Tunnel Vision (35 page)

Suddenly something moved out of the corner of his eye. He looked to the right. It was just above the storm line, where a continuous brow of seaweed had been pushed back during winter storms, now sun-dried to black.

His first thought was that it was a trick of the rising sun. But the surface of the sand seemed to be moving. Crabs. Except crabs didn’t live in high, dry sand, only the wet stuff.

As he sat up to see better, a hand pushed its way into the air.

“Jesus Christ!” George cried. He scrambled out of his chair, knocking his mug over. A moment later, a second hand pushed its way out. Then arms. Suddenly the top half of a man rose out of the sand, rubbing his face and spitting sand.

For several seconds, George was too frozen with horror to move—too stunned by what his eyes were registering. The man rolled to his side to free his legs, then pushed himself onto all fours, drooling sand and gulping in air. He was wearing shorts, but no top or shoes. George gasped as he watched.

The hole was maybe two feet deep—far too deep for the sand to have covered him naturally, like if he got drunk the night before. He had been buried.

The guy struggled to push himself to his feet, wavering and spitting and looking like one of those movie zombies. At one point, he clamped his hand to his side and groaned as he nearly doubled over. Then he checked his hand as if looking for blood.

Then before George knew it, the guy began to stumble toward him. George yelped and grabbed his pole to defend himself, gripping it like a baseball bat. But the guy shuffled by him down the beach, rubbing his face and hands, moving at a weird angle as if he had a stitch in his left side.

He headed toward the wooden set of stairs that led up to the top of the Manomet cliffs. He said nothing, nor did he look back, just climbed the steps one by one to the top, where he disappeared, leaving George wondering how he would explain this to his wife.

68

“They were all premonitions,” Zack said. “I kept seeing myself being buried alive.”

Sarah looked at him. “But how could you see something in the future? That’s impossible.”

“I don’t know how. I don’t understand any of this, except the bastards flatlined me, then dumped me in a hole on that beach.”

It was nearly noon, and he had stumbled up to the White Cliffs complex of condos and golf course. In his print boxer shorts, he looked as if he had just come up from sunbathing. At the top, he found a greenskeeper and asked if he had a cell phone he could borrow. Two hours later, Sarah picked him up on Route 3A.

His brain still felt fuzzy and slow, and his side ached, although there was no wound or bruise. “What about Stern?”

“He denied everything. He just stood there and lied point-blank. I still can’t believe it.”

“Because it’s the truth and he’s scared shitless.”

“But he wasn’t at the lab last night, was he?”

“I didn’t see him. Just Luria and Gladstone’s choirboys. But he may know they came after me. He no doubt called Luria about your visit, which means she’s probably at the lab erasing the evidence.”

“Or at her office at school,” Sarah said. “We have to go to the police.”

“It’s our word against theirs,” he said, thinking how he wanted to get Elizabeth Luria alone.

“Maybe not,” she said.

After leaving Morris Stern’s office, she told him, she had called several of the local hospitals to inquire about any patients who had had bloodwork showing signs of tetrodotoxin. She fabricated a claim that some of the compound was missing from their lab following a break-in and that she was working with authorities from the State Medical Board to help locate victims. Claire Driscoll, an old friend from nursing school who worked at Jordan Hospital, called back to say that a nurse colleague might have some information for her. Sarah then called the woman, who said to come in anytime today. Her name was Karen Wells.

“I think we may have something to show the police. But first we have to get you some clothes.”

*   *   *

They drove to Independence Mall in Plymouth, where Sarah ran into Sears and bought Zack some jeans, a top, and shoes. Also muffins, juice, and coffee. He ate and changed in the car. His head still buzzed, and he felt slow and heavy. He was anxious to file a police report against Elizabeth Luria, but he consented to go along with Sarah, who was convinced that this might be more evidence to build a case. And Jordan Hospital was on the way.

They found Nurse Wells at the desk of the emergency room. She was a pleasant-looking woman around fifty with quick intelligent blue eyes and a take-charge demeanor. Sarah introduced herself and Zack and reiterated what she had said on the phone.

Nurse Wells had a folder on the John Doe in question. “I have to tell you it’s a first,” she said. “I’ve been here for almost twenty years, and never did we have a misdiagnosed death. We had a whole triage team on him and still got it wrong.”

“So, you’re saying that it actually was a misdiagnosis,” Zack said.

“That or the guy was a zombie.”

“So how did he show up here?”

She checked her folder. “An ambulance unit brought him in around three
A.M.
”

“What date was that?”

“May nine, 2008. They picked him up on a 911 call. I guess some people returning home from a party found him under their bushes.”

“Where was this?”

“Plymouth County, just south of the White Cliffs in Manomet.”

“Manomet. That’s near Sagamore Beach.”

“Yeah.”

“What was his condition when they brought him in?” Sarah asked.

“Dead. No BP, no pulse, temp at eighty-two. But the paramedics said he had a pulse when they found him. We tried to revive him with CPR and defibrillators, but those didn’t work. Then we injected him with resuscitation drugs, but that didn’t work either. So we officially declared him dead.”

“How do you explain his getting up and leaving on his own?”

“Beats me, because I can tell you we didn’t fail in our diagnosis. We had all the monitors on him and the guy was flatlined.”

“Any chance we can see the security video?” asked Zack.

“I pulled it out, in fact,” she said. “Because we never got an ID on him, there’s no breach of patient confidentiality. Besides, it’s too grainy to make out his face.”

She led them into a small office with video equipment and closed the door behind them. “Like I said, it’s absolutely creepy,” Karen continued. “The guy was dead on arrival.” From a plastic case she removed a DVD and inserted it into a computer monitor. She made some adjustments, then sat back so Zack and Sarah could watch.

On the screen a nurse with a clipboard walked down a quiet corridor. Karen fast-forwarded to where paramedics burst through a door wheeling a man into one of the bays.

“Okay, I’m going to jump a couple hours,” Karen said.

The same ceiling shot of the corridor running the length of patient cubicles. Nothing moved but for an orderly pushing a cart. After a few seconds, a man emerged from one of the cubicles. His face was aslant from the camera, and he was naked from the chest up. Round monitor electrodes were pasted to his shoulders and chest. He moved unsteadily in bare feet down the corridor, disappearing through the exit.

“I really can’t explain it, but there you are,” Karen said.

“Did you order a blood test for toxicology?”

“Yes, but since he was misdiagnosed, we didn’t bother to do a follow-up.” She pulled a pad out of her pocket. “As it turned out, he had no alcohol or standard drugs in his system, but he did show traces of ketamine and that tetrodotoxin you asked about.”

Sarah shot a look at Zack, who was still staring at the monitor.

“Ketamine we use all the time. It’s a sedative for patients undergoing surgery. It reduces the trauma and helps them forget the ordeal. But frankly, I’m not familiar with tetrodotoxin, at least I wasn’t until you called.”

“It’s the so-called zombie drug,” Sarah said. “What voodoo priests use in Haiti to fake people’s deaths, then revive them hours later.”

“Which may explain why we couldn’t get a pulse or heartbeat.”

“The right dosage lowers body temperature and reduces the pulse, heart rate, and blood pressure to a minimum—probably below what your machines could detect.”

“He looked it, stumbling out of here like he was moving on brain stem impulses alone,” Karen said. “So where the heck did he get puffer fish toxin? It’s certainly not anything we stock.”

“Because it has no medicinal benefit. It’s strictly a research compound.”

“So you think he broke into your lab?”

“Possibly.”

“Can you run that again?” Zack’s eyes were still fixed on the monitor.

“Sure,” Karen said, and restarted the video from the beginning.

When it got to where the man emerged from the bay, Zack hit the pause button.

The video stopped on a frame of the man in profile as he headed down the empty corridor toward the exit. It was grainy and hard to make out. “And you never got an ID on him?”

“He didn’t have any. Just pants and T-shirt. No wallet of IDs. No shoes or socks. His feet were bloody. He was also covered with bug bites and sand.”

“Sand?” Zack said.

69

Roman’s first impulse was to follow the woman out of the Neuroscience Research Center building. She was beautiful and shapely, and it would be fun tailing her butt. Except he knew who she was—Sarah Wyman, a postdoctoral research assistant at Tufts. Also a part-timer at a lab that, according to Norman Babcock, conducted the NDE project in a converted preacher’s home on the grounds of Gladstone’s church in Medfield.

It was the old guy in the office upstairs who held his interest. The name on the door said, “Dr. Morris J. Stern.” He didn’t know the nature of her relationship with him, but the way she looked when she left suggested that they’d had something of a dustup.

Whatever, Roman had some time on his hands, and keeping tabs on Stern seemed like a good idea. So he went back down to the lobby, where he hid behind a book he’d picked up on near-death experiences. He had never experienced one but wondered if there was anything to them. What he read sounded pretty silly—people floating around, looking down on their near-dead selves, and feeling love-happy. They all sounded similar yet deadly sincere. Nearly every one claimed that their dying wasn’t awful but wonderful, using words like “blissful,” “sweet,” “tender,” “sensuous,” “tranquil”—as though it felt so good, they didn’t want to go back to life.

But Roman was confused. While he gladly took Babcock’s money, he couldn’t understand Babcock’s outrage. Nearly every account went on about glorious encounters with beings of light, communicating mind to mind with “a loving omniscient presence,” which some called God and others Jesus. And they all claimed that the experiences transformed their lives for the better—made them more spiritual, loving, kinder, more in tune with the universe. Some NDEs even turned agnostics and atheists into believers.

So where was the blasphemy? Where was old Satan in all this?

70

They couldn’t go to the police without first gathering evidence linking the test victims to the lab. They would also need proof that Sarah had joined Proteus after they stopped using street people as guinea pigs. But that would take more time than they had. So Zack had Sarah drive them to Zack’s place, where he showered, changed, and packed some overnight clothes. Then they headed up Commonwealth Avenue to a dealership just beyond the BU campus, where he rented a Nissan Murano and drove to a parking lot on Longwood.

While Sarah waited in the car, he climbed to the third floor of the Goldenson Building on the Harvard Medical School campus. And just as the secretary had said when he called, she was in her office. Without knocking, Zack opened the door.

Elizabeth Luria jerked visibly in her chair, her face draining of color around her birthmark.

“Looks like you’ve seen a ghost.” He closed the door behind him.

She let out a small squeal as her mouth quivered for words.

He walked to her desk, which was covered with paperwork. “Back from the dead, and hotter than ever.”

“I can explain.”

“What, how you kidnapped me, then buried me alive? I’d really like to hear that, Elizabeth.”

“W-we needed just one more run to confirm merger, just that one, but I know how you refused. We were so close, I—I just felt desperate.”

“So you force-flatlined me and left me for dead for real. But I bet you got your data.”

Her face lit up. “Yes, yes. It’s remarkable. Really. It confirms—”

“Blah, blah, blah. Then you buried me alive.”

“That was an accident, I swear. We couldn’t revive you. Something went wrong. Maybe it was too early for another suspension. Maybe the sedative was still in your system. I don’t know.”

“But you tried, of course.”

Her face exaggerated itself. “Oh, God, we tried. Of course. Of course—injected you with epinephrine. Used defibrillator paddles over and over. Nothing worked, I swear. You had no heartbeat no matter what we did.”