First Do No Evil: Blood Secrets, Book 1 (18 page)

“I can’t tell him that. That’s humiliating.”

“Not as humiliating as getting fired. Now hurry up before anyone sees you.”

She shot him a look filled with hurt and confusion and sprinted out of the medication room. With Rachel safely out of the way, Garth zipped up and shut the door behind her. He estimated he had at least seven minutes remaining before Suzie and Tamara finished up the PICC line, and Rachel would likely be sulking in the bathroom until someone summoned her.

A laminated card dangled from the code cart. He lifted the card and checked the location of the medication he sought. It was in the fourth drawer, back left compartment.

Of course he could break the plastic lock on the crash cart and remove the vial right here and now, but that would trigger an investigation. Or he could simply order the medication through his laboratory, but he didn’t need it for his research, and the order might later lead the police to his door. What he was about to do next would lead them nowhere. The authorities were always looking for the simplest explanation, and Garth need only add a small twist here and there to escape detection. Occam and his razor were a mastermind’s best friend. He recited the location of the vial in order to lock it in his memory.

Fourth drawer. Back left corner
.

He exited the med room and surveyed the unit. Still no one at the nurse’s station. Peering through the observation windows as he circled the unit, Garth noted that only a few rooms were occupied, and those by sleeping patients. He entered the corner room—the one nearest the stairwell.

Inside, he found a slumbering man wearing a non-re-breather mask. Judging by the shallow movements of his chest, the man was heavily sedated. Garth opened the bedside chart and checked the medication list. Morphine drip. Excellent. Unlikely this guy would wake up and cry out for help.

Closing the chart, he moved to the head of the bed and read the oxygen meter. It was set at ten liters. The pulse oximeter was blipping along at ninety percent, and the man’s heart rate varied between fifty-eight and sixty-five. With minimally acceptable saturations and a low heart rate, death could be easily induced—in short order. All conditions seemed favorable.

With no hesitation whatsoever, Garth pulled the latex gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. Then he pushed the oxygen mask off the man’s face and let it drop onto his chest. He waited a beat, expecting the poor fellow’s saturations to drop rapidly from the lack of oxygen. They didn’t. Another thirty seconds and the pulse-oximeter had dropped only to eighty-eight percent. When an alarm beeped, Garth pushed a button marked
Silence Alarm
. He should’ve done that to begin with. It irritated him that he hadn’t, but he was comforted by the fact that the man’s lips had at long last turned blue. Too bad the heart rate held steady at sixty.

Beginning to feel a shadow of a hint of anxiety, Garth decided to implement a more aggressive course of action. He pinched the man’s nose closed with one hand and covered the mouth with the other. The patient was sedated, but not comatose. His hands flopped back and forth like landed fish.

“It’s easier if you don’t fight it,” Garth said kindly. As an afterthought he added, “This isn’t personal. It’s only that you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The hands ceased their flopping. Impatiently, Garth tapped his oxfords and waited. Glancing down he saw a flicker of brown scamper across one calfskin toe. A cockroach. A good omen. He smiled and looked back at the bed. The oximeter precipitously dropped its reading, and the patient’s heart bradyed down to a rate of fifty, and then, after a few more stubborn beats, gave up the fight. The monitor flat-lined.

The alarm beeped again, and Garth silenced it swiftly. He noted the man’s face had gone from blue to ashen, and the chest was frozen. Garth checked for a pulse, but didn’t find one. He replaced the non-re-breather mask over the man’s mouth. Then Garth removed his gloves, stuffed them back in his pocket and ducked his head around the doorframe. The nurse’s station was still vacant when he crept out of the room and made his escape down the stairwell.

Garth calculated he had no more than two minutes from the time he fled the Med-Surg floor until the monitor alarms sounded again, a nurse discovered the lifeless body of the patient in the corner room, and a code was called. If he was going to make it to the elevators in time, he’d better hustle. And hustle he did, down the stairs to the third floor. Exiting the stairwell into the back of the ICU, he strode through the unit and entered the restroom where he’d stashed his scrubs. Hastily bending to retrieve his costume, he banged a knee against the toilet.
Goddamnit.

Not pausing to rub his sore knee, he yanked the scrubs over his street clothes, secured the surgical mask over his face and pulled the paper hat over his hair and eyebrows. Just as the code bells sounded, he pushed out the door of the restroom. Pleased with his alacrity, he planted himself in front of the elevators and waited for someone with a code card to arrive.

Less than a minute later, an agitated group of doctors burst out of the ICU and into the lobby. One of them swiped a card through an electronic reader, and the elevator doors, which had been locked down as soon as the code was called, opened. Garth elbowed his way into the car, joining the crush of hospital personnel already on board. He rode up to the fifth floor and streamed off the elevator, an anonymous member of the mass of mint-clad rescuers rushing to the scene. No real danger in that. When a code was called, anyone with skills who was nearby was expected to respond. No one would be taking names or checking I.D.

By the time he entered his victim’s room again, the code was in full swing. Outside, the morning pulchritude gave way to an impromptu thunderstorm, the type that came and went so impetuously in this mountain town. Blue skies turned gray and rain mixed with hail. Icy droplets fired against the window of the small hospital room like bursts of artillery fire. Dr. V.’s face was a somber mask, running the code, barking out orders and calling for ammo against an enemy he couldn’t defeat.

Laryngoscope.

ET tube.

Epinephrine.

The luscious Carmen was kneeling on the bed, straddling the patient, her plump bottom jousting up and down while she compressed the chest. The crash cart drawers had been flung open, and clear wrappers and empty vials littered the floor. More uniformed personnel arrived, and crammed into every corner of the room.

Dr. V.’s eyes were fixed on the monitors, but Garth’s were fixed on Carmen’s plump ass working up and down as she rode the patient. There was something obscene about a code, and Garth’s penis was growing hotter and harder by the minute.

“How you doing?” Dr. V. addressed Carmen.

“Good. I can keep going.” Her breathlessness contradicted her words, and Dr. V. gestured at a fellow who looked to be in his early twenties to take over for her.

A medical student.
Dr. V. wasn’t holding out any hope for the patient or he wouldn’t have called for the switch. He was allowing a medical student to gain experience without risking anything. The kid couldn’t do any harm to a dead man. His face nearly as white as his short lab coat, the student approached the bed and placed his crossed palms on the patient’s sternum.

“Straighten your elbows, and you won’t get as tired,” Carmen offered as she dismounted.

Without Carmen’s bouncing ass to entertain him, Garth’s mind began to wander to mundane topics—such as the wet weather. His beamer was parked in an outdoor lot, and damned if he hadn’t just washed it. Letting loose a frustrated sigh, he made his way closer to the crash cart. His foot tapped impatiently while the code swirled around him like a hurricane. He was the eye of that hurricane. Calm. Waiting for the perfect moment to make his move. Soaring above the howl of voices, came Dr. V.’s last-ditch commands:

V-fib: Paddles!

Clear
!

Do it again
!

Clear
!

And then, finally, the moment he’d been waiting for arrived. A golf-ball sized chunk of hail cracked against the window, and all eyes turned toward the terrifying sound. Garth shot his hand into the back left corner of the fourth drawer of the code cart and closed his hand around a glass vial. Slipping the drug into his back pocket, he headed for the door.

By now, the crowd was thinning, with more personnel heading out of the room than in. Code etiquette dictated that those individuals arriving too late to play a role might gape only so long before they were expected to wander back to their floors and go on about their business. Garth joined the exodus. It made no difference to him if the patient lived or died.

As he squeezed out the door, he heard Dr. V.’s dejected voice. “I’m calling it, folks. Time of death…”

Pushing open the stairwell door, he glanced back over his shoulder and around the unit. He saw Rachel kneeling on the carpet in front of the nurses’ station, head bent, one arm wrapped around the woman kneeling beside her. The two appeared to be praying. The woman’s back was turned. He couldn’t see her face, but he recognized her wrinkled cardigan. One of the woman’s hands stretched heavenward; the other gripped the wheel of a stroller. A toddler’s hand batted the string of a foil balloon.

Oh
.

That was too bad, really.

But he couldn’t control who occupied the room nearest the exit any more than he could control the weather that had ruined his expensive car wax. Like he’d told the woman’s husband, earlier, it wasn’t personal. It was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He turned back to the exit.

Unconcerned about being noticed, he descended the stairs slowly. He would be hard to recognize with this mask covering most of his face, and it didn’t matter much anyway. No one would watch the hospital surveillance videos because no one would know a crime had been committed. A critically ill man had stopped breathing. His heart had stopped beating. That was all.

If the man’s wife requested an autopsy, it would reveal nothing. Garth hadn’t injected him with poison, or loaded his IV with potassium, or bludgeoned him to death or used any of the other murder methods popularized by Hollywood movies. He’d simply covered the target’s mouth—gently—with his hand until death had ensued. The man hadn’t struggled, and Garth hadn’t used force, so there would be no bruising, no petechial hemorrhages. Let them do an autopsy. They would find no trace of foul play.

Arriving at the surgical floor, he entered the restroom for the third and final time that day, locked the door, and yanked off his scrubs. He’d dump them in a laundry bin on his way out. After splashing cool water on his face, he combed his fingers through his hair. He bent and retrieved his scrub bottoms off the bathroom floor, fished one hand into the back pocket. He pulled out a glass vial about half an inch tall with a metal cap.

Sure, the bottle would be documented missing from the cart, but the code review team would assume the nurse in charge of recording medications had forgotten to mark down its use. She’d have to fill out an incident report. The missing vial would be chalked up to code chaos and human error. Who would suspect that a murder had been committed to steal a few milliliters of non-narcotic fluid? What a shame it would be though, if he’d grabbed the wrong bottle. Garth held the vial up to the light and read the label, just to be certain. He smiled.

It was Vecuronium, all right.

Chapter Fourteen

The whir of an engine sounded, and then a greasy plume of smoke trailed through the parking lot as a bus pulled out of the station. Sky had availed herself of the transit time between her home in Doney Park and the Greyhound depot to fill Danny in on the events of the past couple of days. She’d even told him about the lawsuit and the missing files because he’d asked her to tell him everything—whether she thought it was relevant to the robbery or not. And though Danny had remained silent throughout the telling of her tale, though he’d offered her no insight or advice, she felt somehow relieved of a heavy burden.

Unlike her brother, Danny didn’t take it personally when she didn’t accept his advice, which made it easier to share with him what was on her mind. Anything she hadn’t told him yet was simply because there hadn’t been time to do so. At the moment there was a burning question on her mind, but they were here, now, standing at the entrance to the bus depot. She’d have her answer soon enough.

Danny slid his arm behind her and opened the door for her. Turning to thank him, she squinted against a cloudless sky. Funny, the turns the weather took at this altitude. Over the past hour a hail storm had both come and gone, leaving behind no evidence that it had ever existed—except of course for her memory that it had. After stepping inside, it took a moment for her pupils to dilate in order to accommodate the change from the brightness of the outdoors to the dimly lit interior of the bus depot. She blinked rapidly until her vision sharpened, and then she scoured the sparsely populated room searching for the location of the lockers. They were in the back, kitty-cornered to the cubby of vending machines and rickety tables that were charitably referred to as the snack bar.

Her palm, currently clamped around the key she’d found beneath Edmond’s desk, was itchy and sweaty. Forcing her tight-fisted grip to relax, she unfurled her fingers to reveal the small brass object. Such a distinctive key: a short cylindrical shaft, and a flat round bow painted with red nail polish. A ridiculous image of the bus station night shift, sitting around, painstakingly manicuring the bows of keys drew her smile.