That same day, Tuesday, November 20, 1:15 P.M.
Hampton Junction
“I read your transcript today,” Mark said to Lucy, as they shared a late lunch of soup and salad at his kitchen table. “No wonder you handled yourself so well with my patients.”
She chuckled, with her mouth full of lettuce. “My past was no secret, if you’d read your mail lately. That’s quite a pile on your desk.”
“It’s a bad habit of mine, avoiding mail. All I seem to get is forms, bills, and professional questionnaires. I hate paper-maze stuff.”
“Join the paperless society and use e-mail.”
“I did. That gave me even more junk to deal with, so I canceled it.”
“I’m surprised. You being way out here yet not wired-”
“Oh, I’m on the net and have necessary passwords that let me access labs and X-ray departments to get test results.” He knew he sounded defensive, but he didn’t want this sophisticated, world-traveled lady to think he was a hick.
“It’s just that I never met anybody in America who doesn’t have e-mail,” she said.
He grinned and held out his arm. “Want to touch me to see if I’m real?”
She laughed, skewering what looked like half a head of Romaine with her fork and toasting him with it.
“Tell me about where you were stationed with Médecins du Globe,” he said, figuring he’d mangled the pronunciation.
Her smile vanished. “I’m afraid it was the grand misery tour, from Papua New Guinea tribal wars to refugee camps in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Albania.”
There was hardness in her voice that told him she didn’t want to talk about it. “I can only imagine what you’ve seen,” he said, after casting about for something to say. It sounded lame.
She remained quiet for a few seconds, then asked, “You were never tempted to join? Obviously you have a taste for challenge, working out here.”
“No, never tempted.”
“Why? Most of the time we’re not getting shot at, if that’s what you mean. Much of the work is a lot like this morning. Sick people come in, tell you what’s the matter, and you treat them. Except we deal out of tents and the backs of trucks.”
He noticed how she talked about the work as if it were ongoing for her. As for her making it sound routine, “Yeah, right,” he said. “You guys are awesome. It sure explains how you seemed so comfortable handling my patients. This practice must seem like child’s play compared to what you’re used to.”
The corners of her mouth twitched upward like a pair of mischievous quotation marks. “Well, we did have distractions in the field that you don’t, like local warlords to keep happy, and creepy crawlies in our sleeping bags, which I can definitely say I do not miss.”
“Don’t sell the Adirondacks short in the creepy crawlies department.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was in medical school I did a rotation through an ER in Lake Placid. A hiker came in with puncture marks on his leg claiming a rattler bit him.”
“I thought there weren’t any poisonous snakes in upstate New York.”
“That’s exactly what they told the hiker in ER. Wouldn’t give him antivenom.”
“So what did he do?”
Mark’s grin widened. “Went back to the trail where the damn thing attacked him, found it, and killed it with a tire iron. He returned to the hospital and threw it on the desk of the triage nurse. He got the shot.”
Lucy started to laugh. “No!”
“Saw it with my own eyes. It was even in the journals. Apparently the rattler escaped from a reptile zoo nearby. Taught me to always believe the patient.” He glanced at his watch and pushed away from the table. “We’ve got to get moving. House calls.”
Lucy followed Mark’s directions along an unplowed back road. A brilliant sky provided the perfect blue to contrast with the fresh snow, the sun cast a glitter over everything, and the mountainous contours in the distance seductively beckoned him to ski their curves.
“You know what I love about the first winter storm?” Lucy said as she navigated the coiling road much faster than Mark would have liked.
“What?” He began to keep a wary eye on the ditch, as if that would protect them any.
“Overnight it smooths away all the boundaries, curbs, sidewalks, roads – the things that tell us where to go or what lines to stay between – and makes a place seem all so open, as if for once we can go any which way we want and ignore the rules.”
“Really.” Pressed against the passenger door as she slithered through yet another turn, he wondered if she meant it literally. “How come you dropped out from all the excitement of Médecins du Globe to take a residency in family medicine?” Perhaps if he got her talking, she’d slow down.
“There are only so many nights a person can sleep on the ground worried about bullets and bugs. I was due to come home.”
“Where’s that now?”
“New York. I can’t get enough of the city.”
Like all the other women he knew. “So how did you like McGill?”
“Ah, Montréal,” she said, leaving out the t and pronouncing the city’s name the French way. The ease with which she slipped into the accent suggested a facility with the language rather than affectation. “Wonderful.”
“I take it you speak French?”
They weaved through an S that should have qualified them for the Grand Prix circuit, and a smile created tiny creases around her eyes.
He had to admit she was a superb driver.
“Raised with it,” she said. “My mother was French.”
“But O’Connor is Irish.”
“That’s Dad. He worked for a petrochemical company when he met Mom during a posting in Montréal. Fire meeting fire, those two. For my brothers and me, it was like living between two opera stars – passion personified.”
“You grew up in Montreal?”
“First years of my life only. Dad led us all over the world, including the Middle East. I guess that’s where I inherited my wanderlust. But enough about me. Tell me your story, Dr. Mark Roper, starting with what the hell happened to you last night. I presume it’s got something to do with why you don’t have wheels today.”
Should he confide the events of the last few weeks to her? Part of the curriculum he promised residents included exposure to the world of a country coroner, so why not? After all, it would be no different than trusting her with medically confidential material in his files. “You read about the body of Chaz Braden’s wife being found near here?”
“Who at NYCH hasn’t? I also saw your name in the paper, and Dan’s too, come to think of it, in connection with the investigation.” Her eyes widened. “Does that case have to do with last night?”
“I’m afraid so.” He began to relate the events that had unfolded since he and Dan discovered the remains at the bottom of Trout Lake. As the story progressed and he recounted his childhood impressions of Kelly, Lucy’s expression grew somber. When he described what he’d found in his father’s medical files, quoting parts of the letter by memory, she shook her head.
“That ill-starred woman,” she said. “To sound so happy – yet be on the brink of her death. Do you have any idea who the man was?”
“No,” he answered, a little too quickly, and moved on to describe how Chaz Braden had been a suspect at the time of the disappearance, then cleared by the police. He also filled her in on the file Everett had given him. He left out a lot, too, said nothing about Chaz’s or anyone else’s behavior at the funeral, and, when recounting the previous night’s shooting, made no mention of who he suspected had been the man with the rifle. After all, she was a resident in the hospital where Braden worked. Whatever he thought of the creep, he had no right to share his suspicions. They could blight any future teacher-resident relationship she might be obliged to have with Chaz as part of her program.
When he’d finished, she gaped at him in amazement. “You think he killed her, then tried to kill you because you’re onto him?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“But you feel it was him, don’t you?”
So much for pulling off the persona of being an unbiased investigator. He’d have to be more careful to distance himself from whatever he said about the case to her, but she felt so much more a colleague than a protégé. Still, he held to propriety. “No comment, Dr. O’Connor, and you don’t talk about this conversation with your friends back in New York, understand?”
“Of course not.” She sounded annoyed with him for even thinking such a thing.
“Sorry, but this is a murder investigation, and I want it done by the book, so nobody can scream ‘foul.’ ”
“I understand entirely.” Her tone said the opposite.
God, he hated when women did that, got all frosty and reasonable, while making it clear they thought he was full of crap.
They drove a few miles without saying anything, the easy ambiance they’d first established replaced by awkward silence.
Why should he feel so bad? It wasn’t as if he’d overreacted.
A few more miles went by.
Okay, maybe he overreacted a little bit. She must have felt he was putting her in her place, or something silly like that.
But he definitely didn’t have anything to apologize for.
Not a damn thing.
Nothing.
“Sorry, Lucy, for speaking so sharply. After last night, this case has me on edge.”
“Oh, don’t apologize. You’re absolutely within your rights, protecting the integrity of an inquiry.”
Like hell she thought that. “No, I apologize.”
It still didn’t feel right between them. The only way to make amends was to go on taking her into his confidence. “Now let me tell you the rest of what you need to know, then I’d like to hear your ideas.” He continued the story, describing the morbidity-mortality reports in Kelly’s file, the fact that someone had broken into his house after the funeral, apparently to go through them, and what happened to Bessie McDonald two weeks ago. “I’ve recruited one of Kelly’s former classmates to go over the woman’s files. Her coma seemed a little too convenient for my liking.”
Lucy continued to drive without speaking, but obviously lost in thought. The chill had vanished and Mark started to relax, finding her speed didn’t bother him as much. It wasn’t reckless, and he’d often driven faster. He just resisted relinquishing control to someone else behind the wheel.
“I really would like to work on this with you while I’m here,” she said after a few minutes, “if you’ll accept my help.”
“No question of it. Your rotation is meant to let you experience all aspects of being a rural physician, and this business is part of my job.”
She glanced over at him. “Solving Kelly McShane’s murder has to mean a lot more to you than just being part of your job. From the way you described knowing her, she must have been very important to you as a child.”
The velvet quiet of her voice surprised him more than what she’d said. “Yes. She certainly was special.”
“Your telling about her, what she’d been like, really got to me. I couldn’t help thinking…”
“She reminded you of yourself, maybe? Young, ambitious, ready to take on the world?” He’d said it without thinking, and no sooner were the words out of his mouth, he felt presumptuous at finishing a thought for her.
Lucy flushed. “I was thinking how close we were in age. She was just three years younger than me when it happened.”
A few minutes later they pulled into an unplowed driveway beside single-story bungalow not much bigger than a single-car garage. White smoke drifted out a rusted stovepipe protruding through a tar paper roof. The wood siding had once been painted lime green, but not recently. What few flecks of color remained appeared about to blow off, and the surface beneath had weathered to a nice gray.
“Who are we seeing here?” Lucy asked, getting out of the car.
“Mary Thomson and her sister Betty. Mary’s got terminal breast CA, but refuses hospitalization.” He grabbed his black bag from the backseat and trudged through an unbroken half foot of snow toward the front entrance. “With Betty’s help, I’m keeping Mary at home as long as I can.” He rapped sharply on a new-looking white door with a large windowpane covered by a curtain on the inside. “Betty, it’s Dr. Roper.”
Introductions having been made, he and Lucy entered the bedroom. He removed the dressings from under Mary Thomson’s right arm and exposed a glistening black cavity the diameter of a walnut where the tumor had eaten through the skin of her axilla. Thousands of tiny, scarlet metastases extended to the middle of her chest, rendering it red as a boiled lobster, and from biceps to wrist her arm was swollen the size of a thigh. Where her breast had been, the tissue lay stretched and scarred, some of it cratered like a lunar surface. Everywhere he touched felt hard as wood, and a cloying aroma of decay hovered over it all.
“Now you don’t be shy, dear,” Mary said to Lucy, flashing an overly white smile of false teeth that seemed too big for her gray, gaunt face. “Take a good look, and ask me anything you like.” Lying flat for the examination, she had been sitting propped up against a bank of pillows to greet them when they arrived. Just the simple act of getting upright, he knew, exhausted her, but it remained her way of welcoming visitors to her home, and she always made the effort. “Arm swelled up like that after radiation to the nodes under my arm,” she continued. “Blocked the lymph ducts. At least that’s how Dr. Mark here explained it to me.”
Lucy smiled down at her and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. “How’s your pain?” she said, with the same softness Mark had heard in the car. She gently slid her hand over Mary’s inflamed skin, carefully palpating every inch of the way.
Cuts right to the heart of the matter, Mark thought. With cancer, pain management mattered most, and too many doctors sucked at it.
Mary looked over to him. “Can I tell her, Doc?”
He adjusted an IV line attached to Mary’s left arm. At the other end of it stood a small, square machine winking fluorescent green numbers at them. An electrical wire connected it to a button by her hand, completing the circle. “Go ahead,” he said. “We can trust her.”
“Dr. Mark and I are breaking the law,” she whispered, giving a conspiratorial grin. “Every time I push this,” she added, pointing to the button.
“Mary’s the best teacher you’ll find when it comes to home care and using morphine on demand,” he said. “It’s not so much illegal as controversial outside a hospital, and the law’s a little gray on the matter. Of course, we keep mum about it, so as not to become a test case.”
“But I’m no junkie. Don’t use much more now than I did when Dr. Mark first got this contraption for me.”
“What you are, Mary, is a very brave woman,” Lucy said.
Mary gave a faint laugh. “My sister Betty out there, she’s the brave one, putting up with me like this. Not many let their kin pass on at home these days.”
“Mary, I noticed there were no tracks in the snow today,” Mark said. “Didn’t one of the social workers pass by? I specifically told them to see if you and Betty needed anything every morning.”
“Oh, I said not to bother, since you’d be here. They got far more needy folks than us to worry about.”
After they’d had Betty’s tea and were back outside, climbing into her car, Lucy asked, “How long?”
“A month, maybe more. I doubt she’ll last till the end of your rotation.”
As they picked up speed on the highway, Lucy’s cellular started to ring in her purse, which she’d propped on the console between their seats. One hand on the wheel, she fumbled for it, managing to spill the contents at his feet.
“Merde!” he heard her mutter as he retrieved the phone from amongst the debris. Dan’s number flashed beside the caller identification icon.
“I found your cellular,” the sheriff announced as soon as Mark answered. “One of my men stepped on it under the snow.”
“Terrific. You got any more useful information?”
“The shot came from behind on the passenger side, then out your front window, just as you thought. We’ll never find the bullet.”
“Shit!”
“It gets worse. After I left your place last night I swung around to the office to pick up my camera and flash. Went out to the wreck to try and get shots of boot impressions in the snow, but the wind had already blown them in.”
“Hey, I told you you shouldn’t-”
“I made some phone calls, and here’s the interesting part. The staff at the Braden estate insist Chaz is in New York.”
“But that’s the sort of crap they would say.”
“I also called his office in New York, and was told he’s home with the flu.”
“Again, figures.”
“I then call him at home and am told Dr. Chaz Braden is so sick he’s in bed.”
“Wall-to-wall alibis.”
“But she’ll see if he’ll take the phone.”
“Oh?”
“On the line he comes, and, sounding gravelly voiced, tells me the same story. I said I was sorry to bother him. He said it was no trouble. I told him we’d had a problem yesterday evening with drunken hunters taking potshots at passing vehicles and described what happened to you. He replied, ‘That’s terrible,’ then asked why I was calling him. ‘Just wanted to check if you were having similar problems near your place,’ I answered. He explained that since he had been ill and left for New York sometime after three in the afternoon, he couldn’t say what happened around his place last night. I thanked him, and we hung up.”
“So what’s so interesting? It’s exactly what I’d expect from the son of a bitch.”
“Oh yeah? That mean-mouthed bastard hasn’t been so cordial to me since the first day he came round after I took office. Even then he made it clear that he saw me as small-time, that he was big-city, and that meant I should stay out of his way. Yet here I am calling his big-city self to check on his whereabouts, and he’s polite as can be. What’s a country boy to think?”
Mark perked up. “He’s worried.”
“Yeah. And coming from a guy who normally scoffs in my face, that’s almost as good as an admission he pulled the trigger.”
“So you’ve tossed out the drunken hunter idea.”
“Let’s say I moved it to the back burner. But I can’t arrest Chaz for suddenly being courteous to me. We still don’t have any evidence he took a shot at you.”
Discouraged, Mark hung up at the end of the call and started to salvage the contents of Lucy’s purse from the car floor. The slush from his boots had left everything soggy. A packet of photos had spilled out, and fanned at his feet like a deck of cards.
“I’m afraid these may be ruined,” he said, picking them up and separating them out in the hope they’d dry. He couldn’t help seeing they were all of her in a group hug with four young men. Everyone had broad smiles, and seemed to be from the four corners of the earth. One had Asian features, another Polynesian, the third appeared to be North American Indian, and the fourth, brown-skinned, could have been from anywhere on the planet. Behind them stood a white wall with a red tile roof.
Could one of them be her fiancé? “I’ll spread these out on the backseat. You might be able to save them.”
“Thanks. We rarely see each other these days. I don’t know when there’ll be another chance for all of us to be in a picture together.”
He twisted around and began to place the shots side by side. When he’d finished and she still hadn’t elaborated on who they were, he arranged the pictures a second time.
“So how do you like our little United Nations?”
“Are they your colleagues from Médecins du Globe?” Mark asked.
She laughed. “No! Those are my brothers.”
“Your brothers?”
Her smile widened, and she seemed to enjoy his confusion. “Yeah. We’re all adopted.”
He looked back at the pictures. And at her. “That’s really, cool,” he said.
“Mom couldn’t have kids, but came from a big family and wanted the same, so she and Dad picked us up wherever he was stationed.”
“Amazing,” said Mark, reaching back and carefully picking up one of the photos. “So tell me who’s who.”
5:15 P.M.
Battery Park Towers,
New York City
Earl sank back in a deep, white leather chair, slowly rotating the tapered stem of his martini glass, and looked around him. “This is quite the place, Melanie.”
“I like it.” She occupied a matching sofa across from him, her legs curled beneath a black dress that set her off in stark contrast to the upholstery. Behind her, along the windows facing east, ran a row of attractive oriental silk screens blocking the view. “The residents tell me some tall son of a bitch wearing a visitor’s pass is stalking our hallowed halls and kicking butt whenever he finds a slacker.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Why not? You never could let anything slide, Earl. I doubt that part of you has changed.” She raised her glass to him in a toast.
Not in the mood for reminiscing about their impressions of one another, he simply shrugged and toasted her back. “Tell me about Bessie McDonald,” he said, without pausing to take a sip. “Did she say anything about Chaz Braden that night you visited her two weeks ago?”
Melanie frowned at him. “And still the same old stickler for getting down to business, I see.” She took the time to drink deeply from her tapered glass, the contents a blue concoction she’d made up before he arrived – crushed ice with curaçao, orange vodka, and white rum according to the bottles still on the counter. She waited for him to join her.
He didn’t.
“You don’t like martinis? I can get you something else.” She started to get up.
“No, Melanie, this is fine. Just tell me if Bessie said anything about Chaz Braden.”
She settled back on the sofa. “Well, actually she did. You see, just that morning she’d read in the paper about Kelly’s body being found, and that got her talking about her admission back in ‘seventy-four.”
He felt a surge of excitement and leaned forward. “Go on.”
But after listening to Melanie describe her conversation with her former patient, he fell back in his chair, deflated. It told him nothing new.
“Bessie was my first big case, Earl,” Melanie continued, her voice earnest. “If there’s a moment when I can say I became a doctor, when all the theory suddenly became clear-cut action, it was the night we resuscitated her. Apart from that, I don’t recall much about her admission. But to this day I’ve had a special place in my heart for late bloomers. You know the kind of residents I mean. Nondescript performers one day, then in comes the patient with a problem that they nail before anyone else, and it sets off a spark.”
Earl remembered Melanie coming out of herself in her fourth year, but not that her emergence centered around any specific case. Yet he’d certainly seen exactly what she described happen with his own residents. Reliving this personal epiphany of hers, however, didn’t offer a clue as to what secret Chaz Braden might have been trying to cover up. And Melanie, along with everyone else at the hospital, seemed unable to explain why Bessie now lay in a coma. “Some transient event” had been the best the neurologists came up with after looking at the tests Dr. Roy arranged.
He glanced to his left. Through the west windows he could see the black water of the Hudson where it splayed out to combine with the East River, then continued to flow toward the ocean. He felt the pull of the current on his mood. Even his calls that afternoon to former classmates who’d worked on the digoxin toxicity cases had yielded nothing but exclamations of surprise at his contacting them and no useful recollections about Chaz’s or anyone else’s competence with the medication. There were a few other people yet to reach, but he doubted they’d be any more helpful.
He raised his glass and took a long sip of Melanie’s creation – a blue lady she’d called it. Not bad, for a martini. He usually found them bitter. This had a refreshing, fruity taste.
“Did you have any part to play in the second case, the man who died?” he asked. “I saw your name on the order sheet there as well.”
The makings of a grin played at the corners of her mouth. “Could be. You see, after my triumph with Bessie, I was the floor’s authority on dig for a while, so likely I stuck my nose into that resuscitation as well, if I was around. But I’d have to look at the chart.”
“Would you mind? And could you take a look at Bessie’s old file as well? Those notes might jog your memory about something that’s not written down.”
“Sure.” She leaned forward to take his half-empty glass, got up, and walked with it toward a stunning kitchen area that he knew Janet would die for. Except it looked so polished, he doubted Melanie did any cooking in it.
“That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it?” Melanie said, opening a refrigerator the size of his minivan and pouring him a refill from a small pitcher of the cocktail that she’d left chilling in the freezer.
“It’s still worth pursuing, given what little we have. Keep this under your hat, but unofficially Mark Roper thinks Chaz Braden somehow got Bessie to slip into a coma so she couldn’t talk about what happened back then.”
She started, looked up from refilling his glass, and the blue slush brimmed over the rim onto her hand. “Now there’s one hell of a big leap,” she said, reaching for a cloth to clean up the spill. “Has he any proof?”
“Just his gut.”
She returned with the drink. “How does he think Chaz could have precipitated a coma?” She stood over him, still holding his glass and wiping its stem.
“First of all it would have to be a drug that couldn’t be traced. He figures a shot of short-acting insulin could have done the trick. Think about it. The onset of profound hypoglycemia would occur in a matter of hours after Chaz gave her the injection. A protracted insulin coma would in itself destroy a pack of neurons. Throw in prolonged convulsions and an extended obstruction of her airway, both of which he could have reasonably anticipated since he may have made sure she couldn’t summon help – they found her call button unplugged – Bessie wouldn’t have much left between the ears. In other words, she’d be exactly the way she is now.”
“I see.” Melanie continued polishing the outside of the glass. “You haven’t told me what you think.”
“Two cases of unexplained digoxin toxicity under Chaz Braden twenty-seven years ago, the year Kelly died, and the survivor now lies in an unexplained coma that occurred less than twenty-four hours after forensic experts identified Kelly’s body. That’s a lot of mystery illnesses clustered around a common set of events. Yeah, I’m beginning to go along with the idea there’s a connection.”
Her caressing action with the cloth slowed to a stop. “But do you believe Chaz is responsible for it all?”
“The man’s such an ass, part of me wants to say, ‘Who else could it be?’ ”
“And the rest of you?”
He shrugged. “It bothers me the police investigated the hell out of him for Kelly’s murder, yet couldn’t nail him. So let’s just say that while he’s still number one in my book, and I think what happened to Bessie McDonald is somehow linked to Kelly’s death, I’m also keeping an open mind as to the possibility of other suspects.” He was thinking of Samantha McShane.
Melanie remained perfectly motionless.
He felt a crick in his neck from looking up at her.
“What about making a case against Chaz regarding Bessie?” she asked after a few seconds.
“Maybe we’ll luck out and someone will remember seeing him on the floor that night. If so, we could connect the dots for the police and point them to him. Then he’d at least have some explaining to do.”
“That army of lawyers his daddy keeps will say otherwise.”
“There’s another potential charge that would make everyone, including those lawyers, look at him in a different light. Someone took a shot at Mark early last night-”
“A shot?”
“Yeah, with a hunting rifle. He skidded into a ditch, and Mark thinks it was Chaz’s work as well. Put a chink like that in his armor – it’s reckless endangerment at the very least, if not attempted murder – Daddy won’t be able to protect him. Maybe then we can tie him to Bessie, and ultimately Kelly.”
“It all sounds flimsy.”
“I know.”
“And if you can’t finger him for taking a shot at Mark?”
“We’re screwed, all the way back to square one. We’d have to get him another way, or go after someone new.”
She studied him for a few seconds, then seemed to realize she still held his drink. “Oh, how rude of me,” she said, and placed it in front of him. Reentering the kitchen, she stopped at the sink and began to wash her hands, allowing the water to run down her forearms and off her elbows.
Out of habit from scrubbing up, Earl thought. When distracted, he sometimes did the same.
“If you like, I can order some food, and we can reminisce the night away,” she called over her shoulder, actually sounding festive.
Jesus, he thought, starting to feel uncomfortable. Is she coming on to me? “I’m sorry, Melanie, but I only have time for the drink,” he said, attempting to extricate himself as painlessly as possible from any overture she’d just made. “I’ve a ton of e-mails waiting from my department, and will be hours dealing with them. You know how it is, everyone getting the urge to make decisions when the chief’s away, and then no end of sandbox spats.”
She reached for a towel. “You’re sure? There’s some terrific gourmet French I could have here in twenty minutes.”
“Sorry. But this hit the spot.” He picked up the drink, toasted her with it, and took three healthy swallows, enough to make her think he at least appreciated her bartending efforts. Nasty-tasting concoction.
Then he stood.
She walked over and took his hand. “You always were a stubborn man, Earl.” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. When he returned the gesture, she leaned in, her breasts brushing up against him.
She hasn’t changed a bit, he thought. Still making passes at any half-decent-looking guy.
Outside her building, walking toward the pedestrian overpass that crossed the southern tip of West Street, he figured he’d handled the visit smoothly enough. She hadn’t even asked whom he suspected of being Kelly’s lover. Always a lousy liar, he’d been apprehensive about putting on a show of ignorance.
He looked up behind him and saw her backlit like a tiny mannequin in her penthouse window. To the east, piercing as a phantom pain midst the glitter of lower Manhattan, loomed the area she’d screened off – the void where the Twin Towers once stood.
5:45 P.M.
Hampton Junction
Mark had shown Lucy a full menu of how the human body could fester and fail.
At Zackery Abrams’s she’d seen how pressure sores on a forty-year-old paraplegic could crack the skin along a thigh and open it to the bone. IVs, dressing changes, antibiotics, and painkillers simply held the fort. Skin grafts should have been next, but Zak wouldn’t leave his four-year-old daughter, Christina, in the care of a foster home. “Her mother was killed in the same crash that cost me the use of my legs,” he explained to Lucy, his wan face hardened against the sort of wound that no treatment could cure.
In Christina Halprin’s home the sixty-two-year-old woman explained how her heart was so feeble she could go into acute failure, her lungs filling with fluid, just from making love with Mel, her husband. Rejected as a transplant candidate, and already on every known cardiac medication, she insisted Mark prescribe enough diuretics in order that she could take an extra dose now and then, enough to see her through a special evening with Mel. “So far so good,” she told Lucy, her voice lowered and a soft flush spreading across her cheeks. “Think about it, honey. It’s the one moment when my damned body still feels wonderful. You always read about men going in the saddle. Why not me?”
Lucy got them back out on the highway, and they drove in silence for a while.
“It’s not bullets or bugs you’d be afraid of,” she said out of the blue after they’d gone a few miles.
“What do you mean?”
“Before, when we were talking about Médecins du Globe, it’s the having to settle you couldn’t stand, isn’t it? You couldn’t settle for what we do out there, could you?”
“Something like that.”
“I mean, the care you give these people in the middle of nowhere is awesome. And sophisticated. I bet it would kill you to stand by and let a single one of them die a day sooner or suffer a minute longer than they had to for want of medications or equipment.”
“Hey, I’m not some kind of keep-’em-breathing-at-all-costs nut.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just what you do here compared to what we did in the field. Christ, sometimes it was so primitive we were limited to providing little more than food, water, and simple hygiene.”
He said nothing, yet brought his breathing close to a halt, as if her words were about to cut close to a vital organ. The image of his father, a blackened form, the eyes still alive, crept out of the nightmare where he kept it buried. He immediately shoved it away.
“I mean, you really go all out, won’t – no, make that can’t settle for less.”
Again he said nothing, wishing she’d take the hint that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I meant it as a compliment,” she added, his silence obviously making her uneasy.
“Look, if they’re comfortable and want to stay home, and I can swing it, why not? All it takes is I make a nuisance of myself at Saratoga General, borrowing stuff, so don’t make too big a deal of it. Besides, I haven’t many cases like these, and the local medical profession isn’t comfortable about the ones I do. ‘Roper’s specials,’ the doctors in town call them. But they go along because they’d rather lend me what I need than have my Medicaid and Medicare bunch take beds away from their upscale, private-insurance crowd.” He hoped now she’d let it go.
“Well, I for one think it’s cool, and a hell of a lot more useful than having to watch someone die for want of ‘stuff’ as you call it. They haunt you forever, every lost one.”
He stared straight ahead.
She had him pegged, all right, and that left him uncomfortable. She must have heard what had happened to read him so well. He wasn’t used to feeling so exposed, yet he forced himself to meet her gaze.
The hint of sadness that he’d caught a glimpse of in her eyes last night had returned in force, and her face sagged into a bleak look of defeat. She’d been describing her own scars, not his.
“You’re right,” he said, relaxing a little. “When it comes to human misery, I’m a retail kind of guy, good at handling it case by case. But wholesale slaughter…” He shuddered, television images of sick, starving babies and children flooding into his head.
“It takes courage to know your limits, Mark.” Her voice became soft. “Believe me, I didn’t know mine when I went overseas. Waded in naive as a schoolgirl, then had no choice but to cope.”
Apart from his giving her the occasional direction, they didn’t talk for a long time. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. She simply seemed as lost in her own thoughts as he in his.
He found himself wondering about her fiancé. She hadn’t mentioned him, despite being so open about her family, brothers, work – almost everything under the sun. Obviously she intended to keep that part of her life private.
They pulled into a parking lot in front of a sleek glass-and-steel, tan building made up of three- and four-story modules, each floor wrapped in black-tinted windows. A modest plaque on the snow-covered grounds near the front entrance read NUCLEUS LABORATORIES.
“The place looks like a cubist’s limousine,” Lucy said. Even at this late hour there were few parking spaces. She pulled into one close to the front door. “What’s a fancy operation like this doing out here?” She reached into a small cooler lodged on the floor of the backseat and retrieved from it the brown paper bag containing a half dozen blood samples they’d drawn from patients over the course of the day. Holding it up between them, she added, “Obviously you don’t keep them in business.”
He grinned, took it from her, and got out of the car. The cold tingled the top of his ears. “Some conglomerate built it about five years ago,” he said, leading the way up a wide set of freshly shoveled stone steps. He gestured to the dark line of thick forest on the perimeter of the property. “Liked the cheap real estate and low taxes, I guess. They mostly do work for insurance companies that underwrite employee health plans for a slew of head offices in New York City. The volume’s huge, and they ship a refrigerator truck worth of samples up here every night of the week. The lab provides state-of-the-art service that does everything from routine bloods to genetic workups for research groups. Even Saratoga General and hospitals in Albany contract out their more exotic testing to them. I’m told that all these things taken together bring in more than enough to pay the heating bills.”
“No offense, but why do they bother with you?”
He winked at her over his shoulder. “Because I know the manager. Come on and see science fiction in the sticks.”
They approached a sliding glass panel that opened automatically and admitted them to a marbled reception area befitting any Park Avenue address. The click of their shoes on the floor echoed like castanets.
“Hi, Doc,” said a spindly, white-haired security guard seated behind a polished curved console with a dozen video screens. He pressed a button that unlocked one of the six mahogany doors behind him with a loud click.
They passed through into a long, white corridor.
Minutes later they shook hands with Victor Feldt, a broad-faced, big-bellied man with a walrus mustache and a complexion that easily flushed. His cheeks glowed as he greeted Lucy. “Welcome to our lab, Dr. O’Connor. May I show you around?”
“Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble-”
“You don’t take the tour, you’ll hurt his feelings,” Mark interrupted. “Victor lives for the chance to show off his pride and joy to visitors, especially ones in the business.”
Victor turned a shade more crimson. “Now that’s not true, Mark. I just thought she’d be interested.”
“And I am, Mr. Feldt. Lead on. This facility looks amazing.”
His cheeks got so red, Mark wondered if he shouldn’t take the man’s blood pressure. He’d been treating his hypertension for years, but Victor kept going off the pills whenever he got a new boyfriend because they affected his sex life. Not that that happened often, Victor being one of the few gay men in Hampton Junction.
Let him have his fun talking shop with Lucy, Mark decided. The blood pressure could wait.
He followed along behind, having received the tour several times during the facility’s first years of operation. Impressive as the layout was – room after room of spinning centrifuges, automated conveyers feeding trays of sample wells into multitask analyzers, chorus lines of pipettes dunking into specimens and sucking them up fifty at a time, then reams of tiny tubing carrying the fluids to more machines that would perform another fifty tests on each of them – it still accomplished nothing more than the basic job of any hospital lab. Break the human body down to a measure of its red cells, white counts, and biochemical ingredients – sodium, potassium, proteins, albumin, and so on. Except this outfit scaled itself to process ten times the load of any single health care institution.
Mark watched Victor animatedly explain the details of the operation to an extent that went far beyond what Lucy could possibly want to know, a mark of his loneliness for intellectual company as much as his enthusiasm for his work. He’d arrived from New York when the lab opened, but gravitated away from Saratoga, unable to afford a place among the rich and famous, yet wary of the homophobia of Hampton Junction. So he’d settled on the no-man’s-land between the two, a pretty but isolated cabin by a lake not far from here, where his lifestyle wouldn’t raise eyebrows. When he wasn’t involved with anyone he substituted the Internet for companionship, and owned one of the most awesome computer setups Mark had ever seen in a private home. Victor approached Mark to be his doctor after several bad experiences with a few general practitioners in Saratoga. “Nothing overt, just that they were old farts and not at ease with handing the potential health problems of someone who’s gay,” he’d explained. “On the other hand, I hear nothing scares you.”
They neared Victor’s pièce de résistance, the section where they did the DNA analyses. Located in an area behind glass windows that could only be accessed through an airlock, some of the machinery looked similar to the other equipment they’d seen, but many pieces were right out of Star Trek, and workers inside wore protective clothing.
“Just like in making CDs, we keep a dust-free environment to reduce the risk of contaminating specimens,” Victor explained. “We have a dozen PCR machines, and three dozen electrophoresis units…”
As Victor expounded on the technology of breaking down DNA and separating out specific genes for identification, Mark noticed a change since he’d last been corralled into a tour. There were far more people working in this unit than he remembered, and now it was after hours. “Business must be good as far as the DNA department goes,” he said jokingly, as they returned to the front entrance.
“Booming,” replied Victor in complete earnestness. “We’re even testing for genes that don’t have a confirmed link to diseases yet, but may be a potential risk.”
“Who wants that information?” Lucy asked.
He shrugged. “The New York corporations that have contracts with us. Seems particularly to be the new wave in executive health plans. And, of course, research labs. But we figure the real up-and-coming market will be aging baby boomers who want to know if they’ve got the gene that killed Mom or Dad. Screening for the mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer, colon cancer, Alzheimer’s – you name it. Real cutting-edge stuff…”
Mark cringed as Victor talked. Unfortunately, his prediction had already begun to materialize. Recently a chain of stores better known for selling soaps and shampoos began to market an expensive screening test to detect genetic defects linked to breast and ovarian cancer, placing the devices on display alongside bath oils and bubble beads. And last month his patients started to bring in magazines normally associated with tips for beautiful homes and fine gardens that now carried ads urging readers to get genetically tuned in to what they should eat and drink by screening for disorders affected by diet. The trouble was, not everyone who has a genetic defect will go on to develop the disease they are at risk for, and at this stage of the game, no one could pick the winners from the losers. Rampant commercialization of the technology would lead to widespread, fruitless, and potentially harmful anxiety, while places like Nucleus Laboratories made a pile of money telling healthy Americans that they were sick. He and Victor had already had heated debates over the issue. But this was Victor’s moment in the sun with Lucy, so Mark held his peace.
As she drove the car out of the driveway, Lucy asked, “Is Victor a friend?”
“Actually, he’s a patient.”
“Really? I took you for friends. But around you it’s hard to tell the difference.”
“How do you mean?”
“You have a really nice way with patients. A lot of the people who were in your office today consider you both friend and physician.”
“And how do you know that?”
“They told me so. It was neat to hear.”
“Sometimes it makes the job harder.”
“You mean staying objective-”
“That’s difficult enough. What I’m talking about makes being friends impossible.”
“Oh?”
“People tell me almost everything that’s personal and private, as they do most doctors. But in a place like Hampton Junction, I end up knowing both who’s got the secrets and who the secrets are kept from.”
“What?”
“Just the other day I was sitting in my office with a woman who sees me regularly for stress and a nervous stomach. The reason for her problems – she’s afraid her husband is running around on her. We were interrupted by a phone call from a woman whom I’m treating for depression because the man she loves, that very same husband, won’t leave his wife. They don’t teach you how to manage that kind of situation in New York.”
She gave an appreciative whistle. “Does it happen a lot?”
“Often enough. You’ll probably go through a variation of it while you’re here. After all, you’re a fresh audience, so people will definitely let you in on the seamier sides of life in Hampton Junction.”
She glanced sideways at him.
“Relax,” he added. “It won’t be that bad.”
She smiled, but drove without saying anything. A few minutes later, she asked, “Show me Kelly’s house?”
“Her old family home? It’s long gone. Her parents sold off and moved back to New York after she disappeared.”
“No. I meant where she lived with Chaz Braden.”
“Sure. It’s not far from here.”
She followed his instructions, heading in the direction of Saratoga Springs. After a few miles the thick forest gave way to a floodlit, rolling, snow-covered lawn surrounded by white fences adjacent to a lake. Ablaze with light and well back from the road stood a layered house with several wings emanating from a peaked center, the whole structure wrapped in a veranda. As a young boy passing by with his parents, it had always reminded him of a gilded bird trying to take flight. “Here it is. Rural chic of the pretend horsy set. Paddock style on the front yard, but nary a nag in sight.”
She said nothing, but slowed as they passed the large wrought-iron gate that guarded the entrance. In the parking lot at the end of a quarter-mile driveway, a dozen limousines glittered like a nest of black beetles.
“That’s odd,” Mark said. “Old man Braden must be up for Thanksgiving this year. He usually doesn’t show until Christmas.”
“He’s brought a lot of friends.”
“When here, he’s always having parties. Not that I’m on his guest list. Was, when I was a kid. My father used to get invited. I think that was Kelly’s doing. I learned much later from my aunt that Mom hated going and thought the rest of them acted superior to Dad. But after my mother died, he and I continued to attend, ‘for Kelly’s sake’ I heard him say more than once. Crazy, their looking down on him. Dad was more doctor than both Bradens put together.”
When they got back to Mark’s house, a shiny red Jeep almost identical to his own stood parked in the driveway. The keys and a note from his insurance company advising him that it was only a loaner until they settled his claim had been dropped through the mail slot in his front door. Ride ‘em cowboy, he thought, pocketing the keys.
“Could I take a look at your father’s file on Kelly?” Lucy asked after supper.
“Sure.” He got it out for her.
Having leafed through the contents at the kitchen table, she came to the newspaper clippings on the Braden’s charitable works. “What are these doing here?”
“I’ve no idea. My father kept them there. He also collected a pile of statistics on those two places, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what he was after.”
“Could I see them as well?”
Two hours later, papers spread out in front of her, on chairs, even over the countertops, she continued to pore over the data that had defeated him.
“Any luck?” he asked, standing in the doorway watching her.
“Oh?” she started, obviously surprised by his voice. “No, I mean I can’t see anything glaringly wrong.”
“Well, I’m heading up to bed. It’ll be a big day tomorrow, everybody calling in to get tuned up for Thanksgiving.”
“I’m going to work a while longer.”
“Good night.”
“Good night, Mark.”