Nerves of Steel (31 page)

Past tense, she thought with regret.  "All right.  Let's call it."  The crowd around Trautman's body dispersed as Cassie stepped forward and lay her fingers over his carotid artery.  Then she listened to his heart with her stethoscope.  The only sound she heard was the single monotonous note sounded by the monitor.  "Nothing.  He's gone."

A nurse turned the monitor off and for a single breath the room was silent. 

"Leave everything," Cassie told the nurses as the room cleared of personnel.  "The police will want an autopsy."  She examined the IV bag once more, this time without touching it and adding more fingerprints.  As much as she'd wanted Trautman to talk, someone else had wanted Trautman silent--permanently.

And she had an idea she knew exactly who that someone might be.

CHAPTER 51

"Do you have any idea how many prints there are in a hospital room?" Janet Kwon asked  as she supervised the CSU techs from the doorway of Trautman's room.  "Second only to hotel rooms.  Don't be expecting any miracles.  Just getting all the elimination prints is going to take a few days."  She nodded to the photographer and moved aside to allow the coroner's team approach the body.

"Yeah, right," Drake mumbled, his attention on the corpse before him and the debris scattered around the room.  He'd arrived only to find that while he'd been trying to understand what was going on with Hart, she'd been hip deep in another suspicious death.  "Where's Hart?"

"I sent her down to wait in her office," Kwon replied, her mouth twisted into a frown of disapproval.  "Summers is canvassing the staff, seeing who had access to the medications.  Which is pretty much anyone.  Including Hart."

"What about her ex, King?"

She shrugged.  "No one mentioned seeing him near Trautman, but he has other patients on the floor.   They could be in it together, or it could be either one of them separately."

Drake kicked at the door jamb.  "Any ideas to cause?"

"Best guess?  Someone added insulin to his IV.  Fast acting, easy to get, undetectable at autopsy."  Kwon gestured for him to follow her.  She led him down the hall to the medication room beside the nurses' station.  "Everything's locked up, except it turns out insulin is refrigerated."  She swung the door of the small dorm-size refrigerator open, revealing rows of bottles and stacks of IV bags.  "And there's no surveillance cameras.  In fact, there's almost no surveillance anywhere except the parking deck, the psych ward, the nursery, and a few areas where they tape for teaching purposes."

"It's a big hospital, no way they would be able to monitor the cameras even if they were there.  And patient confidentiality--"

"Just remind me to never be a patient here.  My luck, I'd get that orderly creep I saw sneaking into rooms at night.  Who knows what else goes on around here that no one knows about?"

Drake understood her frustration.  "Who tipped you to the insulin deal?"

"Would you believe, Hart?  I'm telling you, DJ, she's no good."

"Why, because she tried to save the guy?"

"Big question is: what was she doing here in the first place?  The guy almost killed her last night, and she was alone in the room with him when he went downhill.  I asked around, the docs say an OD of insulin acts fast, within five, ten minutes."

"She didn't do it."  Couldn't have.  But the evidence against her was mounting fast. 

"How do we prove this insulin theory?" he asked, composing himself enough to stand and turn back to face Kwon.

"Hart said to test the IV bag.  It's labeled as an antibiotic, so there shouldn't be insulin in it.  She also mentioned that her fingerprints will be on the bag," Kwon continued with a sneer.  "She just happened to touch it during the code."

Drake clenched his teeth to smother his groan.  He was certain Hart was only trying to be helpful.  But why did she have to do it in a way that made her appear so goddamned guilty?

CHAPTER 52

After documenting her part in Trautman's resuscitation, Cassie left a message for Richard to meet her at her office and retraced her steps back down to the ER.  She stopped at the break room and grabbed her coffee mug from the shelf.  The bright cobalt blue mug had the Three Rivers logo emblazoned on one side and her name printed in bold letters in permanent marker on the other.  Administration had presented them to all of the ER staff in hopes of decreasing the expenditure on disposable cups.  Cassie filled the mug and moved down the hall to her office.

She sat down at her desk and began to sort her mail, a mindless activity that kept her thoughts away from Trautman's death.  Or the fact that Richard was probably behind it.  After all, who had more to gain? 

Could Richard also be behind Fran's death?  Had he fallen that far?  The man she knew, the man she'd once loved had been narcissistic, volatile--but not a stone-cold killer.

Big question was, what could she do about it?  Without forcing him to use the tape against Drake?  She had no evidence, only a gut-twisting suspicion.  Was that enough to convince Richard to trade her the tape for her silence?

Her name sounded on the overhead intercom, asking her to report to the nurses' station.  Why hadn't Richard called her extension directly?  The nurses' station was empty except for the bored looking clerk.

"Did you page me?" she asked.

"No, not me," he answered, turning the volume down on the AlterBridge blaring from his iPod.

"Then who did?"

"No one here.  It was the hospital operator.  Why don't you ask her?"

Ed Castro was on duty and the ER was quiet, she saw no reason for Ed or anyone else to page her.  Maybe Drake or one of his counterparts, looking for more information on Trautman's code?  If so, they could come find her in person.  She went back to her office.

Richard sat at her desk, feet propped up, drinking her coffee.  "Hey, Ella."  He swiveled around to greet her.  "How can you drink this shit?"  

The inferior grade of coffee didn't stop him from finishing the cup.

"I've got to talk to you."  She forced herself not to smile at his black eye.  Her work.  Despite the small room, their close proximity or the fact that the man before her might be a killer, she felt no fear, none of the overwhelming sense of claustrophobia Richard usually elicited in her.  Instead, she felt calm, confident.  It was a pleasant change.  "Do you know who killed Fran?"

"I told your friend Drake that you were coming back to me."  He riffled through her mail.  "He didn't seem too happy about it."  He looked up with a wide grin.

"Drake has nothing to do with this.  This is between you and me.  I have no intention of coming back to you, not now, not ever.  I notified the Medical Board that you're using again."

He tossed her mail back onto her desk and set her coffee cup down on her mouse pad.  "I know.   And the test came back clean.  And they always will." 

"How are you faking your drug tests?"  He didn't answer, merely smiled widely, his gaze smug.  She tried another tact.  "If you give me the video, I'll keep quiet about how you injected insulin into Trautman's antibiotic bag." 

"Good try, Ella.  But you can't fool me.  You've got nothing."  He reached a hand out to stroke her arm possessively.  "Just remember.  No one touches my wife and gets away with it.  No one--not even a cop."

It took all her strength not to flinch or jerk away from his touch.  It'd only make things worse--for Drake.  She was silent, taking care not to provoke him further.  He moved closer to her.  He ground his teeth together, something he did only when very emotional. 

"I told you, Ella.  You're mine."  His tongue darted out to lick his dry lips, then he grabbed her by the elbows, drawing her near. She easily broke free of his grasp.  His palms left sweaty stains on her sleeves.

He was sweating all over.  She reached out and touched his flushed face.  "You're burning up." 

He lurched back against the desk.  "Can't breathe," his words emerged in a gasp as he collapsed to the floor.

Cassie stared at him for a blank second.  She should be kneeling at his side, opening his airway, checking his pulse, getting him help.  Instead, she was frozen in place, mesmerized by a bead of sweat slipping down his forehead, falling into his unseeing eye.  He lay helpless at her feet, he could even be dying and for one brief moment the thought gave her a sense of elation, of freedom.

Her next breath brought her crashing back to earth with a heavy sense of guilt.  She couldn't let him die.  Conquering her primitive impulses, she ran out the door to the nurses' station.

"Call a code," she called to the charge nurse.  "Get the cart down to my office.  Now!"  She raced back to Richard.  His breathing stopped and convulsions began to wrack his body.

Ed Castro and a team of nurses arrived to help.  They wrestled Richard's body onto a gurney and wheeled him down to the trauma room.  Richard's jaws were locked together, making it next to impossible to force any air through to his lungs.

"I'm going to cric him," Cassie told the team, reaching for the equipment needed to insert an airway directly through his neck and into his trachea.  She hoped it worked better on Richard than it had on the homeless boy last night.

"What's going on?"  Ed asked as he started an IV. 

"Temp's 105.6," a nurse announced.  "Pulse ox dropping, heart rate 240, BP 210 over 150."

Cassie looked up from her position at Richard's head and met Ed's eyes.  If they couldn't stabilize Richard soon they would lose him.  She remembered her patient from the other night, Brian, her first Double Cross overdose.  He had similar symptoms, but his had developed much more slowly.  So had the boy's last night. 

"Push Valium and pentobarbital," she told Ed.  

"Won't do any good if you can't get that airway."

"I know."  She was counting the seconds that Richard was deprived of oxygen.  Brian had never been hypoxic, and his brain had still been fried by the potent drug combination. 

She looked down at her ex-husband.  She'd once loved the man.  No matter how he had deteriorated, she didn't want to see him suffer.  How could he have been so foolish, taking drugs here at work?  What if this had happened when he was in the middle of surgery?

Splashing betadine on his neck, she felt for the delicate membrane of tissue and inserted the scalpel blade until she had incised a tract into the trachea.  She slid the tube in and began to force air through it, hoping she wasn't too late.

"I'm in."  

"Pulse ox coming up," a nurse informed them.  The other medications took effect, and the seizure stopped.  Richard now lay in a coma, but one produced by the powerful barbiturates they had given to relax his body.

"Pentobarbital coma."  Ed nodded in satisfaction as their patient's vitals began to drift back to normal.  "Haven't used that since I was a resident back in the dark ages.  Good thinking, Cassie."

"I used it the other night on a similar overdose."  She didn't want to dwell on the ultimate outcome of that patient.  Right now two parents were sitting at their son's bedside, waiting for the strength to turn off the machines keeping him alive. 

"He wasn't down long.  He'll be all right."

Cassie said nothing.  The pessimism in Ed's voice said it all.

CHAPTER 53

They were wheeling Richard out of the trauma room when Drake arrived.  "What the hell happened?" he asked Cassie in a tone that made her stop short.  "Do I have to lock you up to keep you out of trouble?"

"Not here."  She led the way down to her office.  Drake followed her inside. 

"Richard came to see me," she started.  "He collapsed from an overdose of the new FX/MDMA drug."

Drake frowned at that, his eyes narrowed.  "King came to see you?"

"Yes.  I asked him to."  She hesitated.  "We had some things to get straightened out."

"So you're not reconciling with him?"

"Of course not."  She glanced up at him, saw his face go from stony to relaxed.  "You never really thought--"

"How did I know what to think?  You weren't talking this morning."

"I'm sorry.  I needed time to think." 

"Why were you in Trautman's room when he died?"  His gaze locked onto hers with an intensity that made her squirm and look away.

"I think Richard's been getting drugs from Trautman."  It was the truth, just not all of it.  "Something that isn't showing up in his urine tox screens.  That's one of the things I wanted to talk to Richard about, but he collapsed before--" She stopped.  Something was wrong.  Things weren't adding up.

"Before what?  He didn't hurt you, did he?" 

Cassie shook her head, her gaze darting around the small room.

"Right before--Richard was drinking out of my coffee cup."  She reached out a hand for the ceramic mug, then drew back as if it was a viper.  

Drake moved past her and examined the cup without touching it.  "There's some kind of chalky residue in the bottom.  A lot of it--" He looked at her appraisingly.  "You're about half King's size.  If you drank the same amount--"

"I'd probably be dead."

She sank back against the desk, her head reeling.  Someone was trying to kill her.  The same someone who had killed Fran?  

Drake reached out to her, his fingers stroking the worry lines at the corner of her eye.  "Let me get someone to secure this place, then I'll take you out of here."

"No." 

"No what?  You're not going to stay here.  Don't you get it?  This actor is after you.  I'll take you down to the House, get your statement, and we'll figure this all out.  I'm not going to let anything happen to you."

"I'm not going anywhere with you," she told him in a flat voice.  Everyone who got near to her, they were all in danger.

He stared at her, at first with concern, then with a frown.  "You're trying to protect me, aren't you?"  She said nothing.  "I'm the cop, remember?  I don't need your protection, if anything did happen, I can take care of myself."

"So can I."

"We are
not
having this conversation."  He took her by the elbow, steered her toward the door.

Cassie twisted free from his grasp.  "Don't try to handle me, Drake."