Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“Okay,” Chaz said, after a few more seconds.

“Now come and have coffee with me.”

“I can’t. Since I was here all night anyway, I put myself on call. I just got beeped for a cardiac case coming in by air ambulance.”

“You?” His son never took weekend calls. Considered excusing himself from it the privilege of being chief.

“Yes, I know. But a couple of loudmouths in my department started to complain about my never putting myself on the schedule. This’ll shut them up for a while.”

Charles walked over to the Starbucks on the ground floor and ordered an espresso. He needed to clear his head after practically having to guide Chaz through Melanie’s files most of the night. His son might not be the dimmest light on the board, but he was a far cry from the brightest.

He found a chair in the corner where he could be reasonably sure of not being disturbed. The place would soon fill up with people on their way to the seven o’clock shift, and he needed to think.

It had been a long road.

The evening when he’d killed her twenty-seven years ago burned as fresh in his mind as the night it happened.

When she’d called the maternity center that morning, he had no idea it would end that way. She was so abrasive, insisting he keep Chaz from trying to follow her and threatening vague revelations that would ruin their name. He had to find out what she knew, and convinced her to meet him one more time that evening. She took the last train to Albany, and he picked her up at the station, then drove her to his office. It was deserted at night.

She’d initially limited her threats to what Chaz would be blamed for – “failing to properly supervise a resident in a case where the patient died.” She hadn’t provided details, and he practically laughed at her, saying, “I’m afraid that happens all the time in a teaching hospital, dear. If that’s all you have to threaten me with, you’re out of luck.” He wanted to goad her, find out if she’d discovered more deadly secrets.

Provoked, she let slip she also had something on him – the odd irregularities about his records – and that Dr. Cam Roper knew, might even investigate the maternity center and the home.

He’d known at that instant she’d have to die, and Roper, too. Once either of them found out the gravity of his secret, there would be no bargaining. The two of them were too straight for that.

The nearest weapon he’d had on hand were the heavy metal stirrups his pregnant ladies put their feet into when he examined them. He grabbed one, came up behind her, and smashed her in the temple. She was unconscious but not dead.

He’d stripped her, tied her up, and taped her mouth in case she woke up. Putting her in the trunk of his car, he drove to his house, where he burned her clothes in the basement incinerator. In the boathouse he found an old anchor, chain, and padlock. After midnight he drove to Trout Lake and commandeered an old rowboat from one of the cottages. As he’d attached the anchor and chain with the lock, she’d started to regain consciousness. She cried as he rowed her to the middle of the lake, and he never forgot the terror in her eyes as he dumped her in.

He shuddered.

Now all he had to do was catch Melanie Collins in the act of finishing off Earl Garnet. Actually, a little after the act, then let Chaz present the evidence of what she’d been up to all these years. Thankfully, Kelly’s letter to Cam Roper suggested she’d found out about Melanie’s first two victims and intended to reveal her discovery. It would be an easy sell to convince the authorities she’d confronted Melanie, and that Melanie killed her to keep her quiet.

Too bad Earl had to die. It would have been possible to convict Melanie without having her kill him, useful even, if he had bought the idea of her guilt so completely he’d have been willing to declare far and wide that her conviction cleared the Braden name. But that had been naive. He obviously still harbored deep suspicions, starting with the break-in at Mark Roper’s house and ending God knew where. It became necessary to change strategy on the spot and goad Earl into yelling the same paranoid-sounding accusations that Mark Roper and Lucy O’Connor had been led to make – to help ensure he’d seem as off base as the other two and that anything any of them had said would be easier to dismiss in the aftermath – then serve him up to Melanie.

He took a long sip of the hot drink.

It scoured his esophagus and ignited a small fire in his empty stomach.

As for Mark and Lucy, they’d be frozen corpses by now. “So tragic,” he would say to reporters. “If only the man had listened to me. I tried to tell him just two days ago to be patient, that there appeared to be new evidence pointing to Kelly’s real killer, but obviously he barged ahead on his own. From the start he seemed obsessed with blaming her death on our family, to the point he began making up the most fantastic stories. That he lost his life trying to find nonexistent remains to support these allegations is a waste beyond words. And what did his futile search prove? Simply how wild and baseless his accusations were. That his resident died trying to save him makes it a doubly senseless loss. Two young lives gone for nothing!”

He smiled at how easily he’d sent Mark rushing off half-cocked. A carefully staged mention of smotherings and eugenics, combined with the young man’s lifelong resentment of all things Braden, and he assumed the worst, taking Lucy with him. Such a hothead, just like his father.

What better way to deflect an investigation that might discover his former baby business – purely a commercial venture, albeit illegal – than have his chief accuser run around making the charges so extreme no one would take them seriously? Just imagine, Charles Braden III as some crazed fanatic who had murdered deformed newborns, then buried them under the orphanage lawn. He chuckled at the outlandishness of it.

Of course, setting Mark up like that had been risky, but after O’Connor arrived on the scene he’d had to take the chance. A more sober questioning of the birth records might have revealed the truth.

Still, as much as it might be a masterstroke luring them to their deaths the way they had tonight, everything would have been over and neater had they died in the blast. For one thing, they couldn’t have saved the talkative old crone. Fortunately, she still didn’t pose much of a threat. According to one of his cronies at Saratoga General, she was a “likely,” as in “likely to croak.”

One reassuring fact – there would be such a media furor in the wake of charging Collins with so many murders, including Kelly’s, none of the recent events in Hampton Junction would garner much scrutiny anyway. His past secrets, and the present one at Nucleus Laboratories, should be safe.

As long as his men found the woman with Victor’s files. They’d been damn lucky to overhear that conversation.

He took another sip of espresso.

As he waited for the buzz to hit, he heard the thud of heavy rotors arriving over the hospital and raised his eyes.

Must be Chaz’s case, he thought.

Chaz huddled in the doorway leading to the heliport on the hospital roof. The blast of the rotors stirred up clouds of dust and debris, making it necessary for him to turn away, protect his eyes, and cover his mouth. Beside him the men and women of the ER team did the same. He stayed apart from them a little to keep out of their way as they would be the first to the helicopter. However, they were all puzzled by how little advance information they’d been given. All they knew from dispatch: they were receiving two hypothermia cases, a man and a woman, one of them a near-drowning victim in critical condition. Normally they would get vitals, names, and circumstances. Nobody liked surprise packages in this business.