“Are you nuts?”
“I’ll be okay for tonight,” he bluffed. “Whoever did this doesn’t know we’re onto them or that you’ve changed my IVs.”
“But what about telling the nurses, so you get the monitor, and the Demerol?”
“I’ll still ask for the Demerol, and make up enough of a story about fluttering in my chest they’ll wire me to something.”
“Then who’ll replace your intravenous with extra potassium when it’s empty? I can’t keep sneaking in here to do that.”
“This bag is good until morning. By then Melanie will be here, and she’ll handle everything. You forget, I start walking around now, my heart’s primed to break into a jitterbug.”
Scowling, she planted her hands on her hips. “I can arrange a wheelchair. A stretcher even.”
“And where would you put me? I need to be in a hospital. The worst of this damn infection is yet to come.”
“And you could have yourself transferred, by air ambulance if necessary, back to Buffalo, where you’d be a lot safer than you are here. So quit the bullshit and tell me the real reason you refuse to leave. Are you using yourself as bait?”
Damn right, he thought, more determined than ever to carry out his plan now that he knew what to expect. Logically, the person who’d gotten to his IV before would want to pull a repeat performance, but only after the next scheduled change of the intravenous bag. Since the old one would have run out around 5:00 A.M., that’s when Earl expected his would-be killer to come sneaking around. “Of course not,” he answered, giving Tanya his most sincere smile, until a new wave of cramps twisted him in two and sent his pulse into triple digits again.
“You are nuts!” Her voice slid a notch higher, sounding frightened.
No fooling her. Worse, he sensed she was going to blow the whistle on him. “Tanya, now don’t you tell anyone, hear me? I’ll be all right. Whoever added the bicarb probably won’t try to slip me another dose until after I’m due to get a new IV bag in the morning. And I’ll be ready to raise holy hell the second anyone comes near me. If I haven’t got a nibble by tomorrow, I promise you, I’m out of here.”
She stared at him with that odd moonlike face of hers, looking skeptical as hell.
It took some arguing, but he finally convinced her that if she made a fuss now about extra security or tried to keep watch over him herself, it would alert his attacker and only postpone another attempt on his life. She reluctantly agreed not to interfere.
“But it’s guards, an air ambulance, and home to your hospital in Buffalo if this nonsense doesn’t work,” she insisted.
“Agreed.”
Shaking her head, she turned and left.
He pressed the call button and waited for the nurses, trying to keep a grip on his nerve and ratchet down the drubbing that his heart-turned-boxing-glove continued to deliver against the inside of his chest.
10:30 P.M.
Hampton Junction
It was snowing again, the flakes coming at the windshield like tracer bullets. Mark sat hunched forward over the wheel to see better as he pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “Nell told me recently about a friend of hers who had a baby at the home,” he said.
“Oh?” Lucy paused in her attempt to direct a blast of hot air from the heater so it would defog the glass.
“The woman had said how she and other expectant mothers wanted to make a garden as a way to lessen the dreariness of the place, but were refused. Not only that, she complained they only had a half-finished lawn to walk on, even though the place was big as a park. And when I went out there, it seemed that lawn never did get completed. It had gone to seed of course, but I could make out the shape. It looked irregular, the bordering undergrowth from the forest having intruded on areas where the grass should have been. Hard to imagine fat cats like the Bradens unable to spring for a bag of seed or more than a few rolls of sod at a time. Unless someone needed an area that was constantly in a state of being dug up, so he could bury what he didn’t want found, then cover it with grass so it stayed put.”
Lucy rode with a hand over her mouth, as if trying not to throw up.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“No, I’m not.”
“Do you want me to stop the car?”
“Won’t do any good. I got like this in the camps. All objective when I found the bodies on paper, but ready to upchuck when the reality of them sank in.”
They rode in silence.
“Why would he do it?” she asked after a few minutes.
“Who knows? Money maybe?”
“But I thought he was already richer than God.”
“He is now. But back then? Sometimes these dynasty families have trouble coming up with the inheritance taxes to pass their goodies from one generation to the next.”
She gave a shudder and huddled deeper into her coat.
He thought of the books in Charles’s library that chronicled all the times and ways humankind had attempted to rid itself of others and protect sameness. “Or it could be a new variant of an old disease,” he said.
“An old disease?”
“Think about the atrocities you’ve seen these last seven years. Aren’t they committed so that the position of one tribe or group or race might be enhanced over the rest?”
“Pretty much.”
“The factions always seem to share the same pretenses, right? Protecting culture, spreading religion, getting an economic edge, creating a nation of superior beings, righting old wrongs – then they outshout each other trying to proclaim their unique benefit to the world, thereby justifying their own entitlement.”
“It’s sounds like you’re quoting a sociology text.”
“It’s by one of my favorite journalists. He writes for the Herald, and I spotted some of his articles glancing through one of Braden’s books last night. That particular line came from a series that won a Pulitzer. It always stuck with me.”
“Well, it describes a few drunken warlords I met in Serbia to a T.”
“I probably still have clippings of the piece at home. It suggests that while primitives use genocide to eliminate outside threats, the sophisticated supremacist prefers eugenics, because that offers the possibility of strengthening the desirable traits of the tribe and weeding out its weaknesses all from within. In other words, improving the species.”
“That’s Nazi drivel.”
“ ‘Marry your own kind’ still holds sway among a lot of non-Nazis.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I’m just trying to crawl inside his head to answer your question, ‘Why?’ ”
“You spend too much time inside that creepy place, and you’re going to have to hose out your own brain.”
“If Braden believes in smotherings, maybe he’s also an advocate of other twisted beliefs in that hall of shame of his. He and his cronies are as arrogant a bunch of elitists who think they are the chosen ones to rule their patch – a sizable chunk of corporate Manhattan – as any tribe you ever came across on your travels, and a hundred times more powerful.”
“So?”
“So maybe Charles Braden made sure they had more than their fair share of healthy offspring.”
“What?”
“Probably some crazy idea to assure their succession – hand off their life works to a generation free of flaws.”
“But that’s nuts. Sick. Loony!”
“Of course it is. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”
“But if he wanted healthy kids for all his crowd, why not just help the parents adopt? He didn’t have to risk committing murder.”
“I don’t know why he didn’t go the official route, but I’m almost certain he didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think the parents knew. At least not the mothers.”