“Not yet. Haven’t had a chance to even think of it.”
“And Nell never said what she’d remembered.”
“No, chances are there never was anything to tell. She could have said that just to get a visit.”
“So we’ve got nothing.”
“Not exactly. I think my phone’s tapped.”
“What?”
“So no more calls to the house, and cell phones are out.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“And I got a pretty good idea what was going on at Braden’s maternity center and the home for unwed mothers.” He spent the next few minutes outlining the implications of the statistics his father had kept, and went on to describe his library encounter with Charles and the hall of shame.
“Mother of God!” Earl muttered at the end of the story. “That’s so monstrous it’s unbelievable.” After a few more seconds, he added, “It could have been why Kelly was murdered, if she found out.”
“Exactly.”
“Unfortunately, that expands the list of suspects,” Earl continued, still sounding incredulous. “We’d have to add Charles, and it could still be Chaz, defending his father. Hell, we might even have to think of Mrs. Charles Braden, wherever she is these days. No one’s brought her up, but I remember a rather fierce woman who, back then, certainly seemed capable of taking extreme measures against anyone who threatened her husband. But it’s astute work, Mark. Excellent, in fact.”
“Oh, it wasn’t me. Lucy figured it out-”
“Who’s Lucy?”
That’s right. Earl didn’t know about her. “The wonderful Lucy? She’s this miracle resident who’s descended into my life and become my right hand at work, who also makes great soup…”
As he heaped praise on her, giving her credit for having cracked the secret of his father’s files, he opened the doors of the booth again to let her hear. Her cheeks flushing crimson, she waved him to keep quiet from the rolled-down window on her side of the Jeep.
The silence at the other end of the line was total.
“What’s the matter, Earl?”
“I hope you didn’t tell her about me and Kelly.”
“No, of course not.”
The silence continued.
“What?” Mark asked.
“Did you check her out?”
“She’s all right, I promise you.”
“The casualty rate among people who might have helped us has tripled in the last twenty-four hours. At best she’s bad luck. You be careful. My advice is turn over everything you’ve found out to the local sheriff and let him handle it. Don’t go doing anything stupid on your own, hear me?”
11:04 P.M.
New York City Hospital
Earl’s pulse leapt to triple digits as he watched the cardiac monitor the nurses had provided. Though at the moment the pattern indicated a fast but normal heartbeat, the result of his own anxiety and responsible for the boxing-glove effect, nasty-looking runs of extra squiggles occasionally popped up. Diagnostic possibilities of what they could be the precursors to ran through his head, and a cold sweat crept over his skin again.
He averted his eyes and settled himself back down. Better keep his imagination in check if he had any hope of toughing this out and catching a killer.
Yet he continued to worry. First about the arrival of this resident, Lucy, on the scene. As much as he liked Mark, the guy jumped to conclusions and rushed to judgment about people, for better or worse. His resentment of Chaz had almost led him to exclude other suspects since the beginning of the case. Then he’d been ready in an instant to label Samantha’s doings with Kelly as Munchausen by proxy syndrome. What if this time he’d gotten it wrong the other way around, and mistaken a serpent for an angel? He was lonely enough to be a mark for any intelligent, half-decent-looking female. From the way he babbled on about her, he’d been smitten, which meant she could lead him by the nose. What if she were in cahoots with someone who wanted to sabotage the investigation, or worse, lure Mark into danger? And now, apparently thanks to this woman’s helpful interpretation of Cam Roper’s old files, Mark was chasing a crazy idea that Charles Braden could have been involved in some bizarre scheme involving mass infanticide. At first, he had to admit, when Mark told him, he’d been shocked into at least considering it, but then when he learned its source… “Jesus!” he said out loud, his bad feeling about her growing worse by the second.
A fluttering sensation in his chest alerted him to a new round of palpitations, and he lay still, inhaling, exhaling, and getting frustrated as hell.
Tanya slipped in to check on him at eleven as promised.
“All’s well,” he lied, grateful that his tracing on the monitor happened to be going through a quiet spell.
She left looking as concerned as ever.
His restlessness became unbearable. He rang for the nurse, asked for a pad of paper, sticky tape, and as many different colored pens as she could spare.
“You should get some sleep, not stay up coloring all night,” the woman said, not at all as jovial, with her red cheeks and granny glasses, as he’d remembered while loaded with morphine. Her name wasn’t much of a yuk either. The tag read MRS. WHITE, as if she’d killed Professor Plum in the library with the pipe wrench.
“What’ll it be next,” she added, “cutting out paper dolls?”
“Sweet!” he told her.
He proceeded to do what he always did when the complexity of a patient’s medical problem overwhelmed him – make a flowchart of all the variables.
At the center he wrote Kelly.
Circling her like malevolent red moons he placed Chaz Braden and Samantha McShane, and in more distant orbits, using a slightly less vibrant orange, Charles Braden III and Walter McShane.
Closer to Kelly he added Earl Garnet, Cam Roper, and Mark Roper, all in green – the men who loved her.
Radiating out from Charles Braden III he drew two lines. On the end of one he wrote Maternity Center, the end of the other Home for Unwed Mothers. He also made a horizontal line connecting the two, in red.
Floating above these, suspended in the middle of nowhere, he added the name Nucleus Laboratories, and joined to it with a hard black line, Corporate Executive Health Plans. With a lighter line, he added, Genetic Screenings: Siblings with a Positive Family History for Cancer.
From these he penciled in a tentative line to Chaz Braden’s name with a ? on it.
Finally, he scribbled Victims with information at the very top of the page, added Victor Feldt as number one with a black line joining him to Nucleus labs, and Nell as number two, her black line leading to Kelly.
And that was it for Hampton Junction.
Or was it? He added Lucy, circled it, and penciled in three faint lines, each marked with a ?, between her name and his principle suspects – Chaz; Charles; Samantha.
Moving to the bottom of the page he wrote NYCH, with four spokes radiating out from it, one to Kelly, one to each of the Bradens, and one to himself. He added a fifth spoke and on it wrote Bessie McDonald-Victim? Finally, he designated a similar Victim? status to himself.
At first he felt a sense of mastery, having condensed everything on one page. A half hour later he seethed with impatience at being no further ahead in sorting it all out.
He couldn’t pull anything into a coherent whole. The diagram seemed to highlight differences between the various parts of the puzzle rather than link them together. Where were the common threads? He couldn’t relate Bessie McDonald to Victor Feldt and Nucleus Labs. He couldn’t connect the labs to Kelly’s murder. There was even a lack of consistency in the attacks on the victims. At NYCH, the person who had silenced Bessie McDonald and infected him operated like a ghost, attempting to leave no trace of foul play. Such stealth suggested a perpetrator determined to escape suspicion altogether, not just evade capture. In Hampton Junction, however, the attempts to remove people, though clever, were crude. The explosion tonight might silence Nell, yet it most certainly would raise suspi
cions. As for Victor Feldt’s timely heart attack, that, too, could have been achieved with unsophisticated means. Mark had said he was overweight, hypertensive, and diabetic – significant risk factors. Someone with a gun had already chased Mark up a hill. The same thing could have been done to Victor with lethal results. Again, clever, but nowhere in the same league as what had been done to Bessie and him. It was as if whoever carried out these acts felt he or she could withstand doubts on the part of the police and public about there being foul play, so long as the events could also be read as accidental, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise.
He sat scowling at the diagram, wondering how the same scam could include such wildly divergent tolerances to risk.
“Too many players,” he muttered.
Yet surely Kelly’s murder was at the center of everything.
A sudden pain coiled through his abdomen, once more sending him writhing, his insides on fire despite the Demerol. When it passed he lay drenched in sweat and exhausted, warily watching the monitor while trying to control his pulse. The slightest sound out in the hall set it racing again.
He shakily returned to his diagram, but a single answer to explain the events in Hampton Junction and NYCH continued to elude him. On a whim he thought, Maybe that’s what this crazy picture was trying to tell me. If he couldn’t make sense of it as a whole, what if he broke it down and looked at the parts separately?
He slashed a black horizontal line across the middle of the paper, dividing the two locales and the respective players.
Immediately it simplified things.
Now he could run any number of scenarios to explain the Hampton Junction half of things. Chaz Braden could have killed Kelly because he’d found out she was leaving him, and Nell he tried to blow up because he feared she really did have information that would finally convict him. Simple, straightforward – he liked it. But he still had no idea why Victor Feldt had been killed or by whom. Nor would anyone, it seemed, until they tracked down the woman with the file. And he couldn’t even begin to guess how the lab’s secret tied in with Kelly’s murder. As for the infanticide story, he continued to find that beyond belief.
Again, he wondered about Lucy’s role in all this.
Sent to sidetrack Mark?
By whom?
Chaz? But would he incriminate his own father?
No, that didn’t make sense.
And Charles wouldn’t set himself up.
Samantha maybe?
Well, whoever it might have been, weaving a story of murder from old birth records was preposterous.
Except for one detail.
He circled Cam Roper’s name.
The man had been the first to take an interest in the statistics that Mark and this Lucy woman now found so incriminating. Yet he died before he saw fit to do anything about it. Or had his death conveniently stopped him from taking action? He’d have to ask Mark how his father died. In the meantime, he lightly penciled in Victim? beside Cam Roper’s name.
It was probably another absurd idea. Otherwise, Mark would certainly have seen the possibility and said something.
Or would he?
Earl thought a moment, recalling how Mark had avoided all mention of how his father died. A person could spend a lifetime trying to bury that kind of pain, especially after losing his mom just two years before. Well-ingrained defenses might have kept him from looking too closely.
“Shit!” he said, abruptly folding the Hampton Junction part of the paper out of sight, admitting he wasn’t anywhere close to getting a handle on the happenings there.
A faint noise of squeaking wheels filtered through his closed door from somewhere out in the hallway. He stiffened as it drew nearer.
A medication cart? Shouldn’t be at this time of night.
It kept coming, the high-pitched sound like fingernails on a blackboard.
Then it stopped.
The sound of a wet mop slapping onto the linoleum floor echoed along the corridor.
Just the cleaner pushing his pail, he thought. But the tightness in his muscles wouldn’t go away. He sat listening, hearing nothing else at first, then a soft swishing right outside the entrance of his room and an occasional tap as the handle struck the wall. He held his breath, expecting to see the door push open and someone come lunging in at him.
The tapping passed down the corridor and out of earshot.
He went back to his diagram, this time focusing only on the NYCH half of things. He first considered the three suspects again. Beside their names he printed the word GHOST.
If it was either Chaz Braden or Charles, he couldn’t see how either one of them could get close enough to him and pull it off themselves. But again the idea of accomplices grated.
A solitary physician working for Samantha? That would be the only way she could pull it off.
There was also another scenario, yet he was reluctant to consider it because it opened up so many unknowns. But to be complete in assessing all the options, as he was always telling Mark, he had no choice. The disparities in “risk tolerance” that he’d noted between what had happened in NYCH and the more blatant violence of Hampton Junction, demanded he look at it.
What if there were two separate processes going on, each with its own players, those players each having his or her own motives, but both people connected to Kelly and her murder?
Or had he missed someone in lining up the suspects?
Mark sat at the kitchen table, halfheartedly spooning down a bowl of chicken and barley soup as Earl’s words ate at him. Of course the man didn’t know Lucy, so naturally would be suspicious of the way she’d shown up in the middle of everything. Yet as coroner, Mark himself should have been more questioning and checked out her credentials a bit better before taking her so much into his confidence.
As for leaving everything to Dan in the morning, that also would be the smart thing to do. Mark had even spoken briefly with him from the pay phone, but only about Nell and her prognosis. The prospect of slipping out to the home for unwed mothers, grabbing some soil samples from under Braden’s nose, and possibly hitting a home run against the man before anyone else got hurt still seemed awfully tempting. But now he wondered if it wasn’t too tempting. For starters, why would Braden have talked so openly of smotherings if he had something to hide? It didn’t add up.
“You go get the shovels, flashlights, whatever. I’ll make the soup,” Lucy had said when they’d arrived home. Twenty minutes later he’d loaded the Jeep, changed into warm clothing, and dug out some caving headlamps so they could work with their hands free. As she quickly emptied her bowl and helped herself to seconds, he even started to second-guess her willingness to go out there. Shit! I have to stop thinking this way. But once released, his doubts roamed free.
“Why so moody?” she asked.
He filled his spoon and took a small sip. “Like you, I’m drained.” He hoped he sounded casual enough. “And I’m beginning to think we must have been crazy to consider doing this tonight. Tomorrow I’ll call Dan, he’ll provide the men, and we’ll do the search properly.”
She stopped midway through taking another mouthful. “Are you serious? Somebody will spot us, call Braden, then watch the injunctions fly. Believe me, I’ve been in court against the kind of legal might Charles can wield. They’re masters at delays and stalling. The warrant you arranged for tonight will be shredded. Mark, we could be in and out, get the samples, and maybe it’s case closed.”
“That’s what bothers me, Lucy. Everything points us in that direction. Well, I don’t feel like going where I’m pointed anymore. I mean, we almost got killed tonight. Victor’s dead. Nell’s hanging by a thread. It’s time to pause and reflect, wouldn’t you say?”
Her expression turned stony.
He immediately regretted the outburst. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take your head off.”
She surprised him by removing the spoon from his hand and entwining her fingers in his. “Come with me,” she said, and led him t
o the front room, where she sat him down beside him on the couch.
“What’s up-”
She silenced him with a pair of fingers to his lips. “Remember I said you could do worse than talk to me about how the past can bite you in the butt. Well, now’s as good a time as any.”
“Lucy, what are you-”
Her fingers pressed against his lips again. “Tell me what seeing Nell brought back.”
“What’s the point-”
“I’m as horrified at what happened to Victor and Nell as you are. It’s horrific. Tragic. Shocking. But what you’re feeling goes beyond that.”
“Now wait a minute-”
“The point is you’re obsessed with discovering the secret of Kelly’s murder.”
“No-”
“I’ve watched you, Mark. Even when you’re not working the case you get a faraway stare in your eyes, and I can tell you’re thinking about it. Believe me, I know the look. I’ve seen it in men on a battlefield who get trapped in what they’ve seen and can’t escape reliving the violence even when everything’s over. Except you were a kid-”
“That’s nonsense. You’re talking about post-traumatic stress – it’s something soldiers get-”
“You’ve never been this wrapped up in a coroner’s inquiry before, have you?”
“Well, no-”
“I think you’re tangled up in 1974, both chained and drawn to whatever happened back then. I also get the feeling you don’t know if you’re stuck in this place, mired in some compulsion, or it’s really where you want to be, doing what you do so well.”
He tried to pull his hand away from hers, but she tightened her grip. Its strength surprised him.
“No, you don’t. I’m the best friend you could have right now, Mark Roper, because I’m not afraid to say what you need to hear. Face it! After all these years, you can’t afford to let much more time slide before you shake off whatever has sunk its teeth into you.”
He felt himself grow sweaty, and the images he’d fought against for a lifetime began to reappear.
He’d jumped off his bike, run up to those people standing in the circle, and pushed through their legs – No he wouldn’t do this. He pulled his hand away. “What do you want to hear, Lucy? That I cried, that I felt terrified, that since then I’ve never stopped feeling there’s this cavity inside me I can’t fill, and the only way to numb the hurt is to keep busy. Holding hands isn’t going to help. There, I’ve talked about it. You want to know how this let-it-all-hang-out crap makes me feel? Angry as hell!”
Mortal Remains Page 35