by Jan Coffey
“We’re expecting some of the investigating officers back here within an hour,” the first policeman explained, trying to stay civil. “You can ask them.”
“An hour is too late,” she snapped.
Lexi held the cell phone out to them. Her body was shaking.
“I just listened to this message. Someone is saying that Juan isn’t safe. I…I only need to know that it’s a lie…that someone is trying to rattle me. Please.” She raised both hands up and away from her body. “Search me. I’m not armed. I’m just a mother who thinks her son’s life is in danger,” she said hurriedly, pleadingly. “I’m certain neither of you two would stand there and do nothing if you thought the life of someone you loved was in danger.”
The two exchanged a look, obviously undecided about what she was asking of them.
The agreeable officer finally nodded with a frown. “Look, Dr. Bradley, just don’t try anything that will make us have to haul you out of here.”
“I swear to you, I won’t.”
“You stand right where you are,” he ordered.
She nodded, planting her feet, hoping that she’d be strong enough to keep her promise.
One stood next to her as the other opened the door. She edged closer. The overhead light was off. The shades were drawn closed. A bedside lamp cast a soft glow across the bed. Tears rushed into her eyes as she saw Juan lying on the hospital bed. He looked peaceful, like he was sleeping. There were no flowers, no gifts, no cards. Nothing to soften the blow of being in a strange place when he woke up. Lexi already knew that she couldn’t be objective when it came to her son. She was looking in there as a mother, not as a physician.
“Are you satisfied now, Dr. Bradley?” the officer next to her asked.
How could she be satisfied? That was her son, her baby lying in that bed and she couldn’t even go to him, hold him. She couldn’t protect him.
Lexi forced her gaze to go to the IV and the monitoring equipment connected to Juan. From what she could see, no one else was in the room. The bathroom door was open, but there was no other way for anyone to get in. She nodded reluctantly.
The door closed. She whispered a thank you under her breath and turned away from them before her tears began to run. She was cold. She hurt inside. Her feet felt like bags of sand. She should have expected crank calls. A lot of them. This is the way things were going to be. She was now the outsider. People would try to hurt her. She’d have to pay the price for what had happened. She had no control over the tears that fell freely now. She hated this weakness, the falling apart, but she couldn’t help it. She reached for her bag to get a tissue and realized that she’d left it in the conference room downstairs.
She reached the nurses’ station just as someone came out of the floor duty office. As Lexi took a tissue from a box on the counter, she recognized Linda. She wiped away at the tears. The woman’s bright face was like sunshine in a gloomy day.
“So, you’re walking around. That must mean you ate something.”
Lexi wasn’t going to correct her.
The nurse was carrying a tray of medication. With her free hand, Linda pulled a couple more tissues out of the box and handed them to Lexi. “I saw you go downstairs with one of those agents. Did you talk to the doctor?”
Lexi shook her head. “Not yet. They’re looking for Juan’s records. They appear to have been misplaced. I’m going back down there now.”
“They can’t be really lost. But remember, don’t let the rest of them see those tears. You’ll do a lot better for yourself and your son by staying strong.”
Lexi knew she was right.
Linda looked down the hall in the direction of the uniformed officers. “By the time you come back from talking to the doctor, I’ll have something for you, too.”
“What?”
“I’m checking on Juan now and giving him his medication. By the time you get back, I’ll be able to tell you his blood pressure and pulse rate and all the other good stuff that you’re dying to know.”
She smiled, appreciating the other woman’s warmth. Linda hadn’t moved away two steps, though, before something crossed Lexi’s mind.
“Those police officers just told me that a nurse had checked on Juan a few minutes ago.”
Linda turned around, frowning. “Are you sure about that?”
“That’s what they told me.”
Linda walked back to the nurses’ station and looked at the top sheet on a clipboard.
She shook her head. “No, Doc. No one from this station has been to his room in at least an hour. Wait a sec.” She poked her head into the duty office and asked someone the same question. She came back shaking her head.
The feeling of nausea in Lexi’s stomach was back. This time it was laced with panic.
“Let’s ask them again,” the nurse said, picking up her medication tray and heading toward Juan’s room.
Lexi moved ahead of the nurse, reaching them first.
The two officers looked warier than the last time, seeing Lexi coming back. At Linda’s question, though, they told her that a nurse had visited Juan’s room within the past twenty minutes.
“Was she one of the four that work at my station?” Linda asked, motioning to the nurse’s alcove.
“We don’t know everyone that works there,” one of the officers responded. “She was wearing a badge and carrying a tray of medication like the one in your hand.”
The nurse asked what the woman looked like, but Lexi’s mind was already on the message she’d listened to on her cell phone. Juan wasn’t safe. Would someone go as far as to disguise herself to hurt him? It didn’t make sense, but still…
Both officers were trying to describe the nurse at the same time. Lexi stepped past them and opened Juan’s door.
“Dr. Bradley, you can’t be going in there,” one of them called after her.
“Leave her be and stop being so ridiculous,” Linda scolded them. “She’s a mother, for heaven’s sake, and a doctor to boot. She’s not going to hurt her own child.”
Lexi walked quickly to Juan’s bedside. She looked at his face, listened to his breathing. Something wasn’t right. He was cold to the touch, but he was sweating. She took his pulse. It seemed normal. She stared at the monitors and fought the feeling of panic growing in her. A phony nurse wouldn’t come inside for no reason. Lexi remembered what one of the officers had said. The woman had been carrying a medicine tray. She looked at Juan again, touched his hand. Her fingers went over the bandages where the IV continued to drip into his veins. The IV.
She whirled around, searching for Linda. She was standing at the door, partially blocking the entrance to the room, talking to the uniformed officers. She was clearly buying Lexi some time with her son.
“Linda, I need you here.”
The nurse turned around. “Just a minute.”
“A minute could be too late,” Lexi said aloud. They could have injected any number of substances into him…or into the IV bag. She ripped the tape off the back of her son’s hand. “We need to take this out.”
“Now, just a minute,” Linda said, coming in.
“Someone is trying to hurt my son. I got a warning on a phone message. I’m removing his IV.”
“I don’t think you should mess around with the medications he’s under. Let me call the doctor on staff first.”
“It might already be too late,” Lexi said as she disconnected the IV tube.
~~~~
Chapter 12
Wednesday January 16
Reno, Nevada
He wasn’t overreacting. He’d been right. It wasn’t going away.
Each new incident was more of a bloodbath than the last one. There were four left. But how many would die in the hands of those four? Forty? Four hundred?
The guilt was killing him. He couldn’t sit idly while another massacre happened. It had to be stopped.
Sitting on the edge of the worn upholstered chair, Mitch Harvey impatiently changed the TV channel at the
commercial break. All the other stations, the half dozen of them, had no interest in the headline news. There was no other mention of what had taken place in Florida on any other channel.
He ran through them again.
There was an old movie on one station. A basketball game on another one. Some stupid standup comedy show on the next. Mitch moved up the channels. There was porn on one of the free pay-per-view channels. A channel showing how to play casino games. Next, a sincere-looking guy in a blue gown preaching a hell-fire sermon.
He continued to switch the remote up and down until he was back to the same station he’d been on before. It was still showing commercials.
He’d been two miles down the road at one of those UPS drop boxes when the news came through over the radio about the shooting, the details sketchy. Just then, Mitch had seen the billboard for the motel. Free cable and Internet. Both were virtually no use to him. The Internet consisted of a network plug in a desk lamp that didn’t work, and the cable channels were shit.
The news station came back on, and once again Mitch stared at the images of the ambulances at the front entrance of the school. The number of injured and fatalities changed each minute. Two commercials ago, they were talking fifteen. Now, the newscaster was saying twenty one. None of it was confirmed. They knew that the assailant was dead. But as far as the rest of the numbers, no one really knew. The high school wasn’t completely evacuated, yet. They didn’t know if there were bodies in other parts of the school. The gunman might have shot someone else on his way to the gymnasium. Another picture of Mike Forbes, the assailant, flashed across the screen. This one was of the entire basketball team, with Mike’s face circled and enlarged on the television screen. A teenage boy’s innocent smile.
The anchorman mentioned the name of a school psychologist, supposedly a well-known national expert who was going to come on air after the next commercial break. The next moment, the pictures of the teenagers involved in the latest wave of violence paraded across the screen. Seven. Seven of them involved in this wave of deadly violence since December 11.
Mitch knew all of them.
“Why don’t you see the connections?” he asked the empty room.
A picture of Juan Bradley flashed across the screen next. Mitch muted the sound when they started rehashing the same information as before about Juan. They had nothing new on him. He was the only survivor. So far.
Wearily, Mitch ran a hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved all week. He looked at the eleven boxes of files that he’d dragged out of the storage space in the outskirts of Reno. They weren’t all of it. There was another storage space, too. But he hadn’t been able to get to it. There was enough here to make a difference, anyway.
All the files were supposed to have been destroyed. He hadn’t done it. Even then, so many years ago, he’d known someday he might need them again. He knew then that they couldn’t close the door on everything they’d done and pretend that nothing was different about these kids.
The dust of a dozen years still covered each of them. The mysteries of so many deaths had answers in the pages of those files.
Mitch couldn’t leave any of them in the trunk of the rental car, but he’d separated five of those boxes from the others. They contained the information about the teenagers who were still alive, along with the files of others that it was too late for. The only open box contained Juan Bradley’s file. His folders lay spread out on the bed.
He’d called Dr. Bradley once already. He’d tried to reach her other ways, too. He’d do it again. She was his contact. She’d know what to do with everything he gave her. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain by helping him. Mitch had no doubt that they would try to eliminate the boy. Curtis would not allow anyone to malfunction and survive. That wasn’t part of the plan.
Back in the early 1990s, their project had been well funded. Mitch had met very few of their investors, though. Curtis was the money man, the one who made the deals and made sure their finances met their expenses. Everyone working on this project knew that there were some heavy hitters behind the scenes, people with a great deal invested. There were also political careers on the line.
That was the reason Mitch couldn’t trust anyone now. He could not be sure who was a friend or who would empty a gun into his head. That distrust extended to his old partner in New York. Curtis Wells was smooth, but Mitch had heard the lies in his voice.
Dr. Bradley was different. She had plenty at stake, and she could do what needed to be done. Hopefully, she could stop what had happened to her son from happening to the others.
The sound of a car traveling along the gravel parking lot in front of the motel rooms made Mitch immediately reach over and turn off the light. He shut off the TV, too. He knew he was doing the right thing. He was ready for it. He’d made up his mind. Better late than never. But he was scared, too.
The car seemed to be moving very slowly. The curtains were drawn, but not completely. Mitch moved to the door and tested the chain. One of the bolts holding the latch was loose. He figured someone putting a shoulder to it could easily break open the lock.
Standing next to the door, he pulled the curtain aside a fraction of an inch and looked outside. A light hanging on the wall at the end of the row of rooms flickered every couple of seconds, shedding meager light on the two cars that were parked in the spaces on this row. Everything else around them was immersed in the darkness. Mitch had asked for a room in the back. He didn’t want any one getting curious over him dragging the boxes out of his car. Looking out at the pitch black beyond the arc of the light, he wasn’t sure that had been such a good idea.
Mitch moved to the other end of the window and peeked out.
The car that had driven by was now stopped at the end of the row. He could just see one of the brake lights from this angle. The car had not parked. The engine was running. Whoever they were, they were just sitting in the middle of the lane. No headlights, from what Mitch could see.
He tried to keep himself calm, but panic set in the minute the driver put the car in reverse. The car slowly backed up until it reached Mitch’s motel room door. He closed the curtain to just a slit, but through it he could see the driver had blocked in the rental car.
They’d found him. Mitch didn’t know how. He hadn’t told anyone about coming to Nevada, about this motel that he’d checked into only this afternoon. He’d even kept his own family in the dark about all of this.
He could hear his own uneven breaths becoming audible. This was something new. Hyperventilating when he was nervous. Even an asthma attack once about a month ago. He hadn’t brought along the inhaler on this trip. Elsa said it was all in his mind. Doctors and a number of tests had told him that there was nothing wrong with his lungs.
You’re overreacting, Mitch told himself, taking slow, deep breaths and counting backward.
Deep down, he knew he wasn’t overreacting at all.
The car was a dark sedan, and it wasn’t moving. Mitch could hear the engine still running. He couldn’t see who was inside or what they were doing.
A pickup truck came around the corner, music blasting through the open windows, the sound of the occupants’ laughter ringing through the night. Rather than going around, the driver of the pickup slammed on the brakes behind the other car and blasted the horn. From the passenger side, a girl poked her head out, drunk and giggling and yelling to get a move on.
The sedan didn’t move.
In the midst of the little showdown, Mitch looked behind him. There were no other doors. The window in the bathroom was too small to escape through. He had nowhere else to go.
The truck blasted its horn again. Mitch peered through the opening and saw the sedan move some twenty feet ahead and pull to the side. The pickup backed up and made a sharp turn, parking alongside Mitch’s rental car.
A beer can was tossed out onto the ground from the driver’s side. The passengers weren’t ready to get out. Mitch looked at the other car. No one had stepped out yet. They
were waiting.
For once in his life, luck was on Mitch’s side. A minute later, another car filled with noisy young people arrived. These people obviously knew the ones in the pickup, and they pulled in next to it. As four young men and women got out, the sedan moved forward another twenty feet.
All the newcomers were unsteady on their feet. Something was said between the driver of the truck and the rest and they all turned to look at the dark sedan, windows closed, engine still running.
One of the four partiers shouted a profanity laced challenge. The girls were laughing, and the challenger started stiff-legged across the lot.
As Mitch waited, the sedan drove off before the partier reached the car. Drunken cheers greeted the victor as he swaggered back to the arms of his date.
Mitch knew that didn’t mean that they weren’t coming back. He looked around the room, trying to think clearly. He had to get out of here now, before they came back for him. There was no way he could take everything with him. He rushed to the bed and picked up an armful of files. Quickly, he pulled the four others that still might be stopped. He could only take the ones that had a chance.
The drunken partiers were still in the lot. They looked at Mitch oddly when he ran to his car and climbed behind the wheel.
~~~~
Chapter 13
Wednesday January 16
Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut
Juan Bradley’s hospital door was open, but a drawn curtain hid everything that was going on inside.
“Who’s in there now?” Bryan asked one of the two uniforms.
“The doctor and two nurses from that station.” One of the officers motioned to the counter down the hall.
“Where’s Dr. Bradley?”
“In that room,” the second man replied, pointing to a closed door directly across the hall. “She seems to have lost control. A little wound up, I’d say. Nearly hysterical. Not at all the way she’s been the past couple of days. Maybe it’s the exhaustion of being here for so long. I don’t know if it’s safe to leave her there all alone.”