Fatal (14 page)

“Well, her death was actually handled by our office. My boss, Josef Keller, the chief medical examiner for the state, did the post.”

“He find anything out of the ordinary? Drugs? Alcohol?”

“Nothing like that. How much do you know about what was going on with Kathy before her accident?”

Grimes shook his head.

“All I know is that she was run over by a car.”

“It was a truck. She ran out of a bar and into the street. The poor driver never even had the chance to hit his brakes.”

“But you said she wasn’t drinking.”

“Her blood alcohol level was zero. Toxic screen—at least the preliminary panel we’ve gotten back so far—was totally negative. She was insane, Bill. Absolutely insane. She had been slipping into a horrible paranoia for months before she died. Thought there were people out to kill her. I kept trying to get her help, but the more I tried, the further she withdrew from me.”

“Did you speak with her family?”

“I called them once, about four weeks before Kathy was killed, but they were just bewildered and also sounded angry at Kathy for having drifted away from them. They couldn’t understand what they could do to help her if I was a doctor and I couldn’t do anything.”

“The Wilsons are good people,” Grimes said, “but simple and very set in their ways. Kathy was their only kid. They never thought she should have left.”

“I know.”

“So that was it? She just went crazy?”

“Just about. As I said, she was convinced at the end that men were after her, trying to kill her. I think she was trying to get away from them when she died.”

“Is it possible she was right?”

“Not that I could see.”

“So the autopsy your boss did didn’t show anything else?”

“Nothing we weren’t already aware of. There was one other thing that was pretty unusual about her, though. Something I didn’t see any reason to share with her parents. Over a number of months before she died, coinciding to some extent with the development of her madness, her face was becoming disfigured by these lumps—neurofibromas, we call them.”

“Neu-ro-fi-bro-mas.” Grimes said the word slowly, as if committing it to his vocabulary. “Cause?”

“Unknown, except maybe bad genetics or a mutation, that sort of thing. Possibly a virus. By any chance, did you ever see the movie
The Elephant Man
?”

“’Fraid not. But I think I know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, in its worst form, her condition would be like that. And it was getting there. She was pretty deformed at the end. No telling what she would have looked like had she lived.”

Nikki glanced up at the sun and then checked her watch.

“You really plannin’ on leaving today?” Grimes asked.

“I’m on call for my office tomorrow night, so I have to be back by then. I’m one of the world’s least reliable nighttime drivers, so I plan on going as far as New York, then the rest of the way in the morning. I’d like to play just a little bit longer, though, before I take off. There are a couple of Kathy’s pieces I’d like to try with the gang.”

“I sure wish you could stay,” Grimes said, with invitation in his voice and expression.

“Thanks for the thought,” she said, not at all threatened by the police chief’s tone, “but I’m locked into getting home.” She stood. “Why don’t you come in and let us play something for you. Do you have any favorites you haven’t heard?”

“I’m not much of a bluegrass expert,” Grimes replied, “although I do enjoy the music. Tell me something,” he said, as he walked her back to the social hall, “why did you decide not to tell the Wilsons about Kathy’s neu-ro-fi-bromas?”

“I didn’t see any reason to tell them over the phone. Then after I met them in person here, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to. Then they told me . . . Kit asked if Kathy’s face had been battered in the accident. The poor dears had enough trouble getting their minds around her deranged mental state. It seemed cruel to tell them her face was deformed as well. Besides, the microscopic examination of her brain and the neurofibromas isn’t done yet. If it shows anything to explain what happened, I plan to share that news with them. If it doesn’t provide any explanation, I’ll have to decide if it’s worth telling them at all. As you know, Kathy’s an only child, so there’s no need to worry about some evil gene working its way through her family.”

“If I were in your position, I don’t think I’d mention it to the Wilsons, either,” Grimes said. “Nothing to gain.”

“Nothing to gain,” Nikki echoed.

“Well,” he said when they reached the social hall, “I’m sorry to have met you under these circumstances, but I’m certainly glad to have met you.”

“Same here.”

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll see each other again.”

“You never can tell. If I find myself headed back this way for any reason, I’ll call you at the station.”

“Do that. And I’ll call you at the coroner’s office if I find myself in Boston.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“And Nikki, if anything does turn up on those microscopic slides you spoke about, please let me know.”

Nikki picked up her fiddle and gently rubbed it down with a cloth.

“I’ll do that, Bill,” she said, taking her seat among the musicians, who were currently between numbers. “Since you don’t have a request, I’ll pick one. We’ve been playing some Alison Krauss. She was Kathy’s idol. Mine, too.”

The smart, distinguished-looking medical examiner she had never gotten to meet might have left, but few others had. People were gathered around the buffet table and scattered across the dance floor, arm in arm, waiting for the next tune. Kathy would have approved and probably would have insisted on adding a keg of Bud to the celebration of her life.

Nikki closed her eyes and let the music fill her mind and her body. A few hours ago she was a total stranger in Belinda. Now, because of Kathy and the gift of bluegrass, she was connected to the town and the forests and the mountains and the water in ways that would endure as long as she did.

IT WAS NEARING 
three-thirty. Nikki helped transfer Kathy’s things into the Wilsons’ Dodge Ram pickup. After everything was set in place, she reached into the trunk of the Saturn and brought out the case containing Kathy’s exquisite mandolin.

“Here,” she said, handing it over to Sam. “Chief Grimes told me you taught Kathy to play.”

“Only fer a couple a weeks,” he replied, taking the instrument out and cradling it in his huge hands, a soft, wistful expression on his face. “After thet she begun teachin’ me.”

He ran his thick-jointed thumb over the strings, which Nikki had tuned before loading the instrument into the trunk. Then he took one of the picks from the case and played a brief riff of remarkable clarity and some technical difficulty.

“That was great,” Nikki said. “No wonder Kathy was so good. It’s in her blood.”

“Here,” Sam said, placing the instrument back in its case and passing it back to her. “I want you ta have it.”

“But I—”

From beyond where Sam was standing, Kit stopped her short with a definitive shake of her head.

“Sam’s got arthritis pretty good,” she said. “We’d both be happy knowin’ Kathy’s instrument is with you.”

Nothing in either of Kathy’s parents’ faces encouraged debate.

“I may come back for a lesson on it,” she said.

“You’d be welcome if’n ya did,” Sam managed, his eyes moist.

Nikki set the instrument on the front seat, embraced the Wilsons, then headed down the arching church driveway toward the road north. At the outskirts of Belinda, she paused and gazed back through the rear window, down the length of Main Street. It really was a lovely town—gentle, earnest people; beautiful countryside; and an appealing pace of life. She ached to think she would never get to know the place with her friend.

She turned north, retracing her route onto the narrow, two-lane road that would bring her to Route 29. The road, snaking through dense forest, was deserted, just as it had been on the trip into town. Nikki pulled on a blue Red Sox cap to control her hair and opened the moon roof and her window. Sunlight filtered through the tops of the trees, dappling the pavement. As she rounded a tight turn, she saw a car pulled over at an angle on the narrow shoulder. A man in jeans and a yellow T lay facedown on the road. A heavyset man in a dark suit knelt beside him. Nikki’s immediate assessment of the scene was that the man had struck a pedestrian. He looked up as she approached, then stood and waved to her. Nikki pulled over, scanning the ground around the victim for blood.

The man, in his thirties and obviously distressed, hurried to her window.

“I . . . I didn’t see him. I came around the corner and there he was. Do you have a cell phone?”

“Is he breathing?”

“I . . . I think so.”

Nikki stepped from the car and hurried to the motionless man, expecting the worst. No blood, no obvious injuries. There was a slight rise and fall of his chest—he was most definitely breathing. She had no intention of rolling him over without stabilizing his neck. She knelt down next to him, peered at his face, and reached across to check his pulse. At that instant, he rolled over, and at the same moment, the large man standing behind her grabbed her roughly by the hair and clamped a cloth over her nose and mouth. It was soaked with a substance she knew well from the lab—chloroform.

“Beddy-bye, Doc,” he said.

 
CHAPTER
13

DURING HER ONE YEAR OF SURGICAL RESIDENCY 
before the switch to pathology, Nikki had earned the nickname “Cube” because of her absolute coolness and composure in the face of even the direst medical emergencies. She never could fully explain what seemed to be an inborn trait, but once she did check her pulse seconds after saving a patient by performing an emergency tracheotomy. Fifty-eight.

“I guess I’m just a very logical person,” she once told a medical friend by way of explanation. “And a very positive one, too. Once a situation begins—critical or otherwise—all I focus on is what I have to do, almost never on what will happen if I screw up.”

The whiff of chloroform gave Nikki three seconds before the obese man in the business suit clamped the cloth over her mouth. As with emergencies in the hospital, her reactions over those precious seconds seemed reflex, but were, in fact, the product of a number of rapid-fire observations and deductions.

Chloroform—take in a sharp breath and hold it! . . . Quick, purposeful movements by the so-called victim—it’s a trap! . . . Beddy-bye, Doc—he knows who I am! This is no random mugging. Trying to beg—to talk them out of whatever they’re going to do—would be hopeless. . . .

Three times in her life Nikki had taken self-defense courses for women. She came away from each of them frustrated, embarrassed, and a little frightened by how much she had already forgotten. But there were three recurring rules the courses had permanently impressed on her brain: Do something quickly; go for the testicles, the nose, or the knee; and as soon as possible, run. Still on her knees, her back to the massive assailant, Nikki drew her fist up in front of her eyes and jackhammered her elbow back into the man’s groin with all the force she could muster. Air exploded from his lungs. He grunted, released her, stumbled backward briefly, and dropped onto his butt like a sack of grain thrown from a truck. The chloroform-soaked washcloth flew off to one side. The rail-thin man in the yellow T-shirt was scrambling to his feet, but Nikki was quicker to hers. She kicked him viciously under the chin as he was coming up, snapping his teeth together and sending him sprawling backward. Then she whirled and sprinted across the road into the forest.

“Get her, Verne!” the larger man shouted, speaking without the mountain twang Nikki had become used to over the day. “For chrissakes, just shoot the bitch!”

“Shit, Larry, she broke my tooth. She broke my fucking tooth in half!”

Nikki was several paces inside the trees when she dared checking over her shoulder. Larry, Mr. Business Suit, was wobbly, but upright. He had shed his jacket, revealing a torso the size of a Volkswagen. Sun sparkled off his expansive white dress shirt, highlighting a shoulder holster on the left and dark sweat stains beneath his ham-hock arms. Verne, also on his feet, seemed less dazed. He had pulled a snub-nosed pistol out of the front of his waistband and was starting across the road after her, still rubbing his jaw. He fired once, but Nikki was charging ahead into the brush and had no idea if the shot was even close.

These men know who I am and are trying to kill me!
her mind screamed.
Move! Just move!

Terrified and bewildered, she raced ahead, trying to get a sense of her situation and to formulate some sort of plan. On her side of the ledger, she was in far better shape than Larry and probably as fit as Verne. Also, she was running for her life.

Her disadvantages were obvious—two men with guns, knowing the area, angry as hornets, and determined to kill her. Not good. Still, she could feel herself maintaining some composure and continuing to fight the urge to panic.

“Cut in over there!” she heard Verne call out. “If I don’t get her first, she’s going to run out of real estate in a hurry. Just don’t let her backtrack.”

Nikki held her hands in front of her eyes to keep from being blinded by slashing branches. The town was several miles to her left. To her right, from what she could remember, was nothing until the main highway, maybe ten miles away. Verne sounded concerned about her doubling back between them, so that might be what she should do. She quickly rejected the notion. The chances of getting caught by one of them while heading back toward the road seemed too great, especially when there was no guarantee even if she made it that a car would come. It had to be straight ahead, searching for a place to hide until dark. Then she could make her way back into Belinda.

A plan, however thin, decided upon, she flattened herself behind the thick trunk of a tree and listened. Verne wasn’t that far behind. She could hear him speaking. It took a while before she realized that he wasn’t speaking, he was singing—singing to her in a twisted, haunting child’s voice.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are. All-ee, all-ee in free. Come on, little lady, there’s no place to go.”

Her focus on Verne was interrupted by a gunshot from off to her left. The bullet slammed into the tree where she was hiding.

“What in the hell’re you doing?” Verne called out.

“She’s right there, jerk,” Larry responded. “Right behind that tree. Give it up, Doc. There’s no place you can go.”

There was a second shot, then a third, but Nikki was already sprinting ahead, weaving through trees and leaping over brush. The huge killer had moved much quicker than she would have imagined him capable of. Underestimating him was a mistake she wouldn’t make again. The trees and dense undergrowth were both her ally and her enemy, concealing her to some degree, but at the same time tearing at her face and arms, threatening to trip her, or blind her, and always keeping her from getting up much of a head of steam.

Why are you doing this to me? Why?

Nikki wanted to stop and scream out the question. But these were men with orders, not answers. Instead, she plunged ahead, splashing into a shallow stream and trying, for a few dozen yards, to sprint down the center of it. There had to be somewhere to hide, or else a path where she could accelerate and put some distance between her and the men. She slipped on wet stones once, then again. Finally, she abandoned her efforts and scrambled up the muddy bank.

“She’s in the brook,” Verne called out. “No, there she is, on the other side. This way! This way!”

Two more gunshots cracked off. One of them snapped a branch right next to Nikki’s face. Unless she could get some space to use her speed, she was going to be shot. She cut to her right, running low to make herself less of a target and to prevent the bushes from getting a straight-on whip at her eyes. It was late summer and the forest floor offered no collections of dead leaves large enough to hide her. She was gasping for air now, struggling to maintain her pace. But she knew she was slowing down. A voice inside began telling her to huddle on the ground behind a tree and simply pray they overlooked her. What other chance did she have?

She knelt on one knee and remained motionless as she tried to regain her wind. For ten seconds, fifteen, all was quiet. Could she possibly have outdistanced them that much in such a short time? The question was answered moments later by the breaking of a stick and some bushes rustling. At least one of them was near—very near. She was gripped by fear now, out of ideas. Again her internal voice warned her to stay put and take her chances. Her instincts urged otherwise. She sprang up and again began running, crashing through the dense brush.

“This way! Over here!” Verne cried out.

Nikki burst through some bushes and stopped short. She was standing in bright sunlight at the upper border of a rock ledge. Stretching out before her was a lake, nestled in a bowl of verdant forest. The ledge sloped slightly downward for about ten yards to a sheer drop-off fifteen feet above the water’s surface. In the distance she could barely make out a couple of boats. This is what Verne had meant when he said she would soon run out of room. Her composure was completely gone now. “Cube” no longer existed. She was trapped and going to die, and all she could think of to do was scream.

She sensed both killers pinching in on her. Running from them was no longer an option. The only move she could fix on was the lake—to dive in fully clothed and hope she wasn’t a fish in a rain barrel. At the instant she turned to charge down the granite slope, there was a gunshot, then another. The second bullet grazed the side of her skull, just above her ear. Stunned, she spun and fell heavily. Her head struck the rock with dazing force. Helpless and barely conscious, she rolled down the incline and off the ledge.

She hit the surface of the lake face first, aware only of the cold water enveloping her and the fact that she couldn’t seem to move in any purposeful way. The fall had driven most of the air from her lungs, and as soon as she entered the water, she began drifting downward. Within ten seconds, she had settled on the stony bottom. For a few moments she was aware, and consumed with the horror of her situation. Then, as blackness and peace closed in around her, she took a breath.