Peter Clement: The Inquisitor

She glared at him. "How the hell did you find out?"

"Through Cheryl Branagh. After my conversation with her Wednesday, she began to think that my idea of someone caring enough about Jerome Wilcher to avenge his death might not be so crazy. I made a call to the cemetery where she remembered attending the funeral, giving the caretaker a story that former colleagues wanted to include the late doctor in a hall of honor but were unable to track down any family members. The caretaker, demonstrating most people's willingness to give doctors confidential information, looked up who had been paying the maintenance for the grave. He found a Mrs. Kathleen B. Otterman, her address on a rural route somewhere in Tennessee."

"The B stood for Biggs?"

"Right. It was her maiden name- she's a divorcee. But I'd no idea of that when I first phoned. The woman herself wouldn't come on the line to talk with me, but her sister gabbed readily enough. Said Katie, as she called her, had been an invalid for years. I asked outright if they knew Thomas Biggs. 'Thomas?' she said. 'Oh, my God, what's happened?' I told her just about the electrocution, not the rest of what he'd done, letting it sound like an accident. Then I told her what hospital they'd sent him to. From the way she went to pieces, he undoubtedly meant a lot to her, and she kept saying, 'This will finally kill Katie.'"

"Is he still alive?"

"More a heart-lung preparation from what I hear. He's got spurts of brain activity that no one can really account for, enough that they won't pull the plug to chop him for parts just yet, though his kidneys and liver are spoken for."

She shuddered. "But what's the rest of the story? I mean, he'd have been what, thirteen when Jerome killed himself? And the man probably wasn't much of a dad, no? Why the hell would he go after Stewart now?"

"I've spent forty-eight hours trying to figure that out. I'm afraid all I could get were secondhand scraps of information, so it's been more filling in the gaps than anything else."

"But what about the police? Won't they-"

"The woman investigating Stewart's death, Detective Lazar, spoke with the county sheriff where Biggs's mother and aunt lived. He knew all the dirt about the family, and gave the impression most of the locals did too. According to him, Thomas's mother had still been married when she started having an affair with Jerome Wilcher. She'd worked as a technician at one of the labs he visited where they were doing research trials for one of his projects. After getting pregnant, she divorced her husband but kept her married name and raised Thomas on her own. Jerome Wilcher visited a lot but must have kept his little family a secret from his New York colleagues- probably because of that ex-wife who kept trying to clean him out financially. Thomas and his mother apparently never got much support, but at Jerome's death, they found out he'd set up a trust for Thomas's university education. Except Katie went off the deep end."

"How do you mean?"

"Once Jerome hung himself, she no longer saw any reason to be discreet, though most of the locals knew what was going on anyway. But she didn't just begin to speak openly about their long relationship. She obsessed about Jerome's death and belabored anyone who would listen with all the details about how he had been sabotaged by colleagues at NYCH. One tidbit that became common knowledge as a result of her going on all the time is that apparently Thomas discovered Jerome's body. The night he killed himself Katie and the boy were due to arrive on one of their rare trips to visit him in New York. Jerome must have been in such deep despair over the collapse of his career that by then he could no longer face them.

"And if that weren't trauma enough for Thomas, the mother went nuts afterward, first trying to hang herself in her basement at the farmhouse. Local rumor had it that she staged the event so Thomas would find her in time to cut her down. But the real damage she did him, according to the neighbors, was done over the long term. When she ran out of sympathetic people willing to listen to her ranting about how Jerome had been so heinously wronged, she unleashed it all on Thomas, feeding him a steady diatribe of hatred against those whom she held responsible for his father's death. To his credit, he moved out as soon as he could, but that wasn't until four years later, when he accessed the trust fund and got himself into a community college as far away as possible. But his mother had unquestionably done her work on him, marked him indelibly- much the way, I suppose, a terrorist might indoctrinate a son to be a suicide bomber- spooning him a daily diet of malice against the intended target."

"He went into medicine just to avenge his father?"

"I doubt that. Again relying on what the locals say, it seems he always wanted to be a doctor, just like the father he never really had- an understandable enough impulse. But his aspirations to follow in the old man's footsteps had an unmistakably morbid twist, thanks to Mama. With the smarts to have his pick of all the top schools, he chose the one where his father had been destroyed. Whether he went there with a plan in mind, to hunt down the one his mother held responsible for Jerome's death, we'll never know. But I doubt it. Otherwise, he probably would have come here straight off. Maybe he first wanted to make a mark where his father had been, and the compulsion to destroy the man who'd engineered his father's downfall only took hold later. And of course, there's the possibility his mother continued to egg him on. But again, that's all part of the story that I doubt we'll ever know."

"My God," she said, quietly, as if thinking out loud. "And he would have gotten away with it too, except for you starting to investigate Elizabeth Matthews's death."

"Yeah, he would have. And the real irony is, I don't think Thomas Biggs had anything to do with that woman's dying."

3:30 p.m.

Earl thought J.S. seemed worse than when he'd initially broken the news about Thomas to her. Her moods fluxed all over the place- flashed with outrage, plummeted into misery, roiled with disgust- and every one of the changes beamed at him through glistening dark eyes.

"It was an act. All a vicious act," she said the instant he stepped into her room. She'd also been transferred out of ICU that morning, the same as Janet.

"He fooled everyone, J.S." he told her. "Me, Janet, everyone."

"But I loved a lie. What the hell does that say about me, my instincts, my trusting anyone again?"

"I think Thomas believed his own lie most of the time. Escaped into it. He couldn't have pulled off that big a charade as an act. The whole thing was complex as hell, and none of us will ever encounter the likes of it again."

"You think that makes me feel better? I loved something unreal. And in the end, the bastard tried to kill me, for no reason other than what, a dry run for his plan to make Janet miscarry?"

"Oh, he had a reason. You were smart enough to eventually see what he feared that Janet and I would see, especially if I checked the records of people using pass cards when they weren't on duty."

"How do you mean I could have found him out?"

Earl swallowed, grateful for something he could answer. "Because he couldn't run his trials only during the nights he was on duty- not enough time- and because he didn't want you to know he was sneaking back into the hospital other nights, he did it only when you were safely at work, and not apt to want to spend the night with him."

She blushed. "It wasn't that often."

"Well, he couldn't risk you even phoning him in the middle of the night and wanting to know where he was. If you realized the killer worked only when you were safely in ER, you might catch on."

"But I didn't." She seemed as disgusted with herself as ever.