Stephen White - Critical Conditions

“We’ll know soon. Couple of hours. If it’s approved, she’ll fly out by air ambulance today.”

“Me too?”

“Sorry. Not today. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.”

She huffed. “Why not today? You still don’t trust me?”

“That’s part of it. Another piece is that I want some time to process with you all we talked about last night, how you feel about it now, you know?”

To my surprise, she wasn’t resistant. She nodded and said, “I know.”

“You’ve been through a lot.”

She closed her eyes. Didn’t disagree.

“And part of it is that we still don’t know what the DA is going to do if you’re no longer in the hospital. They may want to arrest you if I discharge you, Merritt. There’s no way to predict that yet.”

She swallowed, pulled her hair back behind her ears. “I forgot about that. The police.”

“I figured. I’m not big on advice, but can I offer you some?”

She sighed.

“Call your lawyer. Tell him what you told me last night. Tell him what you’re afraid of. You’re going to need his help, Merritt.”

“I want to be with my sister. She needs me.”

“I agree. She does. And to be with her, I’m afraid you’re going to need Mr. Maitlin’s help.”

“I can’t turn on Trent. Chaney needs Trent, too.”

“That’s a tough call for you to make, Merritt. You need to take responsibility for the things you did to help your sister. And you need to let Trent take responsibility for the things he did to help her.”

She turned her palms up and threaded her fingers together in a jumble that was at least as confused as were her choices. After a couple of minutes, she said, “Okay, I’ll call him.” She widened her eyes. “So, do you need to write an order for that, too?”

I thought the sarcasm was a great sign.

While Merritt called Cozy, I paged her uncle. I’d been thinking about what to say and I thought I’d found an ethical crease that I could squeeze through to let Sam know about all the visitors Ed Robilio had been greeting just prior to becoming Dead Ed.

Sam was in his car, going where, I had to guess. “Sam, it’s me.”

“Figured. Any news yet?”

“No, everyone here is chewing their fingernails off. I’ll page you when the word is out. Listen, I’ve been thinking-looking for french fries, so to speak.”

“Hold your thought for a second. I’m still losing sleep trying to figure out why the harassment stopped against Brenda before the public knew Chaney was sick. Am I being obsessive here?”

“I don’t know, Sam. Maybe the guy just gave up on his own. That happens, right? Every candle burns out eventually.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t like loose ends where my family’s concerned. What did you want?”

“Like I said, I’ve been thinking, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Sunny Hasan, remember her, at the cabin? She told us about her uncle and aunt, Andrew and Abby. Last name Porter. You know, how they’re getting a divorce, how there were a lot of bad feelings between them and Robilio?”

“Mmm-hmm. Yeah?”

“I’m just wondering whether any of his latents, you know, Andrew Porter’s, were found at the Robilio house, maybe even in the home office?”

Pause. “You have a reason to think they might have been?”

I stayed quiet and hoped he knew why.

He didn’t miss a beat. “But you think, maybe, it’d be worth checking? Asking Andrew about recent visits? Tension in the family? Like around this divorce thing?”

I wished he could see my face. “I would think more the custody thing than the divorce thing. But that’s sort of it, yes.”

Sam was silent for a couple of measures. “My own brother-in-law, Trent, does some of that, doesn’t he? Custody evaluation work?”

“Yeah, I think he does.”

Sam’s voice lightened as he said, “You’re out on a limb right now, aren’t you?”

“Sam, I’ve been out here so much lately I’m actually beginning to like the view.”

At one forty-five that afternoon, a twin-jet air ambulance lifted off from Centennial Airport for a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Sea-Tac airport in Washington. Chaney Trent was on board along with a nurse, a physician, her mother, her father, and her Aunt Sherry.

The Channel 7 news team had been on the story with three crews and a full graphics package-“Chaney’s Hope,” they were calling it-from the moment Brenda informed her boss she was going to need some extended family leave time. The other local stations were less than an hour behind with their own blanket coverage.

I had finished a long psychotherapy session with Merritt to begin to explore her feelings about her sister’s illness and prognosis, and to give her a chance to look at what she had done with Madison and Dr. Robilio. Merritt’s discharge planning meeting with the unit staff ate up an additional thirty minutes and I was in the unit dayroom as I watched the air ambulance take off-LIVE!-from the runway at Centennial Airport, courtesy of cameras mounted inside the same news helicopter that had floated Lucy Davenport and me over the Continental Divide.

As the plane banked west toward the Rockies, an off-camera reporter, remarkably breathless, read a statement from MedExcel that said that the corporate change of heart about providing approval for Chaney’s procedure was due to a routine re-review of the facts of the case. On air, the reporter didn’t question either the velocity or the direction of the corporate spin.

What was more important news, apparently, were the preparations being made for a local crew to follow the air ambulance to Seattle. We saw almost a minute of tape of those preparations.

As the piece on Chaney’s departure segued into a commercial for Xantac 75, I found myself musing that Dr. Terence Gusman was probably one of the only people in Denver whose heart wasn’t warmed by Chaney’s story.

Merritt had missed the news reports of her sister’s departure for Washington. After our session concluded, she moved into a different consultation room to engage in a much-delayed tête-à-tête with Cozier Maitlin. I was pretty sure she was busy making him crazy with her rules about what parts of her story he could use to help her and what parts he couldn’t. Cozy, I figured, would soon come to the same conclusion I had reached overnight: If Merritt had simply admitted going to Robilio’s house early on, she would have had a living witness to corroborate her story about discovering his body. But now Madison was dead, and Cozy had to find a way, without the benefit of witnesses, to convince the authorities of his client’s innocence. And without enjoying the freedom to tell anyone that his client had been busy blackmailing the victim with a videotape of their scripted sexual encounter.

Although Chaney was on her way to Seattle and Merritt was on her way out of the hospital, there remained some jokers loose in the deck. The videotape, the real one-not the substitute one that Brad had bashed into Madison’s head-had yet to surface. Sometime soon, I feared, Merritt would have to suffer the humiliation and legal jeopardy of the tape being played somewhere to somebody. And at some point, even if it took a grand jury, John Trent and the authorities were going to have a pointed conversation about Trent’s repeated visits to Dead Ed’s house.

I returned to the nursing station and grabbed Merritt’s chart from the rack. After jotting down the specifics of the discharge plan I had just negotiated with the unit staff, I added, with profound understatement, that her legal situation still required clarification. With any luck from the DA or Cozy Maitlin, though, I harbored some hope she would be on her way to join her family in Seattle in a day or two.