Forgotten Place (29 page)

"Then you'll let me go?"

"Yeah, Doc.  I don't have a choice but
to let you go.  How many ways do you have to tell me it's what
you want before it sinks in?"

"Will you come with me?"

His posture relaxed a little bit.  "Of
course, if it's what you really want."

"Johnny, you know everything.  David
won't blurt something out that you don't already know and shock you
into believing the worst about me.  You already know the
worst."

"Right," he muttered, "can't have Devlin
thinking the worst, can we?"

"That's not how I meant
it.  Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to tell you
what I did that night?  I never wanted
you
to know either, Johnny.  But
you were right.  It made a huge difference being able to get
that off my chest."

"This is why you ended up in the condition
you're currently in.  Talking about it was so helpful."

"I've been depressed and in pain.  This
is the truth, Johnny.  I didn't realize how bad things
were.  All I saw was... sleep and the next pain pill.  I
really am feeling much better."

"I'm not stupid.  Prozac doesn't work
that fast, Helen."

"No, it doesn't.  But knowing that
people cared enough to intervene, getting involved in life again,
being able to talk to someone who I don't have to hide what I
feel... it's helped more than anything else."

"Is that why you went off and did this thing
with Lowe today?"

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Helen, you didn't behave honestly
today.  You used Devlin's naiveté to do something you knew the
rest of us would strongly object to.  Did you do it because it
really needed to be done or did you do it to punish me?"

I felt my body thrum in one gigantic,
visible heartbeat.  Johnny hadn't lied.  He knew
me.  Maybe knew me better than I know myself.  "Not
consciously," I admitted.  "When you left yesterday," teeth
clamped down inside my lower lip.  "I didn't like it, feeling
like you were going away and not telling me why, or worse,
insinuating that some... some sex thing was the reason this case
didn't matter to you anymore."

"Just the case, Helen?" soft words caressed
my heart.

"You claimed that getting Datello was your
goal for years, and then because I did some stupid thing yesterday
that pissed you off, you couldn't get away from me fast
enough."

"Ah," he nodded, "that little tease of a
kiss at the press conference."

"I said I was sorry."

"Yeah," he said.  "I remember,
Doc.  It's in the past.  Forget about it."

"All right," but it wasn't.  Something
about it nagged at me, tugged at my heart and hurt worse than the
fear I lived with every day, the pain of shattered bones and the
loneliness I imposed upon myself.

"I'll make some calls, get the jet ready to
leave after therapy tomorrow.  It should get us to D.C. in
time to meet Levine tomorrow night.  In the meantime, I'm
curious to hear what Crevan learned about Riley Storm."  He
made a sweeping gesture with one hand.  "Shall we?"

The unsettled feeling persisted, even when
Crevan launched into the history of Riley Storm.

"According to the resume – excuse me, Helen,
his curriculum vitae – on file with the Bay County supervisor's
office, Riley Storm graduated in the top five percent of his class
at Harvard Medical."

I whistled softly.  "Impressive."

"I would agree, if Harvard had a record of
his training."

"He falsified his medical training?"

"Fudged is more like it," Crevan grinned at
Johnny's stunned question.  "Riley Storm, so far as I can
tell, didn't give much truthful information when he applied for the
job of a medical examiner in Bay County.  For instance, he
claims that he performed his residency at Johns Hopkins in
Baltimore."

"But that didn't happen either, did it?" I
asked.

"Nope.  The strange thing is, Riley was
competent enough on the job not to raise any questions about his
creative history on his job application."

"And nobody bothered to check out his
story?"  Johnny shook his head.  "Unbelievable.  Who
approved his application and hired him?"

"The county supervisor.  Apparently,
she was so impressed that a bona fide Harvard alumnus applied for a
job in nowhere Bay County, that she snapped at the chance to not
only hire him to work for Bay County, but she put him in charge of
the place."

"And this is how Riley Storm became the
chief medical examiner at such a young age.  But Crevan, if he
didn't go to school at Harvard and he didn't perform his residency
at Johns Hopkins, where did he actually train?"  I was still
bowled over that nobody learned this information before he was
hired.

"It wasn't all that difficult to find the
truth," Crevan said.  "A call here, a search there.  It
took me about twenty minutes after I had his CV in hand, to
determine that he lied through his teeth.  Then again, med
school in Puerto Rico, while accredited and recognized the same as
Harvard Med, ain't quite Harvard, if you know what I mean."

"And his residency?"

"Done in Puerto Rico as well.  He did
tell the truth about graduating at the top of his class.  It
just wasn't the ivy league cred he wanted the world to
believe."

"It might've made him susceptible to the
pressure we talked about this morning, Helen," Devlin said. 
"Someone, i.e., Jerry Lowe, learns the truth about Dr. Storm's
invented credentials and uses it to strong arm an agreement."

"I'm not so sure about that.  It's a
far cry from lying on a CV to land a job to embalming someone
before they're dead," I said.  "From the psychological
perspective, normal thinking individuals would rather accept the
consequences for a lie than be sucked into murder, let alone
something as brutal as what was done to Harry McNamara."

"Also, if Lowe was telling the truth when he
implied that Riley was his source for the succinylcholine, he had
to know there was no legitimate reason for Lowe to want a drug like
that, Doc.  It's not like this is something with street
value.  You either use it for surgery or you use it to kill
people."

"There are a couple of other legitimate
medical uses, but that's the gist of why a cop would want that
particular drug.  We know how Jerry Lowe used it over the
years to perfect the abduction part of his crimes.  I'd like
to talk to Riley Storm and get a feel for his side of the
story.  I don't doubt for a second that Jerry will contact
him."

"Doesn't that part of what we learned worry
you, Helen?" Devlin began.  "This guy is locked up in a mental
hospital because nobody can seem to decide if he's competent to
stand trial, but he's still communicating with people on the
outside, still up to speed on what's happening in Darkwater
Bay.  Doesn't that seem wrong to anybody but me?"

"Patients have far more rights than inmates,
Devlin.  There's not much we can do about that yet.  If
we can prove that Jerry is part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy,
that's another thing," Johnny said.  "If we tried to legally
restrict his privileges now, I'm sure his doctors would claim that
he's bragging or some similar nonsense."

"Johnny's right.  Lowe went from a
position of absolute authority to a mental hospital.  We
should consider the possibility that he was exaggerating, except
for one mistake he made that leads me to believe he is in contact
with someone on the outside who keeps him informed."

"What was that, Doc?"

"He was aware of my behavior at Weber's
press conference and insinuated that it had made its way to the
evening news.  Now if that were true, don't you think one of
us would know about it by now?"

"That was a lie," Johnny growled. 
"Crevan noticed, but he was looking for us."

"And Belle noticed it too," I reminded
him.  "She's a reporter."

"It wasn't in the paper," Crevan said. 
"It's not Belle's style to report unless she knows it'll draw
blood.  Which isn't to say she won't find some way to
integrate what she saw into a story to make OSI and division look
bad at some point down the road.  Believe me.  She's too
busy trying to figure out what Weber's personal issue was that
prompted his resignation."

I looked at Johnny.  "That leaves the
other person we know saw what I did."

"Datello."

"I can't believe that he would do something
so stupid as communicate directly with Jerry Lowe," I said. 
"It would be reckless, and Danny is nothing if not careful in the
extreme.  If you think about it, he's far more cautious than
his uncle.  After all, Marcos is facing a laundry list of
charges in federal court.  Danny has managed to keep himself
strictly in a box of suspicious activities.  There is no hard
evidence against him for anything."

"Except for what David Ireland had," Johnny
said.

"We think.  We still don't know what
that investigation involved or that Ireland had hard evidence," I
said.  "It's all theory."

"But at the same time, doesn't Ireland's
murder prove that there had to have been evidence of something?"
Devlin asked.

"It certainly appears that way," Johnny
said.  "Why don't the three of you search that house this
afternoon, and Doc and I will take David's paperwork.  We can
pack it up and take it with us in the morning if we need to."

Devlin looked at me and grinned.

"Going where in the morning?" Ned asked.

"I'll fill you guys in at the Ireland
house.  Let's get back to the case," Devlin said.

Chapter 26

Johnny crashed on the plane much like the
fussy, colicky baby falls asleep in the car seat before his
scream-weary parents back out of the garage.  We were off the
ground for five minutes when he unfastened his seatbelt and
stumbled to the long sofa-style bench and flopped onto his
stomach.  I was pretty sure he'd forgotten where he was and
who he was traveling with. 

The jet Johnny referenced was the property
of Governor Joseph Collangelo, not the state's property, but Joe's
private jet.   The Gulfstream 550 could've seated our
entire team on this case and then some.  Joe was a very
successful businessman in his own right before eschewing the funds
of PACs and corporate donors to run for governor.  The family
money had come in handy as well.  As a resident of the state,
Joe made no apologies for his personal wealth.  He did however
become largely popular with the message that he wanted all to have
the opportunities for success that he did.  The message
resonated, and he won his freshman bid for the governor's office in
a landslide victory.

The fickleness of the public could never be
discounted, and I understood the pressure both Joe and Johnny felt
knowing that Datello was culling the ranks of the state senate for
a lethal competitor that could undo all the good Collangelo had
tried to bring.  His Achilles heel was that change never
happens fast enough for the public who continues to flip-flop
between conservative and liberal labels and fail to recognize that
things did not deteriorate quickly and will not be mended quickly
either.  I recalled an example given by one of my professors
in undergraduate training who talked about how many hours of
immobility were required to cause the skin to become damaged by
unrelieved pressure. 

She said, "Serious damage to the skin can
occur after as little as two to six hours.  These are the
minor types of damage caused by immobility and on average take
weeks to fully heal.  Weeks people, for a few hours of
damage.  This is why a critical response team must be ready to
intervene at a moment's notice.  When you are looking for a
kidnapping victim, the damage can be far deeper than a
psychological trauma.  Something that sounds as trivial as a
pressure sore can become the cause of death when hygiene, nutrition
and mobility are all compromised."

Yes, the world expected politicians to heal
festering wounds that developed over decades in a matter of
months.  If not, the other guy started looking pretty darn
good, even if the devil himself backed his campaign.

I moved from the bucket seating where Johnny
recently vacated my company and slid into one of four chairs around
a table.  The pressure was on all of us, for so many reasons,
it could be paralyzing if I let myself think about it too
much.  Justice for David Ireland, protection for his daughter
and now frail wife, a success story for Collangelo to justify the
cost of OSI.  My eyes drifted over to Orion.  There was a
big reason not to fail laying on his belly just a few feet
away.

He was one of the good guys, without a
doubt.  I thought about how everything became personal for him
on some level, from the tears of his beloved Sister Agnes Marie, to
my woes created by a corrupt husband.  It occurred to me that
Johnny's sense of right and wrong was a lot like my father's – only
Johnny wasn't so jaded that he took to obliterating the enemy
instead of working through the criminal justice system to achieve
the right outcome.

That old nonsensical adage about always
finding something in the last place you looked seemed applicable
when I dug half way through the final box of David Ireland's office
contents.  There were no legal notepads.  After sifting
through photographs of his wife and daughter and awards and
citations that had never been displayed, some still in manila
envelopes, I came to the midsection.

Dozens of printouts from a dot matrix
printer.  They were relics.  Some looked like test pages
the printer used to come online, rows of random numbers that
stretched from one line and wrapped to the next.  I couldn't
conceive why Ireland would keep something so meaningless.  It
couldn't be discarded simply because at this time, it made no
sense.