Lucky Shot

by B. J Daniels

  “Here?”

  Her husband nodded. “Until the place closed about twenty-two years.”

  She stared at him. “Twenty-two years ago?” Even though she knew, she still asked, “Who is it you think was a patient here? If the place closed that many years ago, it couldn’t have been Sarah Hamilton.”

  “I said about twenty-two years ago. It closed only a matter of days after Sarah went into the river.”

  Nettie looked at the building. It was far enough from town, no one would be the wiser if patients were brought here in the middle of the night. “There would have been nurses, though. One of them...” She turned back to Frank. “You found one of the nurses who worked here?”

  He smiled. “She might be hesitant to talk, though. But since you definitely have a talent for getting people to tell you their most well-kept secrets, I was hoping—”

  “What is it you want to know other than if Sarah was brought here?” she asked. Then she answered the question herself. “You want to know who brought her here.”

  “Like I said, right up your alley.”

  “But if the place closed within days after her arrival...then where did she go?”

  “That will probably be a question that not even the nurse can answer.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MAX COULDN’T BELIEVE the path his mind had taken—or more important, where it had led him. All his instincts told him he was onto something. Something big.

  From what he and the rest of the media had been able to find out, Sarah Johnson had attended NYU from 1974 to 1979, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in literature. Had she been planning to get her masters? Maybe teach?

  No, he thought, he wasn’t buying it.

  Think big picture, he reminded himself.

  He mentally ran through what was happening in the country from 1974 to 1979 and then looked up some details. In ’74 a first-class stamp sold for eight cents, the median household income was around nine thousand dollars and the Oakland A’s beat the LA Dodgers in the World Series.

  He scrolled down. It was also the year that Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and President Richard Nixon resigned.

  He checked 1975. The Vietnam War ended, President Ford escaped two assassination attempts, stamps went up to ten cents and Cincinnati beat the Red Sox.

  By 1977, stamps were up to thirteen cents, nuclear disarmament was the big news, along with President Carter pardoning the Vietnam War draft dodgers. Jim Jones’s followers committed mass suicide in Jonestown in 1978 and the Yankees beat the Dodgers.

  Max swore. This was getting him nowhere. He clicked on the year 1979. Ohio agreed to pay $675,000 to families of dead and injured in the Kent State University shootings, the nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island released radiation, first-class stamps went up to fifteen cents and the median household income had risen to over sixteen thousand.

  What was he missing? Maybe he needed to reduce his scope. That’s when he realized he hadn’t been thinking colleges and universities. Hurriedly he typed in Social Unrest and then hesitated. Whatever had happened to Sarah Johnson probably hadn’t happened her first year at school. He typed 1975 after Social Unrest and hit Return.

  As he scrolled through articles, he felt as if he was blindfolded and throwing darts at a map, hoping something would stick.

  Sarah could have gotten involved in any number of underground groups. He found a variety of radical activists with causes ranging from antiabortion, racism and animal rights to ecoterrorists and white nationalist neo-Nazis.

  He quickly checked to see the life cycle of the various groups. Most had sprung up and died off quickly. Some were pacifists, others more radical. One caught his eye. A group he’d never heard of had taken credit for bombing a courthouse in Pittsburgh. Apparently, it was a small anarchist group that had taken responsibility for a series of bombings and bank robberies, modeling itself after the urban guerrilla warfare group, the Symbionese Liberation Army or SLA, that had kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in 1974—the same year Sarah had started college.

  This group called themselves the Prophecy, and, after two of the members had been arrested in 1979—the year Sarah Johnson reportedly graduated from the university—the group was never heard from again. That summer, Sarah met Buckmaster Hamilton in Yellowstone Park, and a year later they were married.

  Max could hear Kat saying that he was making up a wild tale where there wasn’t one. But the timing was right, and the story he’d concocted for her lack of participation in college added up. The problem was tying Sarah Johnson Hamilton to the group.

  And then a snapshot taken by one of the members of the organization came up from some small weekly newspaper. The photograph was of poor quality. But right away, he spotted the only woman in the group and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

  * * *

  REGISTERED NURSE BECCA THORSON got off for her break at two. Dressed in her scrubs and her comfortable white shoes, she stepped out the back door of the small hospital and reached into her pocket for her nicotine gum. She popped a piece into her mouth and opened the cold can of cola she’d bought from the machine.

  Nettie waited until the nurse had taken a long drink before she approached her.

  As Becca lowered the can, she didn’t seem surprised or concerned. “You must be the friend the cop said wanted to talk to me. Well, you’ve wasted a trip. I only worked at Spring Creek a few weeks toward the end. I was a nurse’s aide. I worked nights. I cleaned bedpans, so I can’t tell you anything about Dr. Venable or the sanitarium, other than they were cheap and let us all go without any warning.”

  Nettie nodded. “Sounds like a delightful place to work. I suspect, though, that you’re like me. You’re smart. You notice things.”

  Becca took another sip without comment.

  “I’m interested in one night in particular. It would have been a little more than twenty-two years ago, only days before the place closed for good. A patient would have come in late that night,” Nettie said, watching the nurse.

  “You expect me to remember one patient?”

  “I suspect this one was kept away from the others.” She saw something in the other woman’s expression. “Am I right?”

  “I didn’t see her,” Becca said and took another drink of her cola.

  “But you know it was a woman?”

  The nurse seemed to realize her mistake. “All right, I saw someone bring her in, okay?”

  “A man or a woman?”

  “A man. I didn’t get a good look at him, before you ask.”

  “But you have an idea how large he was,” Nettie prodded.

  “Larger than average, okay?”

  “And the woman?”

  “I told you, I didn’t really see her. Dr. Venable came out, and they rushed her into a room at the end of the hall. She was all wrapped up in a blanket or coat or something. She was small,” Becca said before Nettie could ask. “I didn’t see her again.”

  “Not even to clean her bedpan?”

  “No. Several of us were curious about her because she seemed to be special, you know.”

  “Special, how?”

  “Dr. Venable made her his priority right away. Just like he made it clear that she was not to be bothered. One of the nurses said he kept her room locked when he wasn’t in there with her, but most of the time he was in there.”

  “So you can’t say if she was a brunette or a blonde—”

  “She was a blonde.” She sighed. “I only know that because after she and the doctor left, a company came to clean out all the furnishings. I happened to be up at the place to get my last check. I went into the room.” She shrugged and looked away. “I was curious, all right?”

  Nettie smiled. She knew curious inside and out. �
��You found a blond hair.”

  “She left behind a brush. It had blond hair in it.”

  “You don’t happen to—”

  “No!” she said and mugged an unpleasant face. “I was curious, not...weird. Why would I want her brush?”

  Nettie couldn’t hide her disappointment. If they had the brush, they could have proved who the mystery patient had been through DNA. Not that there was any doubt in her mind that the blonde had been Sarah Hamilton.

  “So the closing came fast after this woman’s arrival at the sanitarium,” Nettie said. “What happened to the other patients?”

  “What few we had were moved to the hospital until a place could be found for them. It wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t have that many real patients.”

  “What do you mean real patients?”

  The nurse looked at her watch.

  “Please. It’s important. The doctor was experimenting on people, right?”

  She looked up in surprise and then looked around to make sure no one from inside was listening. “He said he was helping them forget the bad things in their lives, homeless people he picked up on the highway, vagrant types who hitchhiked through the state and needed a little extra money, anyone willing to let him use them as guinea pigs. He paid them to let him mess with their minds.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what people would do for money. The woman was naive, unlike Nettie, who felt nothing about human nature could surprise her anymore.

  “Why didn’t someone report him?” she had to ask.

  “And lose their jobs? Not just that,” she said as if still feeling guilty she hadn’t turned him in. “The people he experimented on all agreed to it, and they seemed fine when they left so...” She shrugged again. “And to be truthful, most of us thought he was a crackpot and that his experiments were harmless because they didn’t work.”

  “How do you know they didn’t work?” Nettie asked.

  The nurse shrugged. “The people seemed the same when they left.”

  Apparently Becca had expected them to come out like zombies. “What did he do to this special patient?”

  “Who knows? Once she arrived, he spent all his time with her in her room, and a few days later she was gone and so was he.”

  “Do you think they left together?” Nettie asked.

  She shrugged. “Beats me. I was busy looking for another job to pay for nursing school. We’re supposed to give two weeks notice when we quit, but a doctor can just up and decide to close the entire hospital without even telling us until the last minute.”

  “Did you ever see the man who brought the woman in again? Or hear the doctor call either of them by name?”

  “No, and before you ask, the doctor didn’t make a chart for her.” The nurse finished her cola and tossed the can into a nearby waste bin.

  “You got a feeling about the relationship between the doctor and the man who brought the woman in, right?”

  Becca gave that a moment’s thought before she asked, “You mean like, did they seem to know each other?”

  Nettie nodded.

  “I suppose the men must have known each other, but not as well as the doctor knew the woman. He was a lot older than her, but I got the feeling they were old friends.”

  “Was it something either of them said that gave you that impression?”

  “No,” she said slowly. Nettie saw the flash of memory in the woman’s eyes and waited. She’d found that once a person got talking, the memories came flooding back.

  “That night when the man brought her in and the doctor came out to admit her, the woman held out her hand to him, and he took it in both of his. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I got the impression she was glad to see him.”

  * * *

  ANGELINA FINALLY FOUND a private investigator to take her case. Most of them had refused when she told them who she was. No, it was more because of who she was married to and that she wanted dirt on Buckmaster’s first wife.

  She’d always thought that once she and Buckmaster were in the White House—or even on their way like they were now—that people would fall all over themselves getting her what she wanted.

  Apparently not, if she wanted information that might upset the soon-to-be president.

  This knowledge did little to improve her mood. Not that her mood had been good for months. Not since Sarah Johnson Hamilton had come back into Buckmaster’s life. Angelina woke most mornings in a funk at the mere thought of Sarah. Buckmaster mooning around all the time about his first wife hadn’t helped matters either.

  If she could have gotten away with it, Angelina would have killed the woman—anything to get her out of the picture. She’d thought about paying someone to do the job, but since she couldn’t take the chance, she’d have to find another way to eradicate Sarah from their lives.

  She’d already had to deal with one blackmailer.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” The PI asked when she met him at his office to give him his first installment. Curtis Olsen looked more like an accountant than a private investigator. But she’d made the mistake of thinking Moose could handle anything because of his size. She was willing to give Curtis a chance. Also, he was the only one who’d give her the time of day after she told him what she wanted.

  “I want the dirt,” she said, tired of pretending otherwise. “I know there is something to find.”

  “Like what?”

  She shook her head. “Sarah Johnson Hamilton is just too squeaky-clean. She’s hiding something. Something that she’s kept hidden not only from my husband but also from the press. I hope you’re the man to find it.”

  “Let me see what I can do.”

  As Angelina left his office, she hoped Curtis would come through for her. She’d thought about telling him that PI Mike “Moose” McCallahan had pretty much told her there was something to find—before he’d chickened out. But she feared Curtis would quit before he even started if he knew that another PI had bailed already.

  She could feel the clock ticking. She couldn’t let Sarah win because she knew what the prize at the end of this race was—Buckmaster Hamilton and the White House.

  * * *

  KAT HATED THAT she hadn’t been able to prove Max Malone wrong. Now at her computer she typed in Journalist Max Malone. Given the truck he drove and the laid-back way he lived and dressed, she hadn’t been expecting much to come up.

  Not for the first time since she’d met Max did she get a surprise. The first story she stumbled across was about a national newspaper award he’d been given for investigative reporting. She found another where he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for an article he’d done on crooked politics and politicians in Georgia.

  This couldn’t be the same Max Malone. She looked for something that included a photo and found one. He was grinning at the camera, much like he’d grinned at her earlier across the table at the café in Bozeman.

  She scanned the article, tripping over the background material at the end. His real name was Maximilian Malone? Seriously?

  If that wasn’t shocking enough, he apparently was the son of Wallace Maximilian Malone, the famous financier. That couldn’t be right. Why would the son of Wallace Maximilian Malone be sleeping in the back of his old pickup outside the Hamilton Ranch gate?

  Kat growled to herself. Max had wanted her to think he was dirt-poor, living hand to mouth, just another of the many journalists looking for a story. And she’d fallen for it. She hadn’t taken him seriously. She’d played along just to humor him. She realized he probably used this same approach on everyone—including the people he was investigating.

  Shaken by what she was seeing, she scrolled down the listings of the many articles the man had written. Even more shocking was how much acclaim he’d been awarded by his young age of thirty-five.

&nbs
p; Closing the computer, Kat sat for a moment, letting it all sink in. It came down to one simple fact: Max was more than just good at what he did. He got stories where other reporters failed.

  And now he was determined to get her mother’s story.

  Kat stood, thinking she should warn her father, but she quickly sat back down again. She couldn’t imagine anything the senator could do that would stop Max in his pursuit—given the freedom of the press. Also, what little she now knew about Max, if her father tried to stop him, it would only make him more determined.

  The senator’s interference—if he would get involved—would only make things worse. Max already believed he was onto something big. All Kat could hope was that the man was wrong. Meanwhile, she would stay in his confidence and play along, so she’d know if he really did have anything explosive about her mother. Then, she would warn her father.

  Her cell phone rang, making her jump. Even before she checked it, she knew who it would be.

  “So?” Max said, sounding much too confident.

  Kat closed her eyes and groaned inwardly. “There was a fire and—”

  He interrupted with a bark of a laugh. “What a coincidence.”

  Even though she’d thought the same thing and knew he would, too, it still rankled her. “People do have house fires!”

  “And all of her belongings were lost, right?”

  Kat wanted to argue that her mother had just returned from college with all her things, that her parents had been in the process of downsizing, that... She knew he would think the same thing she did, so without a decent defense, she fell silent.

  “I’m not surprised. Luckily, I found something. You need to see this.”

  She had a feeling that whatever it was, she really wasn’t going to want to see it. “Where are you?”

  “I’m leaving Big Timber. Why don’t we meet at the Branding Iron in Beartooth? Isn’t it lunchtime yet? I’m starved.”

  “Apparently you’re always starved.” She thought of Max’s wealthy father. Was it possible he’d done something that had gotten him disinherited? It would explain the old truck and Max’s current lifestyle. Maybe there was more to Max’s story than she was giving him credit for. “Shall I assume I’m buying?”