by Wally Duff
“The doctor was able to repair the severed artery,” she said. “He did find a damaged nerve, which he was able to suture together. The bullet hit her femur and fragmented before it exited. He removed the fragments. There was no fracture.” She closed the chart. “Her total EBL was 3000 cc. The last unit of blood is hanging.”
“How long will she be kept in ICU?” Rick asked.
“As soon as she’s stable, she’ll go to a step-down unit, probably tomorrow after the drain is removed from her leg.”
“Let’s not rush her transfer, dear,” Rick said. “We want to make sure she gets the best possible care.”
“And I trust this will all be covered by the hospital,” David said. “I would hate to think that Ms. Jakkobsen would receive an enormous bill for an incident which was clearly not her fault.”
“But David, she... ” I began.
He held up his hand. “She was an innocent bystander when she was shot by one of this hospital’s doctors,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine how this could happen in any competent hospital.”
“I will see my sister now,” Rick said.
The nurse began to walk toward Alexis’s room.
“Sweetie, we won’t need you,” Rick said.
Alexis’s eyes opened when we walked up to her bed. “Thirsty,” she croaked.
“Honey, they probably don’t want you to drink anything right now, but how about a few ice chips?” Rick asked.
She nodded her head and then stopped. “Whoa. Dizzy.”
“From the anesthetic,” he said. “And the blood loss and pain meds.”
She sucked on a few ice chips and then looked up at me.
“You don’t have to worry about Fertig,” I said.
“They arrested him?”
“Not exactly. After he shot you, he made a run for it in a plane.”
“He escaped?” Her eyes widened, and she tried to sit up, but I gently pushed her back down.
“He crashed the plane. It was half full of fuel. He’s dead.”
She took a few seconds to process what I’d said. “And they’re sure it was him?”
“As far as we know, he was the pilot and the only one in the plane when it hit the ground and then exploded in flames,” I said.
“What did you call Peter after his car crash?” she asked.
“A crispy critter.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said. “Fertig deserved it.”
“Hard to argue with that,” I said.
157
On Thursday morning, Cas and Molly came to the hospital to visit Alexis. Linda finally stopped pouting and was there too. We sat in the ICU waiting room while the nurse changed Alexis’s dressing.
I told them about Fertig’s death.
“Cas, you always thought Fertig killed Peter,” I added after I finished. “In a way, you were right.”
“How did he do it?” Cas asked.
“When Alexis and I were in the doctor’s locker room, the locker room supervisor told me that one morning before Peter killed himself, he slipped on his shoes and cut himself,” I said.
“How the heck did that happen?” Molly asked.
“There was a knife blade sticking up in the sole of his shoe,” I said. “Peter assumed he had previously stepped on a scalpel in the OR, and the blade had finally worked through the sole and cut him.”
“But how did that kill him?” Cas asked.
“Last night while I was sitting with Alexis, I thought I’d figured it out. I called Eddie and he confirmed it.”
“What did he tell you?” Cas asked.
“That the AIDS virus can’t survive very long on an object like a knife blade before it’s no longer pathogenic.”
“Unless a person had access to fresh blood infected with the virus, which Fertig had,” Cas said.
“Peter always came to the OR at the same time,” I said. “Fertig slipped the knife blade into Peter’s shoe right before he got there. Then, Fertig shoved his hand in and cut himself. Peter walked in a couple of minutes later and put on his shoe.”
“Fresh blood, knife, AIDS,” Linda said.
“Exactly,” I said. “Peter put the shoe on not knowing he would cut his foot with an AIDS-contaminated knife blade.”
“Why did Fertig want to give Peter AIDS?” Molly asked.
“He knew Peter had an ego almost as giant as his,” Cas said. “Most doctors do. Fertig didn’t want anyone to know about his having AIDS, and he was certain Peter would feel the same way once he discovered he had it too.”
“Cas is right,” I said. “Peter was a beloved and generous person, but at crunch time, his ego killed him, not Fertig.” I paused. “And Fertig killed himself to hide his AIDS infection too. The proof is that they burned themselves to a crisp to try and hide that they had the AIDS virus.”
“Are you suggesting they killed themselves because they were more concerned about their reputations and what people thought about them than who they were as people?” Linda asked.
“I am.” I nodded at Cas. “We are.”
“But why did Fertig kill those other doctors?” Molly asked.
“Fertig didn’t want the committee members to continue the investigation and find out what Peter had discovered on his own, and he killed them,” I said.
“But what was Peter’s message to us?” Molly asked.
“Maybe Peter realized the only way he could have gotten AIDS was from the knife cut and it was Fertig who engineered it. But it’s no longer important,” I said. “They’re both dead.”
158
On Friday, we all visited Alexis again. This time Shanda joined us. In the afternoon, Alexis’s two kids came home from college to check on their mom, and we didn’t bother them.
Her kids left the hospital on Saturday morning to go back to school. Cas and I came in to visit that afternoon. The nurses told us that Alexis would have her drain removed after we left and then be transferred to a room on the med/surg floor.
She was also going to begin physical therapy, and the nurse suggested we give Alexis Sunday off from our visitations.
On Sunday afternoon, after Carter came home from an emergency work meeting, we began our preparations for Thanksgiving on Thursday. My parents are flying in that morning to join us and Carter’s parents for a traditional meal prepared mostly by Carter.
On Sunday night, I made dinner. After Kerry was asleep, Carter and I snuggled on the couch.
“The lamb chops were superb,” he said. “Perfectly prepared.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Sometimes I need to feel like a normal mommy again, and this was definitely one of those times. What did Brittany find out in Switzerland?”
“She went to the address where Fertig had been going. It wasn’t a bank. It’s one of the world’s most exclusive medical facilities treating patients with AIDS.”
“Which he contracted in Africa.”
He smiled. “How did you discover that?”
“I figured it out after I started going over my files on this story.”
“What tipped you off?”
“Fertig’s trips. I had the flight records of the time he spent traveling to Brazil and Africa. And then fourteen months ago, he stopped going to Africa and began going to Switzerland. Why?”
He sipped his wine.
“You and I assumed he was flying to Switzerland monthly to hide money in a Swiss bank,” I said.
“We did,” Carter said. “So did Brittany.”
“But we were wrong. When he started the monthly AIDS treatments in Switzerland, he lost his hair.”
“If he didn’t hide that, everyone would find out.”
“And to keep that from happening he needed wigs.”
“David and Rick were your main sources, correct?”
“Yep. They called Fertig’s hair stylist, Leslie Van Horn, and he confirmed he’d ordered the wigs for Fertig one year ago. They came from China.”
159
“That explains what Mrs. Warren did
after Fertig’s plane crash,” Carter said.
My stomach began to churn. “Is she leaning on you again?”
“She is. Last night, she made it abundantly clear to our publisher that she did not want any negative press about Fertig.”
I could feel heat rise in my face. “But he was a killer. Isn’t that front-page news? Forget the AIDS business. Did those doctors die for nothing? What about them?”
“Her stance is that there is no substantial proof that he killed any doctors.”
“What about Alexis? He freaking shot her!” I didn’t exactly yell it, but I wanted to.
He finished his glass of wine. “I know she’s a close friend of yours, and I like her, too, but apparently she isn’t as certain as you are that she can identify the assailant.”
I sat up. “That’s idiotic, Carter. I was there. He shot her.”
“Given the publisher’s meeting with Mrs. Warren last night, today I stopped at the hospital to talk to Alexis about the story.”
“That was your work emergency?”
“It was, and it was a good thing I met with her.”
I began to feel queasy.
“I was stunned when she said she now has post-traumatic stress disorder and does not remember what happened to her,” he continued.
I felt like my head was going to explode. “I... I’m speechless.”
“Honey, I’m sorry, but I’m betting it was Mrs. Warren who orchestrated this, because I saw Mr. Warren and his son exiting Alexis’s room when I arrived.”
“Alexis would never...”
He held up his hand. “It’s probable that the hospital has already settled with her for her injuries. It would seem logical that the owners of the hospital might suggest to the doctors under their employment that in the future they use the pharmaceuticals she represents.”
“Don’t you mean ‘owner’ of the hospital?”
He smiled widely. “You have the whole story. I am in awe of your talent, and I want to celebrate.”
Carter left the room and came back with a box of Godiva chocolates for me, a tradition he’d begun when I came home from the hospital after being blown up pursuing the abortion clinic bomber story. He had a bottle of a 1995 Chateau d’ Y’quem from our wine cellar, which he opened with a flourish. He poured two glasses and handed one to me.
“I have saved this dessert wine for a very special occasion, and this is it.” He lifted his glass in a toast. “To the most amazing investigative reporter I have ever known.”
I sniffed it, and then held it in my mouth before I swallowed. “This is pure heaven. I wish I deserved it. Like they say in baseball: good field, no hit. I have a story, but I can’t write it.”
160
Monday, I was way past angry. I had been up the entire night thinking about what I was going to say to Alexis. She was my friend, or at least I had thought she was. I had helped save her, and now I felt like our friendship was shattered forever.
I was fully prepared to let her have it when I walked into her room on the med/surg floor, but she wasn’t there.
I went to the nurse’s station. “Where is Alexis?” I asked.
“She’s walking down to the parking garage and back,” the nurse said. “Or at least trying to.”
“Is that smart given the severity of her injury?”
“She demands to be discharged to get home for Thanksgiving, but the doctor won’t let her go until she’s able to ambulate on her own. This is the first time she’s been up walking except in her room or with assistance in physical therapy, which she started yesterday morning.”
The nurse went back to work. I returned to Alexis’s posh suite. According to David, it was the medical equivalent of the presidential suite in a five-star hotel. The Warrens thought of everything to keep her happy. I wondered how much money Diane Warren was going to give to her. If this suite was an example, Alexis had hit the lottery.
The room had a large walk-in closet. Except for the jacket and blouse, which the ER nurses had cut up, the clothes Alexis wore when she was shot had been cleaned and hung in the closet. Her freshly polished Prada sunglasses and black high-heeled pumps sat on the counter. The way things were going, I was shocked they hadn’t given her a whole new wardrobe.
I fingered the sunglasses and remembered the terrifying moment when I saw her lying on the floor in an expanding pool of blood trying to crawl toward me for help. I’d put the sunglasses in her purse, which I’d then placed on the gurney along with her bloody shoes before she was rushed to the ER.
That was when I thought she was my friend.
Her big black purse was missing. It was probably being held by security so no one would steal anything out of it. Or maybe Diane Warren bought her a bigger one to carry the money she would lavish on Alexis.
The acid in my stomach boiled up into the back of my throat. I wanted to give Alexis hell, and I wasn’t going to do it in an empty room. The nurse told me my former friend’s goal was to walk to the parking garage and return to her room to prove to her doctor she was strong enough to go home.
I went that way, too, practicing what I was going to say when I caught up with her.
161
I stomped down the hospital’s hallway, rehearsing over and over in my head my rant to Alexis. When I reached the door to the parking garage, I saw that the entire door and frame had been replaced.
Opening the door, I looked around in the garage for Alexis, but she wasn’t there. I retraced my steps to see if she had gone to the spot where she was shot. She was probably going to see if Diane Warren had put up a plaque honoring her for not telling the truth.
I vowed to myself I wouldn’t cry when I began yelling at her, but so many things had happened: Fertig and Warren killing themselves, the doctors being murdered, and the man threatening me.
This was a terrific story to write, and she had screwed me out of it.
There she is!
In the distance I saw Alexis holding onto the wall with her left hand as she limped toward the spot where she’d fallen. She wore hospital slippers. The slide of her right foot and slap of the slipper hitting her left heel softly echoed off the tile floor and walls of the hallway as she moved forward.
The mystery of her missing purse was solved because she carried it. It was probably full of thousand-dollar bills.
The yellow crime scene tape had been removed, but even from a distance I could see the dry blood spatters on the wall and floor. The remnants of the broken security camera still dangled from the ceiling near where she’d been shot.
Standing next to the dried blood on the floor, she put her purse down and turned toward the cabinet that housed a fire extinguisher. She opened the glass door and kicked off her left slipper. Then she bent over and removed the slipper from her right foot.
She grabbed the top of the glass door with both hands and planted her left foot inside the cabinet. She simultaneously pulled with her hands and pushed with her left leg toward the ceiling.
She slid one of the tiles back a few inches and pulled out a large white bundle. She threw it to the floor and moved the tile back in place.
Her athletic skills were obvious as she hopped down, landing lightly on her left leg. Standing with her back to me, she rubbed her right leg and then stooped down and put on her slippers.
Then she picked up the bundle.
“I came here to give you hell for not testifying against Fertig,” I said, my voice reverberating in the empty hallway. “Looks like I’m going to have to rethink that.”
162
Alexis whipped around. “Tina? This isn’t what it looks like. I can explain everything.”
She fingered the bundle. It looked like a doctor’s white lab coat wrapped around something else. I put my hand in my purse and grasped my Glock. We were still at least sixty feet apart.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, taking a step forward.
“It was all the doctors’ fault,” Alexis said. “They wouldn’t help me keep my job b
y writing more scripts, so they had to go.”
She took a step toward me.
“Go?”