Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

She went very quiet. “How did it happen?”

Unwanted flashbacks flickered to life: the boom that he heard a mile away, racing toward the smoke on his bike, the circle of people standing around something.

“It was an accident,” he said, trying to shut down the images. “And there’s nothing to talk about. I just wanted you to know why I wasn’t exactly a rock tonight.” The darkest notion of all continued to circle him, but he wouldn’t allow it even to take the shape of thought.

She watched him over the white mound of foam while taking small sips from her own cup, her dark gaze giving him the tell-me-your-story look that he’d seen work so magically with his patients.

Well, it wasn’t going to succeed with him.

Using a tone intended to be all business, he told her only what had been tumbling through his head while he’d worked on Nell, that the gas tank explosion had been deliberately set, intended to kill the three of them. Yet as he talked, his mind veered to the woman on the phone tonight. Whatever else Victor had found, it was what he discovered about the big companies and their executive health plans that seemed to be important. At least she seemed to think so, enough to believe someone could kill him over it.

His thoughts shifted to Charles Braden with those silver-spooned friends of his from the business elites of Manhattan. Maybe one had nothing to do with the other, but he found it impossible not to think that their corporations might be involved.

So he shared all this with Lucy as well.

It didn’t sound so outrageous laid it out in words.

He even talked about his turmoil over how to manage Nell in ER, including the way Braden had intruded on his thoughts because of the set-to they’d had over euthanasia while they were in the man’s library. “I thought he played devil’s advocate last night. But I’m not so sure he wouldn’t have granted Nell’s wish and put her out of her misery if he were running the resuscitation just now.”

“How do you mean?”

“He pontificated about how the line between right and wrong, even life and death, blurs with advances in technology and the times. To prove the point, he raised some pretty troubling issues about euthanasia. It was chilling, hearing him talk about how, in the past, country doctors had smothered deformed newborns to save the family the hardship of raising a handicapped child.”

“What?”

“You heard me right. He’s got this weird collection of medical atrocities he calls his ‘hall of shame’ – twisted eugenics, medical war crimes, that kind of thing – and he uses it to proselytize against deviant science.”

Lucy’s jaw fell, her eyes widened, and she dived for her purse. “Mark, I know what’s wrong!”

“What?”

She hauled out the folded spreadsheets of statistics she’d brought with her and spread them out on a nearby coffee table. “All along you’ve been preoccupied with Chaz, but what if it’s Daddy who has a secret?”

“How do you mean?”

She tapped the papers in front of her. “I didn’t want to tell you my suspicions about what I found here, because they seemed to have no context, and…” She stopped speaking, her cheeks flushed.

“Go on.”

She hesitated, then said, “It’s what we fought about earlier. I wasn’t a total klutz when I came here and stuck my nose in your investigation. I actually bent over backwards not to let my issues with Braden cloud your judgment about the man. So when I saw the discrepancy, I figured my own history with him had made me so biased I might be making too much of it, and I didn’t say anything.”

“Making too much of what?”

“Check this out.” She began to draw her finger down the various columns of numbers. “I think I discovered why your father had been interested in Braden Senior’s charitable works.”

He immediately leaned forward to see what she had.

“These are summaries of the births, deaths, and adoptions at the home; these, births and deaths at the center in Saratoga Springs. Like you, I first looked for the usual indicators of something wrong – a higher mortality-morbidity rate, that kind of thing. But as you said, the statistics are right on the norm for the home, and even lower than normal for the maternity center. In both instances, anyone looking at them would quickly conclude all was well.”

“Right.”

“So let’s say we give the guy credit for superb obstetrical skills on his moneyed patients.” Beside the mortality-morbidity numbers she placed yet another paper full of figures in her handwriting. “This is a synopsis of the actual delivery records your father had requisitioned from both places. I totaled all the infants pronounced normal, and here I itemized those with congenital abnormalities – heart defects; urinary tract anomalies; cleft lips and palates; limb aberrations, including club feet; neuronal tube defects of varying severity, some with only nominally open spines, others with fully open cords; and of course twenty-three trisomy where the mongoloid features were recognizable at birth.”

“You were busy!” Mark said with a whistle, realizing she must have stayed up most of the nights he’d left her working on them at the kitchen table.

“As I said, I got used to reading mass records at the camps. Now here’s the point. The guy’s maternity center is short on congenital abnormalities.”

“Short?”

“Yeah. Remember obstetrical statistics. Three percent of all newborns have some defect at birth. Out of the six thousand deliveries documented in these records, he should have recorded about a hundred and eighty with some kind of problem. He had barely a dozen. Good prenatal care can accomplish a lot, but change the rate of defects that much, no way. He had to be fudging his numbers. At least, that’s what I thought initially, but couldn’t see how or why.”

“Well, I’ll be.”

“And I figured your dad couldn’t pin him down, or he’d have done something about the place.”

He never got the chance, Mark thought.

“Which begged the question,” she continued, “why Braden would care about anyone twigging to the discrepancy in his records at this late date, there being no obvious link with Kelly’s murder or anything else. At least it seemed that way, which is why I hesitated to even bring it up…”

As Lucy talked, the number 180 stuck in his mind. He’d found something of that amount when he reviewed the records himself. But what? He recalled it had to do with the home for unwed mothers, not the maternity center.

“… I did spot another connection, but it didn’t mean anything until just now, when you mentioned eugenics. Look at the total number of adoptions. Braden claimed to have made them directly out of the home for unwed mothers.” She flipped back a page and began to scan yet more lists of figures.

Mark reached over and laid his hand on her arm. He knew what the number would be. One hundred and eighty. His breathing slowed.

“Here it is,” she continued, obviously too charged up to heed his touch. “The number of private adoptions arranged from the home – 180! See what he might have been doing? Substituting healthy babies from the home for deformed ones at the maternity center. I mean, my God, can you imagine anything so hideous? It might actually have been legal if done on the up-and-up, couples from the maternity center putting their deformed kids up for immediate adoption, at the same time picking themselves up a healthy child from the home. Odious, but legal. The trouble is, there’s no records of the abnormal kids at either place. It’s as if they disappeared.”

The same evening, Friday, November 23, 9:30 P.M.