“That has to be the connection to Creeslow,” Ken said, as we headed for the morgue. “Palk could have done a wiring job for the limo service.”
Ken drove. Field sat beside him, while I sat in the back. They discussed motive and why Palk had been chosen. They noticed I was quiet. Field turned around.
“Troubled?” he asked softly.
I was, for many reasons. “He was a seventy-four year old retired tradesman,” I said. “He didn’t have much money or anything else. Why do that to him? He was no threat to anyone. He was just…handy,” I finished heavily and lowered my head.
“They are ruthless,” he said.
I moved my head from side to side, not lifting it. “It’s more than that, Field. They’re inhuman.”
“Someone’s really twisted. Whoever it is has total contempt for life,” Ken said, briefly glancing over his shoulder.
“Someone’s playing God,” I answered.
Chapter 34
“Unless you brought dinner, there isn’t much else to do here.” Joe welcomed us gloomily. He hadn’t bothered to greet us but stood over a table, hands planted on either side of a heap covered with plastic. He kept his head lowered as he spoke.
“You can have this job. I’m ready to retire. I might as well become a mortician. It’s a damn lucrative business. I could open up a chain of funeral parlors and laugh all the way to the bank. It’s a warning, of course,” he said furiously and smashed his hands down on the table.
I felt uncomfortable and didn’t know why. Joe was moody and temperamental. We had often seen him throw things when he was frustrated. I thought him capable of fury, rage, sarcasm or indifference but not defeat. I’d never heard him sound so bitter and dispirited.
“Warning about what?” Ken asked. Field started to look around, examine all the gadgetry that Joe had installed in the morgue.
Joe smacked his hand down on the table again. “Who was he?” he demanded hoarsely.
“Christopher Palk, a retired tradesman—” Ken started to say.
Joe cut him off with the swish of his hand. “Who was he?” he repeated grittily.
Ken looked at me, not sure what to say.
I understood. “No one,” I said. “He was just handy.”
“Precisely!” Joe straightened up and turned to face me. He motioned at the remains that had been transferred to the table, still wrapped in drawstring plastic. “When you execute someone who is no threat to anyone, it has to be a warning.”
“So it’s the same situation as with the waiter,” I said.
“The waiter served,” he said cynically.
“Each of these four deaths—executions—served a purpose, Joe,” I told him. I already knew what purpose the latest murder served and hoped Ken and Field would not share this information with Joe. The state he was in, he’d pick a fight with a colleague in Hopkins at the drop of a hat.
“Did you find out why they executed the first programmer, Meg?”
“You told us the motive was not as important as finding whoever is making these explosive devices,” I pointed out mildly.
He snorted. “When have you ever listened to me?” He ran a hand over his eyes. “I didn’t mean to tell you how to do your job. It was just a suggestion, my perspective.”
“We listened, Joe and we still don’t know why the first victim was executed.”
“Then what purpose did his death serve?”
“A field test, a trial, to define the range of the device.”
He looked at me with a twisted smile. “You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Brick’s death was not a warning,” I maintained.
“Sure it was,” he snorted. “A public warning, ‘Here’s what I can do’. It’s the same with the rest.”
I didn’t think so but I wasn’t going to discuss any more theories with Joe. He must have seen my reluctance and snorted, “A harmless old man, right? The entire city’s going to be paranoid. Don’t bother going back to your office. The phone lines will be tied up for weeks. Everyone who as much feels a twinge in his chest will call.”
“Joe,” I said carefully, “is there any way you can distance yourself from this—”
His derisive laughter stopped me.
“I’m not solving the case fast enough for you, Meg?”
“That’s the problem, Joe. You’ve become involved far more than it’s required or safe for a medical examiner to do,” I said quietly.
“So you want to shut me out of it for my own safety, is that it?”
“I want you to leave the detective work to us,” I said, voice hardening. “If you need a vacation, by all means, take a vacation. Distancing yourself from all this…death, will be rejuvenating.”
He snickered. “I’m a pathologist. Death is my business.”
“Then rent a cozy cabin in Vermont and write a research paper on explosive pacemakers,” I said, frustrated that I wasn’t getting through to him.
“Maybe,” he said, his shoulders sloping down. “But first I have to do my job. So I’m going to follow protocol and analyze blood from our latest victim, to confirm as I did on all the others that there’s nothing whatsoever to catch.”
“Following protocol, no matter how useless, is calming,” Ken said.
“Oh, I’ll be very calm at Hopkins,” Joe snickered. “In fact, I’ll probably be the only doctor there who is.”
Chapter 35
For the next two days I kept stifling shivers. It felt as if an army kept marching over my grave, back and forth, to make sure I didn’t miss the message. Field took his agents and went to meet with the Chairman and those few associates my father still trusted.
He called me during the break in what sounded like a marathon brainstorming session.
“Your father’s not sure whether the Justice Department can touch Blank. We have nothing that would connect the Tavistock Chief Economist to any of the murders or the money-laundering scheme. The man is our President’s trusted and valued friend, a godfather to his daughter. My boss is certainly not brave enough to even suggest Mr. Blank is implicated in this without steel-clad proof,” he said.
I knew what he meant. It would be professional suicide for anyone to speak ill of R. Bishop Blank, never mind accuse him of criminal activity. The only evidence that connected him to the crimes was the ramblings of a dead psychiatric patient. Ken took notes when we visited Patricia and duly put down all her fragmented replies in a report. However, even my Criminal Law professor would have balked at making a case out of such evidence.
“Meg?”
“Still here, Field. I was just thinking—even if we apprehend the criminal mastermind behind the chest bombs and he or she implicates Blank in the scheme, we still won’t have enough clout to indict him.”
“Yeah.”
“However,” I said and waited.
“Don’t stop,” he raised his voice. “No matter how outrageous, I’m open to suggestions.”
“Well, Mr. Blank is my father’s old and trusted friend, which means the only one on Mr. Blank’s level is my father.”
“You want me to tell the Chairman to deal with his Chief Economist?” He didn’t sound outraged, merely resigned.
I chuckled. “It might not reflect well on the Justice Department, particularly the FBI or the Baltimore police but Blank must answer to someone higher in this laundering scheme simply because of the staggering amounts of money involved. He might be the key figure here in the continental US but I think he’s just a director of funds entrusted to his care by many offshore interests.”
“You’re saying that Bishop Blank has an offshore boss?”
“I suspect many Latin American syndicates are involved in this cold scheme so he’d have many nasty and unforgiving bosses—who pay him for this excellent service.”
“Yes, I see where you’re going with this.”
“My father has already identified three hundred corporate accounts in various Tavistock banking institutions and frozen the funds in tho
se accounts. He also said there might be many more such accounts. Tell my father to make it a priority for his banking staff to identify as many of these accounts as they can—as fast as they can—then take appropriate action, with Justice Department’s blessing. Tell him to approach other banking institutions, create a joint task force, with the objective to flush out suspect accounts.”
“Blank’s Latin American bosses—or customers—will take care of him for us,” he said.
“It’s a mercenary solution but if our Justice Department can’t touch him…” my voice trailed off.
“Thanks,” he said, “I’ll give you full credit for the idea. Now I have to go back to the meeting. Be careful and keep me posted on any new developments.”
Ken, sitting on my living room floor, had listened to my conversation.
“Dangerous,” he said when I closed my cell phone.
“For whom?”
“For your father,” he said very evenly.
I smiled. “When this is over, I’ll roll up my sleeves, cook up a storm and throw a party—just for my friends and family. Then I’ll tell you a story. Now’s not the time for it.”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” he said.
“Yes, you were but confessions will just have to wait—for you and Jazz.”
“I understand. I won’t slip. I promise.”
An hour later, we decided that we should go see Bourke.
“We’ve assigned all non-essential administrative and clerical personnel to man the phone lines, calming down Baltimore citizens,” Bourke said when we staggered into his office, deafened by the noise and hubbub in our headquarters.
I glanced at Ken and receiving his nod I said, “We have two possible suspects, chief but we don’t have enough evidence to bring either of them in for questioning.”
“Why not?” he asked, sounding exhausted.
“Both are doctors. We don’t want to add to the panic and pandemonium at Hopkins, though not both doctors work at the hospital.”
“What about the FBI?”
I told him what Field and his agents were doing and where.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass who nails the stinking son of a bitch, as long as he’s stopped,” Bourke said, sounding uncharacteristically coarse.
“The kind of people Mr. Blank has befriended in the Latin American countries are notoriously unforgiving and uncharitable when it comes to losing millions of dollars earned through various criminal activities,” I said.
“Good,” Bourke declared and smacked his hand down on his desk. As if it was a signal, his phone rang. He snatched it. “Yeah,” then listened, his face growing even more haggard. He put the phone down a lot more gently than he picked it up.
“There’s been an incident at Hopkins,” he said, lowering his head. “Joe’s gone berserk.”
Chapter 36
When we arrived at Hopkins, everywhere I looked, I saw signs of tension. Even the walls seemed to be quivering, strumming with it as if vibrating machines were inside them.
The hospital staff had been grouped and each cluster of three or four was either being questioned by a uniformed police officer or guarded. Now and then, a nurse would leave and hurry down the corridor then disappear into a room.
We were on the sixth floor, the cardiac ward. Half of it was rooms filled with patients, the other half was operating theaters and post-op facilities.
Sven came out of the doorway, looked around, saw us and waved.
We entered a lounge that looked like a makeshift campaign headquarters. Officers used any surface they could find to take notes, even as those providing information stood by. Every step I took, was punctuated by someone’s beeper. Cell phones were not allowed.
I saw Joe. He sat on a squat table in the corner, hands stuck under his armpits. His head drooped so low I thought he was asleep.
I opted for a simple approach.
“What happened, Joe?” I asked, with no particular emphasis. I watched his foot shod in a sneaker, scribe an arch on the floor.
“Read the statement. I already gave it to somebody,” he said in a dead voice.
“We will. Talk to me.”
He placed his hands on his knees. Both were bandaged up to the elbows. He said, “A guy came to the Emergency Room. He thought he had a bomb in his chest. I was on the fourth floor, in the labs, picking up paperwork on Palk’s blood analysis. There had to be traces, explosive substance, something. I don’t give up that easily. Quigley was in. I heard his name paged. I went up to see him. He didn’t think there was anything that could be stuck into a patient that would result in the kind of pressure that it would explode the body. I said that maybe a small amount of hydrocarbon-fuel, gas, liquefied under pressure, might be possible, but he said I was full of shit. There are dinitro, tetranitro and octanitrocubane propellants and explosives. I tried to explain four-membered ring compounds. The chemistry should not have been that hard to understand—for a doctor. Quigley said that I should go dazzle idiots on the street with my human cruise missile theory and not to waste his time. He said you could probably clamp something inside. Make the lungs or intestines burst but not the whole body. We argued. Then he got a call. The guy was already in O.R. on six. He had no insurance. He was another Palk, a retired tradesman. Paxton Morris took him.
“We went up to six. Morris had the patient swabbed and marked. He was going in. I wanted to see the guy’s x-rays. Hell, if he had that shit in his chest…” his voice trailed off.
Field touched my arm, handing me a sheet of paper. He blinked once and nodded at it.
I took it and started reading.
Like the rest of us, Joe carried a gun. He’d frightened me with it, once or twice, when I grew bold and leaned over his shoulder too much at the morgue. I thought that’s where he normally left it, not took it to the hospital when picking up lab results. He argued with Quigley. I knew it would have been a violent confrontation. Quigley had tried to block his entry into the O.R. They scuffled. Joe drew his gun and slashed his colleague. The momentum of rage had carried him into the op-theatre.
I wasn’t sure whether this incident was responsible for what happened next.
Morris set off the device in his patient’s chest. This time it was a more powerful explosion. Two nurses and the anesthetist suffered cuts and puncture wounds, mostly from the medical tools and equipment.
Morris suffered cuts too but they didn’t incapacitate him. Joe barged in and faced the blood and tissue splattered surgeon—with a gun in his hand. He accused him of killing the patient, setting off the device on purpose—destroying evidence that would have implicated him.
“Morris might not have done it on purpose, Joe,” I said quietly. The overhead paging system activity had died down.
He snorted. “Sure he did. He got rid of the evidence.”
I sighed. It could be true. Morris may have been startled but not to a degree that saw him reach for a chest saw and attack Joe.
The medical examiner was defending himself when he shot the surgeon who reacted in a bizarre way. Why did Morris turn hostile, I wondered? Why attack the pathologist? Joe’s intrusion was unexpected and it might have enraged the heart surgeon to have his work interrupted but not to such degree as to launch an attack with a saw.
Then again, maybe Morris’ nerves snapped and that’s the way it happened.
Suddenly, Joe lifted his head. I found myself staring into the dark pools of misery. His eyes were hollow, sunken so deep that the sockets looked like coal sacks.
“He came at me, Meg, with a buzzing saw. That damn thing just about chewed off my hand. Maybe I shouldn’t have barged in. I think I fell through the door when Quigley pushed me,” he said.
“With a gun in your hand?” I murmured.
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “That was stupid. I wasn’t thinking straight. I just felt…if that device was whole… Quigley laughed at me. That’s what made me…” his voice trailed off again.
Field touched my shoulder. “The adminis
trators are here. Let’s see what information we can get on Dr. Morris.”
Two days later, we sat in my kitchen. We went to the office and left before we reached our desks. Palk’s death had panicked the entire population of Baltimore. There were even more clerical and administrative staff, manning the phones than we saw when we reported to Bourke. The media had pounced on what happened at Hopkins. Our entire district was a war zone.
“Paxton Morris would have been charged but not with the criminal activity we’re investigating,” Ken said, sliding his hand over the reports scattered on the table.
We spent half a day at the Campbelford Security. It was a private outfit that specialized in pharmacological and medical investigations. Hopkins administration hired them to compile evidence on Dr. Morris. They suspected him of stealing drugs from the hospital dispensary and storage.
Dr. Francis, one of the hospital directors, grimaced when I asked him why Dr. Morris would resort to this but he answered my question. I knew he didn’t like my choice of words—resort.
“I’ve made allowances for Paxton for a long time,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “I warned him that if he continued providing free medication to those who couldn’t afford it, he would be dismissed. He joined our staff just over three years ago and drugs began disappearing from our dispensary almost immediately. He was our prime suspect. I didn’t accuse him of theft but I left him with a clear impression that I knew who was behind it. We’re talking about heart drugs, most of them very expensive and not even covered by some insurance plans. If he chose to donate a generic brand, I closed my eyes. But he refused to use generics. He left me no choice, Detective. He was under surveillance for the last nine months. The security was gathering evidence that would be presented in court. He would have been charged.”
Campbelford gave us the surveillance tapes. Morris was taking drugs without authorization but he didn’t experiment with implosive or explosive implants. Those tapes absolved him.
“He’s not our man,” Ken sighed.
I felt Morris was set up but I had no idea by whom. Joe lost his temper and Quigley did too but…
The Path of Silence Page 23
