Heartsick (21 page)

The Hardy Boys appeared at his office door, forcing Archie to clear his mind and put on his cop face. Both were all jittery excitement. Heil took a few tentative steps toward Archie. Archie had pegged him for the talker. He was right. “We checked the list of school staffers you gave us yesterday and one sort of stood out,” Heil announced.

“Kent?” Archie asked automatically. There was something about the custodian that made him wary.

“McCallum, the physics teacher at Cleveland. Turns out his boat isn’t where it’s supposed to be.”

“Where is it?”

“It burned down yesterday in that marina fire near Sauvie Island.”

Archie raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” said Heil. “We thought that might be a clue.”

Emanuel Hospital was
one of two trauma centers for the region and it was where Archie Sheridan had been medevaced after they got him out of Gretchen Lowell’s basement. It was the hospital favored by the city’s EMTs and it was rumored that many wore T-shirts printed with the words
TAKE ME TO EMANUEL
, just in case they threw a blood clot. The main structure had been built in 1915, but several additions had left the original stone building almost entirely obscured by glass and steel. It was also the hospital where Susan’s father had died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma the week before she got her braces off. She parked in the visitors’ garage and made her way to the medical office building where Archie’s doctor had agreed to meet her. When she took the elevator up to the fourth floor, she was careful to press the elevator button with her elbow rather than her finger. Sick people germs. You couldn’t be too careful.

Dr. Fergus made her wait for thirty-five minutes. It wasn’t a bad waiting room. There was a view of the West Hills, Mount Hood, the meandering Willamette. But it smelled like every waiting room Susan remembered from her father’s appointments. Like carnations and iodine. It was the soap they used to cover up the smell of people dying.

A pile of
InStyle
magazines were fanned out seductively on an end table, but Susan resisted the impulse to waste time and instead spent twenty minutes writing and then rewriting an intro to the next story in her notebook. Then she checked her messages. None. She speed-dialed Ethan Poole. Voice mail.

“Ethan,” she said. “It’s
moi.
Just calling to see if you’ve had a chance to talk to Molly Palmer yet. I’m starting to take this personally.” She noticed that the receptionist was giving her a very dirty look and pointing to a sign that had a picture of a cell phone with a line through it. “Call me,” she said. Then she hung up and dropped the phone in her purse.

A
Herald
was laid out on a coffee table over a pile of
U.S. News & World Report
s. Susan had just pulled the front section from underneath the Metro section and put it on top, so her story would be properly displayed for anyone interested, when Fergus appeared with a shrug of apology and a moist handshake and ushered her back past the examining rooms to his office. He was in his mid-fifties and wore his graying hair in a bristle cut, like some sort of Texas high school football coach, and he walked quickly, at an eighty-degree angle, stethoscope swinging, his shoulders slumped and his fists in his white coat pockets. Susan had to hurry to keep pace.

His office was carefully appointed in classy baby boomer–style and overlooked the downtown skyline on the west side and the battered industrial buildings of the east side, with the wide brown river curving in between. On a clear day, you could see three mountains from Portland: Mount Hood, Mount Saint Helens and Mount Adams. But when people talked about “the mountain,” they meant Hood, and it was Hood that was visible out of Fergus’s window, a perk that was not to be underestimated. Still white with snow, it looked to Susan like a shark’s tooth tearing into the blue sky. But then, she’d never been much of a skier.

An expensive handmade Oriental rug lay over the industrial carpet; a wall of bookshelves housed medical texts, but also contemporary fiction and books about Eastern religions; and a large black-and-white photograph of Fergus leaning against a Harley-Davidson hung on one wall, dwarfing the requisite medical degrees that hung beside it. At least he had his priorities straight. Susan noticed an expensive radio on his bookshelf, and bet that it was tuned to classic rock.

“So, Archie Sheridan,” Dr. Fergus said, opening a blue folder in front of him.

Susan smiled. “I assume you’ve spoken to him?”

“Yes. He faxed over a HIPAA waiver.” Fergus touched a piece of paper on his desk. “We can’t be too careful with the privacy issues today. The insurance companies get to know everything about you. But a friend or family member? Not without the proper paperwork.”

Susan set her digital recorder on the desk, lifting her eyebrows questioningly to Fergus. He nodded. She hit
RECORD
. “So can I ask you anything, then?” she asked.

“I am willing to talk to you briefly about the injuries Detective Sheridan sustained in the line of duty in November of 2004.”

“Go.” Susan flipped open her notebook and smiled encouragingly.

Fergus traced through information in Sheridan’s file. His tone was brusque and businesslike. “He arrived at the ER via medevac at nine-forty-three
P
.
M
. on the thirtieth of November. He was in critical condition. Six fractured ribs, lacerations to the torso, a stab wound to the abdomen, his tox levels were dangerously high. We had to do emergency surgery to repair damage to the esophagus and stomach wall. When we got in there, the esophagus was so damaged, we ended up having to rebuild it with a section of bowel. And, of course, she had removed his spleen.”

Susan was scribbling along when he got to that last part. She stopped writing and looked up. “His spleen?”

“Correct. They didn’t release that at the time. She’d done a decent job dividing the blood supply and suturing him up, but there was some minor bleeding we had to go in and clean up.”

The tip of Susan’s pen remained motionless, pressed against the paper of notebook. “Can you do that? Can you just take someone’s spleen out?”

“If you’ve done it before,” Fergus said. “It’s a nonessential organ.”

“What did she”—Susan tapped her pen nervously against the page—“do with it?”

Fergus exhaled slowly. “I believe that it was sent to the police. Along with his wallet.”

Susan widened her eyes in disbelief and scribbled a sentence in her notebook. “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, shaking her head.

“Yes,” he said, sitting forward, his professional interest clearly piqued. “It surprised us, too. It is major surgery. He’d gone into septic shock and his organs were failing. If she hadn’t treated him at the site, he would be dead.”

“I heard that she did CPR on him,” Susan said.

Fergus examined her for a second. “That’s what the EMTs said. She also used digitalis to stop his heart, and then resuscitated him with lidocaine.”

Susan simultaneously cringed and craned forward. “Why?”

“I have no idea. It happened several days before we got to him. That’s about when she dressed the wounds. He was well taken care of.” He paused, catching himself, and ran a hand past his forehead. “You know, from that point on. Clean bandages. Every wound stitched. She’d had him on intravenous fluids, given him blood. But there was nothing she could do at that point about the infection. She didn’t have the proper antibiotics, or the equipment to keep his organs functioning enough for them to work.”

“Where’d she get the blood?”

Fergus shrugged and shook his head. “We have no idea. It was O-negative, a universal donor, and it was fresh, but it wasn’t hers. And the man she killed in front of Sheridan was AB.”

Susan wrote the word
blood
in her notebook, followed by a question mark. “You said his tox levels were high. What was he on exactly?”

“Quite a little cocktail.” Fergus glanced down at a page in his file. “Morphine, amphetmines, succinylcholine, bufotenin, benzylpiperazine. And that’s just what was still in his system.”

Susan was trying to figure out how to spell
succinylcholine
phonetically. “What would have been the result of all those drugs?”

“Without knowing the order in which they were given, I have no way of knowing. Varying degrees of insomnia, restlessness, paralysis, hallucinations, and probably quite a nice high.”

Susan tried to imagine what that would be like. Alone, in pain. So high that your mind isn’t functioning. Completely dependent on the person who is killing you. She examined Fergus. He wasn’t exactly chatty. But she liked him for being protective of Archie. Jesus, someone had to be. She tilted her head and flashed her most radiant tell-me-anything smile. “You like him? Archie?”

Fergus pursed his lips. “I’m not sure Archie has friends anymore. But if he did, I think he’d count me among them.”

“What do you think of me doing this? Writing this story? Writing about what happened to him?”

Fergus leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. The mountain sparkled in the sunlight behind him. After a while, you probably stopped noticing it. “I tried to talk him out of it.”

“How’d he react?” she asked.

“I was unable to sway him,” Fergus said.

“But you’re not being entirely open with me, either?”

“He never said I had to tell you everything. He is my patient. And I will choose his well-being over your newspaper story. Regardless of what he thinks he wants. We had a lot of press crawling all over this hospital in the weeks after Archie was found. My staff referred them all to the hospital PR department. Do you know why?”

Wait,
Susan thought,
I know this one!
“Because reporters are vultures who will print anything without a passing thought to its relevance, significance, or veracity?”

“Yes.” Fergus glanced at his five-hundred-dollar watch. “If you want to know more, you can ask your subject. I’ve got to go. I’m a doctor. I’ve got patients. I’ve got to see about treating them. The hospital gets testy if I don’t at least make an effort.”

“Sure,” Susan said quickly. “Just a few more questions. Is Detective Sheridan still on any medication?”

Fergus looked her in the eye. “Nothing that would interfere with his ability to do his job.”

“Great. And just so I understand, you’re saying that Gretchen Lowell tortured Sheridan, killed him, and then resuscitated him and took care of him for a few days before calling nine one one?”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Fergus said.

“And Sheridan confirms this?” Susan asked.

Fergus leaned farther back in his chair and interlaced his fingers over his chest. “He doesn’t really talk about what happened to him. He claims not to remember much.”

“You don’t believe him?”

Fergus looked deliberately at her. “It’s bullshit. And I’ve told him that to his face.”

“What’s your favorite movie?” Susan asked.

“Excuse me?”

Susan smiled pleasantly, like it wasn’t a strange question. “Your favorite movie.”

The poor doctor seemed a little bewildered. “I don’t really have time to see movies,” he said finally. “I ski.”

“At least you didn’t make something up,” Susan said with a satisfied nod. People lied all the time about movies. Susan told people that her favorite movie was
Annie Hall
, and she’d never even seen it. “Thanks for your time, Doctor.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” Fergus said with a sigh.

CHAPTER