A Heartbeat Away

by Harry Kraus

  “So?”

  “So it gives me an anchor to distinguish the donor’s memories. The donor was evidently quite passionate.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Get to the point. Do you think this girl was murdered?”

  “Hold your horses, Captain. I’ll show you the tape. But be aware, there are some real oddities. Tori’s memories from Dakota Jones are all third person. It’s as if she sees things from outside her own body. The only thing I can figure is that somehow Tori’s inner psyche has dealt with these transplanted memories as if they are indeed foreign. It’s as if Dakota speaks to her from the outside. She doesn’t always experience Dakota from the first person. It’s like she sees her in action from someone else’s eyes.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following. Do we have evidence of a crime?”

  “Oh, yes. But it’s not the kind of thing I want to discuss over the phone. I need to show you this stuff in private.”

  “Give me a clue. Why the secrecy?”

  “You’ll understand when I show you the tape. My report could be damaging.”

  “To who?”

  “To Dakota Jones, among others.” She hesitated, wondering how much to say. “Maybe the police.”

  “Bring me the video.”

  Mary sighed. “Look, I’m not sure who this Dakota woman really was. There are memories of abuses from people in authority over her, a father or an employer perhaps. I want to study this a bit more before I point my fingers at anyone who may have wanted to harm Dakota.”

  “Can you say who?”

  “Dakota wanted to hurt someone.”

  “What?” The captain’s tone suggested his growing frustration at the conversation.

  “I’ll bring you the tape and let you see.” She paused. “Let’s just say that I think Dakota Jones started that fire.”

  28

  By the time Tori arrived at her suburban Richmond home, a Richmond PD vehicle sat in her driveway. She recognized the officer duo who had investigated her complaint from the evening before. She parked her Mazda on the street and walked up to the older officer.

  He held out his hand. “Officer Campbell. We met last evening.”

  “What’s going on? Did someone break in?”

  He tilted his head toward her front door. “Punched a hole in the window in the entrance, then reached in and unlocked the door.”

  “Robbery?”

  “Not sure. Need to go through the house with you.”

  The younger cop sat in the passenger seat of the patrol car, talking on the radio. “What’s he doing?” Tori asked.

  “We’re calling for a technician. We want to dust for prints, photograph anything inside that may be in disarray.”

  She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  “Don’t touch the doorknob.”

  The door was ajar. She pushed it open with the back of her hand. Other than glass on the hardwood floor, the entryway was normal. She scanned the front room, looking at photographs and books. “I don’t notice anything missing or out of place.”

  “Do you keep valuables in the house?”

  “I have a small safe, but only for important documents, my passport, that type of thing. It’s in the bedroom closet.”

  “Jewelry? Cash?”

  “Nothing much. My tastes are pretty simple.”

  They did a room-by-room inventory. In each room, she tried to imagine the impact of losing the contents. A vase that had been a gift from her mother. A seascape picture painted by a patient. A trophy from a high school track meet.

  In her office, she looked at her ego wall, where her diplomas and awards were on display. This was the personal shrine she’d built. What kind of life have I built? Would I miss anything I own if it all were taken away?

  In her bedroom, she opened the top drawer of her dresser and slipped a small wad of cash from the inside of a sock. She checked her small jewelry box and then knelt over the safe in her closet. Peering inside, she said, “Everything is here. I can’t tell that anything has been bothered. Maybe it wasn’t robbery. Maybe it was meant to scare me into stopping my search into my heart donor’s death.”

  “And maybe your alarm scared off a potential burglar who didn’t have a chance to take anything.”

  “That doesn’t feel right. There has to be a connection with the threats. I’ve never been a target of burglary before. The timing of this break-in is too close to the phone calls to be coincidence.”

  The officer made a note.

  “Could you at least talk to Captain Ellis of the Baltimore PD? He’s in charge of the investigation into my donor’s death.”

  The officer rubbed at a small stain on the front of his uniform. It looked like powdered sugar. “Sure.”

  When they walked back out to the foyer, a technician was dusting the doorknob for fingerprints. “Hey, George,” the man said, “this has been wiped clean. Nothing here.”

  “No surprise.”

  Tori stayed quiet, watched, and paced around the front room.

  After a few minutes, Officer Campbell took a step toward her. “Are you okay?”

  She offered a smile. “I was just thinking about all this stuff. None of it really means that much to me beyond a few photographs.”

  “That’s pretty typical, isn’t it? It takes a crisis to let us know that family and friends are the only things that matter.”

  Tori nodded silently and felt alone. She hadn’t invested much in friendships, and without family, she was acutely aware of her isolation. She looked at him. “Can I fix you some coffee?”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  The menial task brought her some sense of comfort in the presence of yet another stressor. It seemed somehow the right thing to do to care for someone else. And when it came to life outside the operating rooms, she’d never been very good at that sort of thing. Sure, she could take out pancreatic cancer, but could she do the minor things? Could she offer a cup of cold water on a hot day? The thought nailed her conscience. She’d spent the majority of her adult life being cared for by others in orbit around her.

  When she handed the officer a mug of steaming black coffee, she said, “Someone’s trying to scare me, aren’t they?”

  “Appears so.” He shrugged. “Can you think of anyone who might want to scare you? A mad family member of a patient with a bad outcome?”

  She thought back over the last few months. As a cancer surgeon, she often dealt with patient deaths, but she didn’t recall any unbalanced or angry family members. “No.”

  “Boyfriend? Jilted lover? A married man?”

  “No, no!”

  “Just askin’, ma’am. It’s part of the job.”

  “I can assure you, until my heart transplant, my life was appropriately boring.” She gripped her coffee mug as if it might escape. “What about you, Officer Campbell? You have family and friends to make your life meaningful?”

  “Just my wife at home now. My son is deployed in Afghanistan.”

  The technician called from the foyer. “All finished here, George.”

  The officer took another swig of the coffee and set the mug on the island. “Thanks. You should try and get that glass fixed or at least put up some temporary barrier.”

  “Sure.”

  The officers left, and Tori swept up the fragments of glass. Being in the house alone was giving her a creepy feeling. She packed a few additional clothing items in a suitcase and put duct tape over the window.

  She took a Coke Zero from the fridge and stopped to pull the 316 note from under a magnet on the door. She shoved it in her pocket. This will make the perfect bookmark in my new Bible. I’ll put it right at John 3:16.

  On the way to her car, she stopped at the mailbox where she found two Kohl’s flyers and a package. It was a brown pac
kage about six by eight inches, postmarked in downtown Richmond the day before.

  She studied it a moment. No return address. Must weigh two or three pounds. I don’t remember ordering anything. There was no Amazon symbol.

  She took it back into the house where she loosened the paper wrapping with a knife. Inside, at first, she saw only Styrofoam packing peanuts. She brushed them aside to find a plastic Ziploc bag. She lifted it from the container and screamed.

  Stepping back, she let the bag and its contents fall to the floor.

  Inside, the red-brown flesh was easily recognizable to the surgeon.

  She stared at it in disbelief, fighting back a wave of nausea.

  A human heart!

  29

  Emily Greene approached the pharmacy counter and showed her badge to the clerk. “Baltimore PD. I called earlier and spoke to a pharmacist, Mr. John Bell. Is he available?”

  The young woman seemed barely old enough to be out of high school. “He’s expecting you. He’s in the office.” She motioned Emily to follow around the end of the counter. “This way.”

  She walked past several rows of shelving stocked with drugs. In a small office, she saw a man staring into a computer screen. His hair was dark and curly, falling to the top of his white coat. He was clean-shaven and wore one of those pink ribbon pins on his lapel, the kind that identified his support of breast-cancer research.

  “Mr. Bell? I’m Emily Greene with Baltimore PD. We spoke on the phone.”

  “Yes, yes. Thanks for coming over.” He motioned toward a chair on the opposite side of his desk. “I’ll get right to the point. I’m seeing a shift in some of the prescribing patterns. I haven’t checked with other pharmacies, but from what I see, the downtown free clinic is starting to prescribe a ton of narcotics.”

  “What pills exactly?”

  “Mostly OxyContin. Some Percocet and Tylox.”

  “We’ve been seeing a lot of OxyContin on the street. In fact, that’s why I’m looking into this. Someone has found a new source. A forty-milligram tablet can be sold for up to forty bucks a pop in the suburban high schools.”

  “I get that. Now, nothing here is illegal. I just wanted you to be aware of a trend.” He held up a stack of prescriptions. “Look at these. I called the clinic on a few of them, but the story is always the same. They are seeing more and more terminal patients due to problems with the poor not being able to see home health hospice.”

  She took the stack and peeled her finger across the edge. “Whoa.” She shuffled through the top ten or so and read the names of the prescribing doctors. The name on the third prescription caught her eye. Christian Mitchell.

  She lifted the prescription. “This guy,” she asked. “Are you seeing a lot from the same prescribers?”

  “The same five or six doctors man the free clinic, so I see a fair number of repeats. I’ve also seen the same trend with a few of the home health hospice programs.”

  “This is for one hundred tablets. Who could possibly need that many pain pills?”

  “I asked the clinic the same question.”

  “And they said?”

  “These are for terminally ill patients, and many of them have built up a tolerance.”

  “Did you look back? Have the same patients been receiving narcotics in a slowly rising trend?”

  He shook his head. “That’s just it. I’m seeing more and more first-time prescriptions for this amount.”

  “Can I have copies of these prescriptions? If these are terminal patients, I would expect you’d be getting prescriptions for just a month or two. I’ll cross-reference this to the obituaries.”

  “I’m not supposed to give out patient names. Can you get a warrant?”

  “Not sure. Let’s follow the trend for a little while and if it worsens, I’ll sweet-talk the magistrate into giving me a warrant.”

  “Okay.”

  “In the meantime, maybe I can figure out a way to get into that clinic to do some snooping.” She looked back at the prescriptions and frowned.

  “Something bothering you?”

  “This name … I wonder if it could be the same guy I knew.”

  “You bust him before?”

  “Nothing like that.” She set the papers on his desk. “Just someone from a former life, that’s all.”

  She touched the edge of a prescription with Christian Mitchell’s name and remembered.…

  Thirty minutes after Officers Campbell and Moore left Tori’s suburban Richmond home, they were back, this time to investigate the package she’d received in the mail.

  “It’s in there,” she said, pointing toward the kitchen.

  She followed the duo.

  Officer Campbell put on a latex glove and lifted the bag from one corner. He twisted his mouth as if tasting something sour. “You’re sure this is human?”

  She nodded silently.

  He squinted at the package. “Could be a deer, maybe a bear. I saw a deer heart when I went hunting with my cousin.”

  “It’s human,” Tori said. “I should know.”

  “Looks like it’s been opened, maybe stabbed.”

  The younger officer looked on. “We need to talk to homicide.”

  Officer Campbell gestured with his head. “Open that evidence bag.” He then carefully placed the Ziploc into a second bag that he sealed for evidence.

  Tori pointed to the box on the island. “It was in there.”

  Campbell frowned. “Postmarked Richmond.”

  “So now I guess everyone will agree. Someone is threatening me.”

  “No doubt about that.”

  “I need to explain something,” she said. She launched into the explanation about cellular memory and her concern that she’d received transplanted memories, clues to how her donor had died.

  Officer Campbell sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me this in the beginning?”

  “I was afraid you’d react like everyone else. No one seems to believe this.”

  “I’ll get our team to evaluate the package and the contents, see if they can find fingerprints and confirm your suspicions that it’s human.”

  “Oh, it’s human.”

  “Okay,” he said, holding up his hand. “We just need to confirm.”

  The younger officer shook his head. “Whoever did this wants us to know exactly what he’s capable of. That’s sick.”

  “Are you done?” Tori backed away. “I want to get out of here. I’m staying at the Jefferson downtown if you need me. You have my cell.”

  He nodded and handed her a card. “My cell number is here. Call me if you get any more threats.”

  Tori escorted the officers to their patrol car. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, adding to the eerie mood and Tori’s anxiety. She looked down the street, wondering if someone watched. Everything was quiet except for the chattering of leaves responding to the wind.

  She locked the house and jogged to her car, nearly stumbling over a flower bed. Once inside, she pressed the door lock, checked the backseat, and slowly pulled out. She circled the neighborhood three times watching her rearview mirror. The rain started just as she saw headlights in the mirror.

  She followed a crazy route through town, dashing forward through yellow lights, making U-turns, and even circling the med-school employee parking deck before handing her keys to a valet at the Jefferson. If she’d been followed, she hadn’t detected it.

  As she wheeled her suitcase past the front desk, a hotel employee, a young man of college age, called her name from behind the counter. “Dr. Taylor?”

  She looked over.

  “Good,” he said, his eyes bright. “I thought that was you.” He smiled. “You got a delivery.”

  Immediately, her chest tightened. Not here. No one knows I’m he
re.

  He disappeared momentarily into an office behind the counter and returned a few seconds later holding a vase of red roses.

  Mentally, she ran a short list of men who might send her flowers. It was a very short list. Phin? Jarrod? Who knows I’m here?

  She reached for the flowers and plucked a small envelope from a clear plastic holder. She slipped out the card. Inside there were only two words.

  “You’re next.”

  30

  Trembling, Tori looked up. “Who delivered these? What florist did they come from?”

  The young hotel clerk smiled flirtatiously. “Why?” His voice had a singsong quality. “Secret admirer?”

  “It’s not funny. Someone is threatening me.”

  An older brunette woman stepped up next to the young man. “Nice way to be threatened.”

  Tori looked up at the woman. Tori estimated fifty, dyed hair, gray roots. “Did anyone ask for me? Visit my room?”

  “We don’t give out room numbers.”

  “Did anyone ask?”

  The clerks looked at each other and shook their heads. “No one.”

  “I … I need to check out.”

  The woman tapped the computer keyboard. “We have you in until the end of the week.”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t stay here. Someone knows I’m here. Someone is threatening me.”

  The male clerk looked at his coworker. “The cancellation policy—”

  The woman interrupted. “I’m handling this, Stan.” Her voice was firm and silenced the young man.

  “I’ll need a minute to collect my things.”

  “Certainly.”

  Tori looked at the man. “Can you come with me?”

  He looked at his coworker and raised his eyebrows.

  The female clerk said, “Go. I’ll cover the desk.”

  Tori led the man to the elevator and then down the hall to her room. Once there, she let him enter first. She stood in the hall. “Anyone in there?”

  “No.”