Deadly Star

by CJ Petterson

  Jamie Zimmerman, the emergency room’s on-call physician, shook his head. “You can get back in that bed.” He lifted her legs up onto the mattress then checked the broad strip of white adhesive tape that secured the IV in her arm.

  “I was headed to the bathroom with that measuring thingy,” she said and pointed to a plastic container decorated with red lines. “How about it? Can I get out of here tonight or not? I’ve got more important things to do than lounge around your luxury hotel.” She hoped a round of friendly banter would get her a “yes,” from the serious, dark-haired man with raccoon-like circles under his eyes.

  “In the morning. We need to get you rehydrated.”

  She let her smile fade. She’d had a feeling he wouldn’t release her, but it was still a disappointment to hear it. “Rats.”

  “Look straight ahead.” He swung a pen light in front of her eyes then leaned in close enough for her to get a whiff of a wintergreen breath mint with overtones of coffee.

  She refocused on a non-existent spot just over his right shoulder. “What time in the morning?”

  “After morning rounds. If everything checks out okay, you’ll be signing paperwork about ten.”

  “When are you going to move me to a room?”

  “We don’t have any rooms available. You’ll spend the night here.”

  “I need a phone. My cellphone was destroyed in the plane crash, and I really need to call my mother,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t be aware that her parents were dead.

  He looked behind the bed. “Lucky you. You’re in front of a phone jack. I’ll write an order for one.”

  Mirabel crossed her fingers under the sheet. “Really, if I don’t call my mom tonight, she’ll be frantic. And at her age, she doesn’t handle frantic all that well. A little senile, you know?” She hoped she was giving him one of her best pitiful-me looks.

  Zimmerman finished writing in her chart before he peered at her over the tops of his half-rimmed glasses. “All right,” he said and patted her hand. “And I’ll send in someone to help you to the bathroom.”

  “Tell them to not wait too long.”

  “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “Now you sound like my mother. I had an orange this afternoon.” The tape holding the IV needle pinched and pulled at her skin until she tugged lightly on the tube. “You’ve been pumping me so full of liquids, I haven’t even thought about food.”

  “The kitchen is closed, but I’ll get an aide to make a raid on the snack machines.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. Even if I were hungry, that stuff would kill my appetite and maybe me, too.”

  “We’ll bring you a tray anyway, in self-defense,” he said and turned to leave.

  As the curtain fluttered behind him, he said, “Don’t get out of bed.”

  “Love you, too,” she muttered.

  • • •

  The raid on the canteen machines produced the results Mirabel expected. When she returned from her escorted visit to the bathroom, she found a tray topped with a carton of low-fat milk that was not quite cold and not quite warm, a plastic-wrapped Swiss-cheese-and-limp-lettuce-on-whole-wheat sandwich best eaten by the day before, an apple with a silver-dollar-sized brown bruise, and a bag of chips. The food and the remnants of her headache had disappeared before the teenager in the pink-and-white-striped seersucker pinafore came back with a telephone and plugged it in.

  “Just buzz if you need anything,” the girl said as she picked up the tray and slipped through the curtain.

  “A Snickers bar?” Mirabel asked, but the candy-striper was gone, her soft-soled white clogs squeaking against the vinyl floor as she retreated. “Another bag of chips?” she called after her.

  Mirabel glanced at the clock on the wall then gnawed at the skin on the side of her thumbnail. She figured Briggs had had plenty of time to get to the lab and safely hide away the project book. She picked up the telephone and tapped in Ray Briggs’s cellphone number.

  The call went to voice mail after the fourth ring.

  “You’ve reached Dr. Ray Briggs. I’m not available right now. Please leave a message.”

  How like you, she thought, not to say you’ll return the call. “I’ll be waiting at the door at ten-fifteen in the morning. Call if that’s a problem,” she said and hung up. Vaguely annoyed, she muttered, “Where are you?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A woman from the kitchen staff pushed through the curtain with a cheerful, “Good morning,” and delivered breakfast to her cubicle at seven-thirty. After a finger test on the temperature of the eggs and bacon confirmed they weren’t warm, Mirabel opted for the yogurt, which was. Between bites of vanilla yogurt, she sipped tepid, tea-colored black coffee.

  A half-hour later, she picked up the phone and called Briggs’s cellphone. No answer. Then she called all his phones in sequence — home, office, cell — waited a few minutes and tried the sequence again because those were the only numbers she remembered. She spent an hour with the phone in her hand and couldn’t decide if she was ticked he wasn’t answering or worried something had happened to him, too. Either way was reason enough to call the sheriff’s office, she thought. When Thompson came on the line, she wheedled and whined until he said he’d take her to the lab to get her binder.

  “I’ll be ready in fifteen,” she said and started a search for her clothes. She found them wadded up in a plastic hospital bag in the cabinet next to her bed. A whiff of the aromatic contents convinced her there was no way she was going to put them on, so she offered one of the nurses an IOU for twenty dollars to borrow some clothes.

  Grateful the doctor had been right on the money about the release time, she signed discharge papers at ten A.M. wearing a white lab coat, a set of wilted, mint-green scrubs, and a pair of hospital-issue, non-skid walking socks that she’d crammed into her boots. A wheelchair rolled through the curtain guided by a rotund nurses’ aide whose penciled-in eyebrows arched when she got a look at Mirabel’s outfit.

  “Borrowed ’em, and I can walk,” Mirabel said. “I don’t need one of those.”

  “Hospital rules say you do,” the aide said without a smile.

  Mirabel could see the woman wasn’t in the mood for debate so she plopped her bottom onto the gray vinyl sling seat. The aide set the plastic bag of dirty clothes on top of Mirabel’s knees, balanced a pair of crutches on top of the bag, and pushed her through the hallway. She parked her patient in the shade outside the emergency room doors, locked the wheels, and moved to the far end of a bench where she lit up a cigarette while Mirabel replayed the plane crash in her mind. She was tapping the toe of her boot against the footrest when Evan arrived.

  • • •

  An unseasonably hot, dry wind was spinning dust devils around the parking lot when Evan parked behind Mirabel’s lab. He opened her car door and retrieved her crutches from the back seat. “Dr. Briggs was supposed to do what again?”

  “Pick up my work binder and keep it for me. It’s got all the documentation I used for my report. Stuff that would give us a reason for sabotage.”

  Awkward on her new crutches, she trailed him to the lab door by several steps. The buzz of a distant bee caught her attention. She recognized the sound of the fluorescent lights at the same time she noticed the door was ajar.

  “Well, he forgot to close the door,” Evan said and dragged it the rest of the way open. He stepped inside and gave a low whistle as Mirabel stepped in behind him. She gasped at the chaos.

  “You stay right here,” Evan whispered, “while I check it out.” He pulled his gun and slipped farther into the room.

  Mirabel waited few seconds then headed toward her desk as fast as she could swing her crutches. There was a hole where the bottom left drawer should have been. The drawer and its contents lay the floor, and she kicked the desk leg in frustration. “Rats!”<
br />
  The sheriff was almost jogging when he returned. “I told you to stay back at the door,” he growled as he holstered his gun. “You coulda been in real trouble.”

  “The binder’s not here,” she said.

  “You told me Dr. Briggs picked it up.”

  “He was supposed to but look at this mess. I don’t think he got here first.” She collapsed into the desk chair and dropped her crutches on the floor. She spun around and slid open the pocket doors on the computer cabinet. The computer was still there, and it was on.

  She hurriedly typed in a search command. Search is complete. There are no results to display, she read on the computer screen. Every genome file name she keyed in came back with the same message. Her stomach did a series of queasy flips as she stared at the screen. It’s all been erased.

  “When did you see the doc last?” Evan’s voice brought her back.

  “Last night. About eight,” she said, her voice flat. “He walked out right before I heard the announcement that visiting hours were over.”

  “Did you try to call him?”

  “Before I called you. I tried his cell, his office, and his home.”

  “Should’ve tried some of his girlfriends,” Evan said with a smirk. “I’m only slightly kidding, you know. The man does make the rounds.”

  Mirabel’s shoulder lifted a notch. She knew that she and every other woman in town, unmarried or married, would name Briggs as the most eligible bachelor around. He possessed a killer combination: good looks — not quite movie-star pretty but tall, dark, and handsome in a conventional way — and the mystique of being an obviously wealthy medical professional.

  “I know he’s a player,” she said, “but at least give him credit for being faithful to one partner at a time.”

  Evan changed direction. “Somebody sure knew how to toss the place,” he said and sidestepped a scattering of broken petri dishes. “That your telescope?”

  Her eyes shifted to where he pointed at the piece of equipment that lay amid its own ruins.

  “Yeah.” She shook her head. “I just bought the thing.”

  “Looks like a breaking and entering. I doubt we’ll find anything we can use to catch whoever did it, but I’ll call the office and have Esther bring out the crime scene equipment.”

  “Should I be careful about touching things?”

  “Yes, but we’re not like TV. We don’t have none of that high-tech CSI gear to run our own checks for what they call trace evidence. Esther will dust the obvious places and take photographs to document the damage. You can get copies for your insurance claim. If she spots anything that looks interesting, we’ll send it over to the state labs. You’ll need to make a list of what’s missing.”

  Mirabel’s eyes blurred as she looked around the room. “Who’s Esther?”

  “Esther Lee. My new deputy from LA. She said she got tired of the dirty politics and big-city gangbangers and came out here looking for less excitement.”

  Only half listening, Mirabel offered up a lame, “Sounds Biblical … Esther,” when she noticed the sheriff looking at her.

  “She’s Japanese and got sick of hearing people butcher the pronunciation of her real name so she changed it.” Evan grunted softly as he folded at his expansive waistline and picked up a thick chunk of the telescope glass. He turned the shard around in his hand and then held it out. “Hope this wasn’t expensive.”

  “It was,” she said as she took it from him and looked around.

  “You insured?”

  “I don’t even want to think about that. Aren’t you going to call Esther?”

  He nodded. “Right now.” He turned toward the door.

  She picked up the phone on the desk and listened. “The phone still works.”

  “I’ll use the car radio. Makes it more official.”

  As he walked out the door, she noticed he was punching in numbers on his cellphone. She shrugged, swung around, and opened the metal storage cabinet. Running her hands under the middle shelf, she peeled out the compact disc case that had been taped there.

  “Rats,” she said again, unaware her vocabulary had deteriorated to one word. A backup copy of everything she’d sent to Vegas was on that disc, and the case was empty. She hoped Ray had it.

  “Esther’s working a traffic stop right now,” Evan said as he came back in the door. “She’ll come by later. You got a key to lock up?”

  “Hidden outside.”

  She quietly set the plastic CD case on the shelf, closed the cabinet, and turned around. “Just looking to see if Ray put the binder in here,” she said in response to his questioning look. For some reason she couldn’t quite define, she didn’t want to tell him about the missing CD at that moment. He doesn’t believe anything I say, anyway.

  “You got the right idea. Your lab is the first place to search. I’ll go on up into the loft. You keep on looking down here.”

  The sheriff took the stairs two at a time, but his lungs couldn’t keep up with the effort of his legs. In seconds, Mirabel heard him breathing hard enough to start a paroxysm of wheezing coughs.

  She flung open cabinet doors again and searched through the miscellany. If he hid the CD in here, it might be lost forever. She pushed aside a handful of Tootsie Pops, a half-eaten bag of Fritos, an unopened canister of honey-roasted pecans, ballpoint pens, pencils with no erasers, plastic slide carriers, and a half-full box of latex gloves. Come on, Ray. Where’d you put it? After she re-discovered a bottle of spring water, a crinkled tube of toothpaste, and a dried-hard toothbrush, she banged the doors shut.

  “You okay down there?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just frustrated.”

  Evan tromped down the stairs. He used the nail of his thumb to flip a bead of sweat from his temple. “It’s stinking hot up there. Didn’t find anything. You?”

  She smelled sour perspiration when he stood next to her shoulder. A wad of chewing tobacco made a bulge in his cheek, and his breath reeked. Mirabel retreated to the chair and toyed with the telescope’s broken eyepiece. She felt like crying. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “I’m thinking the doc got to your binder before the perp did. That’s the reason for all this.” He moved his arm in a wide arc. “Perp couldn’t find it.”

  “Perp smerp.” At that moment, she had no patience for his cop lingo. “What if when Ray got here, he surprised someone, and what if they kidnapped him?”

  “Any idea who might that be?”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Evan, I don’t know.” She threw up her hands. “How about if we pretend the same perp blew up the plane and ripped apart my lab?”

  “Let me see if I got this straight. I’m supposed to assume that Dr. Briggs came to pick up your red binder, but someone, you don’t know who, was already here. That same unknown subject kidnapped him, maybe killed him, and took your binder because it contains something the un-sub wants, but you don’t know what. And you also think this un-sub is the same one who sabotaged the plane, but you don’t know why.”

  “Yes, Evan. I want you to assume the worst. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do when someone goes missing?”

  Evan sighed. “Doesn’t matter. The department doesn’t take a missing person report for at least forty-eight hours, except if it’s a kid. Dr. Briggs is a grown man who can choose to be anywhere, including in bed with his latest lover, assuming that isn’t you. Besides, only family can file a missing person report.”

  She felt her anger rise and her face warm. “He has no family in this town!”

  “Settle down, Mirabel.” He patted the air in front of him as if he were pushing down against her rising fury. “I’m only telling you department policy.”

  “Department policy, my foot. You’re the department. You make the policy.”

  “Look, I see the place
is trashed, and I told you I’m going to investigate your little break-in. But as of right now I don’t see one single thing here that tells me this is related to the plane crash or that something bad happened to Ray Briggs. And you can’t just file a missing person report because you don’t know where your boyfriend is.”

  That’s two strikes, she thought, but she wouldn’t let his snide comments sidetrack her anger. “Gee, Evan, he’s missing. Isn’t that reason enough? What do you want?” she said, her finger stabbing the air. “Blood?” She was instantly sorry she had vocalized her worst fear.

  “I want something a little more substantial than your complaining that he didn’t show up for an alleged date with you,” he said, his voice even.

  “Alleged date?” She took a deep breath. “You know, Evan, I’ve got about one good nerve left, and you’re standing on it. Why don’t you go write some jaywalking tickets or something? I’ll call the state police or … or the FBI.”

  He hitched up the belt that sagged under the overhang of his stomach. “This is getting us nowhere. You’re hurting, and I’m hot. Come on, I’ll take you on home. Who knows? Maybe he called your house.”

  “I’ve already checked my voice mail, Evan.” She leaned over to pick up her crutches. “Ray hasn’t left any messages.” She caught a glimpse of a dull flash of metal on the floor next to a desk leg, palmed a small object, and straightened. Propping the crutches under her arms produced an ache that reminded her to use her hands for support, not her bruised armpits. “Home sounds like a good idea. I’m suddenly very tired.” She pocketed her find and followed the sheriff out the door.

  Evan pushed the door closed. “Got your key?”

  She pulled a small magnetized case from behind the mailbox and handed it to Evan. He locked the door and dropped the key in his pocket, ignoring her outstretched hand. “I’ll give it to Deputy Lee. She’ll need it so she can investigate the crime scene.”

  “So now it’s a crime scene?”

  “Breaking and entering.”

  While she got comfortable in the front passenger seat, Evan slid her aluminum props across the back seat then eased behind the wheel. He twisted the key in the ignition, and the high-performance, police-special engine coughed to life then settled into a throaty drone. Mirabel fixed her eyes on the road and retreated into silence as he wheeled out of the parking lot.