Oath of Office

CHAPTER 8

The final battle for Dr. John Meacham’s life was over almost before it began. On a vent, with IV blood pressure support and other meds, he was essentially being resuscitated before his heart stopped beating. Dr. Schwartz, the salaried intensive care specialist, who had deferred to Lou for the insertion of the chest tube, administered some cardiac stimulants without any success, and then, after no more than ten minutes, turned to Lou.

“Do you see any reason to continue, Doctor?” he asked.

Lou flashed on the day when he and Meacham had first met at the Physician Wellness Office. Meacham was as tight as a drum skin, and positive that he would never be allowed to practice medicine again. Lou, as a survivor of disaster in his personal and professional lives, knew otherwise. Most of that first session had consisted of him exposing his new client to the life strategies of AA-strategies that he had ridiculed at first as being naive and simplistic-until he actually began to use them in his life.

Meacham had caught on quickly. With the help of an AA sponsor and people at the rehab, his need to drink ceased almost immediately. Following that, his hair-trigger temper gradually came under control.

Now this.

“I can’t think of anything else we should be doing, Dr. Schwartz,” Lou heard his voice saying as if from down a long tube.

Schwartz looked up at the clock and nodded toward Sara Turnbull. “Seven forty P.M.,” he proclaimed.

And just like that, John Meacham’s life was done.

“Has his wife, Carolyn, been around?” Lou asked, realizing that in the craziness of the hours just past, he had lost track of some of his own civility.

“She was in the family room a little while ago,” Sara said. “Should I check?”

“No,” Lou said. “I know her. I’ll go.”

“Out the sliding doors and down the hallway to the left.”

Head down, consumed by heavy sadness at the senseless deaths of so many, Lou stepped through the unit doors.

The husky detective was still at his post. “So, Doc, how’s it going in there?”

“It’s not,” Lou said.

“Dead?”

“Dead.”

The cop nodded. “Whether it’s cops’ bullets at the scene or a shiv in the back in the slammer from one of the other inmates, these things almost always seem to end this way. Well, there go the answers.”

“I suppose,” Lou replied, wondering how easy it would be for him to let matters drop.

The cop was right. There was still a boatload of unanswered questions, starting with the meaning of the words no witnesses.

Lou opened the lounge door. The modest room, furnished in vinyl, with dog-eared magazines scattered about, was deserted. His eyes went first to a television set mounted catty-corner, high up on the far wall. The volume was turned off, though Lou could easily read the CNN news flash graphic from across the room.

BREAKING NEWS: SUSPECTED MASS MURDERER IN CRITICAL CONDITION.

“Not anymore,” Lou murmured, wondering if the grim outcome would have been any different had the local neurosurgeon not gone probing blindly for a bullet in or near the area of the brain dealing with cardiac rhythmicity.

He averted his gaze from the broadcast just as the door to the family room opened and Carolyn Meacham entered. She was slight woman with carefully trimmed gray hair and more makeup than Lou felt she needed. It was surprising that there were no family or friends with her, but perhaps some were on the way. Her makeup did nothing to disguise her pain. Without a word, she raced across to Lou and threw her arms around him, burying her face against his chest.

She was a spirited woman-a New Yorker, Lou thought he remembered, with a hard edge. He had liked her from the very beginning. In all the time he had dealt with her and Meacham, he had never once seen her cry. Now, her tears flowed liberally. It was impossible to imagine what she must have been experiencing since receiving the news. Her three children were all in their teens.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked before pulling away.

Lou nodded. “Just a couple of minutes ago. I came out here from D.C. to see if I could help, but there was really nothing I could do.”

“He was fine when he left home, Lou. He’s been going to meetings and staying sober, and this morning when he left for the office, he was fine.”

“Where are your kids?”

“At my sister Rosalee’s in Chantilly. When the news broke, I had her pick them up at school and take them to her place to keep them away from reporters.”

“Good move. Do you want to go in to see him?”

Carolyn hesitated, and for a moment Lou thought she was going to decline. Then she nodded and took his arm. Her sobbing had already ceased.

The scene in Meacham’s cubicle had largely been cleaned up when they arrived. Nurses had respectfully not pulled a sheet up over his face, although they had left a bandage in place over the bullet hole. Death, as Lou had often encountered it, even violent death, frequently had a calming effect on a patient’s countenance. To some extent, that was the case here.

Carolyn stood motionless for a time, gazing down at the man she had shared a life with for so many years-the interested, interesting caregiver who would never get the chance to see their daughters into womanhood.

“What happens next?” she asked stonily.

Lou felt himself react to her abrupt change in tone. “Now you have to sign some papers with the nurses and John’s body will need to be autopsied,” he said simply.

Carolyn glanced over at him. “Is that really even necessary? Isn’t it obvious how he died?”

“It’s standard practice for all homicides.”

Carolyn shook her head. “Let’s go,” she said, spinning and heading out the door with Lou rushing to keep up.

There were no final caresses, no request for a minute alone, no more tears. It was as if someone had thrown a switch, making Carolyn Meacham aware of the horribleness of her husband’s crime.

Lou gave passing thought to asking what her husband might have meant by the cryptic remark, no witnesses, but this hardly seemed the time.

“I need to pick up my kids and go home,” Carolyn said with no emotion.

“I’ll drive you.”

“I’m fine to drive.”

It was an order, not a statement.

“Well, you may be fine to drive, but you’re not okay to be alone. I’ll ride with you. We can talk in the car. Then, if need be, I can take a cab back here.”

Carolyn made no attempt to talk him out of it.

Outside, the rain had picked up and the fog had thickened. The unseasonable chill persisted. It was Carolyn who first spotted the crowd of reporters lurking about her silver Volvo SUV. Many were using makeshift plastic tarps to shield their equipment from the rain. Lou, headline news himself when the DEA and police descended on his home and arrested him for writing prescriptions for himself, marveled at the resourcefulness of the vultures-how they already knew this particular car belonged to Carolyn Meacham.

As if underscoring his thoughts, their camera lights lit up as soon as he and Carolyn neared. He wondered how long it would take for them to come up with his name. Calls to Filstrup would be sure to follow.

Oh, happy day.

Lou pulled Carolyn close to him, shielding her from the onslaught. Reporters shoved their microphones in her face like mothers trying to force-feed their children, and shouted out questions that became garbled as they clashed with one another in midair. Carolyn was silent ice, her head high, her intelligent green eyes fixed straight ahead. Through the swarm, she somehow managed to get her door unlocked, and then reached across the seat to open Lou’s side. He tossed his rain-dampened jacket into the backseat and quickly climbed in. Carolyn turned the ignition key. The reporters banged on the windows and doors, and stepped aside only when the car began to move.

“Lou?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Something made him do this. He was not a violent person. Something made him do what he did.”

Lou passed on the urge to remind her that a few years ago, her husband had nearly gotten booted out of medicine for losing control.

“I suppose that’s an understandable feeling,” he said instead.

As she pulled onto the driveway, John Meacham’s widow left rubber on the wet tarmac of the doctors-only parking lot.

“Find out what happened, Lou,” she said. “Find out why John killed those people.”