As the train wound along its edge, he watched the mighty waterway rush in the opposite direction toward the ocean. He always found release in the transition from the press of New York and trackside buildings to the gentle sweep of bulrushes, distant trees, and faraway hills. He felt it even when the season drew the landscape in bleak, prewinter blacks and browns, and the low sky, laden with snow, ran north like an empty gray highway. The ability to see farther here coupled with the sense of relief of no longer having so many people crowded around inevitably allowed him to breathe easier and think more privately, maybe even more clearly.

The sway of the car rocked him to the edge of sleep, and his mind’s eye wandered along images of Samantha and Chaz at odds over Kelly, Melanie Collins eulogizing Kelly, Earl crying over Kelly’s letter. How differently he’d begun to see Kelly these last few weeks. A woman who had ducked confrontation with her estranged parents and never resolved the problems that alienated her from them. A woman who ran rather than worked things out – even running from Earl. Someone who sought her sense of self and security through others – the Bradens, Earl, his own father. Even, in a way, through medicine. She must have been driven, succeeding at med school the way she did. No, Kelly was neither the flawless saint who had been put on a pedestal at the service nor the victim who had so enthralled Earl. Instead, he began to construct the picture of a very troubled woman who escaped from one problem directly into another.

The car lurched, startling him from his twilight reverie.

He focused instead on what he and Earl had decided. It was to be a simple division of labor. Earl would do the legwork in New York, despite the risk of singling himself out as a suspect. What a hardnose he’d been about that. Little wonder the guy had such a record for finding trouble. And did he treat everyone as if they were his intern and he’d be in charge? Shit, that had grated. Even so, he liked the man.

For Mark’s part, he would use his position as coroner to request the hospital to identify the two patients whose mortality and morbidity reports they’d examined. He’d first try persuasion, falling back on his old ties with NYCH. He’d made a lot of friends there during med school and his residency, some as influential as the Bradens. If that failed, he’d resort to official channels and exert his power of subpoena. Problem was, the process would begin in county court, wind its way through judges in Albany, and probably get him a response from Manhattan by next Easter. Better he get results with honey than have to try vinegar.

He also intended to chip away at Chaz Braden’s alibis in Hampton Junction during the week of Kelly’s disappearance. The town had its share of people like Nell, with sharp eyes and long memories. One of them might have noticed Chaz when he was supposed to have been in New York.

Earl had suggested it might be useful to stir up local memories, very circumspectly of course, regarding Samantha McShane around that time. Circumspectly indeed… with all the nosing around he was going to do under the watchful eyes of Nell and her network.

Not that he’d have trouble getting people to tell him things. One of the burdens of a small-town practice was knowing the secrets of an entire community: the lies, the concealed failures, the hidden disappointments, the masked betrayals, the deeply buried hatreds – all eventually told to him, as surely as the threads of a web led to its center. These days people seemed to feel more comfortable confessing to a physician than to a minister, priest, or rabbi. He figured it had to do with a doctor’s obligation to be nonjudgmental.

The train slowed, and the stop for Poughkeepsie, a gray brick station blackened with grime, eventually slid into view. As he watched the people get off, his cellular rang.

“Hey, where are you?” he heard Dan say as soon as he pressed the TALK button. “I expected you back last night.”

“You sound like a wife.”

“No, just a mother hen.”

“Something came up in New York. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. Should be there by three-thirty.”

“Would her name be Mandy, by any chance?”

“No, Mother! And if you’ve nothing better to do than carry on like Nell-”

“Hey, I’ve been busy. After you showed me all the press clippings your daddy kept on the maternity center and the home for unwed mothers, I got to thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“I wondered if he’d had a similar interest as coroner, so I spent this morning going through all the crates of records we got stored in the White House beneath the jail. Sure enough, he saved a couple of boxes of stuff in there about those two places. Considered it important enough to mark Do Not Discard on the side, and nobody did. Looks like death certificates and birth records.”

Mark felt his heart quicken. Death certificates from the home for unwed mothers would have come to him routinely because the place fell under his jurisdiction. But the birth records, and anything at all from the maternity center, he would have had to send for specifically.

“Now I can’t make head nor tail of them,” Dan continued, “but I figure you might be able to tell what he was after.”

“I’ll swing by the White House and pick them up on my way home.”

“There’s more. I spent all yesterday looking through the copy of the NYPD file you left me. Their investigation back in ‘seventy-four was pretty complete. They even pulled Kelly’s phone records from her Manhattan apartment. That’s where I found something else interesting.”

Dan had to get a life, he thought. This twenty-four/seven stuff might be good for law and order in Hampton Junction, but not for his mental health.

“She made three long-distance calls the morning of her disappearance. The first was to the Braden estate. One of the maids told the police she remembered Kelly asking for Dr. Braden. The maid told her he wasn’t in and that Chaz had already left for New York.

“Kelly placed her next call to the home for unwed mothers. No one there remembered it. Maybe she didn’t identify herself, the police figured, and was still trying to reach Chaz. He occasionally dropped in at either place on his way to the train and did consults on newborns with heart murmurs. Except that morning he went directly to the station, by his own account. The police checked. The time lapse between the time he and the house staff said he left and how long he had to catch the morning express to Manhattan allowed no detours. So if she did call looking for him, she would have been told he wasn’t there either. At least that’s what the police report figured.”

“Okay.”

“Kelly made a third call, this one to the maternity center, presumably still looking for Chaz. Again, no one remembered her phoning, but the police once more didn’t make anything of that.”

“Where’s this going, Dan?”

“That last call cost her four-fifty. The two previous ones less than a dollar. I didn’t think anything of the difference at first. Hell, a long-distance minute on hold would have eaten up a buck easy those days, before the breakup of AT &T. But I took a closer look at the record, and found she spent ten minutes on the line. She might have reached him there.”

“You mean Chaz Braden lied about going straight to the station?”

“Not only that. If he stopped by the clinic, he would have had to have left the house earlier than he said to make the train at all.”

“And the household staff and people at the clinic went along with the lie?”

“Probably because they’d no choice but to protect their boss’s son or lose their jobs.”

It didn’t make any sense. “Why would Chaz risk so many people being able to expose him?”

“The key lie would be his insistence that he hadn’t spoken with her since she left the estate bound for New York the day before.”

“Any theory about why he wouldn’t want the police to know something so mundane?”

“You tell me. But if she talked to him, at last we’d have a chink in that prick’s story.”

2:30 P.M.

LaGuardia Airport,

New York City

“Hope you don’t have stinky feet,” Earl said to Janet, watching the security officers make a lineup of passengers take off their shoes. The roar of a departing plane blistered the air, making him raise his voice.

“Smart-ass!” She stepped in close to him, took his face between her hands, and gave him a long soft kiss on the lips. “You be careful,” she whispered in his ear.

“I love you, and give Brendan a hug for me.”

“You bet. And you call to give me an update every night.”

He grinned at her. “Sure.”

“It’s not funny, Earl. You make your poking around too obvious, and I’ll end up reading your name in the Herald. Mystery Lover Found.”

“Come on.”

“Come on, yourself. Chaz Braden looked like a big vulture, hanging around at the memorial, eavesdropping on everyone. He’d love to find out whom she met in that taxi and shift suspicion from himself. And from the angry expression on his face whenever he glanced in your direction, I’d be afraid he already suspects that you were having an affair with his wife.”

“If you asked me, he looked pissed off at all Kelly’s old friends. He probably thinks it could be any of them. Otherwise, he would have served me up to the cops by now.”

“My, aren’t you reassuring?”

He grinned down at her, tightening his embrace. “You look beautiful.”

“What I am is frustrated. There are leads Mark Roper should be following that have nothing to do with her old friends and needn’t put you in danger.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve been thinking about Kelly, and there’s a piece missing. The first thing a woman in her predicament would do is arrange a divorce. Back then, God knows where she’d have had to go. Reno, maybe? Mexico? The Dominican Republic? Did you try that angle when you looked for her?”

“No, I never thought of it.”

“A man wouldn’t. You tell that Mark Roper he should see if she got that far. It might help him piece together her movements before she died. He has to do that, at least, if he hopes to find new evidence to prove hubby or mommy or whoever killed her.”

“I’ll tell Mark.”

The boarding call for her plane came over the PA.

“Good-bye, love,” she said, giving him a second kiss even softer than the first. “And don’t forget. Call me every night, be careful of Chaz Braden, and talk to Mark about what I said.”

He pressed her to him, savoring how slight and yielding she felt beneath her coat. “Yes! Now go.”

She stepped into the inspection area, slipped off her shoes, and stood with her arms wide, ready to be electronically frisked. On the outside she looked remarkably calm. But he knew otherwise. Whenever she felt really scared, she started giving him instructions.

4:00 P.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark knew someone had been in his house the minute he stepped in the door.

Little things were out of place.

The separation between coats and jackets in the front hall closet had changed. A week ago he’d moved the summer ones to the back and the winter gear to the front, so the positions of those items remained fresh in his mind.

Someone also appeared to have gone though the pockets, the material of a few being pulled almost inside out.

In the former living room, where he’d set up his waiting area, the phone and clock on an end table weren’t in their usual positions. He kept the face of the latter at an angle so everyone could see the time from any chair in the room, the phone placed off to one side so as not to obstruct the view. Instead they were placed one in front of the other.

Growing increasingly alarmed, he rushed into his office, which had once been the dining room.

All his computer equipment remained in place. The usual stack of unopened mail alongside a pile of unsent billings and recent test results that needed to be put in their proper files – he was weeks behind in his paperwork – were where he’d left them. Turning to the steel cabinets in which he kept patient records, he found them locked. No marks on the metal casings suggested an attempt to force them open.

Thank God, he thought, looking around the room, unable to see anything missing. The adjacent examining room also seemed undisturbed. The drug cabinet, he thought, and ran to the back room, where he’d installed a medium-sized safe to store a supply of narcotics – codeine, percodan, and morphine – along with other controlled medications such as tranquilizers.

He found it intact.

Nor had there been any obvious attempt to tamper with it.

So what could an intruder have been after if it wasn’t computer equipment or drugs?

A third possibility crept to mind as insidiously as a chill. What if anything of interest was still here because the thief hadn’t finished robbing him?

He went very still.

The house itself didn’t creak tonight since the wind was light. He heard nothing else.

Had the person escaped?

Either the kitchen’s back door or the basement door could have been forced? Or one of the ground-floor windows could have been broken.

He pulled out his cellular and called Dan. He’d just left him at the White House, having already picked up the boxes of birth records.

“Someone’s been in my house,” he whispered as soon as the sheriff answered.

“Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus, is anything missing?”

“Not that I can tell in my office or living room. I haven’t checked the rest.”

“Why are you whispering – Jesus Christ! Is the person still there?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m on my way. Get out of there, Mark! Wait in your Jeep with the doors locked. Better still, drive to a neighbor’s.” He hung up.

Good idea.

Except it would take Dan at least ten minutes to get here. That might let whoever it was get away, free to try again.

Tiptoeing back into his examining room, he looked around for a weapon. He kept hammers and axes in the basement. All he could think of to defend himself with was his largest syringe and needle.

So armed, he crept out of his office and silently made his way to the kitchen. Peeking through the swing door, he saw nothing.

He stepped through.

Nobody.

He made his way to the stairs and started up to the second floor, trying not to recall old black-and-white movies where the killer lurked in the dark at the top of the landing. He raised his needle, holding it out in front of him at arm’s length.

No one jumped him.

One by one he checked the bedrooms.

Empty.

That left one other possibility.

At the same time he heard the distant wail of Dan’s siren.

He quickly descended to the first floor, ran back into the kitchen, and threw open the door to the basement. Figuring Dan would be here any moment, he went on the offensive.

Flipping up the switch, he flooded the darkness below with light, and yelled, “Okay, you! The cops are at the door, and I’m armed. Identify yourself now!”

The only sound was Dan’s siren getting closer.

“Do you hear that? Now give up and come out.”

Still no response.

Emboldened, he started down into the single big room. Within seconds he’d checked out the few nooks and crannies where someone could hide.

Not a soul.

Beginning to wonder if he’d been mistaken about an intruder, he turned to go back upstairs.

And saw the coat he’d laid across the bottom of the basement door over a week ago.

It lay pushed to one side, the way it would have been if someone had come in, and, it being dark, not realized it was there. He walked over and tried the door. It was locked, but the mechanism had to be a half century old and could have been easily picked, then locked again on the way out.

He stood there wondering what his uninvited visitor might have wanted and found himself staring at a wall of boxes – his father’s old files.

Oh, shit, he thought, quickly crossing over to check. They appeared just as he’d left them, but with a queasy feeling he pulled open the one containing the original records on Kelly. Chaz Braden could have overheard his conversation with Earl Garnet at the reception about having found old files on her. Had he thought it might contain something incriminating and tried to steal it?

Almost to his surprise he located the folder exactly where he’d left it. He flipped through the contents to verify nothing had been taken. The record of Kelly’s first visit as a little girl – check; Kelly’s letter – check; notations of psychological counseling – check; two dig toxicity case reviews – check; newspaper articles – check. Nothing missing.

Crazy idea anyway, he chided himself. It would have been too obvious a move, even for a klutz like Chaz.

He was returning the folder to its slot when he thought, Wait a minute. He’d kept the contents in the same chronological order he’d found them. Done it out of habit. Doctors always kept the contents in each section of a file, from clinical notes through consults and special entries to test results, in the sequence they were received. It made it easier to review and follow a case that way. His father would have done things the same. It was no accident Kelly’s letter had followed after the entries for psychological counseling, because that would have been the order his father received it. And after photocopying the file Mark had put it back in that same place. Yet just now he’d found it in front of the entries for psychological counseling.

Someone had definitely gone through Kelly’s file.