Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

His restlessness became unbearable. He rang for the nurse, asked for a pad of paper, sticky tape, and as many different colored pens as she could spare.

“You should get some sleep, not stay up coloring all night,” the woman said, not at all as jovial, with her red cheeks and granny glasses, as he’d remembered while loaded with morphine. Her name wasn’t much of a yuk either. The tag read MRS. WHITE, as if she’d killed Professor Plum in the library with the pipe wrench.

“What’ll it be next,” she added, “cutting out paper dolls?”

“Sweet!” he told her.

He proceeded to do what he always did when the complexity of a patient’s medical problem overwhelmed him – make a flowchart of all the variables.

At the center he wrote Kelly .

Circling her like malevolent red moons he placed Chaz Braden and Samantha McShane , and in more distant orbits, using a slightly less vibrant orange, Charles Braden III and Walter McShane .

Closer to Kelly he added Earl Garnet , Cam Roper , and Mark Roper , all in green – the men who loved her.

Radiating out from Charles Braden III he drew two lines. On the end of one he wrote Maternity Center , the end of the other Home for Unwed Mothers . He also made a horizontal line connecting the two, in red.

Floating above these, suspended in the middle of nowhere, he added the name Nucleus Laboratories , and joined to it with a hard black line, Corporate Executive Health Plans . With a lighter line, he added, Genetic Screenings: Siblings with a Positive Family History for Cancer .

From these he penciled in a tentative line to Chaz Braden’s name with a ? on it.

Finally, he scribbled Victims with information at the very top of the page, added Victor Feldt as number one with a black line joining him to Nucleus labs, and Nell as number two, her black line leading to Kelly .

And that was it for Hampton Junction.

Or was it? He added Lucy , circled it, and penciled in three faint lines, each marked with a ? , between her name and his principle suspects – Chaz ; Charles ; Samantha .

Moving to the bottom of the page he wrote NYCH , with four spokes radiating out from it, one to Kelly , one to each of the Bradens , and one to himself. He added a fifth spoke and on it wrote Bessie McDonald-Victim? Finally, he designated a similar Victim? status to himself.

At first he felt a sense of mastery, having condensed everything on one page. A half hour later he seethed with impatience at being no further ahead in sorting it all out.

He couldn’t pull anything into a coherent whole. The diagram seemed to highlight differences between the various parts of the puzzle rather than link them together. Where were the common threads? He couldn’t relate Bessie McDonald to Victor Feldt and Nucleus Labs. He couldn’t connect the labs to Kelly’s murder. There was even a lack of consistency in the attacks on the victims. At NYCH, the person who had silenced Bessie McDonald and infected him operated like a ghost, attempting to leave no trace of foul play. Such stealth suggested a perpetrator determined to escape suspicion altogether, not just evade capture. In Hampton Junction, however, the attempts to remove people, though clever, were crude. The explosion tonight might silence Nell, yet it most certainly would raise suspicions. As for Victor Feldt’s timely heart attack, that, too, could have been achieved with unsophisticated means. Mark had said he was overweight, hypertensive, and diabetic – significant risk factors. Someone with a gun had already chased Mark up a hill. The same thing could have been done to Victor with lethal results. Again, clever, but nowhere in the same league as what had been done to Bessie and him. It was as if whoever carried out these acts felt he or she could withstand doubts on the part of the police and public about there being foul play, so long as the events could also be read as accidental, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise.

He sat scowling at the diagram, wondering how the same scam could include such wildly divergent tolerances to risk.

“Too many players,” he muttered.

Yet surely Kelly’s murder was at the center of everything.

A sudden pain coiled through his abdomen, once more sending him writhing, his insides on fire despite the Demerol. When it passed he lay drenched in sweat and exhausted, warily watching the monitor while trying to control his pulse. The slightest sound out in the hall set it racing again.

He shakily returned to his diagram, but a single answer to explain the events in Hampton Junction and NYCH continued to elude him. On a whim he thought, Maybe that’s what this crazy picture was trying to tell me. If he couldn’t make sense of it as a whole, what if he broke it down and looked at the parts separately?

He slashed a black horizontal line across the middle of the paper, dividing the two locales and the respective players.

Immediately it simplified things.

Now he could run any number of scenarios to explain the Hampton Junction half of things. Chaz Braden could have killed Kelly because he’d found out she was leaving him, and Nell he tried to blow up because he feared she really did have information that would finally convict him. Simple, straightforward – he liked it. But he still had no idea why Victor Feldt had been killed or by whom. Nor would anyone, it seemed, until they tracked down the woman with the file. And he couldn’t even begin to guess how the lab’s secret tied in with Kelly’s murder. As for the infanticide story, he continued to find that beyond belief.

Again, he wondered about Lucy’s role in all this.

Sent to sidetrack Mark?

By whom?

Chaz? But would he incriminate his own father?

No, that didn’t make sense.

And Charles wouldn’t set himself up.

Samantha maybe?

Well, whoever it might have been, weaving a story of murder from old birth records was preposterous.

Except for one detail.

He circled Cam Roper’s name.

The man had been the first to take an interest in the statistics that Mark and this Lucy woman now found so incriminating. Yet he died before he saw fit to do anything about it. Or had his death conveniently stopped him from taking action? He’d have to ask Mark how his father died. In the meantime, he lightly penciled in Victim? beside Cam Roper’s name.

It was probably another absurd idea. Otherwise, Mark would certainly have seen the possibility and said something.

Or would he?

Earl thought a moment, recalling how Mark had avoided all mention of how his father died. A person could spend a lifetime trying to bury that kind of pain, especially after losing his mom just two years before. Well-ingrained defenses might have kept him from looking too closely.

“Shit!” he said, abruptly folding the Hampton Junction part of the paper out of sight, admitting he wasn’t anywhere close to getting a handle on the happenings there.

A faint noise of squeaking wheels filtered through his closed door from somewhere out in the hallway. He stiffened as it drew nearer.

A medication cart? Shouldn’t be at this time of night.

It kept coming, the high-pitched sound like fingernails on a blackboard.

Then it stopped.

The sound of a wet mop slapping onto the linoleum floor echoed along the corridor.

Just the cleaner pushing his pail, he thought. But the tightness in his muscles wouldn’t go away. He sat listening, hearing nothing else at first, then a soft swishing right outside the entrance of his room and an occasional tap as the handle struck the wall. He held his breath, expecting to see the door push open and someone come lunging in at him.