Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“Could they have been what your darling Kelly was trying to hold over your head so you wouldn’t go looking for her?”

“But it concluded here nothing was wrong. During my entire career I don’t recall ever being faulted for using digoxin incorrectly.”

“What exactly did she say to you the night she disappeared? Can you remember?”

Remember? How could he ever forget?

She had ambushed him as he left his Park Avenue office around five that Thursday afternoon. It was hot the way only New York could get in August, when the city sealed itself in its own bubble of dirt, exhaust, and exhaled CO 2from eight million people.

Kelly’s white dress had seemed to float on the humid air as she walked out from under the awning of the next door coffee shop. He had no idea how long she’d been waiting there. The only warning of the extent to which she was about to shake his world was the ferocity of the expression on her face.

“I’m leaving you, Chaz,” she said, stopping while still five feet away, her arms folded across her breasts. “Tonight.”

“What?” The people pushing by on either side of them blurred, the traffic noises sounded hollow and distant. He stepped toward her, his hands ready to grab her arms.

“Don’t come any closer or I’ll scream!”

The sibilant command stopped him cold. He hated public scenes. No doubt that was why she had staked out his office and caught him in a crowd. Seething, he remained where he stood, aware again of the people jostling his shoulders and wondering if they heard her. “Damn it, Kelly.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Leaving you. And don’t try to follow me, or I’ll ruin your career – put a stain on your record that’ll never come out.”

“What are you talking about?” His cheeks burning, he took another step.

“I warn you,” she said in an overly loud voice. People turned to look at her. Some gave him funny glances. But no one stopped.

Except Chaz.

“Daddy’s little progeny headed to be Chief of Cardiology,” she said, her voice taunting and still far too loud for his liking.

“Well, forget about it,” she went on. “One patient dead, one near dead, both on your watch. I can make you equally responsible, or not.”

“What patients?” He could barely keep from lunging at her, as enraged at her slipping from his control as at what she said. But occasional passersby still seemed to be paying attention, especially to her.

“Think I’d tell you now, so you could make records disappear? Just know there’s a viper in your nest, and you missed it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Stay away from me,” she said, louder than ever, “and I’ll clean it out so there’s no reflection on you. Come after me, and your dream of being top dog at NYCH or anywhere else that counts is over.”

“Kelly, for God’s sake-”

Kelly gave him a look of triumphant defiance, turned on her heel, and ran to a cab parked a few car lengths away. Before he could think to race after her, she jumped inside, and the driver pulled away.

“Chaz?” His father’s voice pulled him back to the present.

He found himself staring at his own clenched fists. He’d never told the police of the encounter. And gave only the sketchiest details to his father. He’d been too humiliated to say more.

“Chaz, I asked if you could recall exactly what Kelly said to you that last time you saw her. Didn’t she threaten you in some way?”

Before answering, he took a slow deep breath and forced his hands to relax. “Yes. But what she said to me, word for word, was ‘One patient dead, one near dead, both on your watch.’ ”

“So these two cases could be exactly what she was talking about?”

“I suppose so.”

He began to collect the photos. “Do you remember these two people?”

“Are you kidding? I’d have to see their full charts.”

“Of course.” He thought a few seconds. “But better you not ask for them. I’ll stay here tomorrow to greet our guests, then early Wednesday morning take the train to New York. I’ll slip into medical records and discreetly pull the dossiers myself, unofficially of course, and find out what you might be up against without tipping off Roper or anyone else that we know about them.”

A familiar fatigue engulfed Chaz as his father’s preemptive strike to take charge did its usual work and drained whatever reservoir of strength he might have called upon to fend for himself. As if that part of him ever had a chance to exist. It lay withered and shrunken, the way any organ would end up after a lifetime of disuse.

… Beware a father of spectacular ability… They never let you fail, always stepping in to take over…

Her words taunted him from the grave.

Tuesday, November 20, 6:00 A.M.

Bacteriology Laboratory,

New York City Hospital

Donna Johnson, third-year medical student and part-time lab technician, was sound asleep on the staff-lounge couch when a noise out in the lab wakened her.

What the hell? No one should be there.

She stayed curled up in the darkness, her black skin an advantage for once. If anybody found out she sneaked in here to sleep, it’d be, hello pink slip, good-bye job.

The soft whir of a computer fan started up, a musical chord sounded as one of the countertop units was brought on-line, and a ghostly blue glow seeped through the wraparound windows separating this room from the rest of the bacteriology department.

Definitely somebody there. Thank God whoever it was hadn’t turned on the overhead lights. The place where she lay remained in deep shadow.

Unable to see her watch, she’d no idea of the time. Without moving off the couch, she strained to see the wall clock out in the lab proper, keeping her head below the level of the sill.

She had trouble making out the numbers, and only then realized her glasses had slipped off as she slept. Hopelessly myopic without them, she felt around in the dark. No luck. They must have fallen down between the cushions. She again squinted toward the clock face, and figured it must be near six, the hands seeming to make a near-vertical line.

Shit. Let’s hope this early bird will be quick. The day shift would be showing up in an hour. And she had to pee something awful. She lay back on the couch and tried to ignore her bladder. That just made the urge stronger. She raised her head enough to see over the sill, praying the person would be gone.

She could make out the back of someone in a white coat hunched over a computer while writing on a piece of paper.

Hardly anybody had cause to do emergency cultures or gram stains in the middle of the night. ER prepared their own slides to look at under the microscope, and on the floors, except for life-threatening infections such as meningitis or septic shock, most samples could wait until morning to be processed.

So who the hell was keeping her from going to pee?

The individual clicked off the computer, plunging the lab back into total darkness, but the thin beam of what must have been a penlight snapped on. The user walked it toward the far corner of the lab, passing between columns of fluorescent digital readouts and rows of black microscopes barely visible in the ambient light. He, or she, paused by a rack of unused petri dishes – round shallow containers lined with bouillon agar used to grow bacteria cultures – and slipped one of them into the pocket of the white coat, then continued to where the incubators glinted in the dim illumination.

A click, and one of the counter lights came to life. The black silhouette pulled on a pair of latex gloves from a nearby box, reached into the hood, and began to retrieve stack after stack of petri dishes, laying them out on the counter so that the identifying labels would have been visible, then returning them to the incubator. After five interminable minutes – Donna was crossing her legs and gritting her teeth – the person laid a specific dish aside, carefully lifted off the glass lid, located a supply of culture tubes on the lab bench, and, using the sterile Q-tip from one, scooped up a good-sized chunk of agar. Retrieving the unused container pocketed earlier, the figure then ran the swab over its surface, presumably plating out whatever organism had been harvested. Returning the original sample to its place in the incubator, the silhouette then extracted a Ziploc bag from another pocket, sealed the newly plated dish in it, snapped off the gloves, dumped them into a wastebasket, and turned off the counter light. Once more the thin beam of the penlight cut through the darkness, moving toward the door. The snap of the lock opening sounded loud in the absolute silence, and the white-coated visitor, momentarily framed in the faint light from the hallway, was gone.