Bitter Truth

by CJ Lyons

  “Blanco Canyon. He’s at Blanco Canyon.”

  “What happened?”

  “I followed him out from Gus’s place. He told me he was going to re-open my husband’s death investigation. The fool thought I’d be excited, that I’d want to know the truth. Or maybe he was testing me, to see how I’d react. Either way, I couldn’t let him dig into Max’s death. Plus I knew he was suspicious about Davenport’s men. He didn’t buy that they were just geologists on a fishing trip. I’d heard Gus tell him about a good place to find huckleberries, a meadow above Blanco Canyon. When Bill turned up the road headed there, I followed him. It’s a dead spot for everything—cell, satellite phones, GPS. Seemed perfect. I hit him with the cattle prod and pushed him over the cliff. That’s where you’ll find his body. Blanco Canyon.”

  Tabby yawned and shifted his position on the boulder, eyeing Judith like she was a midnight snack.

  “I told you everything,” Judith insisted. “Now get me the hell away from that damn cat!”

  The state police rescue helicopter found Bill exactly where Lucy had told them he was. She only wished she could have gone herself, but instead, once she’d turned Judith over to her own deputies along with the staties, Harriet drove Lucy over to Deena’s to wait for word from the rescue team.

  Finally the radio crackled. “Rescue three for Magruder two, do you copy?”

  Deena’s hand was trembling so hard that Lucy reached past her for the handset. “Magruder two, copy. You have Mrs. Beachey here.” She wanted them to know that Deena was there in case they were sending bad news.

  Thankfully, good news always came faster than bad. “We found him. He’s hurt but alive. We’ve got him in the helo and are flying direct to Harborview Trauma Center. He says to tell Deena not to worry.”

  Deena’s mom and sister clapped their hands while Deena slumped against Lucy, speechless.

  “Tell Bill she’s gonna kill him for making her worry,” Lucy said, knowing that would make Bill smile. “And that she’ll meet him in Seattle.”

  “Ten-four. Rescue three out.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Thanks to one of the charter pilots ferrying them, Lucy and Deena arrived at the trauma center only a few hours after Bill. He was in surgery most of the night, but in the meantime, Nick had his ankle casted and was discharged, while Gleason was admitted. Thankfully, they were informed, he’d be fine.

  The sun was up before the surgeon finally came to the waiting room where Nick and Lucy were sitting with Deena. “Your husband was quite lucky. In a way, the combination of his blood loss, mild hypothermia, and dehydration saved his life—it kept his blood pressure low enough that the bleeding and swelling from his skull fracture weren’t immediately life-threatening. But it was a good thing we found him when we did.”

  Deena squeezed Lucy’s hand at that. “So he’ll be all right?”

  “He should make a full recovery,” the surgeon assured her. “Though it’ll take a while. In addition to the head trauma, he suffered a subcapsular splenic hematoma that we’ll be monitoring, but I think he’ll be able to keep his spleen. Broken zygoma, broken humerus, bilateral rib fractures—but luckily no pneumothorax. Right hip displacement, which we surgically reduced while we repaired his lacerated saphenous vein. And we had to do an open reduction of his tib-fib fracture on the left, but it looks like there’s no permanent nerve damage or vascular compromise.” The surgeon paused, as if waiting for applause. “You’ll be able to see him soon. He’s just waking up from the anesthesia.”

  Then he left. Deena appeared stunned. Lucy jumped in to translate—she’d been through the drill enough times with victims, medical reports, and, unfortunately, her own injuries. “There’s a bit of bleeding around his spleen that they’re watching. A broken cheekbone and a broken arm. No collapsed lung, but a few cracked ribs—”

  “So don’t make him laugh,” Nick added, his arm wrapped around his own bruised ribs.

  “They fixed his hip, and he had a broken leg as well—but instead of a cast, he’ll have pins and screws and braces on both the inside and outside of his leg, just to help it mend faster.”

  Nick winced at that and reached for Lucy’s hand. She was sure he was remembering her own Erector Set nightmare of hardware from January.

  Later that afternoon, Deena escorted Nick and Lucy in to see Bill. His head was swathed in bandages, both eyes were blackened and almost swelled shut, IVs were running in one arm while the other was in a cast and bound to his chest, one leg was bristling with hardware, and monitor wires were attached to everything from head to toe.

  But he was alive, if not quite awake. They sat for a while with Deena while Bill dozed, occasionally waking enough for her to give him a sip of water.

  “What about the animals in Judith’s zoo?” Deena asked.

  “I asked Gleason about them,” Lucy answered. “He says he knows a rich guy with a spread over in Big Sky who has a licensed wildlife sanctuary.” She’d been glad to learn that Tabby’s attack wasn’t going to be held against the tiger. After all, if anything, he’d shown considerable restraint. More than Lucy had—threatening a wounded woman. She cringed with shame at the thought of it, but then looked at Bill’s fingers wrapped around Deena’s and just couldn’t find it in her to be remorseful. Which maybe she should be even more ashamed of, she wasn’t sure.

  “Funny,” Lucy continued, “but in a way Bill came out the winner. I know that sounds weird, but to the end, all Judith kept asking, what drove her to keep going when she could have walked away scot free, wasn’t the gold. Instead, she was obsessed with knowing where she’d gone wrong. She just couldn’t believe Bill was smarter than her.”

  Deena smiled. “Bill is tons smarter than most people gave him credit for. He pays attention; that’s his secret weapon.”

  Nick rocked against his crutches, redistributing his weight away from his injured leg. “I know why Bill suspected that Max didn’t die of an accidental snakebite.”

  Lucy and Deena turned to him. “You do? What was it?”

  “The snakes,” came a hoarse whisper from the bed. Bill’s eyes fluttered as open as they could given the swelling. “I asked her. About the snakes.”

  “They were counterfeit,” Nick said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think I’ve put together the pieces Bill hadn’t had a chance to gather. Max Keenan died from a coral snake bite, right? Judith didn’t fake his autopsy—in fact, since she was next of kin, she asked the Idaho County coroner to perform his death investigation.”

  “Right,” Lucy said. “He died from coral snake envenomation. But there was a coral snake there—Max’s DNA was recovered from it and its cage. And Judith’s alibi was rock solid. So how could that be counterfeit?”

  “She switched the snake,” Nick answered. “All the time Max was displaying those snakes, they weren’t the real thing—they were lookalikes. Harriet gave me the original shipping invoices, and I found old videos and photos from tourists—it was tough because the thick glass on the snake habitats was designed to warp any efforts to get a close look or take clear photos, but if you look at enough of the pictures—or if, like Bill, you get real photos of the dead animals that were included in Max’s autopsy report, you can see. The so-called copperhead was actually a corn snake, the water moccasin was a regular brown water snake, the black mamba was a racer snake, and so on. Except the coral snake. That was real—at least the one that killed Max was. But the original shipping information was for lampropeltis triangulum annulata.”

  “In English?” Lucy asked, but she couldn’t hide her smile. Nick was so damned cute when he geeked out.

  “Mexican milk snake.”

  “Because he’d stocked the exhibit with harmless lookalikes, Max thought the snakes couldn’t hurt him? So he wasn’t worried when one bit him?” Deena asked.

  “Maybe he didn’t know,” Bill said, his voice growing stronger.

  “Right,” Nick said. “Real coral snakes have such shar
p fangs that their bite can be painless. However it happened, Judith switched the snakes, created an alibi for when Max was due to clean the cages, and bang, the perfect crime.”

  “Until Bill came along and started asking questions,” Deena said proudly.

  “Until Bill came along,” Nick repeated. “The only lawman in four decades smart enough to suspect Judith of murder.”

  Lucy wrapped her arm around Nick and leaned into him. “Pretty clever, Dr. Callahan. I knew there was a reason I married you.”

  “Here I thought it was for my looks.” He glanced at the clock. “We have to go, or we’re going to be late.” He grabbed his crutches and started for the door.

  Bill frowned. “Go where?”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “Nick decided I needed a second opinion about my leg. So he called in a favor.”

  She went to Bill and bent over to plant a kiss on a small patch of his forehead that didn’t appear too badly bruised. “Glad to have you back with us.”

  “Glad to be here.” He reached for her arm, his IV tubing clacking against the bed rail. “Lucy, thanks.”

  “You’d do the same for me. Besides, I wasn’t alone.”

  “Good luck,” Deena called out, as Lucy joined Nick out in the hall.

  They walked across the medical center to the outpatient complex. “You know,” he said as he hopped along beside her with his crutches, “your ankle splint and walking stick saved the day.”

  “Along with Megan’s paracord bracelet. She’s never going to let me live that down, asking her to make me another one.” They reached the clinic door, and she turned to him. “Wait. Are you saying you’re okay either way? If I keep my leg, even if I never get better than I am now?”

  He nestled his crutches against his body and pulled her close. “I’m happy with whatever you decide. Just saying, you’re pretty damn perfect already. If anyone cares about my opinion.”

  She pulled the door open and held it for him. “Let’s just see what Gleason’s mom has to say. Then we can decide.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Lucy held Nick’s hand as they sat in Gleason’s mother’s office. Unlike the other surgeons Lucy had dealt with, Dr. Annette Gleason believed in allowing her patients to get dressed and join her in her office for treatment discussions rather than having them wait in sterile and intimidating exam rooms. She also didn’t crowd her office walls with large gilt-framed diplomas. Instead, her walls held artwork and photographs from her medical missions to Malawi, the Congo, Pakistan, Haiti, and Syria.

  She knocked on her own office door before entering. Dr. Gleason was older than Lucy’s other surgeons, in her mid to late fifties, with dark hair streaked with gray. She was fit and trim—every orthopedic surgeon Lucy had met had that in common—but she moved with the grace of a ballet dancer rather than the stride of an athlete.

  “Do you guys need anything? Coffee? Juice? We don’t offer pop because the sugar and carbonation are deadly to bone health.”

  Lucy squeezed Nick’s hand, too nervous to answer. “No thanks, we’re good,” he said. “Thanks for seeing us so quickly.”

  “Least I could do after you saved my son’s life.” She beamed at a photo of Gleason hanging behind her desk. He was in his official Forest Service uniform, complete with Smokey the Bear hat tilted at a rakish angle. “I’m not sure I’ll ever find a way to fully repay you for that.”

  Dr. Gleason took the empty seat beside them. Another surprise—Lucy had expected her to sit down behind the desk. The doctor placed her tablet in front of them and inclined it so they could all see it. She brushed her finger, and an X-ray of Lucy’s ankle appeared. She’d recognize that chaos of hardware anywhere.

  “Bottom line,” she said before Dr. Gleason could start. “Does it need to come off?”

  The surgeon took her time before answering. And in that pause, Lucy felt herself relaxing, breathing out her anxiety and inhaling a sense of…release. Nick was right. Relinquishing control, not constantly trying to outwit fate—it felt good. Not because Lucy didn’t care what happened to her body, but because she knew she’d be fine—they’d be fine—either way.

  Beyond the office door, a printer’s rumble sounded almost like the growl of a snarling dog. Almost. Lucy banished the whiff of memory before it could take hold, and focused on the surgeon.

  “Come off? Would da Vinci slice off the Mona Lisa’s smile? Your ankle is a masterpiece. Not just the surgical feat of engineering but also the work you’ve put in rehabilitating it.” She zoomed out and up to higher on the leg where there were only bones. “Look at that bone density. Excellent.”

  “The other doctor said my bones were too old to heal properly, and that was why we needed to consider amputation.”

  Dr. Gleason made a tutting noise. “Sometimes it’s easier to blame the patient than look for the real cause, especially in cases like yours where there’s every expectation of failure, given the type of trauma and severe damage you sustained.”

  “So, you’re saying she can keep the leg?” Nick leaned forward. “But what about the pain?”

  “Tell me more about it. Given your nerve damage, I’d expect the electrical shocks and muscle fasciculations, early on. Are those staying the same, getting worse, or becoming less frequent?”

  “Not as often and a little less severe.”

  “Definitely not startling her out of her sleep like they used to,” Nick added.

  “Is there a new pain, then? One interfering with proper function?”

  “Yes. I just thought it was the same pain—they always blamed the nerve damage—evolving. But it’s deeper, and almost constant even when I’m not using the leg. Worse with running and walking.”

  The surgeon nodded. She touched the screen again, this time zooming in to one area of bone pierced by screws and a plate. “Do you see here? The slight angle this screw is taking? Wait—you can see it better on this view. Here, where the screw is forced away from neutral by this band of tissue it’s impinging on? It’s rather subtle, but I think at high magnification you can see it.”

  Lucy tried to interpret the shades of gray on the screen. “Kind of. It looks like the screw wants to go in straight, but that tissue is blocking it. Is that my nerve?”

  “Exactly right. As your nerves healed—and I suspect also as the bone healed after you fought the osteomyelitis, the infection in it—this screw began to pinch the outer sheaf of the nerve. That led to inflammation—”

  “Which caused the pain,” Nick finished for her, sounding triumphant. “That infection was why she had to stay in the hospital for so long and had several operations to clean out the damaged tissues.”

  Lucy didn’t remember most of that time—it was all a haze of pain and fever dreams. She’d been sick enough that she’d been in the ICU the first few days, but she really hadn’t known what was going on, not until she woke up days later to find Nick asleep in a chair beside her hospital bed, his head bowed over her chest as if listening for her heart beat, one hand entwined in hers.

  He was the one who’d consented to the surgeries instead of the amputation the first doctors had wanted back then. Which was why Lucy tried never to let him see how much pain she was really in.

  “The problem with bone infections is that even after the infection is gone, they can cause havoc with any hardware. And, to be honest, as long as you have the hardware an infection can return. So, we have two options.”

  “Amputation?” Nick asked.

  “Yes. It would be below the knee—actually, we have quite a lot to work with as far as favorable tissue. Rehab would take some time, but quite frankly, other than the daily management of the stump and prosthesis, your function would be the same as what you have now or even improved. I have patients who run marathons after—in fact, their main complaint is that their non-prosthetic limb slows them down.”

  “What’s the second option?” Lucy asked.

  “We can replace the screw—and while we’re in there, we’ll also grab a sample
and culture it to see if there’s any new infection complicating things, but I doubt it. You’d also need to cut back on your rehab for a short period, just to avoid aggravating things, but you could still do normal activities as you felt like it. And that’s the key here: not pushing yourself to heal faster but instead giving your body a break and letting it heal at its own pace.”

  Lucy grimaced. The concept went against every instinct, but she’d try. “So you think I can keep my leg?”

  “Yes, I do.” Dr. Gleason’s smile was as reassuring as the scent of home-baked cookies. Something about this woman radiated not only confidence—Lucy had seen plenty of that from her other surgeons—but also comfort and serenity. For the first time in a long while, Lucy felt able to relax and place her trust in someone. She could keep her leg, keep her job, keep working on the rest of everything with Nick and Megan. It seemed all too simple—not the fight she was used to.

  “And all you need me to do is take it easy?” Lucy asked.

  Nick chuckled at that. “Doctor, you have no idea—”

  “Oh, believe me, I think I do. But the bottom line here is that the choice is yours. Not mine.”

  Lucy glanced at Nick, who nodded as he intertwined his fingers in hers. “I want to keep it. It’s a part of me. I know that might not make sense—”

  “No, it makes perfect sense. Sometimes we just need a reminder that it’s okay to stop fighting and take care of ourselves. Maybe this is that time for you.”

  Lucy blinked hard at the surgeon’s words. Now she understood what Nick had been trying to tell her: that not fighting, not constantly struggling, was not the same as surrendering. She could still do what she did and take care of her family…and herself. She just couldn’t do it all, not all the time. Not without losing a piece of herself.

  “So, we’ll take it one step at a time,” Dr. Gleason said.

  Lucy couldn’t agree more.