Saving Max
Page 14
Sevillas frowns. “But we can’t prove it. We can’t very well say that you decided to march into their evidence room and then put you on the stand to testify to what you saw.”
Doaks gives them a wide, jubilant grin. “That’s where my bein’ a genius comes in.” He fishes around in his pocket. “Just yesterday I decided I was gonna need some high-falutin’ gadgets to get through this case. So I got myself a hot-shit cell phone and one of these.” He holds up something that is razor thin and the size of a fat credit card.
“What’s that?” asks Danielle.
“A camera, can you believe it?” He points it at Danielle, presses a button and a flash goes off. “Damndest thing you ever saw,” he says. “So while I’m standin’ there, I remember I got this beauty in my pocket, and I take a bunch of shots. The thing’s digital, you know, so there ain’t no film. Some lady at Walgreen’s said she’d get me prints in an hour. She woulda e-mailed ’em to me, but I don’t want nothin’ to do with computers. They give me piles.”
Danielle shakes her head. “You still can’t get them into evidence.”
“Hell, I hand you the Hope Diamond, and you tell me it ain’t the shade of blue you like.” He scratches the white whiskers on his chin. It sounds like someone scraping branches along a cedar fence. He stops and snaps his fingers. “I got it. Floyd J. can testify.”
“And risk his job?” asks Sevillas.
“He’s quittin’,” he says. “Fed up. They won’t give him benefits, not even a stinkin’ pension. He’ll testify if I ask him to.”
Sevillas nods and makes a note on his legal pad. “It’s terrific work, Doaks, but let’s try not to break into any more government buildings than we have to, okay?”
“It was Floyd J.’s idea, not mine.”
“What does it mean?” asks Danielle. “Will we get all of the evidence kicked out?”
“Unlikely,” says Sevillas. “Let’s wait and see the photos before we get too excited. Now, John, maybe you could tell us how your meeting with Smythe went.”
“Who’s that?” asks Danielle.
“The M.E. who doubles as the coroner. He would have been the first one to examine the body.”
Doaks pulls out his grimy legal pad and sips his coffee. He passes on the good and the bad of his interview with Smythe: the conflicting evidence of cause of death, as Smythe found both petechial hemorrhaging (pinpoints of blood in the eyes), which indicates asphyxiation, and the lacerated femoral artery, which would have killed Jonas in minutes. He also relates Smythe’s examination of a replica of the comb and his findings.
“But how could Max manage such an attack?” asks Danielle. “Jonas outweighed him by at least twenty pounds.”
Doaks shakes his head. “Sorry, Ms. P., but you know how it’s gonna play. They’re gonna say that once a psycho blows his top…”
Sevillas catches Danielle’s stricken eyes. “What Doaks means—”
“—is that he coulda lifted a damned freight train if he’d had to.” Doaks shoots Sevillas a black look. “And don’t fuckin’ interrupt me.”
Danielle goes on. “But why would the murderer—the real murderer—smother Jonas if he had already severed the femoral artery? Surely that would have killed him more quickly.”
Doaks shrugs. “He chalks it up to how killers ain’t always thinkin’ straight when they’re offin’ somebody.”
“What about defensive wounds?” asks Sevillas.
“Maybe, but the coroner’s leaning toward them being self-inflicted. The kid has a history of it, you know.”
Danielle is crestfallen. “Is there anything positive?”
“You never know what Smythe may have by the time he writes up his final report,” says Sevillas.
“Oh, yeah,” says Doaks. “Smythe was curious about somethin’ else. He wants to run some more tests, because it looks like Jonas had some strange blood levels.”
“What difference would that make?”
Doaks shrugs. “Probably nothin’. Just made him curious, is all.”
Danielle feels a spear of hope. “Like I said, I want to know which psychopharmaceuticals Jonas and Max were taking. It could explain a lot.”
“But whether or not the decedent was improperly medicated has nothing to do with how he was murdered,” says Sevillas.
“Of course it does,” says Danielle. “If the possibility exists that the wounds were self-inflicted, then Jonas’s state of mind at the time of his death is critical. If he was under the influence of psychotropic medications, they could have directly affected his actions.”
“A good point,” says Sevillas. “But that doesn’t help us with the evidence of asphyxiation.”
“Ain’t real easy to smother yourself,” mutters Doaks.
Sevillas ignores him. “If, as Smythe posits, Jonas died from lack of oxygen before he bled out and went into organ failure, then what is our argument? That Jonas stabbed himself repeatedly; lacerated his femoral artery; and then grabbed someone down the hall to smother him? And how does that explain Max’s presence in his room without any defensive wounds, covered in Jonas’s blood?”
Danielle tries not to let her frustration show. “Okay, okay.”
Sevillas gives her a kindly look. “Let’s wait until Smythe finishes his report. Don’t get discouraged.” He unscrews the top of his fountain pen and scratches out a note on his pad. The telephone rings, and he goes around to his desk to answer it. Head down, he murmurs into the receiver, his words inaudible.
Doaks stands, stretches and nods at Danielle. “I’m headin’ out. Kreng’s the first thing out of the box tomorrow.”
“What time?”
Doaks groans. “You really gonna make me take you with me?”
“Just to ride along,” says Danielle. “There are a few things I want to be sure you ask her.”
Doaks shakes his head. “Man, you remind me of my daughter, you know that?”
Danielle gives him a surprised look, but then remembers Sevillas’s mention of her when she first met Doaks. “She was at Maitland’s?”
He frowns. “Yeah, nervous breakdown, and it didn’t do her a damned bit of good. She’s okay now. She’s stubborn, just like you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He gives her a surprisingly tender glance. “It is.”
Warmed by his words, she gives him a grateful smile. “I can’t tell you how much that means to me. So I’ll see you tomorrow morning?”
“You’re just hell-bent on making my life miserable, ain’t you?” he says gruffly. “I told you already you can ride shotgun, but leave me alone until tomorrow. Can you do that?”
She smiles. “I’ll do my best.”
Doaks stomps toward the door, muttering. “Women…Didn’t God have nothin’ better to do?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Danielle watches from a distance as Doaks stumps toward the main entrance to Fountainview, a ragged legal pad in his hand. She pushes aside the empty soda cans, coffee cups and junk-food wrappers that carpet his old Nova. The glare of the sun compounds her headache. When she pulls down the visor of Doaks’s car, the keys drop onto the driver’s seat. She looks around the deserted lane where Doaks has parked her—safely, he thinks—far from Maitland.
Outrage and panic at the draconian measures the State has taken to threaten Max roil within her. She stares at the white, evil place where both she and Max began on a tortured road that may lead them both to prison—or death. Although she believes that Max will not get the death penalty due to his age, she has no idea what kind of prison sentence a jury would give him. After all, he was found lying on the floor next to Jonas, covered in his blood. She knows that if she were on that jury, not knowing Max or Jonas, she would give a life sentence very serious consideration.
Danielle snaps the visor back into place. The hell with the restraining order. She can’t stand being so close to Max and not seeing him. Their wretched, truncated calls have done nothing to quell Max’s terror or hers.
It frightens her, this thing that compels her to put the car into Drive and cross the invisible border. Simply pressing the gas pedal could seal her fate. The State can slam her back into jail and revoke her bond—if they catch her. But, damn it, Max is in trouble. The layer of ice under her skin tells her that he needs her—only her.
The gravel crunches under the Nova’s tires as she comes to a stop in the side parking lot. She has chosen this location hoping that the trees will partially camouflage her as she tries to sneak into the unit. This is stupid, she knows, terribly stupid. The duty nurse will see her and call security. She sits and tries to think clearly. She can’t let her aching heart be the instrument of her imprisonment. What good can she do Max if she’s in jail? Just before she turns around to back out of the lot, a movement catches her eye. She puts her foot on the brake and stares. One of the janitors has propped open a metal door with his foot. He grapples with an industrial trash can, which he uses to hold the door open. He yells something back into the building and disappears. The door stands open.
Danielle tries to think of the location of this door in terms of the unit’s layout. It hits her. She parks, grabs her purse, and walks quickly but casually into the building. She ducks behind the door.
“Goddammit!” she hears a male voice yell. “I got to take out the trash. Tell Percy to do it!”
She hears footsteps recede from the door. She looks around. No one. She glides through the doorway and into the cool dimness of the storage room. She maneuvers around stacks of neatly organized linens, towels and bath soap, her sandals soundless on the concrete floor. The doorway to the unit is closed. She holds her breath and turns the knob. It releases and opens into the hallway one bedroom away from Max’s—if they haven’t moved him.
Blood thrums in her ears. Her adrenaline pumps so hard that every nerve is poised to flee or fight. She looks both ways down the hall and sees the back of one of the nurses headed in the opposite direction. The doors to the patient rooms are closed. She looks at her watch. Ten o’clock—time for the nurses to supervise the patients in their daily toilette: shower, brush teeth, dress. If the patient is unable to participate, the nurse simply changes the sheets and goes on to the next room. Danielle has no idea where they are in the cycle. Or when and if one of them will pop out of Max’s room, assuming he’s in his room. But it’s too late to turn back now. She walks along the wall, head down, and stops. She peeks into the small window. He’s there. And he’s alone.
She glances up and down the hall once more and slips in. There’s no way to lock the door from inside. Shit! She slides with her back along the wall, underneath the camera. She takes off her jacket and hooks it over the probing eye of the lens. Max is asleep, his arms and legs in the grip of leather restraints. He seems heavily sedated. She unbuckles the restraints and holds him to her, feeling his heart beat strong and clear. He does not stir. She lays him back on the bed and notices dark, purple marks on the inside of his right elbow. Needle marks. Her heart lurches. His thin arm has the tortured tracks of a heroin addict. What are they doing to him? She starts to panic and then forces herself to stay clearheaded.
She scans the counter. His chart is there, as well as two cobalt capsules she doesn’t recognize. She puts them into her purse. Then she sees a sterile syringe packet, neatly enclosed in clear plastic, next to a glass test tube with a rubber stopper. Someone is coming to take his blood again. Why?
She doesn’t have time to read the entire chart, but the scribbling on the cover catches her eye. It is a schedule of medications and blood drawings. She turns once again to the syringe, rips off the cellophane packaging, and removes the protective tip from the syringe. She takes a deep breath, knowing full well that watching nurses draw Max’s blood for years is a far cry from doing it herself. But she has no choice—she has to know what they’re doing to him.
Hands shaking, she gently lays out Max’s left arm. She cannot bear to pierce the pathetically damaged right one. She tears a strip of cloth from the T-shirt he wears and wraps the makeshift tourniquet gently around his arm. When the vein is prominent, she carefully inserts the needle and then slowly loosens the binding. Max moans and looks straight into her eyes, but does not see her. As she watches the cardinal fluid gush into the test tube, Max’s eyes flutter. She withdraws the needle; presses her finger against the tiny wound; and puts the tip back on the needle.
Frightened by the depth of Max’s stupor, she shakes his shoulder. “Max.” This time she sees recognition and joy in his clouded eyes. “Mom.” He wraps his thin arms tightly around her neck and sobs, his rasps wretched and deep. Danielle hears footsteps far away. She holds Max’s beautiful, pale face in her hands. “Sweetheart, I’m so, so sorry. I know this has been terrible for you, and I promise you won’t be here long, but right now I have to go. Please don’t worry.”
“No!” Max struggles to embrace her again, his speech slurred. “Mom, they’re drugging me. I don’t know what they’re giving me, but it makes me nuts and then knocks me out.” He sits up and rubs his swollen, bloodshot eyes.
Danielle puts a hand on his arm and makes him look into her eyes. “Listen, sweetheart, I can’t explain now, but if they find me here, they’ll revoke my bond and I won’t be free to try to save you.”
Disbelief and horror flood his face. “No way! I’m getting dressed, and you’re taking me with you.” He swings his legs out of the bed and stands. He takes a few steps, but his legs crumple beneath him. He falls into her arms, his thin body a leaden weight. “Mom, I—”
“I promise I’ll get you out of here.” She lays him back on the bed. “Where’s your Game Boy?”
He points a shaking finger at the desk and seems confused until she pulls his iPhone out of her purse and slips the charger into a side drawer. He smiles faintly, clutching it as if it were the Holy Grail.
She bends down and gives him a last kiss, tears streaming down her face. “Use it to call me or text me. Just let me know you’re all right.”
He is clearly fighting to keep his eyes open, to hang on to her words, but she fears he is losing the battle. She shakes him again—hard. “Max, I need you to find out as much as you can about Fastow, the pills, anything you can. I don’t know what’s in them, but I think they have something to do with why you’ve been…behaving as you have.”
His eyes widen. He starts to speak, but Danielle interrupts him. “And don’t let them give you any more pills.”
“How—”
She grasps his face and forces his eyes to focus on hers. “Hold them under your tongue. Flush them down the commode. They’re making you sick; keeping you drugged.”
“But why, Mom? Why would they—”
“Just do it, Max. Please. And pretend to cooperate.”
“What?”
She shakes her head. “If you don’t fight them, they won’t put you in restraints…” She can’t tru
st her voice to finish the sentence.
His eyes fill with tears; his mouth quivers. “Don’t leave me here all alone, Mom. I can’t handle this—I really can’t.”
She puts her arms around him. “You won’t be alone. Tony will see you every few days. His friend Doaks will come, too. I’ve already put their numbers in your phone. I’ll try to get your aunt Georgia to fly down. You can see her as often as you like.” A sob breaks from her as she holds him tighter. “I’ll fix this—I promise. And I’ll have my phone on every minute.”
He nods, his eyes sick with resignation—worse even than when she first abandoned him to this hellish place. Max’s eyes flutter again, but even as he falls back into a stupor, he grasps her arm as if it is a sailor’s oar delivering him from an icy death. She buckles the four-point restraints, tears falling again—this time darkening the cracked, worn leather. She then gently unclasps his fingers and tucks the thin, blue blanket around him, the swirled emblem of Maitland emblazoned in bone white in the center. How can she possibly leave him?
“I’ve got to take care of the Parkman boy. Fastow’s orders,” says a voice down the hall.
Danielle freezes. She grabs her purse and jacket, drops to the floor, and creeps on hands and knees like a soldier in enemy territory—all well beneath the glaring, venomous eye of the security camera. After what seems like eons, she reaches the shower stall. The last thing she sees before she closes the shower curtain are the remains of the syringe packet and the test tube lying on top of Max’s bed.
“Michelle is always running behind.” The voice is loud now, but still outside the door. “You don’t see anyone paying me double to do her job, do you?”
Danielle holds her breath. She hears the knob turn as someone enters the room. A bustle of activity and then angry muttering. “Look at that. She draws blood and leaves everything else lying around—on the patient’s bed, no less! Kreng is going to have a fit.”
A sudden silence convinces Danielle that she is gone. She rushes back to the bed and throws the needle and everything—even the torn T-shirt strip—into her purse. She creeps over to Max and presses her lips against his pale, moist forehead. She breathes deeply. He is still Max. He is still alive. And she will, so help her God, come back and get him out of this place. She slips to the wall, ducks beneath the camera, and removes her jacket. She leaves the same way she came in.