Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

He forced himself to drive more slowly, peering through the dazzling swirls of flakes highlighted in his low beams. What time she’d gone out there, he’d no idea, but already the storm had filled in her tire tracks.

  After five minutes of crawling along, he turned on the radio to keep from screaming in frustration at the slow pace. Normally he would there by now.

  “I’m gonna be all right…” Jennifer Lopez sang.

  He had less than two miles to go when he spotted the glow from the high beams of an oncoming car.

  Lucy careened once off the stone sides before the anchor crashed through a thin layer of ice and pulled her into the frigid darkness.

  The descent accelerated. Water streamed up her nostrils and through the back of her throat. She started to choke and heard bubbles pouring out her nose but couldn’t see them, couldn’t see anything now. The pressure on her head and ears squeezed in until she thought the end would come when her brain burst. Even greater weight crushed her chest and expelled more bubbles, those in a deafening gargle from where the tape tore free of her mouth. Searing pain burned through her limbs and her mind issued frantic alerts that they were in flames; that lactic acid bathed the tissues inside and out, that she had the metabolic consequence of no oxygen – the sorts of clinical snippets she might have used to save another, but not herself.

  Yet her superb condition prolonged her dying. Her heart, trained to endure on near anoxic blood, continued to beat, her brain to think.

  And down she went.

  Finally, the inky darkness from without seemed to spill into her mind, and she knew her ordeal would soon end. She felt her entire body stiffen against its restraints and begin to undulate in the jackknife movements of a tonic-clonic seizure, the last bequest from a nervous system gone mad for want of air.

  No white light awaited her. No final flash of memories comforted her. Rather the hurt subsided, and she seemed to take leave of her body. But instead of rising peacefully upward, she stayed suspended in the water looking down at herself, watching her remains continue to jerk through the dark in a desperate, never-ending dance.

  The white glare hung just over the horizon, the way extraterrestrial events are portrayed in movies, then became very ordinary as the headlamps crested a low hill, and the dark shape of the vehicle drove slowly toward Mark at a cautious speed equal to his own.

  Let it be her.

  He hadn’t met any other vehicle on the road.

  Sure enough, as they closed the gap between them, he made out the familiar shape of her station wagon.

  Thank God, he thought, relief flooding through him.

  He flicked his high beams at her.

  And saw two men driving.

  “What the hell!” he yelled.

  He must have taken them by surprise as well; the night immediately lit up with the red illumination of brake lights, and the station wagon skidded out of control.

  Caught in the glare of his lights, they both gaped at him, their features coarse, white, and garish as they glided closer.

  He saw the man on the passenger side reach down and come up with a gun.

  Mark floored the accelerator. The much-heavier Jeep rocketed forward and smashed into them head-on. For the second time in a week he was surrounded by the impact of crumpling fenders and exploding air bags, but this time he was ready. Gripping the steering wheel, he’d pushed himself well back in his seat and barely felt the blow against his chest. Better still, his windshield stayed intact.

  He held his foot on the accelerator. His tires whined, the Jeep shook, but shuddered ahead, pushing the lighter car before it. Not that its two occupants were about to cause him much trouble. They must have been the kind not to wear seat belts. Both looked to be slumped on the dash, asleep on big white pillows. One had blood pouring out his nose.

  Mark kept the pedal to the floor, aimed for the ditch, and, continuing to shove Lucy’s car until its rear end lifted up over a snowbank, stranded it so nothing short of a tow truck would set it free. Throwing the Jeep into reverse, he shot back to the right side of the highway. Despite the body damage, it still drove fine. Sick with fright over what they’d done to Lucy, he slammed the gearshift into drive, ready to speed away and find her at the home. But wait. She might be in the back of the car tied up on the floor. Or they could have already taken her somewhere else.

  Shit!

  Grabbing his bat, he jumped out of the cab, ran to the driver’s side of the car. A quick glance in the back, and he knew they didn’t have Lucy with them. He wrenched open the door. Neither man moved, but both were still breathing. The gun he’d seen before lay on the floor between them. He didn’t know what type, but its stubby silencer on the end of the barrel made it look like something James Bond would carry.

  He reached across the knees of the one closest to him and grabbed it. Then he went through their pockets. No more weapons, but the roll of duct tape he found would be useful. And in the second man’s pockets he’d found what he wanted most of all – a cell phone from the bad guys. It at least wouldn’t have a tap on it.

  In the minutes it took to bind their hands and feet, the driver started to moan and come around. The passenger hadn’t budged, his respirations growing increasingly gurgly, and from the lie of his head, the neck looked a little twisted.

  Mark grabbed the driver by the collar of his ski suit, pinched him hard on the earlobe to speed his ascent from the depths, and yelled, “What have you done to Lucy?”

  The guy opened an eyelid. “Go see for yourself, asshole.”

  Mark balled his fists and yanked the creep forward, as close to killing someone as he’d ever been. But Lucy mattered more. He threw the scum back, picked up the cell phone, and roused a very sleepy Dan Evans. “Don’t ask questions. Bring the cavalry-”

  “Mark?”

  “I’m east of the entrance to the home for unwed mothers. You’ll find two of Braden’s killers bound and gagged in Lucy’s car. One’s alive, the other – handle his neck with care if you ever want to question him.”

  “Wha’-”

  “Hurry! They’ve done something to Lucy.” He hesitated. Should he assume the worst? Better safe than sorry. “Get an air ambulance to the grounds of the building, pronto!”

  “My God! Right!” He finally sounded fully awake.

  Two minutes later Mark pulled his battered Jeep up in front of the gate, slipped the gun into his pocket, and yanked the headlamp over his ski hat. Quietly, he climbed the gate and started to run, entering the darkness of the forest. He didn’t turn on his light in case he’d give himself away. His insides seized with dread at what he’d find up ahead. Glancing at the luminous dial of his watch, he read 5:01.

  New York City Hospital

  Earl awoke with a jump, and immediately realized he’d dozed off. “Damn Demerol,” he muttered, glancing at his watch. Christ, he’d been asleep well over three hours.

  Had someone slipped in here during that time?

  He quickly eyed his IV bottle and did the calculation to estimate the amount that should remain. The fluid was at the line marked 250 ccs. Exactly where it should be. But anybody could have injected a needleful of God knows what into him or the bag. Yet he felt the same as before.

  His stomach sent a shard of pain from his belly button through to his spine. No change there. Wait a minute. His arms and legs weren’t quite so listless. The potassium was kicking in.

  He glanced over at his monitor.

  The extra beats were less frequent.

  If he’d been given something, it hadn’t hit him yet.

  To keep his mind off doomsday scenarios, he fetched his diagram from where it had slid off the bed and got back to work. Just before he’d conked out, he’d started adding to his list of existing suspects all the people, especially doctors, who either had offered him food or drink between Saturday and Tuesday or come near enough in the hospital to have tampered with his IV, or both. Though he’d accepted the possibility of accomplices being involved, he still didn’t buy the i
dea of his having been contaminated at the funeral or in the cafeteria by rogue waiters or kitchen staff. Too messy.

  That meant he started with Lena Downie. She’d brought tea to him a few times on Monday. The woman had no medical knowledge other than what she read in charts, and talked way too much ever to be chosen as an accomplice. Nevertheless, he wrote down her name at the side of the page.

  Next there was Tanya, who’d made him coffee Tuesday morning. Of course he’d since put his life in her hands, but he put her down as well.

  There were only two doctors he could specifically pinpoint. Again he felt there wasn’t much point, but wrote Melanie Collins and Tommy Leannis.

  Except he’d already pegged his drink with Tommy as taking place after he’d been infected.

  He added Samantha McShane to the list because of the coffee she’d served him when he’d been at her apartment on Wednesday morning. But that, too, had been outside the time frame for the organism to incubate. Besides, he’d already dismissed her as lacking the skills to be The Ghost on her own.

  Which left Melanie and her martinis.

  Great. He’d landed his own physician.

  He pulled the covers around him, finding the air in the room clammy. Whether he was getting a fever, or the heating normally reached its nadir at this hour, he didn’t know. It was the quietest he’d ever heard the building, the usual rush of air through the ventilation system having been shut down. Out in the hallway a distant click echoed as if someone had closed a mausoleum door, and the squeak of rubber soles rushed by his room, then silence returned except for his own breathing and the occasional snarl of his intestines.

  He doodled on his sheet of paper, making certain he hadn’t forgotten somebody who’d slipped him a nibble of food or sip of a drink. He couldn’t come up with a single other person. Only Melanie fit all the criteria.

  “Yeah, right,” he muttered, his sarcasm venting the frustration of having drawn such a blank. She probably infected him with that blue lady she served at her penthouse. Fixed his IV herself, too, so she could add the bicarb. And the bloods, what better way to falsify his results than draw them herself, then substitute them with someone else’s.

  He liked indulging in irony. It was often the most direct way to show up the absurdity of a bullshit idea and dispense with it – a valuable exercise in a busy ER where fuzzy thinking could be deadly.

  Except this idea didn’t succumb. Instead of wilting under ridicule, it stayed in his head, nagging at him.

  “Don’t be absurd,” he said out loud, trying to clear his mind and think straight, figuring the combination of pain, weakness, and Demerol were taking their toll.

  Yet the notion stuck. Like a bad tune caught in a loop of memory, it kept going round and round. Because none of the other players he’d listed had the means and opportunity to do what had been done to him.

  His little ditty didn’t ring so ironic all of a sudden.

  No, he told himself. To think Melanie could be The Ghost was nuts. Insane. Had to be. For starters, what about motive? Why would she try to kill him? His investigation into Kelly’s murder didn’t have anything to do with her.

  Besides, the reason she had means and opportunity wasn’t of her doing. She’d served him drinks on Tuesday because he’d wanted to see her then. She had access to his IV and took his bloods because he’d insisted in ER that she take care of him. To make anything more of it was plain paranoid.

  Unless she’d used the situations he’d given her to her own advantage, suggested a perverse voice from the insolent part of his mind that had first played devil’s advocate by questioning the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, and Santa Claus when he was aged five. It had been getting him to the bottom of things ever since, and he ignored it at his peril.

  Melanie had offered him that blue drink, topping his glass off from a separate pitcher, then washed her hands as thoroughly as if she were preparing for surgery. She’d arrived in his hospital room, carrying his IV bag that she’d already prepared elsewhere, despite everything she’d needed, including potassium vials, being in the medication bins at his beside. She took his bloods, slipping the full tubes into her lab coat pocket without labeling them first. All little details, none of which proved anything, but every one of them giving his suspicions free rein.

  He sat huddled in the bedclothes, stunned by all the unthinkable things that swept so easily to mind, now that his normal checks against imagining the worst about her were breached.

  What about motive – a motive that would make her commit murder to stop his investigation?

  It couldn’t be because she herself had killed Kelly.

  That idea was lunacy. She’d had no reason to murder her. Of course there’d been jealousy on Melanie’s part, Kelly being such a star. But surely that wouldn’t have been enough to commit murder over. Besides, around the time Kelly was killed, Melanie had already begun to blossom as a doctor. It must have been months earlier when she aced the Bessie McDonald case that started to build up her confidence. So people were well into making a fuss over her and her own work by that summer. He vividly recalled how she’d basked in all the attention. At times she carried it too far, the way she evidently craved and reveled in adulation. Judging from her grandstanding with the residents these last few days, he could see that nothing had changed on that front. But back then, as far as he could remember, after achieving her own moments in the spotlight, she threw off the old resentments about Kelly. If anything, he remembered Kelly growing cool to Melanie. She also seemed to find Melanie’s newfound enjoyment of being in the center of things during teaching rounds a bit off-putting. But he’d never heard words about it between the two women.

  Yet a vague pattern, a sense of déjà vu, a feeling of being on the verge of grasping an elusive link-it-all-together piece swirled as illusively as smoke through his thoughts.

  He stared at the shadows cast by his night-light. They filled the end wall like ink blots, his own shape at their center, but failed to offer the revelations he sought.

  He closed his eyes.

  Images of Melanie at the foot of his bed putting on her show melded with memories of her strutting her stuff at teaching rounds twenty-seven years ago. They lasted but a second, only to be displaced by scenes of the intrusive Samantha McShane playing out one of her signature it’s-all-about-me performances.

  “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

  A dreadful sense of isolation enveloped him and filled his ears with a hollow ringing.

  5:02 A.M.

  Hampton Junction

  Even in the shelter of the trees the snow fell so heavily it practically caused a whiteout, but Mark raced through it, slipping as he went, the previously made depressions in the trail already beginning to fill in. He ignored the noise of his boots crunching on the snow, thinking only of reaching Lucy. His breathing quickened more from fear than exertion, and he sucked in cold flakes with each gasp. They choked him, then burned at the back of his throat. Rounding the bend, he peered ahead to the swirling luminous opening that led to the clearing and poured on the speed.

  His eyes accommodated to the darker forest, and he emerged to find the night cast in more visible shades of gray and silver. Immediately he saw two figures huddled side by side near the front of the building. They were peering down at something. His heart leapt.

  “What’d you forget?” one of them called. Whether they glanced his way, he couldn’t tell. It was too dark to see their faces or clothing.

  Which meant they couldn’t see his. But they’d obviously heard him coming. His making no attempt to hide his arrival must have inadvertently tricked them into assuming one of their buddies had returned. It gave him an edge. All this he realized in an instant. And his plan to exploit that edge came just as fast.

  Bluff and get closer.

  He gave a wave, as if signaling them to keep quiet, and started forward, his head down the way a man might walk in order to watch his footing. He had no strategy of attack other than cross the hund
red yards and see what they were looking at, then trust to instinct and reflex. He tried to remember how his height measured against the two he’d left in the car. The driver at least had appeared to be tall, but there’d be no mistaking that Elvis suit of his. As soon as Mark got close enough to see details of their outfits, he’d have to make his move.

  The pair kept their attention on whatever lay at their feet.

  He quickened his pace, pulling the gun from his pocket.

  He hated firearms of any sort, but as coroner he’d seen his share – enough varieties of weapons to find the safety on the one in his pocket. Feeling for it with his index finger, he clicked it off.

  He’d closed the distance to about eighty yards when he made out a black shape at their feet. It appeared round and far too flat to be a body.

  At sixty he could see it was an opening in the ground.

  The well.

  His stomach clamped down so tightly he almost threw up.

  He broke into a run, watching their backs.

  At forty he stopped and took aim. “Freeze,” he shrieked, all his rage at what they might have done to Lucy funneled into his voice.

  The two men spun around.

  “What the fu-”

  “Shit!”

  The one on the left grabbed for the inside of his jacket.

  Mark shot him first, aiming for his legs.

  The man screamed, grabbed his crotch, and doubled over. His partner immediately took off toward the building, dodging and weaving.

  Sprinting forward, Mark fired on the run, still aiming low. Each shot sounded no louder than opening the twist top on a beer bottle, but the pistol gave a heavy kick. He missed every time. “Stop!” he yelled and drew a bead on his quarry’s back. Before he could pull the trigger, his target darted around the corner and out of sight.

  The man on the ground continued to howl as he writhed in a ball. “You fuck! You goddamned fucking bastard!” The snow under him rapidly turned dark.

  Mark knew he wouldn’t be causing trouble anytime soon, if ever. As for helping him – not even an issue until he had Lucy safe. He nevertheless paused to retrieve what the guy had been reaching for and dropped – a gun identical to the first – then raced by him. “Lucy!” he cried, sliding to a stop at the edge of the opening. Bits of snow dropped off into nothing as he teetered over the hole, and his stomach heaved to his throat. He snapped on his headlamp. Water gleamed back at him from forty feet below, the surface as shiny and black as oil. A white rope trailed into it from a large coil that lay half-buried in slush. He grabbed it up and started to reel it in, his worst fears lurching out of control.