The Near Death Experience (Thaddeus Murfee Legal Thriller Series Book 10)

by John Ellsworth

  “It’s not a better case? Why not?”

  “Because the doctor’s medical malpractice insurance doesn’t cover a wrongful death case. It was covering the medical malpractice case, but an intentional act that results in someone’s death is definitely not covered by insurance. So now the heirs have no one to collect from if the doc’s in jail. Catch Twenty-two.”

  “For certain. So what are you looking for?”

  Detective Constance leaned his chair back on two legs and slapped its frame with his palm.

  “Murder One. There was premeditation.”

  Sanders looked at the bank of windows to his right. His office was on the second floor of the Coconino County Courthouse and he had a partial view of the San Francisco Peaks. Rolling it around in his mind, he finally grunted and turned back to his visitor.

  “First degree it is, then. We can always plead him to second.”

  “That’s your call, Gary. Now, what about a search warrant?”

  “For where?”

  “Well—he was visiting here and staying at Murfee’s ranch.”

  “No reason to search there. Where else?”

  “His home?”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “San Diego.”

  “Our warrant’s no good in San Diego.”

  “Good point. So we just go with what we have?”

  “Tell me about witnesses.”

  Constance nodded and looked up at the ceiling. “Let’s see. He admitted the crime to Dr. Stoudemire at the jail. Before that, he told two security officers and I think two nurses, maybe three, at the hospital that he’d removed her life support because the woman’s spirit asked him to.”

  “So maybe four or five people heard him admit it. Sounds like a classic insanity defense.”

  “Sounds like.” Constance made a winding motion at the side of his head. The international sign of crazy.

  “Uh-huh, exactly. Crazy as a bedbug. So tell me, was this guy still practicing medicine?”

  “Not since he had his own death experience.”

  “What’s he been up to then? Just selling books?”

  “Books, videos, seminars. Plus showing up on TV plugging his book. It’s a best seller. Called The Doctor Is In…Heaven.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Yeah, well they probably aren’t doing book reviews down at Kientzel’s Grille.”

  Sanders blanched. “No, no book reviews. We’ve got bigger fish to fry down there.” He laughed.

  Constance’s eyes narrowed. “So when’s your wife filing for divorce? She must be sick of your carousing.”

  “Not open for discussion. All right. Anything else?”

  “Nope. Want me to give the file to Mrs. Vasquez?”

  “Yes, on your way out drop it on her desk. Tell her I said Murder One.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ll get the calendar set up and send you notice. You’re the chief investigator?”

  Constance nodded, standing and taking back his file. “Yep. Yours truly. Me and Detective Hemenway.”

  “Good. See you in court, Connie.”

  It was Constance’s turn. He said to the DA, “What about it? You on this case personally?”

  “Hell, yes. Very high profile. We’ll have CNN here before it’s all said and done.”

  “Counting those votes already. Between the CNN audience and the voters down at the pub, you’re a shoo-in next time.”

  They laughed and Constance left the office.

  32

  Lincoln Mascari was a hoodlum but never say hoodlums are dumb. And Mascari was the smartest of the smart. He knew the woman with the black hair in the car across the street had been taking pictures of him and using a telephoto lens to do it. In short, she was interested in his face. Interest in his face was a red flag to Mascari: someone was looking for the previous, unimproved version. Which meant someone was after Lincoln Mascari, and that was never good. Friends knew how to get in touch with him through certain people in Chicago. Enemies had been forever left behind. But the woman with the camera? That was too damn close for comfort to this godfather. So, he did what all good hoodlums do; he investigated his environs. Which is to say, he sent out Sicilian toadies all over the neighborhood trying to locate anyone with an interest in him.

  Next door lived the Modiglianis, a family surrounded by mountains of euros from their holdings in merchant ships. Their ships plied all the oceans of the world, primarily delivering olive oil to wholesalers who would move the stuff into restaurants and groceries. Alfredo Modigliani was the patri, the senior alpha of the pack. A ranking member of the Corleonesi, Alfredo frightened even Mascari, and Mascari knew better than to trouble the man. But it was also known the old man and his family were away, and their house was deserted except for staff that came and went, which provided cover for Christine and BAT as they came and went at night, keeping an eye on their prey after the Modigliani house staff had left for the day.

  Mascari’s scouts reported back with some terrible news: a white woman and a black man were keeping watch over Mascari from the Modigliani house. Did they know they had been discovered? Of course not said Diego Luchesi, ex-Special Forces from the Italian navy or Marina Militare. He had scaled the house on the far side, his ropes dangling from a parapet while he found an unlocked upper window and let himself in. Stealthily moving through the hallways and rooms down to the ground floor, he had watched from the shadows as the woman and man trained their optics on the house and grounds of Luchesi’s employer, Lincoln Mascari.

  “Should I end them?” Luchesi wanted to know.

  Mascari shook his head violently. “Of course not! We must know who sent them. That is the question!”

  “How will we do that?”

  “You will shadow them. Eventually, they will lead you to their employer.”

  And so Diego Luchesi was sent out after Christine and BAT, always keeping far enough away that he went unnoticed, his face disguised and altered with wigs and glasses and mustaches and clothing; they noticed nothing.

  * * *

  On the morning of May 12, Christine was parked in an Alfa Romeo a half a block away from Mascari’s sprawling residence. She was alert and carefully surveying the traffic and pedestrians that came and went. Once, one of Mascari’s Mercedes entourages sped by, but Christine made no effort to follow. Mascari’s personal favorite, the S550 wasn’t included in the pack so she did not pursue.

  Mothers with baby strollers passed by in both directions. Joggers came and went. An old man bent low on his walker came down the hill and an hour later came back up the hill. She smiled as he went by, but he looked neither right nor left. “Until the very end,” she said to the man though he didn’t hear her. “With you in spirit.”

  At the other end of the block, BAT was parked in a Ford Taurus rental, ready to follow if Mascari drove by in his direction. He had his radio on, listening to the latest Maroon 5 and wishing he had a Starbucks muffin, for his stomach was growling. In his rearview he could see a speed walker approaching on the driver’s side. The walker appeared to be drinking from a large paper cup. Billy A. Tattinger paid her little mind; joggers and walkers and baby buggies were common in the neighborhood. He was punching in the search button on the radio when he heard a knock on the driver’s side window. He looked up, and there was the speed walker with her drink. BAT rolled down the window and the woman looked as if she were about to speak when she suddenly tossed her drink on BAT and followed it with a blazing cigarette lighter. BAT was shocked at the assault and recoiled in horror. The drink, he realized as he was enveloped in flame, wasn’t a soft drink, but gasoline. From waist to head he was covered in shooting flames and he struggled to slap them out, to find something inside the rental car to snuff them out, but these were his last thoughts as he lost consciousness and burned up alive.

  Christine heard BAT’s screams in her earpiece. She frantically started the Alfa Romeo and squealed away from the curb, making her way up the street tow
ard BAT in her fishtailing car. She leaped out of her car. When she reached him, he sat slumped in his seat--now on fire and burning down to the springs. She watched in horror as her old friend was devoured by the flames. Then she realized she had given herself up by coming to BAT. She desperately looked around for the person or persons she knew would be watching. Running back around to her car, she pushed thoughts of BAT to the back of her mind and realized she was, at that moment, fighting for her own survival. Somehow they had been discovered and their surveillance of Mascari had been found out. BAT’s death was the first to come; she would be next, she knew. Extraordinary measures would be required. It would be necessary for her to leave the country in the fastest way possible.

  Falcone-Borsellino Airport was about twenty-eight kilometers west of Palermo. Her own Gulfstream had dropped her off there, along with BAT, but she had sent it away because its registry was in her own name and keeping it at the airport would have been just inviting discovery.

  So she headed for Lungomare Cristoforo Colombo and ran the stop sign at the intersection, tearing along West. LCC was a narrow, two-lane road with the seaside off to her left and old rental housing and marketplaces to her right. Watching in her rearview mirror with one eye and advancing with the other, it was a nerve-wracking fifteen minutes until she could make the cutover to SS113. She then raced along Via Giuseppe Navarra Erudito until she gained access to E90, the high-speed roadway that would lead to Palermo.

  Her aircraft was on the flight line in Rome and taking off twenty minutes from her panicked call. It would fly directly to Palermo and meet her there. Christine kicked it up to 160 KPH and ran for twenty kilometers at this speed. Then she took an off ramp at Bagheria and squealed into an Espresso gas station/food stop. She told the attendant to fill it and then went inside. To the rear wall, she stole, where she placed her back up against the pastry counter and began watching the arriving vehicles. Five minutes later she was fairly confident she wasn’t being followed. At least not by anyone who had followed her into the station.

  She turned and looked over the glassed-in showcase full of treats, including some elaborately glacéed cakes made of almond paste, and a great variety of cookies. Her favorite was the quaresimale, so she ordered a dozen in keeping with looking like anyone else out for a lark that day. She paid for the gas and cookies and headed back outside to her car. Starting the ignition and watching all around, she nosed the little car back behind the station and waited, engine running. No one came up behind, and no one came around from the front. Which didn’t rule out that they might be waiting out front of the station, but she was taking every precaution until she was safe aboard her aircraft and out over the ocean on her way home. Then she drove around front and retraced her route back to the freeway.

  They came up behind her just beyond Bagheria. It was the black S550 Mercedes that Mascari preferred for himself, judging by the silhouette in her rearview mirror. She kicked it up to 160 KPH and the powerful pursuit car stayed right on her bumper. She then backed it off to 100 KPH and the Mercedes didn’t vary, staying right on her bumper.

  Great, she thought, they had her. The solar reflection denied her a look inside the vehicle. She had no way of knowing if there was just one of them or six. It was impossible to say. Christine took inventory of her predicament, instantly recognizing they had the benefit of knowing the highway and street system of the area while she was, essentially, lost with the GPS directing her travel.

  Traffic flow was increasing as they neared Palermo. Which was a good thing, if she were going to lose them. A quarter of a mile ahead was an eighteen wheeler, and she pulled out and came up behind it. Approaching from the left lane, she saw that it was a double-truck: an eighteen wheeler tanker pulling a second tanker. She swung in behind it and the Mercedes followed suit. After a half mile of close-in driving, she saw an upcoming sign for the next exit ramp. Two kilometers ahead. Now if she could just time it right.

  She watched the odometer spin off a kilometer and then she pulled to the right side of her lane of travel. Up ahead was the exit sign. Waiting until she was no more than a half a kilometer from the off-ramp, she suddenly swerved hard left and shot ahead of the truck, shooting across to the right lane and settling in just ahead of the roaring truck. The Mercedes followed in her path, saw it couldn’t edge in between her and the truck, and broke back across the left lane. She knew the driver was trying to decide whether he should pull ahead of her or back behind the truck. One thing was for sure: he couldn’t stay in the left lane or he would lose her. As he began dropping back with the intention of pulling back behind the trucking rig, the three vehicles came up on the exit ramp, which Christine suddenly swerved onto without warning. There! The truck and the Mercedes blasted on past the exit ramp as the Mercedes driver just couldn’t react in time; he was beyond the turnoff before he even realized she had taken it.

  With a scowl and wave as the two vehicles ran parallel for a hundred feet, Christine braked for the stop sign at the end of the ramp, ran through it, and headed back beneath the highway, pulling left and left again, now coming up on the on ramp running the exact opposite direction of her pursuers, back the way she had just come.

  Two kilometers down, she took the next off ramp, came back across underneath the freeway, and began picking her way toward Palermo on secondary roads, avoiding E90. For the first time that morning, she took a deep breath and assessed her situation. She leaned back in the seat and smiled. She tried a pastry.

  It had occurred to her that Diego Luchesi might have planted a tracking device on the Alfa the same night he had scaled the parapet of the Modigliani house and come inside. But she hadn’t been able to locate it if in fact he had.

  In parallel from the E90, her pursuers were merely running abreast of her now, although separated by three kilometers of houses, markets, and back roads.

  She was never out of sight even when she was.

  33

  At Palermo, she parked the Alfa in a front lot of a Ducati motorcycle dealer on Via Trapani. Her American Express made her the owner of a two-year-old Ducati sprint bike; thirty minutes later she was headed for the airport on the northwest side of town. Christine knew that once inside Palermo airport she could check-in quickly and discreetly in the General Aviation Terminal, completely separated from the hustle and bustle of standing in the lines of regularly scheduled airlines. They also offered a direct approach to her plane.

  Through the fence, she spotted her Gulfstream waiting, just before she turned into the GAT. Once inside the terminal, there was no one in line and she was through the terminal and headed for her aircraft in five minutes. She had made no effort to hide her identity.

  Ambrosia Semolina, the captain of her Gulfstream, waited for her at the top of the stairs.

  “We are in a hurry, Amby,” she told him as she trotted up.

  “Aren’t we always, Chris?” said the portly, affable pilot. “We’re fueled, filed, and ready to fly.”

  “You’re the best.”

  Kent, the second chair, followed her back to her lounge.

  “Hey, K,” she said. “Got any coffee?”

  “Just made. Let me get you a cup.”

  “That would be incredible. And a bottle of water.”

  Kent smiled. He was only too happy to wait on his boss, who he secretly was in love with. And he was greatly relieved that she was safe aboard the aircraft and about to head back to the States.

  Christine looked out the window after she had her coffee and the throttles were pushed to the dashboard and held there by two hands. The small runway structures and signs began flashing by as she watched. Then the plane rotated and they were off the asphalt.

  Only then could she close her eyes and return her thoughts to BAT.

  The loss was huge. She loved the man and knew it was she who would have to report his loss to his wife. She dreaded the visit but knew it was required and knew she wanted to do it herself, in person, of course, as soon as they touched down.

 
The widow would want his body. Christine would put her law office staff on that. Surely, there would be a way to make a claim and arrange a transfer.

  Then she pushed the thoughts out of her mind, drank the last swallow of coffee, and reclined her seat. Kent stopped by with a blanket as he always did and she nodded and smiled as she felt it being arranged for her.

  Then she was asleep at 45,000 feet.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, the aircraft carrying Diego Luchesi blasted through the same air.

  The flight plan terminated in Flagstaff, Arizona. Thaddeus Murfee lived just five miles out of town. Luchesi located the lawyer’s property on a digital plat map. He also located the public highway that gave access to Murfee’s home.

  Luchesi gave orders to the pilots to stay onboard until he returned. It might be an hour, it might be two weeks, he said. He would return and the takeoff could mean life or death.

  The pilots understood. They replied that they would remain onboard, fueled, and ready to depart on a minute’s notice.

  “Bona partuta,” they told him. Have a good journey.

  34

  On the second day following her vertebroplasty Katy went home in an ambulance. She was lashed down and completely immobilized. Thaddeus followed behind in his Ram pickup and as he drove, he watched the sunlight shafts play through the ponderosa branches on both sides of the road. He was wondering whether Katy could see the same thing; he hoped she could because he imagined it was her last ride anywhere. Thinking these thoughts, he began to cry. All he could think about was Katy gone from his life, the loneliness he would feel and how useless he would be to anyone. Tears streamed down his face as he bit his lip and willed himself to stop. He didn’t want her to see bloodshot eyes and tearstained cheeks. He rationalized that the outpouring of feelings was probably the result of being cooped up in the hospital for the last week and getting very little sleep. While Katy had dozed on and on under the influence of her medications, he had sat upright in the padded chair and tossed and turned all night long, snatching fifteen minutes here and there until another sound out in the hallway would jar him awake or until another Invasion of the Nurses flooded into her room so that vitals could be taken, fluid levels checked, and fluid outputs noted. He was grateful they were going to the ranch; he wiped hard at the tears and his cheeks and soon found himself laughing at his foolishness. He thought it was not unlike whistling past the graveyard, his laughter.