Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

  His right eye, tearing profusely, clamped itself so tightly shut in reflex to the pain that he could barely keep his left one open. He had to use the fingers of his left hand to pry the lids apart. Even then he couldn’t manage more than a squint and found his field of vision cut in half.

  He tried again to glance behind him. The man, little more than a dark shape in the open snow at the highway’s edge, stood directly below him now and looked right up to where he climbed.

  He can’t see me, Mark thought, keeping his panic in check.

  His tracker shouldered the rifle and started after him, once more following the thin beam of light, presumably playing it over his footprints.

  Mark estimated he had a hundred-and-fifty-yard lead. Not much of an advantage over a bullet. He redoubled his efforts. Everything depended on how far down the other side of the ridge he could get before the gunman reached the peak and drew a bead on him.

  His breathing grew more ragged, and his boots kept slipping, sapping energy from his legs until his calves burned. But at least he wasn’t cold. The exertion made him warm, so much so that as sweat began to cling to his shirt, he hardly noticed his wet pants. Now and then he scooped a handful of slush into his mouth and gulped it down between gasps of breath. The coolness actually felt good. But as soon as he stopped to rest, his damp clothes would accelerate heat loss and quicken the onset of hypothermia.

  But as much as the trees blocked the wind down here, high overhead it roared through the branches, obliterating any noises the man below made. That better work both ways, he thought. Whenever one of the low limbs he grabbed as a handhold snapped off with a crack, he imagined it could be heard for a mile. He tried not to think of the man stopping, unshouldering his rifle, and aiming at the sound. He took yet another furtive look. Mark could no longer see him, not even the thin beam of light. But he could see his own trail, leading to him like a tracer bullet.

  Up he went, his legs and arms aching from the effort. He could only hope the man behind him had as much trouble.

  As the slope became steeper, more slippery, he had to reach directly in front of him to grab rocks and roots buried in the ground so as to propel himself upward. He mustn’t slip now, or he’d slide a lot more than a few steps, possibly all the way to the feet of his pursuer. He tested each handhold before actually gripping it, his exposed fingers aching with wet and cold, and kicked at every toehold to secure an extra half inch of footing.

  He must be near the top, he told himself. The wind sounded louder. And some of what he crawled over became bare rock. In spots it became even too steep to hold an accumulation of snow, and he crawled over bare rock, part of a granite spine that ran the length of the crest. That meant no tracks. Mark felt a sudden burst of elation. If the top was just as bare, he could not only get ahead of the son of a bitch, but run along the ridge before starting down, then lose him altogether.

  He hoisted himself over a ledge and stood on a shelf of stone in a full blast of icy cold. He’d made it. He also instantly started to freeze. His damp clothes flattened against his skin, and the chill cut through him as if he had nothing on. The worst were his fingers, which immediately cramped and curled into claws. But the stony ground beneath his feet, though coated with ice, had been blown clean of snow just as he’d hoped.

  He quickly looked around, making sure his would-be assassin hadn’t somehow beaten him by taking a different route. To the right and left he saw only naked rock disappearing into the gloom. On the horizon in front of him, the wind was rolling back the cloud, exposing a dazzling strip of stars and a full moon low in the sky. He must get to the safety of the woods before it got any higher. Once it lit up the snowscape below, he’d be like a mouse running from a hawk in the clearings.

  Huddled low and keeping his feet wide apart so as not to slip, he thrust his hands under his arms and scurried along the top of the ridge. After about a hundred yards he jumped down onto a bushy shallow ledge on the far side. He saw a gradual, snow-covered slope fifteen feet beneath him. Once there he would be a dozen strides from the trees. He’d need to smooth over any prints he left, then count on the wind to do the rest. With a bit of luck, the man behind him might have already lost the trail and not be able to spot it again.

  He moved to ease himself over the rocky edge and lower himself to the ground when a movement in the darkness below, another fifty yards farther to his left, caught his eye.

  He stood absolutely still.

  Staring down into the shadows, he saw nothing more and thought he must have imagined it.

  Until a shape darker than the woods crept toward him and quickly became a human form.

  But it couldn’t be.

  He had such a head start on the man. How could he be here already?

  Choices raced through his mind. Should he scramble back down the other side? Stay crouched on the ledge? Maybe he hadn’t been seen yet. Or any second there’d be a bullet. He drew his breath, determined not to scream and beg.

  The figure crossed about ten yards below him. Mark could easily see the dark outline of a rifle barrel held upward toward the sky. But the man’s head seemed turned toward the forest, cocked to one side as if he listened for something down there. Not once did he glance up where Mark lay crouched.

  Was it the same person who’d first shot at him? Had he found a less steep way up after all? Or was it someone else? His build looked slimmer, though in the dark Mark couldn’t be sure. An accomplice of the man who’d pursued him, perhaps, lying in wait, knowing his partner would chase the prey up to him?

  Whoever it was remained focused on the forest below, looking down the hill, away from the ridge.

  Some accomplice.

  Mark breathed as softly as he could. The cold continued to rip through him, and he started to shiver. He clamped his jaws closed to keep his teeth from chattering.

  The man beneath him continued to listen and stare into the woods, the white vapor of his breath whipping into the night.

  If he turned, they’d be looking right at each other. Mark quietly curled into a ball and crept back against the bushes, burying his head in his arms to mask the white traces of his own breath in the frost. With his good eye he squinted along the ridge to see if the man he’d thought was on his heels had arrived.

  No one.

  Was the man not thirty feet from him the gunman?

  No, Mark finally decided. From all the years he’d hiked and played around these hills he knew for certain there was no shortcut.

  So who was this guy?

  Just another hunter out poaching who had nothing to do with his pursuer?

  Or is it me he’s listening for?

  His shivering grew worse. His fingers ached. His eye throbbed.

  He glanced once more along the ridge.

  It was fully bathed in moonlight now.

  There, against the sky, appeared the shape of a man climbing into view, a rifle on his back. An instant later he knelt and probed the ground around his feet with a penlight.

  Chapter 9

  That same evening, Monday, November 19, 6:00 P.M.

  New York City Hospital

  Earl huddled against the wind at the Thirty-third Street entrance, cupping the mouthpiece of his cellular with his hand. Horizontal needles of rain stung against his skin. Everyone else rushing by seemed to have an umbrella. He eyed a kid who had been selling them out of a garbage bag and signaled him to bring one over, all the while continuing his conversation with Janet. “I came up empty. The only significant thing is that Cam Roper, Mark’s father, might have looked at those same charts just after Kelly went missing. Except he probably didn’t find anything either, or he would have done something about it. I can’t reach Mark to tell him. His phone doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “It’s still pretty bizarre, those records attracting his interest,” Janet said.

  “If I’m right about Kelly trying to find evidence of malpractice to use as leverage against Chaz, then maybe Cam Roper had followed up on thos
e suspicions, or at least started to before he passed away.” He fished five bucks out of his pocket, and gave it to the pint-sized merchant, who cut the gloom with a grin as bright as polished ivory. Popping open what looked as flimsy as a bat wing and was undoubtedly stolen goods, Earl instantly felt better, but had to speak up as the rain drummed on the black material, creating the din of a thousand impatient fingers. “Cam could have thought she’d confronted Chaz with some grievous error he’d made that would ruin his career, and he’d killed her for it. Except Roper Senior likely came to the same conclusion as the M and M reports. ‘Unexpected but unavoidable digoxin toxicity with no obvious cause.’ ”

  Janet said nothing.

  In the roar of the storm he thought the connection was gone. “Janet?”

  “I’m here.”

  “So what’s got your tongue.”

  “I hesitate to say it, but there’s another possible scenario.”

  A wave of static interrupted them. “Go on,” he said, when it cleared.

  “Somebody could have tried to murder those patients by secretly injecting extra doses of the drug.”

  “That’s pretty far-fetched.”

  “But not impossible. It’s occurred in hospitals before.”

  “But no one ever raised the possibility of foul play here. Certainly it was never mentioned in the charts.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen.”

  He exhaled the way only a former smoker can – long, slow, and from the bottom of his lungs. “Being unable to talk with either of them means I may never know.”

  “What about family?”

  “I talked with the woman’s son this afternoon, but he never brought up anything of that sort. I can call him back and ask him outright if she ever mentioned having any enemies or suspicions of someone trying to harm her, but I think he would have mentioned it if she had. As for the man who died, he’d no next of kin, so there isn’t a hope of finding out more there.”

  She fell silent again.

  “It isn’t entirely a dead end,” he continued. “I’ve arranged to meet with the floor staff involved in her care. Maybe they can tell me if she ever mentioned anyone who might hurt her. And it turns out Melanie Collins continued to see the woman as a patient from time to time over the years, so maybe she’ll be able to fill me in on something I’m missing.” He’d already left several messages on her service, asking her to call, but she hadn’t gotten back to him yet.

  This time Janet let out a sigh, minor-league compared to his own. “Good luck, love. Oh, by the way, I looked up divorce law on the Internet, and as far as I can see, she’d have gone offshore.”

  Once Janet got an idea, she was relentless. “That may be, but the police found no record of any plane or boat tickets in her name.”

  “That doesn’t mean she didn’t intend to go there. Maybe her killer stopped her before she could make the move. All I know is, find a woman’s divorce lawyer, and you find someone who knows a lot about the woman.”

  Mark huddled in the bushes, trying to blend with the scrubby growth.

  The man on the ridge looked up from his study of the ground and seemed to stare right at him. Then he looked in the other direction, and finally rose to his feet. If he’d seen Mark or the hunter below, he showed no sign, turning away and peering into the night.

  The hunter must have been outside his line of sight, Mark thought. Otherwise, if they were together, why hadn’t he called to him? Even if they weren’t, he would still have reacted, possibly even mistaken him for Mark and taken a shot at him.

  Instead the man walked off in the opposite direction, playing his light over the snow on either side of the spiny path.

  Mark exhaled in momentary relief.

  Looking down he saw that the hunter hadn’t budged, his dark form still visible, his breath coming out in well-spaced puffs. By counting the interval, Mark estimated that whoever he was, he’d controlled his respirations down to ten a minute, which took rock-solid nerve.

  As Mark watched, the man slowly leveled the gun barrel as if he were about to shoot something farther down the slope. Again he seemed to be listening.

  Mark heard nothing but the rush of the wind.

  From within the darkness of the woods leapt a great amorphous shadow in what initially appeared to be a singular movement. Immediately it flew into pieces, the parts darting through the trees at the forest edge, each zigzagging around the trunks like formless gray spirits.

  Three shots rang out, but, like smoke, the creatures had vanished.

  Except for one.

  Its antlered head twisted round, and it spiraled to its knees, staggered up on its legs, then pitched forward again. It writhed in the snow, kicking and thrashing its neck side to side as if to shake off what had felled it. Black stains pooled on the snow, and the writhing eventually slowed. It raised its head once more, as if straining to see the moon through the treetops, its mouth open and gasping. Then it collapsed, its mighty struggle giving over to lesser quiverings.

  The hunter walked over and put a final bullet into the buck’s head.

  Mark spun around in time to see the first man standing stock-still in the distance, staring toward the sound of the shot. He then scurried over the edge of the ridge and ran back down the way he’d come.

  7:00 P.M.

  Mark hated all-terrain vehicles. Gas-powered models were carbon-monoxide-spewing noise polluters. Battery-operated versions, though quieter, tipped, killed, and paralyzed just as many victims as their noisier cousins. But among hunters, especially the middle-of-the-night kind, they were the transportation of choice this time of year, before the snow got too deep.

  Perched on the back of a red, four-wheel-drive minitractor, he said nothing of this to his grizzled driver as they bounced over the nonwooded sections of the valley. Rather he expressed profound gratitude for the ride home, especially given that the old guy had had to make a choice whether to haul Mark or the deer out first.

  Mark had won, and got a shot of the man’s whiskey to boot.

  He occasionally had to grab his host’s shoulders to keep from falling off. Under a blue-checked hunting jacket he felt muscles hard as tangled ropes despite a face etched with so many wrinkles they were like rings of a tree and gave an age near eighty. That made him from an era in which men took down deer to put food on the family table, not for sport.

  When they pulled up to the back fence of Mark’s property, his driver didn’t give a name, and Mark didn’t ask. But the handshake between them felt firm, also from another time, when it would have been only natural for a man to help a stranger.

  Mark watched him ride off to fetch his kill. The wind had chased away the storm, and the moon was at its zenith now, its light filling the countryside like clear blue water. Soon his rescuer was but a soundless dot churning a path back up the far slope.

  Marked climbed the rickety log fence and headed over the field toward his house. The snow was barely six inches deep, and he had no trouble walking. All he could think off was a hot shower, clean clothes, and something to eat. Then he’d call Dan, and have him get his ass over to Chaz Braden’s place to ask some pointed questions-

  His thoughts came to an abrupt halt.

  The lights were on in his house.

  And against the upstairs curtains he saw the shadow of someone walking about, moving from room to room.

  Too incredulous to move, his brain clicked into action.

  Braden!

  That ambush and chase had been nothing more than a diversion, intended to keep him out of the way so the son of a bitch could search his house again.

  “Well no goddamn way,” he muttered, sprinting for the back door.

  He reached it in less than a minute, and, finding his key, let himself in as noiselessly as he could.

  Sure enough, he could hear the floorboards above his head creaking as the intruder continued to walk back and forth.

  He crept out of the kitchen, through the hallway to the stai
rs, pausing to pick up the baseball bat he’d put back in the front closet. He glanced outside, and to his amazement, saw a dark station wagon parked in his driveway. Bloody nerve, he thought, and, holding his weapon at the ready, crept up the steps.

  The creaking seemed to be coming from behind the closed door to his guest bedroom.

  Get ready to be welcomed, visitor, he said to himself, reaching the landing and weighing the heft of his weapon. He wanted it to be Chaz. Wanted to terrify the creep, confront him about the shooting, about Kelly, make him blurt out a confession or two.

  He crossed the final few feet and, holding the bat in his right hand, slowly turned the brass knob with his left. He took a few slow breaths, preparing himself for battle.

  “Freeze, you asshole!” he roared, flinging the door open and leaping into the room, the bat cocked over his shoulder.

  A young woman with long black hair whom he’d never seen before clutched a bathrobe around her and let out a bloodcurdling yell the whole county would hear.

  Before he could react, she pivoted on one leg and came at his head with a karate kick.

  His skull hurt.

  And his neck.

  “I’m lucky I didn’t kill him,” a woman said.

  “I’d say he’s the lucky one,” a man who sounded familiar replied. “Where’d you learn to kick like that?”

  “At a karate school in Paris.”

  He must have fallen asleep on his couch with no pillow – that would explain the pain – and left the TV on.

  “Could you have fractured one of his vertebrae?” the man asked.

  He knew that voice. Must be an actor he’d seen before.

  “Not without breaking my foot. It feels fine.”

  The woman’s voice he didn’t recognize at all.