Defiled

by Mike Nemeth

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The first time I woke, I was in the ICU. Thank you, God. She didn’t win. I wasn’t confused or surprised to find myself in a small glass-walled room hooked to IVs and monitors. It was to be expected. Through the window wall, I could see a command center of computer terminals and vigilant nurses tracking the recoveries of the patients in the unit. There was no pain. I was like a butterfly in a cocoon morphing into a caterpillar. It didn’t occur to me to check my leg to see if it was still there. In a moment, the sweet juice flowing into my veins sent me back to dreamland.

  The second time I awoke, I was on a gurney and several white-jacketed attendants were pushing me through a hurricane. Then I heard the rotors and realized the hurricane was the downwash from the propellers. They loaded me onto the chopper and locked the gurney in place. One of the attendants asked if I was okay, and I think I nodded. We levitated, swooped and rotated, and darted away. It was a short flight and it was fun, like an amusement park ride. As we descended, I thought to check my ability to make my limbs obey my brain. I couldn’t tell if I had moved anything. The sign on the helipad read “Tampa General Hospital.” Somewhere between the helicopter and my new hospital room, I lost consciousness.

  The third time, I awoke in a surgical recovery room. The nurse told me how lucky I was to be at “TGH.” “We’re ranked number two in the state of Florida and number nineteen nationally in orthopedics,” she said proudly. They’ve saved my leg! Many times I had sailed past the sprawling TGH campus, located on the northern tip of the big Davis Island across a narrow channel from downtown Tampa. I had never thought I might someday be a patient here.

  When they moved me to my private room, on the fourth floor of the Bayshore Pavilion, I was pleased to find a huge window that overlooked the channel, a marina, and a row of high-rise condominiums known colloquially as “God’s waiting rooms.”

  My surgeon visited later that day. He was a big burly guy, balding but with a waxed mustache more appropriate for a British swashbuckler. He explained that on the day of the incident, the Life Flight chopper had flown me to the emergency room at St. Petersburg General, where doctors performed emergency blood transfusions and repaired ruptured blood vessels. Their actions not only saved my life but also restored blood flow to the leg before a critical mass of cells had died, and so they were able to save my leg. Two days later, I had been transported across the Bay by helicopter to Tampa General Hospital for continuing orthopedic care.

  Here, surgeons reconstructed my shattered tibia, fibula, and femur and inserted rods and plates, which left my damaged left leg three-eighths of an inch shorter than my good leg. The surgeon warned me that this differential would not only cause me to limp, but would also damage the muscles that knit the hip to the sacroiliac, causing intense pain and limiting my mobility. As a result, in my left shoe I would have to wear an insert to level my hips. Philosophically, I said goodbye to flip-flops and hello to the foam-rubber-soled “nurse” shoes popular among the old guys at the club. I hoped they were available in colors other than white and gray.

  It may have been the next day or possibly two days later when Jamie walked into the room during visiting hours. She sported civilian clothes and a smile, but her expression changed when she got a look at me. I hadn’t shaved or showered; I was bandaged from toe to hip; I was pale and bleary-eyed from all the drugs.

  She rushed toward me as though she could change things. “Oh my God, Dad! Are you going to be okay?”

  “Sure, they saved my leg.” I sounded like a bullhorn. “And you came to my rescue. How did that happen?”

  She grabbed my hand, bent toward me, and then thought better of it and gave me an air kiss with plenty of space between us.

  “Travis called me, scared out of his wits. Told me to go to the marina, but I knew where you were going. I missed the turn to the park and ended up on top of the hill overlooking the cove. Had to crawl down through the trees to get a shot at Dickson.”

  So Travis had wanted to defuse a violent situation. He got replaced on the attack team and wanted to protect … whom? His mother? Or his father?

  “Your timing was perfect,” I said. “Nice shot, by the way. Must be fifty yards from the waterline to the boat.”

  “I braced against a tree.”

  “I was ready to shoot him when he got into position for a shot at me, but you beat me to the punch.”

  “He was aiming at you, Dad, over the top of the windshield, so he must have had a shot at something.”

  My body had been concealed by the dashboard, and my head had been under a chair, but I wasn’t about to argue with the woman who had saved my life.

  Jamie rocked from one foot to the other, nervous about something. “That brings up an important point, Dad. Did you hear me warn him?”

  “Oh yeah. He stopped moving, so I know he heard you too.”

  “This is pretty important to me, Dad. How many times did you hear me warn him?”

  “Three times.”

  She nodded yes, like a grammar school teacher getting the right answers from the slow kid. “That’s right. You have to give three warnings before firing. And did you hear me identify myself?”

  “As a police officer?” She nodded. I didn’t recall it, but I knew what she wanted to hear. “Yes, sure. Is it a problem?”

  “Dickson says it was just some crazy lady running down a hill, so he didn’t listen to her. To me.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “In this hospital somewhere.”

  I looked at my daughter with what I hoped was love smeared all over my ragged face. “He’s lying,” I croaked.

  She smiled in apparent relief. “The cops will be here to see you as soon as your doctors give them permission. They’ll ask the same question.”

  “No problem.” She squeezed my hand. I think she meant “thank you.” “Listen,” I continued, “go in the closet and find my cell phone so I can call your mom.”

  She gave me a wry smile. “I already talked to her. She’ll be here to see you as soon as you can have two visitors. She let me have today so we could have our little chat about the incident.”

  “Thanks, sweetie. Drop by anytime.”

  She looked at me as she always did when it was time for Dad to get a lecture. “You were such a fool, thinking you could take on those crackers by yourself.”

  “I did ask for your help. Remember?” Her face turned dark as hurricane clouds, so I added, “If I had told the cops about the threats, they’d have caused Carrie to change her plans. Now I have a resolution.”

  She spread her arms to encompass the entire hospital scene. “You think?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The medical team allowed me to see unlimited visitors beginning Saturday, and Jamie appeared as soon as the afternoon visiting period opened. Again she wore street clothes but she seemed relaxed, gave me a tentative smile as she entered my room. The nurses had cleaned me up a bit—a sponge bath and a shave—so Jamie gave me a proper hug and kiss. Then she related the news from her perspective. The cops would take my statement next week as the last step in the police investigation, then a panel would decide whether Jamie’s actions were justified. She didn’t seem as concerned about it as the last time she visited, so I suspected she had gotten some encouragement from the investigators. Cops will protect cops.

  I was interested in a couple of other angles. “Is Carrie in jail?” I asked her.

  “I belong to a different agency, so they’re not sharing anything with me. The excuse is that I was directly involved and I’m your daughter, but really, if I was St. Petersburg PD, they’d tell me everything.”

  “So the government learned nothing from 9/11. Has Connie been charged with a crime?”

  Jamie gave me a disgusted look. “I bumped into her in the cafeteria. She was here to see Dickson.”

  “Sure,” I said, “getting their story straight before they have to testify. If I had died that would have been easier.”

  “
The nurse said your lawyer has come by a couple of times and peeked in, but you were always asleep.”

  “My lawyer? You mean Tony?”

  “Yeah, the guy with all the hair.”

  Maybe he feels guilty for abandoning me, wants to remain friends. “Oh good. Did you call your mom?”

  “Yes, Dad.” An indulgent smile played across her lips. “She was taken completely by surprise. I think she was irritated that you hadn’t told her the whole story.”

  From the doorway, a little girl’s voice said, “Yes, I was.”

  Our heads swiveled in unison, like two ventriloquist’s dummies. I was overjoyed to see Glenda, whether she was irritated or not. As Glenda advanced she tried to smile, but I saw that tears dripped from the corners of her eyes. She went to Jamie first and gave her a motherly hug. Then Glenda draped her upper body on mine and gave me a big lover’s hug. When she straightened up, my face was wet with her tears.

  “You still have your leg and you look like you’ll live, so tell me what the hell happened,” Glenda said.

  I told them both the whole story, trying very hard to convey the uncertainty surrounding Carrie’s intentions. Nonetheless, Jamie interrupted several times with, “That’s when you should have called the cops,” and Glenda interrupted with, “That’s when you should have told me.” The women quickly sensed an opportunity to go two-on-one against a helpless male. Women are pack animals.

  To Glenda I said, “I know you were trying to help, but I wish you hadn’t taken the diary to the hospital.”

  “It wasn’t doing you any good at my mother’s house.”

  I gave her a soft but troubled look. “The shrinks had already finished the examination, so they turned the diary over to the cops. They can’t prove it was at the Cortes house to be stolen, but it makes me nervous.”

  Glenda shrugged. “We’ll tell them she left it at the beach house, and I found it when I moved your furniture. I was returning it to her.”

  “Not a bad story.”

  “I also took the broken glass to the Dolphin Beach police so they can test for DNA.”

  “I don’t think the cops care about the break-in, sweetie.”

  Disappointed that I didn’t give her credit for her efforts, she said, “Well, it would have been dumped in the trash if I hadn’t saved it.”

  Troubled by her parents’ brewing argument, Jamie changed the subject. “Where are you going when you get out of here, Dad?”

  “Back to the boat.”

  Jamie snorted. “Not anymore. It’s impounded, not to mention shot to pieces.”

  Glenda gasped. For five seconds, we all looked at each other. Finally, Jamie said, “My place is too small, and it isn’t wheelchair accessible.”

  Glenda said to Jamie, “I’m still at Grandma’s, living up those rickety stairs.” They weren’t including me in the conversation.

  They both shuffled from foot to foot, and then Jamie brought the talk to a close. “We have some time, Mom. We’ll figure it out.”

  During the rest of the visit, we laughed a lot. It was like old times, from before our divorce. At the end, Jamie walked around the bed so they could each hold a hand and kiss me on opposing cheeks.

  Jamie asked her mom, “Do you have time for a cup of coffee?”

  The women left together, and I was alone again. I wondered who’d win custody of the damaged goods known as Randle Marks.

  Uncertain about my risk of exposure as an email thief, I logged into the cloud account to delete the files containing Carrie’s keystrokes. In the process, I found a series of emails that revealed who was tapping my email and explained why Carrie had come to the boat. Five of the fake emails I had sent to Tony—all except the first one about Simmons—had been forwarded from shadylady44 to catmarks38. Forwarded. Why would Carrie forward the notes from her secret account to her public account? She wouldn’t. In addition to my forwarded notes, there was a note from cmt1117 to Carrie. The sender had written: Since you won’t talk to me you need to read these. I’ll explain later.

  In her response, Carrie wrote: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, MAE? NOW I HAVE TO FIX IT. And that made everything crystal clear. After I had barged into her house, the family fixer had tried once again to help her sister. Connie Mae Tomkins, born on November 17, aka cmt1117, had stolen and then forwarded the notes. She couldn’t forward the notes from shadylady44 because Carrie didn’t know who that was and might not open the notes. The note accusing Carrie of an affair with Phil Simmons was missing because I had sent that one before the first break-in at the beach house. Someone must have installed the spyware on my personal computer during that break-in. Did Scott Simmons do it for Connie? Obviously, Carrie hadn’t come to the boat to negotiate; she came to the boat “to fix it.”

  At the crack of dawn on Tuesday, the surgeons opened me up again. This time they stitched up the lacerated tendons and ligaments that tie the lower leg to the upper leg, and removed numerous fragments of knee cartilage to produce a kneecap in the shape of an inverted pyramid, a disfigurement the surgeon said would make me unique.

  Two more surgeries were planned. The first, which would take place within a week or ten days, would complete the leg repairs by removing damaged muscle tissue and restoring connections to healthy muscles. The second surgery, planned months into the future after the leg healed, would be cosmetic, to make the tower of ruined flesh resemble a human limb.

  Although I enjoyed the view of downtown Tampa, trusted my surgeons implicitly, and loved my nursing team, I hoped with all my heart and soul that Carrie’s incarceration—and I knew now that she would go to jail—would be at least as painful as my hospitalization.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  On Thursday morning, I was reading two-week-old company email—just to make sure the IPO was still on track without me—when a loud knock rattled my door. It was Callahan, the cop who seemed to be involved in every aspect of my “case.” He wore a faded brown-and-green plaid sports coat that once may have been a horse blanket, a Florida Gators tie in orange and blue, and a beige shirt that wouldn’t stay tucked inside his navy trousers. I couldn’t stop thinking of him as “Frumpy.”

  “Can I help you, lieutenant?”

  He nodded and shuffled toward me. “I need to take your statement, Mr. Marks, just as I’da done at the scene if you’da been conscious and able to speak.” He motioned to my bandaged leg and said, “If you’re up to it.”

  I pushed the food tray and computer out of the way. “Shoot.”

  He snickered at my play on words and explained that statements had already been collected from Carrie, Jamie, Harlan, Travis, Dickson, and Officer O’Shea, the first responder. The fact that he hadn’t been allowed to get a statement from me annoyed him. “Your doctors are like a barbed-wire fence. Case is gonna go cold as a corpse before I get all the statements,” he said.

  He hadn’t taken a statement from Connie—a fact that bothered me. Callahan dug his little notebook out of his breast jacket pocket and cleared his throat.

  “Mr. Marks, on the day in question, did you know your wife was going to visit you?”

  “Yes, my sister-in-law texted me to say that Carrie was on her way.”

  “Why would Ms. Tomkins tell you your wife was coming to see you?”

  “Carrie didn’t want me to have her new cell number, so Connie sent a text for her.”

  That didn’t quite answer his question. “I mean why would your wife come to see you?”

  “Connie told me Carrie wanted to negotiate a settlement. She had come to the dock twice before when I wasn’t there.”

  “Were you willing to see her?”

  “If she wanted to negotiate. Connie said she would dress provocatively to get on board, but if the negotiations didn’t go well Carrie and her family were prepared to be violent.”

  Callahan didn’t hide his confusion. “She was dressed in shorts and a blouse and had a bikini in her bag in case y’all went swimming.”

  I chuckled. “She’s smart. She wore the b
ikini to get aboard, then changed into street clothes so she could tell you that story after she killed me. Canvass the dock. If anyone saw her they’ll remember that bikini.”

  He sighed and made a note. “Were you expecting your wife to be armed?”

  “She may have had a gun in her bag, so I treated her like you would treat a dog that’s been known to bite.”

  Callahan took another note. “She borrowed the one she had with her from that Dickson fella. Belonged to his wife. You knew her pistol had been stolen, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t know if her pistol had really been stolen or if she was crying wolf.”

  Callahan considered that for a moment, then said, “Alright, Mr. Marks, go ahead and tell me in your own words what happened that day.”

  “I was in the park, having a cigar, when I saw her walk through the parking lot and onto the dock. She asked if she could come aboard. I agreed but not because of the bikini.”

  Callahan gave me half a smile. “Okay, she comes aboard the boat and then what happens?”

  “We shoved off and everything seemed to be fine until I turned south toward the cove down by Fort De Soto. Then she got angry because she wanted to go out into the Gulf, up to Clearwater. She became verbally abusive, didn’t understand that the cove was a better place to talk—if that’s what she wanted to do. She said she needed another drink and went belowdecks, but she didn’t take her glass with her. She was gone a long time, so I figured she was making phone calls. I’m sure you guys have pulled her call logs.”

  “We have,” Callahan said, but he did not elaborate. “What did you do while she was belowdecks?”

  “Her behavior scared me, and I was sure she was giving people directions to intercept us. So I made a Mayday call.”

  “So you weren’t evading the police, you were asking for help.”