THE LIFE LEFT: A GRIPPING PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

by L. W. WEDGWOOD

  As she made her way back to the kitchen, she found her legs refusing to respond in the way they should. The floor wobbled like jelly beneath her feet. Her knees numbed. Part of her felt as if she would keel over at any second. Another part of her insisted that she was okay. Her head remained steady, like a buoy on the ocean. She decided that as long as this buoy stayed afloat, then all would be good. Still, as she made it to the kitchen, she felt relieved to have the support of countertops to lean on.

  “Would you like coffee?” she asked, turning to Bell.

  “Thank you.”

  She set about making the coffee, monitoring her movements carefully as she went. Could she be getting ill? A flu or virus of some kind could be robbing her of her usual steadiness. Or did grief do this to you? If she could just get back up to her bedroom and to her medication, then she knew she’d be okay. In the meantime, she had to deal with Bell. She decided that she’d better keep his visit as brief as possible.

  “Sugar?” she asked.

  “No thank you.”

  She placed the cup in front of him and at the same time, she congratulated herself for controlling her trembling. But as she took a seat at the countertop, she could see that Bell didn’t appear so reassured.

  “Mrs. Morrison, are you okay?” he asked.

  “My husband is dead and I think my son is a murderer. No, I’m not okay.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you, but at the same time, damn you! Your partner had no right calling me and telling me that Ron was poisoned. He could have at least waited until after the funeral.”

  “My partner?”

  “Detective Line.”

  “Oh… Line and I aren’t exactly partners; at least not technically. We’re not even working together.”

  “You’re both working on the hospice murders, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are partners.”

  “You said you think that Abn is a murderer. What’s happened? What makes you say that?”

  She reached into the front pocket of her pants and removed a zip-lock bag. She held it up in front of Bell. “I found this in my husband’s medical supply cabinet,” she said.

  “A syringe?”

  “A syringe that’s had bleach inside of it.”

  “I don’t understand. How does this make Abn a murderer?”

  “Abn is the only one who has access to the area where the medical cabinet is,” she said, feeling certain that this much on its own should be explanation enough.

  “What about Ron’s brother? I understand that he also has access to the house.”

  She huffed in protest. “Ed… Ed’s nothing but a dysfunctional, drunken, asshole. He’s well beyond being capable of poisoning terminally ill patients in a hospice.”

  “I’m not so sure. Being a drunk doesn’t rule him out. And’s it’s possible that anyone could have broken in and taken that syringe.”

  Frustration welled inside of her. “Hold on a minute. Up until a few days ago, you were dead-set on pegging Abn as a serial killer and now you’re defending him.”

  “I’m not defending anyone. I base everything I do on facts. I can’t proceed to arrest someone on circumstantial evidence.”

  “Circumstantial?”

  “The syringe isn’t enough. Of course, I’ll have it tested for prints. But even if Abn’s prints are all over it, it’s still not enough.”

  She stood from her seat. “Follow me!” she said.

  She led Bell through the house and up the stairs. With the aid of renewed purpose, her legs now felt rock solid beneath her. The world had steadied and so had her resolve. As she stepped into Abn’s bedroom, she pulled his sketchpad from the shelf.

  “Look at this,” she said, as she handed the sketchpad over to Bell.

  “What is it?” he asked, as he flipped through the pages.

  “It’s Abn’s sketchpad. Now, you tell me if you think that’s the artwork of a normal teenage boy?”

  She waited patiently as he examined each page. His face didn’t reflect the conviction that she felt. He looked every ounce the skeptic. Was she wrong about Abn? What had she missed? Could she be overreacting as a result of her current emotional state?

  “This is pretty normal stuff for a teenage boy. You should have seen what I was drawing at that age,” Bell said, as he closed the sketchpad and handed it back.

  His explanation transported her back to Ron’s bedside, the day he’d died. Ron had said the same thing, almost word for word. Was this true? Was she really that ignorant to the normal thoughts of a teenage boy? Her world swayed as her legs became jelly again. The bookshelf saved her. Without its support, she would have fallen.

  “Mrs. Morrison, are you sure you’re okay?”

  With her fingers dug into the bookshelf, she forced herself to steady. Somehow, she managed to hold on. “I get low blood sugar. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She could tell by his expression, that he didn’t believe her in the least. But all she wanted him to do now was to leave. All she wanted was to be left alone again. She didn’t need him examining the state of her grief.

  “I’m okay,” she said with as much insistence in her tone as she could muster.

  “You don’t look well.”

  “Are you going to help me with Abn or not?”

  “Like I said, I’ll have the syringe checked for prints, but that’s all I can do for the time being. You need to think. You need to bring me something more.”

  “Then you’d best be gone then. I have a lot I need to do today.”

  “Can you give me something that Abn’s handled recently? We don’t have his fingerprints on file.”

  She thought about that for a moment. She led Bell back downstairs and into the kitchen. As she scanned the scanned the area, her eyes soon came to rest on Abn’s favorite drinking glass. She could see that it still had the residue of milk at its bottom. “Will this do?” she said, picking the glass up with a paper towel.

  “That will work.”

  As she handed the glass over, the action felt like a betrayal to her. But deep down, she knew that she had no choice. She had to follow through. She had to know for sure.

  “I’ll call you the moment I get the results for the test on prints,” he said, carefully sliding the glass into an evidence bag.

  As the door closed in Bell’s wake, she turned, resting her back against it. Sinking to the floor, she felt short of breath, as if a panic attack had seized her. Her hands resumed their trembling and tears flowed freely from her eyes as she realized she no longer had anyone to turn to. Ron dead, Abn a possible serial killer. Her father was her only hope. He was on his way from Texas at that very moment. She couldn’t wait to see him.

  She lost track of time as she sat there and submitted entirely to her grief, letting it wash over her and through her. In a sick kind of way, she soon found her sensory overload to be intoxicating. How was that possible? How could a human being take pleasure in such a thing? No answers came to her. Only endurance had a place here. There was no space for rationalizing. Like a marathon runner on the last mile, everything inside her went toward the completion of each stride. But her strides were comprised of soul draining seconds of time and the finish line was nowhere in sight.

  Soon, the ache in her back became too much to endure. She needed to lie down. She needed to rest and collect her energy for the work that lay ahead. Her bed beckoned. She uncurled from where she sat, as if she were a climber embarking on the assent of an unclimbed mountain.

  She arrived at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at them with mounting trepidation. Taking a few deep breaths, she climbed. When she made it to the top of the first flight, she paused to rest. This wasn’t so bad. She was okay. Her power seemed to be returning.

  As she reached the top of the final flight of stairs, she was greeted by the smiling face of Ron in a family portrait taken a year beforehand. The image f
elt to her like a reward for a job well done. All three of them were there, with the glistening waters of Wellington harbor framing the background. She remembered the day well. It had been Abn’s birthday, or at least what they’d decided to be his birthday, because no one really new. They’d gone down to Oriental Bay and had ice cream in the sunshine to celebrate.

  She smiled back at the photograph. She let the memory lift her spirits. They all looked so happy. Even Abn wore a rare, ear to ear grin as he sat atop his shiny new, blue bicycle.

  Blue bicycle… Blue bicycle…

  Something about the bike disturbed the moment of tranquility. The fuzz of her mind took quite a while to compute what it was.

  Then she remembered.

  The image of Michael materialized from somewhere within her thoughts. His words spilled from her mouth as she repeated what he’d said to the detectives that day, “That’s not Abn in that video, and that certainly isn’t his bicycle. Abn rides a red Gary Fisher. That’s a blue Giant,” she said.

  “Hi Mum!”

  Somehow suppressing a jump of fright, she turned to find Abn standing behind her. “Hello darling,” she managed.

  CHAPTER 25

  Bell looked at his watch and saw that it was 2:00 p.m. as he stepped into the elevator. When he exited on the third floor, the sterile stench of the Intensive Care Unit washed over him. The scent further unsettled his already darkening mood. It bought back memories he would have rather left dormant.

  The last time he’d visited, the pain meds in his system had masked his emotions a little. Now, the effects of the drugs were gone. Now, he faced the full storm of his emotions.

  This was where his mother had died. A hit and run accident had secured her spot here in the ICU when he was only ten years old. Things hadn’t changed much since then. Every detail of the surroundings reminded him of those dark days. Each visit he’d made at his father’s side after school had only served to show the hopelessness of her situation.

  It had taken six weeks before his father had decided to pull the plug. In that time, Bell had watched him crumble from the cornerstone of the secure world he’d grown up in. The driver hadn’t just taken his mother that day, he’d also taken his father; only in a slower and much more painful way. Fused by alcohol induced liver failure, his father died just six years later.

  As he entered Boar’s room, he took a small degree of comfort in the fact that at least his partner wasn’t lying in the same bed used by his mother. But this relief vanished when he found Boar’s mother kneeling beside him with her head resting on the bed.

  As he came closer, he could see that Boar’s mother appeared to be as unconscious as her son. A small puddle of drool had accumulated on the white sheets near her mouth. Her eyes were closed and muffled snoring replaced her breathing. He also couldn’t help noticing that her head lay a little too close to an IV line coming from Boar’s hand. If she rolled her head in the slightest way, she would cut off whatever use the IV line offered.

  His immediate reaction was to wake Janine up. But before he had a chance, someone disturbed him.

  “She’s been here all night,” said a voice.

  He turned to find a thin woman, who must have been nearly seven feet tall, staring down at him. Her nurse’s scrubs appeared ill fitting on such a long body, as if the tailor had run out of material in the midst of his job.

  “She hasn’t left at all?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure about yesterday. I only came on duty this morning. But the night duty nurse told me she didn’t leave last night. And I can tell you for sure, she hasn’t moved from that spot since I arrived.”

  “Christ!”

  “She was told to keep quiet about him last night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Christ. She was singing hymns and praying aloud. We had to tell her to do so in silence. We have a policy of remaining religiously neutral in the ICU. And we do not need any unnecessary noise, especially the jovial kind.”

  “Jovial kind?”

  “I was told that she was loud, singing as if she were celebrating in a bar.”

  A tidal wave of suspicion arose inside of Bell as he listened to the nurse. But he forced his worry aside for the time being.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  He was rewarded by the neutral expression of someone used to giving bad news.

  “The swelling in his brain is not coming down. If anything, it’s increased in severity. We’ve tried everything, but the trauma of the accident is proving to be difficult to deal with,” she said.

  “So, the longer the swelling is there, the less chance he has of regaining consciousness?”

  “The swelling is severe.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ll be here all day if you need anything else.”

  He had no time to answer. The nurse took off to continue her rounds. He turned his attention back to Boar and moved to the side of his bed, opposite Janine. Boar’s unconscious face looked nothing like that of a man in a coma. He looked like a man in pain to Bell, like a man at the end of his endurance, submitting in every way to his misery. An occasional spontaneous grimace told him this. The way Boar’s fists clenched told him this. And the closed-eye expression that resembled someone deep in thought told him this.

  Was this the way Boar would spend the rest of his days? Days filled with a machine breathing for him, a demented drug addict praying for him at his side. Days of pain racking his being in a way impossible for him to control or avoid. The more he stood there and took in the scene, the further his spirits sagged.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He looked over the covers of the bed and found Janine staring back at him through bloodshot eyes. He cursed the interruption.

  “I’m his partner and I’m his friend,” he managed.

  “You’re the one who put him here. I’m his mother. I don’t want you here.”

  Something had changed in her eyes since Bell had last seen her. It only took him a moment to realize what it was. Her pupils were now dilated, her skin looked clammy, and her words were no longer that of a woman three years sober. Jesus had left and the devil had returned.

  “You’re high,” he said, the words out of his mouth before he knew what he was saying.

  “What in Hell are you talking about? Leave now, or I’ll get them to throw you out.”

  “I have just as much of a right to visit James as you do. You cannot stop me from being here.”

  “He’s my son. I can do whatever I like.”

  He could now see that she was well and truly gone; deeply in the thick of whatever she had taken. He could see there would be no rationalizing with her. But at the same time, he knew he had to try.

  “James wouldn’t have wanted this. You have to let him go,” he said.

  “What in Hell are you talking about?”

  “If you’re truly his mother, then you have to end this. You have to get them to turn off the machines. Let God decide.”

  “I’m not killing my own son.”

  “I can see that you’re angry. I can see that you’re upset. I feel your pain. But he’s already gone.”

  “He has not gone. He is here. He’s my son and I’m going to take care of him. Now get out! Get out! Get out! Get…” she screamed over and over again.

  He wanted to resist. But her anger had morphed into unbridled rage as she continued with her outburst.

  “Detective, I think it’s best that you leave,” said the nurse as she reappeared.

  With Janine still screaming, he took one last look at Boar. He couldn’t even say goodbye to his friend. His words would never be heard over the insanity of the ranting.

  His phone rang as he made his way through the hospital lobby. “Hello,” he said.

  “Detective Bell. It’s Jimmy from forensics,” said the voice.

  “Jimmy. Do you have the results?”

  “Yes, and they’re a match.”

  “Thanks,” he said. But he felt
anything but thankful as he hung up.

  The bright sunshine did nothing to brighten his mood as he stepped outside. Still reeling from the events in the ICU, he struggled to process the results from the prints test. Had Boar really been right? Had Abn murdered hundreds of people in Iraq and now more here in New Zealand? Worse still, how was he going to tell Jane this news? She was a grieving widow, obviously already teetering on the edge of sanity. Would knowing the results push her over?

  Caught in a whirlwind of emotion, all of these questions and answers flew around him like pieces of a puzzle looking for a place to land. Standing there, breathing in the fresh air of the bright and gusty Wellington day, he let the puzzle pieces’ circle until they eventually fell. The picture became complete. He knew what he had to do. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he dialed the number.

  “Mrs. Morrison?” he said as the call was answered.

  “Yes, Detective Bell,” Jane said.

  “I’m just calling to tell you that I received the results for the fingerprint test.”

  “And are they Abn’s fingerprints?”

  He paused before answering, giving his resolve time to kick in, giving his conscience one last chance. But deep down, he knew he’d already made his decision.

  “I’m afraid not. The prints on the syringe don’t match Abn’s prints.”

  “Oh…” Jane said. “Oh…”

  “You should be happy, Mrs. Morrison,” he said, noting the worry in her tone. But she’d already hung up.

  CHAPTER 26

  Abn couldn’t wait to leave the house this morning. Since Ron had died, the Jane he knew had vanished. Gone was the loving mother he’d known. Gone was the affection. Gone were the tender conversations and playful banter he’d become used to since his adoption. It seemed to him as if some foreign energy had possessed her, had hollowed her out and had left nothing but an empty core of darkness. He may as well have been living in the same house as a corpse. Medication had a part in her condition, of this he felt sure. But which medication?

  He wheeled his bicycle from the garage. It wasn’t until the door began rolling closed behind him that he noticed the envelope taped to his handlebars. Something about the envelope immediately unsettled him. Why was it there? Who had put it there? What was inside of it?