Evasion (11 page)

Charuk paused for a few beats and took a deep breath before he continued. “I understand that you’re upset, Mr. Desmond. But in a situation like this, the investigation had to lead back to the root cause, the reason why your father was in surgery in the first place.”

“This is utter fucking bullshit!” Scott yelled.  “If you’re not willing to admit this is either an accident or homicide, then you could at least have offered
undetermined
as the category for his death.” Scott had, of course, looked into the situation enough to understand the coroner’s role and the five questions they were expected to answer, including the final, most important one, the means by which they died.  The categories for that result were: natural causes, accident, homicide, suicide, or undetermined.

“I can see how you might feel this way.” Charuk said, his calm poker face unwavering – while that demeanor was likely meant to keep an angry or upset patient or family member stabilized, providing a consistent and comforting platform that they could come back to once their anger, tears or whatever high emotion they were running on had played itself out, all it did was further piss off Scott. “But the reason follows the chain back to the underlying reason why the patient was in the surgery.”

“The patient is my fucking father. And he is fucking dead. Thanks either to a quack who should be fucking sued and have his license taken away, or because of a defect in the clips that were used in his surgery.

“THAT is what you were supposed to be determining!  THAT is what I was expecting to hear. Not this goddamn fucking bullshit you’re spewing!”

“I am sorry you feel this way, Mr. Desmond. And, as I stated, I am truly sorry for your father’s loss. But the methodology for determining a death in these circumstances…”

“You can stick your methodology up your ass!” Michael screamed, picking the folder up off of the examining table and opening the door. “Thanks for wasting my time and doing sweet fuck all to look into this!”

“Mr. Desmond…” Charuk said, this time in a partially pleading voice, as if he were talking to an insane person. Scott had to admit that the anger flowing through him, the complete incredulous feeling about what was happening did make him feel insane – insane with rage, insane with disbelief, insane with anger over this situation.

“Go fuck yourself!” Scott said, slamming the door behind him and storming down the hall and out the waiting room past the stares and the fearful looks on the faces of the other patients who had obviously heard most of the exchange – or, at least, Scott’s side of the exchange, since he had been the only one yelling.

Leaving through the front door of the office, Scott felt the rage begin to subside, replaced by the tears of rage. He managed to get to his car, unlock the front door, slip inside and close the door behind him before the tears came out full blast.

“Dammit!” he said, pounding his hands on the dashboard and the steering wheel. “This is complete bullshit.  They’re hiding something, dammit. They’re covering something up, and I want to know what it is! Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!”

Today
 

Scott tumbled head-first into the darkness of the vertical section of the shaft, his arms and hands, already in front of him, instinctively embracing for the impact. A quarter of a second into the fall, he worried that this vertical part of the air vent went all the way from the top floor to the bottom and would that a fall from such a height would certainly kill him.

Great
, Scott thought.
My fear of heights combined with my fear of the dark merging so beautifully into this perfect end to my life
.

But as his elbows, knees, and heels scraped against the metal walls, he realized this section of the shaft was much more narrow than the horizontal sections he had been navigating through, so he folded his arms together, thrusting his elbows hard against the sides and also spread his legs so that his knees pushed against the sides of the shaft as well.

The initial unbalanced manner by which he pressed against the sides initially bounced him and jostled him within the confines of the metal shaft, and his knees and elbows burned from the friction of the shaft, the ridges of where the pieces of vent joined together tearing into his shirt and cutting him.  But he kept the pressure up, pushing out with his arms and legs as much as possible, despite the burning, the pain.

The fear of snapping his neck at the sudden stop at the bottom was a pretty good motivator to help him focus less on the pain and more on just stopping his fall.

He skidded along the shaft for another second or two, the speed of his descent slowing even further.

He pushed out as hard as he could, but the vertical momentum was too much to stop altogether. It did, however, slow him down significantly.

After a few more feet of the reduced speed descent, pressing up against the walls of the shaft, his elbows popped free of the walls on both sides.

The first floor
, Scott thought, and thrust both of his arms straight out on each side, feeling the impact of the ledges on both sides digging in to his biceps.

But it was enough of a jolt to his fall that he was able to further spread his legs out and brace them firmly against both sides of the shaft and stop his descent completely.

He hung there, inverted, unmoving, and took a deep breath, trying to figure out how he could twist around and shimmy in to the horizontal section of the shaft without losing his grip and continuing his plummet into the darkness.

Sweat dripped into his eyes as he hung there, catching his breath, trying to work out a quick plan. He could feel a thin line of blood, warm and sticky, running up the back of his leg. It wasn’t enough blood to start dripping, but he was certainly aware of it, and of the burning sensation. Although his legs didn’t just burn from the spot he figured he’d been shot – they burned in the several spots that had been pressing against the wall in his attempt to slow down the vertical descent.

There was a bit of light coming from off to his right. There was a steady stream of heat blowing up through the shaft, more intense now that his plummet had stopped, and likely further aggravated by the fact that most of the mass of his body was blocking the heat from continuing to rise.

Scott twisted his hips, slowly moving his knees towards his front while pushing the back of his head against the side of the metal shaft. The edges of the horizontal section of the air vent dug deeper into his biceps as he slowly twisted and shifted.

He knew that he couldn’t remain suspended there much longer. His arms would eventually give out and he would plummet all the way to the bottom.

So he had to do something a bit risky – he had to tuck in, do a quick twist, lift his left arm out of the shaft to his left, and thrust it into the one to his right; at the same time he had to continue to twist and thrust his legs completely into the opposite horizontal section, so that his body was planking the gap.

He knew that, while perfectly suspended he might stand a chance of holding himself by gripping onto the ledge of metal, even falling the half foot would be too much for him – the slick metal, particularly with him sweating the way he was in the over-heated enclosed heating vent, wouldn’t allow him any sort of proper grip. There wouldn’t be enough friction to hold himself upright.

Scott flashed back to the scene in
Die Hard
where Bruce Willis’s character, John McClane falls down a section of a significantly larger air vent, more akin to the size of an elevator shaft. In the movie he fell a couple of stories before the last two portions of the fingers of both hands end up catching the edge of one of the horizontal sections and completely stop his fall.

It wasn’t a matter of physical strength, Scott knew – certainly, McClane was tough enough to hold himself up with just the tips of his fingers for a few seconds – but the issue was simple physics. There’s no way that a man in the weight class of almost two hundred pounds would be able to stop such a rapid descent with such a minimal point of contact, the tips of eight fingers.  Never mind the speed of his fall and the slickness of the metal itself, but McClane had already been sweating and he was covered with blood.

While McClane had fallen a few stories and still managed the miraculous save, Scott knew that, if he twisted incorrectly, despite having one full arm extended into the horizontal section, the downward pull of his weight would be enough to dislodge him and send him tumbling down the vertical section of shaft again. There was, simply, nothing for him to grasp onto. His fingers couldn’t dig into or catch on anything.

He took a deep breath, did the final twist and, with all of his might, pulled his left arm in and shoved it quickly into the same side his right arm was in. At the same time, he tucked, twisted, and pulled his legs in, then immediately thrust his legs back out on the opposite direction with all of his might.

His legs pushed through the horizontal section on the far side, a bizarre feeling to have them meet no resistance after the previous several seconds of intense pressure against the metal sides of the air shaft. A split second later, his hip connected with the bottom of the horizontal section digging into his hip. His arms started to slip as the downward momentum wanted, desperately, to pull him naturally down.

He jammed his elbows against the sides of the shaft and prevented himself from falling.

He hung there, his body planking across the section of vertical shaft, and let out a deep breath.

Then, after a few seconds, he managed to get the tip of his shoe against one of the tiny ridges that connected the sections of the shaft and push his upper body further into the one side.  Scrambling with his feet and slowly pulling himself forward with sweaty, slick fingers, he managed to get to a point where his body weight was enough overtop the horizontal section that there was no chance of him being pulled down the vertical section of shaft.

Secure and safe, at least from the fall, he let out another deep breath and rested there, giggling the way John McClane did immediately after surviving a pretty precarious situation in that classic adventure movie. “Eat your heart out, McClane,” Scott chuckled in a half sigh, half laugh. “Yippie Kaye Yay!”

Four-and-a-Half Years Earlier
 

Dr. Citino, the surgeon who had performed the nephrectomy on Scott’s father was a difficult man to find any information on, despite all of the manners by which Scott had access to the average person’s lives using online databases.

He’d spent hours searching through and hacking various university and hospital databases in order to see what he could find out about the man, but at virtually every stop he made along the digital journey, there was little new or fresh evidence in place.

It was almost, if Scott were to speculate wildly, as if somebody had gone in, within a single system, and entered a basic single paragraph worth of information about the man – like cribbed notes from a Wikipedia entry, the information about Citino that appeared on various websites  and in informational databases was almost the exact same word for word.

Citino grew up in a small town in Eastern Ontario, went to Arnprior High School, attended the undergraduate medical program at the University of Ottawa, then moved to Laurentian University where he received his MD. He was single, never married, had no children, and, apart from becoming a surgeon was unremarkable in virtually every possible way.  There were only a handful of pictures of him as a student at both institutions as well as in his roll on the staff at the University hospital in Sudbury, where he was an attending physician with a specialty in surgery. There were a few high school pictures of him, but he hadn’t been a member of any clubs and thus, apart from a few class photos of him through the years, there were no other images of him from high school.

The man drove a late eighties Ford Taurus, never had a single speeding ticket, parking ticket or accident claim on his vehicle. His criminal record, like his driving record, was untarnished and completely clean.  He had a locked Facebook profile – although it was not at all hard for Scott to gain access to his full wall – with a simple photo (one of his staff pictures from his intern days at Laurentian hospital), a handful of friends and less than a dozen updates.  Similarly, he had an old neglected and poorly established
MySpace
page with the same photo and a couple of lines of text about him. The only new information there was a line expressing his enjoyment of honkytonk and new country music.

Digging deeper into Citino’s medical records on staff, Scott had been able to compile some of the stats on his surgeries.  They were, like his driving and criminal records, unblemished in any way – but, like the rest of his life, they were also not at all remarkable in any way either. 

Scott had spent several weeks combing through the various records, medical charts and reports in which Citino was named in any way, whether it had been as his time as a full-fledged surgeon or whether it had anything to do with his time as a medical intern or even med student.

About the only interesting thing Scott had found was, back before medical school, when Citino was an undergrad at the University of Ottawa, he had spent a co-op term on the fourth floor of the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre where he had worked as part of the team that had treated Wendel Schmidt, a CSIS agent during his stay at the hospital following a mental breakdown he had incurred.

Scott found himself reading more about Schmidt and his exemplary record as a field intelligence agent, working on special projects and high tech espionage, rather than following up on Citino himself. Time and again, he caught himself following links to information and profile details about Schmidt, and, only after half an hour of falling down another rabbit hole, realized he had gone on a tangent and was reading about the agent’s work and experiences, speculation about the top secret program he had been working on which caused the breakdown, instead of going back to look at Citino.