Fatal

by Michael Palmer

  Now Nikki shuffled along between them, unable to fully fathom their loss.

  “We thank you for comin’ down,” Kit said in a voice that was eerily like Kathy’s.

  “I miss her terribly,” Nikki said. “She was a year younger than me, and I was the one who had spent my life in the big city, but she was so wise and so tuned in to life that I sometimes thought of her as an older sister.”

  “I understand. Even when she was real young she was sometimes like that for me, too.”

  “When I was first getting to know her, I played classical violin. I asked her if she could turn me into a bluegrass fiddle player. She said she would see. It wasn’t that easy a decision. She picked me up the next evening and drove me way out into the country to this huge field. Then she set out a blanket, brought out some horrible-tasting apple whiskey in a flask, and a portable CD player. We stayed up way past dawn listening to one bluegrass performer after another and sipping that horrible stuff until it tasted like honey. In the morning, I was so badly bitten by mosquitoes that I could barely move. She didn’t have a bite on her. Turns out she was swathed in bug repellent. She wanted to see if I got immersed enough in the music that I didn’t notice I was being eaten alive. The next day she gave me my first lesson. Goodness, but she could play.”

  “We know,” Kit said. “We know. Sometimes the Lord’s ways are hidden from us until we are ready to understand and accept them.” She guided her husband and Nikki back around toward the church, where Nikki could see the crowd continuing to build, then asked, “Nikki, Sam and I want to know, Kathy had the most beautiful face—an angel’s face. Did the accident . . . ? What I mean is . . .”

  “Kit, she was beautiful at the end, too,” Nikki said, willing away countless unpleasant images. “Two bones in her neck separated. That’s why she died. Nothing else. Her face was completely spared.”

  “Thank God,” Sam muttered. “She always insisted on cremation if’n anything ever happened ta her, so we felt we had ta do it.”

  Nikki accompanied Kathy’s parents into the sanctuary and sat beside them during the service. They had asked her over the phone to speak at the service. Rather than deliver memories of her friend, which she simply wasn’t sure she was strong enough to do, Nikki had chosen to read some of Kathy’s poetry, along with the words to two songs whose melodies Kathy had not yet written. She had to stop several times to compose herself, but there was a strength and unabashed faith in the room that made anything she said or did feel right. The service lasted less than an hour and was so poignant, with hymns, readings, recollections, two cuts from Kathy’s CDs, and a song by some friends and the band, that few eyes were dry by the time it was over.

  The reception in the social hall adjacent to the church was much more of a celebration of Kathy’s life and music than a memorial. With her band at the core, musicians came, played for a time, went, and came back again. Most of them were amateurs, yet all of them amazingly talented. Someone would name a tune or simply start playing, and instantly the others would join in. Nikki changed into jeans and sneakers, and brought her fiddle in from the car. She was still pretty much of a greenhorn by comparison to most of the others, but she managed to sit in on the jam for half an hour or so without disgracing herself, and played a lick in “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” that actually earned applause from the banjo player. Finally, mopping her brow with a handkerchief she kept in her case for just that purpose, she took a break and headed for the punch bowl.

  “Here,” a man said from her right. “Let me get you a cup. Alcohol-free or supercharged?”

  He was somewhere in his forties and good-looking in a broad-shouldered, straitlaced sort of way, with razor-cut sandy hair, a muscular build, and dark gray eyes that were too small for Nikki’s taste. He was wearing a white dress shirt and a black string tie with a large turquoise stone mounted on the slide. His mountain twang sounded far less pronounced than that of the others she had met, and his manner and speech had her guessing that he was college educated.

  “Oh, no alcohol, please,” she said. “I’ve got a long drive ahead of me this afternoon.”

  “In that case, I must absolutely insist you stay away from the high-test stuff. For one thing, I think I know whose still it was brewed in, and for another, I’m chief of police here in Belinda. Bill Grimes.”

  He extended his hand and Nikki took it. His grip was confident.

  “Nikki Solari. Pleased to meet you.”

  “That was a very moving reading you did.”

  “Kathy was a wonderful writer. Her words are important to a lot of folks.”

  “Kit told me you’re a doctor.”

  “I’m a pathologist by trade, but a musician by passion. Kathy was in the process of transforming me from a violinist into a fiddle player.”

  “I was listening. She’s done a fine job of that.”

  “Thanks. I’m not in her class, but then again, not many are.”

  “I didn’t grow up in these parts, but I heard her daddy taught her music, and that since she was a child people flocked to wherever she was playing. Folks around here sort of took it personally when she left.”

  Nikki smiled at the notion.

  “I can believe that,” she said.

  “Her death shocked us all. Dr. Solari, if the whole thing is still too raw for you to talk about, I certainly understand, but as a cop, and a friend of the family, I’m curious to know as much as I can about how it happened.”

  “Talking about things helps me deal with them—even if they’re very painful things like this. And it’s fine to call me Nikki.”

  “Bill for me. I get ‘Chief’ so much it’s like taken over as my name.”

  The policeman had an easy, reassuring manner. Carrying their drinks they left the crowd and walked over to a solitary bench, set alongside a massive willow. The sun was beginning its move to the west, and off in the distance, the lush hills seemed phosphorescent. Nikki had never been much of a visual artist, but if she were, the colors of West Virginia would be Nirvana.

  “So you’re a pathologist,” Grimes said when they had settled down at either end of the bench.

  “I work for the ME’s office.”

  “Interesting. Our ME was here at the service, but he left a while ago. Tall, thin, sort of dignified guy wearin’ a grayish suit.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been noticing much of anything today,” Nikki said.

  “That’s understandable. Well, he’s a pathologist just like you. Doc Sawyer’s his name—Hal Sawyer. Nice guy. Real smart, too—not just concerning medical things, either. About Kathy?”

  “Well, her death was actually handled by our office. My boss, Josef Keller, the chief medical examiner for the state, did the post.”

  “He find anything out of the ordinary? Drugs? Alcohol?”

  “Nothing like that. How much do you know about what was going on with Kathy before her accident?”

  Grimes shook his head.

  “All I know is that she was run over by a car.”

  “It was a truck. She ran out of a bar and into the street. The poor driver never even had the chance to hit his brakes.”

  “But you said she wasn’t drinking.”

  “Her blood alcohol level was zero. Toxic screen—at least the preliminary panel we’ve gotten back so far—was totally negative. She was insane, Bill. Absolutely insane. She had been slipping into a horrible paranoia for months before she died. Thought there were people out to kill her. I kept trying to get her help, but the more I tried, the further she withdrew from me.”

  “Did you speak with her family?”

  “I called them once, about four weeks before Kathy was killed, but they were just bewildered and also sounded angry at Kathy for having drifted away from them. They couldn’t understand what they could do to help her if I was a doctor and I couldn’t do anything.”

  “The Wilsons are good people,” Grimes said, “but simple and very set in their ways. Kathy was their only kid. They never thoug
ht she should have left.”

  “I know.”

  “So that was it? She just went crazy?”

  “Just about. As I said, she was convinced at the end that men were after her, trying to kill her. I think she was trying to get away from them when she died.”

  “Is it possible she was right?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  “So the autopsy your boss did didn’t show anything else?”

  “Nothing we weren’t already aware of. There was one other thing that was pretty unusual about her, though. Something I didn’t see any reason to share with her parents. Over a number of months before she died, coinciding to some extent with the development of her madness, her face was becoming disfigured by these lumps—neurofibromas, we call them.”

  “Neu-ro-fi-bro-mas.” Grimes said the word slowly, as if committing it to his vocabulary. “Cause?”

  “Unknown, except maybe bad genetics or a mutation, that sort of thing. Possibly a virus. By any chance, did you ever see the movie The Elephant Man?”

  “’Fraid not. But I think I know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, in its worst form, her condition would be like that. And it was getting there. She was pretty deformed at the end. No telling what she would have looked like had she lived.”

  Nikki glanced up at the sun and then checked her watch.

  “You really plannin’ on leaving today?” Grimes asked.

  “I’m on call for my office tomorrow night, so I have to be back by then. I’m one of the world’s least reliable nighttime drivers, so I plan on going as far as New York, then the rest of the way in the morning. I’d like to play just a little bit longer, though, before I take off. There are a couple of Kathy’s pieces I’d like to try with the gang.”

  “I sure wish you could stay,” Grimes said, with invitation in his voice and expression.

  “Thanks for the thought,” she said, not at all threatened by the police chief’s tone, “but I’m locked into getting home.” She stood. “Why don’t you come in and let us play something for you. Do you have any favorites you haven’t heard?”

  “I’m not much of a bluegrass expert,” Grimes replied, “although I do enjoy the music. Tell me something,” he said, as he walked her back to the social hall, “why did you decide not to tell the Wilsons about Kathy’s neu-ro-fi-bromas?”

  “I didn’t see any reason to tell them over the phone. Then after I met them in person here, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to. Then they told me . . . Kit asked if Kathy’s face had been battered in the accident. The poor dears had enough trouble getting their minds around her deranged mental state. It seemed cruel to tell them her face was deformed as well. Besides, the microscopic examination of her brain and the neurofibromas isn’t done yet. If it shows anything to explain what happened, I plan to share that news with them. If it doesn’t provide any explanation, I’ll have to decide if it’s worth telling them at all. As you know, Kathy’s an only child, so there’s no need to worry about some evil gene working its way through her family.”

  “If I were in your position, I don’t think I’d mention it to the Wilsons, either,” Grimes said. “Nothing to gain.”

  “Nothing to gain,” Nikki echoed.

  “Well,” he said when they reached the social hall, “I’m sorry to have met you under these circumstances, but I’m certainly glad to have met you.”

  “Same here.”

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll see each other again.”

  “You never can tell. If I find myself headed back this way for any reason, I’ll call you at the station.”

  “Do that. And I’ll call you at the coroner’s office if I find myself in Boston.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “And Nikki, if anything does turn up on those microscopic slides you spoke about, please let me know.”

  Nikki picked up her fiddle and gently rubbed it down with a cloth.

  “I’ll do that, Bill,” she said, taking her seat among the musicians, who were currently between numbers. “Since you don’t have a request, I’ll pick one. We’ve been playing some Alison Krauss. She was Kathy’s idol. Mine, too.”

  The smart, distinguished-looking medical examiner she had never gotten to meet might have left, but few others had. People were gathered around the buffet table and scattered across the dance floor, arm in arm, waiting for the next tune. Kathy would have approved and probably would have insisted on adding a keg of Bud to the celebration of her life.

  Nikki closed her eyes and let the music fill her mind and her body. A few hours ago she was a total stranger in Belinda. Now, because of Kathy and the gift of bluegrass, she was connected to the town and the forests and the mountains and the water in ways that would endure as long as she did.

  IT WAS NEARING three-thirty. Nikki helped transfer Kathy’s things into the Wilsons’ Dodge Ram pickup. After everything was set in place, she reached into the trunk of the Saturn and brought out the case containing Kathy’s exquisite mandolin.

  “Here,” she said, handing it over to Sam. “Chief Grimes told me you taught Kathy to play.”

  “Only fer a couple a weeks,” he replied, taking the instrument out and cradling it in his huge hands, a soft, wistful expression on his face. “After thet she begun teachin’ me.”

  He ran his thick-jointed thumb over the strings, which Nikki had tuned before loading the instrument into the trunk. Then he took one of the picks from the case and played a brief riff of remarkable clarity and some technical difficulty.

  “That was great,” Nikki said. “No wonder Kathy was so good. It’s in her blood.”

  “Here,” Sam said, placing the instrument back in its case and passing it back to her. “I want you ta have it.”

  “But I—”

  From beyond where Sam was standing, Kit stopped her short with a definitive shake of her head.

  “Sam’s got arthritis pretty good,” she said. “We’d both be happy knowin’ Kathy’s instrument is with you.”

  Nothing in either of Kathy’s parents’ faces encouraged debate.

  “I may come back for a lesson on it,” she said.

  “You’d be welcome if’n ya did,” Sam managed, his eyes moist.

  Nikki set the instrument on the front seat, embraced the Wilsons, then headed down the arching church driveway toward the road north. At the outskirts of Belinda, she paused and gazed back through the rear window, down the length of Main Street. It really was a lovely town—gentle, earnest people; beautiful countryside; and an appealing pace of life. She ached to think she would never get to know the place with her friend.

  She turned north, retracing her route onto the narrow, two-lane road that would bring her to Route 29. The road, snaking through dense forest, was deserted, just as it had been on the trip into town. Nikki pulled on a blue Red Sox cap to control her hair and opened the moon roof and her window. Sunlight filtered through the tops of the trees, dappling the pavement. As she rounded a tight turn, she saw a car pulled over at an angle on the narrow shoulder. A man in jeans and a yellow T lay facedown on the road. A heavyset man in a dark suit knelt beside him. Nikki’s immediate assessment of the scene was that the man had struck a pedestrian. He looked up as she approached, then stood and waved to her. Nikki pulled over, scanning the ground around the victim for blood.

  The man, in his thirties and obviously distressed, hurried to her window.

  “I . . . I didn’t see him. I came around the corner and there he was. Do you have a cell phone?”

  “Is he breathing?”

  “I . . . I think so.”

  Nikki stepped from the car and hurried to the motionless man, expecting the worst. No blood, no obvious injuries. There was a slight rise and fall of his chest—he was most definitely breathing. She had no intention of rolling him over without stabilizing his neck. She knelt down next to him, peered at his face, and reached across to check his pulse. At that instant, he rolled over, and at the same moment, the large man stan
ding behind her grabbed her roughly by the hair and clamped a cloth over her nose and mouth. It was soaked with a substance she knew well from the lab—chloroform.

  “Beddy-bye, Doc,” he said.

  CHAPTER 13

  DURING HER ONE YEAR OF SURGICAL RESIDENCY before the switch to pathology, Nikki had earned the nickname “Cube” because of her absolute coolness and composure in the face of even the direst medical emergencies. She never could fully explain what seemed to be an inborn trait, but once she did check her pulse seconds after saving a patient by performing an emergency tracheotomy. Fifty-eight.

  “I guess I’m just a very logical person,” she once told a medical friend by way of explanation. “And a very positive one, too. Once a situation begins—critical or otherwise—all I focus on is what I have to do, almost never on what will happen if I screw up.”

  The whiff of chloroform gave Nikki three seconds before the obese man in the business suit clamped the cloth over her mouth. As with emergencies in the hospital, her reactions over those precious seconds seemed reflex, but were, in fact, the product of a number of rapid-fire observations and deductions.

  Chloroform—take in a sharp breath and hold it! . . . Quick, purposeful movements by the so-called victim—it’s a trap! . . . Beddy-bye, Doc—he knows who I am! This is no random mugging. Trying to beg—to talk them out of whatever they’re going to do—would be hopeless. . . .

  Three times in her life Nikki had taken self-defense courses for women. She came away from each of them frustrated, embarrassed, and a little frightened by how much she had already forgotten. But there were three recurring rules the courses had permanently impressed on her brain: Do something quickly; go for the testicles, the nose, or the knee; and as soon as possible, run. Still on her knees, her back to the massive assailant, Nikki drew her fist up in front of her eyes and jackhammered her elbow back into the man’s groin with all the force she could muster. Air exploded from his lungs. He grunted, released her, stumbled backward briefly, and dropped onto his butt like a sack of grain thrown from a truck. The chloroform-soaked washcloth flew off to one side. The rail-thin man in the yellow T-shirt was scrambling to his feet, but Nikki was quicker to hers. She kicked him viciously under the chin as he was coming up, snapping his teeth together and sending him sprawling backward. Then she whirled and sprinted across the road into the forest.