Third Strike: A Charlie Fox Mystery

by Zoe Sharp

  We’d left her organizing her trip and were headed back up towards Boston when Parker called to inform us of Collingwood’s displeasure.

  Now I asked, “And how did he know we aren’t on Long Island, anyway?”

  This time, I heard the smile in Parker’s voice at my naïveté. “He’s with the government, Charlie,” he said. “They have access to just about anything that’s logged-on to a computer—credit cards, cell phones, flight manifests, carrental companies, hotel registers. You name it.”

  “Shit,” I muttered, earning me another clearly audible intake of breath from the rear.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Parker said dryly. “One last thing,” he added. “Collingwood knows that you’re carrying—must have pulled the flight details and picked up that you checked firearms—and he knows you don’t have the permits for Massachusetts. He’s hinted that he could have you both picked up just for that. If things get hairy up there, they’re going to go bad pretty fast. Just remember. And watch your backs, both of you.”

  “We will,” I said gravely. “Thanks, Parker.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, matching his tone to mine. “Keep in touch.”

  As soon as I’d hit the button to end the call, Sean said brusquely, “It’s obviously not good news. So, what gives?”

  Briefly, concisely, I told him Parker’s latest information about Collingwood, aware as I spoke of the solid weight of the SIG at my waist. Already, I’d feel lost without it, especially in light of this morning’s discovery.

  “So, what do we do now?” I said when I was done, twisting in my seat so I could take in my parents’ anxious faces. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “We go to the hospital,” my father said slowly. He glanced up, mouth thinning as the decision firmed. “We go and look at Jeremy’s records at the source, so to speak.”

  “Don’t you think,” Sean put in, “that whoever took the journal from Miranda’s house will also have covered that angle? And be expecting us?”

  “Probably,” my father said, frowning, “but they may well have assumed that the records were secure where they were, and best left alone.”

  “Interesting you should use the word secure there,” Sean said, flicking his eyes to my father in the rearview mirror. “How difficult is it going to be to gain access to them?”

  My father gave a tight little smile. “Well,” he murmured, “let’s go and find out, shall we?”

  But first he leaned forwards in his seat and directed Sean through the suburbs to one of the numerous small shopping malls, and then to a particular store that seemed to sell brightly colored pajamas, if its window display was anything to go by. It was only when we got inside that I discovered the place sold surgical scrubs.

  “If one wants to blend in with a forest,” my father murmured, “it’s best to dress like a tree, don’t you think?”

  The question that formed in my head—how my father knew the place was even here—was answered as soon as we walked through the door. The elderly man behind the counter greeted him by name like an old friend, and asked how the bone work was going. He greeted the next customer with the same easy geniality.

  We moved deeper into the store and Sean nudged my father’s arm as soon as we were out of earshot. “Is this the only surgical-garb shop in the area?”

  “Of course not,” my father said, nonplussed by the question. “But this is the place Jeremy recommended. He used to use it all the time, and they should have everything we need here.”

  Sean suppressed an annoyed sigh. “Yeah, including an owner with photographic recall,” he said, “who will no doubt remember us six months after we’ve gone—and be able to describe us very nicely to the police. Did it not occur to you that picking somewhere you’re not known might have been a better idea?”

  “I’m not planning on engaging in any activity that would interest the police,” my father shot back in a savage whisper, trying to hide the pink stain that had risen from his shirt collar. He had, after all, engaged in plenty so far. “Besides, all we’re going to do is look at some records, not burn the place to the ground.”

  “Well, just supposing things get a little more involved than that?” Sean said.

  My father looked him up and down with insulting calculation. “Well, I’m sure I can rely on you to start a fire, if need be.”

  He stalked along the shelves and quickly outfitted the pair of us in dull hospital garb. It was not, I concluded quickly, designed to flatter. My father was annoyed that Sean wouldn’t carry his selections to the cash register for him.

  “If you want to shop, carry it yourself,” Sean said flatly.

  There was a very good tactical reason for Sean needing to keep his hands free, but by not explaining it, he just came across as rude and argumentative. I scowled at him behind my father’s back. Sean gave me a bland stare in return.

  I had to give my father a swift nudge in the ribs when he would have dragged out his platinum AmEx to pay for the gear. We were already leaving a trail that a bloodhound with a heavy cold could have followed through a nest of skunks. There was no point, I reasoned, as I avoided eye contact with the security camera on the way out, in making things worse.

  CHAPTER 20

  The hospital where Jeremy Lee had been both a doctor and a patient was set a long way back from the road on a huge sprawling piece of land south of Boston itself.

  I still had trouble getting my head round how wasteful America was with its land. Unless you were in the heart of a big city, nobody seemed to bother about redeveloping brownfield sites. They just boarded up the old building and went and broke ground somewhere fresh. Even the smallest business had a car park the size of Sweden.

  It seemed to take forever to reach the hospital entrance. We drove in through carefully landscaped grounds that looked more like a golf club than a medical facility, with fiercely posted speed limits. I hoped the ambulances had a faster approach road, or their emergency patients were likely to expire between the main road and the front door.

  We’d already detoured via a roadside rest stop for Sean and I to change into our disguises. My father had decided to bluff it out in the role he played best—arrogant surgeon. He would walk my mother in through the front entrance and we’d meet up inside. Entirely from memory, he gave us precise directions to the elevators and the stairwell.

  “They’re highly unlikely to have removed Jeremy’s records from the system yet,” he said. “All I need is an empty office with a computer terminal.” His eyes flicked over the pair of us. “You won’t be able to take your guns.”

  Sean’s silence spoke louder than any verbal disagreement would have done but eventually he sighed and shoved the Glock, still in its holster, into the Navigator’s glove box. I added my SIG and, when I glanced at him, caught my father’s satisfied little smile, like he’d just won a point of principle rather than necessity.

  I knew Sean was as unhappy about this as he was about relying on my father’s intel, but he bore it without comment. He’d always been able to listen to orders and evaluate them in a detached manner, even when they were given by officers he despised.

  The plan we loosely devised was that Sean and I would go in via the underground ambulance entrance in the guise of nicotine junkies. To this end, Sean had even picked up a discarded cigarette packet and straightened it out, to add a layer of verisimilitude. The empty packet sat on top of the dash and the strange pervasive smell of unburned tobacco leached into the atmosphere inside the Navigator.

  “What about me?” my mother asked. She had no surgical wear. “I can play some useful part, surely? If you recall, darling, I was awfully good at amateur dramatics when I was younger.”

  “You were.” My father smiled at her fondly if somewhat patronizingly, I thought, and patted her hand. “In that case, we’ll hold you in reserve as our secret weapon.”

  She sat up a little straighter and smiled back, hearing only praise.

  “Look, can we go and get th
is over with before I go old and gray?” I said, a little tartly, earning a reproachful look from both of them. When was I going to outgrow that?

  We parked up as far away from the security cameras as we could manage and parted company, walking quickly. As my father had predicted, nobody paid us the slightest attention as we ambled inside the building, discussing a nonexistent cop show we were supposed to have watched on TV the night before.

  The unflattering skullcap was uncomfortable to someone whose only regular headgear was a bike helmet. I tugged the cap down over my forehead, rubbing the skin carefully as I did so. The lump from when I’d head-butted Vondie in my mother’s drawing room seemed to be taking a long time to disappear. I wondered how her nose was feeling.

  The four of us rendezvoused in the ER, where we were swallowed up in the usual bustle. My mother was sitting in the waiting area, close to the stairs, leafing through a magazine. My father, I noticed, had already managed to purloin a white coat and a stethoscope from somewhere, together with what looked suspiciously like an official ID card on a lanyard around his neck. No doubt he knew the layout of the place well enough to know where such things were kept, and the overwhelming self-confidence to simply help himself. I’d no idea his criminal tendencies were so well developed.

  “Why couldn’t we just do that?” I grouched quietly, gesturing to my shapeless garb.

  Sean’s brow quirked. He was also wearing the delightful little skullcap, but on him it looked good. That wasn’t a stretch. On him, just about anything looked good.

  “Because there would be too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” my father said.

  “These days,” Sean said, “I think you’ll find that’s Native Americans.”

  “If you’ve quite finished,” my father muttered, “perhaps we could concentrate on the matter at hand? There are a couple of security people loitering near the lift and I’d rather not push my luck too far, if I can help it.” He gave a small, almost embarrassed smile. “They may have been briefed to keep an eye out for me.”

  “So, we need a diversion,” Sean said, eyes narrowed. He turned to me and opened his mouth but my father held up his hand.

  “Leave this to me.” He strode away, looking very much at home in this environment.

  Along one side of the emergency room was a row of three glass-walled rooms where patients could be treated more fully. There were Venetian blinds for when more privacy was required. Like watching a movie with the sound turned off, we saw my father enter the middle room where an unattended patient appeared to be either unconscious or asleep, wired up to various monitors. After a quick flick through the chart, he moved alongside the bed and did something that we hardly caught, before leaving quickly. For a few moments nothing happened. Then an alarm began to sound and the nearest medical staff rushed past him to deal with it.

  My father calmly walked back to us.

  “Shall we go?” he suggested quietly, not breaking stride as he reached us and swept past, heading for the stairs. “It won’t take them more than a few moments to work out what I’ve done.”

  “What the hell did you do?” I demanded in a whisper. “Kill him?”

  “Hardly.” He shot me a pained little glance as we sidestepped the security personnel whose eyes, naturally enough, were on the drama in front of them and not on us. “I merely loosened his blood-oxygen sensor. Even a very junior intern,” he added with a slightly scathing note in his voice, “would know enough to check that before attempting to resuscitate him.”

  “Oh well,” I said under my breath as we took the stairs two at a time and the clamor dropped away behind us, “that’s all right, then.”

  He led us without hesitation to the elevator, then up another two floors and through a maze of corridors, finally halting outside an unmarked door that looked no different from any of the others. He tried the handle. It wouldn’t turn. My father’s face took on a piqued look, as if the locked door was a personal affront.

  “This one, I think you can leave to me,” Sean murmured, producing a pick set from his pocket and moving my father aside. The lock was clearly intended to keep out casual trespassers rather than those with more serious intent, and it yielded to Sean’s nimble fingers in less than a minute.

  He straightened and pushed the door open, meeting my father’s sharp gaze with a bland expression on his face. I could see that my father really wanted to snipe at Sean further for his obviously illegal abilities, but even he recognized it would be hypocritical to do so under the circumstances.

  Inside, the room turned out to be a cramped office, its floor space three-quarters occupied by two chairs and a desk, which was empty apart from a double filing tray, a telephone, and a blank computer terminal. All the usual office detritus of books, photographs and paperwork was missing, leaving shadows in the dust and faded patches on the walls.

  My father crossed to the desk and sat behind it, hitting the power button on the computer as he reached for his glasses.

  “How did you know this would be empty?” I asked.

  His eyes flicked over me briefly. “This was Jeremy’s office,” he said shortly, and turned his attention back to the screen. “His was a particular specialty. Recruiting his replacement will take some time.”

  “Are you sure you can access his records from here?” Sean asked.

  “I’ll answer that in just a moment,” my father said, attacking the keyboard once the computer had booted itself up. I tried not to hang over his shoulder as he tapped his name and password into the required boxes.

  The computer thought for a moment, then came up with the message: ACCESS DENIED.

  “Damn,” I muttered. “What now?”

  “Hm, they have been thorough, haven’t they?” my father murmured, not sounding at all surprised. “But not that thorough, I think.”

  This time, he typed Jeremy Lee into the name field, and a seven-character password. I caught only the first couple of letters—M and I—but I could guess the rest. His wife’s name. I remembered the photograph Miranda had showed us of the pair of them on the yacht, happy, carefree, and my throat constricted.

  My father hit ENTER. The computer clicked and whirred again, thought about being awkward while we held our collective breath, and then gave up its secrets.

  It didn’t take more than a few seconds for my father to navigate his way to the appropriate section of the Electronic Medical Record system and key in the name of his dead colleague. Within moments, Jeremy Lee’s official patient records were on screen for us to see.

  My father leaned closer, scanning the information with the mental dexterity of a natural speed reader. His face darkened as he read on in silence, his only movement to stab the key to page down. We didn’t interrupt him until he was done.

  “Fabrication,” he snapped, almost throwing himself back in the chair. “Maybe they’ve been more thorough than I first thought.”

  “What does it say?”

  “That Jeremy suffered multiple fractures of his thoracic vertebrae in his fall, causing hemiplegia—lower-body paralysis—which led to a urinary tract infection, in turn leading to septicemia, which killed him.”

  “And is that feasible?”

  “As a course of events? Perfectly,” my father said, even more clipped than usual. “Hemiplegia often causes such problems, in that the patient can’t adequately empty his bladder. Having a lot of urine in the bladder at all times is a situation ripe for a UTI.” He nodded toward the screen. “They note that he had an indwelling Foley catheter to keep his bladder empty, which is a common enough route for infection. All very logical,” he said bitterly. “All very made up.”

  “So, no mention of osteoporosis?” Sean said. “Spinal or otherwise?”

  My father gave a snort. “Oh yes, as a minor side issue. But as a major factor of his condition? No.” He scrolled back up through the document. “Nor is the Storax treatment mentioned anywhere in his records, despite the fact that the technicians Storax sent clearly identified its presen
ce. They state he was on heavy-duty antibiotics for the infection, and Oxy-Contin for the pain. Nothing else.”

  “What about cause of death?” I asked.

  “Well, I’d hardly expect them to admit in black and white that it was the hundred milligrams of morphine injected into his IV line that did the job.” He unhooked his glasses and almost threw them onto the desktop, hard enough for them to clatter against the surface, and stared after them as though he was going to be able to divine some kind of answer in the grain.

  Eventually, he looked up, hollow-eyed. “We’re at a dead end. Jeremy’s already been cremated and they’ve covered their tracks to the point where it would be just my word against theirs. And they’ve ensured that my word would not carry very much weight at the moment.”

  Sean glanced at his watch. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “That little stunt you pulled downstairs is likely to have them looking for a practical joker.”

  My father reached towards the keyboard again, but Sean leaned across him and switched on the printer. “Print it all out and we’ll take it with us,” he said. “Mrs. Lee will be able to testify how much of it is false.”

  For a moment, my father looked scandalized at the thought of actually stealing a patient’s records. Then I saw the realization hit that the originals had been stolen well before he’d been anywhere near them.

  A watched printer, like a watched kettle, takes forever to boil. This one looked modern but might as well have been a monk with a quill pen dipped in ink for all the time it took to go through its start-up routine and begin spitting out the pages. Just as the last one settled into the catch tray, the phone on the desk began to ring.

  My father glanced up. “They’re on the ball,” he said tightly. “They must have the file flagged on the EMR and they’re checking up on who’s accessing it.”

  Sean snatched the papers out of the printer. “Okay, we’re out of here,” he said to my father. “You may as well leave the computer on—they already know we’ve been in there.” He jerked his head to me. “I’ll take him out the way we came in. You get your mother and meet us, okay?”