Choking, he pulled her higher onto his thighs.
Again he scanned the pale circle and strained to hear the sounds of rotors or approaching sirens.
Nothing – only smaller circles of snow reeling and floating in total silence.
Come soon, he prayed, and filled her lungs yet again.
The ghostly opening peered down on them, offering no more hope than a malevolent, empty eye.
5:15 A.M.
New York City Hospital
Earl had to escape. The one person he couldn’t defend himself against was Melanie Collins.
He tried to call Janet. If anything happened to him, he wanted someone to know the truth. But he found his phone line dead.
He immediately summoned his nurse.
“Dr. Collins’s latest orders are for complete rest,” Mrs. White, his cherry-cheeked angel informed him, delivering the news with an emphatic stare over the top of her tiny square-rimmed spectacles. “She phoned at midnight to check how you were doing. When she learned you’d been making late-night calls and complaining about palpitations, she read the riot act. No ingoing or outgoing communications, period.”
“Now wait a minute-”
“Told us she’d put you out and intubate you if she had to, just so you’d get some rest.”
“No way!”
“Talk it over with her. She’ll be here at seven for morning rounds – you can set your clock by her.”
She turned to leave.
And if he told this red-cheeked minder that Melanie Collins might be trying to kill him?
What makes you think a crazy thing like that? she would ask.
Because Melanie Collins may have killed Kelly McShane.
And why would she have done such a thing?
Because as Melanie basked in the adulation she garnered for nailing hard-to-diagnose illnesses, Kelly must have sensed the same all-about-me afterglow she’d seen her mother exude when people gushed over her for taking care of Kelly’s mysterious diseases.
“So?”
So Kelly realized Melanie made patients sick for the purpose of playing the hero later.
At which point Mrs. White would report he’d gone paranoid, giving Melanie the perfect opportunity to shoot him full of major tranquilizers and summon six big orderlies to tie him down if he protested.
Better he just walk out the door, then sort out the details once he got beyond her power.
He sat on the side of the bed and gingerly tested his legs.
They wobbled as he stood, but held him.
He took a few trial steps, and they nearly buckled.
No matter.
He turned off the alarms on the monitor, shut it down, and disconnected himself. How long would it take the night nurses to see his screen on their central console had gone blank? A while, he hoped.
Next he ripped out the needles in his arm, the IV bag being almost empty. Hoping he’d received enough potassium to at least stabilize his heart, he pressed on the puncture site with his thumb to staunch the flow of blood and hesitantly walked over to the bureau where they’d put his clothes. He started to dress, first pulling on his socks.
“Going somewhere, Dr. Garnet?” said a man’s voice at the door, and Charles Braden III stepped into his room.
Primed on adrenaline, pain, and no sleep, Earl reacted like a cornered animal. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded. He backed up to the bed and slid his hand under the covers, his fingers closing around the fistful of syringes he’d planted, needle first, into the mattress. His revelation about Melanie might change some of his ideas about how the Bradens fitted in the picture, but not enough that he suddenly felt safe around them.
Charles started toward him.
“I’d stay where you are!” Earl said.
The man stopped in midstride. “Why, I just intended to sit down-”
“Tell me what you want.”
In the dim light, the steel-brush silver of Charles’s hair made him seem more formidable, as if he were bristling with quills. “All right, but perhaps you better sit down. What I’m going to say will come as a bit of a shock, and you don’t look so good.”
Earl stayed leaning against the bed, his hand still clutched around his makeshift weapon. “I’m fine where I am.”
Braden shrugged, and sank his hands deep into the pockets of the white coat he wore over his suit as if he were still a practicing doctor. “I’m here to inform you that late yesterday afternoon Dr. Tommy Leannis approached my son with the news that you were the man who went off with Kelly in a taxi the night before her disappearance. Is this true?”
Earl felt the blood drain from his head.
He’d end up being handed to the cops for Kelly’s murder after all – by Charles and Chaz Braden, goddamn it. Exotic theories about Melanie Collins wouldn’t protect him now, especially since he had no proof other than a used IV bag with bicarb in it and a bunch of false-normal potassium readings. The rest was all just speculation.
Instinctively he tried to bluff. “What are you talking about-”
“Don’t play with me. I’ve already heard your denials. Leannis gave my son a tape of a conversation in which you went on at length about it not being true.”
Earl swallowed, his mouth going drier by the second, his heart giving the inside of his ribs another going over. Like a man just shot who tries to fathom the damage, he cast about in his mind for what he’d said to that weasel Leannis, dreading he may have let something slip that would incriminate himself.
“Sure you don’t want to sit down?” Braden said. “You’re starting to look worse than when I came in.”
“No, I’m fine, except I can’t seriously believe you’d take what Leannis said-”
“I also heard the same allegation from the biggest gossip in the hospital, Lena Downie in medical records.”
Earl’s face grew warm. If that woman was blabbing about it, he’d be the talk of NYCH in no time. Whether the police believed the story or not, his credibility, especially now when he needed it most, would be toast. “Oh, my God.”
“What’s even more interesting is who told her.”
Earl felt another surge of pain shoot through his gut. He fought to stay on his feet, a prickle of cold sweat sticking his hospital gown to his skin. “Told her?”
“Yeah. Turns out it’s the same person who gave the notion to Tommy Leannis.”
“But you said Melanie Collins did that.”
“Right. She picked him because, as everyone in the hospital knows, Leannis is a brown-nosing fool. He’d try anything to curry favor with our family in the hope our influence might throw some fresh meat to that cut-and-tuck business he has the nerve to call the practice of medicine. She probably figured he’d come running to us in some sleazy manner with the news, and he didn’t disappoint. Telling Lena Downie as well would be Melanie’s way of assuring a more general distribution.”
“You mean-”
“Melanie Collins is setting you up to take the blame for Kelly’s murder. Not that I figure she intends to let you live long enough to go to trial. Smear you by innuendo as the killer, I suspect, is her plan, then you conveniently die of some apparent complication from your infection, and the case is closed. Nobody’s going to look too closely at loose ends when the prime suspect is dead, especially in a twenty-seven-year-old murder.”
Earl wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.
“Setting me up? You mean you don’t believe I did it. And you know what she’s doing to me?”
“How she specifically intends to make you die, no. But I’ve been through enough of her charts in the last few days to get a pretty good idea of her repertoire. She’s a regular alchemist when it comes to fiddling with drugs and eliciting their side effects, altering sugars, playing with acid-base balance, shifting potassium and sodium levels up and down like elevators-”