Critical Condition

by Peter Clement

  "Of course," he said, smiling agreeably. But he'd already settled on a better plan. It took him an hour to get there. Though the time was only seven-thirty, it was well on the way to dusk where Lockman lived, thanks to the trees overhead. They were the kind that old forests and neighborhoods with old money had in common, spreading over everything like a thick canopy that shut out the light below. And just as on the floor of an old forest the new growth was usually stunted, the offspring in such places often failed to live up to the parents. Matt Lockman was no exception.

  His father had once been chief of radiology at New York City Hospital, a giant in his field. He'd died shortly after Richard first came on staff over twenty years ago. Lockman Junior had tried to follow in his father's footsteps, not only becoming a radiologist, but aspiring in loud, obvious ways to succeed him as head of the department— except his peers had never deemed him to have the right stuff to be put in charge. Richard had good reason to share their opinion. More than once the man had landed the emergency department in court by misreading an X ray for one of the residents, thus failing to pick up a lung tumor, missing a fracture, not catching a subtle sign like free air under the diaphragm indicating a perforated bowel. These were just a few of his transgressions. In each case the proceedings pinpointed Lockman as the culprit, and as a result Richard had discouraged anyone in ER going to him for an opinion on anything.

  Except money. In a specialty renowned for earning top dollar, Lockman very definitely had the right stuff as far as billing to the maximum was concerned. Yet the joke around the hospital was that he needed the cash to pay off all his lawsuits, and though he lived in "Daddy's" former mansion, he did so without servants. He was also the only guy on the block who drove a Camry.

  A few minutes later Richard found the street number. It was a gated property, as were most of the houses in the district, except these wrought-iron barriers were open.

  "Convenient," he muttered, pulling into a straight gravel driveway that ran a hundred feet before widening to serve a three-car garage. Lockman's ordinary looking vehicle was parked outside, its nose to one of the doors like something that didn't belong sniffing to get in, Richard observed. A tall unkept hedge blocked his view of the house.

  He got out and walked over to where an opening in the shrubbery gave access to a gently curving sidewalk leading to the front door. Even in the twilight, Richard could see the old homestead wasn't what it used to be. Made of stone, swathed in ivory, and, like most of the elderly houses he'd caught glimpses of on the way, it was of a size that made it clear just how much old money had once been at stake here. But the splits and peels of white paint on the numerous window frames and shutters revealed the graying wood underneath, a thousand open scars on the corpse of whatever lifestyle once flourished within. The front garden held no flowers, just ornamental evergreens, each in as much need of a trim as the hedge he'd just passed through, and an abundance of weeds. The lawn at least had been mowed, but resembled a bad haircut where there were bare patches that had been sheared too close while other spots could have used a trimmer.

  House rich, cash poor, Richard thought.

  He arrived at the doorway, an ornate wooden entrance bound on either side by narrow full-length windows. A push of the bell produced a two-tone chime deep in the dark interior.

  Birds sang from the trees as he waited. There wasn't so much as a puff of breeze, and though it had been hot during the day, under all that foliage the air felt cool, almost clammy.

  He pushed the bell a second time.

  Still no reply.

  He looked in one of the windows, cupping his hands around his face to cut down the reflection. He saw no movement, only a display of antique chairs and small end tables in the foyer. "Come on," he murmured, imagining the little man scurrying around there somewhere afraid to answer. One way or another, he'd get his hands on that scrawny neck and choke it out of him. Otherwise, once the cops and lawyers got to him, due process would protect him to the point the little weasel might never tell what he and Hamlin had done to Kathleen.

  Seeing no one, he started pounding on the door. "Matt!"

  Nothing.

  He angrily grabbed the handle, and wrenched it clockwise, hoping the lock might be in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the structure.

  To his amazement, the door simply opened.

  He stepped inside. "Matt?"

  No reply.

  The house s me I led stale, musty even. He obviously still didn't have a housekeeper. Whether the man lived alone, Richard didn't know. Certainly he'd never brought a Mrs. Lockman to the hospital social functions that included spouses, only a series of women he'd introduced as "his companion." Richard couldn't recall meeting the same one twice.

  "Matt!"

  He walked through the foyer he'd surveyed earlier and entered a large, richly furnished living room to the left.

  Empty.

  He saw it opened into a long dining area where the centerpiece was a gleaming mahogany table that could easily seat twelve, but there were no takers tonight.

  Continuing toward the rear of the house, he found a kitchen that looked recently updated, full of new appliances.

  Passing the entrance to the basement he spotted a pair of rat traps, loaded and ready to spring, guarding against visitors from those lower depths where it was pitch black. Old-moneyed vermin? he wondered, or upstart interlopers that were new to the neighborhood, along with the dot-com millionaires who'd moved out here, all the trophy digs in New York being taken. Having fought his own battles with the city breed of rodents at his home on Thirty-sixth Street, he decided against having a look in the darkness below. He continued circling the ground floor, striding through a den decked out in leather, a magnificent library that looked so undisturbed it appeared as if nobody had ever taken a book off the shelf let alone read one of them, and an extensively equipped entertainment center dominated by a shiny, black TV screen the same size as one of the garage doors he'd seen on the way in.

  But no Lockman.

  Back in the foyer, he headed for the large central staircase. As he climbed, he wondered at how much better the house appeared inside than out with all its rich interior trappings. Lockman's way of hiding assets perhaps?

  As he neared the landing, he paused, stopped by a familiar smell. Either someone had forgotten to flush, he thought, squinching up his nose at the scent of stale urine and excrement, or Lockman should sell off some of his goodies and hire a housekeeper to clean the toilet. Reaching the second floor he found himself at the center point of a long hallway. Much of the passageway was already in deep shadow from the increasing dusk, and he wondered which direction to take. He took a few steps to the left, the hardwood floor creaking under his feet. The odor, both cloying and sour, grew stronger as he moved, forcing him to swallow a few times, then breathe through his mouth in order not to gag. He also thought he caught a whiff of something else he recognized, and wondered if one of the basement dwellers hadn't died somewhere nearby. The rooms off the corridor were illuminated by the ghostly gray of twilight. Through the first two doorways he saw sparsely furnished bedrooms where drop cloths draped the chairs like shrouds and the mattresses were stripped of their sheets. The third looked like the master suite, given its size and the four-poster that occupied most of the inner wall. The rumpled covers and men's clothing draped over a pair of matching sofa chairs suggested that someone had at least slept here recently. But what struck him most was the stench. It had trebled.

  "Jesus!" he muttered, the force of it staggering him. In the far corner he could see partially into a lit bathroom— the front curve of the toilet bowl, a bit of the sink, a portion of a bathtub— everything gleaming white. Through the frosted glass of a shower stall he saw the blurred, flesh-colored form of someone standing completely still.

  He felt the hairs go up on the back of his neck, and his breathing slowed to a stop.

  The only sounds were the evening birds chirping outside the bedroom windows, one
of which, he absently noticed, was partly open.

  Not taking his eyes off the human shape in front of him, he started to back away, wanting to get out of there. Let the cops handle this, he thought, having already identified the aroma of early rot. He froze.

  There was movement behind the glass. Something chest high and dark swirled in a circle across the skin tones. Then the black shape went lower, and settled at the person's feet. Another seemed to appear from behind the right shoulder.

  What the hell? he thought, exhaling his held breath. Steadying himself, he slowly walked toward the cubicle.

  As he entered the small room, as familiar as he was with the smells of death, the stink became so overwhelming his stomach did a flip into his throat and he nearly vomited. Refusing to yield, he reached for the handle on the glass door and pulled.

  Matt Lockman, his arms lashed to the shower nozzle, hung naked against the tile wall, his feet trailing in a mush of human waste and blood that was up to his ankles. His left rib cage had been cut open top to bottom, the severed ends of the bones sticking outward to reveal the chest cavity within. As Richard recoiled from the sight, a pointed, beady-eyed head of a rat poked from the opening.

  "Jesus Christ!" he shrieked, jumping three feet back.

  The rat retreated around behind the body and disappeared through a hole in the tiles. At the same instant, something brushed by his pant leg. He looked down in time to see a second creature, this one glistening red, its fur matted with streaks of congealed blood and strands of tissue. It was scurrying by him, pulling something nearly as big as itself along with its mouth, something that resembled a raw hunk of beef.

  Richard bellowed at the animal and stomped his foot, startling it enough that it dropped its grisly load and scuttled into the bedroom. He then bent down to examine what it had been carrying. From the arteries and veins hanging out of it like tiny hoses, he instantly recognized a human heart.

  Chapter 8

  Richard felt he couldn't breathe.

  Revulsion played at the back of his throat.

  No stranger to human remains, he struggled to quell the sensations and force himself to think clinically. After all, he'd been trained to remain unfazed around body parts in ER and on autopsy tables.

  But this was the stuff of slaughter, not science. It breached any professional distancing he could muster. Feelings he would normally keep in check ran riot.

  Outrage at the savagery of it.

  Disgust at so obscene a violation of another human being, even a creep like Lockman.

  Who could have done such a thing?

  He moved to take a closer look at the open chest cavity, approaching it cautiously in case there were any more rats. The ribs had been severed cleanly, the way they were by a bone saw at autopsy. Even the curve of the cut matched the usual incision line followed during a dissection.

  His gaze worked upward. Lockman's head had dropped forward onto his chest, but Richard thought he caught a glimpse of something white under the line of the dead man's jaw. He leaned in to get a better look, and saw a plastic tube sticking out the front of the man's trachea.

  But this was a very special type of tube.

  What he was looking at was the instrument used in ER to do a cricothyroid punch, a type of emergency tracheotomy, except it's designed to provide a temporary measure, and is inserted through the membrane just above the trachea with a single stab, a much easier procedure for unskilled hands than the regular technique. But why would anyone intent on butchering Lockman go to the trouble of giving him an airway?

  The answer crept to mind, slowly, like the chill it brought crawling up his spine. Whoever did this wasn't concerned with Lockman's breathing. They wanted him mute, so no one would hear his screams while he or she worked on him.

  Presuming the killer was alone. He spotted a clotted laceration leading from Lockman's left temple to behind his ear.

  A solitary attacker could have knocked him out first, stuck in the cricothyroid punch to render his voice box useless, then tied him up before he came to.

  Richard glanced down at the body's feet and saw, just above all the feces, the upper edge of masking tape wrapped around the ankles.

  The thought of the man being conscious while they cut him open sent his head reeling, and he finally succumbed, leaning over the toilet bowl ready to vomit.

  That's when he heard the floorboards in the hallway start to creak.

  He felt high with success.

  Now it was on to the third name in the list. That it was a patient didn't phase him. They too must make payment for sacrificing a child of God. That she was a famous geneticist would better spread the terror, when the truth would be told. Unlike the other executions, however, the instructions he'd received were very specific about the means of her death. It had to appear natural. This he found puzzling, disconcerting even. He couldn't see any reason why her murder shouldn't be public immediately, and though he'd sworn blind obedience to the Lord, he found it altogether something else to carry out orders he didn't understand that came from mere mortals. But having made a soldier's pledge to follow all such commands, he nevertheless got on with it no matter how difficult he found it not to question the logic.

  Among the many items he had stolen during his years at the hospital were uniforms— those of orderlies, male nurses, porters— any number of sorts. Tonight he would play the roll of a cleaner, the most invisible job in the work hierarchy. He'd worn the drab, olive-green outfit under his jacket when he signed in earlier tonight, as a visitor. Finding a washroom stall, he attached a forged name tag, one modeled after his old one, to his shirt, and emerged as Harold Glass, janitor. He arranged the clip so that the picture portion partially slipped into his breast pocket. No one, he was certain, would pay it the slightest attention, as long as it was there. He then headed for where the housekeeping staff kept their carts, and in no time was dutifully mopping the floor outside the entrance to ICU.

  The doors slid open from time to time, as nurses, doctors, residents, even visitors came and went. On each occasion he surreptitiously glanced up from his work to look inside, studying where the staff were, whether the supervisor was at the central station, and most of all, trying to spot which cubicle Kathleen Sullivan was in. This was difficult, because depending on the instability of the patients, ICU cases were always being switched around, the more critical ones being kept in easy view of the nurses in the charting areas. With the side curtains drawn for privacy, from his vantage point he could see only the foot of each bed. I'll have to get a look inside, he decided, to learn where she was. Then he could time his attack when no one was paying her any attention.

  He put down his mop, pressed the round disk that activated the doors, and strode toward where patients' records were stored. He spotted the nearest wastebasket, picked it up, and headed back to the exit as if to empty the trash. But he took a slightly more circuitous route this time, slowing his walk and looking into each bed as he passed. That afternoon he'd bought one of Sullivan's books to get a picture of her, but found it difficult to recognize the woman once he saw her. Only the auburn gold of her hair tipped him off. Otherwise the pale flaccid face bore little resemblance to the radiant looking woman on the jacket he'd studied so carefully.

  He returned to his cart, dumped the papers into a disposal bin, and started back, his left arm swinging the empty receptacle to and fro, making an obvious show of carrying it to where it belonged so no one would wonder what he was doing here. On the way he felt in his right pocket for the capped, fully loaded syringe of potassium chloride. "Okay to mop in here now?" he said to one of the nurses at the desk.

  "Sure," she answered, not even bothering to look up. "I ought to have let them lock you up, pulling a stunt and sneaking in here on your own like this," McKnight said, scowling down at Richard.

  "I'm sorry," he replied. He left it at that as McKnight seemed angry as hell and any attempt to explain would likely make him madder.

  The Long Island police and two
NYPD homicide detectives who had been creeping up the hallway first scared the hell out of him, then read him his rights, having assumed he was the killer.

  It had taken McKnight coming all the way out from Manhattan to convince his colleagues they should back off.

  The two men were now alone in the kitchen, Richard seated, the detective pacing back and forth, both waiting for the crime lab people to finish going over the scene upstairs.

  "I mean, who knows what could have happened if you'd stumbled in on the murderer." The big man's voice had become a growl. "We might have found you strung up like that."

  "Lockman's obviously been dead since this morning. Whoever did it is long gone."

  "You know what I mean. What were you in such an all-fired hurry for anyway?"

  "You guys were coming after him with a murder charge. I needed him to tell me what they did to Kathleen. I figured once you got to the man his lawyers would make him clam up about everything."

  "And what made you think you could make him talk by getting at him first?"

  "Don't ask."

  The detective stopped midstride, a look of surprise on his face. "Really, Doc, I didn't think you'd go in for rough stuff—"

  "I'll do whatever it takes to help Kathleen. Now if you'll let me out of here, I'll go after Hamlin's charts, not just the DOAs, but all of them. Maybe I can figure out what's going on."

  The detective brightened. "Wow, Doc, now you're talking. I'll tell the people upstairs where we're going—"

  "Wait a minute. I said I can go through the charts. As a chief I'm authorized to doany audit I want— it's called quality assurance. Bringing you in, however, it becomes a violation of confidentiality, as you already very well know, Detective McKnight. No, sir, this is something I do alone."

  The man shrugged, and turned away.

  Most cops, Richard had found out in dealing with them in emergency, would take a shot at asking to see a medical record if they thought it would help their case. They also backed right off as soon as the legality of the issue got thrown at them. It was a game they played, never crossing the line of blatantly breaking the law themselves, but willing to try and lure an overtired, distracted ER doc into letting something slip.