The Last Surgeon

CHAPTER 8

“The police ruled it a suicide. But could it have been murder? Hello, all you Charlotte Night Owls. You’re tuned in to WMEW, 82.5 FM, home of the Rick Clemmons show, starring me, Rick Clemmons.” The rotund DJ, draped in an orange-and-white Hawaiian shirt, wearing loose-fitting cargo shorts and a straw cowboy hat, pressed a yellow button on the eight-channel mixing board, cuing his show’s signature heavy-metal guitar theme song. “For those of you just joining us, our in-studio guest this morning is Jillian Coates, from… Virginia?”

“That’s right. Arlington.”

“Jillian… do you go by Jill or Jillian?”

“Jillian… with a J.”

“Jillian with a J is a photographer and the sister of Belle Coates, the Charlotte resident and nurse at the Central Charlotte Medical Center who died three weeks ago in an apparent suicide from a drug overdose.”

“Nurse, Rick. I’m a nurse just like my sister. I just do photography as a hobby. Once in a while I sell a piece or have a show, but-”

“Yes. Well, the police called the death of Belle Coates an open-and-shut case. Our guest this morning, a nurse currently working at…?”

“Shelby Stone Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.”

“… Shelby Stone Memorial Hospital, isn’t so sure. Separating fact from fiction is what the Rick Clemmons Show is all about, and this juicy tale has more twists to it than a Twizzler. Bogus suicide? Botched investigation? Delusional sister? Psychic connection? You be the judge. But you know that Rick Clemmons always gets to the truth. So remember, our phone lines are open. Call anytime, boys and girls. Let’s get to the bottom of this thing!”

Jillian balled her fists and reminded herself that media exposure was what she was after. You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas, her mother always said.

The weeks since Belle’s death had been a living hell. With one terrible call from the Charlotte police, Jillian’s life had come to an abrupt stop, and then made a sharp right-angle turn. Nothing would ever be the same. Not an hour passed that she didn’t think about her younger sister and imagine what the final minutes of her existence must have been like. It made no sense that Belle, though hurt by her decision to break things off with the philandering jerk she was close to marrying, would be despondent enough to take her own life. She was all about adventure, discovery, and a love of people. Even in the infrequent troublesome times of her life, she had never even hinted at suicide.

Jillian was the volatile, eccentric one-the lone eagle with the spontaneity, the artist’s eye, and the unpredictable temper. Belle was a warm breeze-a zephyr, making everyone’s life she touched feel better.

You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Who in the hell could have done this to her?

When Jillian agreed to come to Charlotte for the radio show, Rick Clemmons’s producer made it clear that the host, though genuinely caring, made his living by being outspoken and feeding the insatiable schadenfreude appetite of his audience. But at this instant, having to endure the man, she wished that he could know exactly what it felt like to lose somebody whom he loved as much as she did Belle. She wanted him to feel his stomach knot up at seeing his loved one’s photograph-to endure a sadness so profound it threatened to stop his breathing.

Sadly, out of more than a hundred requests she had made to local, regional, and national media outlets, Rick Clemmons was the only broadcaster who agreed to air her story. Like it or not, she had to play by his rules. As desperate as she was, she probably still shouldn’t have come. But she had to do something. There was no way she could just turn and walk away. This was her sister… her best friend. Somebody, someplace, had to know something. What else could she do but keep looking, even if it meant having to deal with a bottom-feeder like Rick Clemmons?

Clemmons pressed Mute on his mixing board, then turned to her and asked, “You ready to keep going, little lady?”

“I am,” Jillian said, adjusting her headphones.

“We gotta share a mic, remember. The AKG is on the fritz. Means you gotta lean in real close, now.”

His gaze traveled downward and Jillian could feel him unbutton her blouse with his eyes. She was used to men staring at her and flirting, but something about Clemmons made her itch. To distract herself, she again fiddled with her headphones and politely nodded.

Despite his show airing at the obscene hours of 1 A.M. to 6 A.M., Jillian had held out hope that Clemmons would actually have someone in his audience who could help her. Those hopes took a direct hit when she pulled her rental car into the station’s dirt parking lot, abutting a barren, litter-strewn stretch of Highway 27 between Charlotte and Paw Creek. The producer had said nothing to prepare her for the ramshackle trailer from which WMEW broadcast.

When she first knocked on the rust-speckled trailer door, she half expected a crazed, toothless old man, shirtless in his overalls, to leap out and grab her. She knew going in that WMEW was small-market radio, but hell, this was bordering on microscopic. She wondered how a photographic study of the place would fit in with her current project on America’s back roads. It wasn’t surprising that Clemmons had to resort to tabloid radio to maintain competitive ratings, especially competing in such an ungodly time slot. But she was frustrated to the point of desperation, and it was either play this game, or don’t play at all.

“Okay, Jillian,” Clemmons said into the one working microphone. “Now, if I’m getting this right, some of the evidence you have that your sister was murdered is in her diary?”

Jillian paused to compose herself.

“Not exactly. After the police had completed their evaluation, I came to Charlotte to collect her things.”

“What things?” Clemmons asked.

“Everything. Photographs. Clothes. Files. Her computer. I boxed everything up and hired a moving company to move all of her things to my place. I wanted to go through it all one last time before I… before I started throwing things away. The police didn’t need any of it. According to them, there was nothing for them to investigate.”

“Except maybe murder,” Clemmons threw in.

“There was a diary-more like a journal, actually-but there wasn’t much in it that I didn’t already know. As you can tell, my younger sister and I were very close. Our… our parents were killed in an auto accident twelve years ago, when she was fourteen and I was twenty-four. We lived together until she started nursing school-the same school I had gone to in Washington. During vacations and summers, she stayed with me in the condo I bought with my half of the sale of our parents’ place.”

“Exactly what did you find in this diary that led you to believe the suicide note she left was somehow bogus or forced by another person?”

“First of all, I want to say that I am a psych nurse in one of the best departments in D.C. I’ve been in that specialty for a long time. It’s my job to know when someone is suicidal, and believe me, Rick, Belle was not suicidal. Not in the least.”

“The diary?”

“It wasn’t a deeply personal, from-the-heart diary; more like a journal of events in Belle’s life. It wasn’t locked up or hidden away. I found it on her nightstand while I was boxing up her things.”

“So I’m guessing the diary-I’m sorry, journal-didn’t say, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ If it did, you wouldn’t be on this show.”

“Exactly. There was nothing in any of her entries to suggest that she was even in a fragile state. In fact, I was planning on driving down in a week. All she said the last time I… the last time I spoke with her was that she couldn’t wait to see me.”

“But there was that broken-off engagement that she was depressed about, right? Her fiancé, Dr. Doug Dearing, an orthopedist at the Carolina Bone and Joint Hospital, reportedly was having an affair with her best friend.”

Jillian took some comfort in knowing that Clemmons had at least a cursory knowledge of the facts. She could handle him ogling her, but only if he gave Belle the respect she deserved. It was also great to hear Dearing’s name and actions broadcast.

“Sure, she was depressed about it,” Jillian answered. “Who wouldn’t be? She had seen a therapist and gotten the sleeping pills that-that she took. But she was philosophical about the end of the engagement, and actually grateful she found out about what he was before”-Jillian paused and cleared the fullness from her throat-“they got married. There were passages in her journal where Belle wrote about feeling stronger, more like her old self again. She even referenced her upcoming diving trip to Cozumel with her girlfriends, and how much she was looking forward to it. That’s not the writing of somebody who would take her own life.”

Jillian had read the journal several times. It brought them closer, the way e-mails or talking on the phone had done. But it was also like experiencing Belle’s death over and over again-traveling alongside her through years of hopes, joys, and disappointments, all the while knowing it would come to a tragic end.

“So, have the cops ever investigated this Dearing fellow?” Clemmons asked.

“They did. But he had an alibi. He was with his girlfriend and out of state the night Belle died.”

“Then there’s this wild psychic connection business. What was that all about?”

“I would prefer to avoid the implications of the word ‘psychic,’ and just leave it at ‘connection.’ ”

“Go on.”

“At what might have been the exact moment Belle died, certainly within the same half hour, three hundred and thirty-five miles to the north, I became as violently ill as I have ever been. It felt for a while, as I was getting sicker and sicker, on the floor in my bathroom, as if I were going to die. The horrible attack went on for half an hour or so, and then simply went away, just like that.”

“Yes, okay. Well, the Night Owl listeners to the Rick Clemmons Show might believe in such psychic connections, but we’re here to sort out the facts, and only the facts. And the facts in this case, at least as you have presented them so far, do not lend support to your contention that she was forced to write a suicide note and then forced to swallow a lethal dose of sleeping pills.”

“I disagree. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’ll excuse me for saying so, Jillian, but so far I’m not convinced. Tell me more about the journal. What about it made you think Belle was murdered?”

“It wasn’t the journal so much as it was Belle’s suicide note,” Jillian said. “In both the note, when she told me she was sorry for what she had to do, and all throughout the journal, Belle referred to me only as J.”

“So?”

“In the journal, that was just an abbreviation she used for me. She would never refer to me by an initial in something as emotional as that note. She’d write out my name, or at least ‘Jill.’ I don’t know how, or why, but I’m sure she was forced to write the note and using just the letter J was her way of telling me so.”

“Thin stuff, Jillian,” Clemmons said, glancing down at the lifeless caller board. “I guess the police didn’t make much of it.”

“Actually, they didn’t make much of anything.”

“Well, did you notice anything strange about the things you found in her apartment? Anything at all?”

Jillian hesitated. She already felt foolish enough presenting the psychic connection, and hearing Clemmons talk about the journal made most of her points sound thin. But there was something else.

I have nothing to lose by mentioning this, she decided finally.

“In a box in the back of her closet, Belle had a stack of comic books-fifty or so different issues of the same kind, and they didn’t make anything of those either.”

“Comic books?”

“I feel I know-knew-my sister very well. I had no idea she was interested in any sort of comics, and I told the detectives how odd that was, but they just shrugged the notion off. In the box, right on top of the comics, were several printouts from the Internet. Belle had been researching them. I have no idea why, and as I said, the police just didn’t care.”

Clemmons glanced once more at the naked caller panel.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, what?”

“What were the comic books?”

“Oh, I had never heard of them before, but they were all Marvel comics called Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. And on the cover of several of them she had written ‘Doctor’ or ‘D-R period’ right before his name, or ‘Ph.D.’ right after his name. Maybe that means something to your listeners.”

“Well, it doesn’t to me, except that your little sister may have been more eccentric than you knew. Maybe she had a secret life. Listeners, what’s your opinion?”

As if on cue, a blinking light appeared on the studio’s small call-in panel.

“There’s one,” Jillian said, forgetting for the moment that their mic was on.

“Thanks for the help,” Clemmons said sardonically. “Hey! We got ourselves a caller. Hello to Troy from Weddington. You’re on the Rick Clemmons Show, whatcha got?”

“Yeah, this here’s Troy, from Weddington,” the caller said in a dense, backwoods patois.

Inwardly, Jillian groaned.

“What’s up, Troy? You’re on air with Rick Clemmons. You got thoughts on the Belle Coates case?”

“Nah,” the caller said. “I’uz just driving west on Seventy-four. Thought yer guest sounded hot. Figured I’d call.”

Clemmons looked over at Jillian as though he were making an assessment, offering an apology, and issuing a warning, all at the same time.

“Hey, numbnuts,” he said, “this isn’t the dating game. We’re doing real investigative reporting here. And yes, Troy from Weddington, for your information Jillian Coates is hot-tall and slender and absolutely gorgeous. But she ain’t interested in you, Troy, and guess what, neither am I.” Clemmons disconnected the call and cued the sound effect of an exploding bomb. “Look, folks, you got opinions, share ’em. You got information, especially about a Marvel comic hero named Nick Fury, or Dr. Nick Fury, give it up to us. You got a big woody like that idiot who just called, well, that’s what your bedroom’s for.” Clemmons laughed.

Jillian was glad she wasn’t holding a weapon. Agreeing to appear on this show had clearly been a mistake. The time could have been better spent going through Belle’s things again, searching for any kind of clue as to what might have happened that horrible night.

“As I was saying,” she managed, “if you knew my sister, you’d know she wouldn’t take her own life.”

“Have you hired a PI? You know, somebody familiar with the ins and outs of police work, who can review the case file with fresh eyes.”

“I’m a nurse. The detective I called wanted a retainer that would have just about wiped me out. In the weeks since my sister’s death, I’ve taken a leave of absence and made finding her killer my life’s purpose. I’m hoping somebody out there knows something and has the courage to come forward and help.”

Clemmons clicked over to a second caller.

“Go, you’re on the Rick Clemmons Show.”

“Yeah, lady, why don’t you come over to my apartment and I’ll help you do some real detective work.”

Clemmons disconnected the call and signaled for a commercial.

“Sorry. Even though I think it’s true, maybe the tall and gorgeous thing was a little unnecessary. Ralph,” he called out to the producer, a beanpole with a head resembling an ostrich egg, “what in the hell kind of calls are you letting through?”

“We ain’t got a very big selection, Rick,” the man replied from the tiny control booth. “Besides, you know as well as I do, that kind of call is why people keep tuning in. You’re on in three, two, one… and… now.”

“What happened to respect, people?” Clemmons barked at his audience. “There was a time when you callers at least had some sense of decency. Come on, Night Owls. How about some thoughts about the journal and Jillian’s theory? You know, tonight’s topic? How about some comments on that? How about those comic books she found? Doesn’t it seem weird for Belle Coates to be collecting Nick Fury comics?”

Jillian looked again at the studio walls, adorned with pictures of Rick Clemmons glad-handing with celebrities she recognized. Maybe she had read him all wrong. This wasn’t a dream gig for him. He had mentioned getting fired from a much bigger station in Atlanta, but hadn’t said what he did wrong. Rusted trailer or not, it was starting to sound as if his concern might be genuine.

“Sorry about these callers tonight, Jillian,” he said on air. “Okay, everyone, the truth is what matters most on the Rick Clemmons Show, starring me, Rick Clemmons, broadcasting on WMEW 82.5 FM, where the weather is still the same as it was ten minutes ago when I last told ya’, fifty-five degrees and dark outside.”

Clemmons signaled to Jillian that it was her time to talk.

“I think whoever killed Belle knew her,” Jillian said. “There was no sign of a break-in or a struggle.”

“A young nurse with an obsession for comic books dies under at least suspicious circumstances. Her apartment is locked up solid from the inside. Theories, people. Theories.”

A lone light on the phone bank began to blink, along with a message from Ralph on the small LED display announcing the caller’s name.

“Hey there, Joe from Monroe,” Clemmons said, “nice rhyme. You’re on the Rick Clemmons Show, you got any four-one-one for us?”

The caller laughed. “For this crackerjack? No. Nada. You’re nuts, Clemmons, for having this whack-job on.”

“Joe, get ready to be blown up. That your real name?”

“My real name is Officer You Don’t Need my Name, of the Charlotte PD. And yeah, I got info. I was one of those who investigated this case. And I’ll tell you this much. This lady is way off base. What are you trying to say? That we don’t know how to do our job?”

“No. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I just want somebody to listen to the facts I’m presenting,” Jillian answered, her voice again husky with frustration. “My sister would never, ever have-”

“The fact is that comic books or not, your sister killed herself. Look, we got it bad enough out there with dopers and killings and carjackings, without you making things worse by questioning our ability. We investigated Belle Coates’s death. We investigated it good. Those Internet printouts with the comics were years old. Years. She made the choice. She took the pills. She died. Case closed. Don’t blame us for it, lady. Blame her.”

“I… I…”

There was a click and a dial tone.