Alpha Kill - 03

by Tim Stevens

  “Does she pick patients who are more likely to survive?” Venn knew of cops who massaged their successful arrest and conviction figures by choosing to take on assignments where a favourable outcome was more likely.

  Beth said, “I considered that. But we operate a strict duty system. Whichever team is on call on a particular day accepts all patients who come in. So you can’t really game the system all that much. Sure, there are some transfers between teams, for various reasons. But, for the most part, each team handles a similar workload in the long run.”

  “You said this Dr Collins has a special interest in kidneys,” said Venn. “Do those patients have a better outcome?”

  “Far from it,” said Beth. “The renal ones that need admission to the wards are usually pretty sick. In any case, Dr Collins still looks after other kinds of problems. Diabetes, heart failure and so on. Her patient group isn’t hugely different from any of ours.”

  “How big was the discrepancy?” said Venn. “Between the death rates?”

  “Hers was around twenty-five per cent lower,” said Beth.

  Venn didn’t know much about medicine, but that sounded a lot.

  He said, “But surely somebody would have noticed it by now?”

  “Not necessarily. We’re a competitive bunch, but not to the point of trawling through six months of data on four teams in order to draw a comparison.”

  Venn said, “I still don’t see why you need me.” Immediately he regretted saying it. It sounded harsh.

  If Beth noticed, she didn’t comment. “There’s more,” she said. “I started crunching the stats, looking for other anomalies. It turns out Dr Collins also has a far higher transfer rate out of her ward. So, patients are more likely to be moved on to another facility. Twenty five per cent more likely.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Venn. “She ships out all of the really sick ones before they can die on her.”

  Beth shook her head. “I thought of that, too. So I started digging into the details of the transfers. Pulling up their electronic records. There wasn’t anything about the transferred patients to indicate that they were, on average, any worse off than the rest. I didn’t get a chance to examine all of the records. We’re talking hundreds of patients here. But I got enough of a sample to suggest that Dr Collins isn’t simply turfing the ones she’s likely to lose.”

  Venn said, “Beth, you need to speak with your head of department. Dr Soper.” He’d met Bill Soper, an older man with the air of gravitas you’d expect in a veteran physician.

  “I did,” said Beth. “On Friday. He heard me out, said he’d look into it. Then, this evening, Bill appeared at the hospital. He’s not usually there on a Sunday. He caught me finishing up my paperwork, asked to speak with me in his office. He told me what I’d discovered was nothing to be concerned about. Said he’d looked into it, and there was nothing wrong that he could identify. He said it was just by chance that Dr Collins’ stats were different from mine and everybody else’s.”

  “What did you say to that?” asked Venn, suspecting he knew the answer.

  “I told him I didn’t buy it,” said Beth. “That he must have overlooked something. I said I’d delve into it further, and let him know what I found out. His manner changed. He became... more intense. Told me the stress I’d been under was affecting my judgment, and that I was seeing significance in places it didn’t exist.”

  She glanced away, remembering.

  “I argued back. Insisted there was something odd going on. He became even more insistent. He said Dr Collins was a senior and valued attending physician, and that she wouldn’t take kindly to learning that I’d been questioning her statistics. I pointed out that if anything, her stats ought to be trumpeted. They’re better than the rest of ours. I just didn’t understand why they were so much better.”

  Beth finished her coffee, shook her head when Venn pointed at the cup.

  “Bill made me promise I’d drop it, and I agreed. But I can’t be bound by that, Venn. Something’s not right.”

  He gave it a few seconds, then said quietly, “I agree. But there must be some higher authority you can go to, in confidence. The hospital board, or whatever they are.”

  Her eyes met his. “I spent this afternoon doing a little research into Dr Olivia Collins. Her husband sits on the board, and is a benefactor of the hospital. He’s donated millions over the years.”

  A thought struck Venn. “What’s her husband’s first name?”

  “Bruce.”

  Venn stared at her, his mind racing.

  Bruce Collins was a businessman known for his largesse. He’d founded numerous initiatives throughout the city, including a network of refuges for homeless people and an educational support program for kids whose parents were on welfare. He was the patron of two charities, devoted respectively to finding a cure for multiple sclerosis and eliminating cholera in Africa. For all Venn knew, he took injured kittens into his home and nursed them back to health.

  And he was a major donor to both the Mayor’s office and one of the associations for New York Police Department officers who’d had to retire because of injuries sustained in the line of duty.

  As if reading his thoughts, Beth murmured: “Now you see why I had to come to you, Venn.”

  Chapter 6

  They were all there, the three of them, in the same room. The twins, and Rosenbloom.

  For a moment Drake thought that they’d brought the party here, to this dingy motel with its stuttering, ill-maintained neon sign and indifferent cleanliness. All three of them rose to their feet when he entered, and greeted him with a whoop. He half-expected them to wheel in a cake with a stripper inside.

  “Keep your goddamn voices down,” he snarled.

  Rosenbloom, fat and jowly, sat down quickly, looking offended. He had a laptop open on the coffee table in front of him. Drake didn’t think he’d ever seen Rosenbloom without some kind of electronic device within reach. The guy was like a cyberpunk or whatever they were, a futuristic vision of man linked inextricably with machine.

  The Schroeder twins remained standing, grinning at Drake in genuine delight. Herman, the older by seventeen minutes - as he repeatedly mentioned, to the point where Drake was ready to strangle him - was dressed as usual in his charcoal-gray chalkstripe suit, pressed white shirt and tie, his haircut parted on one side and making him look like a preppy kid from a fifties movie. His sister Gudrun wore a stylish but less formal dress that might just have been spray-painted on. She wasn’t as tall as her brother, but her coiled platinum-blond hair and cheekbones and sultry eyes gave her the appearance of a movie star, and added several inches to her height.

  “Gene!” they cried, speaking almost simultaneously but a fraction out of synch with one another, which they often did. It created the odd and slightly eerie impression of an echo.

  While Drake had a hard time figuring out exactly what was wrong with Skeet Hoxton, he had no such difficulties with the Schroeder twins. He knew exactly what was wrong with them, because they’d told him. In fact, they’d shown him. He’d read the medical reports Herman and Gudrun had proudly thrust into his hands one day.

  Each of them had a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. In common, if medically inaccurate, parlance, they were psychopaths. As small kids in Pennsylvania, they’d done everything together, which you’d expect from twins. Everything included collecting animals from the neighborhood - woodchucks, squirrels, mice, and even pets such as cats and small dogs - and trying to outdo one another with increasingly inventive and bizarre ways of torturing and killing the poor beasts. Both of them had been firebugs, torching the local soup kitchen and a couple of farm buildings and attempting to do so to a Baptist church. They got caught before they could complete that last project, which was how they’d gotten into the system in the first place.

  Both of them had been in juvenile correctional facilities from the age of ten, and during the ensuing time they’d been subjected to an exhaustive array of assessments
from some of the most respected names in forensic psychiatry, psychology and social work. What made them such objects of interest was that they were twins. Herman and Gudrun informed Drake that several academics had built careers from the research papers they’d published on the Schroeder twins, which evaluated the contribution of genetic factors to psychopathy.

  Amazingly - the twins’ own word - Herman and Gudrun hadn’t fallen foul of the law since their release from juvenile detention after they turned eighteen. The authorities had let them go with bated breath, setting up a program of close observation and early-warning triggers. Everybody expected them to celebrate their new-found freedom in the adult word by becoming dervishes of chaos and destruction. Nobody expected them to last more than a year or two before winding up in some adult penitentiary, this time for life.

  But the twins were shrewd. They’d learned the system thoroughly during their years in juve. They knew exactly what to say, what to avoid, how to behave, in order to tick the right boxes on the forms and checklists their social workers and shrinks used to monitor them. Both of them were bright, and they got their high-school diplomas and went on to complete college degrees in art and design.

  Eventually the system lost interest in them. Indeed, there was a profound sense of relief, even smugness, all round. The twins were considered a rare success story, an example of how incipient psychopaths who were noted early enough and given appropriate care and psychological intervention might actually be reformable. Several researchers contacted the twins years later to ask if they’d be willing to participate in follow-up studies to demonstrate how they’d changed, but Herman and Gudrun politely declined. They’d gone through a difficult, troubled phase in their early lives, they said, and they just wanted to leave the past behind them and get on with being productive members of society.

  Which was, as Drake knew, gold-plated bullshit.

  He knew personally of seven people the twins had killed between them, and had no doubt that there were more. Probably far more. In fact, the first time he’d met them they killed a man. Drake had been holding up a liquor store in eastern Illinois one night, on his own. It wasn’t one of his more efficient jobs, and he’d screwed up. He’d thought the store was empty, apart from the clerk, but he’d failed to spot the three customers behind one of the aisles at the far end. Two of them were the Schroeder twins. The other was an off-duty cop.

  The cop had snuck up on Drake as he was getting the clerk to empty the till. And the cop would have gotten the drop on him, if Herman Schroeder hadn’t come up from behind and pierced the cop’s carotid artery with a Swiss Army knife. There’d been blood everywhere, like a pig was being butchered - an apt comparison, Drake thought - and of course the clerk had to be killed after that, Drake doing the honors. Normally he would have shot the twins as well, but something about their cheery, excitable demeanors, something about the way they begged him to let them join him, persuaded him to let them tag along. They might, he sensed, prove useful to him.

  And they had.

  Now, in the motel room in the middle of the night, Drake said: “I’m going to hit the shower. Get your shit wired and be ready to leave as soon as I’m done.”

  From over at his table, Rosenbloom muttered: “Sure that’s wise?”

  Drake stepped past the twins and over to the fat guy. “Excuse me?”

  Rosenbloom didn’t make eye contact. He had social interaction issues. Instead he fiddled with his laptop keyboard, like he’d die if he wasn’t constantly doing something electronic.

  He said, “The highways and the Interstates will be crawling. There’ll be roadblocks all over the place. We got stopped at a few on the way up here. Isn’t it better to lie low for a few days, let the heat die down a little?”

  Drake stared down at Rosenbloom. He kept the geek on board with his crew because the guy was a whiz at computer stuff. He could crack codes, access the secret security plans of banks and other institutions, and sometimes hack databases. He, like the others, was useful.

  But of all Drake’s people, Rosenbloom was the one he liked the least.

  “Your advice is appreciated,” said Drake thinly. “Even though I didn’t ask for it. But your thinking’s exactly wrong. The cops, the Feds, will be expecting me to lie low. They know and respect me well enough to assume I wouldn’t do anything as stupid as make a break for the border. Which is why I’m going to do exactly that. Tonight.”

  Rosenbloom squirmed, but Drake couldn’t tell if it was with embarrassment or annoyance.

  “Gonna be hard to hide you,” mumbled the fat guy. “Even if you’re in the trunk.”

  “Then you’ll just have to try hard, won’t you?” said Drake. “And I’m not going in any trunk, that’s for sure.”

  *

  Drake emerged from his motel room a half hour later. Skeet was waiting for him in the passage outside.

  He looked him up and down, whistled through his teeth.

  At a signal from Skeet, the cars pulled up on the forecourt in convoy. The twins were in front in their Chrysler station wagon, followed by Walusz the Pole in the SUV and Rosenbloom in his rinky-dink Hyundai bringing up the rear. At the wheel of the first car, Herman leaned out and said, “Whoah. Talk about a transformation.”

  Drake had done a little more than just shower. He’d dyed his blond, prison-regulation-short hair dark brown, inserted gray contact lenses which lightened his dark eyes dramatically, and shaved the soul patch from beneath his lower lip. Skeet had come through on the clothes he’d asked for: a light-blue seersucker suit, cream Versace shirt and soft crimson necktie. All rounded off with a pair of handstitched oxblood shoes from Savile Row.

  In the full-length mirror of the motel’s closet, Drake dared to say he looked... elegant.

  He also looked like a goddamn pansy, and he was going to lose the threads as soon as they reached New York.

  Gudrun Schroeder had supplied a couple of other touches: a pair of gel pads to be inserted into Drake’s mouth on either side to make his cheeks look fuller, and some tweezers for him to pluck his eyebrows with. When Skeet handed him the pads and the tweezers, Drake had snorted. But he had to admit, they made a subtle, definite difference to his appearance. Every little helped.

  Drake turned to Skeet. “Only problem is you.”

  Skeet looked confused.

  “You can’t ride with me,” said Drake. “The contrast is too great.”

  Instead of taking offense, Skeet nodded and gave him the thumbs up. He headed for Rosenbloom’s car and dropped into the passenger seat.

  *

  It took them ninety minutes to reach the arms cache.

  Rosenbloom had been right. The convoy managed to avoid roadblocks, but state and Federal law enforcement seemed to have taken over the streets of Illinois. Briefly, Drake turned on the radio to listen to the news. The riot at Horn Creek dominated, of course, and Drake was named as one of the seven inmates who’d escaped.

  Seven, thought Drake. It could have been a lot worse, from the prison’s point of view. The response had clearly been quick and effective.

  Just not quite quick and effective enough to hold him.

  Rosenbloom had hacked the police radio channels and Drake listened for awhile, but the cops seemed to be running around like headless chickens, without any clear notion of where to look for Drake. He switched off, knowing that Skeet and Rosenbloom would be monitoring the channels in the other car and would alert him to any danger.

  The arms cache was in an abandoned farmhouse outside Joliet, in the east of the state. The convoy lumbered down the rutted dirt track, the headlights dimmed. Overhead, the clouds had cleared a little, though the moon was a mere sliver and the starlight permitted only limited visibility.

  Skeet produced flashlights from the SUV and they picked their way over to a half-collapsed barn. The cache was one Skeet and the rest of Drake’s people had added to over the years, whenever they’d procured extra weapons during some job or other. They’d built it up in preparati
on for the day that Drake got out.

  Normally Drake would have helped, but he was in his new suit and didn’t want to get it dirty. Instead he stood back while Skeet and Walusz and Herman cleared the rubble from the floor of the barn until the outline of a trapdoor was visible. They heaved it open. Beneath it was a compartment, six feet deep, holding crates and boxes of varying sizes.

  They hauled out the contents and began to take an inventory.

  Eight semiautomatic pistols of assorted makes. Drake inspected a couple, testing their mechanisms, and chose for himself a Kel-Tec P11. He picked up another gun with his fingertips and peered at it in the dim light. “What the hell’s this?”

  Skeet screwed up his face, thinking. “That’s, ah... oh yeah. I took it off some dead gangbanger when I went in to scavenge, after there’d been a shootout between two crews. Weird-lookin’ little bastard, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a goddamn Saturday night special,” Drake snarled, throwing the gun down into the hole. “Jesus. You might as well use a flintlock. I said build up a cache. Not an antiques collection.”

  Next came two Remington shotguns. Drake took those. They’d be for general use, to share.

  Then the real prize. An Armalite M16 assault rifle. Skeet had mentioned they’d gotten hold of one, but Drake hadn’t quite believed him until now. He caressed the smooth, cold steel.

  “That was my doing,” murmured Gudrun, who was squatting beside them, holding the flashlights. In the shadows her eyes glinted with excitement.

  “Well, and mine,” chimed in Herman beside her.

  It turned out Gudrun had charmed the pants off a soldier at a military installation over the border in Indiana. Herman had procured the rifle while the soldier was distracted. Drake wondered what that soldier was doing now. Whatever it was, he sure wasn’t wearing a uniform, unless it was prison garb.