Forgotten Place

by LS Sygnet

  "Will you come with me?"

  His posture relaxed a little bit. "Of course, if it's what you really want."

  "Johnny, you know everything. David won't blurt something out that you don't already know and shock you into believing the worst about me. You already know the worst."

  "Right," he muttered, "can't have Devlin thinking the worst, can we?"

  "That's not how I meant it. Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to tell you what I did that night? I never wanted you to know either, Johnny. But you were right. It made a huge difference being able to get that off my chest."

  "This is why you ended up in the condition you're currently in. Talking about it was so helpful."

  "I've been depressed and in pain. This is the truth, Johnny. I didn't realize how bad things were. All I saw was... sleep and the next pain pill. I really am feeling much better."

  "I'm not stupid. Prozac doesn't work that fast, Helen."

  "No, it doesn't. But knowing that people cared enough to intervene, getting involved in life again, being able to talk to someone who I don't have to hide what I feel... it's helped more than anything else."

  "Is that why you went off and did this thing with Lowe today?"

  "I don't understand what you mean."

  "Helen, you didn't behave honestly today. You used Devlin's naiveté to do something you knew the rest of us would strongly object to. Did you do it because it really needed to be done or did you do it to punish me?"

  I felt my body thrum in one gigantic, visible heartbeat. Johnny hadn't lied. He knew me. Maybe knew me better than I know myself. "Not consciously," I admitted. "When you left yesterday," teeth clamped down inside my lower lip. "I didn't like it, feeling like you were going away and not telling me why, or worse, insinuating that some... some sex thing was the reason this case didn't matter to you anymore."

  "Just the case, Helen?" soft words caressed my heart.

  "You claimed that getting Datello was your goal for years, and then because I did some stupid thing yesterday that pissed you off, you couldn't get away from me fast enough."

  "Ah," he nodded, "that little tease of a kiss at the press conference."

  "I said I was sorry."

  "Yeah," he said. "I remember, Doc. It's in the past. Forget about it."

  "All right," but it wasn't. Something about it nagged at me, tugged at my heart and hurt worse than the fear I lived with every day, the pain of shattered bones and the loneliness I imposed upon myself.

  "I'll make some calls, get the jet ready to leave after therapy tomorrow. It should get us to D.C. in time to meet Levine tomorrow night. In the meantime, I'm curious to hear what Crevan learned about Riley Storm." He made a sweeping gesture with one hand. "Shall we?"

  The unsettled feeling persisted, even when Crevan launched into the history of Riley Storm.

  "According to the resume – excuse me, Helen, his curriculum vitae – on file with the Bay County supervisor's office, Riley Storm graduated in the top five percent of his class at Harvard Medical."

  I whistled softly. "Impressive."

  "I would agree, if Harvard had a record of his training."

  "He falsified his medical training?"

  "Fudged is more like it," Crevan grinned at Johnny's stunned question. "Riley Storm, so far as I can tell, didn't give much truthful information when he applied for the job of a medical examiner in Bay County. For instance, he claims that he performed his residency at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore."

  "But that didn't happen either, did it?" I asked.

  "Nope. The strange thing is, Riley was competent enough on the job not to raise any questions about his creative history on his job application."

  "And nobody bothered to check out his story?" Johnny shook his head. "Unbelievable. Who approved his application and hired him?"

  "The county supervisor. Apparently, she was so impressed that a bona fide Harvard alumnus applied for a job in nowhere Bay County, that she snapped at the chance to not only hire him to work for Bay County, but she put him in charge of the place."

  "And this is how Riley Storm became the chief medical examiner at such a young age. But Crevan, if he didn't go to school at Harvard and he didn't perform his residency at Johns Hopkins, where did he actually train?" I was still bowled over that nobody learned this information before he was hired.

  "It wasn't all that difficult to find the truth," Crevan said. "A call here, a search there. It took me about twenty minutes after I had his CV in hand, to determine that he lied through his teeth. Then again, med school in Puerto Rico, while accredited and recognized the same as Harvard Med, ain't quite Harvard, if you know what I mean."

  "And his residency?"

  "Done in Puerto Rico as well. He did tell the truth about graduating at the top of his class. It just wasn't the ivy league cred he wanted the world to believe."

  "It might've made him susceptible to the pressure we talked about this morning, Helen," Devlin said. "Someone, i.e., Jerry Lowe, learns the truth about Dr. Storm's invented credentials and uses it to strong arm an agreement."

  "I'm not so sure about that. It's a far cry from lying on a CV to land a job to embalming someone before they're dead," I said. "From the psychological perspective, normal thinking individuals would rather accept the consequences for a lie than be sucked into murder, let alone something as brutal as what was done to Harry McNamara."

  "Also, if Lowe was telling the truth when he implied that Riley was his source for the succinylcholine, he had to know there was no legitimate reason for Lowe to want a drug like that, Doc. It's not like this is something with street value. You either use it for surgery or you use it to kill people."

  "There are a couple of other legitimate medical uses, but that's the gist of why a cop would want that particular drug. We know how Jerry Lowe used it over the years to perfect the abduction part of his crimes. I'd like to talk to Riley Storm and get a feel for his side of the story. I don't doubt for a second that Jerry will contact him."

  "Doesn't that part of what we learned worry you, Helen?" Devlin began. "This guy is locked up in a mental hospital because nobody can seem to decide if he's competent to stand trial, but he's still communicating with people on the outside, still up to speed on what's happening in Darkwater Bay. Doesn't that seem wrong to anybody but me?"

  "Patients have far more rights than inmates, Devlin. There's not much we can do about that yet. If we can prove that Jerry is part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy, that's another thing," Johnny said. "If we tried to legally restrict his privileges now, I'm sure his doctors would claim that he's bragging or some similar nonsense."

  "Johnny's right. Lowe went from a position of absolute authority to a mental hospital. We should consider the possibility that he was exaggerating, except for one mistake he made that leads me to believe he is in contact with someone on the outside who keeps him informed."

  "What was that, Doc?"

  "He was aware of my behavior at Weber's press conference and insinuated that it had made its way to the evening news. Now if that were true, don't you think one of us would know about it by now?"

  "That was a lie," Johnny growled. "Crevan noticed, but he was looking for us."

  "And Belle noticed it too," I reminded him. "She's a reporter."

  "It wasn't in the paper," Crevan said. "It's not Belle's style to report unless she knows it'll draw blood. Which isn't to say she won't find some way to integrate what she saw into a story to make OSI and division look bad at some point down the road. Believe me. She's too busy trying to figure out what Weber's personal issue was that prompted his resignation."

  I looked at Johnny. "That leaves the other person we know saw what I did."

  "Datello."

  "I can't believe that he would do something so stupid as communicate directly with Jerry Lowe," I said. "It would be reckless, and Danny is nothing if not careful in the extreme. If you think about it, he's far more cautious than his uncle. After all, Marcos is facing a laundry l
ist of charges in federal court. Danny has managed to keep himself strictly in a box of suspicious activities. There is no hard evidence against him for anything."

  "Except for what David Ireland had," Johnny said.

  "We think. We still don't know what that investigation involved or that Ireland had hard evidence," I said. "It's all theory."

  "But at the same time, doesn't Ireland's murder prove that there had to have been evidence of something?" Devlin asked.

  "It certainly appears that way," Johnny said. "Why don't the three of you search that house this afternoon, and Doc and I will take David's paperwork. We can pack it up and take it with us in the morning if we need to."

  Devlin looked at me and grinned.

  "Going where in the morning?" Ned asked.

  "I'll fill you guys in at the Ireland house. Let's get back to the case," Devlin said.

  Chapter 26

  Johnny crashed on the plane much like the fussy, colicky baby falls asleep in the car seat before his scream-weary parents back out of the garage. We were off the ground for five minutes when he unfastened his seatbelt and stumbled to the long sofa-style bench and flopped onto his stomach. I was pretty sure he'd forgotten where he was and who he was traveling with.

  The jet Johnny referenced was the property of Governor Joseph Collangelo, not the state's property, but Joe's private jet. The Gulfstream 550 could've seated our entire team on this case and then some. Joe was a very successful businessman in his own right before eschewing the funds of PACs and corporate donors to run for governor. The family money had come in handy as well. As a resident of the state, Joe made no apologies for his personal wealth. He did however become largely popular with the message that he wanted all to have the opportunities for success that he did. The message resonated, and he won his freshman bid for the governor's office in a landslide victory.

  The fickleness of the public could never be discounted, and I understood the pressure both Joe and Johnny felt knowing that Datello was culling the ranks of the state senate for a lethal competitor that could undo all the good Collangelo had tried to bring. His Achilles heel was that change never happens fast enough for the public who continues to flip-flop between conservative and liberal labels and fail to recognize that things did not deteriorate quickly and will not be mended quickly either. I recalled an example given by one of my professors in undergraduate training who talked about how many hours of immobility were required to cause the skin to become damaged by unrelieved pressure.

  She said, "Serious damage to the skin can occur after as little as two to six hours. These are the minor types of damage caused by immobility and on average take weeks to fully heal. Weeks people, for a few hours of damage. This is why a critical response team must be ready to intervene at a moment's notice. When you are looking for a kidnapping victim, the damage can be far deeper than a psychological trauma. Something that sounds as trivial as a pressure sore can become the cause of death when hygiene, nutrition and mobility are all compromised."

  Yes, the world expected politicians to heal festering wounds that developed over decades in a matter of months. If not, the other guy started looking pretty darn good, even if the devil himself backed his campaign.

  I moved from the bucket seating where Johnny recently vacated my company and slid into one of four chairs around a table. The pressure was on all of us, for so many reasons, it could be paralyzing if I let myself think about it too much. Justice for David Ireland, protection for his daughter and now frail wife, a success story for Collangelo to justify the cost of OSI. My eyes drifted over to Orion. There was a big reason not to fail laying on his belly just a few feet away.

  He was one of the good guys, without a doubt. I thought about how everything became personal for him on some level, from the tears of his beloved Sister Agnes Marie, to my woes created by a corrupt husband. It occurred to me that Johnny's sense of right and wrong was a lot like my father's – only Johnny wasn't so jaded that he took to obliterating the enemy instead of working through the criminal justice system to achieve the right outcome.

  That old nonsensical adage about always finding something in the last place you looked seemed applicable when I dug half way through the final box of David Ireland's office contents. There were no legal notepads. After sifting through photographs of his wife and daughter and awards and citations that had never been displayed, some still in manila envelopes, I came to the midsection.

  Dozens of printouts from a dot matrix printer. They were relics. Some looked like test pages the printer used to come online, rows of random numbers that stretched from one line and wrapped to the next. I couldn't conceive why Ireland would keep something so meaningless. It couldn't be discarded simply because at this time, it made no sense.

  Below the file filled with pages of numbers, I found more newspaper clippings. They all related to Datello in some way, all marked with the same code EX2012. I returned to the pages of fading numbers. Each page ended with the same designation. EX2012. Example? Extradition. Extortion. Previous. An address perhaps?

  "Johnny?"

  He didn't stir. I moved closer and watched him sleeping. Had I ever done that before? It seemed like our time together had been a finite blink of the eye. His condemnation of my behavior hit hard again. I was selfish. Too wrapped up in my own mess to notice what anyone else might be feeling.

  I crouched beside the bench seating and watched the slow, regular rise and fall of his chest. His eyes danced beneath reddish purple lids. Dark circles punctuated the soft depressions above his sculpted cheek bones. He looked exhausted. Was it just work? How much had his battle with me over something as ridiculous as eating regularly contributed to the fatigue?

  "Johnny," I spoke softly.

  "Mmm," he smacked his lips. "What is it, baby?"

  The pain that seized in my chest last night returned. Johnny was dreaming. Was it about the mysterious woman he alluded to? It had to be. My hand hovered over his hair, fingers itched to run through it like I had the brief right to do at one time. It fell away.

  Those days were over. I didn't know how I felt about that. Honestly, I didn't want to know how I felt about it. All thoughts of Johnny Orion of late had taken me to a dark and confusing place that not only was unpleasant, it hurt like hell.

  I glanced at my watch, still on Pacific time. It was already one o'clock. We'd be landing soon anyway. I brushed his shoulder lightly. "Johnny, wake up. We'll be landing in Washington soon."

  His eyes popped open. He stared at me without a hint of disorientation. Neat trick. He'd have to tell me how he did that someday.

  "You fell asleep," I said.

  Johnny pulled himself up with astounding grace for a man his size. He stretched his arms overhead and groaned. "Are you all right? Did you eat anything?"

  I shook my head. "Lost track of time in the last box of Ireland's stuff."

  He curled his hands into fists and rubbed his eyes. "We've got lunch in the galley. I'll go get something. We should eat before we land."

  One hand rested on his knee before I spoke. "You're exhausted. I'm sorry that all of this has taken a toll on you, Johnny."

  "Don't be ridiculous. I'm fine."

  "I'm trying to say thank you."

  "Oh."

  "This is a far cry from being at a hundred percent, but I feel like I'll get there again, and I don't think that would've happened if you hadn't... insisted," I said. "I'd apologize for being stubborn and resisting what you were trying to do, but I think we'd both know –"

  "Doc, it's all right. I expected a battle on my hands. It's who you are. The thing is this. I can out-stubborn you every step of the way if that's what I have to do to get your attention. Most of the time, I sort of enjoy the fight. Not this time. This was serious."

  "I know. I'm done fighting it." The urge to cry tightened and burned in my throat. Instead of caving to it, I thrust out my right hand. "Friends again?"

  His eyes were veiled beneath a thick fringe of dark blond lashes. "Sure
, Doc. Friends."

  "I'll get lunch. I went through most of the last box of papers while you were sleeping, and I keep finding this odd reference that Ireland wrote on some of the newspaper clippings. But today was the first time I saw it on something else."

  Johnny followed me into the galley and helped me pull sandwiches, chips, fruit and iced tea from the storage compartment. "What reference?"

  "It's two letters and four numbers, EX2012. I have no idea what it means. The other day, I checked it against that key code Zack faxed over, the one that helped us makes sense of his legal pads. This one appeared nowhere. The first time I saw it was on a clipping of Antonio Datello's obituary."

  "So perhaps it relates to Datello, eh?"

  "I was thinking a date, a case file reference... but nothing matches. It got me wondering about addresses."

  "Logical, but Datello and Marcos probably own more property than Coldwell Banker lists in a year."

  "I want you to take a look at some of these printed pages, Johnny. Maybe on our way home. They look like the self-test a printer runs when it starts, except for the very last notation on the page."

  "EX2012?"

  We moved to the table with lunch and started eating. "It could be gibberish. Maybe this was the red herring Ireland left behind in case someone started going through his paperwork," I said.

  "I don't think so, Doc. The style is the different than the other references he used in his notes, but that just tells me he was being particularly careful about what evidence he had. I suspect that it either points to a file we haven't found yet, or perhaps the one that turned him onto whatever dirt he found against Datello in the first place."

  "What case could've opened his eyes to Danny's illegal activities?" I wondered.

  "That is an excellent question. I don't think anyone has bothered to ask it before. How much do you remember about the notes you and Ned reviewed the other night?"

  The truth was, I had paid less attention to the substance of the cases, instead matching them to his assigned work load before moving to the next notebook. It allowed more time to brood over Johnny's abandonment for other things.