Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

  Mark perked up. “He’s worried.”

  “Yeah. And coming from a guy who normally scoffs in my face, that’s almost as good as an admission he pulled the trigger.”

  “So you’ve tossed out the drunken hunter idea.”

  “Let’s say I moved it to the back burner. But I can’t arrest Chaz for suddenly being courteous to me. We still don’t have any evidence he took a shot at you.”

  Discouraged, Mark hung up at the end of the call and started to salvage the contents of Lucy’s purse from the car floor. The slush from his boots had left everything soggy. A packet of photos had spilled out, and fanned at his feet like a deck of cards.

  “I’m afraid these may be ruined,” he said, picking them up and separating them out in the hope they’d dry. He couldn’t help seeing they were all of her in a group hug with four young men. Everyone had broad smiles, and seemed to be from the four corners of the earth. One had Asian features, another Polynesian, the third appeared to be North American Indian, and the fourth, brown-skinned, could have been from anywhere on the planet. Behind them stood a white wall with a red tile roof.

  Could one of them be her fiancé? “I’ll spread these out on the backseat. You might be able to save them.”

  “Thanks. We rarely see each other these days. I don’t know when there’ll be another chance for all of us to be in a picture together.”

  He twisted around and began to place the shots side by side. When he’d finished and she still hadn’t elaborated on who they were, he arranged the pictures a second time.

  “So how do you like our little United Nations?”

  “Are they your colleagues from Médecins du Globe?” Mark asked.

  She laughed. “No! Those are my brothers.”

  “Your brothers?”

  Her smile widened, and she seemed to enjoy his confusion. “Yeah. We’re all adopted.”

  He looked back at the pictures. And at her. “That’s really, cool,” he said.

  “Mom couldn’t have kids, but came from a big family and wanted the same, so she and Dad picked us up wherever he was stationed.”

  “Amazing,” said Mark, reaching back and carefully picking up one of the photos. “So tell me who’s who.”

  5:15 P.M.

  Battery Park Towers,

  New York City

  Earl sank back in a deep, white leather chair, slowly rotating the tapered stem of his martini glass, and looked around him. “This is quite the place, Melanie.”

  “I like it.” She occupied a matching sofa across from him, her legs curled beneath a black dress that set her off in stark contrast to the upholstery. Behind her, along the windows facing east, ran a row of attractive oriental silk screens blocking the view. “The residents tell me some tall son of a bitch wearing a visitor’s pass is stalking our hallowed halls and kicking butt whenever he finds a slacker.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “Why not? You never could let anything slide, Earl. I doubt that part of you has changed.” She raised her glass to him in a toast.

  Not in the mood for reminiscing about their impressions of one another, he simply shrugged and toasted her back. “Tell me about Bessie McDonald,” he said, without pausing to take a sip. “Did she say anything about Chaz Braden that night you visited her two weeks ago?”

  Melanie frowned at him. “And still the same old stickler for getting down to business, I see.” She took the time to drink deeply from her tapered glass, the contents a blue concoction she’d made up before he arrived – crushed ice with curaçao, orange vodka, and white rum according to the bottles still on the counter. She waited for him to join her.

  He didn’t.

  “You don’t like martinis? I can get you something else.” She started to get up.

  “No, Melanie, this is fine. Just tell me if Bessie said anything about Chaz Braden.”

  She settled back on the sofa. “Well, actually she did. You see, just that morning she’d read in the paper about Kelly’s body being found, and that got her talking about her admission back in ‘seventy-four.”

  He felt a surge of excitement and leaned forward. “Go on.”

  But after listening to Melanie describe her conversation with her former patient, he fell back in his chair, deflated. It told him nothing new.

  “Bessie was my first big case, Earl,” Melanie continued, her voice earnest. “If there’s a moment when I can say I became a doctor, when all the theory suddenly became clear-cut action, it was the night we resuscitated her. Apart from that, I don’t recall much about her admission. But to this day I’ve had a special place in my heart for late bloomers. You know the kind of residents I mean. Nondescript performers one day, then in comes the patient with a problem that they nail before anyone else, and it sets off a spark.”

  Earl remembered Melanie coming out of herself in her fourth year, but not that her emergence centered around any specific case. Yet he’d certainly seen exactly what she described happen with his own residents. Reliving this personal epiphany of hers, however, didn’t offer a clue as to what secret Chaz Braden might have been trying to cover up. And Melanie, along with everyone else at the hospital, seemed unable to explain why Bessie now lay in a coma. “Some transient event” had been the best the neurologists came up with after looking at the tests Dr. Roy arranged.

  He glanced to his left. Through the west windows he could see the black water of the Hudson where it splayed out to combine with the East River, then continued to flow toward the ocean. He felt the pull of the current on his mood. Even his calls that afternoon to former classmates who’d worked on the digoxin toxicity cases had yielded nothing but exclamations of surprise at his contacting them and no useful recollections about Chaz’s or anyone else’s competence with the medication. There were a few other people yet to reach, but he doubted they’d be any more helpful.

  He raised his glass and took a long sip of Melanie’s creation – a blue lady she’d called it. Not bad, for a martini. He usually found them bitter. This had a refreshing, fruity taste.

  “Did you have any part to play in the second case, the man who died?” he asked. “I saw your name on the order sheet there as well.”

  The makings of a grin played at the corners of her mouth. “Could be. You see, after my triumph with Bessie, I was the floor’s authority on dig for a while, so likely I stuck my nose into that resuscitation as well, if I was around. But I’d have to look at the chart.”

  “Would you mind? And could you take a look at Bessie’s old file as well? Those notes might jog your memory about something that’s not written down.”

  “Sure.” She leaned forward to take his half-empty glass, got up, and walked with it toward a stunning kitchen area that he knew Janet would die for. Except it looked so polished, he doubted Melanie did any cooking in it.

  “That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it?” Melanie said, opening a refrigerator the size of his minivan and pouring him a refill from a small pitcher of the cocktail that she’d left chilling in the freezer.

  “It’s still worth pursuing, given what little we have. Keep this under your hat, but unofficially Mark Roper thinks Chaz Braden somehow got Bessie to slip into a coma so she couldn’t talk about what happened back then.”

  She started, looked up from refilling his glass, and the blue slush brimmed over the rim onto her hand. “Now there’s one hell of a big leap,” she said, reaching for a cloth to clean up the spill. “Has he any proof?”

  “Just his gut.”

  She returned with the drink. “How does he think Chaz could have precipitated a coma?” She stood over him, still holding his glass and wiping its stem.

  “First of all it would have to be a drug that couldn’t be traced. He figures a shot of short-acting insulin could have done the trick. Think about it. The onset of profound hypoglycemia would occur in a matter of hours after Chaz gave her the injection. A protracted insulin coma would in itself destroy a pack of neurons. Throw in prolonged convulsions
and an extended obstruction of her airway, both of which he could have reasonably anticipated since he may have made sure she couldn’t summon help – they found her call button unplugged – Bessie wouldn’t have much left between the ears. In other words, she’d be exactly the way she is now.”

  “I see.” Melanie continued polishing the outside of the glass. “You haven’t told me what you think.”

  “Two cases of unexplained digoxin toxicity under Chaz Braden twenty-seven years ago, the year Kelly died, and the survivor now lies in an unexplained coma that occurred less than twenty-four hours after forensic experts identified Kelly’s body. That’s a lot of mystery illnesses clustered around a common set of events. Yeah, I’m beginning to go along with the idea there’s a connection.”

  Her caressing action with the cloth slowed to a stop. “But do you believe Chaz is responsible for it all?”

  “The man’s such an ass, part of me wants to say, ‘Who else could it be?’ ”

  “And the rest of you?”

  He shrugged. “It bothers me the police investigated the hell out of him for Kelly’s murder, yet couldn’t nail him. So let’s just say that while he’s still number one in my book, and I think what happened to Bessie McDonald is somehow linked to Kelly’s death, I’m also keeping an open mind as to the possibility of other suspects.” He was thinking of Samantha McShane.

  Melanie remained perfectly motionless.

  He felt a crick in his neck from looking up at her.

  “What about making a case against Chaz regarding Bessie?” she asked after a few seconds.

  “Maybe we’ll luck out and someone will remember seeing him on the floor that night. If so, we could connect the dots for the police and point them to him. Then he’d at least have some explaining to do.”

  “That army of lawyers his daddy keeps will say otherwise.”

  “There’s another potential charge that would make everyone, including those lawyers, look at him in a different light. Someone took a shot at Mark early last night-”

  “A shot?”

  “Yeah, with a hunting rifle. He skidded into a ditch, and Mark thinks it was Chaz’s work as well. Put a chink like that in his armor – it’s reckless endangerment at the very least, if not attempted murder – Daddy won’t be able to protect him. Maybe then we can tie him to Bessie, and ultimately Kelly.”

  “It all sounds flimsy.”

  “I know.”

  “And if you can’t finger him for taking a shot at Mark?”

  “We’re screwed, all the way back to square one. We’d have to get him another way, or go after someone new.”

  She studied him for a few seconds, then seemed to realize she still held his drink. “Oh, how rude of me,” she said, and placed it in front of him. Reentering the kitchen, she stopped at the sink and began to wash her hands, allowing the water to run down her forearms and off her elbows.

  Out of habit from scrubbing up, Earl thought. When distracted, he sometimes did the same.

  “If you like, I can order some food, and we can reminisce the night away,” she called over her shoulder, actually sounding festive.

  Jesus, he thought, starting to feel uncomfortable. Is she coming on to me? “I’m sorry, Melanie, but I only have time for the drink,” he said, attempting to extricate himself as painlessly as possible from any overture she’d just made. “I’ve a ton of e-mails waiting from my department, and will be hours dealing with them. You know how it is, everyone getting the urge to make decisions when the chief’s away, and then no end of sandbox spats.”

  She reached for a towel. “You’re sure? There’s some terrific gourmet French I could have here in twenty minutes.”

  “Sorry. But this hit the spot.” He picked up the drink, toasted her with it, and took three healthy swallows, enough to make her think he at least appreciated her bartending efforts. Nasty-tasting concoction.

  Then he stood.

  She walked over and took his hand. “You always were a stubborn man, Earl.” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. When he returned the gesture, she leaned in, her breasts brushing up against him.

  She hasn’t changed a bit, he thought. Still making passes at any half-decent-looking guy.

  Outside her building, walking toward the pedestrian overpass that crossed the southern tip of West Street, he figured he’d handled the visit smoothly enough. She hadn’t even asked whom he suspected of being Kelly’s lover. Always a lousy liar, he’d been apprehensive about putting on a show of ignorance.

  He looked up behind him and saw her backlit like a tiny mannequin in her penthouse window. To the east, piercing as a phantom pain midst the glitter of lower Manhattan, loomed the area she’d screened off – the void where the Twin Towers once stood.

  5:45 P.M.

  Hampton Junction

  Mark had shown Lucy a full menu of how the human body could fester and fail.

  At Zackery Abrams’s she’d seen how pressure sores on a forty-year-old paraplegic could crack the skin along a thigh and open it to the bone. IVs, dressing changes, antibiotics, and painkillers simply held the fort. Skin grafts should have been next, but Zak wouldn’t leave his four-year-old daughter, Christina, in the care of a foster home. “Her mother was killed in the same crash that cost me the use of my legs,” he explained to Lucy, his wan face hardened against the sort of wound that no treatment could cure.

  In Christina Halprin’s home the sixty-two-year-old woman explained how her heart was so feeble she could go into acute failure, her lungs filling with fluid, just from making love with Mel, her husband. Rejected as a transplant candidate, and already on every known cardiac medication, she insisted Mark prescribe enough diuretics in order that she could take an extra dose now and then, enough to see her through a special evening with Mel. “So far so good,” she told Lucy, her voice lowered and a soft flush spreading across her cheeks. “Think about it, honey. It’s the one moment when my damned body still feels wonderful. You always read about men going in the saddle. Why not me?”

  Lucy got them back out on the highway, and they drove in silence for a while.

  “It’s not bullets or bugs you’d be afraid of,” she said out of the blue after they’d gone a few miles.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before, when we were talking about Médecins du Globe, it’s the having to settle you couldn’t stand, isn’t it? You couldn’t settle for what we do out there, could you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I mean, the care you give these people in the middle of nowhere is awesome. And sophisticated. I bet it would kill you to stand by and let a single one of them die a day sooner or suffer a minute longer than they had to for want of medications or equipment.”

  “Hey, I’m not some kind of keep-’em-breathing-at-all-costs nut.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just what you do here compared to what we did in the field. Christ, sometimes it was so primitive we were limited to providing little more than food, water, and simple hygiene.”

  He said nothing, yet brought his breathing close to a halt, as if her words were about to cut close to a vital organ. The image of his father, a blackened form, the eyes still alive, crept out of the nightmare where he kept it buried. He immediately shoved it away.

  “I mean, you really go all out, won’t – no, make that can’t settle for less.”

  Again he said nothing, wishing she’d take the hint that he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I meant it as a compliment,” she added, his silence obviously making her uneasy.

  “Look, if they’re comfortable and want to stay home, and I can swing it, why not? All it takes is I make a nuisance of myself at Saratoga General, borrowing stuff, so don’t make too big a deal of it. Besides, I haven’t many cases like these, and the local medical profession isn’t comfortable about the ones I do. ‘Roper’s specials,’ the doctors in town call them. But they go along because they’d rather lend me what I need than have my Medicaid and Medica
re bunch take beds away from their upscale, private-insurance crowd.” He hoped now she’d let it go.

  “Well, I for one think it’s cool, and a hell of a lot more useful than having to watch someone die for want of ‘stuff’ as you call it. They haunt you forever, every lost one.”

  He stared straight ahead.

  She had him pegged, all right, and that left him uncomfortable. She must have heard what had happened to read him so well. He wasn’t used to feeling so exposed, yet he forced himself to meet her gaze.

  The hint of sadness that he’d caught a glimpse of in her eyes last night had returned in force, and her face sagged into a bleak look of defeat. She’d been describing her own scars, not his.

  “You’re right,” he said, relaxing a little. “When it comes to human misery, I’m a retail kind of guy, good at handling it case by case. But wholesale slaughter…” He shuddered, television images of sick, starving babies and children flooding into his head.

  “It takes courage to know your limits, Mark.” Her voice became soft. “Believe me, I didn’t know mine when I went overseas. Waded in naive as a schoolgirl, then had no choice but to cope.”

  Apart from his giving her the occasional direction, they didn’t talk for a long time. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. She simply seemed as lost in her own thoughts as he in his.

  He found himself wondering about her fiancé. She hadn’t mentioned him, despite being so open about her family, brothers, work – almost everything under the sun. Obviously she intended to keep that part of her life private.

  They pulled into a parking lot in front of a sleek glass-and-steel, tan building made up of three- and four-story modules, each floor wrapped in black-tinted windows. A modest plaque on the snow-covered grounds near the front entrance read NUCLEUS LABORATORIES.

  “The place looks like a cubist’s limousine,” Lucy said. Even at this late hour there were few parking spaces. She pulled into one close to the front door. “What’s a fancy operation like this doing out here?” She reached into a small cooler lodged on the floor of the backseat and retrieved from it the brown paper bag containing a half dozen blood samples they’d drawn from patients over the course of the day. Holding it up between them, she added, “Obviously you don’t keep them in business.”