Circle of Influence (A Zoe Chambers Mystery) (19 page)

Zoe didn’t reply. A bead of sweat tickled her forehead, and it wasn’t from the blasting heater. On her third attempt, a red droplet appeared inside the needle. “Bingo,” she said.

Zoe finished taping the I.V. catheter in place, and Earl pulled supplies from one of the cubbies to start the needle chest compression.

“Radio Control to let them know we’re en route,” Zoe shouted to Pete as the ambulance pitched along the potholed road.

Over the roar of the engine and the clanging and banging of equipment swaying around them, she heard Pete’s voice giving the information to the EMS dispatcher.

“Ready?” Earl asked.

“Not really.” Inserting a needle into a patient’s chest was nerve-wracking enough without the added challenge of performing the procedure in a moving vehicle.

“Do you want me to try?”

Zoe shot a look at her partner. They had worked together long enough to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Sticking a patient with a needle was not one of Earl’s strong points. “I’ll do it.”

“Okay.” Earl swabbed McBirney’s upper right chest with Betadine and then leaned back. Zoe inserted a needle between the second and third rib, careful of the angle. She felt a slight give. “I’m at the pleural cavity,” she announced. Drawing a deep breath, she advanced the needle further. A whoosh of air escaped. “Got it.”

She slid the 14-gauge catheter over the needle and removed it. Earl handed her a Heimlich valve and tubing to finish the procedure.

“Good job,” Earl patted her on the back.

“Ha. You’re just glad you didn’t have to do it.”

“You know me too well. Want me to secure it?”

Zoe flopped back onto the bench seat. “Knock yourself out.”

The I.V. tubing and bag swung like pendulums inside the patient compartment as the ambulance careened along the dark country road. Zoe braced one foot against the gurney and the other heel against the base of the bench. She clutched the cot’s side rail and stared at her patient as Earl finished taping the valve and tubing to his chest.

It had only been a matter of time before
someone
tried to kill Jerry McBirney. But who?

No. She couldn’t allow herself to think about that. The man on the cot was just another critical patient.
Do your job, Zoe
. Keep him alive.

Earl moved to the seat at the head of the gurney. Zoe leaned forward to check the flow of the normal saline through the tubing. She clipped her stethoscope into her ears and placed the pad on McBirney’s arm, pumping the bulb of the blood pressure cuff. She listened for the weak
thub, thub, thub
as the needle descended the gauge. Nothing. The cardiac monitor showed a rhythm. Rapid and irregular, but a rhythm. She pumped up the cuff again and let the air out slow. Listening. Watching. Where was it? The needle slipped below seventy. The fluids should be helping by now. Saline might not be a good substitute for blood, but it should at least stabilize his pressure. The needle dropped below sixty.

The cardiac monitor screeched, no longer showing a rhythm. Earl jumped.

“V-Fib,” Zoe said.

Earl yanked the defibrillator from its compartment and set it up. Zoe ripped the non-rebreather mask from McBirney’s face and placed her ear near his mouth. “No respiration,” she reported before grabbing a CPR mask, sealing it over his face, and administering four breaths. She listened again, watching his chest for movement. Nothing.

“Clear,” Earl said. Zoe leaned back.

The electrical shock caused the body to buck against the restraints. But the monitor showed no change. No steady
blip blip blip
.

Earl charged the defibrillator again. “Clear.”

Again, the shock provided nothing beneficial.

Zoe’s own words rang in her ears.
No one dies in our ambulance
.

“Start chest compressions,” Zoe ordered as she rummaged through the storage compartments for the laryngoscope and blades.

After sticking a needle into McBirney’s chest, intubation was relatively simple. With the endotracheal tube in place, she attached the bag-valve mask and oxygen.

Breathe, you bastard.

“Let me shock him one more time,” Earl said.

Zoe knew the defibrillator wasn’t going to help. She suspected he did, too. While her partner charged the paddles, Zoe hung a second bag of saline, ready to make the switch when the first one ran dry.

“Still V-fib,” Earl announced.

Zoe leaned toward the front of the ambulance. “He’s in full arrest,” she called to Pete.

In response, he flipped on the siren. The ambulance lurched as it accelerated.

Earl staggered and grabbed for a handrail.

“Here,” Zoe said. “You bag and contact Brunswick. I’ll do compressions for a while.”

He nodded, and they squeezed past each other. He perched on the edge of the seat at McBirney’s head, pressing breath into their patient with the bag and reaching for the radio phone. “Brunswick, this is Medic Three.”

Zoe braced her feet against the gurney and the bench. She jammed one shin into the cot’s side rail and pressed the top of her head against the cabinet above McBirney to steady her. CPR in a speeding ambulance was no easy feat. And Brunswick Hospital was still more than twenty minutes away.

EIGHTEEN

Pete leaned against a low, brick wall outside Brunswick Emergency Department’s ambulance entrance, his breath frosted into a cloud in front of him. Medic Three sat silent, a few feet away. At least by driving the ambulance, he had a head start on Baronick, who’d dismissed him back at Rodeo’s Bar. Fine. Let the cocky young detective deal with processing the crime scene in sub-zero temperatures.

He was beginning to wonder why he stayed on in this low-budget rural township where he had little choice but to turn over the big cases to County who had the funding and the lab facilities to properly investigate them. Why the hell didn’t he ditch this rural police chief gig and go back to Pittsburgh? The only reason he’d moved here in the first place was because Marcy wanted to live in the country.

Marcy.

Pulling out his cell phone, he turned it over and over in his gloved hand. He considered calling her to break the news. But he shoved it back in his pocket. Baronick could handle that, too. There wasn’t much Pete could do to protect her at this stage anyway. She was the victim’s wife. Automatic suspect number one.

He pushed away from the wall and moved toward the automatic doors, which swung open at his approach. Inside, the emergency department smelled of antiseptic and bleach mingled with the faint aroma of body fluids. Somewhere, an alarm beeped, demanding attention it wasn’t getting. A child’s unmistakable wail echoed down the hallway.

Pete had helped Zoe and her partner unload McBirney and had watched as they whisked him through the doors, disappearing into the organized chaos. He hadn’t followed. Give them time. He’d just be in the way, anyhow. But his curiosity nagged at him. What was going on? Was McBirney dead or alive? He hadn’t looked good with the two paramedics working frantically over him the whole trip and then as they rushed him into the hospital.

Pete had no clue where they’d gone. He tugged off his gloves and stuffed them into his coat pockets. Drifting down the hall, he took a glimpse in each room he passed. In one, a young man in baggy jeans held a grungy, bawling child as a sallow-skinned woman reclined in the bed. So that was the source of the wailing he’d heard. Next door, a boy held an icepack to his head while a woman—Pete presumed his mother—paced. The curtains were drawn on the next two, and a pair of Brunswick city police officers flanked the doorway of another room. Pete exchanged a nod of acknowledgement with them. 

Medical personnel crowded into the central nurses’ station. Two nurses sat, scribbling notes onto records. A lanky male in pale green scrubs squeezed into the space as a petite brunette in white scurried out. A doctor stood in the adjoining glass-enclosed office frowning as he spoke on the phone. Zoe’s partner, Earl, stood on the far side of the station, engaged in jovial conversation with an older man wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat.

Pete circled the station. Earl spotted his approach. “Hey, Chief. Thanks again for driving.”

The bespectacled older man clapped Earl on the shoulder. “I have to get back to work. Take it easy, you hear?” With a nod to Pete, he hurried away.

“Any word on your patient?” Pete asked.

“Nothing new that I’m aware of. He’s in room eleven if you want to check on him.”

Pete thanked the paramedic and headed down the hallway, dodging harried medical personnel and checking room numbers as he went.

A nurse carrying two I.V. bags of deep red blood bustled past Pete, heading in the same direction, but at a much quicker pace. She ducked into the last room on the left. Room eleven. The curtains were drawn in there, too, but they moved and swayed, indicating some action behind them. Pete paused in the doorway and noted several pairs of feet visible where the curtain failed to meet the floor. The feet shifted and maneuvered around the concealed patient. Grim voices exchanged information in tones too low for him to comprehend the words. But he discerned a sense of urgency in them.

Pete knew better than to enter. He hesitated. Glanced around. The hall cut to the right with more patient rooms on its left. Across from those cubicles, an ambulance cot sporting clean linen was parked. Zoe squatted next to it, her back against the wall, elbows on her knees and face in her hands. Her blonde hair was more disheveled than usual, sticking out on the sides, but flattened on the top from her hat, which lay on the floor.

“Hey,” he said softly, kneeling down next to her.

She lifted her face, revealing eyes rimmed in red with dark circles beneath them.

He gave her a smile. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks.” She buried her face in her hands again, but this time she pressed her palms against her eyes and ruffed up her bangs with her fingers.

“How’s the patient?”

She shrugged. “You know as much as I do.”

Pete shuffled around until he was side-by-side with Zoe, his back against the wall. But his knees complained too much to mimic her squatting position. Instead, he sat and stretched his legs out. She slid down and did the same.

“What’s your professional opinion?” he asked. “Think he’ll make it?”

Zoe didn’t answer right away. She stared into space, and her face transformed through a succession of expressions from a scowl to a deep frown to something Pete interpreted as fear.

What the hell was she afraid of?

He touched her knee, and she flinched.

“Umm, it’s impossible to say.” Zoe brushed a hand across her eyes. “You wouldn’t think he’d have much of a chance considering the blood loss. But the cold temperatures could’ve worked to his advantage.”

A pair of techs, pushing a portable x-ray machine, bustled into room eleven. The nurse who had passed Pete carrying the blood, another tech, and a solemn young man in a blood-spattered lab coat scurried out, talking in hushed tones as they went.

Pete stared at the doorway. He knew Zoe didn’t want to discuss any of this. But he had too many questions, and not much time before Baronick and his posse showed up and booted him back to Vance Township.

“We need to talk,” Pete said.

“I know.”

Earl rounded the corner. He froze mid-stride when he saw Pete and Zoe. He appeared about to ask a question. But he reconsidered and quietly reversed direction.

“Marcy came to see me earlier.”

Zoe met his gaze without saying a word. God, she looked exhausted.

“She said she and Ted were
not
having an affair.”

Her eyebrows raised for a moment, then settled. She shifted her gaze to her hands, and a distant smile flickered across her lips.

“She said Ted was helping her get a divorce attorney.”

“So it was Jerry who gave her the black eye.”

“You knew about that?”

“The black eye? Yeah. She wore sunglasses into the funeral home. I saw her take them off for a moment.”

Pete remembered Zoe had mentioned seeing Marcy at the viewing. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

“I don’t know. I started to, but…” She shook her head.

The X-ray techs rolled their machine out of the room. Within seconds, a man and a woman in scrubs rushed back in.

“According to Marcy, she was afraid of McBirney and didn’t want him to know she planned to leave him. He found out she was meeting with Ted and assumed they were having an affair.”

Zoe’s face softened, and she nodded. “That makes sense.”

“So do you want to tell me what you’ve been hiding from me?”

She stiffened. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

A piercing electronic squeal emanated from room eleven, producing a flurry of activity as a team of four charged down the hall and into the glass-fronted cubicle.

“He’s arresting again,” Zoe said. “They had him back for a while.”

Pete watched and listened, expecting someone to come out and pronounce the patient had died. But nothing happened other than one tech leaving and another taking his place.

“They won’t call it until after they warm him up,” Zoe said.

“Huh?”

“You aren’t officially dead until you’re
warm
and dead.”

“Oh.” His mind snapped back to the myriad questions plaguing him. And to something Marcy had said. “What did McBirney do to you?”

Zoe’s face went stark white. “What?”

“Marcy told me Ted asked her how things were with her husband, because he knew what McBirney had done to you. What,” he asked as he watched her face go from white to almost green, “did McBirney do to you?”

A woman and a man, both in print scrubs, rushed into room eleven. Raised voices drifted out to them.

Zoe pressed both hands against her face and drew in a deep, ragged breath. As she exhaled, her hands dropped to her lap. The fear Pete had read in her face had been replaced with resignation.

“When I was twenty-three, Jerry McBirney tried to rape me.”

The story she poured out stunned Pete. From McBirney’s manipulative endeavors to charm and seduce a young girl, to the drunken attempted rape, to the vindictive poisoning of her horse. He’d known McBirney was a bastard, but he’d had no inkling of the depths to his evil.

“Why didn’t you report it?” Pete asked when Zoe finally grew silent.

Her laugh reeked of desperation. “I was a kid. I’d—been with more than my share of boys all through high school. Part of me—a big part of me—thought I deserved it. Had asked for it somehow.”

“No one asks for—”

“I know that. Now. Then? I was confused. Lost. Honestly, I was more upset about him killing my mare than the other stuff. And I didn’t think the police would do anything about a dead horse. Besides, I couldn’t prove anything. Couldn’t prove it then. Can’t prove it now.”

Some days, Pete hated the way his mind worked. Too many years as a cop made him see things, think things that he wouldn’t had he been a civilian. For instance, this whole sad tale should have stirred nothing but sympathy in his heart. Instead…

He knew full well Zoe hadn’t stabbed McBirney. There was also the matter of evidence—or lack thereof. But others—Baronick for one—would pounce on her story with nothing short of bloodlust.

“I saw him today,” Zoe said, shattering his reverie.

“What? Who?”

“Jerry McBirney. He came to the barn when I was getting ready to go riding. He wanted to convince me he hadn’t killed Ted.”

The skin on the back of Pete’s neck prickled. “What happened?”

She frowned. “We kind of got into it.”

Damn it. “What do you mean,
you got into it
?”

“I told him to leave. He wouldn’t. He tried his charming, innocent act on me. It didn’t work. I reminded him of what he’d done to me. He laughed it off. Said it was my word against his. ‘Water under the bridge,’ I think he said. He denied having anything to do with my horse.” She paused and took a deep breath as if fighting off tears. “Then he threatened to take Windstar away from me.”

Windstar?

She must have noticed his confusion. “The horse I have now. His mother was my mare that died.” Zoe sniffed. “McBirney claimed Windy really belonged to him. I know he probably couldn’t make a claim like that stick in court, but I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Pete closed his eyes. Why the hell hadn’t he left it alone? She hadn’t wanted to tell him. He should have respected her wishes.

“I kind of—attacked him.”

Pete’s eyes flew open. “You what?”

“Well…I offered to pay him off…just to get him to leave me—leave Windy—alone. He claimed I could…” She rubbed a spot on her head and winced. “He suggested a way I could pay that didn’t involve money.”

“That son of a—” Pete contemplated marching into room eleven and ripping the plugs to every life support gadget out of the walls.

“So I hit him.”

Hit him? Pete looked at her slender hands. No bruises. No scrapes. “With what?”

“The only thing I could grab. Windstar’s bridle. Well, technically the bit. Then I sprayed him in the face with fly repellent.”

Stunned, Pete ran the scene through his mind. The mental image of Zoe going on the offensive with
fly spray
made him laugh, but he camouflaged it as a cough. He wanted to hug this woman. He wanted to take her out to dinner and then bring her home to his bed. He did
not
want to make her mad.

And he sure didn’t want to see her arrested for murder.

The cliché about confession being good for your soul might be true, but Zoe wasn’t convinced. Pete wanted answers. She hadn’t been willing to give up Logan or their investigation into Ted’s murder. So when Pete had asked about her more distant past and transgressions, the story had tumbled out. The freshness of the newly re-opened wound made it simpler.

But no less painful. 

Nearby, someone cleared their throat. “Excuse me.”