Текст книги "Brain Dead"

Автор книги: Eileen Dreyer

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter 22

Barb started calling damn near at dawn. "What's going on?" she asked. "I would have been over there but I was stuck pulling a double shift in the city. Murphy said he was handling it."

"He said that, did he?" Timmie asked, half-asleep at her kitchen table.

"He didn't think you wanted to be bothered. Now, what the hell is going on?"

Timmie stared into her coffee without much seeing it. "How about I give you the Reader's Digest version?"

Even that took fifteen minutes.

"Well, was it Landry?" Barb demanded when she'd finished.

"Beats me. Nobody saw him but Cindy."

"Oh, great. The ideal witness. She probably swore she saw him with Elvis. Okay, what else is going on?"

"Conrad's coming in this morning to pick up the box with Alice's meds. I think I'm going to miss it. It's become kind of a mute but tasteful pet, you know?"

"Only you would think a chameleon is too noisy. I've been keeping tabs on the official game of hot potato they're playing with Alice's earthly remains. Van Adder refuses to consider it as one of his cases. Alex doesn't want to release her until questions about that dij level have been answered. It was 6.7, by the way."

Timmie whistled. "Considering how slow her system was, imagine how much higher it could have gotten if she just hadn't croaked."

There was a small silence. "You're a bit more chipper than the last time I talked to you."

Timmie thought about it a minute. "I guess I am."

"How's your dad?"

She considered the question and realized she could answer it almost free of guilt. Was this all it took to free yourself of that kind of turmoil? Turn down one murder-for-hire offer? Maybe she could share this with other Alzheimer's children.

"He's okay," she said, and damn near meant it.

Barb sounded as if she were smiling. "Good. Now, how can we prove who called you?"

"How the hell do I know? Whoever it was called from Alex's office, which was locked tight when we got there, and I couldn't identify his voice again if my life depended on it."

"Fingerprints?"

"I'll suggest it to Micklind, but who says he'll be allowed to investigate? We don't have the tape with the offer on it. Besides, what do you bet Landry has the perfect alibi?"

Barb snorted in disgust. "This stuff sure looks a lot easier when they do it in the movies. Well, what about Ginny?"

"Ginny? The night operator Ginny?"

"Sure. Anybody using the doctors' lot has to punch in with his ID card. When they do, their name flashes up on the night operator's board in case she has to page them."

Timmie almost couldn't breathe. "And the administrators park in the doctors' lot?"

"You think they're gonna park with the peons? Tell you what. I'll get Ginny's number and call her."

"You get the number. I'll call. I need to know more than you do."

Ten minutes later, a sleepy but agreeable Ginny was on the phone. "Honey, what can ole Ginny do for you?"

Timmie worked very hard to keep her tone level. "Last night when I called you about Dr. Raymond's phone number?"

"Sure, sugar."

"About that time, did you notice anybody check in from the doctors' lot?"

Ginny thought about it for almost five minutes longer than Timmie could tolerate. "Couple o' OBs," she said. "We had twins this mornin', didya know?"

"No, I didn't. Anybody else?"

"You want somebody in particular?"

"Mr. Landry?"

"Aw, heck no, sugar. I woulda remembered. Last time I saw him here on nights he pulled a surprise inspection, got four people fired. He wasn't here."

"How 'bout Dr. Raymond?"

"No. Like I told you. He's been away. In fact, I saw Miss Arlington heading out to pick him up at the airport. Evidently somebody's borrowing his car."

Then he hadn't been home. He had an alibi. He was safe.

At least for that. Timmie let out her breath. She'd have her talk with him when he came to pick up the car she hadn't even used.

"But that other doctor was there," Ginny said, grabbing Timmie's attention.

Timmie gulped. "Other doctor?"

"Sure. I noticed because I didn't see his name on the board. But I saw him at the elevators about two, and I thought, why, that's the second time I've seen him in two days. You know?"

Timmie held her breath. "Who, Ginny?"

"Why, Dr. Raymond's partner. Dr. Davies?"

* * *

Timmie was still sitting in the same place ten minutes later when the doorbell rang. She almost didn't get up to answer it.

Davies had offered to kill her father? Davies was their angel of death? Timmie didn't know how to feel about that. She didn't know him well enough to feel disappointment or anger. She just wanted to know how this affected Alex. How it was going to affect the unit. She wanted to know how they were going to prove it.

The doorbell rang again. Timmie held off answering it until she made a quick call to Murphy, who wasn't there. She left the message on his machine.

"Get everything you can on Dr. Davies. I think he was the one who called me. Call me at work this afternoon."

By the time Timmie reached the front hallway, the jabs on her bell were starting to sound frantic. She thought to look through the glass in the door, and then remembered she hadn't replaced it yet. So she checked through the window and got the third or fourth surprise of her day. Talk about her work coming to her. She yanked the door open so fast her guest took a surprised step back.

"Alex," she greeted him. "Come in. You and I have to talk."

* * *

He didn't know. Timmie just couldn't believe it, even seeing the reaction set in on his lovely golden features when she told him what was happening up in his beloved unit. He really didn't comprehend the fact that those lovely old people who were dying in Restcrest weren't just filling a heavenly transportation quota.

"How could you not figure this out?" Timmie demanded, suddenly furious. "Everybody in town knows but you. And it's your unit!"

Alex Raymond sat in stunned silence on her couch. "You have to be imagining this, Timmie."

Timmie was pacing. She'd had her fill of sitting in one place for a lifetime, evidently, because suddenly she couldn't hold still. "Am I?" she asked. "Then I imagined Daniel Murphy being beaten half to death to get him to stop investigating. I imagined somebody phoning me last night who might be your partner, offering to kill my father if I'd just shut up and leave everything be. Hell, Alex, I must have imagined Victor Adkins being murdered because he believed Charlie Cleveland when he said his father had been murdered. Charlie came to you and you didn't even listen to him!"

Alex paled. Clasped his hands together. Bent his head. Timmie thought he was praying. He wasn't. He was just frozen.

"What did you think those patients were dying of?" she asked.

He didn't budge. "They were frail. They were sick. It wasn't such a surprise, Timmie."

"It was an answer to a prayer, Alex," she accused, having recited a similar version herself more than once. "It was an answer to a lot of prayers."

And it was just easier to pretend it was all okay.

God, she'd lived with that one most of her life. She just couldn't do it anymore. Not simply because her father had been threatened. Because she'd almost been seduced into killing him for her own comfort.

"There's something I don't understand, Alex," she said, standing before him. That forced a laugh from her, a short, sharp sound that made him flinch. "Hell, there are a lot of things I don't understand. But one thing in particular. I don't know Davies from Adam. And yet, he knew me. He knew my dad. He said things..." She stopped for a second, pulled herself up straight, as if that could help her reassert control. "He talked about my dad like he'd known him his whole life, Alex. How could he do that?"

Alex looked up at her, his face ashen and still. His smile, when it came, was wistful, just like it always was when he discussed her dad. "Peter Davies is my partner, Timmie. And your dad... well, you know how I feel about your dad. I talk about him all the time...." He shook his head, tentative acceptance of Timmie's words dying. "It couldn't have been Peter. It simply couldn't. And he is not committing euthanasia just to get research material. I mean, my God, what kind of man do you think he is?"

"You need to find out," Timmie said, and saw him flinch again.

She guessed Alex figured that Alzheimer's was enough reality for him in this lifetime. If he paid his dues to reality there, maybe he wouldn't have to set his feet in it anywhere else.

Well, Timmie waded hip deep in reality every time she set foot in an ER. But reality also waited outside those doors for her, just like it did for everyone else. Everyone else who wasn't Joe Leary or Alex Raymond, evidently.

"Help me, Alex," she said. "Protect the people you've spent your whole life trying to help."

If it were any other situation, any other threat, she would have asked him to think of his mother. She would have asked him whether he would have wanted to put his mother in this kind of peril, simply because she was ill. But she'd walked much too close to that truth to offer it up now.

He was shaking his head again. "There has to be some other explanation."

"Then help me find it. Order a postmortem on Alice Hampton. Go back through those other charts with a fine-toothed comb. Call the police and demand an investigation. Raise holy hell before somebody else does and blames you and the unit."

Still, unbelievably, he just sat there. Just as Timmie had done only yesterday, which meant she couldn't really blame him merely because she was finally ready to act. She could blame him for being deliberately blind, but that wouldn't help.

"Let me think," he begged, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I need to think."

"If that's what you need to do," Timmie conceded. "But I can't wait."

She didn't. Even before Alex made it all the way out the front door, she was on the phone to Micklind. By the time Timmie went in to work at three, she had assurances that Conrad was hard at work sending the medicines in her box through both his gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer and his fingerprint techs, Ginny was making a statement to Murphy about Dr. Davies, and Detective Micklind was pressuring his chief to open a case investigating the strange death of Alice Hampton.

Which left Timmie with the big question of what Alex was going to do. She never got the chance to find out. Twenty minutes after she arrived at work, the area had its first full-fledged ice storm of the year, which inevitably signaled the kickoff of the Puckett County TraumaFest.

* * *

Murphy realized what was happening to the roads when he made the last turn onto Charlie Cleveland's street and slid sideways into a mailbox. The mailbox, one of those craft-show specials that looked like a barn on a milk can, tilted over. The Porsche stopped, without noticeable injury. Murphy cursed himself blue. Then after pulling the mailbox upright, he left the car at the side of the street and slid the rest of the way downhill to Charlie's house.

He'd spent the first two hours of the afternoon getting a five-minute statement from the hospital night operator who had seen Peter Davies wandering around the hospital two nights in a row, when he had no reason to. The operator had said he'd been mumbling to himself, a man intent on a mission.

Or a man terrified of an outcome.

Murphy had followed the talk with the operator with a call to his friend at the Post about the state of Peter Davies's research.

"Fine," he'd said, punching up names on his computer, which was even more ancient than Murphy's. "Getting a lot of notoriety. Matter of fact, he's in the final running for a huge health department grant that could set him up into the next century."

"He is, huh?"

"Yeah. Finalists' names came out this week."

"When do they decide?"

"Next couple of weeks. I've had four calls from the Price PR department in the last two days about it, and the health and leisure editor's three up on me."

Which meant that Davies might well have had an impulse to quiet things down the last few days or so. Tough to convince a government agency that you're working for the welfare of patients you're killing to get their brains.

But if Davies had just been informed in the last week about the finalists' position, would he have had as much reason before to kill people off, raw material or no? Murphy had sat and talked with the guy, and he wasn't convinced that murder was his standard MO for getting his material. And an offer made out of desperation was a lot different than one made during the course of a regular working day.

Davies was gifted, no question. Dedicated, focused, probably brilliant. Definitely a geek with clusters. But a man who didn't just murder people, but made their relatives take part in it? Murphy couldn't quite see it.

Which was why he'd decided to visit Charlie Cleveland.

"Well, hi there, Mr. Murphy," the gray man greeted him when he opened the door to Murphy's knock. "Awful day outside, isn't it?"

"It is, Mr. Cleveland," Murphy agreed. He'd traded in his standard uniform for the turtleneck, leather jacket, and combat boots he'd used for some of his more mobile assignments, and he was still wet and miserable. "Mind if I come in?"

Mr. Cleveland cast a careful look over his shoulder. He wasn't reading the paper this time, but his half glasses were pushed up to the top of his head as if he'd been working at something. Behind him, Murphy could hear the chatter of a television.

"It's important," Murphy insisted gently. "The woman who was here with me before got a call very much like yours, and we taped it. I need to know if you recognize the voice."

Mr. Cleveland said not another word. He just pushed open the storm door and stepped aside.

And then reinforced Murphy's suspicions ten minutes later, after he'd heard the tape.

"That's not him."

Mrs. Cleveland stood in the doorway to the kitchen, as if distance could protect her from her husband's admissions. She was as tidy and unremarkable as Mr. Cleveland, with helmet-permed steel-gray hair and the kind of housedress Sears sold. She was frowning, but Murphy had the feeling she wasn't given to it.

"You're sure?" Murphy asked her husband.

Mr. Cleveland nodded emphatically. "The person who called me didn't have as deep a voice as this. Also didn't sound quite so... unsettling."

"Are you saying it wasn't a man?"

Mr. Cleveland blinked. "I'm not saying that at all. It could have been either. I just know it wasn't this voice."

Murphy nodded and pocketed his tape recorder. "Thank you."

"Something else," Mr. Cleveland said, sliding those glasses back onto his nose as if making a statement. At the kitchen door, Mrs. Cleveland deliberately turned away. "Remember we talked about people possibly donating to Restcrest?"

Murphy had been about to get to his feet. "Yes?"

Mr. Cleveland nodded without emotion. "I thought I'd ask around myself. Seemed to make more sense that way."

"Yes, sir?"

The man nodded now, his fingers tapping against gray serge pants legs. "So far I've talked to five people in town who had parents there. All five made donations. Also asked for donations in lieu of flowers, if you know what I mean."

"Yes, sir, I do."

He nodded again. Tapped his leg as if putting in the final punctuation. "At least five of them."

Murphy got to his feet. No wonder none of them had wanted to talk to him. "Thank you, Mr. Cleveland. I'm sorry we had to put you through this."

When Mr. Cleveland looked up to answer, Murphy saw the tears in his eyes. But the man couldn't manage an answer after all. He just shook his head, and Murphy showed himself out.

* * *

Timmie got a call from Murphy at five, but she was busy helping to put pins in a femur fractured in a motorcycle accident. She told the tech to tell Murphy she'd call him later. She never got around to it.

By six she'd increased her take to seven various injured limbs, a brace of back pains, and a gunshot wound of the lower leg, and by seven, she was triaging a busload of high school athletes who'd run right through the front window of a Stop & Shop, where a gaggle of senior citizens had been making a run on toilet paper, bread, and milk to get them through the storm.

"How do you do that?" Ron asked as she shuffled carts and redirected doctors.

Timmie didn't even bother to look up. One of the kids had a head injury. One of the seniors was dead, and thirty other people needed to be seen. "Experience," she said. "Triage isn't any tougher than air traffic control."

"Planes don't scream at you if they have to wait."

"That's because pilots understand that the one with the least fuel lands first."

"Then why are you getting involved with that stuff at Restcrest?"

Timmie stopped dead in the middle of the hall. "What do you mean?"

Ron shrugged, even as he handed her three more charts. "Those gomers aren't low on fuel. They don't have any fuel. Wouldn't it be kinder to just let them die?"

This wasn't the conversation to be having in the middle of a minor disaster. Timmie triaged three more kids to waiting and intercepted a set of hysterical parents trying to find their son.

"Do you know why those old people are being murdered?" Timmie asked Ron.

"To put them out of their misery."

"You're sure."

He took a second to gather paperwork. When he answered, he couldn't quite look at her. "No."

"That's why it needs to be stopped. Last I heard, even in places with right-to-die laws, only the patient can ask. Those little old people didn't ask."

He still wouldn't face her. "Not everybody's gonna feel that way. Especially when you could end up ruining the hospital."

Which meant that Timmie's problems undoubtedly wouldn't be over once she got her answers. A pleasant thought. After all, maybe she'd had to be on constant alert when she worked in L.A., but she'd never had to protect her back from her fellow workers.

"Everybody should have thought of that when this was a little problem," she said, turning back to work.

By nine, the noise level was deafening, and Timmie was feeding ipecac to a toddler who'd thought birth control pills were Pez.

"Timmie Leary, Dr. Jones, line one. Timmie Leary..."

Timmie handed the barf basin to the anxious mother and jogged to the door.

"Hello?"

"Cara mia, it sounds like a madhouse there. Let me take you away from all that and make you a happy woman."

Timmie stripped off her gloves as she checked to see who was within earshot. Only Mattie, and she was busy trying to explain to a private doc how his forty-six-year-old patient had ended up with his tongue stuck to a post.

"Conrad, mi amore," she crooned in the receiver. "You give me the answer I want, you'll make me a delirious woman."

"How could I not?" he demanded. "When you give me gold, I have no need for alchemy."

Timmie caught her breath. "I was right?"

"Unless you prefer to find your digitoxin in a bottle marked Lasix. This poor grandmother either needs to contact the law offices of Brown and Cruppen or the district attorney."

Timmie found herself in a chair without realizing how she got there. "My God. We have proof."

"But not an identity."

"No prints?" she asked.

"One partial index and thumb only. What do you think our chances are they're our perpetrator's?"

Timmie sighed. "None. With all the people who've handled that vial, there should have been dozens of overlapping prints. Our man must have wiped them all off. They'll be Gladys's for sure."

"Our man?"

"That's the current thinking."

"What else can I do?"

"I'll let you know. Grazie, Conrad. I'd kiss you full on the mouth if you were here."

"I can make it in half an hour," he promised. "Fifteen minutes if I commandeer a helicopter."

Timmie laughed. "Would that I could, caro. But I'm up to my armpits in alligators. Maybe later."

"Ciao, then, bambino. And Timmie, my heart? Take care. There's somebody bad in your hospital."

And he didn't even know about her friends.

Timmie took a second to call Murphy, but his line was out of order. Evidently the ice had started taking its toll on the utilities in the area. Thank God her dad was safe next door.

Considering the conversations she kept having, though, it wouldn't hurt just to make sure.

Cathy was on, and reported that all was well, vigilance high, her father safe and happy as he entertained his cadre of caregivers with a one-man Eugene O'Neill retrospective. Timmie truly hoped so. She figured she could take care of herself, and Walter had Meghan safely tucked away at his house. But Joe was vulnerable. Especially now that Timmie had made him so.

"New patient to room five," the intercom droned.

Timmie looked up. Her room. She was about to get to her feet when she heard it. A high, wavering whine. Gomer noise. She damn near sat right back down. Was this divine retribution or staff retribution, she wondered? She didn't ask, just walked in to where the patient waited, skeletal and unshaven and vacant-eyed.

Mattie located her there twenty minutes later. "Girl named Gladys on the phone for you. Somethin' about pharmacy?"

Timmie looked up from the mountain of towels and sheets she was bundling up. The first thing she'd had to do for her patient was wash him, top to bottom, because no one had. For a long time.

Mattie scowled. "You bein' punished, ya know."

Timmie finished stuffing sheets into the contaminated bag and closed it. "I was thinking that same thing."

"But then, I always seem to get Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. She 'cross the hall."

Timmie stretched and headed for the phone. "Sheena, huh? Is she as pretty as they say?"

Mattie huffed. "Only if you like chest hair and Adam's apples."

At least Timmie could laugh about that. Dumping the bag outside her patient's door, she reached for the phone. "Hello?"

"Timmie? You wanted to know about Alice's medications?"

"Yes, Gladys."

While she talked, Timmie leaned around to catch sight of Sheena, who at six foot plus was swathed in what looked like a fake leopard-fur rug, long black wig, and red stiletto heels. Obviously for stealthy jungle attack, Timmie thought.

"Well, I talked to my pharmacy tech this afternoon," Gladys anxiously informed her. "The one who always services us?"

"Uh-huh."

Timmie had also just noticed that Sheena evidently never traveled without her jungle cats. These were stuffed and moth-eaten and moldy, piled on the cart behind her like dirty blankets.

"...changed just that afternoon."

Well, that yanked Timmie back from the ozone layer. "I'm sorry, Gladys. What?"

"The meds in that nurse server. The pharmacy tech had just restocked them the afternoon Alice died. Right about two o'clock."

She had Timmie's undivided attention. "What about the Lasix, Gladys?" Timmie asked, hopping onto the desk to focus on the situation at hand. "Does she remember that Lasix multivial?"

"That's just it. She restocked the Lasix at two, because Alice was out. She put in four multidose vials. So the Lasix was only in that nurse server from two until five, when I gave it."

Timmie forgot Sheena completely. "Which means that only a limited number of people could have switched it."

"Yes."

"Was Dr. Davies in that afternoon?"

"Dr. Davies? Sure, but..." Her voice started out sounding confused and wound up outraged. "Dr. Davies?"

"Okay, let's try this. Write down all the people you know were there for sure. You and the day crew. Okay?"

"Okay, but it can't have been—"

When the first person screamed, Timmie looked up. When it was followed by a growl of outrage that sounded a lot like "Don't fuck with me!" she damn near forgot Gladys altogether.

Sheena had escaped her lair. She'd also escaped her clothing, which just proved that that Adam's apple wasn't an illusion. Sheena had run off with Tarzan's equipment. She'd also broken out a defibrillator, and was brandishing the paddles at one of the techs. Unfortunately, they were charged and blinking, ready to discharge.

"Gladys?" Timmie asked. "I'll call you back."

Timmie hopped off the desk, and Sheena turned his attention to her. "These are deadly," he threatened, "and I'm not afraid to use them. Now, I want out of here."

Fighting hard not to give in to a silly grin, Timmie shrugged good-naturedly and pulled the tech out of the way. "Sure. What the hell? Have a ball."

"You crazy?" Mattie demanded behind her.

"Nah," Timmie assured her under her breath. "That's not the Fry Daddy he has, just the Fry Baby. Doesn't have as much battery power. He'll run out of juice in half a block."

"By then he could roast a sheep with those things."

"He'll freeze his own little weasel long before that."

"Timmie Leary, line one. Mr. Murphy. Timmie Leary!"

Eyeing the large, hairy, naked man who was holding the crash cart hostage, Timmie sighed. "Tell him I'll call him back."

And then, like the second float in the National Cardioversion Day parade, Timmie followed Sheena out the door.

* * *

Timmie didn't think she'd laughed this much in weeks. She and Mattie were sliding around the sidewalk on the way to her house like Sheena hitting the driveway with a loaded crash cart. After the evening they'd just survived, they'd decided it would be pushing their luck to try and get to Mattie's, so they'd called the Rev, whose phone still worked, to tell him to meet them at Timmie's the next morning. Then, like mountain climbers without pitons, they had slithered all five blocks to Timmie's house.

The storm had stopped after depositing some four inches of ice across the western third of Missouri. Trees glittered and glistened, bushes hung over like old men, and electrical wires spat sparks and snaked across the gleaming streets from where they'd simply broken under the weight of the ice. Half the town was without power, and the rest without salt or traction on the steep, winding streets. The city lights reflected in a low, gray sky, and the world shimmered. It was a beauty Timmie had all but forgotten out on the coast. It was a cold that soaked right through her jacket.

"I will never forget the look on your face when Sheena walked out of that room without his fur," Mattie chortled.

"He had his fur," Timmie disagreed, wiping tears away. "He just forgot his clothes."

Mattie's laugh was high and shrill. "Girl, you know we never gonna get over havin' our defibrillator kidnapped."

Timmie laughed even harder and almost landed right on her butt. "I could already envision its picture on the side of a milk carton. Holding today's paper in its little paddles..."

Mattie smacked her on the head. "Stop it! I thought you was crazy when you let him go outside. But, girl, the minute he hit that ice, he turned that crash cart into a bobsled."

"Woulda made a helluva run, too, if he hadn't broadsided that ambulance at the bottom of the hill." Timmie pulled her key out and blew on her cold, chapped fingers. "Be careful of the steps. I haven't salted any better than the county."

They clung to each other and the ice-slick porch posts to keep themselves upright. Timmie strode over the creaky step and pulled open her screen door.

"You get some answers about your old people tonight?" Mattie asked.

Timmie smiled almost benevolently. "I did. I see a light at the end of the tunnel, and this time it isn't a freight train."

Not a freight train. A superliner that smacked Timmie full in the face when she opened the door to her house and realized that her lights were on.

"Get out," she instinctively urged, hand back against Mattie.

"What?"

She hadn't left her lights on before leaving. She hadn't let anybody in her house. But somebody was there.

"What..."

Timmie stopped pushing. She'd just caught sight of the wall.

Her grandmother's cabbage rose wallpaper, spattered in gore.

"No. Oh, no."

Her first thought was that her father had gotten here. Sneaked out of Restcrest while she was busy with normal mayhem and completed his attempt to blow his brains out with that huge old .45 she'd hidden high in the front hall closet.

"Timmie?" Mattie, right behind her, didn't see it yet. She didn't hear the sudden, startled thudding of Timmie's adrenaline-stoked heart. No emergency room nurse could mistake the smell, though. Sweet, cloying, coppery. The smell of tissue and blood and destruction.

"Sweet Jesus..."

Timmie saw feet in tasseled loafers. Gray pinstriped pants. Long legs. She couldn't move. She couldn't look.

She couldn't stop.

His brains and his blood were spattered on her wall. His body lay across her living room floor where it had fallen, his pants dark with urine, his eyes wide and sightless, the right side of his head simply gone. And lying just beyond the reach of his right hand, her father's old .45.

"Oh, my dear sweet Jesus," Mattie whispered in sick dismay. "Timmie, who is that?"

Timmie choked. She tried to suck in a breath and sobbed instead. "Jason. My ex-husband."