As part of his plan the killer had probably meant all along for someone to recognize the pattern of the Phantom at work when the infections began to occur, and all along he’d counted on someone resurrecting the old rumors that would make Cam a scapegoat for murder—mass murder. Except Janet, after recognizing that someone was once again punishing the punishers, had resisted going down the false trail that had been laid out to incriminate her friend. I’d been more obliging.
I’d even offered up other suspects besides Cam on my own— Rossit, Hurst, the entire board of St. Paul’s—hell, I’d become a fund of false leads, a voice directing the police to everyone but the killer, leaving the true Phantom free from suspicion, safe from detection.
In that dreary room I anguished that if I’d been more attentive to Janet’s instincts, two of the “suspects” I’d fingered might still be alive.
I knew who was going to come through that door. He’d always been close at hand, ostensibly helping, feeding me just enough bits of information to keep me diverted toward Cam. I’d just begun to guess his motive—why he would kill punishers, including one in particular, and then seek to destroy this hospital—when I heard the key in the lock. At the sound I tried to drop my head, slouch forward, and feign being unconscious still, hoping that when he came near enough to check me, I’d take him. But I had to move carefully not to dislodge the duct tape, and he had the door open too quickly.
“Well, well,” declared Harold Miller. “Finally awake, are you?” He sounded like a host greeting a guest who’d overslept. He was carrying a tray of culture sticks which he took over to the table. “It’s about time. Garnet. After all, I didn’t hit you that hard.” I didn’t answer him, didn’t even react. I wanted to size up the best way to make him come near.
“You’ll be interested to know I’ve been busy finishing my ‘work,’ so to speak.”
I felt a rush of alarm. Son of a bitch, I thought, he’s been infecting more people. I had to get back and warn anybody he’d been near. “Trying to kill them makes you a worse creep than they ever were,” I snapped, hoping to goad him into coming closer.
But he didn’t rise to the bait. “Oh, I don’t particularly care who I kill to bring down this place. Using punishers as victims was mainly to make it look like Mackie’s work. Your arrival here did make it necessary to speed up my schedule though,” he continued breezily, “but don’t worry, I got it done. Even had time for the finishing touches, so to speak, on our star patient in ICU. She was so grateful.”
Janet! Oh my God! He’d infected her again. “What have you done?” I cried out. The possibilities tore through my mind like bullets—his infecting her skin, redosing her lungs, slipping the superbug directly into her IV. I felt my head swim, my heart race, my breathing quicken again. It was all I could do to keep from leaping at his neck and strangling him.
“Maybe you’ve figured out how I’ve been doing it,” he mocked while he puttered with the culture swabs and other screening equipment he’d taken off the tray.
“Damn you to hell. Miller! What have you done?”
He stopped, turned to face me, and leaned back against the table with his arms folded across his chest. “You’re not talking very nicely to me. I’m most disappointed. Garnet. I’ve been looking forward to regaling you with the finer points of my work, not fighting with you.” As he spoke, he watched me with those dreadful eyes, but now a fire shone out of the sadness.
I nearly sobbed aloud, I was so frantic. ‘Tell me what you’ve done to Janet.”
“Some follow-up cultures, as a precaution was what I suggested to her. She agreed, and I swabbed her nasal passages like I usually do when I’m screening people,” he replied offhandedly.
“What did you do?” I screamed at him.
He chuckled, easily, hideously. “As I said, I simply screened her.”
Screening! The three nurses had been screened before they became ill.
“I had to,’’ he added, his voice suddenly hard. “You yourself told me she never accepted that Mackie was the killer, even after I made you suspect him. Once you turn up dead, she’ll be a relentless pursuer—too bright and dangerous for my good—so I screened her.”
Desperately, I fought to control my panic. I had to get beyond his game of cat and mouse, or he’d go on taunting me with his refusal to tell about Janet. I grabbed the first idea that came to mind. Seconds ago he’d sounded inclined to boast Maybe I could trick him into doing some bragging. Trying not to show even a flicker of fear, as coolly as I could I said, ‘I thought so, Harold. You can’t tell me what you did to Janet, because you never got near her—you couldn’t have—not without written orders by two doctors or getting by a security guard at her door. You may kill me, Harold, but about her, you’re bluffing, and your pathetic mind games disgust me.” Make him defend himself, I figured, and he might blurt out what he’d done.
I figured wrong.
The impact on him of my defiance was immediate. His eyes darkened, and he started to uncoil from leaning against the table like some king cobra getting ready to strike.
Oh Christ, I thought, immediately realizing my mistake. I’d been so desperate about Janet I’d violated the first rule of ER in dealing with an agitated psychotic. I’d challenged his sense of control.
His powerful shoulders seemed to hunch up. “Listen to me, you fuck,” he shrieked, “or I’ll finish you off with the shovel right now!” His rage so startled me I rocked back in my chair and almost brought my arms forward to protect myself, thinking he was about to fly at me. Instead he angrily pivoted and strode over to the shovel. Grabbing it with both hands, he turned and started for me, waving the blade in the air and eyeing my head like it was a ball on a tee. As I got ready to leap away from him, I realized in an instant that even if I made it to the door, he’ d nail me in the fraction of a second it would take to open it.
He stopped advancing about four feet to my side and enough in front of me that he couldn’t see my wrists weren’t taped, but he’d come well within range to finish me with one swipe. Our eyes locked, and I saw in them a terrible excitement, as if all his pain and despair had been assuaged by this instant of ultimate control where he could decide if I lived or died. Even if I didn’t bolt, he might kill me anyway, simply for my defying him. I seized on the one advantage I had left and decided if I was about to die, I’d go down thinking like a doctor. “Am I feeling what your father made you feel, Harold?” I asked as gently as I could.
He kept the shovel in the air, but his eyes changed. The fire that so often appears in the eyes of the insane dimmed ever so slightly. In ER I always relied on that dimming, as an indicator of how well I was doing, whenever I had to talk down people who were in Miller’s state of mind. I kept speaking as gently as I could. “I saw your parents’ old files. He was abusing you, wasn’t he?”
No answer. The shovel remained in the air.
“Your mother didn’t stop it, did she? No one from this hospital did either. The one time a social worker from here spoke to you about it, she didn’t follow up. Somebody at University Hospital should have known that you’d be too scared to tell the truth, that you’d had to lie, that you’d been made to say everything was fine, that you’d been forced to hug your mother and smile.”
The blacks of his eyes began to glow again, but he had a faraway look, as if his fury were being stoked by some distant agony.
“Did your mother frighten you into not reporting your father? Did she say he’d hurt you more, hurt both of you more if you told?”
He seemed to rock back on his heels and leave whatever distant place he was remembering, then focused his gaze once more on me. He nodded but remained silent. Through the transparency of his gloves I could see his hands straining as they kept their grip on the shovel handle. I felt I was dismantling a bomb. If I touched on the wrong memory, his fury could explode.
“The hospital should have pursued their suspicions,” I continued, “but it failed you there, didn’t it, Harold? Your fat
her hadn’t lost his license yet and was still on staff then. Do you think that’s why the social workers backed off and went easy on your parents, because both of them worked here?”
This time he spoke. “He gave me a session anyway, even after I did lie, and as usual she just hid upstairs.” His voice had changed, had altered to an extent that surprised me. It was free from any hint of his mother’s wheedling tones. I was shifting something in his disturbed mind, but if for the better, I couldn’t tell. Whatever my impact, I was certain that for the moment my talking to him was all that was keeping me alive.
He kept his grip on the shovel, the blade at the ready.
“What did he used to do to you?”
The question seemed to go by him. He didn’t respond at all, as if he hadn’t heard it. I’d often seen that kind of reaction in ER as well, when I was after emotionally charged information. From my experience, I knew it was best to let people alone for a moment then, giving them time to wrestle with the pain of recall. As I waited for his answer, I felt I had moved our stand off onto more familiar turf, despite having a shovel held at my head. Eliciting a history from hostile and violent patients—in effect getting them to tell their story—was part of a day’s work in ER. But in this case, the questions and their timing had to be exactly light.
“How did he hurt you?” I repeated as gently as I could after what I hoped was an appropriate interval.
The fire in his eyes roared back to life in the here and now. The shovel blade began to move through little test arcs. “He called it punishment,” he replied, his voice full of venom but still free of Phyllis’s legacy. “Down in the basement was where it happened. He rarely left more than one or two marks on me. Not only did he know how to hurt me so nothing would show, but one of his hits was good for a thousand threats; my fear was the same. Sometimes I felt relief when the blow finally did come; imagining it, constantly expecting it, was more horrible than physical pain.” He broke into that chilling laugh. “I think you probably know firsthand what I mean,” he taunted, waving the shovel near my face. Then he abruptly stepped closer, still in front of me, and said into my ear, “You know I can and will use it. Garnet.” His voice was all at once as cold as the grave, and his eyes, so near mine, continued to glow like a pair of black coals.
Get him now, my impulses screamed. But I didn’t know how to decontaminate Janet yet.
He moved back, and my only chance to grab him so far was gone.
He continued speaking from a few feet in front of me. “I lived with knowing what he could do, anytime, day or night.”
I kept my eyes on the shovel. His hands were now tightening and relaxing his hold on it while he talked. “Sometimes he’d get me out of bed and take me down there—keep me there for hours while he drank and ranted. His specialty was humiliation…” His voice trailed off and his black stare seemed far away again. This time his eyes were also filled with a strange incredulity, as if he still couldn’t believe what his memory was showing him even after all these years.
In the fullness of his silence I held my breath. I’d no idea what he was going to do. As I watched, his forehead became covered with a sheen of sweat and turned the color of paste. It felt like minutes before he resumed speaking, but it probably had been only seconds. “I used to call for my mother to come and help me, but she just stayed in her room upstairs.” His voice had changed again, was thin and little, like a child’s. “I think she figured if he had me, he wouldn’t hurt her. When he fell asleep, then I could sneak out on my own, but I was always terrified that he’d wake up and come after me again.
The next day she’d look me over and say, ‘See, it wasn’t so bad,’ and then start the refrain, ‘We mustn’t tell. We mustn’t tell.’“
He started striding back and forth in front of me, continuing to talk, no longer as a child, his voice hard again. He’d swung the shovel over his shoulder but still gripped it. “By the time I was fifteen, I had some muscle in my arms and shoulders. Do you know what I did to stop him?”
Before I could answer, he’d pivoted and swung the shovel full force at my head!
I’d less than a second to jerk my neck back and felt the cold steel fly by my face. “Christ!” I roared at him. Fright set my heart accelerating. I braced for his next strike and readied myself to jump out of its way.
But he simply stood there staring at me, his gaze coldly neutral. I couldn’t tell if he’d intended to finish me off or if the miss was deliberate—a part of the thousand threats he wanted me to endure before he finally delivered a killing stroke.
“One swing. Garnet, and it was finally over,” he declared softly. The words seemed to float across the space between us. “Used the baseball bat he’d given me for my birthday and hit the home run of my life. On that night, I had peace from hating him. She put him at the bottom of the stairs and made it look like a fall. ‘Always good to have a nurse in the family,’ she used to say. But if I thought I was free of being frightened or that the hatred wouldn’t return...”
Oh my God was all I could think.
“...threatened to turn me in unless I catered to her, doted on her, looked and acted the devoted son. She was obsessed that I had to make up for his abusing her...”
He spoke in a rush now, as if pressured to get the misery out.
“As I got older, she tightened the leash. She actually declared my life was hers to control, since without her keeping me safe from the cops I wouldn’t have a life.”
I still couldn’t make a break for it, not with him pacing between me and the door.
“She forced me to try for medical school, expected me to become her new Dr. Miller, said that I was his son, that I’d have to reverse the humiliation she’d endured at UH when he was boozing and fucking around on her. But I got turned down anyway.”
I tuned out his rant and eyed the weapon I’d put within reach, but knew I couldn’t get to it as long as he held the shovel.
“I managed to get hospital laboratory sciences. She made more threats about the police to make sure I came to UH when I graduated. Even then I was her slave.”
The torrent of words streaming from him was the stuff of delirium. His pace of walking back and forth picked up tempo. The fire in his eyes became alarmingly bright.
“And I wasn’t free from hating him anymore. Flashbacks—I was in the basement with him again and again and again—left me so full of hatred that I wanted him alive so I could kill him again and again and again! I wanted that release.”
He stopped pacing and stood directly in front of me. The shovel was back on his shoulder, but the two-handed grip hadn’t changed.
Anytime, I kept thinking, he could strike anytime.
From the rage I saw in his eyes I figured only a syringe of haloperidol could bring him down now.
Once more I got ready to jump out of the way.
But once again, he fooled me. “The beauty of it. Garnet, is that it worked,” he declared in a soft voice.
I flinched I was so startled to hear him speak after being so sure he was about to plant that shovel in my brain. This was his game again, I realized, the thousand threats he’d once endured and had now learned how to make, probably liked to make. Sadistic—like father, like son—he’d become what he hated.
“I couldn’t be so obvious as to make Mother my first target for the superbug,” he continued, his voice dreamy. “I’d tried depositing it on those other nurses first but only managed to give them Legionella. Did you know it was a two-step process?” He didn’t pause for my answer, neither did his gaze waver from mine. “I timed everything before their vacations so they’d be away from the hospital when they got sick and there’d be less scrutiny to cope with while I perfected my technique. When you told me Mother had staph, though, I had to hide how excited I was. It was fitting she got it first.”
He paused, and I held my breath. Whatever demons he was exorcising while he talked, he was skirting around the edges of what I needed to know—his technique.
&n
bsp; “I knew immediately you were smart, and maybe a threat—that silly bitch would have to go to your hospital—and I nearly choked when you said right away you thought she also had Legionella. At that moment I wasn’t at all sure that you’d fall for the Phantom business I’d set up or that you wouldn’t see right through the rest of my scheme, so I brought a special mask to St. Paul’s that I intended to give you. But luckily for me you’d screwed up on her first visit. That gave me a huge psychological advantage. I gave the mask to Deloram instead, just to muddy the waters.” He gave a teasing laugh, the sound of it cold. “You’re going to love it when I tell you my secret about the masks. I’ve become very good at handing one to a colleague after pretending to take it from the regular pile.”
Handing out masks to others before putting one on yourself was a point of etiquette doctors practiced without even thinking about it. He could have given one to Michael and Janet the same way.
“Over the next few days, with a few timely hints from me, you began suspecting Mackie just as I’d planned for someone to do. Then I was ready, finally, to infect punishers en masse and bring down University Hospital.”
Your technique with staph, damn it! How’d you get them with staph?
He’d slipped into that faraway state again. I didn’t move, didn’t even blink, not wanting to do anything that would catch his attention and shut him up.
Death Rounds Page 40