Third Strike

CHAPTER 20

The hospital where Jeremy Lee had been both a doctor and a patient was set a long way back from the road on a huge sprawling piece of land south of Boston itself.

I still had trouble getting my head round how wasteful America was with its land. Unless you were in the heart of a big city, nobody seemed to bother about redeveloping brownfield sites. They just boarded up the old building and went and broke ground somewhere fresh. Even the smallest business had a car park the size of Sweden.

It seemed to take forever to reach the hospital entrance. We drove in through carefully landscaped grounds that looked more like a golf club than a medical facility, with fiercely posted speed limits. I hoped the ambulances had a faster approach road, or their emergency patients were likely to expire between the main road and the front door.

We’d already detoured via a roadside rest stop for Sean and I to change into our disguises. My father had decided to bluff it out in the role he played best—arrogant surgeon. He would walk my mother in through the front entrance and we’d meet up inside. Entirely from memory, he gave us precise directions to the elevators and the stairwell.

“They’re highly unlikely to have removed Jeremy’s records from the system yet,” he said. “All I need is an empty office with a computer terminal.” His eyes flicked over the pair of us. “You won’t be able to take your guns.”

Sean’s silence spoke louder than any verbal disagreement would have done but eventually he sighed and shoved the Glock, still in its holster, into the Navigator’s glove box. I added my SIG and, when I glanced at him, caught my father’s satisfied little smile, like he’d just won a point of principle rather than necessity.

I knew Sean was as unhappy about this as he was about relying on my father’s intel, but he bore it without comment. He’d always been able to listen to orders and evaluate them in a detached manner, even when they were given by officers he despised.

The plan we loosely devised was that Sean and I would go in via the underground ambulance entrance in the guise of nicotine junkies. To this end, Sean had even picked up a discarded cigarette packet and straightened it out, to add a layer of verisimilitude. The empty packet sat on top of the dash and the strange pervasive smell of unburned tobacco leached into the atmosphere inside the Navigator.

“What about me?” my mother asked. She had no surgical wear. “I can play some useful part, surely? If you recall, darling, I was awfully good at amateur dramatics when I was younger.”

“You were.” My father smiled at her fondly if somewhat patronizingly, I thought, and patted her hand. “In that case, we’ll hold you in reserve as our secret weapon.”

She sat up a little straighter and smiled back, hearing only praise.

“Look, can we go and get this over with before I go old and gray?” I said, a little tartly, earning a reproachful look from both of them. When was I going to outgrow that?

We parked up as far away from the security cameras as we could manage and parted company, walking quickly. As my father had predicted, nobody paid us the slightest attention as we ambled inside the building, discussing a nonexistent cop show we were supposed to have watched on TV the night before.

The unflattering skullcap was uncomfortable to someone whose only regular headgear was a bike helmet. I tugged the cap down over my forehead, rubbing the skin carefully as I did so. The lump from when I’d head-butted Vondie in my mother’s drawing room seemed to be taking a long time to disappear. I wondered how her nose was feeling.

The four of us rendezvoused in the ER, where we were swallowed up in the usual bustle. My mother was sitting in the waiting area, close to the stairs, leafing through a magazine. My father, I noticed, had already managed to purloin a white coat and a stethoscope from somewhere, together with what looked suspiciously like an official ID card on a lanyard around his neck. No doubt he knew the layout of the place well enough to know where such things were kept, and the overwhelming self-confidence to simply help himself. I’d no idea his criminal tendencies were so well developed.

“Why couldn’t we just do that?” I grouched quietly, gesturing to my shapeless garb.

Sean’s brow quirked. He was also wearing the delightful little skullcap, but on him it looked good. That wasn’t a stretch. On him, just about anything looked good.

“Because there would be too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” my father said.

“These days,” Sean said, “I think you’ll find that’s Native Americans.”

“If you’ve quite finished,” my father muttered, “perhaps we could concentrate on the matter at hand? There are a couple of security people loitering near the lift and I’d rather not push my luck too far, if I can help it.” He gave a small, almost embarrassed smile. “They may have been briefed to keep an eye out for me.”

“So, we need a diversion,” Sean said, eyes narrowed. He turned to me and opened his mouth but my father held up his hand.

“Leave this to me.” He strode away, looking very much at home in this environment.

Along one side of the emergency room was a row of three glass-walled rooms where patients could be treated more fully. There were Venetian blinds for when more privacy was required. Like watching a movie with the sound turned off, we saw my father enter the middle room where an unattended patient appeared to be either unconscious or asleep, wired up to various monitors. After a quick flick through the chart, he moved alongside the bed and did something that we hardly caught, before leaving quickly. For a few moments nothing happened. Then an alarm began to sound and the nearest medical staff rushed past him to deal with it.

My father calmly walked back to us.

“Shall we go?” he suggested quietly, not breaking stride as he reached us and swept past, heading for the stairs. “It won’t take them more than a few moments to work out what I’ve done.”

“What the hell did you do?” I demanded in a whisper. “Kill him?”

“Hardly.” He shot me a pained little glance as we sidestepped the security personnel whose eyes, naturally enough, were on the drama in front of them and not on us. “I merely loosened his blood-oxygen sensor. Even a very junior intern,” he added with a slightly scathing note in his voice, “would know enough to check that before attempting to resuscitate him.”

“Oh well,” I said under my breath as we took the stairs two at a time and the clamor dropped away behind us, “that’s all right, then.”

He led us without hesitation to the elevator, then up another two floors and through a maze of corridors, finally halting outside an unmarked door that looked no different from any of the others. He tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. My father’s face took on a piqued look, as if the locked door was a personal affront.

“This one, I think you can leave to me,” Sean murmured, producing a pick set from his pocket and moving my father aside. The lock was clearly intended to keep out casual trespassers rather than those with more serious intent, and it yielded to Sean’s nimble fingers in less than a minute.

He straightened and pushed the door open, meeting my father’s sharp gaze with a bland expression on his face. I could see that my father really wanted to snipe at Sean further for his obviously illegal abilities, but even he recognized it would be hypocritical to do so under the circumstances.

Inside, the room turned out to be a cramped office, its floor space three-quarters occupied by two chairs and a desk, which was empty apart from a double filing tray, a telephone, and a blank computer terminal. All the usual office detritus of books, photographs and paperwork was missing, leaving shadows in the dust and faded patches on the walls.

My father crossed to the desk and sat behind it, hitting the power button on the computer as he reached for his glasses.

“How did you know this would be empty?” I asked.

His eyes flicked over me briefly. “This was Jeremy’s office,” he said shortly, and turned his attention back to the screen. “His was a particular specialty. Recruiting his replacement will take some time.”

“Are you sure you can access his records from here?” Sean asked.

“I’ll answer that in just a moment,” my father said, attacking the keyboard once the computer had booted itself up. I tried not to hang over his shoulder as he tapped his name and password into the required boxes.

The computer thought for a moment, then came up with the message: ACCESS DENIED.

“Damn,” I muttered. “What now?”

“Hm, they have been thorough, haven’t they?” my father murmured, not sounding at all surprised. “But not that thorough, I think.”

This time, he typed Jeremy Lee into the name field, and a seven-character password. I caught only the first couple of letters—M and I—but I could guess the rest. His wife’s name. I remembered the photograph Miranda had showed us of the pair of them on the yacht, happy, carefree, and my throat constricted.

My father hit ENTER. The computer clicked and whirred again, thought about being awkward while we held our collective breath, and then gave up its secrets.

It didn’t take more than a few seconds for my father to navigate his way to the appropriate section of the Electronic Medical Record system and key in the name of his dead colleague. Within moments, Jeremy Lee’s official patient records were on screen for us to see.

My father leaned closer, scanning the information with the mental dexterity of a natural speed reader. His face darkened as he read on in silence, his only movement to stab the key to page down. We didn’t interrupt him until he was done.

“Fabrication,” he snapped, almost throwing himself back in the chair. “Maybe they’ve been more thorough than I first thought.”

“What does it say?”

“That Jeremy suffered multiple fractures of his thoracic vertebrae in his fall, causing hemiplegia—lower-body paralysis—which led to a urinary tract infection, in turn leading to septicemia, which killed him.”

“And is that feasible?”

“As a course of events? Perfectly,” my father said, even more clipped than usual. “Hemiplegia often causes such problems, in that the patient can’t adequately empty his bladder. Having a lot of urine in the bladder at all times is a situation ripe for a UTI.” He nodded toward the screen. “They note that he had an indwelling Foley catheter to keep his bladder empty, which is a common enough route for infection. All very logical,” he said bitterly. “All very made up.”

“So, no mention of osteoporosis?” Sean said. “Spinal or otherwise?”

My father gave a snort. “Oh yes, as a minor side issue. But as a major factor of his condition? No.” He scrolled back up through the document. “Nor is the Storax treatment mentioned anywhere in his records, despite the fact that the technicians Storax sent clearly identified its presence. They state he was on heavy-duty antibiotics for the infection, and Oxy-Contin for the pain. Nothing else.”

“What about cause of death?” I asked.

“Well, I’d hardly expect them to admit in black and white that it was the hundred milligrams of morphine injected into his IV line that did the job.” He unhooked his glasses and almost threw them onto the desktop, hard enough for them to clatter against the surface, and stared after them as though he was going to be able to divine some kind of answer in the grain.

Eventually, he looked up, hollow-eyed. “We’re at a dead end. Jeremy’s already been cremated and they’ve covered their tracks to the point where it would be just my word against theirs. And they’ve ensured that my word would not carry very much weight at the moment.”

Sean glanced at his watch. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “That little stunt you pulled downstairs is likely to have them looking for a practical joker.”

My father reached towards the keyboard again, but Sean leaned across him and switched on the printer. “Print it all out and we’ll take it with us,” he said. “Mrs. Lee will be able to testify how much of it is false.”

For a moment, my father looked scandalized at the thought of actually stealing a patient’s records. Then I saw the realization hit that the originals had been stolen well before he’d been anywhere near them.

A watched printer, like a watched kettle, takes forever to boil. This one looked modern but might as well have been a monk with a quill pen dipped in ink for all the time it took to go through its start-up routine and begin spitting out the pages. Just as the last one settled into the catch tray, the phone on the desk began to ring.

My father glanced up. “They’re on the ball,” he said tightly. “They must have the file flagged on the EMR and they’re checking up on who’s accessing it.”

Sean snatched the papers out of the printer. “Okay, we’re out of here,” he said to my father. “You may as well leave the computer on—they already know we’ve been in there.” He jerked his head to me. “I’ll take him out the way we came in. You get your mother and meet us, okay?”

I nodded and opened the door a crack as if expecting to see security men rushing to detain us. The corridor outside was deserted.

I slipped through the gap and made for the nearest staircase, taking it at a run and jumping the last few steps onto each half landing as I went, heedless of the residual bruises from my taxi encounter. After the first couple of flights my left leg started complaining bitterly at this treatment, but I ignored it.

I reached the ER and spotted my mother sitting in the waiting area, pretending to leaf through a magazine. She looked tense and awkward, but so did everyone else there. They all looked up when I hurried into view.

“Ma’am, would you come with me, please?” I said in my best generic East Coast drawl.

I didn’t have to feign the urgency in my voice, nor she the way her face paled at my words, but nobody watching saw anything amiss. Some even threw her sympathetic glances as she jumped to her feet and followed me out.

“What it is?” she said as soon as we were out of earshot. “Where’s Richard?”

“He’s fine,” I said. “We got what we came for, but they know we’re here.”

I was aware of a tension in my chest that had nothing to do with running down a flight of stairs. We’d pushed our luck coming here to begin with, and were pushing it even further with every minute we stayed. If anything, the disguises made it worse, like being caught out of uniform behind enemy lines. As if it made the difference between being treated as a legit prisoner of war, or being shot outright as a spy.

Not that I was expecting hospital security to gun us down if they got hold of us, but when we turned what should have been almost the final corner to our escape route, I found it was a close run thing.

The two security guards we’d slipped past earlier had cornered Sean and my father by a bank of elevators. They looked up sharply when I appeared.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded, East Coast again.

There was a pause, then one of the guards said, “Nothing that need concern you, ma’am.”

My brain clicked over. Clearly, they’d been looking for my father alone. Sean, I surmised, had been caught up in this purely by association. Any threat I might present was quickly weighed and dismissed.

“Of course it does,” I said, pushing a note of weary belligerence into my voice. I advanced, careful in my positioning, forcing the guard who’d spoken to turn away from Sean slightly to keep me in full view, just in case we couldn’t talk our way out of this. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sean shift his balance. Almost imperceptible, but enough.

I stabbed a finger towards my father. “This man’s a doctor—a damned good one. I need his expertise for a consult. Right now.”

“We got orders to hold him,” the guard said, but I saw the crease in his brow as the indecision and the worry crept in. He glanced at his partner for support, received only a halfhearted, puzzled shrug in return.

I sighed and deliberately lowered my voice. “Look, whatever the problem is, can’t it wait? I got a kid about to go into the OR whose legs are in a million pieces. You want to explain to his mother why he’s gonna spend the rest of his life in a goddamn wheelchair?”

I waved an arm vaguely behind me and felt rather than saw my mother step in closer. The guard who’d been doing all the talking let his eyes flick over her. Then he frowned again, his expression hardening.

My eyes met Sean’s. He’s not going to buy it.

I know. Be ready.

The guard opened his mouth, got as far as, “Look, Doc, I got my—”

“Oh, Doctor!” my mother cried suddenly. “Is this the surgeon? Is this the one who can save my poor Darcy’s legs?”

Darcy? Where the hell did that come from?

I turned. My mother had come to a faltering stop, a picture of anxiety, twisting her hands together in front of her breast like a tragic Shakespearean actress. All she needed was a handkerchief to dab at her eyes, but I thought that might have been overplaying the role a little, even for her.

“Ah, Mrs. Bennet,” I said, as the Pride and Prejudice reference finally sank in. Besides, wasn’t Mrs. Bennet supposed to be a scatterbrain? “There may be some kind of problem, I’m afraid. These gentlemen,” I said ominously, indicating the security guards as I moved to comfort her, “want to detain Mr. Foxcroft and—”

“Oh, but you can’t!” my mother cried, her voice rising, jagged. Her eyes swiveled wildly from one to the other. They couldn’t hold her gaze, shuffling awkwardly. They fetched and held and ejected people. They didn’t get into conversation with them. Not for minimum wage across a twelve-hour shift. And clearly not enough to be thrown by my mother’s obvious English accent, either.

“Look, lady—” the guard tried again.

“Tell them, Dr. Wickham!” my mother said, wheeling to face Sean, her face imploring. My God, were those actual tears? “Tell them he’s my only hope!”

And with that she gave a kind of a wail and collapsed into the arms of the guard who’d been doing the talking.

“Aw, lady, for Chrissake …” He tried to paw her away, like she was contagious, keeping his head back and his chin tucked in. Finally, he managed to get a grip on my mother’s upper arms and hoisted her away. “Go on, get him out of here,” he said to me in desperation. “But if anyone asks, you ain’t seen us and we ain’t seen you! Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed gravely. “Don’t worry, you won’t see us.”

The four of us disappeared along the corridor as fast as we could manage, round a corner and out through the first exit we came to that didn’t claim to be alarmed.

“My God, Elizabeth,” my father muttered, and his voice might have been shaky and breathless purely because we were all but running across the car park towards the Navigator, but that wouldn’t account for the note of wonder I heard there, too. “My God …”

Sean hit the remote and the locks popped. We piled in and he had the engine cranked and the vehicle already rolling before the last door was slammed shut behind us.

My mother fastened her seat belt and smoothed her skirt, frowning a little at a crease in the material. Then she looked up and smiled and, just for a moment, there was a distinct twinkle in her eye—a frisson of pleasure, excitement, even pure thrill.

“That was nicely played—well done,” Sean said, but his praise was guarded. “You took quite a risk, though. If they’d tagged even one genuine member of staff, we’d all have been sunk.”

I glanced at him, surprised by the downbeat tone. “Come on, Sean,” I said. “It was inspired and, anyway, it worked! Isn’t that what counts?” I smiled at him, but he didn’t return it. “Anyway, what alternatives did we have?”

He didn’t answer right away, concentrating on his driving. He was making a series of random turns, fast enough to put distance between us and the hospital, unobtrusive enough not to get us pulled over.

I frowned. Sean was cautious, yes, but he’d never been mean when it came to giving due credit, and he admired inventiveness. At that moment he glanced sideways and the brooding darkness of his gaze almost made me flinch.

What the hell …

My father leaned forwards in his seat. “What’s the matter, Sean?” he said in a clipped, almost taunting tone. “Did Elizabeth’s actions disappoint you in some way?”

“Disappoint me?” Sean echoed, his expression blanking as his voice grew lethally soft. “Of course not. Just how would they do that?”

I fired my father a warning look but his eyes were locked onto the narrow slot of the rearview mirror, which was all he could see of Sean’s set face, and he didn’t catch the gesture. Or, if he did, he chose to ignore it.

“You were about to start a fight,” my father said on a note of disdain. “It seems to be your first instinctive response to any difficult situation. Then Charlotte and Elizabeth managed to talk our way out—rather successfully, I thought. Does that fact wound your ego in some way?”

I was torn between pleasure at the unexpected praise, and anger at his attack on Sean.

“It never hurts to plan for the worst,” was all Sean said. “And I think you’ll find that Charlie was just as prepared to take direct action.”

“Hm,” my father said. He let his eyes slide over me, and there was something vaguely dissatisfied in that brief appraisal. “How much of that is due to your influence, I wonder.”

“Some,” Sean said. “But have you considered how much of it is down to you?”

“Oh, cut it out—both of you,” I snapped. “Stop talking about me like I’m not damn well here. Or at least have the decency to wait until I really am not here before you dissect my character.”

“I think you’ll find what we’re doing is vivisection,” Sean said, showing his teeth in a tight little smile totally devoid of humor. “For it to be dissection, I believe you’d have to be dead.”

“Well then,” I said coldly, thinking back to February, to a few long seconds in a frozen forest in the snow when my heart had briefly given up the fight. “In that case you missed your chance, both of you.”