Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  They had reached a crossroads. The HVAC area was behind them; in front of them was a wide corridor leading to the patient rooms in both directions, where the chance of discovery would be substantially increased. “I asked Jimmy,” Jason added, “what might be going on. He said, ‘How the hell should I know, bro?’ but then he pointed out that she’s probably still in the building. Too hard to get somebody out unless you do it in an ambulance, maybe, and there ain’t been no squad runs in or out yet tonight.”

  His cell made a noise. It sounded, Bell thought, like a sick cricket. She worried about the noise and the attention it might bring, but nothing happened. “Text,” Jason said. He checked it. A grim smile spread across his pimple-scarred face as he read the long paragraph. “We’re in business. Jimmy’s been on the lookout—you can go wherever you want to in this place, long as you’ve got a mop and a bucket and you keep your head down and your mouth shut—and he says he just saw ’em wheeling her into the surgical wing. Flat on a gurney with an IV in her arm. But still breathing.”

  “Surgical wing?” Rhonda said. “Why would they need to—?”

  “Hold on.” Bell had to interrupt her, because the proper response to Jimmy Dillon’s information involved a blunt, one-word command and a fierce prayer that it would be followed: “Run.”

  * * *

  Now she didn’t care if they were spotted. There was too little time and too much at stake. Bell took the lead, running as fast as she could through the hallways, pausing only to check the signs.

  SURGERY, followed by a long red arrow indicating the proper direction, was the one she was looking for, and when she saw it, she waved back at Rhonda and Jason and they all hurried that way. They passed rows of patient rooms and nurses’ stations and an occasional gaggle of empty wheelchairs angled along the walls of the corridor. They passed hospital personnel wearing smocks of white or pale green or light blue, women and men who looked up from their clipboards or their iPads with startled frowns. Bell had been a runner in high school and college, and while she wasn’t nearly so fast as she’d been back then, while she wished like hell she was in better shape, she did the best she could. She was faster than Jason, who was half her age but clumsy, and faster than Rhonda. She remembered Lindy’s face as the young woman lay in the bed in the ICU ward, a face radiant with belief in her father, and the memory of that face made Bell even more determined to stop a monstrous plan that was, she now believed, the real reason for just about everything that had happened since Jed Stark tumbled to the floor of Tommy’s bar, impaled by a Craftsman screwdriver.

  “Stop!” Bell cried. “Stop now!”

  She had come swooping around the corner, rapidly scanning the sign on the door—SURGERY PREP—and as she slammed through it and yelled, she knocked over a metal cart on the other side of the door. The tray of instruments made a tinkling racket as it spilled, the contents clattering and pinging against the tiled floor.

  Sharon’s guard, the man named Leo, charged at Bell, but Sharon immediately grabbed his arm and held him back. “No—No—leave her alone,” Sharon said. “They can all stay. Once I explain it, we’ll be fine.”

  Bell didn’t wait to hear what Sharon had to say. Or Bradley Portis, for that matter, who stood nearby. She lunged at the bed to which Lindy was strapped and began pulling at the thick canvas bands around the young woman’s wrists. Lindy, awake but apparently sedated, barely reacted to this sudden flurry of events. She looked at Bell uncomprehendingly.

  “This,” said Porter, his voice chilly and dismissive, “is an important medical procedure.” He glared at Sharon. “These people cannot be here.”

  “We’re not leaving,” Bell declared. “Shut this down.” She turned. “Rhonda, I’d like you to document everything in this room. Every name. Every word said. No one comes in or goes out.”

  “You can’t—” It was Sharon again, her voice strained and anxious. Pleading now. “I’m begging you. Just let this happen. That’s all you have to do. Just stand back and give us some time. The surgeon’s on her way. All she knows is that we’ve got a heart. A perfect heart. We’ve got a heart, you hear me? We’ve got one. For my little boy.” She took a short, passionate breath. “Montgomery’s in the next room—they’ve given him the anesthetic. He’s almost ready. It’s just a matter of minutes now and we can start. Please. My son. My son—he’s dying.” She grabbed Bell’s arm. Bell shook her off, but Sharon kept talking, urgently and beseechingly, trying to make Bell look at her: “Please. Please. For God’s sake—please. Anything. I’ll give you anything.”

  Fugate, syringe in hand, was backing slowly toward Lindy’s bed, taking advantage of the confusion to administer the lethal dose of morphine. Before she could connect it to the IV line, Fugate’s wrist suddenly was snatched up by Jason Brinkerman. He squeezed until she screamed in pain and dropped the syringe. It bounced on the floor and rolled a short distance. “Hey,” he said. “What the hell’re you up to, lady?”

  “Please.” Sharon was still begging, repeating the word Please over and over again, more desperate, more hysterical, with each repetition. The tears had made a clownish mess of her makeup; mascara carved crooked paths down both sides of her face. “You have to understand,” she said. “He’s too far down on the list. My little boy is too sick. Twenty patients die every day waiting for a new heart—do you know that? We can’t wait any more. We’re out of time. And money doesn’t matter to those transplant people. Money doesn’t matter!” she cried. “My boy. My beautiful little boy.”

  Bell plucked off Sharon’s hand for a second time and turned to Portis. “You bastard,” she said. There was disbelief in her voice as well as anger. “You fucking bastard. Letting your hospital be used this way. When I get through with you and your corporation, mister, you and Nurse Ratched here will wish that you’d never—”

  “Oh, please,” Portis said, interrupting her. He was angry, too, which surprised Bell. She had expected denials and evasions and blame-shifting. That’s not what she got.

  “Don’t bother,” he continued, “with your self-righteous indignation. Spare us your noble little speeches. Quick lesson in economics, lady. The company that runs this place is required to make a profit. You follow? Four-fifths of the people who come here for treatment are old and sick and poor. The only way to keep it going—the only way—is to play ball with the Riley Jessups of this world. We do what Jessup wants, he gives us a ton of money, and we buy the equipment so that all those fucking hillbillies you saw in our parking lot last week—the crippled old ladies and the coal miners with black lung who don’t have a dime to their names—can get treatment here.” He folded his arms. Irritated with the lot of them. “All I know is that the girl over there was brought into the hospital yesterday with brain trauma. The nursing supervisor told me that her accident was not survivable. Fine. So we do the right thing. We set up for the transplant. Is it strictly by the book? No. But it’s for the greater good.

  “I don’t expect you to understand the advanced moral calculation,” he said, shrugging dismissively as he finished. “Way above your pay grade, lady. Hell, if you had any brains, you wouldn’t be living in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, now, would you?”

  Overlapping his last syllable was a howl of pain, a prolonged, pitiful wail that sounded barely human. It was Sharon. She had dropped to her knees and was clawing at the air, sobbing and shrieking. The security guard named Leo reached down and tried to help her up, but she slapped at his hands, and spit at him; she didn’t want anything he had to offer. She wanted only one thing: her son’s life.

  And for a moment—fleeting, but it cut deep—Bell felt sorry for her, felt sorry for this woman who had watched her child grow sicker and weaker day by day, every day of his young life, knowing that the one thing that would save him was just a deal and a few hundred thousand dollars and a scalpel-cut away. Had Bell and Rhonda and Jason arrived ten minutes later, the surgery would have been under way; her boy would have had his new heart, no matter the cost to anyone else.
She’d been so close. So close to having her child be well and healthy, her child made whole, her child gifted with a beautiful long life. So close.

  Bell felt a slight shift in her feelings, the same shift she’d felt when Portis spoke, explaining his actions; she’d never admit it to that arrogant asshole, but his words made a harrowing kind of sense. It’s so damned easy to hate, Bell thought. It’s a lot harder to figure out just where to direct that hatred.

  She heard a soft intake of breath from Lindy Crabtree. She looked over at the bed. The young woman’s eyelids fluttered open; she was struggling to regain full consciousness. And Bell’s anger at Sharon and Portis suddenly was revived. She heard Rhonda’s voice:

  “Lindy, sweetie, let’s get you out of here. You ask me, this hospital’s got a mighty peculiar idea of how to heal the sick.”

  Chapter Forty

  The Raythune County Courthouse reared up against the midnight sky. Except for the faint glow in a ground-floor window—on the side in which the jail was located—no lights were on. Thus it was difficult to tell precisely where the courthouse ended and the rest of the world began, so seamlessly did the building’s dark contours blend into the blackness of night in the mountains.

  It was an hour and a half after events had transpired at the hospital. Inside the old stone building, past the empty corridors and the closed office doors and the locked-up courtrooms, three people—Bell, Sheriff Fogelsong, and Lindy—were heading toward one of the cells. Fogelsong had been blunt with Lindy: Her father was dying.

  Rhonda Lovejoy, joined a short while ago by Deputy Harrison, had remained behind at the hospital. After the scene was secured, Rhonda would take Jason home; first she had to wait for the FBI special agent to arrive from Charleston to oversee the arrest of Sharon and Leo. The sweep would include—for their role as co-conspirators—Bradley Portis and Sally Fugate. An agent was already on her way to the estate to pick up Riley Jessup.

  The door to the cell was open, and Lindy rushed inside. Her father lay on his back on the short-legged metal bed, eyes closed, hands stacked on his massive chest. Those hands rode up and down with the staggered rhythm of his labored, irregular breathing.

  Bell started to follow her in, but heard a signal from Nick—a brief, meaningful cough—and she stopped. “Give her some time,” he murmured. Bell nodded, falling back into the short corridor that led to the row of cells. She waited, side by side with the sheriff. And there she filled him in on all that had happened that night, and what prompted it.

  Sharon’s explanation back at the hospital had been wedged between sobs and wild clawing threats and then desperate whimpers. On her knees, swaying back and forth, the governor’s daughter had unraveled before their eyes; like so many of the criminals with whom Bell dealt, Sharon wanted to justify herself. Wanted them to understand. Everything I did, Sharon cried, over and over, I did out of love. Love for my little boy.

  Growing up in Acker’s Gap, Margaret and Maybelle were best friends. Lindy was Maybelle’s child—the inconvenient by-product of her dissolute youth. By then, Margaret was married to Odell Crabtree, and the couple agreed to take the girl and tell everyone that Lindy was their own. Odell didn’t want to do it, didn’t want a child to raise, but a hefty payoff from Riley Jessup changed his mind. A few years later Maybelle—now Sharon—settled down in a respectable marriage and had a second child: Montgomery.

  When the extent of the boy’s health problems became grievously clear, all Sharon could think about was the strong, healthy child she had offloaded on her friend. Sharon didn’t want her little girl back; she wanted her little girl’s heart. “Wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair!” Sharon had screamed at Bell, while Rhonda and Jason helped Lindy rise from the bed, bundling her up in Jason’s flannel shirt. Using it as a coat. “Not fair that my boy suffers like he does,” Sharon went on, incensed by the injustice of it all, “and that girl’s got no problems at all. That girl nobody wanted. A throwaway. A mistake. I had to pay them to take her, you hear me? Margaret would’ve raised her for nothing, but Odell wanted money. Cash. That’s the kind of man he is.”

  Only a heart transplant would save Montgomery, Sharon told them, and she’d been forced to learn the grim facts. More than three thousand people in the United States are languishing on a list, waiting for a donor heart. Years might pass before Montgomery’s name came up—time he didn’t have. “Those transplant people don’t care about our fucking money,” Sharon said, almost choking on her disbelief. “You can’t buy them off. Believe me, I tried.” She hadn’t been able to get the girl out of her mind—Lindy, the child she’d abandoned so long ago, back in Acker’s Gap. The child who was growing and thriving. And thus Sharon’s obsession began: “The girl. The girl and her perfect heart. That’s what Monty needs—her heart. That’s what will save my precious boy.”

  If the transplant authorities wouldn’t take a bribe, maybe Odell Crabtree would. He’d taken one before, when Sharon wanted to dump the newborn; maybe he’d take it again now. He didn’t care about the girl. He hadn’t cared for about nineteen years ago, when he’d demanded and received a folded-over wad of cash for his trouble. Odell was a coal miner. A brute. A savage. A symbol of everything that Sharon and her family had left behind when they moved away from Raythune County. Surely he’d like to be rid of the girl—and end up with a nice big payoff for his trouble.

  It was Riley Jessup’s idea to bring in Sampson J. Voorhees. “Big-city lawyer,” Sharon said with a sneer, although there was a gleam of admiration in her eyes, too. “Elephant balls—and able to keep a secret, if the price is right.” From his office in New York, Voorhees tried for months to put the offer before Odell Crabtree, to get the old man on board. But they received no response from Crabtree. The next step: Forget the negotiation. Hire a local to do the dirty work. Get Jed Stark to stir up trouble in Raythune County, attacking a series of random victims. Drive home the point that a killer’s on the loose. That way, Stark could murder Lindy—and get the body to the medical center—with little fuss. Nobody would ask questions. She had, after all, no real family. No friends. With her mother gone, there was nobody left to care about Lindy. Nobody to harangue the overworked local authorities to stay focused on the case.

  The transplant would be done in Raythune County. Riley Jessup’s connections would ensure it. If anybody asked questions later, it wouldn’t matter; Montgomery would be alive. They wouldn’t take his new heart away from him.

  “But that fucking sonofabitch Stark got himself killed in a stupid bar fight,” Sharon said, practically spitting her disgust, “right after he killed some old coot. Didn’t finish the job. Barely started it.” Voorhees arranged for the payoff to Tiffany Stark to keep her quiet about the plan.

  At that point, before Bell could go on with her recapitulation of Sharon’s confession, Fogelsong spoke. “So the attack on Charlie Frank was Perry Crum’s doing.” The sheriff had propped his backside against the cinder block wall, grateful for the chance to take the pressure off his spine. He looked, Bell thought, about 110 years old. And she figured she looked at least a dozen years older than that. “It had nothing to do with Riley Jessup,” he added, “or his daughter or their plot to save the boy.”

  “That’s right.”

  The sheriff frowned. “So they were chosen at random,” he said. “Freddie Arnett. Charlie Frank. Murdered by different people for different reasons—but victims of the same bad luck.”

  “Yeah,” Bell said. “Jed Stark came across a defenseless old man working in his driveway in the middle of the night. Perry Crum saw a guy walking along the side of a deserted road.” She let the fact of the unfathomable brutality of coincidence sink in. No way to pretty it up. Or have it make sense. “For Freddie Arnett and Charlie Frank,” she added, “it was the wrong place to be. At the wrong time. We were looking for logic. For a pattern. We could’ve looked forever and never found it—because there isn’t one.”

  Fogelsong thought about her words. Bell, he knew, was doing the same thing that
he was: pondering the malicious miracle of chance in lives that were already twisted into unnatural shapes, by virtue of where those lives were being lived, the burnt and battered ground that constituted the arena for this long pageant of sorrow.

  A phone call might have drawn Freddie Arnett back inside his house that night, just before Jed Stark came along, and Stark would’ve picked somebody else to bludgeon to death. A request from Martha Frank—a glass of water, a readjustment of her pillow—could have delayed Charlie’s walk, so that when Perry Crum found himself on Godown Road, Charlie would still have been at home, stroking his mother’s head, telling her she was safe, telling her everything was fine, telling her that he would always be right there by her side. And Perry would’ve moved on. Found somebody else to make his point with.

  “Voorhees is untouchable, I guess,” the sheriff said.

  “Well, he’s been in business a long, long time. Which means he’s very good at covering his tracks. I’ll try—but I bet we can’t lay a glove on him.”

  Fogelsong shook his head. Something still troubled him. “A heart donor’s different from a bone marrow donor,” he said. “People get donor hearts from strangers all the time. Doesn’t have to be a family member.” His voice was growing raspy; he’d had quite a night himself, picking up Perry Crum out at the Crabtree house and reviving him and then stuffing the howling, squirming, cursing old man in the Blazer and booking him at the courthouse.

  “No,” Bell replied. “It doesn’t.”

  “So couldn’t Stark have just murdered any young person? Anybody who was roughly the same age and size as Montgomery? Given Jessup’s connections around here, they’d get that heart to the boy, anyway.”

  “Yes. But Lindy was perfect. Nobody looking out for her. Nobody to ask hard questions about her death. Truth is—Jessup and his daughter really couldn’t have done this with anyone else. It was only possible for them if they used Lindy. And not just because of the logistics.” The sheriff looked perplexed, and so Bell groped for a way to explain it. “You have to understand how Jessup and his daughter justified their plan. How they reconciled it in their own desperate minds.” She paused. “Everybody’s got a story they tell themselves so that they can sleep at night, Nick. So that they’re not torn up with guilt and regret every second. And it all comes down to how they looked at Lindy Crabtree. What they saw her as.”