“Such as?”
“I won’t know until she talks to me.” She slipped the strap of her purse over her shoulder and walked out the front door.
Mark followed her to the Jeep, once more with the uneasy feeling that she was leaving something out. He took a breath of the crisp air, trying to clear his head. Dealing with Victor all day had occupied his thoughts, but now they roamed freely through all the other unknowns that were piling up, as foreboding as thunderheads. He couldn’t shake his fear about Earl being in danger, so much so that he’d tried to phone Melanie again, figuring she could ensure a security guard would be at his door. But he’d only reached her answering service. Pulling out of the driveway, he started to call Nell on his cellular, then hesitated, his finger suspended over the number pad.
One way someone could have known that Victor had found something suspicious at Nucleus Laboratories might be a phone tap. Mark recalled that on the night of the break-in, he’d found the clock on his phone stand slightly out of position. Someone could have been trying to place a tap on the line. And how would the person who shot at him know when he’d be driving on the road from Nell’s? Maybe those damn clicks weren’t the usual problem with his line.
He’d check when he got home. And forget using the cellular. Anybody determined to listen in on him could buy scanners for them. Shit! Had Nell been overheard saying she had new information about Kelly’s death?
Jesus, he thought, and gunned the car, heading for the nearest pay phone on the edge of town.
“What’s up?” asked Lucy.
“I just realized our phone conversations may no longer be private.” He explained why in the minutes it took to reach the booth.
To his relief, Nell picked up. “Nell, listen-”
“I know. You’re going to be late,” she said without letting him speak.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes. But maybe we should rethink this.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re going to go somewhere else for dinner.”
“Are you crazy?”
“We’ll pick you up-”
“Just come on over. I can use the extra time to have a bath.” And she hung up.
He tried dialing her back.
Off the hook.
Not this nonsense again.
“Oh, God,” said Lucy when he told her.
As he drove, he figured out how to convince her she needed protection. Hell, maybe she’d even get off on the idea. And he’d call Dan. She might listen to him. But listen she would, because damned if he was going to put anyone else in danger. The entire day he’d agonized over the possibility that he’d gotten Victor killed by encouraging him to play computer detective. He remembered his singing at the piano only two nights ago, and the thought of performing an autopsy on him in the morning became unbearable.
Lucy rode staring out the window.
The quiet between them grew suffocating.
“You know, we could both go deaf in this kind of silence,” he said.
She gave a small, solitary chuckle. “Sorry. I was just thinking how sometimes in the camps, when I felt most overwhelmed and helpless, I’d take care of some small, personal matter, just to get the world back into perspective.”
“Such as?” He welcomed the chance to discuss anything that might get him out of his own head.
“Writing letters home worked best, saying things I hadn’t had the chance to say to the people I loved most. Once I did that with each of my brothers, Mom, and Dad, I usually felt better. At least, it seemed less daunting to face the big problems in front of me.”
“What would you write about?”
“Usually I’d pick something I really liked about the person I wrote to and let them know. And if there were any unresolved quarrels, I’d try to patch them up. That way if something happened to me, I wouldn’t have left precious words unsaid.”
“Sounds like a nice kind of letter to get.”
She grew quiet again, her gaze fixed on the dark blur of forest at the road’s edge. “Would you like me to write one to you?” she asked after a few seconds.
He grew very still. “Yes, I’d like that.”
“Because that’s what I’ve been doing, Mark. Sitting here composing a letter to you.”
“Really?” He drove the next mile without saying anything. “What’s in it?” he finally asked.
“Most I think you already know. How great a doctor I think you are. How much I adore working with your patients and being up here. And how worried I am that I’ve permanently ruined your opinion of me by coming to you under false pretenses.”
She was right. He did know all that. And her failure to be up front with him had stoked his suspicions of her. Once fooled, it was easy to wonder what else she might keep from him. And he still felt a woman as smart as she should have known better, especially about letting her personal issues place evidence at risk.
He was about to tell her so, then suggest they put it behind them and make the best of her time here, when she added, “I don’t know if I can ever win your trust back. I’d like to try, but I won’t stay if my being around makes you feel I compromised you, your practice, or your investigation. Just give the word, and I’ll leave in the morning.”
That surprised him. Her words sounded as if she’d been reading from a carefully written note, with the ring of an ultimatum. But he also knew something else. When this case ended, he’d have to come to grips with the fact his ineptness might have cost a man his life. Measured against that, whatever technical dings his reputation as coroner took in the process would no longer matter. Yet going back to his old existence, living alone in the house where he’d been born and practicing medicine in isolation, would be even lonelier than before, entirely because of her having been here. He realized this without having to think about it or put it into words. It came to him the way an animal senses its terrain is no longer hospitable, through a combination of instinct and intuition that reads a warning to move on and find more fertile ground, yet she’d catalyzed the process. All at once he felt cautious about how to handle the next few minutes with this strange, forceful, and disquieting woman who had entered his life.
“Basically I still think you need me around here, and more than just professionally,” she continued “You’re one lonely bugger.”
He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Any other revelations you’d care to reveal?”
“Yes.”
“Oh?”
She held her head a notch higher. The light from an oncoming car caught the fine lines of her nose and jaw, making him think she looked absolutely regal.
He held his breath, and waited for it.
“I don’t have a fiancé.”
He reacted with a mix of relief, pleasant surprise, and a self-congratulatory he’d-known-something-was-fishy-about-her-engagement-all-along celebration. Where there had been doubt and suspicion seconds before, there was the glimmer of a new possibility here. It had nothing to do with the grim business that seemed to be closing in on them, but a sea change occurred inside his head. As he sometimes did in a tense moment, he laughed. “Why the pretends?”
By the light of the dashboard he could see her face. She pursed her lips, but the corners played at breaking into a smile. “I heard you were a real womanizer and figured it was the best way to avoid trouble.”
“Womanizer? Who told you that?”
“The other residents who’d done a rotation with you. All your patients gabbed to them about the string of women you get up here, and how none of them stay. Let’s see, there was a theater director, a physiotherapist, and a veterinarian-”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Having met you, I personally think they must have been nuts.”
“Well, thank you for that at least. Residents should know better than to believe country gossip-”
“Oh, I don’t mean them. I’m talking about your lady friends, for not wanting to stay, silly.”
He still hadn’t co
me up with a reply to that when his cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Dr. Roper, you don’t know me,” a woman’s voice said. “I got your number from the book. You answered the phone when I called Victor’s house this morning.”
“Oh, yes. I recall your voice.” He heard her suck in her breath, but she said nothing. “May I know who I’m talking to?”
He listened to her breathing a few seconds. Finally, she said, “ I have some documents that belong to Victor. I didn’t know what had happened when I tried to reach him. I feel terrible, first the firing, and now…”
He slowed, and pulled over to the side of the road. “Let me call you back-”
“No! I don’t want anyone to know who I am.”
He didn’t want to lose her again.
“Then let me give you another number where to reach me.” He’d take the call at Nell’s. She and Lucy could wait in the Jeep. “In about ten minutes?”
“No. I’m freezing my buns off as it is in a pay phone.”
Oh, God. He’d have to risk being overheard. As long as she didn’t say her name, at least she’d be safe. “What documents?” He motioned Lucy to slide over and listen with him. She responded immediately, a puzzled expression on her face.
“You mustn’t tell anyone about this. We’ve had orders not to talk with you about him.”
“We?”
“The people who worked with Victor at Nucleus Labs.”
Her breathing sounded in his ear a few seconds. He could even hear her shivering. She must have her lips pressed to the mouthpiece.
“What do you want to do?” he asked. “We could meet.”
“No.”
“I could pick these documents up.”
More breathing.
“Tell me what you have then.” He felt cold just listening to her.
“Maybe I better explain how I got them in the first place. I don’t want to get in trouble with the police.”
He opened his mouth to stop her, but she pressed ahead.
“Victor programs his PC at home to forward whatever files he’s working on to both his and my computer at our offices whenever he shuts down-” She stopped and let out a breath that stuttered into a sobbing sound. After a few seconds, she said, “I mean he used to. I still can’t believe he’s dead.”
She may already be saying too much. “Listen, you should call me on a regular phone before saying anything more. I’m on a cell phone,” Mark warned her, all the while worried he might lose her for good.
He thought he heard her swallow. “No, I can hear you okay, and I want to get this over with. He’d set the system up that way so we’d always be sure to have his files the next morning in case he forgot to forward them manually. For a bright man, he sometimes had a mind like a sieve…”
She didn’t understand. But if he spelled it out that someone might be listening in… Christ it was too late anyway.
“He obviously didn’t delete that function, because a folder dated yesterday was on top of my e-mail when I got to work. The first pages were nothing special, results of genetic screenings we’d done on various groups of siblings, mainly for different sorts of cancer genes. You’ve probably seen the type of reports I’m talking about in your own practice.”
He had. They were a bunch of spikes along a horizontal line, each peak representing the amount of a particular sequence of DNA, the building blocks of the gene under investigation, including a peak or peaks for the mutated section, if it’s present. These defective portions stood out like sore thumbs when compared to a similar preparation of a normal strand, even to the untrained eye. “Victor left me a message saying he’d retrieved some test results that he’d found peculiar. Could they be the ones?”
“Peculiar? Not that I could tell. The only thing odd about them was that they’d been flagged for some reason, yet there were no obvious abnormal spikes. I wouldn’t know how to read the finer details well enough to have spotted anything else. Victor could have, though. He had the knack, and the training. In fact I initially thought they were copies he’d been using to practice his interpretation skills on and had simply returned them. It was the next few pages that got me concerned. As soon as I read them, I knew they were nothing anyone at Nucleus Labs had been meant to see. When I phoned his house, it was to ask him what he wanted me to do with the file. But you answered. By midmorning word got around that he’d died, probably from a heart attack, and I was devastated. But when we found out the police were all over his house, I got frightened. After all, I know you don’t bring out the yellow tape for simple coronaries, and after seeing what he’d been doing on the computer, well, my imagination went into overdrive.”
“Just tell me what you have.” He could barely keep his voice steady.
Still more breathing. Then she asked, “Do you know how screening for executive health plans work?”
“Sure. I’ve done my share.”
“He’s managed to get records from some of our biggest clients documenting when executives’ policies were newly issued or terminated,” she continued. “This basically reflects who’s been hired and who’s been fired. I can only guess someone at these companies sent them to him on the QT after he’d twisted their arms. He had that kind of good rapport with the people he dealt with. Word got around like wildfire on the Internet when they learned…”
He thought he heard her sob again.
“Sorry,” she said. “All those e-mails of condolences, yet outside of office hours he seemed so alone.”
Waiting for her to compose herself, he wondered if she knew the half of it.
She sucked in a deep breath. “Dr. Roper, before telling you what he found, I have to know. Did someone kill Victor because of this?”
Mark’s official line that he couldn’t give out confidential information sprung to his lips, but he didn’t speak it, knowing he might spook an already frightened woman. Instead he told her the truth. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, God! So it’s possible.”
“Listen. We can get you protection. I’ll take you to the police myself, right now if you want. And we mustn’t say anything more-”
He was listening to a dial tone again.
As he slowly lowered the phone, he sat staring straight ahead, trying to think what he should do. His gaze swept north, pulled by a glowing orange smudge that pulsed and waned above the trees against the nighttime skyline. It took him a second to realize it must be coming from a huge fire, and a heartbeat more to think it could be near Nell’s cabin.
A wall of flames rose above the back half of the structure; smoke engulfed the front.
She lay in the snow before the door where she’d crawled, naked, the skin on her head and the left side of her torso covered in carbon. But within the blackened face, white eyes glittered, alive, the nightmare from his childhood.
He thought her wrist had a weak pulse. As he reached into the flesh of her neck to palpate her carotid to be sure, that same cloying smell that could send his heart pounding came off her in waves and filled him with terror. Swallowing to keep from gagging, he felt the artery fluttering beneath his fingertips. In the headlights of the Jeep he could see the burns weren’t that deep. The black was mainly soot.
Her darkened lips parted, revealing a slash of creamy teeth, and she screamed.
“Help me get her to the back of the Jeep,” he told Lucy, his voice quivering and barely able to keep from breaking.
Seconds later they careened out of the driveway, Lucy at the wheel as he huddled over Nell’s body, muttering words of encouragement, at the same time punching in the number for the fire department, summoning them to a lost cause. Then he called Dan, briefed him on the details, and dispatched him to the scene.
Her screams continued, and her pulse grew weaker.
“She needs morphine and IV fluids, or she’ll never make it to Saratoga. Go to Mary and Betty Thomson’s,” he yelled at Lucy. Then he called their number, told them he’d be there in five minutes and what t
o have ready for him.
Betty stood at the door with the vials, bags, needles, and tubing in a plastic bag. “I’m praying for her,” she told Mark as he scooped up the equipment.
“Me too,” he heard Mary call from the back room.
Lucy spun the Jeep back out on the highway and they were off again.
The burns on her head, shoulders, and left trunk were less than he originally thought, first- and second-degree at the most, the same for the side of her face. It puzzled him how she’d protected that part of her body from more severe damage. The mucosal membranes inside her mouth, however, were blackened as well, and he feared most for her airway. The soft tissues there were much more vulnerable, and even with less deep burns, they could swell up to obstruct her breathing. An explosion must have accompanied the flames, as only hot gases would penetrate orifices to damage them like that.
He easily inserted an angiocath needle into her right arm and opened the IV full, to raise her pressure, then adjusted it to replace the bodily fluids that would leak from her charred skin. To quiet her shrieks and cries, he injected half an ampule of Mary’s morphine.
To his astonishment, her eyes fluttered open, she moaned, and said, “Some dinner party, eh, Doc?”
“What happened, Nell?”
“The back of my cabin blew… where propane tank is.”
He reached for her hand, feeling the need to hold it, not just to comfort her, but to keep his own from trembling.
“Was in the tub taking my bath,” she continued. “That’s what saved me.”
Her voice kept fracturing into different pitches, all of them high, as if forced through a strainer. The soft tissues near her vocal cords were swelling closed. She’d need a tube to keep breathing, and fast.
Like a drowning man clinging to a single plank, he focused solely on what he knew best: checking her pulse – weak; assessing her breathing – labored and noisy; fine-tuning her IV – running fine. The routine momentarily kept his larger questions at bay, and all their ramifications. “We’ll soon be at the hospital,” he said, reassuring her and hitting the numbers for ER on his phone.
She began to moan again, and mutter incoherently.
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