She grabbed two more vials of potassium from the medication bin, having already added one to the new bag of normal saline that she’d brought with her.
“And I’ll need to be on a cardiac monitor, plus you better give me a hundred milligrams of Demerol after all, to at least take the edge off the spasms-”
“Whoa, I’m not even supposed to be here, remember?” She shook up the intravenous solution to mix in the added vials. “What I suggest,” she added, her fingers flying as she got the new bag up and running, “is request the Demerol yourself as already ordered, and complain of palpitations or something so they put you on a monitor while they sort it all out. That ought to just about cover your needs for the moment. Just before shift change in the morning I’ll phone the result to the floor clerk here, pretending I’m a lab tech reporting an error. She’ll tell the nurses, and they’ll order a repeat themselves. That way you’ll know if more potassium’s required.”
He felt sheepish about his previous suspicions of her. “You’re a wonder, Tanya Wozcek. I don’t know how to thank you.”
Her weak smile couldn’t hide the worry in her eyes as she fine-tuned the intravenous rate. She knew as well as he did it would be very touch and go. “Does that burn?” she asked.
The concentrated solution she’d prepared could strip the lining of a vein, sclerosing it. It already felt like fire going up his arm. “I’ll live,” he muttered.
She slowed the rate by two-thirds.
What he wanted to know was how his potassium could have been brought so low so fast. The runs? Not this quickly. Something else had to be depleting it. But what?
He glanced toward the IV bag Tanya had discarded. “Did your friend run any other tests on me?”
“Sure. Your white count’s up, which is to be expected with the infection, but everything else was fine, except for a high CO2 which probably doesn’t matter.” She anchored the tubing to his skin with tape.
CO2 was an indicator of his naturally occurring bicarbonate level, the base that balances all naturally occurring acids circulating in the body. It also existed as a pharmaceutical preparation. Though rarely used anymore, it was part of the emergency protocol for dropping critically high serum potassium levels, and large vials of it were common in hospitals. The solution itself looked clear as water, and if someone did do a blood test checking the bicarb level, it would normally be to make sure the reading wasn’t too low. Nobody would make too much out of an unexplained elevation, just as Tanya hadn’t. In other words, it would be a perfect agent to mess up a patient’s potassium without raising suspicions, and anyone could have slipped a dose into his IV while he’d been sleeping. It also had another nasty little property, he remembered, a chill slowly creeping up his spine. It could precipitate digoxin toxicity in patients who were already on the medication. “Tanya, quick, please grab a urine dipstick and hand me the IV bag you just replaced.”
She frowned, but did as he asked.
He released a few drops of the remaining fluid on the test strip.
The portion measuring acid-base should have remained a neutral beige. Instead it turned blue as a sapphire, indicating extreme alkalinity.
Bingo!
A sickening cold sensation filled his chest.
“Who else would know how to play with potassium like that but a doctor?” she said, once Earl told her what had been done to him. “Chaz still has my vote, or someone he ordered to do it. Christ, forget our other plan. We’ve got to get you out of here. If they can get to your IV bottles without you knowing-”
“Not just yet.”
“Are you nuts?”
“I’ll be okay for tonight,” he bluffed. “Whoever did this doesn’t know we’re onto them or that you’ve changed my IVs.”
“But what about telling the nurses, so you get the monitor, and the Demerol?”
“I’ll still ask for the Demerol, and make up enough of a story about fluttering in my chest they’ll wire me to something.”
“Then who’ll replace your intravenous with extra potassium when it’s empty? I can’t keep sneaking in here to do that.”
“This bag is good until morning. By then Melanie will be here, and she’ll handle everything. You forget, I start walking around now, my heart’s primed to break into a jitterbug.”
Scowling, she planted her hands on her hips. “I can arrange a wheelchair. A stretcher even.”
“And where would you put me? I need to be in a hospital. The worst of this damn infection is yet to come.”
“And you could have yourself transferred, by air ambulance if necessary, back to Buffalo, where you’d be a lot safer than you are here. So quit the bullshit and tell me the real reason you refuse to leave. Are you using yourself as bait?”
Damn right, he thought, more determined than ever to carry out his plan now that he knew what to expect. Logically, the person who’d gotten to his IV before would want to pull a repeat performance, but only after the next scheduled change of the intravenous bag. Since the old one would have run out around 5:00 A.M., that’s when Earl expected his would-be killer to come sneaking around. “Of course not,” he answered, giving Tanya his most sincere smile, until a new wave of cramps twisted him in two and sent his pulse into triple digits again.
“You are nuts!” Her voice slid a notch higher, sounding frightened.
No fooling her. Worse, he sensed she was going to blow the whistle on him. “Tanya, now don’t you tell anyone, hear me? I’ll be all right. Whoever added the bicarb probably won’t try to slip me another dose until after I’m due to get a new IV bag in the morning. And I’ll be ready to raise holy hell the second anyone comes near me. If I haven’t got a nibble by tomorrow, I promise you, I’m out of here.”
She stared at him with that odd moonlike face of hers, looking skeptical as hell.
It took some arguing, but he finally convinced her that if she made a fuss now about extra security or tried to keep watch over him herself, it would alert his attacker and only postpone another attempt on his life. She reluctantly agreed not to interfere.
“But it’s guards, an air ambulance, and home to your hospital in Buffalo if this nonsense doesn’t work,” she insisted.
“Agreed.”
Shaking her head, she turned and left.
He pressed the call button and waited for the nurses, trying to keep a grip on his nerve and ratchet down the drubbing that his heart-turned-boxing-glove continued to deliver against the inside of his chest.
10:30 P.M.
Hampton Junction
It was snowing again, the flakes coming at the windshield like tracer bullets. Mark sat hunched forward over the wheel to see better as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “Nell told me recently about a friend of hers who had a baby at the home,” he said.
“Oh?” Lucy paused in her attempt to direct a blast of hot air from the heater so it would defog the glass.
“The woman had said how she and other expectant mothers wanted to make a garden as a way to lessen the dreariness of the place, but were refused. Not only that, she complained they only had a half-finished lawn to walk on, even though the place was big as a park. And when I went out there, it seemed that lawn never did get completed. It had gone to seed of course, but I could make out the shape. It looked irregular, the bordering undergrowth from the forest having intruded on areas where the grass should have been. Hard to imagine fat cats like the Bradens unable to spring for a bag of seed or more than a few rolls of sod at a time. Unless someone needed an area that was constantly in a state of being dug up, so he could bury what he didn’t want found, then cover it with grass so it stayed put.”
Lucy rode with a hand over her mouth, as if trying not to throw up.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“No, I’m not.”
“Do you want me to stop the car?”
“Won’t do any good. I got like this in the camps. All objective when I found the bodies on paper, but ready to upchuck when the reality
of them sank in.”
They rode in silence.
“Why would he do it?” she asked after a few minutes.
“Who knows? Money maybe?”
“But I thought he was already richer than God.”
“He is now. But back then? Sometimes these dynasty families have trouble coming up with the inheritance taxes to pass their goodies from one generation to the next.”
She gave a shudder and huddled deeper into her coat.
He thought of the books in Charles’s library that chronicled all the times and ways humankind had attempted to rid itself of others and protect sameness. “Or it could be a new variant of an old disease,” he said.
“An old disease?”
“Think about the atrocities you’ve seen these last seven years. Aren’t they committed so that the position of one tribe or group or race might be enhanced over the rest?”
“Pretty much.”
“The factions always seem to share the same pretenses, right? Protecting culture, spreading religion, getting an economic edge, creating a nation of superior beings, righting old wrongs – then they outshout each other trying to proclaim their unique benefit to the world, thereby justifying their own entitlement.”
“It’s sounds like you’re quoting a sociology text.”
“It’s by one of my favorite journalists. He writes for the Herald, and I spotted some of his articles glancing through one of Braden’s books last night. That particular line came from a series that won a Pulitzer. It always stuck with me.”
“Well, it describes a few drunken warlords I met in Serbia to a T.”
“I probably still have clippings of the piece at home. It suggests that while primitives use genocide to eliminate outside threats, the sophisticated supremacist prefers eugenics, because that offers the possibility of strengthening the desirable traits of the tribe and weeding out its weaknesses all from within. In other words, improving the species.”
“That’s Nazi drivel.”
“ ‘Marry your own kind’ still holds sway among a lot of non-Nazis.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m just trying to crawl inside his head to answer your question, ‘Why?’ ”
“You spend too much time inside that creepy place, and you’re going to have to hose out your own brain.”
“If Braden believes in smotherings, maybe he’s also an advocate of other twisted beliefs in that hall of shame of his. He and his cronies are as arrogant a bunch of elitists who think they are the chosen ones to rule their patch – a sizable chunk of corporate Manhattan – as any tribe you ever came across on your travels, and a hundred times more powerful.”
“So?”
“So maybe Charles Braden made sure they had more than their fair share of healthy offspring.”
“What?”
“Probably some crazy idea to assure their succession – hand off their life works to a generation free of flaws.”
“But that’s nuts. Sick. Loony!”
“Of course it is. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”
“But if he wanted healthy kids for all his crowd, why not just help the parents adopt? He didn’t have to risk committing murder.”
“I don’t know why he didn’t go the official route, but I’m almost certain he didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think the parents knew. At least not the mothers.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Not necessarily. I think I may have already talked to a woman who had her baby switched.”
“No way!”
“Someone who gave birth at his maternity center. Nell suggested I get in touch with her. She blew me off – thinks Charles Braden is a god – but a lot of little details add up.”
“Such as?”
“She said the baby ‘wouldn’t breathe when he came out.’ What else might have been wrong, I’ve no idea. But Braden, instead of trying to resuscitate the kid on the spot, ran from the delivery room, giving the infant mouth-to-mouth respirations, and get this, jumped in his car and supposedly raced to the hospital himself.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Except a week later he placed a healthy baby boy back in that mother’s arms.”
“And she thought it was her own?”
“From the description of what happened in the delivery room, I don’t think she or anyone else got a good look at the newborn. And Nell told me how both at the maternity center and the home, they never let the same staff work more than a few days a week. I’ll bet that was so he could ‘return’ babies when different people were on duty, and he also timed it so the mother went home the next day.”
They rode in silence again.
“I can’t believe the parents knew about the smotherings,” she said eventually.
“Neither can I.”
She remained huddled up in the corner of the cab, apparently lost in thought.
He peered into the storm, the downpour having grown so thick he was driving through white streamers.
“Do you think there’ll be too much snow once we get there?” she asked.
“Don’t know. But I doubt this will keep up. It’s too heavy to last long.”
“Why would he bury them on the grounds, and not off in the woods, someplace far from any connection to him?”
“Ever try to dig a hole in the forest floor? Around here it’s full of rocks and roots. Whenever murderers have made that mistake, even if they managed to scratch out a shallow grave for their victim’s body, animals usually dug it up. I know infants are much smaller, but hunters still might spot the remains, or someone’s pet might start bringing in the bones.”
She fell silent again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
He’d certainly sewn up Charles Braden, all right. Taken threads of the man’s life and tied them together into a nice tight story. Even managed to get him with his own words, quoting from that odd book collection of his. Clever, and no holes. He had an answer for every question or objection Lucy could throw at him, coming up with motive, means, and opportunity.
Yet it almost seemed too neat. Other less macabre explanations were possible. Braden could have been switching babies in secret, but not killing the deformed ones. He might have been turning them over to other orphanages farther afield so the paperwork wouldn’t appear locally. That would require documents he wouldn’t have, but maybe he’d simply forged the signatures, given fictitious names for the mother, listed the father as unknown. If Braden had been switching babies, phony paperwork was much more plausible than infanticide. Yet after seeing those books he had, and hearing what he said about smotherings…
All they would need was one trace of human DNA from the soil and they would have him. But they’d have to get it clandestinely. The minute Braden suspected anyone digging soil samples, he’d have lawyers by the carload sealing up the place.
He glanced over at Lucy. She rode with her face turned away from him. He had to hand it to her, she had quite a talent with spreadsheets. Braden must have figured no one would ever notice the discrepancy with the numbers. Certainly he, Mark Roper, coroner, hadn’t, and wouldn’t be planning to head off in the middle of the night with a pick and shovel if she hadn’t pointed the way.
One thing he hadn’t shared with her, had been trying not to think of at all – the similarity in the attack on Nell and – No, he wasn’t going to even consider that. Couldn’t!
They made the rest of the trip without talking.
As they passed the pay phone near his house, she said, “Maybe you should don your coroner’s hat, phone the friendliest judge you know to get a warrant. Violating the rights of a derelict lawn shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle for American justice. If we do find anything, we’ll want to be able to use it in court.” She gave him a weak smile. “See, I’m learning. Then you and I are going to have a bowl of soup – something UN soldiers in Bosnia told me was a necessity for this kind of detail.”
He c
ould imagine. Rule number one: Never spend a cold night digging for bodies without something hot on your stomach.
He pulled over and made a call to a semi retired judge living in a cottage nearby who had once known his father.
“Any luck?” Lucy called from the Jeep when he hung up.
“The guy agreed – promised he’d get the paperwork to me tomorrow,” he yelled back to her, holding the door to the booth open as he dialed the nursing desk for Earl’s floor at NYCH. “If anyone bothers us tonight, we’re digging for worms – Oh, hello, it’s Dr. Mark Roper. Is Dr. Garnet awake?”
“Awake! He’s a one-man, all-night vigil.”
“Plug in his phone. I want to call through. It’s urgent.”
In a matter of minutes he’d told Earl everything that had happened – the explosion, Nell, the conversation he’d had with the woman who worked at Nucleus Laboratories, and that what Victor had found seemed mostly to do with the executive health plans of big corporations. “At least that’s what upset the lady who called. Victor had also zeroed in on some genetic screening results he thought were peculiar, but she couldn’t see anything wrong with them.”
“Who were they of?”
“Siblings with a family history of cancer. They apparently were all negative.”
Earl immediately triaged the rest of the information into a series of succinct questions.
“You’ve still no idea who owns Nucleus Laboratories?”
“No.”
“Any ideas about how to track down your caller and this file she has?”
Mortal Remains Page 34
