White River Burning

by John Verdon

  He called back but just got voicemail. He considered trying to reach her through the hospital number but changed his mind when he recalled the time-consuming runaround involved in his earlier effort. Assuming he’d end up driving there anyway, he decided to just go.

  After explaining the situation to Shelby, he jogged the four blocks down the hill to where he’d left his car in front of the Loomis house on Oak Street. The groups of neighbors had dispersed. The yellow police tape and the darkened red stain on the grass were the only signs that something unnatural had occurred.

  He got in the Outback and followed the route he’d taken to the hospital with Heather. The traffic was moving more slowly now with people coming home from work. It gave him time to think, a mixed blessing at that time of day, nearing dusk, when his concerns seemed to intensify.

  Near the top of his present list was his worrisome position in the investigation of the Loomis shooting. Revealing that Loomis was shot as he set out to discuss his and John Steele’s efforts to probe corruption in the department would likely abort any progress in that direction and perhaps even expose other individuals to retaliation. On the other hand, the phone company would have records of Loomis’s call to Gurney to set up their meeting and his subsequent call to the diner to change the meeting time. If those records were discovered, and if the waitress identified Gurney, he could be charged with withholding evidence in the investigation of a felony—itself a felony.

  Complicating his decision was the larger question of whether the attempt on Loomis’s life was a calculated effort to keep that meeting from happening or a mindless shoot-a-cop retaliation for the playground murders. He was pretty sure it was the former.

  As Gurney got out of the car at the hospital parking lot he felt, for the first time that day, a chill in the air.

  The building’s entrance was sheltered under a broad portico. A RAM van was parked next to it, and a small crowd had gathered. A media crew was adjusting TV lights around two central figures. One, in a short red skirt and white blouse, was the news personality he’d seen on Battleground Tonight. The other, in a crisply tailored blue uniform with gleaming brass buttons, was Dell Beckert.

  A crew member by the open rear doors of the van called out, “Light and sound levels good. Recording and transmitting. You’re on!”

  The reporter’s expression switched from bitchy boredom to the standard RAM-TV expression of concern with the worrisome state of the world. She was holding a wireless microphone. “I’m Stacey Kilbrick at Mercy Hospital in White River, New York, where Detective Rick Loomis is barely hanging on to life after being shot by a sniper in his own front yard—raising the tension in this upstate city to the breaking point. I’m talking to Chief Dell Beckert, who just emerged from the hospital. What can you tell us, Chief?”

  Beckert’s face was a picture of rock-solid determination. “First, let me assure everyone that we have the tense situation in White River under control. Second, we’re making rapid progress toward the identification and apprehension of the coward who tried to kill this fine officer, a servant of our community, a man with a spotless record. Third, you have my personal assurance that law and order will prevail. To the tiny deluded minority who incite violence for their own selfish ends, I say this: you will be brought to justice. Finally, I ask for your prayers for the full recovery of Detective Rick Loomis. Thank you.”

  Kilbrick stepped forward to ask a question, but Beckert was already striding away toward a dark-blue Ford Explorer idling in the circular drive just beyond the portico. She turned to the camera. “I’m Stacey Kilbrick at Mercy Hospital. I’ll be keeping you up to date with developments as they occur. Please, folks, remember to say those prayers.”

  The video lights went out and the bitch face returned.

  Gurney headed into the hospital lobby.

  Although the exterior of the building came from the same 1960s manual of bleak design as the police headquarters, the interior had been renovated in accordance with more recent ideas about reducing stress in medical settings through the use of soft lighting, colors, and textures. A gently curved cherrywood welcome desk was staffed by three smiling senior citizens.

  Gurney’s welcomer was an elegantly dressed woman with a snow-white permanent and light-blue eyes. He told her he’d come to see a patient in the ICU. She regarded him with interest and spoke in a lowered voice. “Are you a police officer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. They’re restricting access, but you probably know that. The media people are just so . . .” Her voice trailed off in disgust, as though media people were sewage that might seep into the building. She told him that the ICU was on the second floor and gave him directions to the elevator bank, adding with a frown, “Such an awful thing.”

  Stepping out of the elevator on the second floor, he found himself in front of a waist-high partition enclosing an administrative island. On the partition was a sign telling him to turn off his cell phone and other electronic devices before entering the ICU. Behind the island was a nursing station with computer monitors, resuscitation equipment, and rolling IV stands. In a far corner of the station a grinning cop was chatting up an attractive nurse’s aide.

  At a desk inside the island, a slim young man with short, gelled hair looked up at Gurney. His teal name tag said he was Bailey Laker. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Rick Loomis. Or Mrs. Loomis.”

  “And you are . . .”

  “Dave Gurney. Mrs. Loomis asked me to come.”

  The cop left the nurse’s aide, his grin fading, and came around to Gurney’s side of the island. His shiny brass name tag said he was C. J. Mazurk. “Hello, sir,” he said with that assessing look common to cops everywhere. “Who did you say you were?”

  Gurney presented his ID.

  He took it, studied it for a long moment, and handed it back. “DA’s office?”

  “Right. Mrs. Loomis is expecting me.”

  “She’s down that hall. Visitors area. Turn off your phone.”

  Gurney complied. Halfway along the corridor there was a room with couches, chairs, and a wall-mounted TV tuned to a weather channel. When he stepped inside he saw at the far end of the room a sideboard with a coffee machine and next to it three women sitting at a small table. Heather Loomis, Kim Steele, and Madeleine.

  His surprise at seeing Kim and his wife faded as he recognized a phenomenon he’d witnessed many times—the instinctive support police wives give each other in difficult circumstances. Heather and Kim were already well acquainted, of course, through their husbands. And it had been Madeleine’s sense of identification with Kim that had solidified his own involvement in the case.

  He greeted them, then sat in the fourth chair at the table.

  “There’s coffee,” said Heather, pointing to the sideboard.

  “Maybe later. Is there any news about Rick?”

  “They say he’s in stable condition.”

  “Barbiturate-induced coma,” said Madeleine evenly. “To relieve the pressure on his brain. So it can heal. Like after my friend Elaine’s car accident. She was put in a therapeutic coma for a couple of weeks. And she’s perfectly fine today.”

  Heather blinked and managed a small smile. Kim took her hand and held it.

  A cleaning woman with striking almond-shaped eyes, a dust-mask over her mouth and nose, and a name tag identifying her as Chalise Creel came into the room pushing a janitorial cart. She steered it through the obstacle course of couches and chairs to the sideboard, emptied its waste container into one in the base of the cart, and steered her cart back out into the corridor.

  Heather turned to Gurney. “You got my message?”

  “It was patchy, but I got enough of it to know you wanted to see me.”

  She reached into her sweatshirt pocket, pulled out an index card, and handed it to him.

  Scribbled across the middle of the card were some unevenly spaced letters and numbers:


  He examined it for a moment. “What is this?”

  “It’s a message from Rick. When they brought him in from the ambulance and were attaching the monitor things to him, he was trying to speak. They wanted me to see if I could understand what he was saying, but he couldn’t get it out. I asked the nurse to get something for him to write on, and she came back with a pen and that index card. I put the pen in his hand and the card under it on the stretcher. It took him a long time to print those letters, lying on his back, barely conscious. But that’s what he wrote.”

  After studying the sequence of characters, Gurney tried one way of grouping them, reading aloud, “‘To LDC thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’” He looked at Heather. “Do the initials ‘LDC’ mean anything to you? Or that number? Possibly as an amount of money?”

  She shook her head.

  “Suppose we grouped the opening letters differently: ‘Told C thirteen thousand one hundred eleven.’”

  She shook her head again.

  “Maybe we should read the number as individual digits, like a zip code.”

  “It still doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “It has to mean something,” said Kim. “Something he wanted you to know.”

  It occurred to Gurney that the “message” might be nothing more than the product of a delirious brain; but it was clear that Heather and Kim wanted it to be important, and he wasn’t going to deflate that hope.

  “May I take this with me?” he asked Heather.

  She nodded. “I think Rick may have intended it for you.”

  “I pray to God you get the bastard who shot him,” said Kim. Her eyes were welling with angry tears.

  Her emotion led to a silence.

  Finally Heather spoke up in a controlled voice. “Dell Beckert was here.”

  “What did he want?” asked Gurney.

  “At first? To pretend that he cared about Rick.”

  “And then?”

  “He wanted to know how many phones Rick had.”

  Gurney had a sinking feeling. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him Rick had a department-issued BlackBerry, an iPhone, and our house phone.”

  “Did he want to know anything else?”

  “He asked if Rick had any contact with individuals from the Black Defense Alliance or from that other one, whatever it’s called. White Men for Black Justice? Their spokesman keeps popping up on those programs where everybody yells at each other. Cory Payne? I think that’s his name. He hates the police.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said Rick kept his police work to himself. Then Beckert told me the . . . the other shot . . .” She hesitated, glancing at Kim.

  “It’s all right. Go ahead.”

  “He told me the shot that hit John Steele came from an apartment linked to a BDA member. And the one that hit Rick may also have come from a house with a BDA link.”

  Gurney paused, taking this in, before returning to an earlier point. “Those phones you told Beckert about—do you know which of them Rick used for the calls he made to me, or to the diner, or to the person who wanted to come to the meeting we were supposed to have?”

  “None of them. Rick has a fourth phone I didn’t mention, an anonymous prepaid one he used for calls about the project he and John were working on.”

  “Where’s that fourth phone now?”

  “Rick keeps it hidden. All I know is that it never leaves our house. And that he’d never want Beckert to get hold of it.”

  Gurney felt a sense of selfish relief. That hidden phone was the only hard evidence of his conversation with Loomis. As long as it remained hidden there was little chance of his being charged with failing to report that conversation. As he was wondering how well hidden it was, a short brown-skinned man in green hospital scrubs entered the room. A white plastic name tag identified him as P. W. Patel, MD.

  “Mrs. Loomis?”

  She turned toward him, her eyes full of fear.

  “I don’t bring you any bad news,” he said in a softly accented voice. “I came only to tell you that in a few minutes we will take your husband to radiology for another brain-imaging procedure. The neurosurgeon has requested this. It is a normal request, not a cause for worry. If you and your companions wish to see the patient before he is taken to radiology, this must be done now. You understand?”

  Heather nodded. “Can you tell if there’s been any change in his condition?”

  “No change, but this is not bad. With TBI we must wait and see.”

  “TBI?”

  “Traumatic brain injury. We wait and monitor intracranial pressure. Because of damage to the temporal bone structure. Perhaps this will not be a problem, since the bullet did not perforate major brain areas. But we wait and watch.”

  Heather nodded uncertainly. “Thank you.”

  “You are welcome, Mrs. Loomis. Perhaps not too far away there can be good news. But now, if you wish to see your husband for a few minutes . . .”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  After he left the room, Madeleine asked Heather, “Do you want us to come with you?”

  She blinked in confusion. “Yes. I don’t know. Yes, come.” She stood up and headed out of the room, seemingly unaware of banging her shin on the corner of a low coffee table.

  They followed her—Kim, Madeleine, and Gurney in that order—into the corridor and past the nursing station, where the cop and the nurse’s aide had resumed their conversation. Behind the nursing station they came to a row of patient enclosures with sliding glass doors. At the center of each enclosure was a high-tech hospital bed surrounded by monitoring equipment.

  Only one enclosure was occupied. The four visitors gathered outside it in the single-file order in which they’d come down the hall. From where Gurney stood, all he could see of the patient in the bed was a massive bandage covering his head, an oxygen mask covering most of his face, and a web of wires and tubes connecting him to the bedside machines. He looked vulnerable and anonymous.

  A tall nurse approached Heather. “You know the routine here, but I’ll repeat it for your friends. Please do not touch anything beyond those glass doors. Especially do not touch the patient or the devices connected to him. The sensors are sensitive. The alarms go off easily. Are we all okay with this?”

  Heather answered for everyone. “Of course. Thank you.”

  Leaning toward her, the nurse spoke softly. “I’ve seen folks in worse shape than your husband come through just fine.”

  Heather opened the sliding glass door and went to her husband’s side. Kim followed part of the way, stopping inside the doorway. Madeleine remained outside. Gurney stood behind her.

  The intensity of Heather’s focus on Rick began to make Gurney feel out of place. It soon appeared to have the same effect on Kim, who backed out of the enclosure. She whispered to Madeleine, “Maybe we should let her be alone with him?”

  Madeleine nodded her agreement. Just then they saw Heather bending over the bed, the tip of her forefinger touching the back of Rick’s hand.

  “I’m here with you,” she said gently. “I’m right here beside you.”

  As Gurney was leaving the ICU, he noted that the cop and the nurse’s aide were still very much involved with each other. He stopped by the corner of the nursing station.

  “Excuse me, Officer? Over here, please.”

  The cop stared at him.

  “Now. Please.”

  The nurse’s aide raised an eyebrow and stepped away, saying something about making her rounds.

  The cop’s stare got chillier as he approached Gurney. “What’s up?”

  “I assume you’re here to protect Rick Loomis. Do you have any idea what you’re protecting him from?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You think you’re here to prevent unauthorized media intrusions, make sure no reporters get in, or try to take pictures, or try to talk to Loomis. That about ri
ght?”

  His eyes narrowed. “What’s your point?”

  “My point is that the media idiots are the least of your problems. There’s something about the shooting you need to know. The public version is that Loomis was shot by black radicals because he’s a cop. But the fact is he may have been shot for another reason. By someone who wanted him dead—not just any cop, but him in particular. If that’s true, there may be another attempt on his life. It could happen soon, and it could happen here.”

  “Where the hell are you getting this from?”

  “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you understand what’s at stake here.”

  The cop pursed his lips and nodded with obvious skepticism. “What was your name again?”

  Gurney repeated his name. “Pass along what I told you to whomever relieves you. They need to understand what they’re here for.”

  The expression on the cop’s face gave Gurney the feeling that his comments might or might not get passed along to the next shift, but they’d surely get to Judd Turlock.

  Gurney left the ICU and headed for the visitors’ lounge. When he got there he found Madeleine waiting for him in the corridor. Kim was inside sitting on one of the couches. Madeleine led him away from the open doorway and spoke in a low voice.

  “Is there anything else you need to do here?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve done all I can for the moment. Which isn’t much. How about you?”

  “Heather wants to stay here overnight. Kim wants to stay with her. I think that’s what I should do too.”

  “Stay here in the ICU?”

  “There’s a facility here on the grounds. The Mercy Visitors Inn, for family and friends of patients. It just feels right to be with them.”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  “I’d like that. But I think Heather and Kim would rather you were off somewhere investigating—discovering the meaning of Rick’s note.”

  “Isn’t tomorrow one of your days at the clinic?”