Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

  “You’ll have left boot prints, tire tracks-”

  “The woods are full of hunters with boots, and by morning the plows should have cleared the road-”

  “It was stupid-”

  “I know! But do you have any idea what I’m going through? The whispers at the hospital again. The other doctors shunning me again. Patients transferring out of my practice again. Secretaries and nurses afraid to be alone in a room with me. So to hell with you and your sanctimonious crap about what I should and shouldn’t do. Why shouldn’t I send the little fuck scurrying down the other side of the ridge with bullets at his heels?” The room pitched to one side, and he sat down on the nearest sofa. Christ, I shouldn’t have drunk so much, he thought, gripping his head between his hands and trying to stay the terrible swirling in his brain. In a few seconds it steadied. Without looking up, he could feel his father looming over him and sensed the man’s disgust. A wave of defeat swept through him as tangible as the effect of the alcohol. And as familiar. He’d mostly given up the latter, but had been succumbing to the former for years. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, defiance draining out of him. There was no point in fighting the man. Never had been, never would be. Nor of fighting to be free of Kelly. In the world’s eyes he’d always be her killer.

  Between his fingers he could see the spacious room where he’d once believed he could be happy with her. Everything was decorated in beige, cream, and gold – the chairs, sofas, tables, lamps, even the walls and chandeliers – befitting a gilded lifestyle. Except it only reminded him of stale marzipan – ornate on the outside, hard and crumbly within.

  His father sat down beside him. “Why, Chaz?” His tone of voice was surprisingly quiet, almost tender.

  Good question. It had all been an impulse born of booze, lack of sleep, and being powerless to regain control over his life. “I’d gone off the wagon, had a few drinks, and listened in on the tap your men put on his phone. I heard Roper call that old busybody Nell and invite himself out there to ask her a bunch of questions about us. I lost it. It’s bad enough at work, but now, with him stirring up shit here…” He couldn’t explain the rage inside him. It was as if for that one moment Mark Roper had seemed responsible for all the innuendo, all the accusations of the last few weeks, and the temptation of taking a shot at the bastard, making it look like a hunter’s stray bullet, proved too hard to resist. Then seeing him take off into the bush, tail between his legs, it felt so damn good to have the upper hand, he couldn’t help but go after him. “Pow! Pow! Pow! All the way home. It would have been fantastic, having him in my sights, driving him like a scared rabbit. And I would have, too, if that other hunter hadn’t been there.”

  “Thank God he was,” his father said, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. He stood up from the couch and, running a hand through his steely hair, started to pace. “Chaz, once you take over the family affairs after I’m gone, you’ll run things your own way, with the help of your mother if she’s still here. But there’s one practice of mine I advise you to adopt.”

  Chaz groaned inwardly and sank back into the sofa, sending the contents of his skull into yet another death spiral. He couldn’t endure one of his father’s when-I-kick-the-bucket talks just now. And he couldn’t stand to hear him nonchalantly mention “mother,” the woman who had exiled herself to a permanent around-the-world cruise years ago rather than risk losing her share of the many family business interests in a messy divorce.

  “Did you ever wonder why I only choose security people who are ex-military?”

  “Because they’re trained to kill bad guys with a flick of their eyelashes?”

  “Besides the obvious.”

  Chaz said nothing, knowing his immediate role was to shut up and learn.

  His father stopped by the fireplace, picked up a poker, and used it to stoke a bed of coals beneath a smoking log. “I find men whose particular skills were in special operations, the kind that involve entering premises by stealth and obtaining information with no one the wiser that they’ve even been there. That’s how we can keep abreast of potential problems like Dr. Mark Roper – with subtlety and finesse, not bullets and car crashes. Am I understood?”

  Chaz just nodded, and sent the looping in his head to new levels.

  “Did anyone see you come in just now?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good. Now the first thing we do is get you back to New York. My chauffeur will drive you there tonight. No stops, and you come into your apartment through the garage so as to avoid the doorman. Tomorrow you make a big deal about having had the flu and returning to the city. My driver will say whatever we tell him, so we’ll fudge the time you left. Make it earlier, and he’ll attest you were well past Albany at the time in question.”

  He nodded again.

  “Before you go, have a look at these photos. Tell me what you think.” He threw a stack of large prints on the coffee table between them.

  Chaz, still cradling his head with one hand, focused on the first image. He found himself looking at a medical record for Kelly dated July 1951. “How’d you get these?”

  “Subtlety and finesse, remember?”

  Chaz rubbed his eyes and strained to read the writing in the photo. “So she had cramps as a kid,” he said when he finished, “and her mother interfered then as she does now. What good does it do us to have this?”

  “Keep going.”

  He looked at the next set of pictures. Again he wasn’t impressed. “Cam Roper spent years talking with her. We knew that. He’s the bastard who put ideas of medical school in her head.”

  “Oh, I think our Kelly had a mind of her own.” He reached over and handed the next photo to Chaz personally.

  Chaz started when he recognized her familiar handwriting. The sight of it catapulted him back to the early years when she wrote him every few days about their plans, the wedding, the life they’d have together, and a bittersweet ache for squandered chances gripped his stomach. But as he read further, a fury as consuming and fresh as if he’d intercepted the letter the day it was written enveloped his chest and squeezed. “That bitch. That betraying, lying bitch…” Speechless with anger, he rose to his feet and let the photo fall from his hand. He’d loved her, wasted his life over her, his whole goddamned life, and it just kept getting worse.

  His father walked behind him and gave his shoulders a squeeze, then started to massage them with his surgeon’s fingers, strong and penetrating. It felt good. “Easy, son. I know seeing this must hurt. But surely you had your suspicions.”

  The roiling in Chaz’s stomach grew worse.

  “The good news is it may finally be your way to get clear of her.”

  “Nothing will ever do that, not after all this time.”

  “It will if we can give the police her lover.”

  The effects of whiskey and exhaustion left him slow to react. “You mean give the letter to the police?”

  His father broke off the massage, exasperated. “Of course not. How the hell would I explain where we got it? No, we first find out who this man was, then hand him over. They get a new suspect, and you’re in the clear.”

  His brain emerged from its misery. My, God! he thought, seeing the glimmer of a way out.

  “Don’t you have any idea who it might have been?” his father asked.

  Chaz felt an old resentment rekindle itself – no, the right word was jealousy. Jealousy over anyone she had befriended and seemed to have fun with. Not that he suspected an affair back then. He hated how her moving close to others meant she drew away from him. But now he could find the bastard who’d been screwing her and stick him with her murder. The idea lit a fire in him.

  So which one had cuckolded him?

  A guy in her class? Or one of the residents two years ahead of her. Hell, it might even have been a colleague of his, sharing consults with him during the day and banging her at night.

  Someone outside the hospital?

  Someone not even a doctor?

  He
ground his frustration between a fist and a palm. “We’ll never figure it out!”

  “If we keep track of Mark Roper’s conversations we will.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He knows about this letter,” his father said, walking over and retrieving the copy from the floor. “That means he’ll be looking for the man as well. We listen in, and sooner or later he may end up talking to or about the guy. Then either he turns him in, or we do it for him.”

  Chaz’s hopes stirred again. “That sounds as if it just might work.”

  “I also want you to see the rest of these.” His father handed him the remainder of the photos from the file.

  “What are M and M reports doing here?”

  “I thought you’d tell me. Aren’t those your initials signing off the resident and student orders?”

  Chaz had to hold the snaps just right to see the writing. “Yeah, but what have they got to do with Kelly?”

  “Could they have been what your darling Kelly was trying to hold over your head so you wouldn’t go looking for her?”

  “But it concluded here nothing was wrong. During my entire career I don’t recall ever being faulted for using digoxin incorrectly.”

  “What exactly did she say to you the night she disappeared? Can you remember?”

  Remember? How could he ever forget?

  She had ambushed him as he left his Park Avenue office around five that Thursday afternoon. It was hot the way only New York could get in August, when the city sealed itself in its own bubble of dirt, exhaust, and exhaled CO2 from eight million people.

  Kelly’s white dress had seemed to float on the humid air as she walked out from under the awning of the next door coffee shop. He had no idea how long she’d been waiting there. The only warning of the extent to which she was about to shake his world was the ferocity of the expression on her face.

  “I’m leaving you, Chaz,” she said, stopping while still five feet away, her arms folded across her breasts. “Tonight.”

  “What?” The people pushing by on either side of them blurred, the traffic noises sounded hollow and distant. He stepped toward her, his hands ready to grab her arms.

  “Don’t come any closer or I’ll scream!”

  The sibilant command stopped him cold. He hated public scenes. No doubt that was why she had staked out his office and caught him in a crowd. Seething, he remained where he stood, aware again of the people jostling his shoulders and wondering if they heard her. “Damn it, Kelly.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Leaving you. And don’t try to follow me, or I’ll ruin your career – put a stain on your record that’ll never come out.”

  “What are you talking about?” His cheeks burning, he took another step.

  “I warn you,” she said in an overly loud voice. People turned to look at her. Some gave him funny glances. But no one stopped.

  Except Chaz.

  “Daddy’s little progeny headed to be Chief of Cardiology,” she said, her voice taunting and still far too loud for his liking.

  “Well, forget about it,” she went on. “One patient dead, one near dead, both on your watch. I can make you equally responsible, or not.”

  “What patients?” He could barely keep from lunging at her, as enraged at her slipping from his control as at what she said. But occasional passersby still seemed to be paying attention, especially to her.

  “Think I’d tell you now, so you could make records disappear? Just know there’s a viper in your nest, and you missed it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Stay away from me,” she said, louder than ever, “and I’ll clean it out so there’s no reflection on you. Come after me, and your dream of being top dog at NYCH or anywhere else that counts is over.”

  “Kelly, for God’s sake-”

  Kelly gave him a look of triumphant defiance, turned on her heel, and ran to a cab parked a few car lengths away. Before he could think to race after her, she jumped inside, and the driver pulled away.

  “Chaz?” His father’s voice pulled him back to the present.

  He found himself staring at his own clenched fists. He’d never told the police of the encounter. And gave only the sketchiest details to his father. He’d been too humiliated to say more.

  “Chaz, I asked if you could recall exactly what Kelly said to you that last time you saw her. Didn’t she threaten you in some way?”

  Before answering, he took a slow deep breath and forced his hands to relax. “Yes. But what she said to me, word for word, was ‘One patient dead, one near dead, both on your watch.’ ”

  “So these two cases could be exactly what she was talking about?”

  “I suppose so.”

  He began to collect the photos. “Do you remember these two people?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d have to see their full charts.”

  “Of course.” He thought a few seconds. “But better you not ask for them. I’ll stay here tomorrow to greet our guests, then early Wednesday morning take the train to New York. I’ll slip into medical records and discreetly pull the dossiers myself, unofficially of course, and find out what you might be up against without tipping off Roper or anyone else that we know about them.”

  A familiar fatigue engulfed Chaz as his father’s preemptive strike to take charge did its usual work and drained whatever reservoir of strength he might have called upon to fend for himself. As if that part of him ever had a chance to exist. It lay withered and shrunken, the way any organ would end up after a lifetime of disuse.

  … Beware a father of spectacular ability… They never let you fail, always stepping in to take over…

  Her words taunted him from the grave.

  Tuesday, November 20, 6:00 A.M.

  Bacteriology Laboratory,

  New York City Hospital

  Donna Johnson, third-year medical student and part-time lab technician, was sound asleep on the staff-lounge couch when a noise out in the lab wakened her.

  What the hell? No one should be there.

  She stayed curled up in the darkness, her black skin an advantage for once. If anybody found out she sneaked in here to sleep, it’d be, hello pink slip, good-bye job.

  The soft whir of a computer fan started up, a musical chord sounded as one of the countertop units was brought on-line, and a ghostly blue glow seeped through the wraparound windows separating this room from the rest of the bacteriology department.

  Definitely somebody there. Thank God whoever it was hadn’t turned on the overhead lights. The place where she lay remained in deep shadow.

  Unable to see her watch, she’d no idea of the time. Without moving off the couch, she strained to see the wall clock out in the lab proper, keeping her head below the level of the sill.

  She had trouble making out the numbers, and only then realized her glasses had slipped off as she slept. Hopelessly myopic without them, she felt around in the dark. No luck. They must have fallen down between the cushions. She again squinted toward the clock face, and figured it must be near six, the hands seeming to make a near-vertical line.

  Shit. Let’s hope this early bird will be quick. The day shift would be showing up in an hour. And she had to pee something awful. She lay back on the couch and tried to ignore her bladder. That just made the urge stronger. She raised her head enough to see over the sill, praying the person would be gone.

  She could make out the back of someone in a white coat hunched over a computer while writing on a piece of paper.

  Hardly anybody had cause to do emergency cultures or gram stains in the middle of the night. ER prepared their own slides to look at under the microscope, and on the floors, except for life-threatening infections such as meningitis or septic shock, most samples could wait until morning to be processed.

  So who the hell was keeping her from going to pee?

  The individual clicked off the computer, plunging the lab back into total darkness, but the thi
n beam of what must have been a penlight snapped on. The user walked it toward the far corner of the lab, passing between columns of fluorescent digital readouts and rows of black microscopes barely visible in the ambient light. He, or she, paused by a rack of unused petri dishes – round shallow containers lined with bouillon agar used to grow bacteria cultures – and slipped one of them into the pocket of the white coat, then continued to where the incubators glinted in the dim illumination.

  A click, and one of the counter lights came to life. The black silhouette pulled on a pair of latex gloves from a nearby box, reached into the hood, and began to retrieve stack after stack of petri dishes, laying them out on the counter so that the identifying labels would have been visible, then returning them to the incubator. After five interminable minutes – Donna was crossing her legs and gritting her teeth – the person laid a specific dish aside, carefully lifted off the glass lid, located a supply of culture tubes on the lab bench, and, using the sterile Q-tip from one, scooped up a good-sized chunk of agar. Retrieving the unused container pocketed earlier, the figure then ran the swab over its surface, presumably plating out whatever organism had been harvested. Returning the original sample to its place in the incubator, the silhouette then extracted a Ziploc bag from another pocket, sealed the newly plated dish in it, snapped off the gloves, dumped them into a wastebasket, and turned off the counter light. Once more the thin beam of the penlight cut through the darkness, moving toward the door. The snap of the lock opening sounded loud in the absolute silence, and the white-coated visitor, momentarily framed in the faint light from the hallway, was gone.

  Pretty fuckin’ furtive, thought Donna, intrigued enough by what she’d just seen to forget the urgency of her previous problem.

  She had her own small light to get around, a tiny red bulb on her key chain, and used it to make her way to the computer where the visitor had been working. Entering the access code, she clicked up the most recently viewed page.

  Whoever it was had been after the preliminary culture results of specimens currently being incubated in the lab. Scrolling down the screen she saw: