Mortal Remains (41 page)

Within seconds he felt the icy water at his neck and watched it inch past her hairline toward her eyes.

He got off his knees and crouched on the flanges, then pulled her to him, trying to bend her at the waist so her back was on his lap and she’d be faceup. That way he could keep her head above water and still give her mouth-to-mouth ventilation. He moved her into position, but her entire body, already stiff with cold, wouldn’t flex properly. When he bent down to deliver another lungful of air, the waterline lapped over her face.

Where was Dan?

What if the pilots couldn’t fly because of the storm, or took too long, or couldn’t find this godforsaken place?

Rapidly losing strength, his teeth chattered so fiercely now that they clicked against hers. He tried to recall what his textbooks said about survival times in frigid water as far as staying conscious, but his memory no longer functioned that well, a sign that his body heat was quickly dropping.

Choking, he pulled her higher onto his thighs.

Again he scanned the pale circle and strained to hear the sounds of rotors or approaching sirens.

Nothing – only smaller circles of snow reeling and floating in total silence.

Come soon,
he prayed, and filled her lungs yet again.

The ghostly opening peered down on them, offering no more hope than a malevolent, empty eye.

5:15 A.M.

New York City Hospital

Earl had to escape. The one person he couldn’t defend himself against was Melanie Collins.

He tried to call Janet. If anything happened to him, he wanted someone to know the truth. But he found his phone line dead.

He immediately summoned his nurse.

“Dr. Collins’s latest orders are for complete rest,” Mrs. White, his cherry-cheeked angel informed him, delivering the news with an emphatic stare over the top of her tiny square-rimmed spectacles. “She phoned at midnight to check how you were doing. When she learned you’d been making late-night calls and complaining about palpitations, she read the riot act. No ingoing or outgoing communications, period.”

“Now wait a minute-”

“Told us she’d put you out and intubate you if she had to, just so you’d get some rest.”

“No way!”

“Talk it over with her. She’ll be here at seven for morning rounds – you can set your clock by her.”

She turned to leave.

And if he told this red-cheeked minder that Melanie Collins might be trying to kill him?

What makes you think a crazy thing like that?
she would ask.

Because Melanie Collins may have killed Kelly McShane.

And why would she have done such a thing?

Because as Melanie basked in the adulation she garnered for nailing hard-to-diagnose illnesses, Kelly must have sensed the same all-about-me afterglow she’d seen her mother exude when people gushed over her for taking care of Kelly’s mysterious diseases.

“So?”

So Kelly realized Melanie made patients sick for the purpose of playing the hero later.

At which point Mrs. White would report he’d gone paranoid, giving Melanie the perfect opportunity to shoot him full of major tranquilizers and summon six big orderlies to tie him down if he protested.

Better he just walk out the door, then sort out the details once he got beyond her power.

He sat on the side of the bed and gingerly tested his legs.

They wobbled as he stood, but held him.

He took a few trial steps, and they nearly buckled.

No matter.

He turned off the alarms on the monitor, shut it down, and disconnected himself. How long would it take the night nurses to see his screen on their central console had gone blank? A while, he hoped.

Next he ripped out the needles in his arm, the IV bag being almost empty. Hoping he’d received enough potassium to at least stabilize his heart, he pressed on the puncture site with his thumb to staunch the flow of blood and hesitantly walked over to the bureau where they’d put his clothes. He started to dress, first pulling on his socks.

“Going somewhere, Dr. Garnet?” said a man’s voice at the door, and Charles Braden III stepped into his room.

Primed on adrenaline, pain, and no sleep, Earl reacted like a cornered animal. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded. He backed up to the bed and slid his hand under the covers, his fingers closing around the fistful of syringes he’d planted, needle first, into the mattress. His revelation about Melanie might change some of his ideas about how the Bradens fitted in the picture, but not enough that he suddenly felt safe around them.

Charles started toward him.

“I’d stay where you are!” Earl said.

The man stopped in midstride. “Why, I just intended to sit down-”

“Tell me what you want.”

In the dim light, the steel-brush silver of Charles’s hair made him seem more formidable, as if he were bristling with quills. “All right, but perhaps
you
better sit down. What I’m going to say will come as a bit of a shock, and you don’t look so good.”

Earl stayed leaning against the bed, his hand still clutched around his makeshift weapon. “I’m fine where I am.”

Braden shrugged, and sank his hands deep into the pockets of the white coat he wore over his suit as if he were still a practicing doctor. “I’m here to inform you that late yesterday afternoon Dr. Tommy Leannis approached my son with the news that you were the man who went off with Kelly in a taxi the night before her disappearance. Is this true?”

Earl felt the blood drain from his head.

He’d end up being handed to the cops for Kelly’s murder after all – by Charles and Chaz Braden, goddamn it. Exotic theories about Melanie Collins wouldn’t protect him now, especially since he had no proof other than a used IV bag with bicarb in it and a bunch of false-normal potassium readings. The rest was all just speculation.

Instinctively he tried to bluff. “What are you talking about-”

“Don’t play with me. I’ve already heard your denials. Leannis gave my son a tape of a conversation in which you went on at length about it not being true.”

Earl swallowed, his mouth going drier by the second, his heart giving the inside of his ribs another going over. Like a man just shot who tries to fathom the damage, he cast about in his mind for what he’d said to that weasel Leannis, dreading he may have let something slip that would incriminate himself.

“Sure you don’t want to sit down?” Braden said. “You’re starting to look worse than when I came in.”

“No, I’m fine, except I can’t seriously believe you’d take what Leannis said-”

“I also heard the same allegation from the biggest gossip in the hospital, Lena Downie in medical records.”

Earl’s face grew warm. If that woman was blabbing about it, he’d be the talk of NYCH in no time. Whether the police believed the story or not, his credibility, especially now when he needed it most, would be toast. “Oh, my God.”

“What’s even more interesting is who told her.”

Earl felt another surge of pain shoot through his gut. He fought to stay on his feet, a prickle of cold sweat sticking his hospital gown to his skin. “Told her?”

“Yeah. Turns out it’s the same person who gave the notion to Tommy Leannis.”

“But you said Melanie Collins did that.”

“Right. She picked him because, as everyone in the hospital knows, Leannis is a brown-nosing fool. He’d try anything to curry favor with our family in the hope our influence might throw some fresh meat to that cut-and-tuck business he has the nerve to call the practice of medicine. She probably figured he’d come running to us in some sleazy manner with the news, and he didn’t disappoint. Telling Lena Downie as well would be Melanie’s way of assuring a more general distribution.”

“You mean-”

“Melanie Collins is setting you up to take the blame for Kelly’s murder. Not that I figure she intends to let you live long enough to go to trial. Smear you by innuendo as the killer, I suspect, is her plan, then you conveniently die of some apparent complication from your infection, and the case is closed. Nobody’s going to look too closely at loose ends when the prime suspect is dead, especially in a twenty-seven-year-old murder.”

Earl wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“Setting me up? You mean you don’t believe I did it. And you know what she’s doing to me?”

“How she specifically intends to make you die, no. But I’ve been through enough of her charts in the last few days to get a pretty good idea of her repertoire. She’s a regular alchemist when it comes to fiddling with drugs and eliciting their side effects, altering sugars, playing with acid-base balance, shifting potassium and sodium levels up and down like elevators-”

“Wait a minute. You make it sound like there’s been a lot more cases than the two Kelly discovered.”

“The woman’s been setting up her ‘triumphs’ for a couple of decades. Glory-kills, I suppose you could call the ones who didn’t make it. Deaths didn’t really matter to her, as long as she got kudos for nailing the diagnosis.”

“My God. But how did you get onto her?”

“I started with the same two charts you did, and saw the same patterns. I also had access to her student evaluations. I remembered she had been something less than a star during her rotation in obstetrics. My staff nicknamed her ‘Fumbles’ they were so afraid she’d drop a baby. I also looked up the other departmental assessments of her. Borderline. So how does someone so mediocre get so good? I asked myself.”

Earl listened with a mixture of relief and wariness. “And what about the rest of the story?” he asked. Braden seemed about to clear him, but would he help Kelly’s lover, or make him pay?

“Obviously, Kelly came to the same conclusions about the digoxin cases that you and I did.” Braden said with no hesitation. “She confronted Melanie, and Melanie killed her to avoid getting caught.” He continued to stand there, his hands in his pockets, white coat immaculate, looking like he’d stepped out of a fashion magazine, at five-thirty in the morning. Something didn’t add up. “Why did you tell me this now?”

Braden looked at him as if he were crazy. “Because my son and I only just now finished going through Melanie’s files. We’ve been at it since yesterday morning, and wanted to make sure we were right before saying anything. I came right up because I figured your life might be in danger. And so did you, from the looks of it when I got here. Weren’t you about to escape her clutches?”

Sounded reasonable. And he should be grateful to the man. Why didn’t he feel that way? Instead, he had the inkling he was being manipulated. “What do we do now?” he asked, playing along while trying to sort out his doubts.

“First thing this morning I’ll call the CEO of the hospital and the president of the medical school. This is going to be a tabloid special, and they’ll want to get all their legal ducks in a row. Then we’ll call the police, and they’ll arrest Collins. I want it over with fast, before anything else tragic happens. I tried to warn Mark Roper the other night that I was onto something and requested that he slow down to give me a couple of days. But he’s such a hothead, just like his father. Insisted on plowing full speed ahead with his investigation.”

The more the man talked, the more Earl grew wary. Charles Braden still had a lot of questions to answer about his role in other matters, from the demise of Cam Roper, whom Braden had just called a real hothead, to a recent gas explosion. And he appeared to be in an unseemly hurry to rein in Mark. In fact, Earl just realized an obvious hole in Braden’s story.

“Tell me, Charles, how did you know which charts I first looked at in this case?”

Braden studied him a few seconds, his blue stare now cold as a polar sea. “Why, Lena Downie must have told me. You know what a chatterbox she is.”

Really?
Earl thought. That would be easy enough to check out. “Why I asked is that Mark Roper said someone sneaked into his house and went through his father’s file on Kelly. The M and M reports on those two patients that started this whole paper chase were in there. Would you know anything about that break-in?”

Braden didn’t bat an eye. “You, know, Earl, after what I’ve just done for you, I don’t necessarily want a show of gratitude, but I would expect you to have the common courtesy not to make gratuitous insinuations about the whole Kelly affair, especially after all the harm you did to my son’s-”

“She told me it was Chaz who wrecked any feelings she had for him.”

Braden said nothing this time, but his body seemed to tense beneath the gleaming white coat.

In the menace of that silence, Earl teetered between opposing instincts.

One urged him to probe further. Demand what kind of game Charles had been playing at the birthing center. Shake him up with the fact that Mark Roper had some interesting questions regarding statistics for the place. Confront him about the death of Victor Feldt and what it had to do with Nucleus Laboratories, executive health plans, or genetic screenings on siblings with a family history of cancer – anything to provoke an angry outburst and a revealing slip.

But self-preservation made Earl cautious. Whatever Charles had been up to, trying to spook him with bravado could be very dangerous. Better to outmaneuver him. “Sorry, Charles, I didn’t mean to insinuate you had anything to do with the break-in at Mark’s, and I’m most grateful for the warning about Melanie, believe me. As for my hurtful comment regarding Chaz and Kelly, it was inexcusable. Please, accept my apology, and put it down to the morphine talking.”

Braden continued to watch him.

Earl felt the man see right through his wooden attempt to make peace. “Look, I spoke out of line,” he added. “Let me make it up to you by helping out with Melanie’s capture. After all, that’s the important thing, right? I’ll get back into bed, so when she makes her morning rounds nothing will tip her off that we’re onto her. You start rousting the administration. With me corroborating what you and Chaz are saying, they’ll be more ready to believe us.” His real plan? Pretend to cooperate, then, once Braden left, skedaddle the hell out of the hospital to the nearest police station. Now that he had Melanie pegged, let the cops figure out the rest.