Authors: Neil McMahon
But Monks’s fingers had felt something else in the pocket, about the size of a film can, smooth and hard. He tugged it free. It was a multi-dose glass vial of potassium chloride.
His hands gripped the car frame. Thirty milligrams in solution, injected IV, would freeze the heart instantaneously, with the only trace a slight electrolyte imbalance in the blood. Death attributed to a coronary or stroke, a secondary complication of the presenting overdose.
Easy. And much easier still for Naia to have killed Jephson herself.
There was a reason she had set Monks up to do it, and the reason that reverberated in his brain
came in the words of Harold Henley:
They stronger yet if they just taken another life. Fatter.
Monks heaved Jephson up into a fireman’s carry and headed for the Emergency Room in a lurching run.
The emergency staff at Mercy Hospital were not easily impressed, but the sight of one of their own doctors staggering in with a man over his shoulder caused a flutter. Aides came fast with a gurney. Monks leaned against a wall, fighting for breath
The on-duty physician, Jim Parrish, strode over to Monks.
“I found him outside,” Monks said. “Somebody must have dumped him.”
They moved along with the gurney, Parrish automatically checking vital signs. “What the hell are you doing here, Carroll?”
“I’m scheduled at noon. Aren’t I?”
“I didn’t think so.” Parrish was in his unities, competent and unimaginative. Although he had never said so, it was clear he was aware that Monks’s reputation was not pristine.
Not the man Monks wanted in on this.
But he had seen, with a jolt of hope, that Vernon Dickhaut was here.
“Christ, I must have got my calendar wrong,” Monks said. He had already read the ER: there were no visible crises, but it was crowded, and this being Friday, it would get more so.
They paused, both aware that Jephson’s condition was serious but not critical. The aides wheeled the gurney on into a cubicle, a nurse following to start a workup.
Parrish said, “Alcohol and drugs?”
“Plenty of both, is my guess.”
“He doesn’t seem the type.”
“Maybe a suicide attempt. You look busy, Jim. This might be a good one for Vernon. I could keep an eye on things. I mean, I found the guy.” He hardened his gaze a notch. It was Parrish’s ER, but he was senior.
Parrish shrugged, and waved his clipboard in a gesture of assent.
Monks caught Vernon’s gaze and nodded him toward the cubicle. They met just outside the door. Monks blocked it casually, trying to look like an older doc giving a word of advice.
Very quietly, he said, “This isn’t what it seems. I can’t explain now, but in a few minutes I’m going to ask you to look the other way. Will you help?”
Vernon’s sky-blue eyes widened to the point of goggling. For ten seconds, the two men looked into each other. Then Vernon nodded.
Monks said, “First guess is morphine or Demerol. Let’s start with one milligram of Narcan, a five-second push, IV. Start lab, blood sugar, and do a urine-tox screen. He’s drunk, too, so watch his breathing. If that doesn’t start him around within two minutes, it might be Valium: try point-two
milligrams of Romazicon. I’ll be back in five.”
Monks walked to the physicians’ room, deliberately not moving too fast. Inside, he put on his lab coat, transferring the pistol to its pocket. It was 11:47
A.M.
He called Larrabee and said, “That was Jephson in the trunk.”
“I saw you carry him in. Is he dead?”
“Not yet. That’s the task.”
There was a short but pointed silence, while Larrabee did not ask the question:
Is he going to be?
Larrabee said, “She’s got something in mind. Following you, waiting to pick you off.”
“Let’s let her follow. With you watching.”
“I don’t know how close I can stay.”
“I know this hospital, Stover. And I’ve got a gun.”
Another pause. Monks pictured Larrabee passing his hand over his hair.
“Where do they keep the janitor carts, all that stuff?”
“Basement,” Monks said. “I’ll be leaving the ER in ten to fifteen minutes, heading for the elevators. Up to the sixth floor, north wing, for five to ten more, then down to the morgue. That’s in The basement, too.”
The connection ended. Monks picked up the house phone and punched the extension for the morgue.
“Roman. Get rid of everybody down there. I need you alone in twenty minutes.” He kept talking, trying to voice the flow chart taking shape in his mind.
When Monks came back to the ER, Jim Parrish was not in sight: presumably he was with another patient. Vernon was inside the cubicle, alone with Jephson. Monks stepped in and closed the door.
“I gave him both, Narrcan and Romazicon,” Vernon said. “He’s still out hard.”
Monks leaned over Jephson, thinking,
What the hell?
But the answer was already coming: something Monks had not seen in more than ten years—probably chosen by someone who knew that this type of O.D. could not be brought back to consciousness for hours.
Monks said, “Barbiturates.” A once popular choice for suicide. Except suicides did not typically lock themselves in car trunks.
Jephson’s pulse was normal, his breathing labored but steady. A dose just short of lethal—probably deliberately, so that Monks would be forced to finish this.
He stepped outside again, motioning Vernon to follow.
“Patient was stable when you released him into my care.”
“Released him?”
“This is what I asked you.”
Doubt came into Vernon’s eyes, but again, he nodded.
“He’s mine now,” Monks said. “You’re no longer in any way responsible.”
He walked to the ER desk. The day Charge Nurse, Helen Toner, watched his approach with guarded astonishment. He remembered that he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and had not shaved.
“Mrs. Toner, please admit the patient in Cubicle Four to my service on Six-North. Single room. Probable overdose, rule out coronary or stroke.”
“Dr. Monks, I thought—you’d made a scheduling mistake. That is, you’re not really on duty. Are you?”
“This is a slightly irregular situation. I found the man, I began his care. I’m considering myself responsible.” Monks laid Jephson’s wallet on the desk. “You’ll find enough information here for preliminary paperwork. We’ll worry about notifying relatives when he’s settled.”
“I’ll see if they have a room.”
There were personnel and patients just on the other side of the door to the waiting room. Monks leaned close and dropped his voice.
“Helen.
Find
a room. And rush the paperwork.” In a normal tone, he said, “I’ll take the patient up myself.”
She stared. Then leaned back in her chair and said, “Yes, Doctor.”
Monks pushed the gurney loaded with monitor, IV paraphernalia, and Francis Jephson, along the hall at a brisk but untroubled pace. He passed several familiar faces, maintenance workers and personnel. Others, strangers, might have been visitors or staff from another unit.
Or Naia herself.
Twenty yards behind him, Larrabee, wearing a janitor’s coat, pushed a cart stacked with cleaning supplies. He paused and began dust-mopping while Monks waited for the elevator.
There were no other passengers. Monks unloaded the gurney on Six-North, a general unit for those not well enough to go home, but not requiring intensive care. Things were quiet, most patients sedated or asleep, a few chatting with visitors or watching television. He started down the hall, pausing to study his clipboard until a second elevator with Larrabee arrived.
The Nurses’ Station was in an alcove midway, presided over by a pleasantly worn-looking nurse named Rose Olsen. She glanced up at his approach and blinked. It was not common to see a senior physician pushing a gurney.
Monks returned her greeting blandly and handed her the check-in forms from his clipboard.
“That’s 624, Dr. Monks. It’s ready. I’ll help you move him.”
“Rose, I’m going to leave him on the gurney
a
few minutes. The monitor started jumping on the way up here. I’ll call you when I need you.”
Monks pushed the gurney into the room and closed the door. From under the blanket he took out an evidence camera he had borrowed from the ER and positioned it on the windowsill. He took a sterile, plastic-wrapped syringe and the vial of potassium chloride from his pocket. He inserted the needle into the vial and drew liquid into the syringe, balancing both in one hand and snapping a photo at each step. He inserted the needle into the injection part of the tubing.
Then he looked down into the face of the man who had started this engine of misery.
Aloud, Monks said, “I can see why you covered up for little Robby Vandenard, way back when. Money. Status. Rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy.
“But why did you keep setting up the NGIs? The vicious thrill, like watching that video? Getting off on what Naia did, that you were too cowardly to do yourself?”
Monks held the camera against his chest with his right hand. He placed his left thumb on the syringe’s plunger and snapped a photo. He snapped three more as he pushed the plunger home.
He put the syringe back in his pocket and
replugged the IV. He pulled the monitor sensor away from the skin of Jephson’s chest and retaped it to the gurney’s pad. The waves on the screen became a jumpy line of static. Monks took more photos.
Then he jerked open the door and called sharply, “Nurse! This patient’s having PVCs.”
He watched her stand in alarm and start toward him, but he stopped her with outstretched palm, already pulling the gurney from the room.
“I’d bener get him to the ICU. He can’t stay here until his rhythm is stable.”
He pushed the gurney past her, clandestinely wiggling the monitor cable to mimic the jumpy lines of premature ventricular contractions. Larrabee stepped aside, gaze deferentially low.
The elevator doors closed. Monks rode down, past the ICU, to the basement.
The basement corridor was empty. It was not an area that got much traffic. Except for building maintenance and supply, there was only the morgue. Monks walked slowly, until another elevator opened and Larrabee came out pushing the cart. He disappeared into the fire stairwell. Its windowed door would give a view of both sections of the L-shaped hall.
Inside the morgue, Roman was waiting, gloved, wearing smock and cap. They worked quickly, lifting Jephson onto one of the stainless
steel autopsy tables, then covering him with a plasticized sheet folded down from the waist.
Roman positioned a cart with autopsy instruments—knives, bone saws, specimen jars, stainless steel bowls, and a scale—then stepped to the microwave. He took out a Tupperwarelike container and emptied its contents carefully into one of the bowls: a human heart, swimming in darkish blood. He splashed fingerfuls of blood on Jephson’s chest, dabbing it around, then surrounded the area with blood-soaked towels.
Monks stood back with the camera and snapped several photos. The entire procedure had taken perhaps three minutes.
He stepped into Roman’s office, picked up the house phone, and called the extension for the Emergency Room.
“Mrs. Toner, I have some terrible news. My patient, Francis Jephson, suffered what appears to be a massive coronary and died in return from the floor to the ICU. I pronounced him at 12:11
P.M.
Dr. Kasmarek is performing the autopsy. Please call Admitting and see to it the death is entered on the computer bank immediately.”
Silence.
Monks said, “Mrs. Toner? Was that clear?”
The faint reply came: “Right away, Doctor.”
He nodded to Roman to come inside the office, and closed the door.
Roman said quietly, “How long’s he out for?”
“A few more hours.”
“You want me to hit him with something if he comes up?”
“If you haven’t heard from me by then, get him to the police.”
Monks took out the cell phone and once more called the now-familiar number that was his link to Naia.
When the tone came, he said, “It’s done. The autopsy has started. I have photos, and the hospital’s data bank will confirm it. Tell me where we make the exchange.”
He clicked it off and waited.
Two minutes passed. Three.
The phone’s chirping ring sounded. When he raised it to his ear, his palm was slippery with sweat.
“This is Monks.”
“Where the fuck are you?” It was Larrabee’s voice, a tense whisper.
Startled, Monks said, “In the morgue.”
“You haven’t left?”
“No.”
“Somebody just went into the machine room. I thought it was you. I’m going to check it out.”
Monks turned to Roman, gesturing to him to stay put, and strode down the hall. He looked cautiously around the corner. An empty gurney was pushed against the wall outside the door to the machine room. He trotted there on his toes,
moving as quietly as he could, his hand on the pistol’s butt.
The physical plant was huge, a labyrinth of pipes and machinery strung along narrow corridors to allow human passage. It was dimly lit, hot and loud with the throbbing growl of the building’s pulse being pumped out through ceilings and walls. He moved a step at a time, the pistol in both sweating hands, his head turning back and forth to peer through the gloomy maze.
He inhaled, then stepped around a corner, gun ready. Several yards ahead, a man was lying on the floor facedown, his feet toward Monks.
Larrabee.
Monks turned in a circle, teeth bared. His heart was slamming with rage and fear. There was no one, no sound. Blood streamed from a gash across Larrabee’s temple. Monks knelt, fingers going to a wrist. The pulse was fast but strong. Monks’s hand searched for other wounds and found something protruding from the back between the shoulders.
A dart, a hypodermic syringe, the type shot from a gun.
“It’s okay, buddy, we’ll get you upstairs,” Monks whispered. He got one arm around the torso and was rising with the weight when the edge of his vision caught the moving shadow. He started to turn, raising the pistol, but a hard crack came down on his wrist, knocking the
gun from his grip, sending pain flaring through him.