Death Rounds (53 page)

“By the way,” Amy told us, “since you haven’t been here, Muffy’s been sleeping in Brendan’s room, guarding him like he was her own pup.” Amy held the receiver up to Muffy’s ear, and we heard her barking excitedly at the sound of our voices.

I’d continued to check on Michael every few hours and been reassured he was making progress. But I wasn’t prepared for the call that came to our room that evening. “Earl, it’s Stewart Deloram. I’ve got someone here who wants to speak with you. Hang on a minute.”

I heard rustlings, then I could hear him breathing for a few seconds before he spoke, as if it were difficult for him to get the receiver into position. “Boy,” Michael rasped, “that was harder than giving up cigarettes.”

On hearing my friend’s frail voice, my eyes filled with tears. “Michael, you are amazing! Simply amazing,” I told him.

He gave a sound in return that was half chuckle and half wheeze. “Gotta go,” he said. “They seem to think I shouldn’t talk for long. Better humor them. Bye, Earl.”

When I hung up, Janet needed no explanation. My side of the conversation was enough to make her eyes sparkle. We hugged, laughed, and cried, sharing our joy.

That night we slept in the same bed. Despite the narrow mattress and the fact that our IVs kept getting tangled we managed to resume our campaign to keep Brendan from being an only child.

* * * *

“He says he wants to see you,” Williams told me.

“See me! Did he say why?”

Riley answered. “Miller’s not saying anything to us, anything at all. Who knows what the creep wants? My advice. Doc? Don’t bother. You’ve been through enough.”

It was late Monday morning, and we were having coffee together in the otherwise deserted cafeteria. The area, along with ICU and OB, was one of the few that had been declared clear of staph. As a result, we were free of protective clothing as we sat around and talked, and it felt wonderful, despite the grim business we were discussing.

“I agree with Riley,” Williams chimed in. “We’ve pretty well put together what happened. There’s no need to talk to him. He’ll be dead in twenty-four hours, anyway.”

Undoubtedly he would, I thought, and I might end up wondering about what he wanted to tell me for the rest of my life. “Why don’t you two fill me in on what you’ve figured out,” I suggested. I wanted to think over whether I’d see Miller. “For starters, what happened the night Cam disappeared?”

Riley looked at Williams, got the nod to do the honors, and started. “We figured that Miller overheard Cam Mackie when he called you and Douglas. Maybe Mackie even confided to Miller what he’d found in the charts, not realizing that he was talking to the killer. If that was the case. Miller would be faced with a crisis. He already had to know that his mentor was brilliant enough to beat every one of us to figuring out the rest of it. But the fact that Mackie had already zeroed in on evidence of how the three nurses were infected in a matter of hours—evidence so complex, I remind you, it took the rest of us days to find—must have convinced Miller that his own exposure could occur just as quickly. According to our preliminary path report, he probably only knocked Mackie out in the lab, then finished him off by strangling him to death sometime before burying his body. The crime scene investigation will tell us more for sure. That chamber, by the way, was a root cellar at one time.”

“We timed it out,” joined in Williams. “Miller could have carried an unconscious Cam Mackie to that room, killed him, then raced back to the lab with the samples of staph that he set up for you and me to find. Once his display was ready, he probably used Mackie’s office, dialed the number of that single line phone, and waited until one of us answered. When he heard your voice, he started sending those messages. I bet he preferred your getting there first, because he could terrorize you about Janet. Distracted, you were more likely to jump to the conclusion he wanted you to make about Mackie.”

Riley took over. “While you and Douglas were figuring out what to do and dealing with Fosse, Miller had time to slip back to his hiding place, bury Mackie, and cover the grave with boxes. Then Miller returned to the bacteriology lab, claiming Mackie had also telephoned him.”

I remembered how Miller had looked freshly showered that night when he’d arrived at the bacteriology lab. The thought of him having just washed up after killing and burying Cam sickened me.

“What about the asylum?” I asked. “Was he ever there?”

“Probably,” Williams said, “until you spooked him that first night you ran into him. The second time you saw him with the cart, we think he could have been getting ready to move. Given how little equipment he had, it would have been an easy matter—a couple of trips at most.”

While refilling our cups from a silver serving pot, I asked, “Did anyone figure out how he used the screening process to set up the targets?”

Riley grinned. “I worked this one out with Madge in staff health.” He took a sip of coffee and settled back in his chair, obviously enjoying the chance to show off his discoveries. “Screening is done a ward at a time, but the exact date of each call-up is at the discretion of several people in that clinic, depending on how busy they are. Once a notice goes out, the nurses have two weeks to get their cultures done, at their convenience and without an appointment, either in staff health or in the labs. Madge thinks Harold Miller faked a message from staff health, notifying the floor where his target worked—ICU, the OR, or in the case of his mother, OB.”

Riley’s use of the abbreviations of our lingo made it hard for me not to smile.

“That started a screening process when it suited him,” Riley continued, “shortly before each of his targets was scheduled to leave on vacation. Since the only thing staff health cared about was that every nurse in a high risk area got a minimum number of cultures per year, they’d never be bothered, maybe not even notice that an extra set had been done.”

“But the nurses he’d targeted wouldn’t necessarily come to him for their cultures,” I said.

“The screening itself gave him an excuse to seek them out a few days later and reculture them. ‘Bad sample,’ he’d say. ‘Got to do it over.’ Then he’d use one of his swabs contaminated with staph.”

Williams joined in. “The timing of the screening was one of the things that tipped off your friend Popovitch. I talked to him briefly on the phone. The other clue was the unordered procedures that required the targeted nurses to get into protective gear, including masks. Like you, he found both those ‘coincidences’ suspicious. Then he started to figure how it could be done, just as you and I did, but it wasn’t until he was being resuscitated, with everyone wearing masks and taking cultures, including from inside his nose, that the exact technique struck him. He sounds like quite a guy. He said that he would have written you a longer note but his residents were impatient to get him fall of tubes.”

“Amazing” was all I could think to say, remembering how near death he’d been at that moment.

“You know,” Williams said, “it astonishes me how well Miller covered his tracks as the Phantom before he resorted to insecticides. I suppose it doesn’t matter now, but I couldn’t turn up anyone who could connect the ipecac to him. Even his targets from psychiatry couldn’t recall if Miller had been around shortly before they’d started hallucinating. We placed him in physio and rehab, though. He was down there a lot around the time of the insecticide poisonings, claiming to need therapy for a sore back. I think I figured out how he did it too. While I was interviewing workers in the department, I observed their routine. They sometimes leave their wet thongs unattended and off to one side while they’re in the whirlpool baths with a patient Miller probably watched his intended victim until he had a chance, then sprayed the target’s footwear with domestic pesticide. It’s as though he became more visible once he became more lethal, but...” The large man shrugged. “Ah, what the hell am I going on for? It’s over, thank God.”

I thought of a final question. “Riley, could Miller have gotten away with making you think Rossit was the killer, presuming you eventually found both our bodies?”

Riley grimaced. “Think about what nearly happened with you and Miller, Doc. Suppose he’d gotten one good whack at your head before you got him. You both could have died in there. Miller probably thought he’d make it look like you’d strangled Rossit while trying to escape from him, but that the head injuries you sustained in the process were too grave for you to get yourself out of the room afterward. To have set it up, all he’d have to have done would be to smash you into a coma, position you near Rossit, then let his organisms work on you. In time, either they or the results of the head injury would finish you off. When we came on the scene, we could very easily figure that Rossit was the Phantom and that he’d caught you snooping in his lair...with a tragic result.”

Williams added, “Even if the police found you before you were dead, you wouldn’t be in any condition to talk.”

We sat in silence for a while, sipping coffee. Whether Miller had that grisly fate in mind for me I’d never know for sure, but it would be the stuff of future nightmares.

Eventually we began chatting about more pleasant things, like going home. We were almost comfortable with each other after what we’d been through together. I’d also noticed how Riley had started calling Williams by his first name. Considering the way they’d been so testy with each other before, I commented on their apparent friendliness now.

Williams smiled. “It turns out we have a common interest in football.”

“Common!” Riley exclaimed excitedly. “Doc, you’re with someone famous. I only recognized him when I finally saw his face without a mask. This is Spider Williams, one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of Michigan State. What an arm he had! My dad and I used to drive a hundred miles just to see him play.”

“Thanks, sonny,” Williams said.

I joined in the laugh—I figured Riley was ten years junior to Williams and me—then left them to their discussion of old plays and long ago victories.

I had something more current to do.

* * * *

I’d decided to meet with Harold Miller for no better reason than my own peace of mind, an aid to putting the ordeal to bed.

As I approached his brightly lit cubicle midst the dim lighting of ICU, I couldn’t help but think of the time when I saw Phyllis Sanders in an identical setting at St. Paul’s. Pulling on isolation garb at the door to his room, I watched two nurses ministering to him. One of them fiddled with the dressings around his neck and over many portions of his face. In most cases the gauze was soaked through with reddish brown stains. The other nurse adjusted a pad which had been secured over what should have been his right eye; I’d been told by the residents that it had been removed surgically, there being nothing viable after it had been enucleated by glass during our struggle.

The skin around his head and upper trunk that wasn’t covered with dressings was scarlet and puffy, as if he’d been scalded rather than infected. But as soon as I stepped into the room, the smell of the putrefying flesh left no doubt that infection was the underlying process. His coughing was paroxysmal, and rather than use a steel basin which one of his nurses held out to him, he let the resultant sputum roll down his chin. “My head,” he moaned. “My head.” On his arms and legs were more red swollen areas, some of them also covered by gauze, these too saturated through, but with yellow seepage.

Looking at him, I could think only of the state of the organs I’d seen at his mother’s autopsy. It was telling testimony to the destruction that was raging through his own body now. The staph bacteria had obviously been carried from his infected skin into his bloodstream and throughout his body. His lungs would be riddled with cavities of pus, his head pain was probably the result of developing brain abscesses, and further sites of infection were setting up deep within his skin and bone, giving rise to the sores over the rest of him.

As I approached his bed, he was staring off to one side, his remaining eye having the same faraway look I’d seen in the subbasement.

“Harold, it’s Dr. Garnet,” said one of the nurses.

There was no response. He simply lay there. I leaned over him. “Mr. Miller, I was told you wanted to speak to me.”

I wasn’t even sure he could hear. But seconds ago he’d been lucid enough to complain about his head. “Does he respond?” I asked the nurses.

“Sometimes,” the nearer one said, “when he wants to.”

As if to underline her point, he suddenly spoke, but without moving his head or shifting his gaze. “I want to speak to you in private.”

The two nurses quickly finished up what they were doing and left.

He slowly turned to look at me. “I obviously don’t have much time,” he rasped, “and it’s hard to talk. I think there’s an abscess starting in my throat.”

His voice had a slightly muffled tone, as though he were speaking with a hot potato in his mouth, a sure sign of pharyngeal swelling.

“What did you want, Mr. Miller?” I was determined to keep this short and get out as quickly as possible.

“I heard Williams and Riley talking about what you’re putting yourself through.” He went into another paroxysm of coughing. When it subsided, he said hoarsely, “She wanted to go back to your ER that evening. Dr. Garnet, but I dissuaded her.”

“Pardon?” I said, not sure what he was talking about.

“My mother. She told me over the phone she was going to return to St. Paul’s and tell you personally about her dizziness—she thought you were so nice and that you’d want to know—but I talked her out of it. If it hadn’t been for me, you would have had her at your doorstep a few hours after she’d been discharged, describing her orthostatic drop to you.”

I felt baffled, repulsed, and intrigued at one and the same time. But I made no show of my reactions, merely shrugged, then watched intently as he struggled for a deep breath. To my shame, I wanted to hear more.

“And Mackie, he was slated to die,” Miller said with difficulty. “Part of my plan to make him a scapegoat, whether you thought he was guilty or not. He had to disappear, to make it look like he’d gone into hiding but was continuing to kill. Except I had to get rid of him that night on the spur of the moment...to keep him from exposing me...and I didn’t have time to get his body to a safer hiding place.”