by Sarah Graves
“And by stimulants you mean…”
“Amphetamines. But you can see positives if the patient’s on prescribed Ritalin, the attention deficit disorder drug, too. So take that for what it’s worth.”
“Got it. And the second part of your story?”
“Okay.” Emily took a breath. “The blood-type part. See, I got a guy in my ER once, had a rash. I gave him Benadryl and steroid cream and sent him home.”
Lizzie turned onto Main Street. “Sounds reasonable enough to me.”
“Textbook,” Emily agreed. “But two hours later he’s back and now he’s vomiting bright-red blood. Large amounts of blood.”
Lizzie pulled to the curb. It was way too early for Missy Brantwell to be at work, but that was her yellow Jeep, and behind that was parked Peg Wylie’s crummy little Honda sedan.
“Real shocker of a bleed,” Emily continued. “The kind nobody ever gets used to, just a remarkable volume of…”
“Yeah, okay.” Lizzie parked.
“Turned out the rash was part of a weird hemorrhagic syndrome and if I’d just typed his blood the first time around, I might’ve bought him enough leeway to save his life. As it was…”
“Huh.” Lizzie got out of the Blazer. “Emily, listen, I don’t want to be rude, here, but—”
“Okay.” Emily cut to the chase. “So on Jane Crimmins, I got her blood type because I always do, nowadays. And then a little while after you’d left, her old records came in.”
“You mean her medical records? But how did you get—”
“The federally funded rural health initiative in northern Maine has us on their network,” Emily replied. “Links people’s medical records from anywhere in the world. I can get your medical history, any medications you’re on, lab results, all right off the computer.”
Inside the office, Peg looked ghastly, her blunt-cut blond hair unkempt and her fireplug-shaped body clad in a rumpled shirt and baggy jeans.
“…so I put her name into the system, along with her Social Security number. Card was right there in her wallet,” Emily said.
A new thought struck Lizzie. “Wait a minute. If you can get lab results from the computer, why’d you bother testing her blood? I mean, wouldn’t the computer tell you what her blood type is?”
“Aha,” said Emily. “That’s just my point. You see…”
Lizzie, phone in hand, locked up the vehicle, and strode toward her office.
“…you see,” Emily went on, “it turns out that the blood type on the computer and the type that the patient really had…”
“Hi,” Peg Wylie uttered dully as Lizzie came in.
“…they didn’t match,” said Emily.
“What?” Lizzie threw her jacket and bag at the coat tree and nodded to Missy, gesturing for Peg to sit.
“The blood types,” Emily said. “The medical records say Jane Crimmins is B-negative. But the blood that I drew here, that got tested right here in our lab, is O-positive.”
Missy had made coffee. Lizzie poured a cup gratefully.
“I guess there could be a computer mistake,” said Emily, “but it’s not likely, and a lab error here is out of the question. We rechecked twice.”
Peg’s skin looked claylike, her eyes sunken with fatigue. She bit a thumbnail nervously, waiting for Lizzie.
“So you’re telling me the woman you saw in the emergency room is not Jane Crimmins.”
“That’s what it looks like. And before you ask who she really is, I’d love to tell you but the computers aren’t that good yet.”
The TV in the office was on, and the weather guy was saying something ominous. “Listen, if you find out anything else—”
“You got it,” the ER doc agreed, hanging up.
Lizzie turned to Missy Brantwell. The background check she’d asked Missy to do on Jane had come back clean: no wants, warrants, or priors. “Call the motel in Houlton, will you, and get Jane Crimmins on the phone?”
She paused, searching her memory for yet another name that the locals had all probably known since infancy. “What’s it called again, not one of those motels right out on the highway but the other one, off on the side road…”
She struggled for the name but all she remembered about the place she had chosen for Jane Crimmins was that the hodgepodge of buildings around the big gravel parking lot had sported a fraying banner: EAT SLEEP AND SWIM IN OUR POOL!
“Treetops,” Missy pronounced at once, then dialed the phone on her desk and spoke briefly into it. But a moment later she looked up puzzledly.
“Jane Crimmins isn’t there. Or at least no one answers in her room.”
“What does that mean?” Peg put in nervously, looking from Lizzie to Missy and back again.
“She isn’t, huh? Well, isn’t that just special.” Lizzie frowned down at her two hands and very carefully did not punch or strangle anyone with them.
“You go on outside and wait for me in the Blazer,” she told Peg, who looked mutinous. But she went. Peg’s email had mentioned new info. Lizzie supposed she’d better find out what it was.
Besides, something about Peg just wasn’t hitting Lizzie right. A little time alone with her in the Blazer might help uncover the reason for that, too. “You okay?” Lizzie asked Missy when Peg was gone. “Your mom okay, everything all right with the baby?”
“So far.” Missy smiled tiredly. “Fires are still far enough from our place so I’m not too worried. Mom’s never really asleep these days. People with her condition tend to wander at night, but I had the sitter come out overnight to keep an eye on her.”
She sighed resignedly. “Turned out that I couldn’t sleep much, either, so finally I figured I’d just come on in here.”
With a confused mother and a lovely but demanding toddler son, the office was about the only place Missy could get any rest at all, lately.
Not that she’d be getting much today. “Okay, I’m on my cell. If you need to head home, just go, and call me when you can.”
The smoke hadn’t gotten any thicker overnight. But all it would take was a stiff breeze to whip things up again. “I’m going to take Peg with me down to the motel. Maybe my little pal Janie, or whoever she is, left something behind.”
Like a notarized affidavit saying what the hell she’s up to, Lizzie thought. But that was too much to hope for. If she’s left anything in that motel room, I’ll bet I’m not going to like it.
Which for ordinary life was way too pessimistic, of course. But when a murder cop expected the worst, in Lizzie’s experience he or she turned out to be correct more times than not.
Like this time, for instance.
—
When you’ve worked in a medical center for as long as I’d worked at the one in New Haven, you can do almost anything in it: take showers and change into clean clothes, find food, watch TV, or even sleep overnight in a bed if you’re careful and you know how to pick your spot. It’s like a small city, containing everything needed for life.
You can learn almost anything about any of the patients in there, too, especially if you’re the one creating their medical records, like I was. Place and date of birth, all the vital statistics, next of kin, medical or surgical history, any drugs prescribed now or in the past, allergies and precautions…it’s all recorded, and not just in their charts.
Because the thing is, when I typed a report I made a hard copy that would be returned to a physician, a social worker, a therapist…whoever had sent in the dictated report in the first place. But it wasn’t the only place the information went; as I sat at my keyboard and typed in the material, a computer file was also being created.
That computerized file could be retrieved and sent anywhere in the world electronically; for instance if you developed a heart problem or any other illness or condition while you were on vacation, the doctor wherever you were could consult your file via computer. It took a password to do it, of course. You couldn’t just waltz in off the street and snoop in there. But the needed credential was
gained easily by emailing a request for one to the database administrator.
Or by being me.
I actually was one of the administrators, and I accessed the medical database all the time, to create, update, or correct a medical record. As a result it was simple for me to access the data of anyone who had ever been a patient in the network, to request anything I wanted, and—in a near-instantaneous twinkle of electrons—get it.
Or change it, which I thought might come in handy once Cam and I began working on our plan. That was why, soon after Cam and I had set up the orderly Finny Brill to get Henry Gemerle out of the forensic hospital for us—and while Cam was in the very same medical center where I worked, recovering from her brain surgery—I tried altering a few things in the medical records on my own.
To find out, I mean, whether or not I could get away with it. And when I did, I got more ambitious. For starters, I decided to try ordering a few drugs.
—
Sitting beside Lizzie in the Blazer that Thursday morning, Peg Wylie said nothing as they drove out of town. Instead she gazed silently at the dried-out winter landscape that was coming to be the new normal around here: cracked mud in place of pasture ponds, dust where there should be snow.
The sky went on brightening, revealing old fence posts now weathered to silvery gray with shreds of rusty barbed wire still clinging to them and nests of bittersweet vine crowning their tops. Then:
“I lied to you,” Peg said suddenly.
A hawk soared above, wings outspread, then dove fast, some rabbit or other small, soft mammal in the dry weeds having a bad morning suddenly.
“About Tara’s father, I mean,” said Peg.
Lizzie wasn’t sure if the shriek as they passed was real, or if she’d imagined it. Either way, though: Bye-bye, rabbit.
“I had a boyfriend, and I got pregnant,” Peg said. “And then I got married. I was sixteen.”
The road south of Bearkill ran along a high, narrow ridge with views east across the St. John River to New Brunswick, Canada, and west to the northern reaches of the Appalachians. At this early hour the mountain peaks were indistinct humps against a dull sky, their eastern slopes covered with now-leafless hardwoods.
Lizzie pulled into a scenic bypass overlooking the river. The land past the trash cans and picnic tables dropped away to a vista of water and small islands far below, stretching to the horizon north and south. Directly to the east, a pale-pink line appeared on the horizon.
“Okay,” said Lizzie. “And then what happened?”
Peg lit a cigarette. Her blond hair was bleached, a line of darker roots showing her natural color, which was light brown with a few gray streaks, and her eyes in the growing dawn were blue.
Pale, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky blue. She dragged nervously on the smoke. “And then his unit got called up. Military, he was in the National Guard. They got sent to Iraq.”
Lizzie nodded, waiting. The pink line to the east turned pale yellow. A breeze, freakishly warm for this time of year and smelling freshly of the river, sucked the rank cigarette smoke out the passenger-side window.
Peg took another drag, pinched the butt with her thumb and index finger, then tucked it into her cigarette pack—there were no ashtrays in vehicles anymore, and around here lately no one flicked cigarettes out windows, even on gravel parking lots.
But finishing the cigarette seemed to have shut off Peg’s speech-switch, too. She fell silent again, her face desolate.
“So?” Lizzie prompted finally, restarting the Blazer as a thin orange disk peeped up from the trees on the far side of the river. Then it jumped up, its light turning the hills to the west to gold while she turned back out onto the highway, once more heading south.
On the outskirts of Houlton they pulled off onto a side road, drove half a mile, and found the wide gravel driveway of Treetops. The colonial-style house, white-clapboarded and with the traditional green shutters at the windows, was the central hub of an elaborate series of more recent additions: a two-story brick unit housing the lobby and combination bar and restaurant—HOT BEEF SUB WITH AU JUICE SAUCE! read the yellowing placard propped in the window—and three one-story windowed spokes radiating outward from the central brick section, each spoke containing a dozen guest rooms.
At the rear, just visible over the guest-room sections, was what Lizzie assumed was the pool building, a blue-domed structure resembling a miniature covered sports arena.
Peg had stayed silent for the last part of the trip but now the sight of the motel seemed to get her going again from where she’d left off.
“Then he came home.” She sighed. “Freaked out, hooked through the gills on heroin, and all pissed off at the whole damn world. At me, too. Tara was three months old.”
Peg stopped, turning to stare out the window. Lizzie decided to give the woman a minute to collect herself. She hit her phone’s auto-dial.
“Missy, do me a favor? Drop the New Haven cops a request for more records. Any priors on Henry Gemerle, and ask them for all of the unsolved stranger-rapes in the area from—” She specified the years she wanted. “Oh, and you know what? Ask them if there’s a yard behind the Gemerle house, too, and was it investigated at all.”
She listened a moment. “Yeah, investigated as in dug up, or if cadaver dogs were ever in it. Or,” she added, “GPR.”
Ground-penetrating radar was a near-prohibitively expensive way to look for evidence. But Yale was in New Haven and probably had an archaeology department, so the cops there might have access to the technology without having to buy the gear.
She turned back to Peg, who’d straightened in her seat looking ready to talk again. “So then what happened?”
Around the back of the motel, four huge metal dumpsters and an industrial-sized propane tank formed an L-shaped service area. She parked next to it and got out, fishing around in her bag for a magnetic-stripped rectangle of plastic.
The employees at Treetops were just as cash-strapped as the minimum-wage workers back in the city had been. Getting the extra key card from the desk clerk last night had cost two folded twenties wrapped in a ten—the same price as Boston.
Lizzie hadn’t even been sure at the time why she’d done it.
Force of habit, probably. But now she was glad.
“Then I left,” said Peg, as if this must be obvious. “He was just getting impossible to live with.”
The key card opened the motel’s rear outer door. Inside, the hall stank of chlorine from the indoor pool.
“Last time I heard he’d just gotten out of jail again. And I don’t want him to find us here. Not ever,” Peg went on.
“Right,” Lizzie said tiredly, but she didn’t believe a word of it. What Peg had just told her might be a decent reason to keep your head down, keep your troubles from going public. A guy with a heroin habit was no one’s idea of fun.
But it wasn’t enough when your kid was missing. Lizzie punched her phone’s REDIAL button. “Yeah, Missy, one more thing. Sorry about this, but call the New Haven cops again?”
She turned to Peg. “What’s his name? Your ex, his last—”
Peg looked startled. “Zimmerman, his name is Mitch—”
Lizzie repeated this to Missy. “I’ll hang on,” she added, then listened while Missy relayed the information from the NHPD: brown/blue, six foot two, 190, muscular build, forearm tattoos.
Right now he was in custody on armed robbery charges, Missy said. So at least Mitch Zimmerman existed. Peg might even have been married to the guy like she said, not that it mattered. She was still lying; for one thing, the story was so harmless that if it were true, she’d have offered it earlier.
The room Lizzie had checked Jane Crimmins—or whoever she really was—into the day before was the last one on the corridor, adjacent to a whirring, clattering compressor of some kind, perhaps connected to the pool.
She slid the key card in and the door swung open; as the standard motel-room interior with its heavy drawn curtains came dimly into view, P
eg stopped.
Lizzie did, too, glad suddenly for the chlorine reek. “Stay behind me, don’t come in.”
“Tara?” Peg’s voice rose. “Oh, my God, is that—”
“No.” I hope not, anyway, Lizzie thought. She flipped on a light switch. The room was a battle scene: chairs overturned, lamps broken, blankets torn off the bed.
The heavy ceramic lid from the toilet tank lay near the far wall. Lizzie crouched next to the bloody heap by the dresser, her heart slamming in her chest. Being a murder cop was like being an ER physician sometimes, she supposed: You could cultivate all the calm exterior manner you wanted.
But as Emily Ektari had said earlier, no one ever got used to the sight of a lot of blood all of a sudden.
A lot of blood.
EIGHT
Lizzie looked up at Peg’s horrified face. “Take it easy. It’s not Tara, okay? I don’t think anyone’s here at all.”
Lizzie scanned the carpet, looked under the beds, noted the disarrayed bedclothes, and checked behind the overturned TV.
Nothing. “Peg, go down to the lobby and ask to use the phone, okay?” Lizzie scribbled on the desk pad.
“Call this number, a guy named Dylan Hudson should answer. When he does I want you to tell him that you’re with me and that I need him to come out here.”
Peg nodded dumbly but made no move to obey.
“Hey, you okay?” Lizzie peered into Peg’s shocked face. “ ’Cause this really isn’t Tara, you know that now, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Peg managed shakily. “Just blood.” Her gaze flitted around the room. No clothes or other personal items were visible, and nothing was on the bathroom counter but unopened soap and the standard tiny bottles of motel toiletries.
“But whose blood?” Peg whispered.
That was the big question, all right. “Just go, Peg. You want to help Tara, you do what I asked.”
Finally Peg obeyed, and once she was gone Lizzie knelt and peered under both beds again, into the entryway closet, and all around the bathroom. She checked all the dresser drawers and the bedside table, too: Bible, a sheet of TV instructions, and a menu from the motel’s restaurant, nothing else.
