Deadline

by Randy Alcorn

  As for his newfound joy of discovery, he hoped it would never end. His journal had always been self-talk, valuable but fatally limited to his self-understanding. Now it was more a daily letter to someone else, Someone beyond himself he could talk to and ask guidance from.

  He’d written that morning, I’ve kept going back to think about wonderful days with Finney in the past. Now I find myself thinking that perhaps the best days with him may still be in the future.

  Though he felt embarrassed to write it, even to someone who knew his every thought, he even dared to hope they’d one day explore heaven together as they’d explored the woods as boys. The little he’d heard about heaven so far sounded rather monotonous and boring compared to this world, but a man could hope for something more, couldn’t he?

  Finney. He knew how to live, and he knew how to die. Jake hadn’t known how to do either. But he felt now he was taking his first toddler steps on the right road, headed the right direction. For some reason he thought of the reunion in Bangkok, sneaking up on Finney and asking, “What’s up, bro?” Bro had a new and deeper meaning now. It sounded good.

  “Maybe you’re able to see me, Finn. I hope so. I think you’d get a kick out of all this.”

  I am getting a kick out of it, bro, said a voice from another world. And so am I, thought a towering figure standing guard next to Jake, but invisible to him. And I too, thought still Another who looked over them, taking delight in each, and in them all together.

  Jake sat quietly at his desk. Unknown to him, Sandy watched him around the edge of her terminal, noticing his eyes land on a picture of Carry, a recent one with Jake standing next to her. She saw something different in his eyes now whenever they landed on the photo.

  Sandy had been watching him carefully, sometimes disheartened, sometimes pleased, often amazed at the changes in her favorite columnist. More than once she’d stood up for him to colleagues engaged in newsroom chatter at his expense. Sandy thought Jake might just be going through a phase, some overzealous religious response that would fade or taper off, as such things often did when reality set in and the world turned out to be no different than it had always been. Still, she would continue to watch him. She would see.

  Jakes most recent in a series of controversies at the Trib was his column laying out the inside story of Clay Dalinger. He talked about the pain and rage men feel when their children are harmed by any violent act, including abortion. He wrote the column in direct response to the Trib’s headline, “Anti-abortionist linked to murders of doctor and businessman.” Jake said that was misleading, that he’d done thorough research (why hadn’t anyone else?) and Clay Dalinger had never attended a single prolife rally or given a dime to a prolife cause. He wasn’t even on anyone’s mailing list. He wasn’t an activist—he was just a man whose child had died.

  Then he’d told the story of Hyuk. Jake hadn’t defended Dalinger—the man had killed his two best friends. He simply pointed out how men can feel a burning compulsion to enact retribution against those who’ve violated loved ones they were meant to defend. Jake also related the irony of coming back from Vietnam twenty-five years ago and being called a “baby killer.” And now, he said, those holding to the political ideals of the anti-war movement, including many journalists, were the very ones obscuring, denying, or defending the wholesale killing of babies in America.

  “Perhaps it is time,” Jake had said, “journalists actually take the moral high ground on this issue they’ve kidded themselves into believing they’ve occupied all along.”

  Jake’s column pushed all the wrong buttons.

  Some supported him, others disagreed but understood, still others issued a barrage of outrage and venom. They accused him of defending a murderer; they said he’d be responsible for any violent acts done by those reading his column. The abortion lobby and a coalition of feminist groups threatened to boycott the Tribune unless Jake was reprimanded and wrote a public apology in his column. Some of his fellow reporters called for his resignation. He’d been voted off the multiculturalism committee, with only Clarence, Jess, and Misty voting to keep him on.

  These were not easy days at work. It was a hurricane. But he felt as though he was in its eye, surrounded by wild, threatening winds, yet somehow centered and secure.

  Jake was about to leave the Trib this Friday afternoon, ready for a most welcome weekend, when he was buzzed by Elaine at the front desk.

  “Jake, there’s a man here to see you. He says it’s police business.”

  “Big guy, raspy voice, ketchup stains on his tie?”

  “Yes, I think we’re talking about the same fellow. Says his name is Elliot Ness.”

  “Tell him his badge means nothing in this building. I’ll come down.”

  Ollie had taken some heat from his lieutenant for working too closely in the investigation with someone outside the precinct. So he told Jake they’d better not talk again until he and his partner wrapped some things up. Ollie had been tight-lipped since the day in the hospital, and to make it easier on him Jake hadn’t made any contact. It had been a few weeks, and Jake missed the old redneck.

  He put a few papers in his briefcase, packed in all the extra mail — “hate mail” and “love mail” and “not-too-sure-what-they-think-about-the-change-in-me mail,” he now called it. With a springier step than usual, his mind on tonight’s dinner at Janet and Carly’s, he headed to the elevator.

  He ducked down low on the first floor and sneaked over to the side of the reception counter where Ollie stood across from Elaine. He jumped up suddenly, punching Ollie in the stomach. Elaine let out a startled cry and Ollie rolled his eyes as if to say, “It takes more than that to scare me.”

  “Never sneak up on an armed man. You’re lucky I have the steely nerves of Wyatt Earp, or you’d be looking down a gun barrel.”

  “I’ll remember that. To what do I owe your visit to my turf, Marshal?”

  “From what I’ve been hearing, thought this might be my last chance to visit you while you still worked here.”

  Elaine looked down uncomfortably. She’d told Jake how much she appreciated his recent columns. He felt a growing friendship with her, one he hoped he wouldn’t be losing.

  “No, I think I’ll be around here for a long time, Ollie. I’m a newspaper man. I still love the place.”

  “One or two last turns in the case you should know about,” Ollie said. “Let’s take a walk.”

  February was taking its last strong stand before succumbing to the newness of March. Jake shivered and dug his hands deep in his coat

  “What’s up? Clay have an accomplice?”

  “No. It’s weirder.”

  “How so?” It was like old times, trying to get Ollie to spill it.

  “Clay didn’t murder Doc.”

  Jake stopped in his tracks and faced Ollie.

  “What?”

  “Oh, he tried to murder him. He cut the rods and put him in critical condition. But he didn’t finish him off.”

  “What are you saying, Ollie?”

  “You remember the doctor Clay said he followed to see your friend, you know, the one who was in on declaring his mother dead?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Turned out to be Dr. Simpson.”

  “Simpson? You’re kidding.” Jake flashed back to their encounter in Doc’s room, and two months later in the hallway outside ICU. “What about him?”

  “Well, at first Clay didn’t remember his name, but the next day we gave him a list of doctors and he picked him out. So, we started surveillance on Dr. Simpson. Figured he was probably the other doctor mentioned in the computer file note. Guess who we found out he had all kinds of connections with?”

  Jake sighed. “Elvis? JFK?”

  “Mary Ann, your buddy’s secretary. Sums of money and important papers were exchanged. We ran background on Mary Ann, and it turns out she was a set up from day one. Doc’s old secretary got a great job offer in another town, underwritten by money from the syndica
te. She had no idea, of course. So Mary Ann applies and fills this sudden vacancy. Her real job was to make sure Dr. Lowell and Dr. Simpson and anyone else in the transplant business didn’t pull any fast ones. Turns out she knew your phony FBI buddies. Works for the same organization, known for its retirement plans.

  “We got our hands on some hot stuff, including a payoff Simpson took for bumping somebody else up the transplant list, just a few weeks after the deal with Clay’s mother. Simpson and Mary Ann pulled it off themselves, even with your buddy gone. They came up with a plausible reason, no other doctors questioned Simpsons judgment, and he got his payoff.”

  Jake closed his eyes, waiting for his brain to catch up with Ollie’s words.

  “Mary Ann? And Simpson? Incredible.”

  “You haven’t heard the most incredible part. See, Simpson didn’t just bump a guy up the list. He provided the organ donor. Guess whose fresh heart was sold to our eager cash customer?”

  A light turned on in Jake, but he didn’t want to think it.

  “Whose?”

  “Your friend’s. Dr. Lowell’s.”

  Jake shook his head in amazement.

  “See, once we got interested in Simpson, I started checking out nurses who worked with him. I have this way with the ladies, you know. Anyway, I hit the jackpot. Talked to a nurse named Robin Bender. Name sound familiar?”

  “Not the last name, but I know Nurse Robin. Bumped into her twice at the hospital. Nervous type.”

  “Real nervous. She was super eager to talk, like she’d been waiting for somebody to ask her some questions. Felt guilty she hadn’t said anything earlier. See, I’m there nosing around about Simpson related to the deal with Clay’s mom. But now she’s telling me this whole other story about how she was on duty the morning your friend died. She tells me one minute she’s in there checking on your friend. She swears the tube was perfectly in place and he was totally unconscious from the drugs.” Ollie made a dramatic pause.

  “Less than five minutes later everybody was rushing to his room to revive him, but it was too late, he was already brain dead. Then she saw the air tube in your buddy’s hand, and everyone said he must have pulled it. She said she couldn’t believe that. No way. But the only one she saw go into the room between the time he was alive and dead was, guess who?”

  “Simpson?”

  “None other. Given all the other stuff we know about Simpson, it makes a powerful case. There’s more, but let me fill you in on Nurse Robin.”

  “About what?”

  “I feel like I should work up to it. I hate to just come right out and say it, you know…”

  “Ollie!”

  “Okay, okay. She’s the one that sent you the yellow card.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. Red fingernail polish and all.”

  “But … how did she know about Clay cutting the tie-rods?”

  “That’s just it. She didn’t. Didn’t even have a clue.”

  “I don’t get it. Then why the note?”

  “She wasn’t talking about the car accident. She was talking about the accident with your friend’s air hose. That’s what she meant when she said, ’It wasn’t an accident.”’

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The whole time we didn’t get it. See, she was so uptight about this thing, she wasn’t thinking about the car wreck, she was just thinking about the accident with her patient supposedly pulling out his air hose.

  “But I still don’t get the note.”

  “Robin was terrified to come forward. She just wanted someone to come ask her questions so it wouldn’t seem like squealing. See, she didn’t actually see it happen, but gut-level she felt sure something was wrong. She was afraid to go to anybody at the hospital, but she knew about you from your column. She figured when she sent you the note, you’d go to the police and then we’d come ask her questions. Well, nobody ever showed up till I came in three months later asking about Simpson.”

  “I never told you, Ollie, but I bumped into her just before Christmas. We came really close to talking, but I wrote her off as a basket case and got distracted. By Simpson in fact.” Jake stopped to think.

  “Ollie, what you’re telling me is if we had really known what the note was talking about…”

  “Then we would never have known Clay tried to kill Doc. We would have found out the nurse’s suspicions about Simpson, but we wouldn’t have had him. He would have denied it, and we’d have left it there. We wouldn’t have all the other pieces to the puzzle. If we understood her note, we’d have never gotten either killer. Sometimes it pays off to not get it, huh?”

  Almost seems providential.

  They kept walking, Jake considering how incredibly close the truth came to being buried. Why wasn’t her note more clear? He was just glad it wasn’t. It had happened again. Things were so different than they appeared. What seemed to be true so often wasn’t.

  “I haven’t finished on Simpson,” Ollie said. “I took him in, showed him what we had, right down to the financial records and names and places and times he met with Mary Ann. Then I think maybe he misunderstood me to say we had a witness, a nurse who saw him pull Dr. Lowell’s tube. After he sat there choking for a few minutes, I suggested he might get some leniency if he coughed up some names. Like every name he’s known since kindergarten. I kept reminding him he didn’t have to answer any questions without a lawyer, but he kept talking. What was I supposed to do, gag him? The mention of possible leniency made him real cooperative. Confessed to everything, including some things we didn’t even suspect. Even admitted pulling your buddy’s air tube, but then, he knew we already knew that, so we didn’t act real surprised.

  “Know what he said to me, Jake? This will really frost you. He said he was acting in your friend’s best interests, death with dignity and all that. He said Doc probably wouldn’t have recovered and with his neck injuries likely would have been handicapped anyway. He knew Doc would have wanted his organs to go to someone else. He said doctors have to make tough decisions all the time, and there were other people who needed the hospital bed, and Doc’s heart could save someone else’s life. I told him I was deeply moved by his compassion, that in my book he was sort of a cross between Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa.”

  “What’s next for Simpson?”

  “We’ll pit him and Mary Ann against each other, get him to incriminate her, then cut a deal with whichever can deliver some bigger fish to us, probably Mary Ann. Between her and your friend Charlie, we might reel in a marlin or two.”

  Jake walked quietly, gazing at the patches of sidewalk not covered by snow, studying the cracks he’d stared at so many times before. Just when he thought he’d finally come to terms with all that had happened, it kept getting bigger. Doc was taken out by two men. One was paying him back for killing his child, wife, and mother, The other was treating him exactly as Doc had treated Clay’s mother, and rationalizing it just as he had. What was that Bible verse he’d read the other day? “Whatever a man plants, he also reaps.”

  Jake thought about Mary Ann. No wonder she could afford such nice clothes and jewelry! He shuddered at how close he’d come to getting in bed with her, literally and perhaps figuratively. Why had she tried to seduce him? His ego hadn’t considered anything but the obvious, but now he realized she had an angle. Who knows what he might have told her that would help the wrong people, or how she might have steered him the wrong direction.

  Thank you, Lord, for getting me away from Mary Ann that night. And thanks, Finney. For once, I listened.

  “Something else I’m following up on now. You know the rash of murders that were holding us back from this case? Some of them were your usual street killings, but remember me telling you about this group of murders with no robberies or apparent motive?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, some of them may be related to this case.”

  “Really?”

  “We suspected the murders weren’t random, and we knew some of
them were committed with the same gun. But we couldn’t find any link between the victims, so there: was no way to come up with suspects. But something Simpson said turned my wheels. So I followed a hunch and did some cross-checks. And guess what?”

  “No clue.”

  “In the last four months, three people on the waiting list for vital organ transplants at Lifeline have been murdered. It appears while your friend and Simpson were tinkering with the list on the inside, someone else was adjusting it their own way. The doctors had no idea this was happening. I don’t think so anyway. But someone had a plan. There’s more than one way for a wealthy unprincipled person to move up the list. I don’t know where this will lead us, but I can’t believe it’s a coincidence.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Which leads me to my last item. When I ran the cross-check and hit pay dirt, I thought of something else. So I pulled some strings and got hold of a different list, ran a different check. Three other victims—all yuppies—and no apparent motive for their murders. None of them were waiting for transplants, but they had one thing in common. You heard of Life-Givers, the organ repository in town that recruits organ donors through TV and newspaper ads and lectures?”

  “I’ve seen their ads in the Trib.”

  “Well, our three yuppies, with no other known connection between them, had all signed up with Life-Givers as organ donors within the last year. And they were killed in such a way that vital organs were still intact, with someone—we don’t know who in any of the three cases—calling 911 immediately.”

  “You mean…”

  “Why not? You need to get your vital organ sooner? There’s at least three ways. Bribe some doctors and get your name bumped up the list. Decrease the number of recipients ahead of you. Increase the number of donors. It’s supply and demand, right? We can’t prove anything yet. But if I could get hold of Life-Giver’s donor sign-up list, complete with home addresses, you can be sure someone else could too.”

  Jake looked at Ollie, making sure his revelations were finally over. They walked a ways further in the wet silence of the sidewalk.

  “Amazing, isn’t it? You’ve got good people donating organs and getting transplants, then greed gets its hand on it and turns it into a nightmare. I guess anything, no matter how good, can be corrupted.” Jake mulled it over.