Lethal Practice

by Peter Clement

  Though only a little off my path, his trail rose steadily and was free of the hidden boulders and pockets that had made my chosen route so hazardous. It also provided the foot- and handholds I’d hoped it would, and climbing was infinitely easier. Ahead only the occasional snap of a twig confirmed his presence. For all his two-ton size and antlers rising six feet above my head, he glided through the forest like a spirit. My huffing and coughing must have been an unseemly din to him.

  In minutes we crested the ridge. A blast of wind in my face confirmed we were over. His prints kept their measured pace, but trusting his affinity to find known pathways even in snow, I started the descent with new confidence. Picking up speed, reaching from one tree to the next for support, I pirouetted down the mountain in a mad slalom of “allemande left, allemande right” from trunk to trunk. So invigorating was this senseless speed into thick snow, I began giggling again at the absurdity of my situation. Hunted by killers, saved by a moose.

  I crashed right into the forming ice at the lake’s edge. A few seconds of teetering on my toes like a drunk kept me from diving outright into the open black water.

  Regaining my balance and my bearings, I knew the cabin was minutes away on my left. The creature I’d staked my life on was nowhere to be seen. His prints led to a few yards from the water’s edge, then wandered off north, to nowhere. He hadn’t come to drink.

  In the light of day it would seem that plain blind chance had caused our paths to cross. But here, jubilant at my reprieve, readied for war, I felt I’d been blessed and delivered to safety through that solemn beast.

  The snow blurred his empty path. I turned in the opposite direction and trudged toward the cabin.

  In a few minutes I was going by the boathouse where the trees reached the edge of the lawn. I stopped in the shadows of a large pine and peered through the storm at the darkened, familiar refuge.

  This lakeside path was farthest from the front entrance. Anybody already there wouldn’t expect me to arrive from this direction. The downside was, I couldn’t see the front entrance and if any snow had been disturbed.

  No telltale tracks or depressions covered by new snow ran around this end of the cabin, but the structure was about a hundred and thirty feet long. I stared at the large black picture windows overlooking the lake. If anyone was inside, they would see me before I saw them.

  I hung there, listening, watching. There was nothing but the snow.

  I was getting ready to hurry to the end wall when the gravel-covered area in which we parked and the entranceway at the far end burst into light.

  “No!” I breathed, and froze, still in the cover of the pine’s shadow. Expecting catastrophe, I waited. A light breeze caught the boughs above me. They made a soft hushing sound as they swayed in response.

  No shouts, no running boots, nothing. After thirty seconds, the light went off.

  The wind. It had swayed the trees and fired the movement sensors that automatically went on when we arrived at night. It always happened in a wind. I had learned to ignore it. But this night it made me jumpy.

  Any jerks in the house wouldn’t know it was just the wind. They’d be watching now, but they’d be looking down the road, where they’d think I’d be coming from.

  Time to move.

  My pause in the shadows had left me stiff. I groaned out loud as I lugged myself awkwardly over the snow-covered lawn to crouch under the gable end of the cabin. I peered around the corner but saw nothing in the murk ahead.

  I began creeping along the front wall, staying low to keep under its many windows. I was a quarter of the way up when another gust of wind whirled down the cliffs behind me and once again tripped the lights. This time everything around me, myself included, was bathed in beams of light in which the falling snow danced madly. Pretty, but deadly, if it was still important I remain hidden.

  But again, there were no shouts, no hands from anywhere to grab me. Nothing.

  Ahead the snow in the parking area and the path to the front was level and undisturbed. While the light stayed on, I stood up and walked the remaining sixty feet to the door. The glass was intact. The lock was on. There were no signs of it being forced. No tracks led around to the windows on the opposite end of the cabin that I’d been unable to see a few minutes before. All I saw were soothing gusts of snow swirling against the log walls.

  No one was here. For the moment, I’d gotten ahead of them.

  * * * *

  Once inside, the warmth compared to the outdoors and the wood smell of pine logs provided its usual solace and comfort. I felt heady, defiant. I could win this thing.

  Doug’s boys had binoculars. At the first sign of a hidden exhaust plume, smoke, or an unidentified vehicle entering the property, they’d be using the cellular phone to warn me and then summon the police from nearby Holi Mont to “assist Detective Riley immediately.” Then I would have to make a choice. If I preferred, I could play it safe and clear out into the woods. The killers, once on the property, were trapped. Doug’s boys would move their truck down and block the road and then hide out until the cops came. If the killers got tired of looking for me or sensed the trick and tried to get out, they’d be stopped by the roadblock. Then they’d either waste their time trying to get their vehicle around it or take off on foot, in winter, in the mountains. Easy prey, either way, for the cops when they arrived. I’d finally know who my attackers were, except this way all I might be able to charge them with would be trespassing.

  I hadn’t told Doug my other choice. He never would have agreed to it. I’d head out to the woods as the killers came in, but only to have more room to maneuver. Instead of hiding, I would show myself and provoke an attack. Until I found the secret of the ER data that they so feared, I had no proof. I had to let the police catch them actually trying to kill me.

  In the vestibule, I dropped my frozen clothes and grabbed the phone.

  I dialed the number of Doug’s cellular; he flipped on instantly.

  “Earl?” he asked, obviously waiting and worried.

  “Yeah. I’m okay. The snow made it slow. I’m in now, and all’s quiet here.”

  I glanced at my watch. 10:30. Three and a half hours since I began my run. The trek in had taken over an hour.

  But Doug had other news. “Earl, get ready to move. We’ve got company here.”

  I stopped undressing. “Already! Damn!” So much for outmaneuvering them. “How? What have you got?”

  “Look, it just may be watchers, like we anticipated. Here on spec, without a clue that you’re already in. But I want you ready.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Watching. But get this. These guys have a pretty distinctive choice of transportation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of them’s in an ambulance.”

  “Shit.” It had passed me on the road. Then I remembered the box van that had been behind me when I drove south five nights ago. I’d seen its brake lights in my rearview mirror after I’d taken the turnoff to the cabin. It could have been an ambulance too. It was making sense fast. So fast, I was holding my breath and going cold in my guts.

  I exhaled into the receiver.

  “Earl?”

  My mind was racing ahead. What was implausible before was becoming a hideous possibility. If Watts’s hunch was right and the rise in derelict DOAs was from some maniac knocking off drunks with cardiac needles, an ambulance with the help of equally ghoulish attendants was the perfect cover. The calls would lead them to possible prey. Once they had a victim inside, they could do whatever manipulations they wanted. Screams wouldn’t be heard over the siren. And if they were, what the hell. It was an ambulance with yet another maimed and screeching patient en route to an emergency room. And then they’d spread the corpses around the city. I shuddered. It might be the how of the DOA epidemic, but not the why. And not the connection to Kingsly. Nor to me.

  “Are you there?” Doug asked again quietly.

  “Yeah. But if I’m right,
Doug”—I faltered, still stunned at the probable scale of systematic killings—“Jesus!”

  “Earl, tell me later. Now, just get ready to run!”

  But I stayed on the phone. “Doug, this afternoon I estimated the number of DOAs in the city this year. It’s maybe what’s behind all this, and they may all have been killed like Kingsly and the derelict at St. Paul’s. It took over a year for the medical examiner to notice. Hell, it took me that long to realize that one DOA every few months had crept up to over one or two a month. If the other hospitals in and around the city have the same, we’re looking at a mind-boggling number of murders.”

  “Lord!” he exclaimed. “Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure, not at all. But like it or not, I just figured out a way so many people could have been murdered.” And slipped in unnoticed under our overworked, preoccupied noses, I thought. Whoever was doing this had cynically relied on our fatigue and usual indifference— born of overwork—to a dead vagabond. Again it had to mean that at least one of the killers knew emergency and knew emergency physicians but this time had played us like a program to hide corpses.

  My distracted silences were obviously making Doug edgy. “Earl, figure it out later. Get ready to move! They’re here. Let’s call the cops!”

  “No! We have to wait till they come in,” I insisted, “just like we planned, or I’m back to square one.”

  I heard him sigh heavily, but he didn’t refuse to hold off our call for help. Thank God I hadn’t told him I intended to be more of a decoy than we discussed. Then another thought fell into place, like a tumbler to a lock. “Wait a minute, what do you mean ‘one of them’? There’s more than the ambulance?”

  “That’s right. About ten minutes ago, another car arrived, slowly, from the north, just like you in the cab. It went on south. A few minutes later we see it coming back on the northbound, lights out, and it pulls in behind the ambulance.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Like I said, sitting there.”

  “How many?”

  “Can’t tell for sure. No one’s gotten out.”

  “Did the ambulance try to arrive on the q.t.?”

  “Nope. It drove up, lights flashing from the north, did a U-turn at the intersection near your entrance, and parked with the lights doused.”

  “Did my cabbie go out of sight way farther south like I asked?”

  “Yep. As ordered.”

  “And their car went farther south before turning around, like the cab, and afterward snuck back?”

  “Right.”

  The car had taken the same precautions I had; the ambulance hadn’t.

  “Do you figure they don’t know you’re up there yet, watching them watch?”

  I didn’t like the pause Doug took before answering. Finally, the best he seemed able to muster was a quiet “Probably.”

  “Probably! Hell, not exactly a battle cry of confidence.”

  No answer.

  “Doug, what’s bothering you?”

  A wave of static came and went before he answered.

  “You mean besides the fact I’m looking at a nest of vipers who kill on almost a daily basis? Well, it’s that I think there’s not enough of them.”

  “What!”

  “Your escapade at the morgue involved at least three people. We know there’s at least two down there, but I think that’s all.”

  “How? I thought they didn’t get out of their vehicles.”

  “They didn’t. But one of my guys saw a cigarette tip glowing in the driver’s seat of the ambulance, and the same thing just now in the car. Nothing in the passenger seats, and the glow just staring at your entrance each time; no turning toward a passenger to talk.”

  “Maybe they don’t talk.”

  “Maybe, but the way the tips are bouncing up and down, the two drivers are talking to each other, or someone, on the ambulance radio or car phone. Seems funny such chatty types wouldn’t say a word to someone beside them.”

  He was reaching. I was beginning to feel guilty for involving him at all. It was turning out a lot worse than we had guessed back in my kitchen. “How can you see all this?”

  “One of my guys has night binoculars.”

  “Where’d he get those?”

  “Souvenir from ‘Nam. Amie and Norm are vets.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Over the years I’d enjoyed the quiet closeness of these two large men. Even in a crew of characters like Doug’s team, their easy humor and unflappability were a pleasure to be around.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah, except they don’t work so good.”

  “Which, Amie and Norm or the binoculars?”

  Doug chuckled. “Both. The vets are fat forty-five-year-old warriors.” I heard mock protests from somewhere in Doug’s cab. The morale was still good at his end. “And as for the binoculars, well, let’s say they worked better in ‘Nam, where it didn’t snow.”

  How many killers there were had always bothered me. “So we’re missing a viper. Maybe it’s still in Buffalo, looking. Maybe we’ve confused them as planned.”

  “We might get a better count on how many are here soon; the snow’s letting up. Meantime, stay ready.”

  He hung up without waiting for my answer.

  My pants and half-removed longjohns were twisted into partially thawed ropes that lay in a cold puddle at my feet. I stepped out of them and then extracted what was left of the computer printouts I’d stuffed around my legs from the soggy mess on the floor. They were unusable, at least for now, but might be legible if they were dried. I placed them on a marble table over an electric heater. I gathered up the rest of the clothing and carried it to the washing machine, where I dumped it.

  Next I salvaged the disks from my inner coat pocket. Thankfully, they were fine. Most of what I needed to start with was on them. I’d need the printouts only if my first ideas didn’t work out.

  I peeled off my sweater and T-shirt, more soaked with sweat than snow, and found that the printouts wrapped around my waist were just as wet as the others. I added them to the table and put the remaining clothes into the washer.

  Naked and shivering, I quickly headed to the master bedroom at the far end of the main floor, where I’d find something dry to put on.

  This room was the windowed end of the cabin overlooking the lake where, fifteen minutes ago, I’d been peering in from the outside, unable to see anything. As I found my clothes and dressed in the familiar darkness, I could see outside relatively easily. The snowfall was letting up, and the lake was becoming visible to the end. The dark trail of my tracks where I had run from the deep shadows at the edge of the woods to the outside of this bedroom wall was obvious. But I wasn’t going to worry about that at the moment. It shouldn’t matter anyway.

  Warm and dry, I grabbed the disks and headed back to the other end of the house and the small room over the kitchen that held my computer. I turned the screen on, and the gray glow bathed the keyboard enough to work without turning on the room light. It didn’t make sense, but I felt better keeping in the dark.

  * * * *

  The sprawl of numbers and abbreviated diagnostic categories spilled down the screen and gave me a sense of security. I was back in my own realm of expertise. Here, amid the maze of a functioning emergency department, if one of the killers had left aberrant signs, I had a good chance of ferreting them out.

  I entered the DOA category into the most frequent diagnosis menu so I’d be able to subject it to the same profile breakdown I’d already done for the major emergency case categories. DOAs would hardly ever command such attention, apart from a footnote as to their proportion of our overall mortalities. The killers probably counted on that too. The posts on those derelicts would be done cursorily by frazzled pathologists wondering what bureaucratic idiot was wasting their valuable time.

  All pretty safe for our murderers, until Kingsly.

  The screen flickered and retrieved the diagnostic categories I was waiting for
. I punched in the keys to call up a coded cross-reference with individual physicians for the frequency of DOAs. The screen hummed and clicked again to follow this unusual command.

  I was looking for a fiend with the knowledge of someone close to the ER. Hurst gave me the creeps, but he wasn’t part of emergency or linked to the data in front of me. Besides, he simply didn’t have the ER mentality that I’d sensed driving the work of the killer, especially the way Watts had been set up—an ER drill with a live victim.

  I sure had my suspicions about Kradic, and I had to control my dislike of Jones long enough not to exaggerate what I thought she might be capable of doing, but I also thought again about other doctors and nurses I’d worked with for years. With a few exceptions, I realized I knew nothing of their private dreams, desires, hatreds, or burning causes. All I ever saw was their outward professional conduct. Did the repeated rudeness of a triage nurse mean stress and insecurity, I wondered, or a pathologic cruelty? Was the distance I’d seen some doctors take from pain and fear a blundering defensiveness or a carefully concealed sadism?

  I winced, remembering an old school of so-called thought where respected emergency physicians would roughly perform a not-so-necessary gastric lavage on an overdose patient to “teach her a lesson.” Thankfully those days were over, but was one of them a fiend, hungry for a reason to inflict pain?

  Surely, though, killing, repeatedly and almost clinically, went beyond any of the scenes I had witnessed.

  I stopped myself, a little aghast, not because I had failed to guess who might be the monster among us but because for too many I couldn’t say for sure who or what they were outside our peculiar cell of work. The medical field had hidden murderers before. So-called doctors and nurses had performed atrocities in Dachau and gone home to play with their children. One such “healer” had dedicated his life to humanitarian clinics in the third world before being tracked down after the war. In the past year an esteemed physician in Oregon had slashed and strangled six prostitutes over a ten-month period, then moved over to Europe and was caught after a series of similar killings there. The DOA profile by individual physician popped onto the screen and pulled me back to my hunt for a current creep.