He removed his Leatherman from its holster on his belt, fished for the knife blade, then reached high to saw through the nylon. When he was done, both prisoner and matron fell in a heap on the floor. “You okay, Gladys?” he asked, suppressing a grin.
“No, I’m not okay. Get this bitch off of me!”
Two more staff members arrived at the door, one of them wheeling a crash cart, loaded with all the equipment necessary to perform CPR.
Dan knelt next to his patient and paused a moment to don latex gloves. With the tension of the rope removed, her color looked nearly normal, other than some bruising around the area of the rope burn. He pressed two fingers deeply into the flesh of her neck, just slightly off midline, and arched his eyebrows high.
“Hey, we got a live one,” he announced. “Pulse is a little thready, but it’s there. Time to go to work, people. Anybody called Fire and Rescue yet?”
“On their way,” someone said.
Over the course of the next thirty seconds, Dan found nothing but good news. His stethoscope found good lung sounds on both sides, as well as a patent airway. One of the most critical complications of what the incident report would euphemistically call a near-hanging was the fracture of the larynx, the voice box. Vascular as hell, a fractured larynx would bleed like a son of a bitch and swell up to the size of a grapefruit, cutting off the flow of air through the patient’s windpipe. That would have required him to do an emergency tracheostomy, a procedure he hadn’t tried in over a year. As it was, the rope seemed to have avoided the critical structures of the throat entirely.
Dan plucked a penlight from his breast pocket and flashed the beam first into one eye and then into the other. The pupils performed as they were supposed to, contracting uniformly to the beam of light.
“I’ve got normal breath and lung sounds and perfect pupils,” he announced to the still-gathering crowd. None of them knew the exact significance of his words, but the banter helped him concentrate. “Quite an audience,” he observed lightly.
There wasn’t much to do, actually. The patient was stable; breathing on her own and clearly perfusing oxygen. In the world of the road doctor, that was called a save. To kill some time, he started an IV of dextrose and water, flowing at just a high enough rate to keep the patient’s veins open, in case something catastrophic happened and she decided to crash. With the line in place, they could administer virtually any drug they wanted to.
“Hey, Doc!” someone called.
Dan looked up. He loved it when they called him Doc. “Yeah?”
“I got somebody from the FBI on the phone. Wants to know if this one’s gonna get a bed or a coffin.”
Dan laughed. “Tell ’em that Dan Schearer’s on duty. I only do beds.”
Barely 6:00 A.M., and the streets of Little Rock were still deserted. That didn’t stop Irene from using the bubble light and siren, though. Paul sat planted in the front seat next to her, looking like he still hadn’t come to grips with morning. Irene had given him only five minutes to pull himself together and meet her in the lobby.
They’d got to within three blocks of the jail when George Sparks called on Irene’s cell to inform her that Carolyn was still alive and en route to St. Luke’s Hospital. The turn Irene executed in the middle of the street would leave marks on the pavement for years to come.
For his part, Paul pulled his seat belt tight. Between being ejected out of a good night’s sleep, Irene’s driving, and the absurd tale she relayed from the night before, he’d have sold his soul for a stiff drink.
“Say that again slowly,” Paul said, his tone dripping disbelief.
Irene smiled and nodded her head. “Yeah, you heard it right. I think this whole mess was started by Frankel and that he’s still running it.”
Paul gave a low whistle. “Jeeze, Irene, if I ever piss you off, will you at least give me a fair warning?”
She laughed. “This isn’t a grudge,” she insisted. “I’m telling you, it’s a solid case.”
“Referred to you by none other than Jake Donovan,” Paul finished. “At least there’s no conflict of interest.”
She changed lanes. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think we have an indictment here, but I’m telling you the pieces fit.” She ran through the coincidences of the notes and the locations. “And let’s not forget the munitions George Sparks was tracking down in the desert. But here’s the real kicker. You ready?”
“Holding my breath. You do see that parked car up there, don’t you?”
Actually, she hadn’t. She swerved violently to the left, then back into her own lane, siren and horn screaming the whole time.
“Sorry about that,” she said sheepishly. “Woke you up, though, didn’t it?”
He answered with a look.
“Okay,” she went on. “Here’s the kicker. Let’s assume that the arms were stolen and sold in the early eighties.”
“By our boss.”
She waved him off. His defeatist attitude really grated on her sometimes. “Doesn’t matter. Not for now, anyway. Just assume they’re being stolen and sold.”
“Got it. Stolen. Sold.”
“Bite me, Boersky,” she growled. “Well, what do you know? Up until then, nary an article was published on chemical warfare incidents anywhere in the world. Then, starting in early ‘84, we got incidents popping up all over the world. Iran, Iraq, Libya, even Tokyo, for crying out loud!”
Paul looked at her disapprovingly. “And because people are getting gassed, you think Frankel did it? I’m afraid I don’t see the nexus.”
She tried again. She pointed out that no one incident was enough to draw a conclusion, yet taken together, as a tapestry of events, it all started to make sense. Frankel was the common denominator. He was in the article about General Albemarle, he was involved in the right-wing rag’s prophetic allegations about Newark, and he friggin’ ran the investigation after the explosion. Then, there was the business of the notes and the inherent flimsiness of the case itself.
“Tell me this,” Irene challenged. “Why didn’t Frankel keep digging? Why doesn’t the file have interviews with friends and coworkers and teachers?”
“It does,” Paul scoffed. “The file is full of them. I’ve read them.”
She shook her head emphatically. “Uh-uh. No, you haven’t. Look again. What are those interviews really about? The investigators back then were trying to catch the Donovans; they weren’t trying to build a case against them.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a huge difference! You look through those files again, and you’ll see it. Frankel and company only asked questions about where the Donovans might have run to. Nothing about whether they might have done it. No one ever noticed the sloppy work, because everyone thought they already knew the answer. Frankel was going to rest his whole case on the note and their escape.”
Paul let the words settle into his brain while she negotiated a treacherous series of turns through the center city. “And that other guy? Tony Bernard? He was just a bonus kill?”
“No. At least not at first. I think he was the original patsy. But when the Donovans survived, the bad guys had to regroup in a hurry. That meant killing Bernard.”
“And leaving a note.”
She nodded. “Yes. And leaving a note. Chances are, there was a whole other note already drafted, to frame Bernard. How big a deal could it be to rewrite it?”
“You’re crazy, Irene.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Travis was tired of the pain. He was tired of being checked and poked and peeked into. Most of all, he was tired of this tube they’d shoved down his throat to help him breathe. It helped some that it didn’t hiss anymore unless he told it to; unlike before, when it made him breathe.
The hissing snake. When he was first climbing out of the deep cave of his unconsciousness, in those horrible moments when the line between reality and fear was blurred, all he could think about was the snake in his mouth. He’d panicked, clawing at the tube with both hands to pull it free. They said he was strong, too. It took two doctors and a nurse to keep his arms pinned to the bed. The struggle didn’t last long, of course. Somebody injected something into his IV line, and right away, everything changed. He wasn’t afraid of the snake anymore. In fact, he wasn’t afraid of much of anything.