The silence at the other end of the line was total.
“What’s the matter, Earl?”
“I hope you didn’t tell her about me and Kelly.”
“No, of course not.”
The silence continued.
“What?” Mark asked.
“Did you check her out?”
“She’s all right, I promise you.”
“The casualty rate among people who might have helped us has tripled in the last twenty-four hours. At best she’s bad luck. You be careful. My advice is turn over everything you’ve found out to the local sheriff and let him handle it. Don’t go doing anything stupid on your own, hear me?”
11:04 P.M.
New York City Hospital
Earl’s pulse leapt to triple digits as he watched the cardiac monitor the nurses had provided. Though at the moment the pattern indicated a fast but normal heartbeat, the result of his own anxiety and responsible for the boxing-glove effect, nasty-looking runs of extra squiggles occasionally popped up. Diagnostic possibilities of what they could be the precursors to ran through his head, and a cold sweat crept over his skin again.
He averted his eyes and settled himself back down. Better keep his imagination in check if he had any hope of toughing this out and catching a killer.
Yet he continued to worry. First about the arrival of this resident, Lucy, on the scene. As much as he liked Mark, the guy jumped to conclusions and rushed to judgment about people, for better or worse. His resentment of Chaz had almost led him to exclude other suspects since the beginning of the case. Then he’d been ready in an instant to label Samantha’s doings with Kelly as Munchausen by proxy syndrome. What if this time he’d gotten it wrong the other way around, and mistaken a serpent for an angel? He was lonely enough to be a mark for any intelligent, half-decent-looking female. From the way he babbled on about her, he’d been smitten, which meant she could lead him by the nose. What if she were in cahoots with someone who wanted to sabotage the investigation, or worse, lure Mark into danger? And now, apparently thanks to this woman’s helpful interpretation of Cam Roper’s old files, Mark was chasing a crazy idea that Charles Braden could have been involved in some bizarre scheme involving mass infanticide. At first, he had to admit, when Mark told him, he’d been shocked into at least considering it, but then when he learned its source… “Jesus!” he said out loud, his bad feeling about her growing worse by the second.
A fluttering sensation in his chest alerted him to a new round of palpitations, and he lay still, inhaling, exhaling, and getting frustrated as hell.
Tanya slipped in to check on him at eleven as promised.
“All’s well,” he lied, grateful that his tracing on the monitor happened to be going through a quiet spell.
She left looking as concerned as ever.
His restlessness became unbearable. He rang for the nurse, asked for a pad of paper, sticky tape, and as many different colored pens as she could spare.
“You should get some sleep, not stay up coloring all night,” the woman said, not at all as jovial, with her red cheeks and granny glasses, as he’d remembered while loaded with morphine. Her name wasn’t much of a yuk either. The tag read MRS. WHITE, as if she’d killed Professor Plum in the library with the pipe wrench.
“What’ll it be next,” she added, “cutting out paper dolls?”
“Sweet!” he told her.
He proceeded to do what he always did when the complexity of a patient’s medical problem overwhelmed him – make a flowchart of all the variables.
At the center he wrote Kelly.
Circling her like malevolent red moons he placed Chaz Braden and Samantha McShane, and in more distant orbits, using a slightly less vibrant orange, Charles Braden III and Walter McShane.
Closer to Kelly he added Earl Garnet, Cam Roper, and Mark Roper, all in green – the men who loved her.
Radiating out from Charles Braden III he drew two lines. On the end of one he wrote Maternity Center, the end of the other Home for Unwed Mothers. He also made a horizontal line connecting the two, in red.
Floating above these, suspended in the middle of nowhere, he added the name Nucleus Laboratories, and joined to it with a hard black line, Corporate Executive Health Plans. With a lighter line, he added, Genetic Screenings: Siblings with a Positive Family History for Cancer.
From these he penciled in a tentative line to Chaz Braden’s name with a ? on it.
Finally, he scribbled Victims with information at the very top of the page, added Victor Feldt as number one with a black line joining him to Nucleus labs, and Nell as number two, her black line leading to Kelly.
And that was it for Hampton Junction.
Or was it? He added Lucy, circled it, and penciled in three faint lines, each marked with a ?, between her name and his principle suspects – Chaz; Charles; Samantha.
Moving to the bottom of the page he wrote NYCH, with four spokes radiating out from it, one to Kelly, one to each of the Bradens, and one to himself. He added a fifth spoke and on it wrote Bessie McDonald-Victim? Finally, he designated a similar Victim? status to himself.
At first he felt a sense of mastery, having condensed everything on one page. A half hour later he seethed with impatience at being no further ahead in sorting it all out.
He couldn’t pull anything into a coherent whole. The diagram seemed to highlight differences between the various parts of the puzzle rather than link them together. Where were the common threads? He couldn’t relate Bessie McDonald to Victor Feldt and Nucleus Labs. He couldn’t connect the labs to Kelly’s murder. There was even a lack of consistency in the attacks on the victims. At NYCH, the person who had silenced Bessie McDonald and infected him operated like a ghost, attempting to leave no trace of foul play. Such stealth suggested a perpetrator determined to escape suspicion altogether, not just evade capture. In Hampton Junction, however, the attempts to remove people, though clever, were crude. The explosion tonight might silence Nell, yet it most certainly would raise suspicions. As for Victor Feldt’s timely heart attack, that, too, could have been achieved with unsophisticated means. Mark had said he was overweight, hypertensive, and diabetic – significant risk factors. Someone with a gun had already chased Mark up a hill. The same thing could have been done to Victor with lethal results. Again, clever, but nowhere in the same league as what had been done to Bessie and him. It was as if whoever carried out these acts felt he or she could withstand doubts on the part of the police and public about there being foul play, so long as the events could also be read as accidental, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise.
He sat scowling at the diagram, wondering how the same scam could include such wildly divergent tolerances to risk.
“Too many players,” he muttered.
Yet surely Kelly’s murder was at the center of everything.
A sudden pain coiled through his abdomen, once more sending him writhing, his insides on fire despite the Demerol. When it passed he lay drenched in sweat and exhausted, warily watching the monitor while trying to control his pulse. The slightest sound out in the hall set it racing again.
He shakily returned to his diagram, but a single answer to explain the events in Hampton Junction and NYCH continued to elude him. On a whim he thought, Maybe that’s what this crazy picture was trying to tell me. If he couldn’t make sense of it as a whole, what if he broke it down and looked at the parts separately?