Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“Just tell me what you have.” He could barely keep his voice steady.

Still more breathing. Then she asked, “Do you know how screening for executive health plans work?”

“Sure. I’ve done my share.”

“He’s managed to get records from some of our biggest clients documenting when executives’ policies were newly issued or terminated,” she continued. “This basically reflects who’s been hired and who’s been fired. I can only guess someone at these companies sent them to him on the QT after he’d twisted their arms. He had that kind of good rapport with the people he dealt with. Word got around like wildfire on the Internet when they learned…”

He thought he heard her sob again.

“Sorry,” she said. “All those e-mails of condolences, yet outside of office hours he seemed so alone.”

Waiting for her to compose herself, he wondered if she knew the half of it.

She sucked in a deep breath. “Dr. Roper, before telling you what he found, I have to know. Did someone kill Victor because of this?”

Mark’s official line that he couldn’t give out confidential information sprung to his lips, but he didn’t speak it, knowing he might spook an already frightened woman. Instead he told her the truth. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, God! So it’s possible.”

“Listen. We can get you protection. I’ll take you to the police myself, right now if you want. And we mustn’t say anything more-”

He was listening to a dial tone again.

As he slowly lowered the phone, he sat staring straight ahead, trying to think what he should do. His gaze swept north, pulled by a glowing orange smudge that pulsed and waned above the trees against the nighttime skyline. It took him a second to realize it must be coming from a huge fire, and a heartbeat more to think it could be near Nell’s cabin.

A wall of flames rose above the back half of the structure; smoke engulfed the front.

She lay in the snow before the door where she’d crawled, naked, the skin on her head and the left side of her torso covered in carbon. But within the blackened face, white eyes glittered, alive, the nightmare from his childhood.

He thought her wrist had a weak pulse. As he reached into the flesh of her neck to palpate her carotid to be sure, that same cloying smell that could send his heart pounding came off her in waves and filled him with terror. Swallowing to keep from gagging, he felt the artery fluttering beneath his fingertips. In the headlights of the Jeep he could see the burns weren’t that deep. The black was mainly soot.

Her darkened lips parted, revealing a slash of creamy teeth, and she screamed.

“Help me get her to the back of the Jeep,” he told Lucy, his voice quivering and barely able to keep from breaking.

Seconds later they careened out of the driveway, Lucy at the wheel as he huddled over Nell’s body, muttering words of encouragement, at the same time punching in the number for the fire department, summoning them to a lost cause. Then he called Dan, briefed him on the details, and dispatched him to the scene.

Her screams continued, and her pulse grew weaker.

“She needs morphine and IV fluids, or she’ll never make it to Saratoga. Go to Mary and Betty Thomson’s,” he yelled at Lucy. Then he called their number, told them he’d be there in five minutes and what to have ready for him.

Betty stood at the door with the vials, bags, needles, and tubing in a plastic bag. “I’m praying for her,” she told Mark as he scooped up the equipment.

“Me too,” he heard Mary call from the back room.

Lucy spun the Jeep back out on the highway and they were off again.

The burns on her head, shoulders, and left trunk were less than he originally thought, first- and second-degree at the most, the same for the side of her face. It puzzled him how she’d protected that part of her body from more severe damage. The mucosal membranes inside her mouth, however, were blackened as well, and he feared most for her airway. The soft tissues there were much more vulnerable, and even with less deep burns, they could swell up to obstruct her breathing. An explosion must have accompanied the flames, as only hot gases would penetrate orifices to damage them like that.

He easily inserted an angiocath needle into her right arm and opened the IV full, to raise her pressure, then adjusted it to replace the bodily fluids that would leak from her charred skin. To quiet her shrieks and cries, he injected half an ampule of Mary’s morphine.

To his astonishment, her eyes fluttered open, she moaned, and said, “Some dinner party, eh, Doc?”

“What happened, Nell?”

“The back of my cabin blew… where propane tank is.”

He reached for her hand, feeling the need to hold it, not just to comfort her, but to keep his own from trembling.

“Was in the tub taking my bath,” she continued. “That’s what saved me.”

Her voice kept fracturing into different pitches, all of them high, as if forced through a strainer. The soft tissues near her vocal cords were swelling closed. She’d need a tube to keep breathing, and fast.

Like a drowning man clinging to a single plank, he focused solely on what he knew best: checking her pulse – weak; assessing her breathing – labored and noisy; fine-tuning her IV – running fine. The routine momentarily kept his larger questions at bay, and all their ramifications. “We’ll soon be at the hospital,” he said, reassuring her and hitting the numbers for ER on his phone.

She began to moan again, and mutter incoherently.

“This is Dr. Mark Roper, and I’m bringing in an eighty-year-old woman who’s been in an explosion and has first- and second-degree burns to the head and trunk, but with more severe airway involvement…”

His own voice sounded far away as he continued to brief the triage nurse, kneeling over Nell and watching Lucy at the wheel as they sped along the deserted road. Riddles and ghosts continued to circle, threatening to come in from the darkness.

He continually had to reposition Nell’s head to prevent her tongue from falling backward where it might obstruct her breathing; only then did he realize she’d finally worn her damn plate.

“Roper’s special,” the triage nurse called into her intercom the minute she saw Mark jump out of the Jeep in the ambulance bay.

Lucy frowned.

Instantly orderlies, nurses, and two doctors arrived to help.

“I thought only doctors who didn’t want your patients called them Roper’s specials,” she said to him as they transferred Nell to a stretcher and raced her down the hall.

One of the physicians, a tall ebony-skinned woman with a long gray braid down to her waist gave her an incredulous look. “Where are you from, gal? In ER it means when Mark sends us someone he can’t handle alone, we better be on our toes.”

“Dr. Lucy O’Connor, meet Dr. Carla Moore, one of the few in this establishment who don’t always consider me and my patients to be a pain in the ass.” He tried to sound calm, yet he still quaked inside, trying to keep memory from intruding on what had to be done now.

Nell’s respirations were already down to a squeak. “Seems like we need to intubate this one,” Carla said, as they skidded into a resuscitation room the size of a shoe box lined with racks of equipment, everything – lines, monitors, IVs – within easy reach.

Carla shoved an anesthetic tray at him. On it were different-sized endotracheal tubes spread out in a semicircle around a laryngoscope. “Will you do the honors? I could use your help.”

He nodded, slipped on a pair of sterile gloves, then positioned Nell’s head and neck as if she were leaning forward to sniff a flower, maximally opening her airway. He reached for a silver suction probe to clear away her saliva, his fingers fumbling the instrument as he worked.