“Tonight? Better at night.”
“That’s fine. No hurry.” Everyone else could learn even more from looking at her for the rest of the day, lying there in the middle of the floor. He took only a little pleasure from it, and people had to learn their lessons, and even when it was too late for one of them, others could learn from that one’s mistakes. Especially when the lessons were clear and hard. Even the drugs wouldn’t block this one out.
“What about the guy?” he asked Billy.
Billy smirked again. It was his favorite expression. “Blew him away. Both barrels, ten feet. We won’t be seeing him no more.”
“Okay.” He left. There was work to be done and money to collect. This little problem was behind him. It was a pity, he thought on the way to his car, that they couldn’t all be solved this easily.
The body remained in place. Doris and the others sat in the same room, unable to look away from what had once been a friend, learning their lesson as Henry wished.
Kelly vaguely noted that he was being moved. The floor moved under him. He watched the lines between the floor tiles travel like movie credits until they backed him into another room, a small one. This time he tried to raise his head, and indeed it moved a few inches, enough to see the legs of a woman. The green surgical slacks ended above her ankles, and they were definitely a woman’s. There was a whirring sound, and his horizon moved downwards. After a moment he realized that he was on a powered bed, hanging between two hoops of stainless steel. His body was attached to the bed somehow, and as the platform rotated he could feel the pressure of the restraints that held him in place, not uncomfortable, but there. Presently he saw a woman. His age, perhaps a year or two younger, with brown hair stuffed under a green cap and light eyes that sparkled in a friendly way.
“Hello,” she said from behind her mask. “I’m your nurse.”
“Where am I?” Kelly asked in a raspy voice.
“Johns Hopkins Hospital.”
“What—”
“Somebody shot you.” She reached out to touch his hand.
The softness of her hand ignited something in his drug-suppressed consciousness. For a minute or so, Kelly couldn’t figure out what it was. Like a cloud of smoke, it shifted and revolved, forming a picture before his eyes. The missing pieces began to come together, and even though he understood it was horror that awaited him, his mind struggled to hurry them along. In the end it was the nurse who did it for him.
Sandy O‘Toole had left her mask on for a reason. An attractive woman, like many nurses she felt that male patients responded well to the idea of someone like her taking a personal interest in them. Now that Patient Kelly, John, was more or less alert, she reached up and untied the mask to give him her beaming feminine smile, the first good thing of the day for him. Men liked Sandra O’Toole, from her tall, athletic frame to the gap between her front teeth. She had no idea why they considered the gap sexy—food got caught there, after all—but as long as it worked, it was one more tool for her business of helping to make sick people well. And so she smiled at him, just for business. The result was like no other she had encountered.
Her patient went ghostly pale, not the white of snow or fresh linen, but the mottled, sickly look and texture of Styrofoam. Her first thought was that something had gone gravely wrong, a massive internal bleed, perhaps, or even a clot-driven thrombosis. He might have screamed, but couldn’t catch his breath, and his hands fell limp. His eyes never left her, and after a moment O‘Toole realized that she had somehow caused whatever it was. O’Toole’s first instinct was to take his hand and say that everything was all right, but she knew instantly that it wasn’t true.
“Oh, God ... oh, God ... Pam.” The look on what ought to have been a ruggedly handsome face was one of black despair.
“She was with me,” Kelly told Rosen a few minutes later. “Do you know anything, doc?”
“The police will be here in a few minutes, John, but, no, I don’t know anything. Maybe they took her to another hospital.” He tried to hope. But Sam knew that it was a lie, and he hated himself for lying. He made a show of taking Kelly’s vital signs, something Sandy could have done just as well, before examining his patient’s back. “You’re going to be okay. How’s the shoulder?”
“Not real great, Sam,” Kelly replied, still groggy. “How bad?”
“Shotgun—you took quite a bit, but—was the window on the car rolled up?”
“Yeah,” Kelly said, remembering the rain.
“That’s one of the things that saved you. The shoulder muscles are pretty beaten up, and you damned near bled to death, but there won’t be any permanent damage except for some scarring. I did the job myself.”
Kelly looked up. “Thanks, Sam. Pain isn’t so bad . . . worse the last time I—”
“Quiet down, John,” Rosen ordered gently, giving the neck a close look. He made a mental note to order a complete new set of X rays just to make sure there wasn’t something he had missed, maybe close to the spine. “The pain medication will kick in pretty fast. Save the heroics. We don’t award points for that here. ’Kay?”
“Aye aye. Please—check the other hospitals for Pam, okay?” Kelly asked, hope yet in his voice though he knew better, too.
Two uniformed officers had been waiting the whole time for Kelly to come out from under. Rosen brought in the older of the two a few minutes later. The questioning was brief, on doctor’s orders. After confirming his identity, they asked about Pam; they already had a physical description from Rosen, but not a surname, which Kelly had to provide. The officers made note of his appointment with Lieutenant Allen and left after a few minutes as the victim started to fade out. The shock of the shooting and surgery, added to the pain medications, would diminish the value of what he said anyway, Rosen pointed out.
“So who’s the girl?” the senior officer asked.
“1 didn’t even know her last name until a couple minutes ago,” Rosen said, seated in his office. He was dopey from lack of sleep, and his commentary suffered as well. “She was addicted to barbiturates when we met them—she and Kelly were living together, I suppose. We helped her clean up.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My wife, Sarah. She’s a pharmacologist here. You can talk to her if you want.”
“We will,” the officer assured him. “What about Mr. Kelly?”
“Ex-Navy, Vietnam vet.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that he’s a drug user, sir?”
“Not a chance,” Rosen answered, a slight edge on his voice. “His physical condition is too good for that, and I saw his reaction when we found out that Pam was using pills. I had to calm him down. Definitely not an addict. I’m a physician, I would have noticed.”
The policeman was not overly impressed, but accepted it at face value. The detectives would have a lot of fun with this one, he thought. What had appeared to be a simple robbery was now at least a kidnapping as well. Wonderful news. “So what was he doing in that part of town?”
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “Who’s this Lieutenant Allen?”
“Homicide, Western District,” the cop explained.
“I wonder why they had an appointment.”
“That’s something we’ll get from the Lieutenant, sir.”
“Was this a robbery?”
“Probably. It sure looks that way. We found his wallet a block away, no cash, no credit cards, just his driver’s license. He also had a handgun in his car. Whoever robbed him must have missed that. That’s against the law, by the way,” the cop noted. Another officer came in.
“1 checked the name again—I knew I heard it before. He did a job for Allen. Remember last year, the Gooding case?”
The senior man looked up from his notes. “Oh, yeah! He’s the guy who found the gun?”
“Right, and he ended up training our divers.”
“It still doesn’t explain what the hell he was doing over there,” the cop pointed out.
“True,?
?? his partner admitted. “But it makes it hard to believe he’s a player.”
The senior officer shook his head. “There was a girl with him. She’s missing.”
“Kidnapping, too? What do we have on her?”
“Just a name. Pamela Madden. Twenty, recovering doper, missing. We have Mr. Kelly, his car, his gun, and that’s it. No shells from the shotgun. No witnesses at all. A missing girl, probably, but a description that could fit ten thousand local girls. Robbery-kidnapping.” All in all, not that atypical a case. They often started off knowing damned little. In any case, the two uniformed officers had mainly determined that the detectives would take this one over almost immediately.
“She wasn’t from around here. She had an accent, Texas, somewhere out there.”
“What else?” the senior officer asked. “Come on, doc, anything you know, okay?”
Sam grimaced. “She had been the victim of sexual abuse. She might have been a hooker. My wife said—hell, I saw it, evidence of scars on her back. She’d been whipped, some permanent scarring from welts, that sort of thing. We didn’t press, but she might have been a prostitute.”
“Mr. Kelly has strange habits and acquaintances, doesn’t he?” the officer observed while making notes.
“From what you just said, he helps cops, too, doesn’t he?” Professor Rosen was getting angry. “Anything else? I have rounds to make.”
“Doctor, what we have here is a definite attempted murder, probably as part of a robbery, and maybe a kidnapping also. Those are serious crimes. I have procedures to follow, just like you do. When will Kelly be up for a real interview?”
“Tomorrow, probably, but he’s going to be very rocky for a couple of days.”
“Is ten in the morning okay, sir?”
“Yes.”
The cops rose. “Somebody will be back then, sir.”
Rosen watched them leave. This, strangely enough, had been his first real experience with a major criminal investigation. His work more often dealt with traffic and industrial accidents. He found himself unable to believe that Kelly could be a criminal, yet that had seemed to be the thrust of their questions, wasn’t it? That’s when Dr. Pretlow came in.
“We finished the blood work on Kelly.” She handed the data over. “Gonorrhea. He should be more careful. I recommend penicillin. Any known allergies?”
“No.” Rosen closed his eyes and swore. What the hell else would happen today?
“Not that big a deal, sir. It looks like a very early case. When he’s feeling better I’ll have Social Services talk to him about—”
“No, you won’t,” Rosen said in a low growl.
“But—”
“But the girl he got it from is probably dead, and we will not force him to remember her that way.” It was the first time Sam had admitted the probable facts to himself, and that made it all the worse, declaring her dead. He had little to base it on, but his instincts told him it must be so.
“Doctor, the law requires—”
It was just too much. Rosen was on the point of exploding. “That’s a good man in there. I watched him fall in love with a girl who’s probably been murdered, and his last memory of her will not be that she gave him venereal disease. Is that clear, doctor? As far as the patient is concerned, the medication is for a post-op infection. Mark the chart accordingly.”
“No, doctor, I will not do that.”
Professor Rosen made the proper notations. “Done.” He looked up. “Doctor Pretlow, you have the makings of an excellent technical surgeon. Try to remember that the patients upon whom we perform our procedures are human beings, with feelings, will you? If you do so, I think you will find that the job is somewhat easier in the long run. It will also make you a much better physician.”
And what was he so worked up about? Pretlow asked herself on the way out.
8
Concealment
It was a combination of things. June 20 was a hot day, and a dull one. A photographer for the Baltimore Sun had a new camera, a Nikon to replace his venerable Honeywell Pentax, and while he mourned for his old one, the new camera, like a new love, had all sorts of new features to explore and enjoy. One of them was a whole collection of telephoto lenses that the distributor had thrown in. The Nikon was a new model, and the company had wanted it accepted within the news-photo community quickly, and so twenty photographers at various papers around the country had gotten free sets. Bob Preis had gotten his because of a Pulitzer Prize earned three years before. He was sitting in his car on Druid Lake Drive now, listening to his police radio, hoping for something interesting to happen, but nothing was. And so he was playing with his new camera, practicing his lens-switching skills. The Nikon was beautifully machined, and as an infantryman will learn to strip and clean his rifle in total darkness, Preis was changing from one lens to another by feel, forcing himself to scan the area just as a means of keeping his eyes off a procedure that had to become as natural and automatic as zipping his pants.
It was the crows that caught his attention. Located off-center in the irregularly shaped lake was a fountain. No example of architectural prowess, it was a plain concrete cylinder sticking six or eight feet up from the water’s surface, and in it were a few jets that shot water more or less straight up, though today shifting winds were scattering the water haphazardly in all directions. Crows were circling the water, trying occasionally to get in, but defeated by the swirling sheets of clear white spray, which appeared to frighten them. What were the crows interested in? His hands searched the camera case for the 200mm lens, which he attached to the camera body, bringing it up to his eyes smoothly.
“Sweet Jesus!” Preis instantly shot ten rapid frames. Only then did he get on his car radio, telling his base office to notify the police at once. He switched lenses again, this time selecting a 300mm, his longest. After finishing one roll, he threaded another, this one 100-speed color. He steadied the camera on the windowsill of the tired old Chevy and fired off another roll. One crow, he saw, got through the water, settling on—
“Oh, God, no ...” Because it was, after all, a human body there, a young woman, white as alabaster, and in the through-the-lens optics, he could see the crow right there, its clawed feet strutting around the body, its pitiless black eyes surveying what to the bird was nothing more than a large and diverse meal. Preis sat his camera down and shifted his car into gear. He violated two separate traffic laws getting as close to the fountain as he could, and in what was for him a rare case of humanity overcoming professionalism, slammed his hand down on the horn, hoping to startle the bird away. The bird looked up, but saw that whatever the noise came from, there was no immediate threat here, and it went back to selecting the first morsel for its iron-hard beak. It was then that Preis made a random but effective guess. He blinked his lights on and off, and to the bird that was unusual enough that it thought better of things and flew away. It might have been an owl, after all, and the meal wasn’t going anywhere. The bird would just wait for the threat to go away before returning to eat.
“What gives?” a cop asked, pulling alongside.
“There’s a body on the fountain. Look.” He handed the camera over.
“God,” the policeman breathed, handing it back after a long quiet moment. He made the radio call while Preis shot another roll. Police cars arrived, rather like the crows, one at a time, until eight were parked within sight of the fountain. A fire truck arrived in ten minutes, along with someone from the Department of Recreation and Parks, trailering a boat behind his pickup. This was quickly put into the water. Then came the forensics people with a lab truck, and it was time to go out to the fountain. Preis asked to go along—he was a better photographer than the one the cops used—but was rebuffed, and so he continued to record the event from the lake’s edge. There wouldn’t be another Pulitzer in this. There could have been, he thought. But the price of that would have involved immortalizing the instinctive act of a carrion bird, defiling the body of a girl in the midst of a major
city. And that wasn’t worth the nightmares. He had enough of those already.
A crowd had already gathered. The police officers congregated in small knots, trading quiet comments and barbed attempts at grim humor. A TV news truck arrived from its studio on Television Hill just north of the park, which held the city zoo. It was a place Bob Preis often took his young children, and they especially liked the lion, not so originally named Leo, and the polar bears, and all the other predators that were safely confined behind steel bars and stone walls. Unlike some people, he thought, watching them lift the body and place it in a rubber bag. At least her torment was over. Preis changed rolls one more time to record the process of loading the body into the coroner’s station wagon. A Sun reporter was here now. He’d ask the questions while Preis determined how good his new camera really was back at his darkroom on Calvert Street.
“John, they found her,” Rosen said.
“Dead?” Kelly couldn’t look up. The tone of Sam’s voice had already told him the real news. It wasn’t a surprise, but the end of hope never comes easily to anyone.
Sam nodded. “Yeah.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. The police called me a few minutes ago, and I came over as quick as I could.”
“Thanks, pal.” If a human voice could sound dead, Sam told himself, Kelly’s did.
“I’m sorry, John. I—you know how I felt about her.”
“Yes, sir, I do. It’s not your fault, Sam.”
“You’re not eating.” Rosen gestured to the food tray.
“I’m not real hungry.”
“If you want to recover, you have to get your strength back.”
“Why?” Kelly asked, staring at the floor.
Rosen came over and grasped Kelly’s right hand. There wasn’t much to say. The surgeon didn’t have the stomach to look at Kelly’s face. He’d pieced enough together to know that his friend was blaming himself, and he didn’t know enough to talk to him about it, at least not yet. Death was a companion for Sam Rosen, M.D., F.A.C.S. Neurosurgeons dealt with major injuries to that most delicate part of the human anatomy, and the injuries to which they most often responded were frequently beyond anyone’s power to repair. But the unexpected death of a person one knows can be too much for anyone.