I need to get out of here. Then, suddenly, absolutely, I know what I’m going to do.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Meditation turned out to be a complicated matter, which must explain why D.D. never did it. There was much settling of oneself into a comfortable position, most of the staff members opting to sit on the floor, the pros in fancy lotus positions, the less converted sprawling casually, their backs against a wall.
Space seemed to matter, people selecting spots where they could be on their own. Even Greg and Danielle, late arrivals to the party, didn’t buddy up. Greg positioned himself partway down the hall, while Danielle sat not far from where D.D. was currently standing.
The young nurse glanced at her. Opened her mouth slightly as if to say something. Then her jaw snapped shut. She closed her eyes and tilted her face toward the middle of the common area, where Lightfoot directed efforts in a low, melodic tone.
The shaman sat on top of a table, a bottle of iced green tea positioned within easy reach, a wrist resting on each knee and his fingers pointing up.
He spoke firmly, with a strong cadence. D.D. still thought he looked tired. Then again, it was after midnight now. She and her crew were equally beat, which made this a fun diversion for the evening.
Karen, the nurse manager, sat closest to the Admin offices. She’d removed her glasses for the occasion. A large bear of a man—Ed, D.D. thought was his name—sat not far from her. The younger MC with the short black hair—Sissy? Cecille?—sat to the left of him. Then came three more MCs and another nurse, Janet. The only person who didn’t participate was Tyrone, who had checks duty: Every five minutes, he recorded the location of each child and staff member. Given the kids and staff were currently quiet, the duty had him standing in the middle of the hallway, across from D.D. She felt like they were bookends—the only two vertical people at a horizontal party.
Gang’s all here, she thought, and was very curious about what would happen next.
“Slowly inhale,” Lightfoot intoned. “Feel yourself drawing the breath deep into your lungs, pulling in the air from your toes, bringing it up your entire body, every cell contracting, every pore of your body inhaling a slow rush of fresh oxygen. Still inhaling, for a long count of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Now exhale. Push the air out for a shorter count of one, two, three, four, five …”
D.D., leaning against the wall with her arms across her chest, found her breathing pattern falling into Lightfoot’s hypnotic rhythm. She caught herself, forced a short exhale, and felt light-headed.
Alex had gone to fetch pizza. The taskforce members still had a long night ahead of them; given the earlier disruption with the kids, and now the “debriefing,” the detectives hadn’t had a chance to interview the staff yet. Karen had promised to start sending them MCs, one by one, the moment Lightfoot’s session was over. Assuming of course the unit remained under control. Given the fresh rounds of screaming and banging D.D. had heard just ten minutes ago, she wasn’t overly optimistic.
Lightfoot needed to live up to his hype or she didn’t see how the kids or the staff were getting through the night.
Lightfoot was sweating. D.D. could see beads of moisture forming on his upper lip. Despite his instructions for slow and steady breathing, his own chest moved shallowly, and one hand trembled on top of his knee.
The force of his efforts to stave off so much negative energy? To find the light amidst the dark?
Good Lord, now she was starting to sound like him.
“I want you to release your tension,” Lightfoot instructed, his voice strained. Across from him, Karen opened one eye, frowning at the healer.
“Focus on your toes. Feel the tension in the bottom of each foot. The tight little muscles along the arch of your foot, the tendons moving up your heel. The tiny muscles clenching each toe, digging them into the carpet. Now catch that tension. Relax it, push it out. Feel your toes uncurl, your feet relax comfortably against the carpet. Your heels are soft and pliant, each foot relaxed. You can feel the light, your foot warming, a white glow spreading across the bottom of your heel. Focus on it. Feel it expand, climbing to your ankles, your calves, the bend of your knees.”
The white light had a ways to go. Many muscles had to relax. Many body parts needed to glow. Around the room D.D. could see various staff members giving themselves over to the exercise. Even Danielle appeared fresher, the lines in her forehead smoothing out, her slender wrists resting loosely on her knees.
Lightfoot, on the other hand, looked like hell. He was sweating profusely, his pale yellow Armani shirt blossoming with dark stains. He used the small break between glowing muscle groups to take discreet swigs of iced tea. He had the group relaxing their stomachs now, and the iced tea bottle was nearly empty. D.D. didn’t think the healer was going to make it. Did one call for a time-out, a brief intermission, in the midst of meditation? Or did that ruin the moment, like checking your police pager in the middle of sex?
Now, as she watched, he grimaced. Rubbed his chest. Grimaced again. A muscle in his left shoulder did a funny little dance, then relaxed again. Lightfoot took another drink, squeezed his eyes shut, and seemed to settle in.
“Focus on the light,” he intoned. “The warm glow of light, of love. Feel it expand your rib cage, filling your lungs. Then push it up. Push it into the chambers of your heart. Love is in your heart. Love is pulsing through your veins, pushing out the negativity, filling your limbs with a great weightlessness. Light is love. Love is light. You are flooded with it. You feel it beating in your chest. You feel it pulsing beneath your skin. Your arms want to rise on their own. They are alight with love, weightless with joy.”
Sure enough, around the room, several pairs of arms began to rise up. Not Danielle’s, D.D. noticed. And not Karen’s. The nurse manager had abandoned the meditation. She was studying Lightfoot instead.
“Warmth,” he intoned. “Love. Light. Heat. Joy. I release all judgments. I understand I am responsible for all corporal actions and I forgive myself for my sins. I forgive others. I am a being of light. I call upon that light. I call upon the love in this room—” A sudden spasm crossed his face, peeling his lips back from his teeth. Lightfoot caught the grimace, soldiered on. “I seek the love of my friends, companions, coworkers—” His voice broke off again. Both shoulders twitched, his left arm bouncing up from his knee. Then his eyes popped up, and he winced sharply, abandoning all pretense as he brought up a hand to shield his face from the overhead lights.
The break in rhythm caught the attention of others. Danielle opened her eyes. Greg, too. They eyed Lightfoot uncertainly.
Karen was already on her feet, returning her wire-rimmed glasses to her face. “Andrew?” she asked as a fresh spasm shook his body.
D.D. pushed away from the wall, starting to understand that this was no longer business as usual.
Lightfoot raised his head toward the ceiling, shut his eyes, and bore down, as if fighting some kind of internal war.
“I call upon the LIGHT!” he boomed. “I am a being of LOVE. I am filled with JOY and PEACE and CONTENTMENT. I release negativity. I cast off all judgment. I feel the love of my friends and community. Their LOVE gives me the strength to PUSH the darkness from this building. There will be no NEGATIVITY. There will be no anger, no PAIN. We are united in the light, filling this space with LOVE, holding this space with LOVE. I call upon THE LIGHT, THE LIGHT, THE LIGH—”
His rising voice broke off. Both hands gripped his face. The next instant, the healer pitched forward, rolling off the edge of the table and flipping onto the floor, where his body convulsed wildly.
“The light, the light!” he screamed. “It’s burning my eyes, my eyes, my eyes!”
“Code blue!” Karen bellowed, sprinting toward the fallen man. “Call downstairs. We need a crash cart, stat!”
She was already on her knees beside Lightfoot, trying to secure his head in her hands as his body flailed and he beat at her with his hands.
&n
bsp; “Bite stick!” Karen demanded, working to peel open one eyelid, check his vitals.
“Don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t touch. It burns.…”
The staff sprang belatedly into action. The nurses, Danielle and Janet, made a beeline for medical supplies. Greg grabbed a phone, while the other MCs pushed back tables, cleared the area. Lightfoot’s neck and back arched, muscles coiling and uncoiling rigidly beneath the tan sheath of his skin. Karen finally got his eyelid open. His eye was not rolled back up in his head, as D.D. had expected. Instead, he peered directly at Karen, quite conscious.
“The light,” he moaned. She released his eyelid. He moaned again, this time in relief.
Danielle and Janet were back with supplies. Karen took a Popsicle stick and jammed it into Lightfoot’s mouth. He immediately tried to spit it out. “Don’t touch me!”
“Towel,” Karen ordered, rolling him onto his side. “Quick, over his eyes. Cecille, kill the overhead lights. We can work by the glow of the hallway bulbs.”
Cecille obeyed, darkening the common area as Ed raced down the hallway to grab a towel. The second the overhead lights winked out, Lightfoot seemed to relax.
“Hurts. Can’t stop,” he muttered. “Inside me. Feel it. Cold, cold, cold. Bitter … burns. Must fight. White light, white light, white light. Tired. So tired … Must find … the light.”
Ed returned with a stack of towels. They folded one and placed it over the top part of Lightfoot’s face, shielding his eyes, D.D. took a second towel and, with effort, managed to pry Lightfoot’s fingers from Karen’s wrist and wrest his hand onto a rolled towel.
“Talk to me, Andrew,” Karen demanded loudly. “Stay with us. Where do you feel the pain?”
“Legs … arms … back … body … muscles, hurt, hurt, hurt.” His body thrashed against the floor. “Too loud. Too bright. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.…”
“The light hurts you?” Karen prodded.
“Burns … my eyes.”
“And noise?” D.D. spoke up.
“Ahhhhahhh,” he moaned, bringing up one hand to block his ears.
The doors burst open. Two medics bustled into the area, led by the security guard. They took one look at Lightfoot’s convulsing form and sprinted over to him.
“Condition?” the first man asked Karen.
“Started three minutes ago. Convulsions, light sensitivity, noise sensitivity,” Karen reported. “But conscious. Aware of his condition.”
“Pulse?”
“Two ten.”
The medic arched a brow. D.D. didn’t blame him. With that pulse rate, Lightfoot should be racing up Mount Everest.
“History of seizures?” the medic asked, trying to check vitals.
“Unknown,” Karen answered, just as Lightfoot said, “No. Not seizures. Spasms. Muscle … spasms …”
The medic glanced at Lightfoot’s towel-draped face, then back at Karen. She shrugged.
“The dark …” Lightfoot groaned. “I’m filled with the dark. So, so cold … it burns.…”
“Hallucinating,” the medic muttered. He straightened, nodded to his partner. They grabbed a backboard and looked ready to get to work.
“Wait a minute,” D.D. called out. A case she’d read once. Lightfoot’s uncanny consciousness, even during what appeared to be a grand mal seizure. She strode over to Lightfoot’s table and sniffed his bottle of iced tea. Nothing. She touched her fingertip to the top edge, where a drop of moisture rested. She brought it cautiously to her mouth and, with a bolstering grimace, stuck out her tongue. It tasted …
Teaish. Grassy. Lemony. Then, beneath it all, a slightly bitter aftertaste.
“You need to get this tested immediately,” she informed the medic. “But I’m guessing strychnine.”
“Rat poison?” Greg spoke up from the hallway.
“In his drink?” Karen echoed, frowning. The staff looked at one another, then down at Lightfoot’s churning body.
“Symptoms fit.” She looked at the medic. “Hypersensitivity, muscle spasms, initial consciousness …”
“Yeah.” The medic nodded. “Now that you mention it … Well, we gotta motor, then, ’cause next on that list is respiratory failure. Come on, buddy. Hang in there with us. If you’re ever going to get poisoned, a hospital is the place to do it.”
With help from the MCs, they got Lightfoot’s body onto the gurney. Then they raced out of the unit for the elevator banks.
The elevator arrived with a ding. The doors opened, and Alex strode out, bearing a steaming tower of boxed pizzas. He looked at the medics, Lightfoot’s strapped-down body, and the shell-shocked staff, all staring at him.
“What happened to the healer?” he asked.
“That,” D.D. replied, “is an excellent question.”
Karen and her crew might be crack medics, but there was still a reason they paid D.D. the big bucks.
“Where did Lightfoot get the tea?” she demanded, the second the medics disappeared into the elevator.
“I don’t know. I think … I assume he brought it with him.” Karen looked at her staff. They milled about the half-lit common area, kicking at towels, staring at hastily rearranged furniture. Several were rubbing their arms, as if fighting a chill.
“Sure there’s no iced tea in the kitchenette?”
“No. We don’t stock it here.”
“Downstairs cafeteria?”
Karen shook her head uncertainly. Danielle piped up, “Andrew’s tea, the Koala brand, is one of those all-natural, all-organic, keep-the-planet-green products. I don’t think you can buy it around here.”
“Thank heavens for small favors,” D.D. muttered, as shutting down a hospital cafeteria and calling poison control was not high on her list of things she wanted to do right now. “Lightfoot arrive with any stuff, maybe a lunchbox, briefcase?” D.D. had a fleeting image of a brown leather strap over Lightfoot’s shoulder when she and Alex had first spotted him by the elevators. “Maybe a manbag,” she mused. “I want it.”
Karen dutifully led D.D. into the Admin area, where Lightfoot had stowed a brown leather satchel. D.D. flipped it open to find a container of Greek yogurt and a bag of sunflower seeds. She took the food for testing, then returned to the common area, where she could see the staff eyeing one another nervously for imminent medical collapse.
“Anyone else have iced tea?” D.D. asked.
One by one, they shook their heads.
“Who’s eaten here tonight?”
Four staff members slowly raised their arms. D.D. noted that Greg and Danielle were not among them.
“What time?”
The MCs had started at seven p.m., taking a snack break between nine and nine-thirty.
“Good news,” D.D. informed them. “Strychnine is one of the fastest-acting poisons, with symptoms emerging within five minutes of ingestion, so if you’re vertical now, you’re probably going to be vertical later. Timeline fits what we saw tonight: Lightfoot opened his drink, took a few sips, started the meditation, drank a bit more, and I’d say about eight minutes into it …”
“Collapsed in full convulsion,” Karen filled in, her voice subdued. Everyone stared at the table that Lightfoot had been sitting on.
“Strychnine is odorless,” D.D. informed the anxious staff members, “but has a bitter taste. So if you run across anything that tastes funky, set it aside immediately. I’ll phone the lab, have them send someone over to test the water, as well as everything in the kitchen, but that’ll take some time. When are the kids due to eat again?”
“Not until breakfast,” Karen supplied, “though some of the kids need a middle-of-the-night snack.”
D.D. thought about it. “Stick to food or drink items that come from sealed packages. Snack-sized cereals, that sort of thing. As long as the seal hasn’t been broken, they should be okay. Make sense?”
Everyone nodded mutely.
“All right. Who saw Lightfoot with the iced tea?”
The one with the short-cropped hair rais
ed her arm. Cecille. “Um, I was one of the first people to take a seat. Andrew wasn’t here yet, but the iced tea was already on the table, like he’d maybe just opened it, then went to get something. Or maybe he went to throw away the cap.”
“The cap!” D.D. agreed. She marched over to the trash can. Right on top, one white lid stamped Koala Iced Tea. D.D. snapped on gloves and fished it out. Metal, for sealing a glass bottle. Not the kind of container that could be easily tampered with—say, penetrated by a syringe. Nope. Cap came off. Poison went in.
Now, possibly, the product had been poisoned at the warehouse level, part of a massive terrorist act. Or possibly, Lightfoot’s barky little dog had plotted revenge and spiked her master’s tea on the home front.
But D.D. was willing to bet Lightfoot’s distinctive beverage took the hit while sitting exposed in the common area.
“How long was Lightfoot gone?” she asked Cecille.
The MC shrugged. “I’m not sure. Not long. A few minutes. Five minutes maybe. People were starting to gather. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
D.D. looked around the room. One by one, everyone dropped their gazes.
“I was with a kid,” Greg volunteered softly. He glanced at Danielle. “She was with me. We came late.”
Establishing alibis. D.D. liked it. And they thought the milieu of the unit had been compromised before.
“I don’t understand,” Karen spoke up. “Why would someone poison Andrew? I mean, this whole thing … This is crazy.”
“Good question.” D.D. considered it. “Maybe because you brought him here to fix the unit. Calm it down. Following that logic, maybe someone doesn’t want the unit calmed down. That person wants you all jumpy and edgy and chasing after exploding kids. Lightfoot’s poisoned. You’re all freaked-out as hell. Mission accomplished.”
Karen gaped at her. “That’s insane.”
“Twelve dead and one injured. All connected with this ward. You’re right—can’t get much more insane than that.”
“Stop it! We are not those kind of people—”