Fatal

by Michael Palmer

  “I’m afraid this Teague business has made me a few enemies around town, Mae,” Matt said.

  “Correction, sir, people in town like you and respect the kind of doctor you are. Many of them sympathize with you because of the losses you’ve endured. But they’re losing patience. Since you came back here to practice, your attempts to get the mine fined or even shut down for safety violations have already rankled a whole bunch of people. It’s made you an irritant in some quarters and the butt of jokes in others. Saving Darryl Teague has merely pushed the envelope.”

  “Mae, come on, now. Stop mincing words. What do you really think?”

  Mae smiled in spite of herself.

  “Very funny,” she said. “But it’s not so funny when people won’t come to see the best doctor in the valley because they think he’s always crusading to take away their livelihood.”

  “I’m not crusading to take away anyone’s livelihood. It’s just that—”

  “Matthew, open your eyes,” Mae cut in. “Ever since Ginny died, you’ve had blinders on. You were already writing letters to the mine safety people and trying to make every injury in the mine a federal case. After she passed away, you just haven’t let up. And what have you got to show for it? Nothing.”

  “Ah-ha!” Matt said. “Now, that’s where you’re wrong.” He raced into his office and returned with a stack of magenta paper. “I have these to show for it, fresh from the copy store.”

  He set the sheets on Mae’s counter and passed one over.

  WANTED

  INFORMATION ON ILLEGAL TOXIC WASTE

  DUMPING OR STORAGE AT ANY MINE IN

  MONTGOMERY COUNTY

  $2,500 REWARD

  FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO MSHA OR EPA ACTION

  COMPLETE CONFIDENTIALITY GUARANTEED

  REMEMBER, IT’S YOUR HEALTH

  The Healthy Mines Coalition

  “Lord,” Mae groaned. “‘Healthy Mines Coalition’?”

  “I thought that sounded better than Matthew Rutledge, M.D.”

  “Matthew, when are you going to see the light? You can’t hurt these people. They have more money than we could ever dream of, and more influence in high places than they need to brush off a fly like you. Going against them, you can only hurt yourself.”

  “Mae, Ginny died of a type of cancer that only shows up one in a million times in female nonsmokers her age. Now along comes two cases of a totally unusual syndrome in two men who both just happen to be miners. How can you not believe that BC and C is responsible? Do you have any idea how many barrels of toxic petrochemicals they generate converting coal into fertilizers or paint, or especially coke? Where are they?”

  If nothing else, Matt had done his homework. The production of coke, the derivative of coal that was essential to the production of iron and ultimately steel, was, to his mind, a major culprit. With enough plant space, equipment, and technology, certain types of coal could be utilized nearly 100 percent. But various by-products of production—creosotes, tars, pitches, and many other hydrochemicals—if not generated in sufficient quantities to be commercially valuable, had to be disposed of safely, or else stored. It was in this area that Matt believed the powers at BC&C were cutting their most dangerous corners.

  Shaking her head more in frustration than disapproval, Mae handed the fliers back to him.

  “You have five minutes before Jim Kinchley,” she said. “I sent him over to the lab for routine bloods and an EKG.”

  “Perfect. Mae, don’t worry. We’ll do fine.”

  Mae smiled thinly and returned to her business.

  Matt repaired to his office and began working his way through the pile of lab reports and charts on his desk. As usual, Mae made sense, he was thinking. When was the last time one of his letters to the editor had actually been published? And what about the abortive town meeting he had held where there were only seven attendees, including his mother, uncle, and two homeless people who were clearly there for the coffee and cookies?

  He looked up just as a scarlet tanager alighted on a branch of the white oak outside his window. For a minute, maybe even longer, the magnificently colored little songbird perched there, motionless, looking, it seemed, directly at him.

  Ginny?

  The bird remained fixed in its spot.

  Ginny, is that you?

  From the doorway, Mae Borden cleared her throat discreetly.

  “Matthew, are you okay?”

  “Huh? Oh, sure. I’m fine.”

  He glanced back at the tree, but the tanager was gone.

  “You were thinking about your wife, weren’t you?”

  “No, I mean yes. Yes, I was.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You know, Mae, it’s been almost four years and the feelings haven’t really changed inside me at all. If anything, I miss her more than ever. First it’s a cloud that reminds me of her, then a scene in the woods, or the way a woman on the sidewalk looks from behind. Just now it was a bird—a tanager. Only this time it didn’t just remind me of her, Mae, I had this powerful feeling it was her. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get my brain around how long forever is. I keep thinking that some director’s going to walk into the room, clap his hands, and announce that this scene is over and we get to move on to the next—the one where she’s waiting at home to tell me about her day with the kids at school.”

  Mae crossed the room and set her hand on his shoulder.

  “You have every right to hold fast to the memories of her,” she said, “so long as they don’t blot out the life you have left to live. With your dad gone, and your mother, bless her soul, getting more and more . . . sick, and the hours you spend working here and in the hospital, and now this mine thing, I wonder sometimes how you do it. The trick is to have those memories remind you not of what life was, but of how wonderful it can be again if you’d allow it.”

  “I hear you.”

  “I hope you do.”

  Mae walked around to the corner of the desk and picked up the stack of magenta fliers.

  “You going to throw those away?” Matt asked.

  “No,” she said, her tone and expression bittersweet. “I’m going to put them up all around town. Who knows?”

  As she left Matt’s office, the phone was ringing. Through his open door he heard her answer it.

  “Dr. Rutledge’s office . . . When? . . . Any idea why? . . . I’ll tell him right away. . . . Thank you. Thank you for calling.”

  She set the receiver down and moments later appeared at the doorway.

  “Matthew, that was Janice in the ICU. Darryl Teague just had a sudden cardiac arrest. They tried resuscitating him, but nothing worked. He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 4

  IT WAS THE SECOND STRAIGHT DAY OF UNREMITTING rain. Nikki Solari hated running in this kind of weather, but today she was considering doing it anyway. It had been more than a week since her roommate and close friend, Kathy Wilson, had stormed from their South Boston flat. A week without so much as a word—to her or to their mutual friends. The police had been surprisingly little help. Nikki had filled out the appropriate forms and brought in some photographs, but so far, nothing.

  “. . . Miss Solari, try to relax. I’m sure your friend will turn up.”

  “It’s Doctor Solari, and why are you so sure?”

  “That’s the way it is with cases like this. Everyone worries and the missing person just shows up.”

  “Well, this missing person is an incredibly talented musician who would never leave her band in the lurch, which she has. She is a wonderfully dependable friend who would never do anything to upset me, which she has. And she is an extremely compassionate and kind woman who would never say anything abusive to anyone, yet before she disappeared she had become abusive to everyone.”

  “Doctor Solari, tell me something honestly. Were you and Miss Wilson lovers?”

  “Oh, Christ . . .”

  Nikki desperately needed to wrest the worry from her brain, if only for a while,
and the only ways she had ever been able to do so were running, making music, and performing autopsies.

  It was eleven in the morning. One more hour until lunch. She could go out and splash through a few miles then. She stood by the window of her office watching the cars creep down Albany Street past the modern building that was the headquarters of the chief medical examiner and his staff. This was her third year as an associate in ME Josef Keller’s office. She was fascinated by the work and absolutely adored the man. But the past week had been hell. She glanced over at her desk. There were reports to be read, dictations to do, and several boxes of slides to review, but the concentration just wasn’t there.

  “Hey, there, beautiful, you’ve got a case.”

  Without waiting for an invitation, Brad Cummings strode into the office. Divorced with a couple of kids, Cummings was the deputy chief medical examiner. He was athletic, urbane, and, in the eyes of perhaps every woman in the city except Nikki, handsome. She found him smug, self-absorbed, and way too pretty—quite possibly the absolute antithesis of what she was looking for in a man.

  “Where’s Dr. Keller?” she asked.

  “Away until one. That means I’m the boss until then, so I get to say who gets what case, and you get this tubber.”

  “This what?”

  “Sixty-six-year-old guy had a coronary getting into his Jacuzzi, smacked his head on the side, and went for the eternal swim. He’s just eight months post-bypass surgery. I spoke to his doctor, who said he was on mucho cardiac meds and undoubtedly had an MI. So, he’s really just a ‘View.’ You don’t have to cut on him at all. And that means we have time to go have lunch at that place on Newbury Street I’ve been telling you about.”

  “Brad, I don’t want to go out with you.”

  “But I thought you broke up with that drip you were dating.”

  “Correction, that drip broke up with me. And I’m not interested in starting up with another one.”

  “She digs me. I can tell.”

  At the best of times, Nikki had precious little patience for the man.

  “Brad, you have more than enough scalps hanging on your lodge pole without mine. And I’m sure there are plenty more where those came from. We’ll keep getting along fine so long as you keep things on a business or collegial basis. But I promise you, Brad, call me beautiful again, or sweets, or honey, or babe, or anything other than Nikki or Dr. Solari, and I’ll write you up and hand it over to Dr. Keller. Clear?”

  “Hey, easy does it.”

  Nikki could tell that he stopped himself at the last possible instant from adding “babe.”

  “I’m going to get started on the new case,” she said.

  “I told you, this is a straightforward View. No scalpel required, just eyeball him and sign off.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll make that decision after I’ve seen the guy.”

  Nikki didn’t add that there wasn’t a chance in the world she would pass on this case regardless of how open-and-shut it was. Here was the perfect opportunity to get her mind off of Kathy for a few hours without getting soaked on the streets of Boston.

  “Suit yourself,” Cummings said. “Three days.”

  “What?”

  “Three days. That’s how long the dude’s been in the water. He’s a little, um, bloated. Sure you don’t want to just View and then skidoo?”

  “Have a good lunch, Brad.”

  Nikki changed into scrubs and located the remains of Roger Belanger on the center of three stainless-steel tables in Autopsy Suite 1. The daughter of an Italian and an Irishwoman, she could easily trace her thick, black hair and wide (some said sensuous) mouth to her father, and her fair skin, sea-green eyes, slender frame, and caustic wit to her mom. At her father’s urging, she had tried to follow his rather large footsteps into surgery. But after a year of residency, she switched to pathology, realizing that her desire to have a life outside of medicine was precluded by spending most of it in the OR or on rounds. Not once had she regretted her decision.

  Belanger was hardly the most unsightly corpse Nikki had ever examined, but neither was he at all pleasant to look at. Overweight and nearly egg-bald, he was extremely bloated and discolored, with purplish marbling of his skin. His flaccid limbs were well past rigor mortis. The white scar from his bypass ran the length of his breastbone.

  Good-bye for now, Kath, she thought as she began to focus in on the details of the body. I’ll let you back in in two hours.

  “No matter how obvious a case is,” Joe Keller had reminded her on more than one occasion, “no matter how apparently open-and-shut, you must make no assumptions. Process is everything. If you stick to process, step by step, you will seldom have to explain having missed something.”

  Step one: Read over as much information as you can lay your hands on about the subject. Step two: Inspect every millimeter of the skin.

  Nikki used the foot-activated dictation system as she went.

  “. . . There is a well-healed three-inch scar in the right lower abdominal quadrant, possibly from an appendectomy; a ten-inch scar less than a year old down the mid-anterior chest; a ten-inch scar of about the same age on the inner right thigh, probably from harvesting a vein for his bypass; and a well-healed two-inch scar just below the left patella, probably from the repair of a laceration many years ago.

  “There is a single contusion just above and behind the right ear, with discoloration and some swelling, but no depression of the bone beneath. There is a nickel-sized abrasion just beneath the right mandible that—”

  Nikki peered at the innocent-looking scrape. It was the only place on Belanger’s waterlogged body where skin was actually scraped off. She put on a pair of magnifying goggles and illuminated the area with a gooseneck lamp. The abrasion was actually a perfect hexagon. And in the center of the shape were ten tiny bruises perfectly forming the letter “H.” She photographed the area, then proceeded with her meticulous examination.

  Process is everything.

  An hour later, she had accomplished two major things. She had in fact managed temporarily to drive her concerns for Kathy Wilson from her mind, and she had come within one final step of proving that Roger Belanger had been murdered. She stripped off her gloves, grabbed the Boston Yellow Pages, and made a call. Minutes later she paged Brad Cummings.

  “Jesus,” he said, the dishes clinking in the background, “this pager goes off so infrequently, it scared the heck out of me.”

  “You almost done?”

  “We were just waiting for our flans.”

  Nikki didn’t want to go anywhere near who “we” was.

  “I need you to pick something up for me and come back to the office, Brad.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, no flans. Just go to Mulvaney’s Pool and Patio on Route 9, right after the mall. You know where that is?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll have a package waiting in your name. Eleven ninety-five plus tax. I’ll pay you back. Hurry.”

  For the next forty-five minutes, Nikki finished collecting her specimens and waited. Inexorably, her concerns for her friend reemerged. The two of them met almost three years ago at a folk club in Cambridge. Nikki had been a classical violinist from age three when her father enrolled her in a Suzuki method class. She played in chamber-music groups right through college and medical school when time allowed, and was reasonably satisfied with what she got from her music—that is, until she heard Kathy Wilson and the Lost Bluegrass Ramblers play. Kathy sang lead and played strings—mandolin, guitar, and bass—with astounding deftness and heart.

  Nikki had heard bluegrass before, but in truth she had never paid much attention to it. That night, the Ramblers, and Kathy in particular, brought her an exhilaration that had long ago vanished from the music she played and listened to. After the performance, she waited by the dressing room door.

  “I don’t collect autographs,” she said once Kathy had emerged, “but I wanted to tell you that I love your voice an
d your energy.”

  “Jes doin’ what comes naturally. You play the fiddle professionally?”

  “Hardly. How did you—”

  “You’ve got a fiddler’s mark right there under your jaw.”

  Nikki knew the reddish-brown mark and the small lump beneath it, caused by long-term pressure from her violin’s chin rest.

  “It became permanent sometime during college,” she said. “I play mostly chamber music.”

  “Eyes and necks, that’s how I judge a person. Eyes and necks. An’ yours tell me you care a lot about people an’ about music.”

  Half an hour later, Nikki was drinking beer with the band and sharing intimate details with Kathy about her laughable lack of judgment when it came to choosing men. A week after that, Kathy gave her a lesson in bluegrass. Over the two years that followed, Nikki developed into a reasonably proficient bluegrass musician, good enough to sit in with the group when they weren’t touring.

  “Girl, you’re capable of hittin’ on all cylinders when you put your mind and soul to it,” Kathy said. “But you gotta learn how to shut out the extraneous—especially all them folks who want a piece of you. Do that an’ you’ll feel your feet start floatin’ off the ground when you play.”

  From day one, being around Kathy was an adventure in spontaneity. Nikki had friends—close, good friends—from college and before, and two from medical school. But from their earliest times together, often talking and giggling from the end of a show until breakfast, Kathy and she were sisters.

  “I’ve had it with men,” Kathy moaned after she and her bassist boyfriend had broken up for the third and last time. “Pass the beer nuts is all they’re about.”

  “That and apologizing for leaving the toilet seat up again.”