She reached the last tree in the line that bordered a deep and convoluted gorge. Beyond this point, she could not continue in the chair. As the wheels leaped over a ditch, she could hear the rustling of the waterfall beneath, and she knew that Boundary Road was at the very foot of the hill. She would stand on the old bridge and signal wildly. Someone would stop. She would then return to her apartment on Avon Court and wait for Milbert. This time he would have to listen to her.
Bertha rose to her feet and took a single step from her chair, her feet shuffling on the gravel. And then, chin up, eyes constricted in resolve, legs growing stronger with every step, she raised her feet one by one off the ground.
41
Lake Michigan, Chicago, Illinois
When Holden Pigg learned of his host’s choice of venue, he assumed it was a mistake. But then, when Peter Lister confirmed it with him, he concluded the CEO was just out of his freaking mind.
Sunset on Lake Michigan, the temperature plummeted to near freezing, and the man was running around on board his yacht in short sleeves, cheeks flushed, holding a glass of whiskey in one hand and checking the sails with the other. “Frost is an anesthetic,” he said.
Pigg gazed down from the upper deck, his teeth chattering. Lister, in charge of the giant wheel, stood like a scarecrow in the transparent chamber of the deckhouse, the whistling wind threatening to erode its glass windows to dust. Pigg thanked the Lord that he had been wise enough to bring a pair of ski gloves, a hat with wool earmuffs, and a coat with a double lining.
Lister was trying his best to keep a straight sailing route within the gray and desolate space, but Pigg soon realized that the somber background hues camouflaged high waves, and the apparently heavy yacht leapt in the air like a toy in the bath.
Pigg regretted agreeing to the “short ride.” He wiped his green-tinged face with his gloves, slippery and soaked with cold sweat.
His host disappeared from view for a moment, and Holden Pigg almost shouted in relief when Lister popped up from the lower deck in front of the back door. As he entered, he dropped the papers for their meeting, scattering them about the cabin.
“Time to turn around,” Lister announced as he went back inside and took command of the controls. “According to radar, a storm is imminent.”
What was it until now, Pigg wondered to himself, ice skating?
He hurried behind his host and stood next to him, shoulder to shoulder. That way he had a chance to observe him closely. They were the same height, and Pigg concentrated on the man’s eyes.
What was that deep inside his right eye? A tattoo?
“So your name’s Pigg, with a double G. And you’re not with the police.”
“No, Mr. Lister,” said Pigg, almost pleadingly. “I’m a claims adjustor with Crown Insurance. Dr. Ashraf Nouri had a life insurance policy with us. His wife is the beneficiary. Of course, it’s our duty to determine the cause of his disappearance.”
“Isn’t that for the police to uncover?”
Pigg nodded vigorously. “Certainly. But we also conduct our own, separate, investigation.” He decided against disclosing the fact that Virginia Nouri was also a close friend.
“And what makes you think I can help you?”
“Dr. Nouri worked for your company.”
“’Worked,’ you said, so you know he’d already left us. You’d better check with Oculoris, Pigg. They may be more up to date.”
“Already asked. They also have no idea. A brilliant scientist, a good salary, beautiful wife, a baby on the way—can you think of a reason why he would disappear?”
“The police already asked me all that. Sorry, but I have no idea. All I can tell you is that he’ll be missed by us all. He was an outstanding scholar—in the magnitude of a Nobel laureate—and a huge loss to academia.”
The insurance investigator spoke sourly, as a wave smashed on the side glass. “You sound convinced he’s dead.”
“What else? Is there a chance he’s still alive? I would like to believe that. His wife will confirm that Ashraf was a very responsible person. They spoke several times a day. When I heard about what happened, I must confess I was very surprised.” Lister stooped, opened a small cabinet and took out a new bottle of Maker’s Mark. “More whiskey? From Kentucky. They make the finest bourbon.”
“Does your fleet of company cars include a black Acura Legend?” Holden Pigg asked as he perused his papers, which were flapping in the turbulence. “Dr. Nouri was last seen being dragged into such a car from a sidewalk on Jackson Boulevard.”
Lister glared at him for a long moment and Pigg shrank in sudden suffocation. “Medionetyx has no foreign cars in its fleet. Only made in the USA.”
***
There were two passageways in the medical school complex where you needn’t go through endless automatic doors in order to cross to the west wing and the Animal Building. The closest was on the top floor. I climbed up and pushed open the emergency exit door.
The emergency stairwell did not have vents, and the cold air hit my bristling face as I entered.
I crossed to the other side of the building, went downstairs and tried to enter the sixth floor. It was locked. I went down another floor and tried the emergency door there. It, too, was locked. I realized a similar fate probably awaited me on all the other floors.
I heard him panting two floors above. “For Chrissakes, stop running. I just want to talk.”
Yeah. Sure. In the space between the floors there was a single window, slightly more than a fissure with a big yellow sign hanging above featuring a half-circle arrow and “Open in Case of Emergency.” A rotating handle pushed the glass out.
The medical school building was an ugly, square, ten-floor glass tower. The rooms were planted right in the middle, surrounded by corridors, like cabins in a cruise ship. The architects had decided scientists didn’t need windows—views might distract. If they wanted a breather, the distinguished PhDs had to step out of their cubbyholes, lean over the railing, and look at the Ohio River through the double-glazed external wall. The landscape this time of year consisted of sleet, bare trees, frozen grass, heavy metal arched bridges, and saturnine chimneys, such as those in the industrial park in Southern Indiana, across the murky river.
I squeezed out and could not resist looking down. The water fountain looked like an environmental hazard, looming up in the center of an empty pool. The concrete square was just a black nothingness. I stretched my legs until they reached the surrounding concrete ledge that ran around each floor. The protrusion was minimal, so the heels of my shoes were left hanging in the air. As I crept along, my new cellphone slipped out of my pocket and crashed five floors below. I pressed my glasses firmly onto my nose. Heaven help me if they fell too.
I moved on tiptoe, not peeking down. Only when I reached the corner did I dare look back. I was both thrilled and scared: thrilled that no one was pursuing me; scared there was no turning back.
I saw the Irishman’s head poking out the window; his stocky body couldn’t pass through. I groped the metal frame of the next window. I was facing the rooms of the neurobiology lab. I punched the window, but nothing happened. But when I tried to push the side lever, I was surprised how easily it yielded—half my body followed inside with the momentum.
I pulled myself the rest of the way in, then caught my breath in the hallway facing the lab rooms of the renowned neuroscientist, Professor Eugene Wexler. The room was dark and open, but not empty. On either side of a narrow passage, animal cages were placed one top of the other, like shelves in a library.
Each cage was occupied by a kitten, its head shaved to the scalp, making it appear like a baby piglet. Electrodes were attached to the space between the ears and collar, and computer screens showed the signals they were transmitting, rows of brainwave charts that looked like saw-teeth.
The crowded aisle ended in a locked door. Wexler’
s office was behind the wall, in the adjacent space. I knocked on it, but no one answered. I gazed through the peephole. What had I initially thought to be the sound of a heartbeat being monitored was actually a leaky faucet.
As I returned to the last cage, a foot slipped out of the grille. It had long curved paw nails and was accompanied by a long snaky hiss.
One of the cats was awake and hostile.
42
At Blue Meadows, the corpse of Joseph-Arthur Ginzburg was trundled into a back room.
He was laid on the treatment table, wrapped in a sheet, and a death certificate, signed by the doctor on call, was duly attached. Soon the ambulance would arrive and transfer him to the Spring Hills Funeral Home.
The stir of the last few hours gradually subsided. The night-shift nurses were used to the elderly dying in the wee hours. Recently these deaths had proliferated, but who would be surprised when a childless eighty-nine-year-old Alzheimer’s patient died from heart failure?
Sleeping pills had already been dispensed. The drug cart stood covered in its niche near the nurses’ station, alongside the resuscitation cart, its defibrillation pedals recharged, the syringes and bottles refilled.
Both wings were darkened except for nightlights.
The attending physician returned to her room. Before retiring, she went over the charts, giving final instructions to examine two more patients in trouble. All these activities were intended to reduce later interference to a minimum.
She needed only twenty minutes of quiet. No more.
Her wish was going to be fulfilled. She turned her head toward the door and listened. Light snores, mingled with sighs, echoed from the hallway. Soft music from a radio infiltrated the Lysol-scented air.
The doctor snuck out of her room and headed the other way, to the back-treatment room. After she shut the curtains and turned on the wall lamp, she donned latex gloves and removed the sterile sheet that covered the tray of surgical instruments.
She inspected the tools carefully. Nothing was missing.
Over time she had acquired the necessary skills to perform the surgery directly on the stretcher. Because of the square structure of the room, she couldn’t stand at the head of the bed, but had to operate from the side, stretching up on her tiptoes.
But she could only manage that for ten minutes tops, probably less. She had to hurry up and finish before the ambulance arrived.
All the better.
In addition, there were the repeated escape attempts by the lady in Room 22. She was also participating in the experiment. Mrs. Hertz reassured everyone that the serial runaway was always caught in the end—no need to inform her fidgety grandson and provoke histrionics. Better if he did not find out.
The doctor fastened her robe, folded back the sleeves and removed her watch and bracelet. Then she unzipped the body bag, going over the chin curve all the way below the neck, and rolled it under a triangular rubber headrest.
According to the wall clock, about two hours had passed since she’d determined the death of Mr. Joseph-Arthur Ginzburg from Room 17, who had completed five weeks of treatment with the new eyedrops. One eye had received the active compound, while the other got only a balanced saline solution. It would take the notebook to crack the code, but that could wait.
Just before beginning the surgery she gave the computer printout a final glance to ensure that the information in her possession was accurate. She identified her signature at the bottom of the document. There were three copies—white, red and yellow. Even death had its bureaucracy.
JA Ginzburg, 89-year-old male, 6022 Dutchmans Ln, Louisville
KY, widower with no children, no relatives, an Alzheimer patient
in fair condition, fxn. Assmnt.: confused but indep. long-term care (uncomplicated), left heart failure, mild systemic hypertension
controlled on diuretics, borderline diabetes mellitus, 8 weeks post
right THR for fractured femur (w/o complications), bilateral
nuclear cataracts ++
Cause of Death: Cardiac Arrest
The attending physician untied the white ribbon and removed the sheet below the pillowcase. She walked to the head of the bed, mounted a stool, and spread open the right eye, inserting a metal speculum between the lids and adjusting the width. Then she administered artificial tears to maintain wet corneas.
Skillfully, she inserted a tiny pair of scissors into the sub-tenon, the space between the eyelid and the eyeball, and progressed rapidly, spreading the arms of the scissors as she moved deeper inside the socket. The dissection separated the grip of the extraocular muscles in all four quadrants. When she reached the posterior muscular ring, she inserted a cotton ball, quickly detached the oblique muscle, exposed the optic nerve, and cut it off with a single precise snip.
Still on the stool, she turned around with the eyeball dangling from a clamp, and let it drop carefully into a container filled with rosy tissue culture fluid.
Then she carried the stool to the opposite side of the stretcher and repeated the same sequence in the left socket. Only when two empty dark holes gazed at her from the face below did she allow herself to grin in relief.
She slid off the stool, stretched, bent over her bag, rummaged inside, and emerged with a pair of prosthetic eyeballs, similar in color to those enucleated.
The orbital cavities were filled with cotton balls and the shells placed over them to seal. Before removing her latex gloves, she gingerly closed the eyelids over the prostheses, then pulled the sheet back in place.
The doctor removed the headrest, pulled the sides of the bag closed, and re-zipped it all the way up. Her lips widened in a smile; a new dimple created in the dark mole.
43
Saturday
Shit! Where did that damn student disappear to?
All night, Gibbons had been trying to find him inside the labyrinth called the School of Medicine. The damn building had too many floors, and countless corridors, wings, doors, auditoriums, and stinking lab rooms.
Go find a butterfly hiding in that awful maze!
For Milbert it was familiar territory. Medical students spent more time there than at home.
Which was why Gibbons surmised that the student had chosen to remain on campus. Maybe he’d already called university security or even the police. But if he had, where was the squad car?
Gibbons arrived uninterrupted at the fifth floor. But the doors to the Brain Research Laboratory—where he had last seen Milbert threading through the external wall—were locked and required an access code. The Irishman pushed his pocketknife into the rubber frame where the two halves of the door connected, twisted it till he widened the slit enough to insert his hands and crack it open just enough to pass through and went inside. He found an internal connecting door, but it was double-locked.
He pulled out his pocketknife again and stuck it into the woodwork, under the metal eave of the lock. Scrap iron bounced and the handle fell to the floor. The thump was so delicate that the reverberation was too weak to activate the alarm.
In the room, a windowless niche, he found laboratory equipment, two library shelves, and the desk of a researcher named Eugene Wexler. On the table stood a picture of a smiling couple, in a frame bearing the label Cortina, Italy, 1991. The man had a silver mane, the woman with hair sparser than his; both were holding skis. The wall was covered with diplomas.
The room had another door. Gibbons approached i and heard the wail of a cat behind it.
He tried the handle. It, too, was bolted. Gibbons used the same knife to break in, but this time it provoked a rustle on the other side.
He had taken only a few steps along the narrow passage between the cages when a bald cat lunged at him, stretching a paw from behind the bars and scratching his waist through his shirt.
The Irishman cursed. He inspected the tear in the shirt and gently stroked the bleed
ing wound with his fingertips.
Then he cleaned the pocketknife of sawdust leftovers, approached the cage, waited behind it until the cat tried to poke its nose out between the bars, then speared the blade between its eyes.
44
It was late, and the Blue Meadows inmates were deep in slumber.
From the entrance it was impossible to see any light in the rear treatment room. Fluorescent lighting filtered through the shutter lines, painting stripes across the first row of bushes in Seneca Park. It was not long after the stretcher in the center of the room had been covered and the lights switched off.
A little earlier, Boris had noticed the absence of Mrs. Bertha Zucker from Room 22, but because it was a recurring event, he was in no hurry to call the police. He made sure to inform Mrs. Hertz, though, and interrupted her in the middle of an Actors Theater performance. She was furious and had made a note to have a word with Bertha’s grandson, who had recently become quite a nuisance in his own right.
Strange, he had not shown up today.
Meanwhile Hertz ordered Boris to send someone to conduct a search of the park. The grumpy old woman couldn’t have traveled far in this inclement weather. But the new employee he’d sent to find Bertha had returned empty-handed.
Boris reported to Mrs. Hertz that he’d already tried to contact her grandson but had received no answer from his cell or the Crescent Hill apartment. Hertz decided to wait another hour before summoning the police. She did not return to the second act after intermission, heading back to the Meadows instead.
But even before Mrs. Hertz arrived, Boris found himself gazing at the flickering light in the nurses’ station main switchboard—an incoming call. He picked up the phone. It was the duty administrator at Baptist Hospital East.
“She’s here again. The police brought her to the ER.”
“’She all right?”
“Doc Wentworth checked her out. Just few scratches and bruises. We’re about to release her shortly.”
An Eye For Murder: A Medical Thriller Page 22
