Robin Cook 1990 - Vital Signs

by Vital Signs(lit)

  After putting Wendy's packed suitcase into the corner of the closet, Marissa walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. For several minutes she eyed the phone, trying to muster her courage.

  Finally, she picked up the receiver and dialed her home in Weston. The phone rang only twice before Robert's groggy voice said, "Hello?" Marissa realized that it was after two A.M. in Boston.

  "Robert!" Marissa blurted out.

  "Something terrible has happened."

  Then, before she could tell him anything, she burst into hysterical tears again. It took five minutes before she could tell him about Wendy.

  "My God!" Robert said.

  Marissa described her suspicions; that Wendy's death might have been deliberate, not accidental.

  Robert didn't reply at first. Then, like the police inspector, he reminded her that she'd had a terrible shock.

  "After such an experience your imagination can do strange things," he told her.

  "You might be trying to ascribe blame where there is none.

  Anyway, try to relax. Try not to think too much."

  "Could you come?" Marissa suddenly asked.

  "To Australia?" Robert said.

  "I think you should come home instead."

  "But the police told me to stay on the island," Marissa said.

  "The formalities can't take more than a day or so," Robert said.

  "It would take me almost two days to get there. Besides, it would be hard for me: to leave now. It's only a week before April fifteenth, and you know what that means: taxes. It's better for you to come home as soon as you can."

  "Sure," Marissa said, her tone suddenly flat.

  "I understand," "Should I call Gustave?" Robert asked.

  "If you would," Marissa said. But then she changed her mind.

  "On second thought," she added, "maybe I should do it. Gustave may want to talk to me."

  "All right," Robert said.

  "Then call me back as soon as you know when you're arriving."

  Marissa put the receiver down. Calling Gustave was going to be the hardest phone call she'd ever made. She tried to think of what to say, but there was no way she could soften the news.

  Finally, she picked up the phone and dialed.

  Gustave answered on the first ring. As a surgeon, he was no doubt accustomed to being awakened in the night. He didn't even sound as if he'd been asleep, though Marissa was sure he had been.

  She got to the point quickly, telling Gustave exactly what had happened. She was even able to hold back her tears until she had finished relating the day's events.

  On the other end, over the thousands of miles, there was only a heavy silence.

  "Gustave-are you all right?" Marissa asked, her voice breakMg.

  After a pause, Gustave said, "I... I suppose I will be. It's just so hard to believe. But Wendy always was a bit foolhardy when diving. Where are her belongings?"

  "I've packed them," Marissa said, surprised and relieved that Gustave was taking the horrid news so well. She guessed he was relying on his practiced surgeon's objectivity and that the reality would hit later when he was alone.

  "It must have been a terrible shock for you," Gustave said.

  "Are you all right?"

  "I'm managing," Marissa said.

  "Marissa, I appreciate your calling. If you could just ship her belongings to me I would be most grateful. I'll contact the Augtralian authorities. I'd better go. Goodbye."

  The line clicked dead and Marissa slowly replaced the receiver in its cradle. Her heart ached with the same pain she knew Gustave was feeling.

  Flopping back on the bed, Marissa covered her face with her hands and sobbed until she could no longer cry. Then, with her hands still covering her face, her sadness began to transform to irritation, then even to anger.

  Instead of being pleased with how much in control Gustave had been, it began to bother her. When she replayed the conversation in her mind, she hated that Gustave had sounded so cold and detached, as if she had been giving him a report on one of his patients and not on his wife. It made her suddenly wonder if the problems spawned by the infertility treatments were such that Gustave was relieved to some extent by Wendy's untimely death.

  Rethinking Gustave's conversation made Marissa do the same with Robert's and with a similar result. The idea that Robert wouldn't volunteer to come instantly to Australia, knowing what kind of trauma she'd experienced, was unforgivable. Taxes!

  What an absurd excuse. After all that had happened, she would have hoped that he would make their marriage a priority.

  Marissa got up from the bed and walked to the window. The ocean glistened in the late afternoon sunlight. It was hard to believe that Wendy had met such a brutal fate in so serene a milieu. She wondered what her own fate would have been had nausea and fatigue not forced her back to the boat. Maybe she'd be dead as well. Maybe that had been the idea: to get rid of them both.

  Marissa's throat went dry. She swallowed hard. She was thinking dangerous thoughts, maybe even crazy ones. Her mind went back to the vicious Chinese security guards at the Women's Clinic. Could they possibly be related to the sinister Chinese aboard the Oz? Marissa wondered if there was any connection between the Women's Clinic in the States and the FCA in Australia.

  Marissa went out onto her balcony. She sank into the chaise lounge. That Wendy died for nothing hit her hard. How could she just let it go and return to Boston? Her thoughts drifted to the elusive Tristan Williams. Why would a trained pathologist make up the ridiculous data that could easily be proven false, all for the questionable benefit of publishing an article? It just didn't fit.

  Marissa tapped her fingers nervously against the arm of her chair. She thought again of those men tossing chum over the side.

  If they were so innocent, why did they flee the instant she called out to them? She could assume Tristan Williams had committed professional hara-kiri on a whim. She could talk herself into believing that those two on the Oz had not realized what they were doing. But the whole weird thing was beginning to remind her of the way she felt in the early days of the Ebola outbreaks when she'd been with the CDC, Back then, Marissa had begun to suspect a sinister force at work long before her colleagues did.

  Despite setbacks, she clung to her beliefs, ultimately proving the existence of a cabal even more diabolic than she had ever imagined. Now, as then, she was beginning to think it was time to go with her instincts.

  Even if she didn't have much more than a hunch that there was more to these events than met the eye, she had to dig deeper.

  Impulsively she went back inside and called Robert back. She woke him a second time.

  "I need you here, Robert," Marissa said.

  "The more I think about-Wendy's death, the more I think it was caused deliberately."

  "Please, Marissa. You're overreacting. You've had a tremendous shock. Shouldn't you just get on a plane and come home?"

  "But I think I should stay."

  "I cannot come to Australia," Robert said.

  "I told you business is_" Even though she realized she was being unreasonable, Marissa hung up on him before he could finish his sentence. Then she realized there was something he could do. Snatching up the phone, she dialed Robert yet again.

  "I'm glad you called back," Robert said.

  "I was hoping you'd come to your senses."

  "I want you to find out something for me," Marissa said, ignoring Robert's comments.

  "I want to know if there is any business connection between the Women's Clinic in the States and Female Care Australia."

  "I can check in the morning," Robert said.

  "I want you to do it now," Marissa said. She knew Robert's computer was hooked up to several business data banks.

  "If I do this," Robert said, "will you come home and stop asking me to come to Australia?"

  "I'll stop asking you to come to Australia," Marissa said.

  "Give me your number and I'll call you back."

  Five
minutes later Marissa's phone rang. Robert had been faster than she'd expected.

  "You were right if you guessed they were associated," Robert said.

  "Both the Women's Clinic, Inc." and Female Care Australia Limited are controlled by an Australian holding company by the name of Fertility, Limited. I found it out by reading the back page on a prospectus on the Women's Clinic."

  "What are you doing with a prospectus on the Women's Clinic?" Marissa asked.

  "I thought it was a private company."

  "They floated a big stock offering a few years ago to finance their nationwide expansion," Robert explained.

  "It's been a good stock. I've been very pleased with it."

  "You own stock in Women's Clinic?" Marissa asked.

  "Yes," Robert said.

  "I have a significant position with both the Women's Clinic and

  FCA."

  "You own stock in FCA as well?"

  "Sure do," Robert said.

  "I bought it on the Sydney Exchange."

  "Sell it!" Marissa shouted.

  Robert laughed.

  "Now let's not confuse emotions with business," he said.

  "I see both stocks splitting in the near future."

  "I think there is something seriously wrong with these companies,"

  Marissa said with vehemence.

  "I don't know what it is they're up to, but I think it may be linked to these cases of TB salpingitis."

  "Don't tell me you're back on that crusade," Robert whined "Just sell the stock," Marissa said.

  "I'll take your recommendation under advisement," Robert said evasively.

  Marissa slammed the phone down, cutting off Robert before he could say more.

  Anger had now overcome to a large degree her sadness about Wendy. Although she thought that her hormone-induced hyper emotional state might have had something to do with her change in mood, she didn't care. Instead of giving in to depression, she opted for action. Picking up the phone, she called the Royal Flying Doctor service in Charleville.

  "Yes," the woman at the other end of the line told her, "Dr.

  Tristan Williams is with us, but he's out at isolated cattle stations at the moment. He won't be back for several days."

  "Does he have a specific schedule?" Marissa asked.

  "Indeed he does," the woman said.

  "Unless there is an emergency.

  Our doctors have a regular route whenever they leave for a loop of the outback."

  "Could you tell me where he will be two days from now?"

  Marissa asked. She thought that should give her enough time to get there no matter how far away it was.

  "Hold the line," the woman said. She was gone for several minutes. When she came back on the line she said, "He'll be near 4 a town called Windorah. He's to make a call at the Wilmington Station."

  "Does Windorah have a commercial airport?" Marissa asked.

  The woman laughed.

  "No, not quite," she said.

  "In fact it doesn't even have a bitumen road."

  Marissa next called the airport to see about connections to Charleville. With reservations made on an airline called Flight West, she quickly packed her bags and went down to the lobby.

  After making arrangements for Wendy's bag to be brought to the hotel's storage room, she checked out.

  During the short ride to the airport, she began to wonder about defying the police inspector's request to remain on Hamilton

  Island. She wondered if security people at the airport might try to stop her. But there was no problem and she boarded the plane for Brisbane without any incident.

  In Brisbane she had a short wait before she boarded a commuter plane with only twelve seats. At a little after nine in the evening, the plane lifted off the tarmac, and headed due west toward Charleville, a town situated on the edge of the broad expanse of the Australian outback.

  While Marissa was flying over the Great Dividing Ran 9e, a series of mountains separating the narrow, lush coastline from the rest of Australia, Ned Kelly and Willy Tong climbed the stairs in the mostly darkened FCA clinic and headed for the deserted administration area. The door to Charles Lester's office was ajar. The two men walked in unannounced.

  Charles looked up from a puddle of light emanating from his brass desk lamp. The shadows made his deep eye sockets appear blank like a man with no eyes. His mouth beneath his heavy mustache was clamped shut with the corners downturned.

  Charles was not happy.

  "Sit down!" he ordered.

  Ned flopped casually into one of the chairs facing the desk while Willy leaned up against a bookcase.

  "I just heard what happened on the evening news," Lester said.

  "You've managed to make things worse. First, you only got rid of one of the women. The one you let get away is talking about her friend's death being deliberate because she saw you two blokes. The police, it seems, are investigating."

  "How were we to know one of them would come out of the water while we were throwing in the chum?" Ned said.

  "It was a bit of bad luck. Otherwise it would have worked. We tossed in enough bait to summon every shark from the entire Coral Sea."

  "But eliminating one and raising suspicions is not what you were supposed to do," Lester snapped.

  "Now it is imperative rather than merely advisable that this second woman be eliminated.

  It said on the news that her name was Dr. Marissa Blumenthal-Buchanan."

  "I know which one it is," Ned said.

  "The sheila with the brown hair."

  "You want us to go back to Hamilton Island and hit her?"

  Willy asked.

  "I want you to do whatever it takes," Lester said.

  "What if she's already left the island?" Ned asked.

  "I doubt she's left with an investigation underway," 1,ester said.

  "But let's call the hotel. You said she was staying at the Hamilton Island Resort?"

  "That's the one," Ned said.

  Lester picked up his phone and, after obtaining the number, called the hotel. To his dismay he learned that Mrs. Buchanan had already checked out.

  Lester stood up and leaned over his desk.

  "I want you mates to clean this affair up. Ned, you start looking for this woman in the usual hotels, here and in Sydney. Use our government connections to find out if she's left the country. Willy, I want you to visit Tristan Williams and hang around. This Mrs. Buchanan had originally talked about finding the man. If she were to have a conversation with him, a bad situation could conceivably get far worse."

  "What if she's already left the country?" Ned asked.

  "I want her disposed of," Lester said.

  "I don't care where she goes, the States or even Europe. Is that clear?"

  Ned stood up.

  "Perfectly clear," he said.

  "It'll be a challenge.

  But then, I like challenges."

  April 9, 19907:11 Am.

  Marissa woke up feeling exhausted. She had not had a good night's sleep. She had checked into a tidy motel in Charleville and, though her bed was comfortable, she'd hardly done more than doze. Every time she closed her eyes, she'd see that great white shark. The few times she managed to fall asleep, she'd be shocked awake by a nightmare vision of Wendy in the shark's jaws. Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, she did sleep fitfully for almost three hours.

  Although she wasn't hungry, Marissa forced herself to eat some breakfast before setting out for the car rental office.

  As she walked down the street in Charleville, Marissa had the feeling she was in a time warp and was back in a Midwestern town in the United States fifty years previously. The quaint Victorian character that she'd expected to see in Brisbane was evident in some of the homes and office buildings. The air was clear and bright, and the streets were free of litter. And the early morning sun was hot enough to suggest what its noontime power would be.

  At the car rental office in the Shell station, Marissa rented
a Ford Falcon. She asked for a map, but the attendant didn't have one to offer.