Natural Causes

by Michael Palmer

  “So Blankenship tried to kill you?”

  “Not Blankenship. A m-man he hired. Tall and b-blond with—”

  “No!”

  Rosa was about to say the word herself when Martha Fezler screamed it. Her eyes were wide with terror. At that instant a soft pop came from Rosa’s right. Martha cried out and flew over backward as if she had been hit by a wrecking ball. Warren and Rosa dropped to where she lay. She was grunting for breath. Her eyes were glazed.

  “Oh, God!” Warren said, touching the dime-size hole in her overall bib, which was already soaking through with blood. “She’s been shot.”

  “Excellent deduction, Warren.”

  They spun to the voice, which Rosa had recognized even before she saw the man. Darryl was leaning comfortably against a support beam, grinning at her the way he first had on the highway. The silenced revolver, held comfortably in his hand, was pointed at a spot somewhere between her and Warren.

  “H-he’s the m-man,” Fezler said from his knees. “B-Blankenship’s man. Why d-did you sh-shoot my s-sister, you f-fucker? Why?”

  “It’s just business, Warren,” he said, taking a step toward them. “I’m sure Rosa there understands that. She doesn’t hold it against me that I shot out that tire of hers. She knows it was just business. Just a way to find out exactly where she was headed. I don’t hold it against you that my knee got blown apart the last time we were together and that I’m going to be a fucking gimp cripple for the rest of my life. Occupational hazard is the way I look at it. Business. Now, though, it’s your turn.”

  “You s-son of a bitch!” Fezler whined.

  “Get up! Now!”

  Numbly the scientist did as he was asked. He looked like a man resigned to death.

  Darryl’s gun came up. Rosa could see Fezler had no intention of moving. She dove at him from the side and pushed him as hard as she could. He stumbled, tripped, and then toppled off the rear platform between the rails and the building. The gunman’s reflex shot splintered the floor where Fezler had been standing.

  “Run, Warren, run!” Rosa screamed.

  Darryl turned to her and smiling in a calm, twisted way, shot her in the chest. In grotesque ballet, Rosa spun nearly full around, her arms flapping like a rag doll’s, her glasses flying off. She fell heavily to the floor, not two feet from where Martha lay. Pain exploded through to her back from a spot just above her right breast. She cried out, but was not aware that she had made a sound. Drawing even a shallow breath sent daggers through her chest, and up into her shoulder and jaw.

  Darryl, now ignoring her completely, had moved to the spot where Warren had fallen from the platform. He held the obscene, silenced revolver loosely as he stared out toward the water. Lying on her side, gasping for air, Rosa prayed that Fezler had overcome his cowardice and kept his head enough to try to escape.

  “P-please d-don’t sh-shoot,” she suddenly heard him beg.

  “Up,” Darryl said. “Slowly now. On your feet.”

  Silently Rosa cursed both men. Moving through pain unlike any she had ever known, she pulled herself toward them.

  “Now, Warren, this way. Come on.… Come on, boy.”

  Rosa felt herself move, then move again, first on her belly, then on her hands and knees. Her lung had collapsed. Of that she was sure. She tasted blood and sensed it welling up from her chest. She felt dizzy. Her vision blurred. Then, as she wondered if she could move even one more foot, her hand brushed against Martha Fezler’s coffee can. Hearing the soft scrape, Darryl turned. With all her strength, Rosa splashed the solvent into his face. He staggered backward, screaming, pawing frantically at his eyes with his free hand and firing the revolver wildly with the other.

  A bullet tore through the flesh of Rosa’s arm, but she barely noticed. She had pulled herself up by a line and stumbled over to the wall.

  “Warren, help!” she cried hoarsely.

  Darryl, now writhing on the floor by the tracks, fired instinctively at her voice. The bullet shattered the barnside just inches from her face.

  “Please help me!”

  Again a bullet slammed into the wall by her face. The blood gurgling in her throat was beginning to suffocate her. Her cough was futilely weak, her consciousness beginning to go. The room swirled mercilessly as she slipped toward the floor. Suddenly, through the unrelenting haze, she heard a crash, followed instantly by Darryl’s dreadful wail. Then, just as suddenly, there was silence.

  Rosa lay by the wall, conscious, but barely so. Her hand was inches from her eyes. Still, it took some time before she realized that she was clutching the safety line Martha had so loosely tied. She peered across through a deepening gloom. Twenty feet away, Blankenship’s hired killer lay facedown and very still. The huge marine inboard engine rested squarely on his back.

  “Warren?” Rosa whimpered, almost soundlessly. “Please come.”

  There was no response. Rosa battled the encroaching darkness. But slowly her eyes closed.

  “Rosa?” Fezler meekly whispered her name, as he touched her shoulder. “C-can you hear me?”

  Rosa nodded but could not speak. She felt blood oozing from her mouth.

  “Hang on. I’ll c-call an ambulance.”

  “Wait,” she gasped.

  “W-what?”

  “Pad … pencil … over there.”

  Bewildered, Fezler retrieved the pad and then lifted her head and rested it on his lap. Painfully, slowly, she dictated a phone number to him.

  “Call … now,” she managed. “Explain … to … him.… Sarah … is … at … M … C … B .… This … man … will … help.”

  “I’ll g-get an ambulance,” Warren said. “Rosa? Dammit, Rosa, no!”

  The muscles in her face relaxed. Her lips curled up in a thin smile.

  “Go,” she said.

  CHAPTER 41

  October 29

  EACH HOUR OF SARAH’S INCARCERATION ON THE locked ward of Underwood Six was more traumatic and unpleasant than the last. The staff seemed determined that she should neither expect nor get any special treatment merely because she was a physician. And some of them clearly enjoyed having power and control over an M.D. Every request she made, however minor, was prohibited or modified by some sort of unit rule. Her primary antagonists were the mental health workers—mostly recent college graduates who majored in psychology or sociology, and who all seemed to have taken the job as a stopgap while they tried to decide what to do with their lives.

  “My doctor hasn’t been by to see me all day. It’s very important that I talk to him. Could you please call him?”

  “I’m sorry. We never call doctors unless it’s an emergency or a problem with medication. He’ll be here later tonight or in the morning, just like all the other doctors.”

  “Hi, I hate to bother you, but I’d like to see the nurses’ Physicians’ Desk Reference, please. I’m trying to check on a drug company named Huron Pharmaceuticals.”

  “I’m sorry. No staff books can be lent out to patients.”

  “Well, could you check on Huron for me?”

  “Perhaps later, after group, if there’s time.”

  Eventually, a surprise letup in the line waiting to use the one pay phone had allowed Sarah to call a friend in the hospital pharmacy. There was, he told her, absolutely no such company as Huron Pharmaceuticals. Not local, not regional, not national, not foreign. Nowhere. That information sent Sarah marching once again into battle against the mental health workers.

  “I was certain my lawyer was coming during visitors’ hours. Now they’re over and he hasn’t shown up. Can I see him just for a minute if he comes late? It’s very important.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s not possible.”

  “If he happens to call the nurses’ station, could you put him through to me?”

  “Outside calls can only come through the patients’ pay phone.”

  “But the pay phone was tied up all evening. And then it got shut off at ten. No one told me that was going to happen. Could I
please use the nurses’ station phone to try to reach him?”

  “Everything will be just the same tomorrow morning, Sarah. You may not believe that, but it will. Now, why don’t you take the medication Dr. Goldschmidt ordered, read for a while, and get some sleep?”

  After learning that the pay phone had been shut off at ten, Sarah gave up on hearing from Matt before morning. But with each passing hour, her concern for him grew. Why would he not at least have called? She calmed herself only by reasoning that he had inadvertently missed the narrow, two-hour visitors’ window and then had become the victim of a constant busy signal on the pay phone. Perhaps he had come to the ward late and had been turned away by one of the mental health workers.

  The hours on Underwood Six had dragged past a minute at a time. Now it was half-past two in the morning. Sarah sat in a worn leather chair by the lounge window, grateful that no one had produced a rule prohibiting that specific behavior. The one redeeming thing about being a patient on a locked psych ward, she was realizing, was that one could act crazy and have no one take much notice.

  Her throat was still raspy from the endotracheal tube, and in addition to feeling tired and weak, she had a rather nasty cough. But she also felt committed to staying up all night if necessary. If and when the Huron Pharmaceuticals truck returned to the Chilton Building, she wanted to know it. In less than seven hours, the building was going to blow. And secrets were either going to be buried beneath the rubble or were being hauled away before the blast made their removal impossible. The Huron people might have already finished their business within the condemned building. But maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t. One lucky shaft of light, one good look at the driver of the truck, might pull everything together.

  “How’re you doing?”

  Sarah, perhaps drifting off, was startled by the voice.

  “Oh, hi,” she said.

  The man, Wes, was a mental health aide. He and an RN were the graveyard shift staff on Underwood Six. At forty or so, he was older than the day and evening shift mental health workers, but Sarah assumed that his role on the floor had more to do with security than therapy. He had the lean, muscular frame of a gymnast or weight lifter, and a tattoo of a skull and dagger on one deltoid that he seemed determined to show off. Sarah’s impression was that he was quite taken with himself. She also doubted seriously that his formal education extended much beyond high school. Since his arrival at eleven, this was his third trip over to talk with her.

  “You watching anything interesting?”

  “Not really. That building over there’s going to be blown up tomorrow.”

  “I know. I’m going to stay to watch it. These’ll be the best seats anyplace. You ever work in there?”

  He had made it clear in their earlier conversations that he had learned a great deal about her from the evening shift report and from reading her chart. The notion of that infuriated her.

  “What? Oh, no. It’s never been open since I’ve been here. I’m just curious about it, that’s all.”

  Sarah continued staring across the campus, thinking about Matt. Logic told her he was fine. But a heavy, unpleasant, totally illogical sensation in her gut told her something had gone wrong.

  “So, are you dating anyone?” Wes said, scanning her unabashedly.

  Oh, no! Sarah thought. “Yes. Yes, I’m engaged,” she said quickly.

  The mental health aide coming on to her. Just what she needed. She flashed on how valuable it would be if every prospective doctor was required to spend time as a patient. They could call the course Helplessness 101.

  “Hey, that doesn’t matter to me if it doesn’t matter to you,” Wes said, adjusting the sleeve of his T-shirt to fully expose the skull. “There are a lot of rules here. I can help you get around some of them.”

  Sarah thought for a moment he was going to reach over and touch her. The prospect nauseated her. But if she rebuffed him too harshly, almost anything might happen to her. The Sealy Posturepedic Suite, as the patients called the padded room, was occupied primarily by those who lashed out in some way against the authority of the staff.

  “Look, um, Wes. I really appreciate your coming over to talk to me. But I just need to take things slowly … if you know what I mean.”

  The man’s face lit up.

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. I know what you mean. You want anything right now? A cold drink? Something sweet? Maybe something white and powdery? You have no roommate and the room next to yours is empty.”

  Sarah’s nausea intensified. If this nightmare ever was over for her, she vowed to return to Underwood Six as a physician. And in the name of all those women who would ever be incarcerated there, she would hang this sleaze out to dry.

  If …

  She begged off any favors from him for the time being, told him it was fine for him to stop by later provided she was still awake, and continued staring intently across the campus. With each passing minute, she felt more and more determined, before the big blast, to find a way off Underwood Six and into the Chilton Building.

  Now that idea, she acknowledged with a half smile, was crazy.

  By three-thirty, she was beginning to lose her battle with exhaustion. She knew she was nodding off between stints with the binoculars. But she was totally unwilling to quit, and kept prodding herself awake. Rosa, Matt, and Eli had spent most of their day unraveling various threads of the CRV113 mystery. She had spent her day in group and her night fending off a mental health aide who was more disturbed than most of the patients. The impotence of her situation was intolerable. Somehow, she was going to make a contribution, she insisted to herself. Somehow, she was going to find a way to—

  Sarah shook her head to clear it and wiped her face with the damp washcloth that had been her only ally through the long night’s vigil. There was movement on the far side of the Chilton Building. She cut the overhead fluorescent lights, took up the binoculars, and braced her elbows firmly between the sill and the window. Lighting immediately around the Chilton Building was nonexistent. But the moon, though setting, was nearly full; and the campus walkway lights were numerous enough to further soften the gloom. Sarah waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but she felt certain already of what she was seeing.

  The Huron truck was back.

  • • •

  Black Cat Daniels knew that he was going to die. And at times over the brutal hours he had spent as Eli Blankenship’s captive, he had prayed that he would. Some time after being knocked unconscious, he had come to lying facedown in the back of what he assumed was the Huron Pharmaceuticals van. His hands were bound tightly behind him with thin wire, and his ankles were lashed to one wall. His head throbbed mercilessly, and his debilitating dizziness and nausea refused to ebb.

  The van was parked inside a darkened structure of some sort, possibly a garage. There was some street noise—an occasional passing automobile—but no voices. The position Matt had been left in was horribly uncomfortable. But even his slightest movement sent pain screaming up his arms from where the wire cut into his wrists.

  Blankenship made his first visit to the van long after Matt had regained consciousness. There was some surprise at seeing that it was he, but in truth, not all that much.

  “I should have known,” Matt said.

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose you should have.”

  “You killed Colin Smith.”

  “I had to.”

  “And Pramod Singh.”

  “Had to.”

  “And you set up Ettinger to take the blame.”

  “Now, that I wanted to do. So, then. I’ve answered your questions. Suppose you answer a few of mine. I need to know if there are any other, shall we say, loose ends I need to tie up. Is there anyone else I should be concerned about? Anyone else you’ve spoken with? Jeremy Mallon? Paris? What did they say to you?”

  Matt did his best to turn away, but Blankenship merely shook his elbow. Matt screamed with the pain.

  “I don’t know anything,” he cried. “I don’t know
anything else.”

  Blankenship pulled his head up by the hair.

  “I hope you’re telling the truth,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  He let go suddenly. Matt’s face slammed onto the metal floor. The next time he came, he brought a drug—some sort of injection. Matt nearly passed out from the pain of merely having his arm moved about for the needle. Then, moments later, the pain vanished. For a stretch that might have been minutes—or days—he heard only isolated words and phrases, first in Blankenship’s voice, then his own, floating through his mind like feathers. Finally darkness and silence swept down and enveloped him.

  When he regained consciousness, he was sitting on the floor of a damp, totally darkened room, his legs extended, his ankles tied together. His hands were lashed behind him to a metal pipe. The air was dusty, and smelled of concrete and mold. His face felt battered and swollen. One tooth was broken off. The only positive thought he had was that he was still alive. But he knew that condition would not be lasting too much longer. Minutes later, now fully awake, he learned precisely how long.

  The voice, a man’s, came over loudspeakers that were mounted somewhere in the blackness.

  “Attention, attention please,” it said. “This building will be demolished by explosion in three hours. No one should be inside the structure, or within the blue protective barriers. Repeat. This building will be demolished …”

  “Help!” Matt hollered. “Please help!”

  His voice echoed weakly about him. There was no chance anyone would hear him. No chance at all. Silently he cursed Eli Blankenship and his own carelessness. Then he lowered his chin to his chest and waited.

  CHAPTER 42

  AT SIX-THIRTY, WHEN A SET OF CHIMES ANNOUNCED wake-up, Sarah had showered and changed and was back in the patients’ lounge, drinking coffee. If all went according to her still-evolving plan, she would be inside the Chilton Building within the hour. The clock was still ticking toward the 9 A.M. demolition, but the stakes had risen considerably. For hidden somewhere within the building, probably in the basement or subbasement, was a body.