Mortal Remains (32 page)

She turned her head and gave him a contrite smile as if she sensed his discomfort with what she’d done. “I would have told you all this by next week. Events just started to roll faster than I expected, and you got the jump on me. Our first day together, when you said how everyone would let me in on the seamier sides of Hampton Junction, I nearly ‘fessed up then and there. I hope you can forgive me.”

Forgive? His instincts leapt to point out the potential problems she’d caused, but in the firelight her dark eyes emitted a sad warmth that laid a calming hand on his concerns. “Of course,” he said, deciding against saying anything for the moment. It was too late to do anything about what had happened anyway.

They remained where they were for a while, sipping wine, Lucy talking about the service industry that had sprung up for people trying to find a biological parent – everything from detectives to tracking programs on the Internet – and how none of it worked for her. To Mark it sounded as if she was still trying to justify her subterfuge. In any case, the openness between them from before dinner was gone.

Before going to bed, he took his messages.

“… Dr. Roper, it’s Victor. I think I’ve found what had companies using Nucleus Labs so jumpy. Also, I got to wondering about the group of New York doctors and, being in a suspicious frame of mind, figured I ought to check if there were anything in the test results themselves to warrant someone wanting to store them separately. I hacked into the terminal we forward them to, and there’s a peculiar little something there as well. Give me a call…”

Instantly he felt wide-awake. He was dialing the number when the next recording sounded.

“… Mark, it’s Earl. I’m in the hospital, admitted as a patient. We have to talk…”

Holy shit!
he thought. There was no answer when he got through to Victor’s. “Maybe he’s out somewhere for Thanksgiving dinner,” he said to Lucy, who had appeared at the door to his office. She must have overheard the messages.

He was already dialing the number for NYCH.

“I’m sorry, sir, but all calls to that number have been blocked. I can give you the nurse’s desk.”

“Are you a relative?” said the woman who picked up.

“No, I’m his colleague, Dr. Mark Roper. He and I are working on a coroner’s case together. I must talk with him.”

“Dr. Garnet has been sedated, sir, and Dr. Collins has left strict orders he not be disturbed.”

“Then connect me with Dr. Collins’s home.”

“One moment.”

“Mark!” Melanie greeted him. “I’m sorry, I guess I should have informed you about Earl’s admission. Apologies.”

“What happened?”

“Looks like he picked up a bug from our fair city’s fine cuisine. I’ll have preliminary cultures in the morning.”

“But is he all right?”

“Sure. I mean, he’s got a lot of discomfort, but vitals are fine, lytes et cetera check out okay, and believe me, he’s well covered in the analgesia department.”

Mark’s heartbeat ticked up a notch. He hesitated to ask his next question, thinking it would sound crazy, but went ahead anyway. “Melanie, I know you’re going to think I’m nuts for even suggesting this, but is there any way Earl could have been deliberately poisoned?”

“You mean by the likes of Chaz Braden?”

“My God. Earl told you?”

“Only about your suspicions over what happened to Bessie McDonald. As for him, his case seems bona fide. Certainly Earl didn’t say anything to make me think differently. But don’t worry. I’m hovering over him like a mother hen. Chaz Braden, or anyone else I haven’t personally authorized, won’t get near him.”

That’s a pretty big promise,
Mark thought, knowing perfectly well how staff could come and go as they pleased on a busy ward, whatever Melanie might order. Nevertheless, he thanked her, asked that she phone him if there were any changes in Earl’s condition, and hung up.

Quickly telling Lucy what had happened, he tried Victor’s number again.

Still no answer. “I guess we’ll have to wait until morning. He’s obviously got a better social life than I thought.”

“Let’s hope he’s getting laid,” she said with a wicked grin, and walked over to where she’d left the boxes of birth records she’d been going through. “As for me, I’m going to work on these a while. You, mister, better go to bed. You look tired.”

Mark felt a flash of alarm, his concerns about the integrity of evidence resurfacing. Then he thought,
What the hell.
She’d already been through them once. From his own look at them, they didn’t seem to have a bearing on the case anyway. And somewhere in there should be her own birth record. Maybe she’d find something useful in that regard. Who was he to stand in the way of a woman’s search for her mother?

As she spread out some of the papers on the kitchen table, he saw large sheets that looked like accounting ledgers with reams of handwritten numbers on them. “What are those?”

“A summary I’m making of all the statistics. I got pretty good at spotting trends on spreadsheets like these in the refugee camps. I thought I’d give it a go here.”

Impressed by her diligence, he wished her good night, and went upstairs to bed.

But as he tried to fall asleep, his ugly confrontation with Braden crowded in, hanging over everything like a cold shroud. Damn the man to hell for suggesting such muck about his father.

He eventually drifted off.

Bad dreams ambushed him throughout the night. The one that brought him fully awake found him in the cold water where they’d found Kelly with her killer out in the blackness, circling him, drawing closer. He struggled to reach the surface, but his limbs moved in agonizing slow motion as he sank deeper, and the dark liquid congealed around him with the smothering slipperiness of blood.

That same evening, Thursday,

November 22, 11:30 P.M.

New York City Hospital

Earl’s eyes shot open.

He lay motionless, peering through the darkness, wondering what had awakened him. He heard a soft click, the sound of his room door swinging shut.

Someone must have been in to check on him and just left.

Probably a nurse.

Mentally he felt wrapped in cotton from the morphine he’d gotten during the day, but for the moment he didn’t have any pain. He definitely didn’t want another shot, not the way it turned his brain into cream cheese.

When the first dose wore off, he’d managed to phone Janet and explain what had happened, trying to minimize his symptoms. “Don’t worry, you know these things are usually over in twenty-four hours. I’m just sorry I can’t have Thanksgiving dinner with you and Brendan.”

“Dammit, Earl, be straight with me.”

“I am, I swear-”

“You wouldn’t let anyone drag you into a hospital bed unless you were half-dead. Now tell me what’s going on – really.”

“Everything’s fine, Janet, just fine…” As he’d talked, it became all he could do to keep his voice from giving away the sheer agony in his stomach. He didn’t want her jumping on a plane, bringing Brendan, and having them both fretting at his bedside. He finally convinced her to stay put.

“But if you’re not telling me something, Earl Garnet, I’ll doctor you myself, starting with the biggest colonoscopy tube I can find-”

“Of course I’m telling you everything.”

“You lie like a pirate.”

“Me?”

“When it comes to whether you’re sick or in trouble, you do.”

To Brendan he’d said, “Just a sick tummy, like you get sometimes.”

“Drink Seven-Up,” his son had advised.

He’d also tried to reach Mark, got his answering machine, and left the number.

Then he’d requested a nurse to contact Melanie. “Ask her to please change the order to Demerol or codeine – something that won’t put me so out.”

A matronly red-cheeked woman wearing granny glasses had cheerfully spiked another needleful of morphine into his IV line. “No such luck. Dr. Collins says you need your rest.” She relaunched him to the other side of the universe.

The soft squeak of crepe soles approaching his bed snapped him into the present, and a white shape glided toward him in the darkness.

“Who’s there?” he yelled, jackknifing upright.

“It’s Tanya Wozcek, Dr. Garnet. Quiet down. I shouldn’t even be here.”

“Tanya?”

She snapped on his bedside lamp. The light caught the bristles of her short hair and turned it into a silvery brown aura. “I heard you were admitted. All the women on my floor are talking about what a weird coincidence it is, you getting sick after asking all those questions about Bessie. I had to make sure you were all right, so I slipped away.”

“I’m okay,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Chaz Braden hasn’t been near you, has he? I mean, is there any way he could have made you ill?”

Whatever he suspected Braden of doing, the last thing he needed right now was an outlandish rumor casting himself as the man’s latest victim. Should he or Mark ever find enough evidence to lay charges against Chaz, he could just imagine what a defense lawyer would say. “So Chaz Braden, in addition to murdering Dr. Kelly McShane, making Dr. Bessie McDonald slip into a coma, and firing a shot at Dr. Mark Roper, also managed somehow to poison Dr. Earl Garnet, even though no one can tell us when or how. Is there an MD in Manhattan he hasn’t attacked?”

“No, I haven’t even seen him since last Saturday. And though I appreciate your concern, I insist you don’t go spreading-”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t take advantage of your being here.”

“Tanya, don’t get carried away-”

“Dr. Garnet, for God’s sake, he got to Bessie. He could get to you the same way, or have someone sabotage you for him.”

That gave him pause. Still, such talk had to stop. “No way,” he said, even as he began to wonder about whom Braden might have hired to poison him. “There hasn’t been anyone near me, and if we go around making unsubstantiated allegations, no one will ever believe us once we do get evidence-”

“Dr. Collins has got you on morphine, for Christ’s sake. A squad of Marines could march in here, and there’d be times you wouldn’t know.” As she leaned in to speak with him, the illumination from the lamp caught her face from the side, exaggerating the shadows around her mouth and eyes. “So tell me, how do you feel?”

“Crappy.” He grinned at his choice of word.

Her worried expression continued to hover over him like an overwrought half-moon. “But are your symptoms what they should be, or has he done something else to you?”

Let’s see,
he thought.
Excruciating pain, nausea, a bellyful of writhing snakes, and soon to come, promising more delights. Maybe vomiting, most certainly the runs. Yeah, Tanya, that seemed exactly right. What a relief. I’ve only got one thing wrong with me, with or without any help from Chaz Braden.
Clenching his jaw even tighter against a new volley of cramps, he muttered, “Of course they are.”
Now go away, so I can twist and squirm in peace.

“What’s in here?” She turned to read the label of his IV bag.

“Normal saline, with extra potassium, exactly as it should be.”

“And who prepared it?”

“Dr. Collins herself. She did it to save the nurses – Oh, God.” All at once he felt scalded inside, as if something were shredding the walls of his intestines.

“What is it?”

“Just please leave. I’ve got to call the nurse.”

“For more morphine?”

“Whatever.”

“Why not Demerol-”

At the moment he didn’t care. “I’ll ask for it. Now, please get out of here.”

“Who gives you your shots? Always the same person?”

“Yes! She looks like Santa Claus in drag. Now dammit, Tanya, I’m ringing my buzzer.” He flayed at it with one hand, cradling his stomach with the other.

“Okay,” she said, pressing it for him, then heading to the door, “but I’m keeping an eye on you.”

He let out a long moan, and twisted himself into a pretzel.

Two hours later he fell and cut his head making a rush for the toilet as the remainder of his symptoms, long expected, kicked in.

That put an end to the morphine.

It also earned him a tube down his stomach.

His life became sandwiched between basins at one end, bedpans at the other, and the unremitting agony of a gut on fire in between.

They started giving him Demerol, but it barely muted the pain. A second dose didn’t work much better, other than to make him sleepy. He knew not to request a third. It’d have the same effect as morphine as far as suppressing his gag reflex, and he’d be choking on vomit.

“How about we ask Dr. Collins about a tube in your trachea to protect your airway? Then we could knock you right out,” the nurse with red cheeks suggested.

He declined. Then he thought, “Wait a minute. Weren’t you on the day shift?” he asked, fearing he’d let himself get disoriented.

“Dr. Collins asked that I switch to nights, just so you got the best of care.”

Oh, great!

By dawn he felt like an empty husk. “I’m dehydrating,” he told Santa, trying to prop himself up on one elbow. He flopped back, unable to bear the weight. “The IVs aren’t keeping up with the fluid I’ve lost. And better check my potassium. My muscles are so weak I can hardly move.”

“This isn’t a service station, Dr. Garnet.” Her icy tone sounded as cold as the North Pole and just as hostile, making it clear he wouldn’t be breaching the divide between patient and staff on her watch. But she sped up the IV.

By the end of her shift he could barely hold an emesis basin.

“And how are we today?” Melanie asked, disgustingly chipper as she swept in at 7:00 A.M. on the wings of a crisp lab coat, obviously giving him the honor of being her first case for morning rounds. A semicircle of sleepy residents sporting more wrinkled wear shuffled in after her and formed a small white amphitheater at the foot of his bed.

“As you recall,” she began, addressing her entourage without giving him a chance to answer, “Dr. Garnet came into ER over twenty-four hours ago with symptoms of bacterial enteritis characterized by inordinate pain, yet a relatively delayed onset of diarrhea. With this subtle discrepancy, I suspected this might be
E. coli 0157:H7
, rather than the more typical organisms we might expect. Of course I withheld antibiotics pending cultures. As I passed through bacteriology this morning, I picked up the preliminary results. All sorts of normal
E. coli
are being grown as would be the norm, but no salmonella, no shigella, and no
Campylobacter
. That means, I think it’s reasonable to assume that hidden amongst these noninfectious
E. coli
, we’ll find the infectious strain, or a serotype close to it, that I initially suspected. Of course we’ll have to wait a full forty-eight hours…”