Mercy

by Daniel Palmer

  “Like I said, it was a while ago and I’ve done a lot of stains since then. So I guess my memory isn’t so great after all.”

  Lucy thanked Becca, who did have a memory to rival Lucy’s. But slides were slides, and memories were not always to be trusted.

  * * *

  IT WAS a repeat of the last time Julie was here. It was how prison life was designed to be—the same thing, day in and day out. Julie had made the call forty-eight hours earlier and gotten on the visitors’ list. A different employee with the same stern look processed Julie’s ID through a standard series of checks. Julie was cleared to go inside. While waiting for the trap guard to show, she phoned Dr. Goodman in the ICU.

  “How’s Shirley Mitchell?”

  “She’s out of surgery but not hemodynamically stable. Could take another twenty-four hours.”

  Or longer than that.

  The dark thought passed quickly. There was every chance Shirley Mitchell would never be stable enough to be taken off mechanical ventilation. Julie’s conversation with the sick woman came back to her. “Let me die,” she had said, or something to that effect. Sam had asked the same of Julie, Julie had championed that very right, and Brandon Stahl might be imprisoned for fulfilling that very wish. Julie ended her call with Dr. Goodman and was soon led down a familiar corridor, stuck in the middle of a grim processional.

  The trap guard escorted Julie to an empty partitioned section. She took a seat on a metal stool bolted to the floor, and waited. A loud buzzer went off. Looking to her left, Julie saw Brandon Stahl enter the room behind the glass. This time, Brandon did not need to prompt Julie to pick up the wall-mounted phone. He still looked frail to her with his mop-top hairdo, twiggy arms, and a face incapable of hiding his humanity.

  “How are you, Brandon?”

  Brandon’s expression was grave. “I should be asking you.”

  “You heard the news about Sherri, I take it.”

  “We may be locked up from the outside world, but we’re not cut off completely. Tragic.”

  Julie returned a skeptical stare and said nothing for a time.

  “You don’t think I had anything to do with her death, do you?” Brandon asked.

  “Did you?”

  “No,” Brandon said emphatically.

  “I saw the bullet hole in Sherri’s head, and it’s not something that will leave me anytime soon.”

  Brandon’s eyes flared. For the first time Julie saw in them a look befitting a hardened criminal.

  “Have you come here to tell me you’re not going to try to help anymore?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because I had nothing to do with that poor girl’s murder. I don’t care if she testified against me or not. What happened to her was a horrible crime. But I didn’t send any inflammatory messages to my so-called devotees, like some of the news reports implied. Contrary to popular belief, I do not want to be, nor should I be, the poster child for mercy killing. Don’t thrust that mantle on me.”

  Brandon jabbed with his finger. “I never asked one person to stand outside the prison and protest on my behalf. They send me letters all the time with stories about their sick mothers and fathers, aunts, uncles, whatever, and ask for my advice on how to kill them. How do they get the drugs? How do they properly inject them with a needle? Like I’m Dr. Kevorkian’s protégé or something. That’s my legacy. I’m the how-to-do-it guy for murder.” Brandon shook his head in disgust. “That’s not me. That’s not who I am.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m just a nurse. That’s all I ever wanted to be.”

  Tears almost came to Brandon’s eyes. He could cry, and would not be alone. On both sides of the partition tears flowed freely, and the emotions spilling out were raw and unfiltered.

  “I want you to try and remember something for me,” Julie said.

  “Okay.”

  “Did Donald Colchester have any allergic reaction that you can remember?”

  “Allergic reaction?”

  “Anything that stood out in your mind.”

  “That’s a long time ago, and I’ve had a lot on my mind since then.”

  “Understood. But I’m looking for a link between Sam’s case and Donald’s.”

  “And you think it could be allergy related?”

  “We’re having a hard time coming up with an event that could cause these disabled men to have been scared or stressed to death.”

  Brandon leaned back in his chair, lowered his gaze, and folded his arms. “Did you look at Sam’s medical record?”

  “I did,” Julie said. “But nothing jumped out at me.”

  Brandon rubbed his chin, deep in thought.

  Julie’s mouth formed a grimace. She wanted an answer, a bit of light shined in the dark.

  “Are you thinking an anaphylaxis-type allergic reaction?”

  “Doesn’t even have to be that severe.”

  “And there was nothing in Sam’s file?”

  “No. And I looked it over very closely.”

  “What about Colchester’s file, then? Did you look at that?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “As in, deleted from the EMR system, or some glitch. IT can’t figure it out. Believe me, I’ve asked. Best I came away with is a help desk ticket, which is why I’m counting on your memory.”

  “Seems funny, you know. You looking into this and then Colchester’s EMR file goes missing.”

  “Yeah, though ‘suspicious’ was the word that popped into my mind. The doctor who took my copy of the file suddenly isn’t answering my calls and surprise, surprise, I can’t seem to get a meeting with him, either.”

  “I don’t know.” Brandon held a breath. “I mean, we’re talking a long time ago. Years.”

  “Just try.” Julie leaned forward and put her hand against the glass. “Was there anything?”

  Brandon groaned, closed his eyes tight, and grabbed a clump of his hair as if it hurt to think that far in the past, to think about it at all. Then his eyes sprang open and he looked almost pleased.

  “I got something,” he said. “I just remembered. It was horrible, too, because he was paralyzed.”

  “What was horrible?”

  “Urticaria,” Brandon said. “Hives. A bad case of them, too. They just broke out one day. We gave him antihistamines of course, but I spent a lot of time putting cold compresses and wet cloths on the affected areas.”

  Julie’s stomach dropped at the same time her mouth fell open. So much had happened since the accident. It was all a blur. She had cared for Sam, eaten lunch with him, cried with him, nurtured him, brought in Michelle so he would stop begging to die—all while working her job and looking after Trevor. Of course it could slip her mind. Hives. And Julie now knew exactly what entry someone had deleted from Sam’s medical record.

  CHAPTER 38

  The overcast day seemed a perfect match for Trevor’s somber mood. Poor kid, he wanted to be anywhere but in the car driving with his mom to Beverly Municipal Airport on Massachusetts’s North Shore.

  For the past few miles Trevor had kept his face in his phone.

  “What time are we going to get back?” Trevor asked. “Jake wants me to come over.”

  Julie mulled it over a moment. “Well, to be honest, I thought we could spend the day together,” she said. “After this jaunt we could maybe get a bite to eat, catch a movie or something. The IMAX isn’t too far from here.”

  Julie came up with this plan only after her son tried to make a plan of his own. She wanted time with Trevor, as much of it as she could get, but had been so preoccupied with this upcoming rendezvous it had not occurred to her to make a day out of it.

  Trevor contemplated the offer, and eventually he gave a gentle nod.

  “Sounds like fun, Mom. I’ll see what’s playing.” He returned to his smartphone.

  “Nothing too violent, please.”

  Trevor gave a sidelong glance with a perfect “come on now” expression.

  “Okay, how about no
thing crazy violent,” Julie said. “Superhero violence, fine, but no serial killers, or assassins or ninjas or any of that. Deal? I just don’t think I can handle it.”

  Trevor reached up and touched Julie’s shoulder. She could see in his eyes he was thinking about his mom and Sherri Platt.

  “Maybe let’s just go for lunch somewhere,” Trevor suggested.

  Julie gave Trevor’s hand an appreciative squeeze. “Sounds good to me, honey,” she said.

  With everything that had happened, Julie was not about to leave Trevor home alone while she went on this jaunt. It did not take an M.D. to know Dr. Gerald Coffey had been intentionally avoiding her for days. She had called and e-mailed, all without reply. She even resorted to camping out in front of his office only to learn he was off for the week. A staycation, his assistant had called it. The same assistant also made a point of saying Dr. Coffey was available for patient consultation if needed. This meant he should have been available to answer Julie’s numerous calls.

  What Julie wanted were answers, and those answers could not wait for Dr. Coffey’s return. Someone had intentionally deleted data from Sam’s file, and from the file of Tommy Grasso, and quite probably from Donald Colchester’s as well. Julie confirmed with Lynn Golden, Tommy Grasso’s respiratory therapist, that not long before Tommy died, he’d developed a bad case of hives. Stunned by the revelation, Julie double-checked Tommy’s EMR and found no entry of the reaction anywhere. Jordan double-checked and had confirmed a single deletion in the transaction log. They both saw reasonable cause to correlate the two. Someone had answers, and Julie hoped that someone was landing at Beverly Municipal Airport on time.

  This rendezvous would not have taken place, at least not in this way, without Trevor’s help. Julie knew Dr. Coffey owned a plane. He’d made a point of bragging to her about his flying during that awful meeting. On a whim, she’d asked Trevor if it was possible to track down a pilot by their flight plan. Not that she expected Trevor to know, but she thought he might be able to figure it out. Trevor jumped on the assignment in a way he rarely did with homework, and in a matter of minutes came up with the answer.

  “I just searched Gerald Coffey’s name in the FAA’s online registry and found a record of his plane,” he had said.

  Julie had been in Trevor’s bedroom, staring over his shoulder in astonishment as he typed with dazzling speed. It seemed a new Web page loaded with each blink of his eyes. In the background Winston could be heard scampering about his cage, seeming as excited as Julie. The FAA page Trevor found showed an entry for a Diamond DA40 owned by Dr. Gerald Coffey.

  Julie had Trevor do some additional research. “Made in Canada and Australia, the four-seat aircraft is considered a first choice for discerning pilots.” At $184,000, one would have to be very discerning. Trevor searched for flight plans on a Web site called FlightAware. There were none, though he soon discovered that flight plans were not required for private planes.

  Julie’s disappointment was short-lived.

  “When there’s cloud cover he would have to fly IFR, and that requires him by law to file a flight plan,” Trevor said, reading a Web page on the topic.

  “You’re brilliant,” Julie said, ruffling his hair.

  The forecast for the weekend was overcast, so in the morning Julie asked Trevor to do the search again. Bingo. Dr. Coffey planned a flight from Beverly to Providence, Rhode Island, and back to Beverly again. He would be landing at 11:30 in the morning.

  Julie had contemplated surprising Dr. Coffey at his Marblehead home, but what she wanted was neutral territory. She worried that he would see her questions as threatening. If Dr. Coffey were involved in some kind of cover-up, a conspiracy of some sort, he might act erratically, might claim self-defense when the police arrived to find Julie’s lifeless body in the same gruesome state as Sherri Platt’s.

  How hives and rare heart attacks in healthy hearts could be tied to Dr. Coffey and William Colchester, to Brandon Stahl’s murder conviction, and to the deaths of Tommy Grasso and Sam Talbot, Julie could not begin to fathom. Lucy’s findings were inconclusive. Becca, whom Lucy claimed possessed a steel-trap memory, recalled Sam’s pathology slide as showing an allergic reaction, but the actual slide showed nothing of the kind. Julie could not explain the discrepancy, just as Brandon Stahl could not explain how morphine ended up in his apartment.

  Julie and Trevor arrived in plenty of time to find parking and to get settled in the small airport’s lounge. Through a bank of tall picture windows, Julie watched Dr. Coffey’s D40 descend from the overcast sky, appearing almost to the minute of when he was scheduled to land. Trevor’s expression was priceless. He had figured out where Dr. Coffey would be, and seeing his theory prove out made him beam with delight. Julie hugged her son to her body and kissed the top of his head.

  “Good work, sweetheart,” she said. “Now when he shows up, I want you to wait over by the Coke machine. This has to be a private conversation.”

  The lounge area was a spacious room with navigation maps on the wall, a few vending machines, some tables and chairs, and not much else. A few minutes after he landed, Dr. Coffey entered the lounge looking every bit the pilot. He had on a brown leather jacket and gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, which he wore despite the cloud cover. Every one of his silver hairs looked perfectly placed. He walked with purposeful strides until he came to a hard stop the moment he realized the figure in the middle of the lounge was Julie. He exchanged his sunglasses for his other spectacles, the ones made of black plastic with thick lenses, the ones that magnified his surprised eyes.

  “Dr. Devereux, what on earth are you doing here?”

  “Dr. Coffey, what a funny surprise.”

  Judging by Dr. Coffey’s glower, he found nothing funny about it.

  “You know, I was thinking about you. Thinking there must be something wrong with my phone,” Julie said. “I called you a number of times and e-mailed as well, but never got a response. Lucky for me I bumped into you, in the airport of all places. Was that you who just landed? Beautiful plane.”

  “It was. But again, what are you doing here?” Dr. Coffey’s voice had the edge of an ax.

  Julie pointed to Trevor. “My son is an aspiring pilot. He likes to come and watch the planes land.”

  “Really? I’ve never seen you here before,” Dr. Coffey said.

  “We go to different airports,” Julie said without hesitating.

  Dr. Coffey glanced at his expensive wristwatch.

  “I’m afraid I’m in a rush, Julie,” he said. “It’s nice to see you. Best to your boy.”

  Dr. Coffey walked past her, but Julie reached out and gently took hold of his arm.

  The doctor whirled on his heels, his cheeks reddening while his nostrils flared like those of an angry bull.

  “Oh, no worries, I’m in a hurry, too,” Julie said in a calm voice. “This won’t take but a minute.”

  “Perhaps another time,” Dr. Coffey said.

  “I just want to know if you had anything to do with my no longer having access to Donald Colchester’s medical record?”

  Dr. Coffey’s lips were closed, his expression serious. “Why on earth would you ask me something like that?”

  “I gave you my copy of Colchester’s file and the next thing I know, I don’t have access to the electronic version. I’m just curious. Do you know anything about that?”

  “That—that—has nothing to do with me, I assure you.”

  Julie took note of Dr. Coffey’s brief stutter. But she studied his body language a moment, and decided he was a better liar than poor Sherri Platt.

  “I would like to have the file back, if I may,” Julie said.

  Dr. Coffey shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. I shredded those documents after you left. There was no reason for me to keep them.”

  “I guess you didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to access them again.”

  “To be honest, none of this is really my concern.”

  Julie caug
ht a nervous glance from Trevor. He could tell this conversation was tense, and conflict, especially in the wake of his parents’ divorce, was something he worked hard to avoid.

  “Let me ask you something medical, if I may.”

  Dr. Coffey sighed aloud. “If you must.”

  “What kind of allergic reaction could cause a heart attack?”

  The sneer on Dr. Coffey’s face was meant to intimidate.

  “I would think you would know a life-threatening manifestation of allergic disease is usually the result of anaphylaxis.” He eyed Julie a little darkly. “You’re not back on the takotsubo bandwagon, are you?”

  “Something like it,” Julie said. “Of course, my first thought was of anaphylaxis, but what I was looking for was an allergic reaction similar to takotsubo.”

  “And I asked you to let that go.”

  “Allow me, if you will, to share a little something I found out. You see, I may have graduated from a state medical school, but even I know how to do a Google search. And do you know what you get when you search ‘allergic reaction similar to takotsubo,’ those exact words? You get a link to Kounis syndrome.”

  Dr. Coffey folded his arms as if to say he found Julie’s revelation and investigation a personal affront.

  “Kounis syndrome,” Julie continued. “Allergic angina, allergic myocardial infarction—I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “So in your professional opinion, could Kounis syndrome be misdiagnosed as takotsubo?”

  Dr. Coffey pondered the question in a thoughtful manner. “I guess it’s possible.”