Mortal Remains (36 page)

“That was how my father died,” he said, holding a mug of cappuccino with both hands as he took a sip. The warmth didn’t help the icy grip on his stomach any, nor the cold in his fingers, and his insides were still shaking. “Except there was no one there to help him.”

She went very quiet. “How did it happen?”

Unwanted flashbacks flickered to life: the boom that he heard a mile away, racing toward the smoke on his bike, the circle of people standing around something.

“It was an accident,” he said, trying to shut down the images. “And there’s nothing to talk about. I just wanted you to know why I wasn’t exactly a rock tonight.” The darkest notion of all continued to circle him, but he wouldn’t allow it even to take the shape of thought.

She watched him over the white mound of foam while taking small sips from her own cup, her dark gaze giving him the tell-me-your-story look that he’d seen work so magically with his patients.

Well, it wasn’t going to succeed with him.

Using a tone intended to be all business, he told her only what had been tumbling through his head while he’d worked on Nell, that the gas tank explosion had been deliberately set, intended to kill the three of them. Yet as he talked, his mind veered to the woman on the phone tonight. Whatever else Victor had found, it was what he discovered about the big companies and their executive health plans that seemed to be important. At least she seemed to think so, enough to believe someone could kill him over it.

His thoughts shifted to Charles Braden with those silver-spooned friends of his from the business elites of Manhattan. Maybe one had nothing to do with the other, but he found it impossible not to think that their corporations might be involved.

So he shared all this with Lucy as well.

It didn’t sound so outrageous laid it out in words.

He even talked about his turmoil over how to manage Nell in ER, including the way Braden had intruded on his thoughts because of the set-to they’d had over euthanasia while they were in the man’s library. “I thought he played devil’s advocate last night. But I’m not so sure he wouldn’t have granted Nell’s wish and put her out of her misery if he were running the resuscitation just now.”

“How do you mean?”

“He pontificated about how the line between right and wrong, even life and death, blurs with advances in technology and the times. To prove the point, he raised some pretty troubling issues about euthanasia. It was chilling, hearing him talk about how, in the past, country doctors had smothered deformed newborns to save the family the hardship of raising a handicapped child.”

“What?”

“You heard me right. He’s got this weird collection of medical atrocities he calls his ‘hall of shame’ – twisted eugenics, medical war crimes, that kind of thing – and he uses it to proselytize against deviant science.”

Lucy’s jaw fell, her eyes widened, and she dived for her purse. “Mark, I know what’s wrong!”

“What?”

She hauled out the folded spreadsheets of statistics she’d brought with her and spread them out on a nearby coffee table. “All along you’ve been preoccupied with Chaz, but what if it’s Daddy who has a secret?”

“How do you mean?”

She tapped the papers in front of her. “I didn’t want to tell you my suspicions about what I found here, because they seemed to have no context, and…” She stopped speaking, her cheeks flushed.

“Go on.”

She hesitated, then said, “It’s what we fought about earlier. I wasn’t a total klutz when I came here and stuck my nose in your investigation. I actually bent over backwards not to let my issues with Braden cloud your judgment about the man. So when I saw the discrepancy, I figured my own history with him had made me so biased I might be making too much of it, and I didn’t say anything.”

“Making too much of what?”

“Check this out.” She began to draw her finger down the various columns of numbers. “I think I discovered why your father had been interested in Braden Senior’s charitable works.”

He immediately leaned forward to see what she had.

“These are summaries of the births, deaths, and adoptions at the home; these, births and deaths at the center in Saratoga Springs. Like you, I first looked for the usual indicators of something wrong – a higher mortality-morbidity rate, that kind of thing. But as you said, the statistics are right on the norm for the home, and even lower than normal for the maternity center. In both instances, anyone looking at them would quickly conclude all was well.”

“Right.”

“So let’s say we give the guy credit for superb obstetrical skills on his moneyed patients.” Beside the mortality-morbidity numbers she placed yet another paper full of figures in her handwriting. “This is a synopsis of the actual delivery records your father had requisitioned from both places. I totaled all the infants pronounced normal, and here I itemized those with congenital abnormalities – heart defects; urinary tract anomalies; cleft lips and palates; limb aberrations, including club feet; neuronal tube defects of varying severity, some with only nominally open spines, others with fully open cords; and of course twenty-three trisomy where the mongoloid features were recognizable at birth.”

“You were busy!” Mark said with a whistle, realizing she must have stayed up most of the nights he’d left her working on them at the kitchen table.

“As I said, I got used to reading mass records at the camps. Now here’s the point. The guy’s maternity center is short on congenital abnormalities.”

“Short?”

“Yeah. Remember obstetrical statistics. Three percent of all newborns have some defect at birth. Out of the six thousand deliveries documented in these records, he should have recorded about a hundred and eighty with some kind of problem. He had barely a dozen. Good prenatal care can accomplish a lot, but change the rate of defects that much, no way. He had to be fudging his numbers. At least, that’s what I thought initially, but couldn’t see how or why.”

“Well, I’ll be.”

“And I figured your dad couldn’t pin him down, or he’d have done something about the place.”

He never got the chance,
Mark thought.

“Which begged the question,” she continued, “why Braden would care about anyone twigging to the discrepancy in his records at this late date, there being no obvious link with Kelly’s murder or anything else. At least it seemed that way, which is why I hesitated to even bring it up…”

As Lucy talked, the number 180 stuck in his mind. He’d found something of that amount when he reviewed the records himself. But what? He recalled it had to do with the home for unwed mothers, not the maternity center.

“… I did spot another connection, but it didn’t mean anything until just now, when you mentioned eugenics. Look at the total number of adoptions. Braden claimed to have made them directly out of the home for unwed mothers.” She flipped back a page and began to scan yet more lists of figures.

Mark reached over and laid his hand on her arm. He knew what the number would be. One hundred and eighty. His breathing slowed.

“Here it is,” she continued, obviously too charged up to heed his touch. “The number of private adoptions arranged from the home – 180! See what he might have been doing? Substituting healthy babies from the home for deformed ones at the maternity center. I mean, my God, can you imagine anything so hideous? It might actually have been legal if done on the up-and-up, couples from the maternity center putting their deformed kids up for immediate adoption, at the same time picking themselves up a healthy child from the home. Odious, but legal. The trouble is, there’s no records of the abnormal kids at either place. It’s as if they disappeared.”

The same evening, Friday, November 23, 9:30 P.M.

New York City Hospital

“M
y potassium’s 2.1?” Earl felt a ripple of fear. At anything below 3.0, heart muscle became so twitchy the slightest stimulation could throw it into various sorts of fibrillation. Just like what happened to Bessie McDonald. Except hers had been limited to the upper chambers. His entire myocardium could end up squirming like a useless sack of worms, in other words, complete cardiac arrest. He broke out in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with his gut.

Instinctively he didn’t want to move. Any exertion at all could tip him over the edge. Already he could feel his pulse start to pound, the effect he’d expect from all the adrenaline that must be surging through his blood.
Christ, slow the rate down,
he thought, trying to calm himself, but that only made it tick up higher. His intestines kicked in with a snarl, and hinted at sending another wave of cramps his way. “Oh, great,” he muttered, pain being another surefire way to get his heart racing. “Tanya, I need IV potassium fast, maximal dose, sixty milliequivalents in a liter, run it in at ten to twenty milliequivalents an hour.” The rate had to be exact. Too much too fast could also stop a heart cold.

She grabbed two more vials of potassium from the medication bin, having already added one to the new bag of normal saline that she’d brought with her.

“And I’ll need to be on a cardiac monitor, plus you better give me a hundred milligrams of Demerol after all, to at least take the edge off the spasms-”

“Whoa, I’m not even supposed to be here, remember?” She shook up the intravenous solution to mix in the added vials. “What I suggest,” she added, her fingers flying as she got the new bag up and running, “is request the Demerol yourself as already ordered, and complain of palpitations or something so they put you on a monitor while they sort it all out. That ought to just about cover your needs for the moment. Just before shift change in the morning I’ll phone the result to the floor clerk here, pretending I’m a lab tech reporting an error. She’ll tell the nurses, and they’ll order a repeat themselves. That way you’ll know if more potassium’s required.”

He felt sheepish about his previous suspicions of her. “You’re a wonder, Tanya Wozcek. I don’t know how to thank you.”

Her weak smile couldn’t hide the worry in her eyes as she fine-tuned the intravenous rate. She knew as well as he did it would be very touch and go. “Does that burn?” she asked.

The concentrated solution she’d prepared could strip the lining of a vein, sclerosing it. It already felt like fire going up his arm. “I’ll live,” he muttered.

She slowed the rate by two-thirds.

What he wanted to know was how his potassium could have been brought so low so fast. The runs? Not this quickly. Something else had to be depleting it. But what?

He glanced toward the IV bag Tanya had discarded. “Did your friend run any other tests on me?”

“Sure. Your white count’s up, which is to be expected with the infection, but everything else was fine, except for a high CO
₂
which probably doesn’t matter.” She anchored the tubing to his skin with tape.

CO
₂
was an indicator of his naturally occurring bicarbonate level, the base that balances all naturally occurring acids circulating in the body. It also existed as a pharmaceutical preparation. Though rarely used anymore, it was part of the emergency protocol for dropping critically high serum potassium levels, and large vials of it were common in hospitals. The solution itself looked clear as water, and if someone did do a blood test checking the bicarb level, it would normally be to make sure the reading wasn’t too low. Nobody would make too much out of an unexplained elevation, just as Tanya hadn’t. In other words, it would be a perfect agent to mess up a patient’s potassium without raising suspicions, and anyone could have slipped a dose into his IV while he’d been sleeping. It also had another nasty little property, he remembered, a chill slowly creeping up his spine. It could precipitate digoxin toxicity in patients who were already on the medication. “Tanya, quick, please grab a urine dipstick and hand me the IV bag you just replaced.”

She frowned, but did as he asked.

He released a few drops of the remaining fluid on the test strip.

The portion measuring acid-base should have remained a neutral beige. Instead it turned blue as a sapphire, indicating extreme alkalinity.

Bingo!

A sickening cold sensation filled his chest.

“Who else would know how to play with potassium like that but a doctor?” she said, once Earl told her what had been done to him. “Chaz still has my vote, or someone he ordered to do it. Christ, forget our other plan. We’ve got to get you out of here. If they can get to your IV bottles without you knowing-”

“Not just yet.”

“Are you nuts?”

“I’ll be okay for tonight,” he bluffed. “Whoever did this doesn’t know we’re onto them or that you’ve changed my IVs.”

“But what about telling the nurses, so you get the monitor, and the Demerol?”

“I’ll still ask for the Demerol, and make up enough of a story about fluttering in my chest they’ll wire me to something.”

“Then who’ll replace your intravenous with extra potassium when it’s empty? I can’t keep sneaking in here to do that.”

“This bag is good until morning. By then Melanie will be here, and she’ll handle everything. You forget, I start walking around now, my heart’s primed to break into a jitterbug.”

Scowling, she planted her hands on her hips. “I can arrange a wheelchair. A stretcher even.”

“And where would you put me? I need to be in a hospital. The worst of this damn infection is yet to come.”

“And you could have yourself transferred, by air ambulance if necessary, back to Buffalo, where you’d be a lot safer than you are here. So quit the bullshit and tell me the real reason you refuse to leave. Are you using yourself as bait?”

Damn right,
he thought, more determined than ever to carry out his plan now that he knew what to expect. Logically, the person who’d gotten to his IV before would want to pull a repeat performance, but only after the next scheduled change of the intravenous bag. Since the old one would have run out around 5:00 A.M., that’s when Earl expected his would-be killer to come sneaking around. “Of course not,” he answered, giving Tanya his most sincere smile, until a new wave of cramps twisted him in two and sent his pulse into triple digits again.

“You are nuts!” Her voice slid a notch higher, sounding frightened.

No fooling her. Worse, he sensed she was going to blow the whistle on him. “Tanya, now don’t you tell anyone, hear me? I’ll be all right. Whoever added the bicarb probably won’t try to slip me another dose until after I’m due to get a new IV bag in the morning. And I’ll be ready to raise holy hell the second anyone comes near me. If I haven’t got a nibble by tomorrow, I promise you, I’m out of here.”

She stared at him with that odd moonlike face of hers, looking skeptical as hell.

It took some arguing, but he finally convinced her that if she made a fuss now about extra security or tried to keep watch over him herself, it would alert his attacker and only postpone another attempt on his life. She reluctantly agreed not to interfere.

“But it’s guards, an air ambulance, and home to your hospital in Buffalo if this nonsense doesn’t work,” she insisted.

“Agreed.”

Shaking her head, she turned and left.

He pressed the call button and waited for the nurses, trying to keep a grip on his nerve and ratchet down the drubbing that his heart-turned-boxing-glove continued to deliver against the inside of his chest.

10:30 P.M.

Hampton Junction

It was snowing again, the flakes coming at the windshield like tracer bullets. Mark sat hunched forward over the wheel to see better as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “Nell told me recently about a friend of hers who had a baby at the home,” he said.

“Oh?” Lucy paused in her attempt to direct a blast of hot air from the heater so it would defog the glass.

“The woman had said how she and other expectant mothers wanted to make a garden as a way to lessen the dreariness of the place, but were refused. Not only that, she complained they only had a half-finished lawn to walk on, even though the place was big as a park. And when I went out there, it seemed that lawn never did get completed. It had gone to seed of course, but I could make out the shape. It looked irregular, the bordering undergrowth from the forest having intruded on areas where the grass should have been. Hard to imagine fat cats like the Bradens unable to spring for a bag of seed or more than a few rolls of sod at a time. Unless someone needed an area that was constantly in a state of being dug up, so he could bury what he didn’t want found, then cover it with grass so it stayed put.”

Lucy rode with a hand over her mouth, as if trying not to throw up.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“No, I’m not.”

“Do you want me to stop the car?”

“Won’t do any good. I got like this in the camps. All objective when I found the bodies on paper, but ready to upchuck when the reality of them sank in.”

They rode in silence.

“Why would he do it?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Who knows? Money maybe?”

“But I thought he was already richer than God.”

“He is now. But back then? Sometimes these dynasty families have trouble coming up with the inheritance taxes to pass their goodies from one generation to the next.”

She gave a shudder and huddled deeper into her coat.

He thought of the books in Charles’s library that chronicled all the times and ways humankind had attempted to rid itself of
others
and protect
sameness
. “Or it could be a new variant of an old disease,” he said.

“An old disease?”

“Think about the atrocities you’ve seen these last seven years. Aren’t they committed so that the position of one tribe or group or race might be enhanced over the rest?”

“Pretty much.”

“The factions always seem to share the same pretenses, right? Protecting culture, spreading religion, getting an economic edge, creating a nation of superior beings, righting old wrongs – then they outshout each other
trying to proclaim their unique benefit to the world, thereby justifying their own entitlement.
”

“It’s sounds like you’re quoting a sociology text.”

“It’s by one of my favorite journalists. He writes for the
Herald
, and I spotted some of his articles glancing through one of Braden’s books last night. That particular line came from a series that won a Pulitzer. It always stuck with me.”

“Well, it describes a few drunken warlords I met in Serbia to a
T
.”

“I probably still have clippings of the piece at home. It suggests that while primitives use genocide to eliminate outside threats, the sophisticated supremacist prefers eugenics, because that offers the possibility of strengthening the desirable traits of the tribe and weeding out its weaknesses all from within. In other words, improving the species.”

“That’s Nazi drivel.”

“ ‘Marry your own kind’ still holds sway among a lot of non-Nazis.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I’m just trying to crawl inside his head to answer your question, ‘Why?’ ”

“You spend too much time inside that creepy place, and you’re going to have to hose out your own brain.”

“If Braden believes in smotherings, maybe he’s also an advocate of other twisted beliefs in that hall of shame of his. He and his cronies are as arrogant a bunch of elitists who think they are the chosen ones to rule their patch – a sizable chunk of corporate Manhattan – as any tribe you ever came across on your travels, and a hundred times more powerful.”

“So?”

“So maybe Charles Braden made sure they had more than their fair share of healthy offspring.”

“What?”

“Probably some crazy idea to assure their succession – hand off their life works to a generation free of flaws.”

“But that’s nuts. Sick. Loony!”

“Of course it is. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“But if he wanted healthy kids for all his crowd, why not just help the parents adopt? He didn’t have to risk committing murder.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t go the official route, but I’m almost certain he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think the parents knew. At least not the mothers.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not necessarily. I think I may have already talked to a woman who had her baby switched.”

“No way!”

“Someone who gave birth at his maternity center. Nell suggested I get in touch with her. She blew me off – thinks Charles Braden is a god – but a lot of little details add up.”

“Such as?”

“She said the baby ‘wouldn’t breathe when he came out.’ What else might have been wrong, I’ve no idea. But Braden, instead of trying to resuscitate the kid on the spot, ran from the delivery room, giving the infant mouth-to-mouth respirations, and get this, jumped in his car and supposedly raced to the hospital himself.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Except a week later he placed a healthy baby boy back in that mother’s arms.”

“And she thought it was her own?”

“From the description of what happened in the delivery room, I don’t think she or anyone else got a good look at the newborn. And Nell told me how both at the maternity center and the home, they never let the same staff work more than a few days a week. I’ll bet that was so he could ‘return’ babies when different people were on duty, and he also timed it so the mother went home the next day.”

They rode in silence again.

“I can’t believe the parents knew about the smotherings,” she said eventually.

“Neither can I.”

She remained huddled up in the corner of the cab, apparently lost in thought.

He peered into the storm, the downpour having grown so thick he was driving through white streamers.