Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

He was already dialing the number for NYCH.

“I’m sorry, sir, but all calls to that number have been blocked. I can give you the nurse’s desk.”

“Are you a relative?” said the woman who picked up.

“No, I’m his colleague, Dr. Mark Roper. He and I are working on a coroner’s case together. I must talk with him.”

“Dr. Garnet has been sedated, sir, and Dr. Collins has left strict orders he not be disturbed.”

“Then connect me with Dr. Collins’s home.”

“One moment.”

“Mark!” Melanie greeted him. “I’m sorry, I guess I should have informed you about Earl’s admission. Apologies.”

“What happened?”

“Looks like he picked up a bug from our fair city’s fine cuisine. I’ll have preliminary cultures in the morning.”

“But is he all right?”

“Sure. I mean, he’s got a lot of discomfort, but vitals are fine, lytes et cetera check out okay, and believe me, he’s well covered in the analgesia department.”

Mark’s heartbeat ticked up a notch. He hesitated to ask his next question, thinking it would sound crazy, but went ahead anyway. “Melanie, I know you’re going to think I’m nuts for even suggesting this, but is there any way Earl could have been deliberately poisoned?”

“You mean by the likes of Chaz Braden?”

“My God. Earl told you?”

“Only about your suspicions over what happened to Bessie McDonald. As for him, his case seems bona fide. Certainly Earl didn’t say anything to make me think differently. But don’t worry. I’m hovering over him like a mother hen. Chaz Braden, or anyone else I haven’t personally authorized, won’t get near him.”

That’s a pretty big promise, Mark thought, knowing perfectly well how staff could come and go as they pleased on a busy ward, whatever Melanie might order. Nevertheless, he thanked her, asked that she phone him if there were any changes in Earl’s condition, and hung up.

Quickly telling Lucy what had happened, he tried Victor’s number again.

Still no answer. “I guess we’ll have to wait until morning. He’s obviously got a better social life than I thought.”

“Let’s hope he’s getting laid,” she said with a wicked grin, and walked over to where she’d left the boxes of birth records she’d been going through. “As for me, I’m going to work on these a while. You, mister, better go to bed. You look tired.”

Mark felt a flash of alarm, his concerns about the integrity of evidence resurfacing. Then he thought, What the hell. She’d already been through them once. From his own look at them, they didn’t seem to have a bearing on the case anyway. And somewhere in there should be her own birth record. Maybe she’d find something useful in that regard. Who was he to stand in the way of a woman’s search for her mother?

As she spread out some of the papers on the kitchen table, he saw large sheets that looked like accounting ledgers with reams of handwritten numbers on them. “What are those?”

“A summary I’m making of all the statistics. I got pretty good at spotting trends on spreadsheets like these in the refugee camps. I thought I’d give it a go here.”

Impressed by her diligence, he wished her good night, and went upstairs to bed.

But as he tried to fall asleep, his ugly confrontation with Braden crowded in, hanging over everything like a cold shroud. Damn the man to hell for suggesting such muck about his father.

He eventually drifted off.

Bad dreams ambushed him throughout the night. The one that brought him fully awake found him in the cold water where they’d found Kelly with her killer out in the blackness, circling him, drawing closer. He struggled to reach the surface, but his limbs moved in agonizing slow motion as he sank deeper, and the dark liquid congealed around him with the smothering slipperiness of blood.

That same evening, Thursday,

November 22, 11:30 P.M.

New York City Hospital

Earl’s eyes shot open.

He lay motionless, peering through the darkness, wondering what had awakened him. He heard a soft click, the sound of his room door swinging shut.

Someone must have been in to check on him and just left.

Probably a nurse.

Mentally he felt wrapped in cotton from the morphine he’d gotten during the day, but for the moment he didn’t have any pain. He definitely didn’t want another shot, not the way it turned his brain into cream cheese.

When the first dose wore off, he’d managed to phone Janet and explain what had happened, trying to minimize his symptoms. “Don’t worry, you know these things are usually over in twenty-four hours. I’m just sorry I can’t have Thanksgiving dinner with you and Brendan.”

“Dammit, Earl, be straight with me.”

“I am, I swear-”

“You wouldn’t let anyone drag you into a hospital bed unless you were half-dead. Now tell me what’s going on – really.”

“Everything’s fine, Janet, just fine…” As he’d talked, it became all he could do to keep his voice from giving away the sheer agony in his stomach. He didn’t want her jumping on a plane, bringing Brendan, and having them both fretting at his bedside. He finally convinced her to stay put.

“But if you’re not telling me something, Earl Garnet, I’ll doctor you myself, starting with the biggest colonoscopy tube I can find-”

“Of course I’m telling you everything.”

“You lie like a pirate.”

“Me?”

“When it comes to whether you’re sick or in trouble, you do.”

To Brendan he’d said, “Just a sick tummy, like you get sometimes.”

“Drink Seven-Up,” his son had advised.

He’d also tried to reach Mark, got his answering machine, and left the number.

Then he’d requested a nurse to contact Melanie. “Ask her to please change the order to Demerol or codeine – something that won’t put me so out.”

A matronly red-cheeked woman wearing granny glasses had cheerfully spiked another needleful of morphine into his IV line. “No such luck. Dr. Collins says you need your rest.” She relaunched him to the other side of the universe.

The soft squeak of crepe soles approaching his bed snapped him into the present, and a white shape glided toward him in the darkness.

“Who’s there?” he yelled, jackknifing upright.

“It’s Tanya Wozcek, Dr. Garnet. Quiet down. I shouldn’t even be here.”

“Tanya?”

She snapped on his bedside lamp. The light caught the bristles of her short hair and turned it into a silvery brown aura. “I heard you were admitted. All the women on my floor are talking about what a weird coincidence it is, you getting sick after asking all those questions about Bessie. I had to make sure you were all right, so I slipped away.”

“I’m okay,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Chaz Braden hasn’t been near you, has he? I mean, is there any way he could have made you ill?”

Whatever he suspected Braden of doing, the last thing he needed right now was an outlandish rumor casting himself as the man’s latest victim. Should he or Mark ever find enough evidence to lay charges against Chaz, he could just imagine what a defense lawyer would say. “So Chaz Braden, in addition to murdering Dr. Kelly McShane, making Dr. Bessie McDonald slip into a coma, and firing a shot at Dr. Mark Roper, also managed somehow to poison Dr. Earl Garnet, even though no one can tell us when or how. Is there an MD in Manhattan he hasn’t attacked?”

“No, I haven’t even seen him since last Saturday. And though I appreciate your concern, I insist you don’t go spreading-”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t take advantage of your being here.”