Mortal Remains (42 page)

The rigidity under the lab coat lessened. Still, Braden seemed to be in the limbo of deciding something. “You’re right about going back to bed and Melanie finding you there,” he finally said, turning and walking toward the door. “But we both know you don’t intend to hang around, and I can’t allow that. Better we sedate you.” He stuck his head into the hallway and yelled, “Nurse!”

Earl broke into a cold sweat. “Wait a minute! What if Melanie does something to me while I’m under? You yourself said it would take a few hours to convince the police…”

Braden looked at him, his eyes almost sorrowful.

My God. He’s going to let her kill me!
Earl’s mouth went dry “I’ll tell the nurses what you’re doing.” His voice sounded like a croak. “You won’t get away with it.”

Braden glanced back out in the hallway, apparently unconcerned.

“I’ll say that you’re under investigation for murder,” Earl added, judging his chances of knocking him over and making a run for it.

Braden shook his head as if enduring a great weariness. “You must be mad, the morphine no doubt.”

“What about Mark Roper? He already thinks you smothered deformed infants and buried their bodies on the grounds of your home for unwed mothers.” Earl raised his voice to make sure any approaching nurses would hear the accusations. Whether they believed him or not, he hoped to at least make them pause before carrying out the man’s orders. But his own skepticism about Braden being capable of infanticide had vanished. “He’s going to the police about it this morning. When he finds out you visited me, he’ll suspect you arranged my death.”

Braden stared at him in amazement. “The grounds? Oh, my God, Dr. Garnet. Even if I were the monster you’re suggesting, I wouldn’t be fool enough to leave human remains on the grounds of an abandoned building.”

Braden ought to be sweating bricks by now if he’d done any part of what Mark had accused him of, Earl thought. Instead he remained calm, practically purring. Could he have already moved the bodies? Son of a bitch! Or he’d never buried anything there at all. Of course. He’d be too smart to leave that kind of evidence behind.

Mark’s account of what happened with Braden in the library flashed to mind, and a sickening realization swept through Earl. Mark had been on the losing end of a game he probably didn’t even realize Braden had been playing. Because not only would Charles have been too smart to leave bones lying about where they could be found, he wouldn’t have said the suggestive things that he had about smotherings if he’d truly wanted to avoid such atrocious allegations. Instead, it almost seemed he’d invited them. Why?

“Nurse!” Braden bellowed a second time. “Nurse, come quickly.”

“Now hold on-”

“Nurse!”

Earl heard the sound of running feet in the hallway.

Mrs. White bolted through the door, her cheeks aflame.

“I’m afraid Dr. Garnet’s having a psychotic episode, probably from the drugs-”

“What are you doing out of bed-” she said, striding toward him. “And what happened to your IV?”

“Nurse, I’m fine-”

“I blame myself, Nurse,” Braden continued, his voice serene with the quiet authority of one used to being in charge. “I barged in here on a grievous family matter between Dr. Garnet and my son – well, let’s just say I was upset.”

“He came here to set me up-”

“This is what I mean about paranoia. We had words, but then Dr. Garnet began to spout the most bizarre accusations, about me murdering babies, and burying their bodies-”

“He’s lying! The man is under suspicion for murder. Coroner Mark Roper will verify everything I said-” Earl stopped, realizing too late he’d whipped his hand out from under the covers and was brandishing the glinting points of a half dozen needles in their faces.

Mrs. White screamed.

“My God!” Braden said, recoiling in horror.

Another nurse appeared at the door. One glance and she bellowed, “Orderlies! We’ve got a code forty-four!”

From his residency days, Earl recognized the call. Within sixty seconds a herd of young men wearing white would stampede into the room with enough Haldol and tie-downs to immobilize an elephant.

“Put down the needles, sir!” the nurse at the doorway said.

Braden and Mrs. White backed away from him.

At the very least he had to get to a phone and call Janet.

“Back off,” he screamed at the one blocking the way out.

She stood her ground. “Don’t do this, sir.”

“All I want to do is call my wife. No need for drugs. No tie-downs. Just let me call my home.”

“Absolutely, sir. You can make the call as soon as you put down the needles.”

He knew the tone and the routine. He’d used it himself many times. When a patient threatens staff, promise him anything, then hit him with everything, all in the name of preventing anyone from getting hurt. There’d be no stopping what he’d set in motion. And no calls.

“I’m getting to a phone,” he said, advancing toward her. “I won’t hurt you.”

She retreated a few steps, the look of terror in her young eyes horrible to see.

He lunged by her and raced down the hall toward a stand of public phone booths.

His legs nearly went from under him.

“Stop!” he heard Braden yell.

Still brandishing his needles, he ran up, grabbed the nearest receiver, and punched in
0
plus his number.

Immediately he was surrounded by a growing group of orderlies, the two nurses from his room, and Braden. They all shouted instructions at him and each other.

“Put down the needles.”

“Watch it.”

“Who the hell’s he calling?”

The phone chirped through the long-distance dialing and rang Janet’s cellular.

The semicircle closed in.

He made wide sweeping arcs with his weapon, and they shrank away from him. He was bluffing of course, and ready to drop them the instant anyone rushed him, but they didn’t know that.

The yelling continued.

“We got to jump him.”

“You jump him. Those needles could be contaminated.”

“Why not wait and see who he’s calling?”

“I advise you to get him now!” Braden thundered.

The second ring sounded.

Be at home, Janet, and not off in the delivery room.

More orderlies arrived, tie-down straps in hand.

A third nurse appeared with a large syringe.

A shock of red hair made its way through the crowd.

The next ring broke off with a click.

She’d answered. “Janet, help me. Melanie Collins is trying to kill me, and Charles Braden-”

“The person you are calling is not available…”

No!

Over that he heard, “You have a collect call from…”

“Janet! Help-”

“I’m sorry, but your collect call has not been accepted…”

At that second some hero in the crowd dived at his legs. As he tumbled to the ground he dropped his handful of syringes to one side, careful not to jab anyone, and went limp.

His intention was lost on the swarm that grabbed him. They hoisted him on a gurney, held him in place, and tied him down.

The nurse with the syringe approached. The rest hung back, like onlookers at an accident.

Earl seized on an idea. “You can’t give me that,” he said to the one with the needle.

“And why not?” She lifted a flap of his gown and anointed his butt with an alcohol swab.

“Because I’ve a critically low potassium.”

“What!” She pulled up just before the tip of the needle hit skin.

He was thinking clearly now. “Low potassium and major tranquilizers don’t mix,” he told her. “Causes cardiac conduction problems, as if I didn’t already have enough of those already. Ask any doctor.” He hadn’t made it up. And in the time it took her to sort it out, he might convince the other nurses not to give him anything.

“He’s right, ma’am,” said a male voice from somewhere behind her.

Earl recognized Dr. Roy’s voice.

Mrs. White appeared at the side of her colleague who had the needle and showed her Earl’s chart. “Better listen. There was some kind of screwup with his potassium last night. The lab called about it.”

The one with the needle looked disappointed. “Oh, man, I hate it when we have doctors as patients…”

As they second-guessed themselves, a new volley of painful spasms erupted in his stomach. Gritting his teeth, he nevertheless pressed his case. “Nurse, Mrs. White, I don’t need sedation at all-”

“Will someone medicate this man, or should I do it myself?” Charles Braden interrupted. He stepped up to Mrs. White and took the chart from her. “Here, he’s got a standing order for morphine. Give him that.”

Oh, God, not again. I’ll be a sitting duck for Melanie.

As Charles walked away, Mrs. White readily trotted off to the medication cupboard.

“Please! Call my wife! Dr. Janet Graceton. She’s in the case room at St. Paul’s Hospital in Buffalo.”

No one paid him the slightest attention.

The crowd started to thin out. He saw Dr. Roy’s bushy red hair disappearing down the hall. He had another idea. “Dr. Roy. Call Tanya Wozcek. Tell her what’s happened. Then do the DONT.”

The people who had started to wheel the stretcher back to his room looked at him as if he were crazy.

“Who’s Tanya Wozcek?” he heard someone whisper.

“I think she’s a nurse up on geriatric?”

“Sounds like that’s where this guy is headed.”

Twenty minutes later he felt his brain had been packed in a SlushPuppie.

He also didn’t seem to care.

C
harles Braden stepped outside the Thirty-third Street entrance of NYCH and dialed Melanie Collins’s number on his cell phone.

“Yes,” she said sleepily.

“Melanie. It’s Charles Braden. I’m sorry to wake you so early, but there’s been a problem with Earl Garnet.”

“Problem?”

“Yes. I blame myself. My son had just received the upsetting news that Garnet was the man in the taxi with Kelly the night before she disappeared. I went to Garnet’s room and confronted him about it. Now I know I shouldn’t have, but-”

“What happened?” Her sudden alertness told him he had all her attention.

“He started going on about how you had been deliberately making patients sick so you could then diagnose bizarre syndromes and act the hero. Even said you killed a few, made one of your former victims slip into a coma to silence her, and, get this, accused you of trying to kill him. Now I think it’s the drugs, but they had to sedate him-”

“I’m on my way-”

“Melanie, that’s not the worst of it. The man has this crazy idea Kelly found out what you were doing, and that you murdered her to keep her quiet.”

“Oh, God.”

“Fortunately just the two of us were in the room. He’s not talking much to anyone right now, but I thought you should know. Even ridiculous rumors like that, once they get rolling, can snowball.”

“I appreciate the heads-up.”

I’ll bet you do,
he thought, hanging up.

Now all he had to do was wait. He glanced at his watch and saw it read nearly six. The coffee shop would be open in a few minutes.

He dialed medical records at Lena Downie’s extension. Chaz would be waiting there for his call.

“Dad?”

“So what do you think?”

“You were right. She’s definitely dirty. I can’t believe the woman got away with it for so long.”

“Because no one was looking.”

“But she killed who knows how many over the years.”

“And Kelly, remember.”

The silence on the other end of the phone hung between them, pregnant as a held breath. “I guess I thought I’d feel so different finding her killer,” Chaz finally said, his voice funereal. “Rage, relief, free – something. Instead, I’m just empty inside.”

“That’s to be expected-”

“Expected! My life’s been chained to her fucking corpse. Now she’s turning to dust, and what do I have – closure? What a fucking joke. And you say, ‘That’s to be expected.’ ”

Charles winced at Chaz’s anger.

“Chaz, why don’t you join me in the coffee shop so we can talk. We still have to decide how to proceed-”

“How did Garnet take it when you confronted him?”

“Not well.”

“Did he deny it?”

“He went a little wacko, to tell you the truth.”

“I’d like to wacko him-”

“Now you stay away from him, Chaz. This whole thing has to be done properly, and legally. Then you’ll finally feel free. I promise you.”

He could hear his son breathing at the other end of the line. The seething rage in that sound frightened him. “Chaz, promise me you’ll stay away.”

“Okay,” Chaz said, after a few more seconds.

“Now come and have coffee with me.”

“I can’t. Since I was here all night anyway, I put myself on call. I just got beeped for a cardiac case coming in by air ambulance.”

“You?” His son never took weekend calls. Considered excusing himself from it the privilege of being chief.

“Yes, I know. But a couple of loudmouths in my department started to complain about my never putting myself on the schedule. This’ll shut them up for a while.”

Charles walked over to the Starbucks on the ground floor and ordered an espresso. He needed to clear his head after practically having to guide Chaz through Melanie’s files most of the night. His son might not be the dimmest light on the board, but he was a far cry from the brightest.

He found a chair in the corner where he could be reasonably sure of not being disturbed. The place would soon fill up with people on their way to the seven o’clock shift, and he needed to think.

It had been a long road.

The evening when he’d killed her twenty-seven years ago burned as fresh in his mind as the night it happened.

When she’d called the maternity center that morning, he had no idea it would end that way. She was so abrasive, insisting he keep Chaz from trying to follow her and threatening vague revelations that would ruin their name. He had to find out what she knew, and convinced her to meet him one more time that evening. She took the last train to Albany, and he picked her up at the station, then drove her to his office. It was deserted at night.

She’d initially limited her threats to what Chaz would be blamed for – “failing to properly supervise a resident in a case where the patient died.” She hadn’t provided details, and he practically laughed at her, saying, “I’m afraid that happens all the time in a teaching hospital, dear. If that’s all you have to threaten me with, you’re out of luck.” He wanted to goad her, find out if she’d discovered more deadly secrets.

Provoked, she let slip she also had something on him – the odd irregularities about his records – and that Dr. Cam Roper knew, might even investigate the maternity center and the home.

He’d known at that instant she’d have to die, and Roper, too. Once either of them found out the gravity of his secret, there would be no bargaining. The two of them were too straight for that.

The nearest weapon he’d had on hand were the heavy metal stirrups his pregnant ladies put their feet into when he examined them. He grabbed one, came up behind her, and smashed her in the temple. She was unconscious but not dead.

He’d stripped her, tied her up, and taped her mouth in case she woke up. Putting her in the trunk of his car, he drove to his house, where he burned her clothes in the basement incinerator. In the boathouse he found an old anchor, chain, and padlock. After midnight he drove to Trout Lake and commandeered an old rowboat from one of the cottages. As he’d attached the anchor and chain with the lock, she’d started to regain consciousness. She cried as he rowed her to the middle of the lake, and he never forgot the terror in her eyes as he dumped her in.

He shuddered.

Now all he had to do was catch Melanie Collins in the act of finishing off Earl Garnet. Actually, a little after the act, then let Chaz present the evidence of what she’d been up to all these years. Thankfully, Kelly’s letter to Cam Roper suggested she’d found out about Melanie’s first two victims and intended to reveal her discovery. It would be an easy sell to convince the authorities she’d confronted Melanie, and that Melanie killed her to keep her quiet.

Too bad Earl had to die. It would have been possible to convict Melanie without having her kill him, useful even, if he had bought the idea of her guilt so completely he’d have been willing to declare far and wide that her conviction cleared the Braden name. But that had been naive. He obviously still harbored deep suspicions, starting with the break-in at Mark Roper’s house and ending God knew where. It became necessary to change strategy on the spot and goad Earl into yelling the same paranoid-sounding accusations that Mark Roper and Lucy O’Connor had been led to make – to help ensure he’d seem as off base as the other two and that anything any of them had said would be easier to dismiss in the aftermath – then serve him up to Melanie.

He took a long sip of the hot drink.

It scoured his esophagus and ignited a small fire in his empty stomach.

As for Mark and Lucy, they’d be frozen corpses by now. “So tragic,” he would say to reporters. “If only the man had listened to me. I tried to tell him just two days ago to be patient, that there appeared to be new evidence pointing to Kelly’s real killer, but obviously he barged ahead on his own. From the start he seemed obsessed with blaming her death on our family, to the point he began making up the most fantastic stories. That he lost his life trying to find nonexistent remains to support these allegations is a waste beyond words. And what did his futile search prove? Simply how wild and baseless his accusations were. That his resident died trying to save him makes it a doubly senseless loss. Two young lives gone for nothing!”

He smiled at how easily he’d sent Mark rushing off half-cocked. A carefully staged mention of smotherings and eugenics, combined with the young man’s lifelong resentment of all things Braden, and he assumed the worst, taking Lucy with him. Such a hothead, just like his father.

What better way to deflect an investigation that might discover his former baby business – purely a commercial venture, albeit illegal – than have his chief accuser run around making the charges so extreme no one would take them seriously? Just imagine, Charles Braden III as some crazed fanatic who had murdered deformed newborns, then buried them under the orphanage lawn. He chuckled at the outlandishness of it.

Of course, setting Mark up like that had been risky, but after O’Connor arrived on the scene he’d had to take the chance. A more sober questioning of the birth records might have revealed the truth.

Still, as much as it might be a masterstroke luring them to their deaths the way they had tonight, everything would have been over and neater had they died in the blast. For one thing, they couldn’t have saved the talkative old crone. Fortunately, she still didn’t pose much of a threat. According to one of his cronies at Saratoga General, she was a “likely,” as in “likely to croak.”

One reassuring fact – there would be such a media furor in the wake of charging Collins with so many murders, including Kelly’s, none of the recent events in Hampton Junction would garner much scrutiny anyway. His past secrets, and the present one at Nucleus Laboratories, should be safe.

As long as his men found the woman with Victor’s files. They’d been damn lucky to overhear that conversation.

He took another sip of espresso.

As he waited for the buzz to hit, he heard the thud of heavy rotors arriving over the hospital and raised his eyes.

Must be Chaz’s case,
he thought.

Chaz huddled in the doorway leading to the heliport on the hospital roof. The blast of the rotors stirred up clouds of dust and debris, making it necessary for him to turn away, protect his eyes, and cover his mouth. Beside him the men and women of the ER team did the same. He stayed apart from them a little to keep out of their way as they would be the first to the helicopter. However, they were all puzzled by how little advance information they’d been given. All they knew from dispatch: they were receiving two hypothermia cases, a man and a woman, one of them a near-drowning victim in critical condition. Normally they would get vitals, names, and circumstances. Nobody liked surprise packages in this business.

The craft rocked to a landing on the pad, the rotors whined down, and the ER people, crouching low, ran for the doors. The crew already had them open and slid a stretcher halfway out the craft to their waiting hands. As nurses, residents, and orderlies crowded around their charge, Chaz, still hanging back, couldn’t tell if it was the man or woman. He was able to see that IVs were up and running through warming coils, that one of the attendants was ventilating the victim, that the oxygen passed through a tube immersed in what he assumed was a basin of hot water, a pretty good improvisation. Wires lead to an O
₂
saturation meter, a catheter bag dangling from a side rail indicated urinary output –
Jesus,
he thought,
everything’s been done. There must be a doctor on board.

Someone still inside the ambulance handed out a half dozen tubes of blood, then a syringe wedged in a styrofoam cup overflowing with crushed ice, the standard way to preserve serum slated for acid-base testing. No doubt about it, a physician had gift-wrapped this case so it could bypass emergency and go straight to intensive care. Chaz stepped forward to take charge when a nurse lifted down a portable monitor that beeped out a very slow pulse. As she moved to secure the piece of equipment at the foot of the stretcher, the victim’s face came into view.

“Lucy O’Connor?” Chaz said, so stunned he waded into the throng of people who were beginning to wheel the woman into the hospital, getting in their way.

“Hold it right there, Chaz!” said a man’s voice over the noise of the helicopter. “Your services won’t be required.”

He looked up to see Mark Roper, wrapped in blankets but standing, being helped out of the passenger compartment. Stunned, Chaz yelled, “What the hell’s happened?”

Mark brushed off supporting hands and walked right by him, leaving the ambulance attendants shaking their heads in dismay.

“He ought to be on a stretcher,” one of them said to Chaz.

“Yeah,” echoed his colleague. “Instead, he took care of her the whole way.”

“I’m fine!” Mark yelled over his shoulder. “First I get Lucy to ICU.” He swung his gaze to Chaz. “Then you and I are going to talk.”

Melanie Collins ran across the parking lot toward the front door. She could still make this work. Her gaze traveled up to the floor where Earl lay sedated and helpless. Acutely psychotic patients had been known to possess super-human strength, enough to smash a window despite being drugged, and jump. An early-morning haze of dust, exhaust, and grime blurred the outlines of the building and would provide her with the cover she’d need to break the glass with a chair and shove him through.
He overpowered my attempt to stop him,
she could claim, appearing suitably shaken and distraught, maybe even verging on hysterical, after screaming for help.

But high overhead, a streak of azure showed through tattered gray clouds and tried to pin a blue ribbon on the start of an otherwise mediocre-looking day. It just might succeed, judging by how quickly the smog seemed to be dissipating. By the time she got to his room, there’d not be enough mist to conceal her from the street.

No, better stick to her original plan. She slipped a hand into the pocket of her lab coat and fingered the loaded syringe of short-acting insulin. It might take an hour to produce seizures, perhaps longer, but in the end would be neater. Convulsions were a natural complication of the
E. coli 0157:H7
organism; it accumulated on receptor sites in the brain as well as in the kidney. And she’d be at the resuscitation stressing that fact, loading him up with antiseizure medication that wouldn’t work and dismissing the need to give him sugar if anyone suggested it. She didn’t necessarily need to kill Earl, just let the seizures knock off enough neurons that he would never talk again. Like Bessie.