Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“Going somewhere, Dr. Garnet?” said a man’s voice at the door, and Charles Braden III stepped into his room.

Primed on adrenaline, pain, and no sleep, Earl reacted like a cornered animal. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded. He backed up to the bed and slid his hand under the covers, his fingers closing around the fistful of syringes he’d planted, needle first, into the mattress. His revelation about Melanie might change some of his ideas about how the Bradens fitted in the picture, but not enough that he suddenly felt safe around them.

Charles started toward him.

“I’d stay where you are!” Earl said.

The man stopped in midstride. “Why, I just intended to sit down-”

“Tell me what you want.”

In the dim light, the steel-brush silver of Charles’s hair made him seem more formidable, as if he were bristling with quills. “All right, but perhaps you better sit down. What I’m going to say will come as a bit of a shock, and you don’t look so good.”

Earl stayed leaning against the bed, his hand still clutched around his makeshift weapon. “I’m fine where I am.”

Braden shrugged, and sank his hands deep into the pockets of the white coat he wore over his suit as if he were still a practicing doctor. “I’m here to inform you that late yesterday afternoon Dr. Tommy Leannis approached my son with the news that you were the man who went off with Kelly in a taxi the night before her disappearance. Is this true?”

Earl felt the blood drain from his head.

He’d end up being handed to the cops for Kelly’s murder after all – by Charles and Chaz Braden, goddamn it. Exotic theories about Melanie Collins wouldn’t protect him now, especially since he had no proof other than a used IV bag with bicarb in it and a bunch of false-normal potassium readings. The rest was all just speculation.

Instinctively he tried to bluff. “What are you talking about-”

“Don’t play with me. I’ve already heard your denials. Leannis gave my son a tape of a conversation in which you went on at length about it not being true.”

Earl swallowed, his mouth going drier by the second, his heart giving the inside of his ribs another going over. Like a man just shot who tries to fathom the damage, he cast about in his mind for what he’d said to that weasel Leannis, dreading he may have let something slip that would incriminate himself.

“Sure you don’t want to sit down?” Braden said. “You’re starting to look worse than when I came in.”

“No, I’m fine, except I can’t seriously believe you’d take what Leannis said-”

“I also heard the same allegation from the biggest gossip in the hospital, Lena Downie in medical records.”

Earl’s face grew warm. If that woman was blabbing about it, he’d be the talk of NYCH in no time. Whether the police believed the story or not, his credibility, especially now when he needed it most, would be toast. “Oh, my God.”

“What’s even more interesting is who told her.”

Earl felt another surge of pain shoot through his gut. He fought to stay on his feet, a prickle of cold sweat sticking his hospital gown to his skin. “Told her?”

“Yeah. Turns out it’s the same person who gave the notion to Tommy Leannis.”

“But you said Melanie Collins did that.”

“Right. She picked him because, as everyone in the hospital knows, Leannis is a brown-nosing fool. He’d try anything to curry favor with our family in the hope our influence might throw some fresh meat to that cut-and-tuck business he has the nerve to call the practice of medicine. She probably figured he’d come running to us in some sleazy manner with the news, and he didn’t disappoint. Telling Lena Downie as well would be Melanie’s way of assuring a more general distribution.”

“You mean-”

“Melanie Collins is setting you up to take the blame for Kelly’s murder. Not that I figure she intends to let you live long enough to go to trial. Smear you by innuendo as the killer, I suspect, is her plan, then you conveniently die of some apparent complication from your infection, and the case is closed. Nobody’s going to look too closely at loose ends when the prime suspect is dead, especially in a twenty-seven-year-old murder.”

Earl wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“Setting me up? You mean you don’t believe I did it. And you know what she’s doing to me?”

“How she specifically intends to make you die, no. But I’ve been through enough of her charts in the last few days to get a pretty good idea of her repertoire. She’s a regular alchemist when it comes to fiddling with drugs and eliciting their side effects, altering sugars, playing with acid-base balance, shifting potassium and sodium levels up and down like elevators-”

“Wait a minute. You make it sound like there’s been a lot more cases than the two Kelly discovered.”

“The woman’s been setting up her ‘triumphs’ for a couple of decades. Glory-kills, I suppose you could call the ones who didn’t make it. Deaths didn’t really matter to her, as long as she got kudos for nailing the diagnosis.”

“My God. But how did you get onto her?”

“I started with the same two charts you did, and saw the same patterns. I also had access to her student evaluations. I remembered she had been something less than a star during her rotation in obstetrics. My staff nicknamed her ‘Fumbles’ they were so afraid she’d drop a baby. I also looked up the other departmental assessments of her. Borderline. So how does someone so mediocre get so good? I asked myself.”

Earl listened with a mixture of relief and wariness. “And what about the rest of the story?” he asked. Braden seemed about to clear him, but would he help Kelly’s lover, or make him pay?

“Obviously, Kelly came to the same conclusions about the digoxin cases that you and I did.” Braden said with no hesitation. “She confronted Melanie, and Melanie killed her to avoid getting caught.” He continued to stand there, his hands in his pockets, white coat immaculate, looking like he’d stepped out of a fashion magazine, at five-thirty in the morning. Something didn’t add up. “Why did you tell me this now?”

Braden looked at him as if he were crazy. “Because my son and I only just now finished going through Melanie’s files. We’ve been at it since yesterday morning, and wanted to make sure we were right before saying anything. I came right up because I figured your life might be in danger. And so did you, from the looks of it when I got here. Weren’t you about to escape her clutches?”

Sounded reasonable. And he should be grateful to the man. Why didn’t he feel that way? Instead, he had the inkling he was being manipulated. “What do we do now?” he asked, playing along while trying to sort out his doubts.

“First thing this morning I’ll call the CEO of the hospital and the president of the medical school. This is going to be a tabloid special, and they’ll want to get all their legal ducks in a row. Then we’ll call the police, and they’ll arrest Collins. I want it over with fast, before anything else tragic happens. I tried to warn Mark Roper the other night that I was onto something and requested that he slow down to give me a couple of days. But he’s such a hothead, just like his father. Insisted on plowing full speed ahead with his investigation.”

The more the man talked, the more Earl grew wary. Charles Braden still had a lot of questions to answer about his role in other matters, from the demise of Cam Roper, whom Braden had just called a real hothead, to a recent gas explosion. And he appeared to be in an unseemly hurry to rein in Mark. In fact, Earl just realized an obvious hole in Braden’s story.

“Tell me, Charles, how did you know which charts I first looked at in this case?”