Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

  The coffee he’d gulped down before leaving the house seemed to repercolate itself at the back of his throat. Let him be getting wood. Or be gone for a walk. Maybe off on a drive.

  But the Victor he knew would not only have been by the phone, eagerly awaiting Mark’s call, ready to divulge whatever he’d discovered, but also would have called Mark by now, perhaps a dozen times over.

  Ice coated everything, and the frozen world seemed metal hard, cast in silver, gray, and black. Even the shiny surface of the snow had a jaggedness to it.

  Mark’s grip tightened on the wheel.

  Victor’s car stood in the driveway.

  A Tiffany lamp glowed warmly behind the front window.

  No smoke rose from the chimney.

  They walked up the unshoveled steps and knocked on the front door.

  No sounds came from inside.

  Mark reached for the handle, turned, and shoved the door open.

  It revealed a long, dim, central hallway leading toward the back of the house.

  Empty.

  “Victor?” he called.

  No answer.

  “It’s Mark Roper and Lucy.”

  Still no reply.

  Mark stepped inside, making his way between the antique tables and shelves loaded with porcelain figures that lined the walls. The place seemed cold. “Stay here,” he said, continuing down the corridor. A peek through the door on his right revealed a magnificent mahogany dining room table and china cupboard, but no Victor. The door on the left opened into a small living room dominated by a baby grand but otherwise empty.

  He followed the hallway toward the back, coming to a swinging door at the end that he presumed led to the kitchen. “Victor?” he repeated, the floorboards creaking under his boots. The air here felt cooler still.

  He pushed his way through.

  The back door was open. Halfway across the threshold lay Victor, facedown, his legs covered with drifted snow. A half dozen logs lay scattered on the floor in front of him.

  Mark swallowed once, walked in, and knelt by his head. The skin was ice-cold. He felt for a carotid pulse, knowing he wouldn’t find any.

  Whenever Mark found himself alone with a dead body, the absolute silence of the corpse unnerved him the most. No soft sounds of air moving in and out of the lungs, no brush of clothing against the skin with each inhalation or expiration, no tiny cricks that tendons sometimes make when a person moves, not even a gurgle from the stomach. He instinctively slowed his own breathing, so as not to disturb that stillness, and the world around him seemed to go quiet as well. It was as if all that dead flesh, like a black hole, sucked the sounds of life from the room.

  What had happened appeared obvious. An overweight, hypertensive, diabetic man had gone out to get wood in the snow, and the exertion had brought on a heart attack. Except he must have initially fallen outside, Mark thought, noticing recent scratches on Victor’s wrists. They were identical to the ones he himself had received the other night while running from his pursuer, his wrists plunging through the icy crust of the snow each time he slipped.

  Maybe that outside fall had been a simple slip, or due to the initial symptoms of what killed him, and he’d been able to pick up the logs and continue to the back porch.

  He looked around at the once-cozy room where Victor had prepared meals, mostly to dine alone. Brightly embroidered wall hangings offered homespun encouragement for the future, confidently predicting: MY PRINCE WILL COME; A KITCHEN IS THE HEARTH OF A FAMILY’S HOME; A COUPLE’S LOVE IS A FEAST FOR LIFE. Beside these were photos of a young man whom Victor had told him about. His first name was Brad, and he had died the year before Victor moved here. They’d been lovers for over a decade. Victor thought a period of time in the country would make it easier to get over his grief and move on. It never happened.

  Mark snapped open his phone to call Dan. Only when he saw the blurry numbers did he realize his eyes were full of tears. He stayed kneeling, wiping them clear, whipsawed between sad and angry, not really understanding why. After all, he’d seen patients die before, even people who had called him friend.

  He heard the floorboards creaking. “Did you find him?” Lucy asked from out in the corridor.

  He tried to warn her back, but she stepped through the door.

  “Oh, no!” Her hands flew to her mouth as she sank to her knees by his head. “The dear, dear man.” She reached out and ran her fingers along the side of Victor’s face, brushing the tip of his magnificent mustache.

  Mark quickly turned away. Victor would never feel her simple gesture, just as in his last years he’d so rarely felt the caress of someone who loved him.

  “Let’s wait in the car,” he said to Lucy. “I’m going to call Dan and treat this place as a crime scene, so don’t touch anything on the way out.”

  “A crime scene?”

  Mark nodded. If there was anything to Victor’s last message, his death had been damn convenient to someone.

  “No forced entry, nothing broken, no suggestive marks on the body. Suspicious as hell, right?” Dan asked when Mark told him to treat the death as a possible homicide.

  “I know it sounds crazy, Dan, but humor me. Too many timely illnesses have happened on this case.” Mark filled him in on what Victor had been up to and how Earl had to be admitted to NYCH.

  As Dan listened, his scowl deepened, but in the end, he pulled out the yellow tape. “You realize I’m on thin ice here,” he muttered, cordoning off the driveway.

  Within half an hour men and women in dark blue jumpsuits, SARATOGA SPRINGS P.D. written on the back, were crawling all over the house using Ziploc evidence bags and tweezers to collect every stray hair, thread, or broken nail they could find. A pretty blond woman, her regulation peaked cap worn backward, hunched over Victor’s computer and carefully covered the keys with a fine white powder. “Look at this, Chief,” she said, summoning Dan to her side. “Most of his prints have been partially smudged out.”

  “Wiped?” Mark asked, leaning in to see.

  Dan shook his head. “More like someone’s used it while wearing gloves.”

  “Can I try and turn it on?”

  The woman stood aside. “I’m all finished. Be my guest.”

  Mark pushed the ON button, and the screen flickered to life. Against a background of tropical fish, it requested an access code. “Have you got someone who can hack into these things?”

  Dan chuckled. “Yeah. They’re called kids.”

  “Seriously.”

  “There’s a white-collar crime unit in Albany. They’ve done a few favors for me from time to time.”

  “Anything quicker?”

  “We’ve got some floppies and CD-ROMs back at headquarters programmed to search for passwords,” the woman said as she packed away her supplies. “I could give them a try. But we’d need a warrant.”

  The prospect of learning what Victor had found out, like scent to a hound, unleashed a rush of adrenaline in Mark. “Great. I’ll come with you-”

  Victor’s phone beside the computer started to ring. They all looked at each other. Mark took the initiative, and picked up the receiver. “Victor Feldt’s residence.”

  “Victor?” It was a woman’s voice. She sounded young, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Who’s speaking, please?”

  “I need to speak with Victor.”

  “I’m Dr. Mark Roper. Can I know who’s speaking?”

  “Dr. Roper? Is Victor all right?” She sounded alarmed.

  “Can I know who’s speaking, please?”

  “Oh, God, what’s happened?”

  “Are you family-”

  He was cut off by a dial tone.

  He tried *69 to get the caller’s number.

  It had been blocked.

  “Don’t get too excited about our CD program helping you,” the technician said on her way out the door. “Whoever was at the keyboard after Victor might have gotten in and already trashed everything, or worse, substituted new data for ol
d, which means the original is really gone.”

  3:40 P.M.

  Hampton Junction

  A low gray sky had slid over the valley, as oppressive as a slab of cement.

  “Earl, it’s Mark. How are you feeling?” He’d asked Lucy to drive so he could use the phone.

  “Mark? Frankly, I don’t feel too good.”

  He sounded groggy as hell. “I’m not surprised. Melanie told me what happened to you. Are you able to talk? It’s urgent.”

  “Talk’s about all I can do.”

  “You’re sure you’re able? I could call back.”

  “Now you’ve got me dying of curiosity. Shoot!”

  Mark briefly explained who Victor was and everything that had happened to him.

  “You think he was killed because of what he discovered?” Earl asked at the finish. His voice had become hard-edged, with none of its previous languor.

  “If so, it was very cleverly staged. Even the lividity matched how we found him.” The purplish discoloration where venous blood pooled, then clotted in the lowest points of the body during the first hours after death was an indelible record of the person’s position when he died. A pattern that didn’t conform to how the body lay would indicate someone had subsequently moved or repositioned the corpse. “I’ve arranged to do an autopsy on him tomorrow morning at Saratoga General, so I’ll be able to pick up obvious signs of foul play. And I’m going to screen his blood for every drug I can think of that could precipitate an MI. The lab people are going to scream, but I’m on my way there now to make sure I’ll have everything I’ll need. But there may be no signs or drugs to find.”

  “And you’ve no idea what he turned up?”

  “Nope.”

  Earl exhaled into the phone. “How can your man and whatever he found have anything to do with Kelly’s murder?”

  “I’ve no idea yet. We’re going to try and get into his computer.”

  Silence reigned on the line.

  “Earl?”

  “I’m here. Just thinking, to see if I can put any of this together.”

  “What you ought to be thinking about, with opportune comas and heart attacks going around, is if someone made you sick as well.”

  More silence.

  Finally, Earl said, “To be honest, I’ve started to wonder the same thing. My end of the investigation has sure as hell been sidelined, if that’s the motive.”

  “I’m afraid it might not end at that.”

  Again more silence.

  “Anyone try to get near you who shouldn’t?”

  “You mean like Braden? No.”

  “Earl, get somebody you can trust to stay in your room. Can Janet join you?”

  “I’m not putting her in danger.”

  “Then hire a guard. Jesus, man, if we’re right, you’re a sitting duck.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’re sure? Why don’t I make the arrangements?”

  “I said I’ll take care of it. Got to hang up now. Goddamn nature calling!”

  The line went dead.

  “How is he?” Lucy asked.

  “Not so good.”

  “Hiring a guard, now that’s a good idea. Do you think he’ll do it?”

  “I don’t know. But if he hasn’t by later tonight, I will.”

  The Braden mansion came into view, all its parts coated in gleaming white, again reminding him of a bird, but iced over this time, trapped in midflight. And the limousines were gone. The lack of tracks in the drive meant they’d left during the night.

  “Hunting season over?” Lucy said.

  She drove in silence after that, her lips drawn in a tight line. As he watched her profile in the thin winter light, her skin seemed pale, translucent even. The tiny furrows at the corners of her eyes narrowed. “Mark, may I give you some advice?”

  He smiled. Whenever a woman asked if she could give him advice, he inevitably got it, wanted or not.

  “You better take care,” she continued, without waiting for his permission.

  “In what sense?”

  “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If you’re right about Bessie, Victor, and Dr. Garnet, you could be next.”

  3:45 P.M.

  New York City Hospital

  Mark’s phone call and the news about Victor Feldt galvanized Earl, made him realize the extent this business might be a killing game. It sent his mind racing through possible scenarios – when he wasn’t writhing in pain.

  If he’d been deliberately poisoned, and the bug was indeed E. coli 0157:H7, then the normal incubation before the onset of symptoms was three to nine days, but sometimes as short as two. It could have been slipped into his food or drink anytime since he arrived in New York last Saturday up to Tuesday evening.

  The reception? Unlikely, since no one else was sick – unless someone hired a rogue waiter to do the job. The same went for the hotel. But why increase the chances of getting caught by bringing in an outsider who might later blab everything to the police? The smart thing would be to act alone.

  So when?

  In the bustle of the hospital cafeteria? Someone could have been close to him in line, slipped something into his food or drink. But that raised other questions. How would the person have transferred the organism to his food? The easiest way to transport it would have been in water. But he would have noticed if someone had soaked his plate – unless it was added to an already full cup or glass. Or was in such a small quantity he wouldn’t have detected it. Still, the pouring move would be tricky, since the person would likely have used a sort of container and acted when nobody was looking. With a lot of people around, somebody else might easily see. No that wasn’t it-

  “Dr. Garnet?” Tanya Wozcek poked her head in the door, greeting him with a big smile. “How are you feeling?”

  The pain only lapped at his innards for the moment, temporarily spent. “Okay, I guess.” As she approached his bedside, he tensed.

  She eyed his IV bags and checked the rate of flow. “Everything still what you’d expect?”

  “Pretty much. Except I’m more goddamned weak than ever.”

  She frowned. “I peeked at your test results. Potassium, lytes, and hematocrit – they all seem fine.”

  “Well, I sure don’t.”

  She studied him, her overly intense gaze flicking to the IV bottle and back to him again. The movement made him uneasy, and a chill swept through him. What did he know about her, anyway? He’d taken her word about her devotion to Bessie McDonald. What if the opposite were true? As Bessie’s nurse, she’d have had an easy time secretly injecting her with anything, including a dose of short-acting insulin. And what better way to mislead him, loudly voicing her suspicions and concern? No, it didn’t make sense. She wouldn’t have had to voice anything to cover up what happened to Bessie. Yet Tanya had raised his own doubts about the coma. If she just kept quiet, most likely he would have dismissed it as an unfortunate but plausible outcome for a woman with a history of strokes, exactly the way everyone else had. Then again, that could all have been a clever way of winning his trust, so she could get close to him.

  “Results can be wrong,” she said, her somber expression still disquieting. She reached for the tray of blood-taking equipment that Melanie had left by his bedside. “Let me check them again. I’ll submit the sample under my name, in case someone’s been tampering with your readings.”

  She was as paranoid as he needed to be.

  Still not entirely certain he trusted her, he gingerly held out his arm. Because he’d seized on a strategy that could bring everything to a head. Let whoever it was make a move. Odds were his would-be assassin had some mortal complication from his toxic E. coli infection planned for him. That meant sooner or later they’d come face-to-face. So get the showdown over with. The trick? To be ready.

  Suspect everyone.

  Stay alert.

  And keep tucked into his bedclothes a handful of syring
es. They had three-inch needles that he’d already stolen off the tray of blood-taking equipment. Weak as he was, he could drive them into an eye of the attacker.

  Even Tanya’s.

  She slid the gleaming tip of her needle into his vein, and he poised himself to spring at the first sign of her doing anything bizarre.

  But the woman expertly finished the task, pressed a piece of cotton to the puncture site so it wouldn’t bleed, and smiled. Then she rushed toward the door. “I’m taking this to the lab myself,” she said. “I’ll be back at eleven, when my shift ends.”

  Earl loosened his grip on the makeshift weapon but remained tense. He couldn’t stay awake forever; eventually he’d have to hire a security guard. Even then he’d only be delaying an adversary who had already gotten to him once without his knowing. It would also tip him or her off that he, Earl Garnet, was onto the fact he was a target. Unless Janet hired the people in the guise of a twenty-four-hour nursing service. Still, better to chance luring the killer in now, while this creep still believed Earl to be unprotected as well as unaware. Having already refused any more Demerol, he counted on pain to keep him from falling asleep, at least until morning. If by then nothing had happened, he’d ask Janet to bring on the watchdogs.

  As he lay waiting, the afternoon light waned, and a thickening sludge of dirty brown smog nuzzled the window.

  Chapter 16

  That same Friday, November 23, 6:55 P.M.

  Hampton Junction

  Mark’s attempts to reach the doctors on Victor’s list had proved futile. All were gone for the day, and he’d ended up talking to machines or leaving messages with tired-sounding operators at their answering services.

  The last thing he felt like doing was eating dinner at Nell’s.

  On the other hand, Lucy was adamant they go. “If the woman knows anything about these places,” she said, folding up her spreadsheets of statistics and sticking them in her purse, “I want to talk with her.”

  “She’s not going to look at a bunch of numbers.”

  “They’re for me to use, like notes, to guide me in what questions to ask.”