Alex became immediately alert. “What is it? A patient?”
A wan smile greeted the question. “Isn’t it always? This one has me completely baffled. It’s a young girl. She’s a six-year-old. Her mother brought her in to my office the day before yesterday and reported the child had repeated bouts of nausea and vomiting. I did the usual examination. No fever. A bit underweight, perhaps, but there’s no good rule to determine exactly correct weight in a growing child. So I sent her off to the clinic for a blood test.”
“And?”
“The child became sick there, and the mother was hysterical. I can’t blame her for being upset. She was having visions of leukemia, or something worse. I reassured her, of course, especially since there’s nothing in the test results showing anything serious. But, just to be safe, I’m keeping the girl in the hospital.”
“How’s she doing?”
“That’s it. She seems to be fine, then when they’re about to discharge her, she gets sick again.”
“How about where kids make themselves throw up. Bull-something-or-other.”
Frances broke into a loud laugh. “In spite of yourself, you’re beginning to think of symptoms and treatment rather than punishment.”
“I’ve learned from you. Besides, it seems to me you’ve had one or two patients like that already.”
“Right. They were anorexics who, when they did eat, would then sneak off and throw up. It’s called bulimia. And that’s one of the first things I checked on once I couldn’t find any evidence of bacterial or viral infection, and no peculiarity in the blood count. It seemed unlikely, though, because it’s usually adolescent girls who suffer from it. But there have been reports of younger ones, so I alerted the hospital staff.
“They insist the vomiting is spontaneous. There’s no finger-in-the-throat business. She shows no signs of trying to throw up. The clincher is her appetite is good, and they watched her close enough to make sure she was eating all of her food and not squirreling any of it away somewhere the way anorexics often do.”
“I guess I’ve exhausted my medical repertoire. If I know kids, though, she’ll just get over it.”
“I wish I could convince myself of that—or convince the mother. I’ve had to prescribe tranquilizers for her, she’s so upset. The worst of it is she’s new in town and, what with all this privacy of patient information business, I’m having the devil of a time getting the girl’s records. There’s some mixup in the names. And her former doctor…well, he can’t even remember the child.”
“Isn’t kind of strange? Would you just forget a patient you’ve had recently? Don’t answer that. I know what you’re like. But what about other doctors?”
“In some places, it’s an assembly line. It’s sure possible for a doctor to not recognize a patient by name. I’ll call him this afternoon. Maybe a description and the symptoms will shake something loose.”
Alex looked thoughtful, downed his coffee, sat back and said, “Ask him if he remembers the mother.”
“You’re on to something, aren’t you?”
He unclipped his cellphone and slipped it across the table. “Call the hospital.”
***
Both Frances and Alex were late getting home after work, and the immediate topic of conversation was what Alex now referred to as the “case.”
“Why it occurred to you and not to me, I’ll never understand,” Frances said.
“That’s simple. You’re thinking in terms of patients, not criminals.”
“But it’s in the literature. It’s very rare, but it does happen. I should have known enough to ask the hospital staff to watch for it when the girl would become sick. Once you got me to ask the question, one of the nurses picked up on it right away. It was only during or shortly after the mother’s visit. So when she came in this evening, they confiscated her purse…”
Alex grimaced.
Frances laughed at his expression. “They’re not the police. They don’t have to worry about illegal search and seizure. The hospital’s job is to care for their patients, and includes seeing to it they aren’t poisoned. Anyway, the mother was carrying a fistful of ipecac capsules. It wasn’t hard to figure out what she was doing with them. The girl’s fine. No vomiting sessions for twenty-four hours.”
“So now we do have a ‘case.’”
“No way. The mother is sick, even though the girl isn’t.”
“But she lied to you. When we checked her out, we found she’d been to four different cities and had the child treated for the same symptoms. As soon as it looks like the doctors are catching on, she cuts and runs. She’s guilty of child abuse, at the very least.”
“Settle down, Alex. She’s suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. It’s an established illness and she needs treatment, not imprisonment.”
Alex grumbled, but said, “I guess a mother who’d do something like that to her own kid must be sick.”
Frances laughed. “You’re learning, Alex…learning to be compassionate.”
OFF WITH THE NEW
The stone dust was worse than ever today because the wind had died down and all five of the apprentices were busy on engravings. Old Almal was goading them along while himself working besides them for a change, since the Prince wanted the inscriptions finished today. The noise of the pounding was music to his ears because it meant business was better than ever. Even the rasping coughs of the workers sounded reassuring.
The press of work made Jeltulin’s visit all the more annoying. There just wasn’t time for chatting. But the caller wasn’t to be put off. He shouted above the din, “Look Almal, the caravan from Babylonia brought in a camel load of these.” He held up for inspection a small clay tablet with wedge shaped inscriptions on its surface.
Almal put down his chisel long enough to inspect the object, shrugged, and turned back to his work.
Annoyed at this reception, Jeltulin insisted on being noticed. “Look, Almal,” he said, putting the tablet right under the stonemason’s nose. “It probably didn’t take the scribe ten minutes to do this. Why, you would spend the better part of the day to write as much.”
Almal snorted. “And how long is it going to last?”
“Just as long as anything you do. Here, feel the surface. It’s rock hard.”
The mason took the tablet, hefted it, turned it to look at it’s back then tossed it in the air to watch it shatter into pieces when it fell to the hard dirt floor. “So much for your new invention, Jeltulin. Try that with one of my stones. They will last forever.”
It was too much for the visitor. “You’re an old fool, Almal. Long after your work is confined to gravestones, those tablets will be in every household and on every altar.”
A guffaw greeted his words as Almal once more went to work on the stone slab.
The youngest of the apprentices paused for a moment, picked up a shard of the broken tablet, looked at the wedge shapes and wondered if anyone in town was fashioning clay and preparing styluses. He also wondered what it would be like to work where the air wasn’t constantly filled with dust from stonework. Almal glared at him. Going back to his chipping, the apprentice also decided there was no future in clay tablets.
UNRECOGNITION
It was difficult for Dr. Frances Latham to hide her amusement when Police Captain Latham came storming through the door. No question about it: her husband was in a foul mood and, nine times out of ten, it indicated a reaction to a particularly difficult case.
“Don’t just growl, Alex,” she said as she kissed him. “Tell me right off what’s bugging you. Sharing will lighten the burden.”
In spite of himself, he smiled and returned the kiss with a bear hug thrown in. “He did it. I know he did it. We had an eyewitness and, if she hadn’t backed down, Willy Henrix would be in court tomorrow with a murder charge hanging over his head for killing a liquor store owner.”
“All you had was the witness?”
Alex shook his head. “He’s been around the neighborhood and ac
tually bought liquor there earlier, which he admits. Even seen looking like he was casing the store, which he denies. He’s got a robbery record running to two pages, along with a couple of convictions, and he’s arrogant as all get out. The M.O. fits perfectly with what he’s been accused of before.
“Says he’s innocent, of course, and doesn’t want a lawyer. He even volunteered for a polygraph test, but—psychopath that he is—he’s beaten them in the past. A lie detector test would be a waste. The worst of it is I ended up giving him an out—based on the best science of the day.”
Frances greeted the last with a raised eyebrow.
The response to the skepticism was quick. “Absolutely the best. Professor Danlevy—you know, the crime specialist teaching at State—is an expert in brain fingerprinting. You’ve heard of it haven’t you?”
“Some. Bunch of electrodes attached to the head, then questions about memories.”
“Right. If a person has actually seen something or someone and is shown a photo of the scene or the person, the brain puts out what’s called a P300 signal through the machine indicating he recognizes whatever he’s been shown.”
“Oh, I get it. Show him a photo of his wife, and it doesn’t matter whether he says yes or no to recognizing her, the machine says he does.”
“And it really works. Danlevy did a demonstration with a half-dozen of the men at the station. One-hundred percent success. Willy never heard of brain fingerprinting, but he was only too willing to have us try it on him. We explained it to him, then went to work with enough electrodes stuck to him so he looked like a porcupine. Then we showed him a photo of the store. Bingo, he recognized it, which didn’t mean much, though, since he’d already admitted having bought booze there. We even showed him a photo of the gun he left behind. He recognized it too, but it was a Saturday-night special. They’re common, and all over the district, so his recognition didn’t mean much either.”
“Then you showed him a picture of the store owner?”
“Right. And, guess what.”
“He’d never seen the man before in his life.”
“That’s what he said. Swore he’d never set eyes on him. And, as far as the machine was concerned, he was telling the truth. But we know he bought liquor from the owner—at least once. Talk about arrogance! Here he admits he did buy liquor at the store, but insists he’s never seen the owner. Hell. Let’s face it. We know Willy not only bought liquor from him, we know he shot him.”
“What did Danlevy say?”
“Just what you’d expect. ‘The machine doesn’t lie. The suspect is innocent.’”
Frances frowned. “Buying doesn’t mean much. When I get groceries, I probably don’t even look at the clerk. At least not always. I can’t be expected to remember someone I haven’t seen.”
“But shooting someone?”
“Of course. It would be hard to threaten someone with a gun, then pull the trigger without even looking at him.”
“So there we are. Willy was in the store. He held it up. He looked right at the owner. He knew the man…the man he shot to death. But no P300. Not a squeak. Not a murmur. As far as the machine’s concerned, Willy had never seen the owner and certainly didn’t kill him. But I know he did.
“Meantime he just grins and says, ‘I told you I didn’t shoot the guy. You can’t hold me. When are you going to let me go?’ Well, we’re holding him overnight, but unless we can find out what went wrong, he’s out tomorrow. The worst of it is that, if he’s charged with the crime, we’ll have to reveal the results of the test to his attorney. So I’ve provided Willy with a perfect alibi.”
Frances looked thoughtful. “Maybe not perfect. Let me check on something.” She walked over to their overflowing bookcase, pulled out a thick medical volume and began flipping through the pages. “When I was an intern I ran across an intriguing patient. She was suffering from…here it is. Prosopagnosia.”
“What in the world is proso…whatever?”
“She couldn’t remember faces. It’s an amazing disability, a very rare condition, but thoroughly authenticated. The person suffering from it can look at a person, day after day—even their own spouse—and won’t recognize their face. They use other cues, without realizing it. Voice, body proportions, other peculiarities, but the face is a blank. Want to test Willy again?”
***
Dr. Latham was expecting a call at her office the next morning. The voice was familiar. The tone was one of elation.
“You’re an absolute sweetheart. He doesn’t remember me. Doesn’t remember the arresting officer. Doesn’t remember the desk sergeant. I’m sure if we had a picture of his mother, he’d shake his head and there would still be no P300. Danlevy can’t believe it.
“Of course, it didn’t prove Willy shot the owner, but he got so rattled by what we found out he ended up confessing.”
LONE WOLF
Lada would long remember this year. The death of her mate, caught on the tip of a moose’s rack, had left her leader of the pack.
It was not unknown for a she-wolf to lead, and the thick forest in the foothills of Stone Mountain provided game enough for all, even for the humans who—with their clubs and pointed sticks—were every bit as dangerous as Wamili, the mountain lion. For the most part, however, they stayed near their fields where they had cut down the trees and did strange things to the earth.
On the rare occasions when a pack of them came up into the forests, their noise and stench announced their presence well ahead of time, and the wolves found it easy to avoid them.
But there were other matters to tend to besides the hunt for deer and mountain sheep forced down from the crags by the snow. While most of the pack had paired off, Rama, one of Lada’s young daughters, had not come into first heat. Maro, who hovered near her, was greeted only with hostile growls.
The lone wolf appeared around then. Larger than any others in her pack, a streak of silver gray along his backbone, he was clearly powerful. Lada felt uneasy around Kolo, but there was no question about how valuable an addition he was. Swift, sure of foot, he brought down deer at an all-out lope. And Rama was obviously impressed by his prowess. He stayed.
Lada remembered the night, first because the sky was clear, the moon was full, the first signs of the impending winter were in the air. One of the bitches was due to whelp, and the pack was restless as it guarded the lair in a rocky cul-de-sac. The night was still young when she heard the crash of something approaching through the ticket.
It was a man! Eyes gleaming, club in hand. Backed as they were against the wall of stone, Lada knew they would be no match for the club-wielding human. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Maro circling behind the savage figure, but where was Kolo when they truly needed him?
The creature rushed at them. Lada timed her leap to match Maro’s diverting attack from the rear. The man turned. Lada aimed at his throat. Jaws, capable of crushing the bone of a moose’s leg, sank effortlessly into the soft flesh. He was dead before he fell to the ground.
The pack moved out that evening, the whelping could wait until they made it across the valley to the foothills opposite, where Lada had hunted as a pup. She wanted nothing more to do with the territory they were leaving, where the corpse they’d left behind had slowly turned, before their eyes, into the silver-backed form of Kolo.
Lada had heard of such monsters. They were rare, but they did exist. And now she had firsthand knowledge of were-men.
LAST CALL
The sound made the already-nervous car occupant jump. “Damn cellphone!” Depressing the power button cut it off at the second ring. After tossing the instrument back onto the passenger seat, the fingers returned to their original task—one last wire to connect, followed by a sigh of satisfaction.
***
Captain Turlow Jackson was in his domestic mode this evening. There had never been any specific agreement between him and his lover, but the informal rule was whoever got home first took care of dinner arrangements, whether
a reservation at a local restaurant, a take out, or—in this instance—a meal from scratch. The odor of frying chicken greeted Homicide Lieutenant Leola Van Damm as she came through the door.
Turlow smiled over his shoulder at the attractive blonde who had put her arms around him and, even before shrugging off her jacket, kissed him on the back of the neck. “Smell’s wonderful, Captain. Getting used to your new title, yet?”
“Not really. I keep turning around to see who everybody’s talking to.”
“We should have known. When you got a fancy corner office, for sure the chief had great plans in store for you. But, to change the subject, what’s on the menu, tonight? Whatever it is, it smells mouth-watering good.”
“Another of my mother’s famous recipes,” he said, nodding at the frying pan. “I’ve even got grits coming up. No collards, though. God, how I hated them when I was a kid. It seemed every black family in the neighborhood used to have a big pot of that green mess on the table.”
“I’ll bet North Carolina white families had the same mess on their dinner tables.” Leola forked off a bit of tender chicken, blowing on it before tasting it.
“Maybe, but I didn’t get to eat at any white tables, so I wouldn’t know.”
“Did you bring a copy of Lucas Tor’s file?”
“Yup. But you don’t get to see it until after dinner. I know you. You’ll want to read it when we’re supposed to be eating. Did you come right home from the scene?”
“Uh huh. That’s why I wanted you to make a copy—so I wouldn’t have to go by the station.”
“Everything under control at Tor’s?”
Setting the table, Leola sounded amused. “You want me to wait before reading the file, but you want to know everything that happened.”
“Conversation won’t interfere with the joy of eating.”
But the joy of eating took precedence over conversation for the next few minutes. Finally, Leola asked, “How much do you know, other than what I told you over the phone?”
Expect the Unexpected Page 50
