Lethal Practice (39 page)

I still had a dead feeling inside. In some ways I knew it would never be over.

“By the way,” Deloram continued, “some big detective’s taken a special interest in you. He’s been here regularly for the last two days to see if you were ready to talk to him yet, but I told him you weren’t going anywhere and needed the rest. I suggested he run your name for unpaid parking tickets while waiting.”

Riley. “Let me speak to him next time.”

“Sure.”

“Where’s Janet?”

“Asleep.”

I must have looked lonesome because he said, “Hey, give your guardian angel and us a break. She’s been like a one-woman accreditation visit since you got here. It took her twenty-four hours just to trust us enough with your precious skin before she agreed to a little nap herself. She’s in the residents’ room, wondered if we’d changed the sheets since she rotated through here ten years ago. Let her rest.”

“So this is day two?”

“More or less.”

“How much longer?”

“Now, that, my son, is a closely guarded medical secret.”

“Dammit, Stewart, quit kidding around. When do I get out of here?”

He slid off the side of the bed where he’d been sitting, strode to the cubicle curtains, struck an operatic pose, and answered, “Soon, my son, soon, or never.” Then, with a maniacal grin, he left.

Outside from the nurses’ station I heard his deliberately overloud instructions. “Oh, Nurse Mandy, I think it’s time to change Dr. Garnet’s Texas catheter, please.”

There were giggles, and Nurse Mandy, who regularly modeled swimsuits in the ad section of the
Buffalo Gazette,
jiggled into the curtained area to do her duty. Then he must have hit the alarm-set switch at his desk because every bell and buzzer at my bedside went off again.

“You’re a sick person, Deloram! Sick!” I yelled against a rising wall of laughter from beyond my curtains. Nurse Mandy never missed a beat, so to speak.

* * * *

I figured the stay at Deloram’s little kingdom would end when he got bored with me or I could stay awake for more than an hour. The first occurred pretty quickly. I didn’t see him much after our chat. The second feat proved more difficult.

A few awakenings later I found Janet back in her chair. She looked tired, but she smiled my way and softly said, “Hello.”

“Hi, yourself.”

I enjoyed just watching her for a few quiet minutes. She looked pleased that I was awake and reached for my hand. It felt wonderful.

“I was afraid you’d still want to brain me,” I whispered.

“That would presume some brains in the first place.” Her voice was a little less soft.

“You
do
still want to brain me.”

“I’m letting them fatten you up here first.”

“How’s Muffy?”

“Better than you. She’s out of intensive care.”

I was left to stew in an uneasy silence for a while. Then Janet added, “She’s going to be all right. Probably will be home next week.”

“And how is home coming along?” It wasn’t exactly a roaring conversation, but I figured sputtering talk was better than icy silence.

What I got back, however, was ice
and
talk. “Let’s just say,” she began rather coolly, “that Doug’s wife was as thrilled as I was with the great bozo escapade. Now that she’s let him back out of her sight, the work is going quite nicely.” A pause. Then a hint of melting, “Especially the baby’s room.” More thought. “It’s really quite lovely.”

“You look like you could use some of the sleep I’m getting.”

“It’s the two men I run around with. One keeps me up all night with worry, the other kicks me awake when I sleep.”

“I’m sorry, Janet. It was a pretty boneheaded idea.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, great! You decide on your own to play Hardy Boys with our contractor, without so much as a word to me, and then bring the Wicked Witch of the Night down on us, and you think a big doleful ‘I’m sorry’ is going to cut it!”

As Janet’s voice rose, the rest of the ICU suddenly got very, very quiet.

“C’mon, Janet, this is embarrassing me.”

“Ahh, scare me half to death, then poor you gets embarrassed.”

She was up off her chair now, obviously enjoying my discomfort. “You can just lie there in silence and contemplate your sins,” she proclaimed rather loudly, then walked over to my array of monitors. She gave me a big wink and started shutting off the alarm switches one by one. “No! Not another word.” She started undoing her ponytail. “Just let me read in peace” was her final, very public instruction.

Then she leaned over me and let her hair shower down around our faces. For the next half hour, not a bong could be heard. At least not in my cubicle.

* * * *

My next awakening was not so pleasant. Bufort sat huddled in the chair like a hulking toad. Riley prowled restlessly back and forth in front of the curtains.

I wasn’t sure what time it was except that another serving of the dried egg stuff lay congealing on my bed tray. Must be day three.

Bufort didn’t even wait until I was fully awake. “Dr. Garnet, do you know the penalty for impersonating a police officer?”

“Why, Bufort? Is someone threatening to charge you with it?”

“What!”

“I wouldn’t worry. It’ll never stick. At least not for impersonating a competent one!”

A few of my bongs had started going off. Janet must have reattached them. Bufort’s eyes bulged, he was so enraged. Riley had gone perfectly still.

“That’s right, you pompous prick, your silly, conceited posturing left me at the mercy of a serial killer, a maniac. If I hadn’t done what I did, I’d be dead by now, and you’d be clucking your tongue and pronouncing it an unfortunate end by stress.”

“That’s absolutely—”

“It’s absolutely true, and you know it! You bother me one more time and I’ll give enough depositions to bust you to traffic tickets!”

A few nurses swished by the curtains and busied themselves with the alarms my rocketing pulse and blood pressure had triggered. A very stern Nurse Mandy said, “Gentlemen, you are out of here.” Forcefully, she levered Bufort out of the chair by the elbow and showed him the door. Riley winked at me as he trailed after his boss.

* * * *

The rest of the afternoon crept by. Popovitch and Sylvia Green dropped in to wish me a speedy return to work. Sometime later a rather morose Hurst hung around the end of my cubicle for a few seconds, mumbled about reopening the hundred beds, then left. I guess he figured it was politically unwise to continue our battle while I was so helpless.

I had a couple more sleeps and then was gently shaken awake. It was Riley. “Hi, Doc,” he said quietly. “Dr. Deloram said you wanted to speak to me?”

He’d pulled a chair up near my bed and kept looking nervously over at the curtain. I guessed he’d snuck back in and was afraid of being found again by Nurse Mandy.

“Yeah,” I answered sleepily.

But before I could say anything else, Riley interjected, “I wasn’t part of what that idiot boss of mine pulled today, but I couldn’t prevent it.” Then he gave me a big grin. “You really got him!”

I smiled back at the compliment. Then I got down to what I wanted to ask him. “I’ve got a lot of questions about how it all happened. And with Jones dead, are you going to be able to make a case against her thugs? The thought of them getting out scares me. And who was the guy that came back to resuscitate me? After all the killings that Jones had involved him in, why’d he bother?” Slept out, I was eager now to talk.

Riley leaned back in the chair. “First of all,” he began, “the guy who saved you is going to testify against the other two goons who worked with Jones in exchange for a lighter sentence. You won’t have to worry about them. Apparently they used to beat up on strikebreakers for the truckers’ union before they got to be ambulance drivers. That’s where Jones found them. Since they know we have a witness, their lawyer advised them to cooperate, and they’re talking now as well, though we haven’t made them any promises. They claim they never actually killed anyone, but are admitting to working with Jones for more than three years, snagging derelicts off the street for her ‘research,’ and then scattering their bodies around town after she was done with them.”

Three years. That was longer than I’d figured.

“They also did her other dirty work,” Riley added, “like trying to run you down, helping her trash your house, and setting up Watts. We found the Dobermans in a cage behind the house where one of them lived. They said it was for the money she paid them, but I got a creepy feeling they liked watching people suffer and would’ve done it for free. One of them also told me she really liked getting it on with them, together.” He related her sordid story with the neutral cynicism I’d expect from a cop. But I couldn’t suppress a shudder on hearing what she’d kept hidden all these years.

“A few of the vagrant DOAs’ bodies are being exhumed,” he continued, “to get evidence of needle marks in the heart. By the way, why was she so afraid of your ER data?”

I sat up. “The data covered only twelve months of her activity, but it contained enough information to expose her, if you knew enough to ask the right questions. It showed that DOAs came in only on the mornings when she was off duty the night before, or, to put it crudely, only when she wasn’t stuck in the ER and was free to go out and kill. I’m pretty sure the same pattern will show up for the times the other DOAs turned up all over the city. At first I made the mistake of looking for the shift with a lot of DOAs, but then I realized that didn’t make sense because they weren’t being killed in the ER. What pointed to her was the lack of DOAs when she was on duty. Show that same pattern for all those derelicts murdered with a cardiac needle and Jones would stand out from every other ER doc in Buffalo. I don’t know if she always used Watts’s lab to kill them, or if she sometimes ran her codes right in the back of the ambulance. If so, it might also have been possible to link the deaths to the nights she was on the road with the cardiac study.”

Riley reached for his notebook. “Can I get copies of the data that shows this?”

“Sure. See my secretary.”

Then I remembered Jones’s words back at the cabin. “All that risk, all that work. I couldn’t let it go to waste.”

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed, suddenly realizing the obvious. “The torsade de pointes killings were only part of it. There must have been earlier murders as she tried to get a breakthrough treating V. tach. and V. fib.”

Riley looked puzzled, and I took a moment explaining the terminology. When I finished, he stayed silent, then reached into his briefcase and handed me a folder. “Does this mean what I think it does?” he asked. “We found it in her apartment.”

I opened the file and recognized Jones’s familiar handwriting. It was an outline of the research she’d intended to pursue ‘in phase two of the cardiac study, but it was never intended for presentation to any ethics committee.

“My God!” I said again as I handed it back to him.

“She intended to go on killing, didn’t she,” he replied.

“I think she’d already started,” I answered.

“What!”

“Her idea in there,” I said, nodding to the file, “was to see if magnesium sulphate would be a breakthrough in the prevention of deadly heart rhythms as opposed to their treatment. She proposed loading up her derelicts with magnesium sulphate and
then
challenging them with her erythromycin/terfenadine cocktail or unsynchronized electric shock, like she’d tried on me, to see if they’d be more resistant to developing abnormal rhythms.”

“I thought those medicines usually produced torsade de whatever, and it was too rare to make her famous.”

“Torsade de pointes is still a variant of V. tach., and preventing it might have given her a useful lead on how to prevent ordinary V. tach. and V. fib. I’d already figured she was onto something new, using her old techniques, because the DOAs had kept coming. And even though she’d finished her paper on torsade de pointes, Watts had found terfenadine and erythromycin on the last John Doe.” I paused, thinking of all the poor souls who had died in such fear, then tapped the grisly document still in Riley’s hand. “She’d obviously begun her own phase two.”

“Christ!” whistled Riley as he returned the file to his briefcase. I thought he was going to close it, but he hesitated before snapping the clasps shut and took out a small cassette instead. I noticed his jaw was bulging as he looked at it. “Doc, you also asked about the fourth man, the one who saved you. I wasn’t going to put you through this yet, but if you’re well enough, I’d like you to listen to part of his interrogation.”

“Sure, but why wouldn’t I be well enough to hear it?”

“Because it’s going to take you back through all that happened to you, but from their point of view. And there are some nasty insinuations about you, at first.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me start by telling you about the guy who saved you. His name’s Vito Manley, though that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What’s important is he’s different from the other two. He worked for the same company as them, but he’d been transferred to dispatch at 911 about four years ago as part of some program to improve standards when MAS took over. A few months later, Jones appeared on the scene and started riding the ambulances for the research project. He noticed she preferred his old company and later realized it was because the types there suited her purposes.”

“How’d he get involved?”

“Listen for yourself. The full session was formally videotaped, but I recorded the parts I wanted you to hear on a cassette.” He pressed the Play button. Even with the hollow sound of a recording taken in a room, I recognized the familiar voice of the man who had saved my life and who had kept saying, “I’m sorry.”

“She’d slipped me a few thousand to direct any calls to pick up street derelicts to her and not make a record of it. Hell, I thought it was a Medicare scam—that she was copping their cards and running up a bunch of bogus claims payable to her. It seemed safe enough, at least for me. It wasn’t until last year, when someone started blackmailing her, that she told me what was really going on. Then she threatened to pull me down with her unless I helped her find out who it was.”