Authors: Dorothy Phaire
“Deek, do you have something sterile to cut the umbilical cord with?”
“No, but there may be roller gauze in our first aid kit to tie it off with. I’ll go get it,” he said.
“That’ll work until the ambulance gets here and they can clamp and cut the cord with something sterile.”
Deek rushed out to get the first aid kit. Billi grimaced from the pain. There was nothing sterile to use to make an episiotomy incision so her delivery could go smoother, no drugs or IV to reduce the pain. Billi tightened her muscles and gave another strong push. Seconds later, a full-term baby girl with a stock of coal-black, curly hair, plunged into the world. Renee caught the baby with Deek’s shirt and wrapped it around her. Renee checked her watch and saw that it was 4:57 PM.
At that moment, Deek ran back into the lounge with the first aid kit. He stood by looking helpless with the kit in his hand while Renee quickly used her fingers as a suction to scoop out the mucus from the baby’s mouth and clear her passageway. The baby let out a hearty cry. The audience behind the covered glass panel clapped and cheered. The infant’s dark brown vibrant eyes looked at Renee with a startled expression. Her forehead and one eye were bruised from the difficult birth but at least the baby could breathe on her own.
Deek cut a strip of roller gauze and tied off the umbilical cord. Renee laid the bundled baby on her mother’s chest. Billi forced a weak smile but something didn’t look right in her color. A stricken expression came over Renee as she examined Billi. The new mother breathed heavily and her pulse felt faint.
“Billi has a placenta abruption and if the ambulance doesn’t get here immediately, it will be too late,” Renee whispered to Deek.
“I don’t understand,” he said, looking worried, “I thought the hard part was over.”
“Once Billi’s labor began and her water broke so fiercely, the large gush of fluid leaving the uterus caused an increased risk of placental abruption. That means the placenta detached too early.”
“Is there anything we can do in the meantime?”
“I’m afraid not. She’s at a higher risk for postpartum hemorrhaging because her uterus is not contracting the way it needs to after labor,” Renee explained.
Suddenly, they heard the ambulance outside. “Good, they’re here,” said Deek, “I was just about to put her in a squad car and drive her to GW myself.”
When the EMS personnel reached the homicide unit, Billi was unconscious. The EMS staff cut the umbilical cord with sterile instruments and discarded the afterbirth. Renee requested to ride with Billi in the ambulance but they told her she had to follow in her own car because only family members were allowed in the ambulance. Deek headed to his locker to put on a clean shirt. On the way he showed Renee where she could wash up in the Ladies Room. A few minutes later, they met up in the squad room of the homicide unit. He told Renee he would drive her to George Washington University Hospital where the ambulance was headed since it was the closest hospital. On the way out, he grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair and helped Renee with her coat.
They arrived at the hospital only minutes behind the ambulance. Deek and Renee rushed through the emergency room door and asked several desk attendants and medical personnel about Billi. No one wanted to take the time to give them information about a homeless woman who had just given birth with life-threatening complications. Deek stopped a nurse on her way down the hall and showed her his badge. He asked what happened to the maternity patient just brought in.
“Are you family?”
“No, she has no family. Ma’am, I just introduced myself as a homicide detective working on a case so it should occur to you this is police business,” said Deek with annoyance in his voice.
“Please wait here Detective. I’ll go check on her.”
Renee sat down while Deek stood nearby. A short time later, they saw the nurse coming down the hall towards them. Renee got up and they both approached her hoping to hear everything was fine. They couldn’t tell anything from the flat expression on the nurse’s face.
“How is she?” Renee blurted out.
“The patient you asked about died from hemorrhaging in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The body’s been taken to the morgue. Do you know who she was?”
“Her name was Belinda,” said Deek. “I don’t have a last name.” Renee covered her mouth and looked away. She said a silent prayer for Billi’s soul.
“What happened to her baby?” asked Deek.
“The baby’s healthy. She weighed 7 lbs. 8 oz. and measured 20 inches long. Her Apgar score was 10, which is good,” said the nurse and went on to explain. “Apgar’s a test we use on newborns to check their activity or muscle tone, their pulse rate, reflexes, skin color, and respiration. Everything looked good on all counts.”
“What’s going to happen to this baby?” Renee asked.
“We notified Child Family Services because we don’t have facilities to keep border babies here at the hospital. Due to the quick delivery though, the baby still has some amniotic fluid in her lungs that she has to expel before we release her to Child Services. She’ll be in the nursery overnight for observation then she can go home.”
“Home?” said Renee, “that little baby has no home and no mother.”
“That’s all the information I can give you, Ma’am. If you’d like to go to the nursery to see the infant, she’s on the 3rd floor,” the nurse said and walked away.
Deek looked at Renee and knew the answer to his question before he even asked it.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked anyway. Deek waited but Renee didn’t answer right away.
“I’ve been having this same dream lately,” she said in a subdued voice, “where I see the fuzzy outline of a baby suspended in the clouds with its umbilical cord still attached and dangling. I feel a desperate need to hold the baby in my arms. So I reach out to grasp it but just as I touch its fingertips, it suddenly vanishes. The hurt is so real I can actually feel the pain in my body when I wake up.”
Deek glanced down at her with sincere, dark eyes. He smiled and grabbed her hand. Without uttering another word, they walked hand-in-hand to the elevator and got on. He pressed the button for the third floor.
A
t the GW hospital lobby, Deek offered to take Renee home but she could clearly see he was too exhausted to drive all the way across town. She called her driver, but Remy wasn’t available, so she ended up calling a cab instead. By seven PM that evening, daylight had turned to dusk when the taxi dropped Renee off in front of her door. She walked passed the For Sale sign that her realtor had placed on the front lawn. Thanks to the recovering D. C. housing market, her house had only been listed three days but already attracted several interested buyers.
Renee unlocked her front door and lumbered up the long staircase. She still wanted to call Brenda and ask her secretary to explain that damaging story in this morning’s paper. She knew Bradford and Deek would follow-up as part of the investigation, but she needed to hear it from Brenda herself. For right now though, she only wanted to go straight to her haven—the bathroom with its large, step-down tub bordered with scented candles and colorful soaps along its ledge. After quickly undressing and leaving her clothes in a heap on the bedroom floor, she soaked in a tub of foamy suds until she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. When the telephone rang, Renee’s eyes sprung open and it took a moment to recognize her familiar surroundings. She’d been swept away in a fantasy dream about her and Deek making love.
“
Now who is this?” she said out loud and reached for her cell phone on the bathtub ledge and answered it.
It was one of her colleagues, Dr. Hershel Goldbaum. After a brief perfunctory greeting, she found out Dr. Goldbaum was calling about a former patient that she had transferred to him three months ago. The last thing she wanted to do was discuss this former patient that she had only talked to once at an initial screening session. Renee promised her friend Hershel she would FAX him the information he needed about his patient as soon as possible. She hung up the phone and climbed out the tub, cursing Hershel and the patient under her breath. After patting herself dry she slipped on a black silk robe hanging from the door hook and went downstairs to her office.
Dr. Hershel Goldbaum was a clinical psychologist like herself who in addition to family and relationship counseling also specialized in chemical dependency, personality disorders, depression and attempted suicides, compulsive-obsessive behaviors, identity confusions, and bereavement counseling. Hershel said he needed her notes from the patient’s initial session so he could conduct an evaluation to submit to the courts in the morning. Renee always screened new patients and tended not to get involved with people who were referred by the courts if she could help it. Not only was this patient a court referral, he had been convicted of pedophilia. Renee refused to accept any patient who abused or harmed children. This time she’d delete the patient’s records so she would not have to recall his session again.
Renee turned on the computer in the outside reception area where Brenda worked. Since hiring Brenda she had little need to use the PC because her secretary maintained patient records electronically and retrieved whatever she needed in a flash. Brenda had once instructed her on what to do to locate a patient record but that was months ago. Renee fumbled through the document storage application that Brenda had installed, but the program was not intuitive for an average, non-technical user like herself. Since she had a working knowledge of Windows Explorer, as a last resort, she opened Explorer to try searching for the patient’s file. All she found was a list of meaningless filenames sorted by ‘date modified’ and that didn’t tell her anything. The first file that appeared at the top of the list had a filename of TSS1001.xls. Since it still wasn’t sufficient to identify its contents, Renee opened the document and noticed Microsoft Excel displayed on the screen. Upon glancing at the file, she realized it was some type of company budget spreadsheet from the President and CEO of Techands Inc, Clifton Corbin Shaw.
Renee wondered how this file showed up on her computer. Of course, Deek could explain it but she didn’t want to disturb him. He was either home resting or back at the police station. Then she remembered that Brenda had set up a network linking her PC to Bill’s as a practice exercise for her computer class. With the recent trauma in Brenda’s life, it was no wonder she forgot to disconnect the link.
At first Renee dragged the mouse up to the ‘x’ to close the file but her curiosity got the better of her and she slowly read the file contents. Renee did not trust Shaw and wished her husband had listened to her numerous warnings about him. If there was something important that affected Bill’s future, she wanted to know about it. Just because they were separated and getting a divorce didn’t stop her from caring about him. In the biblical sense, they were unevenly yoked as husband and wife but hopefully they could still be friends. She used this reasoning to justify her snooping as she read the company’s budget sheet and private memo to executives that she was also able to retrieve from her PC’s hard drive.
The report showed that a benefactor named James Ian Mathias funneled large sums of cash to Techands Inc through company president, Clifton C. Shaw. Earlier that day Renee had learned from Deek and FBI Agent Santos that Mathias was the alleged drug kingpin and leader of the Jett Set Crew. Upon studying the spreadsheet, Renee saw where thousands of dollars were being laundered through Shaw’s corporate account on a weekly basis. If Mathias was really a drug lord then Techands Inc. appeared to be a front to receive his illegal earnings. That was the only way she could explain the regular influx of cash from Mr. Mathias. Mathias was named as investor and William Hayes, her husband, was listed as a general partner. Techands Inc’s legitimate business of providing software support was purely coincidental. The company’s main mission seemed to be a laundering service for drug money. She refused to believe that Bill had knowingly gotten involved in a money laundering scheme. She felt certain that Mathias and Shaw were using him without his knowledge. She had to warn him.
Renee immediately dialed Bill. As usual, the line was busy on his cell phone and his voicemail came on. She left him an urgent message to come to the house as soon as possible so they could talk. She printed out the Techands company documents and turned off the computer. She didn’t have time to spend all evening searching for those damn patient records for Hershel. Hershel would have to wait. She hurriedly called him back and said she couldn’t locate the patient’s file on her computer and her secretary was not available. Once her secretary came back to work in a few days, she would have the notes sent. Renee hung up the telephone and returned upstairs to her bedroom to wait for Bill to arrive. Moving day into her new place would be next Saturday so in the meantime she could start packing.
Less than an hour later, Bill walked into her bedroom. Renee had not heard him pull up outside or enter the front door. As she closed her suitcase, she glanced at him briefly with an expressionless face then went to her closet to retrieve another empty suitcase. She didn’t trust herself to speak at that moment. Either he was a crook or he was naive. For his sake she hoped it was the latter. Renee threw the suitcase on top the bed and returned to the closet to pull down an armful of garments.
Bill approached her with both arms outstretched. “I knew you’d come to your senses My Love,” he said with a sardonic grin and distinct smell of alcohol on his breath, “I got your message that you’re ready to talk now so I rushed right over.”
Renee continued to busy herself packing while trying to remain calm.
“What’s all this packing about?” he said, pointing to the suitcase. “I also noticed that ‘For Sale’ sign outside. Should I assume you’re moving in with me tonight, Sweetness?”
She didn’t answer him so he kept talking.