Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (219 page)

The door opened, and the head nurse stuck her head in. Show time. Sharon arranged to have Caitlin O’Malley assigned to her. The young woman was much more settled now, the day nurse was happy to report, and it appeared the powerful anti-psychotic medications were beginning to take effect. She was no longer pacing and agitated, and she was able to communicate simple needs.

After the shift handover was complete, Sharon ventured onto the ward and walked down the long hall, which was painted a cheerful apple green and tiled in a warm beige linoleum. She stopped to talk to a group of patients in the sunroom, but Caitlin was not among them. Sharon found her in the room she shared with another woman. Caitlin’s bed was nearest the window, which looked out through safety bars at a glorious orange maple. Caitlin, however, was curled up against the wall in the corner of her bed, her sheet pulled up to her chin and her eyes pressed shut.

She was a tall, slender woman with a heart-shaped face and pallid skin that showed the ravages of poor diet. Her hair had been freshly washed, and it fluffed about her face in wispy strands, but it was a long time since it had seen a stylist. The Gothic black was growing out, revealing two inches of chestnut brown roots.

Sharon tapped on the open door and called her name softly. Caitlin didn’t move, but her eyes pressed more tightly shut. As Sharon approached, she saw tears leaking from the corners of the lids. She sat down gently on the bed.

“Caitlin? Remember me? I’m Sharon, your nurse this evening. How are you feeling?”

Caitlin moved her head back and forth.

“Sad? Something you want to talk about?”

“I feel dead.” It was a mere whisper through dry, cracked lips.

“The meds?”

This time a faint shake of the head.

Sharon reached for the plastic water glass on the night table by her bed. “Do you want a drink?”

Caitlin opened her eyes and focussed slowly on the room. She looked across at her roommate’s empty bed, her gaze taking in the photos and the vase of flowers on the night table, then her own empty table, before settling on Sharon. Her eyes were bleary, the pallid grey of a cloudy day, but there was a glimmer of knowledge in them. She allowed Sharon to hold the glass to her lips, then sank down on the pillow again. Slowly fresh tears welled.

“I don’t want to live like this.”

It was a statement Sharon heard often, and sometimes her pat words of encouragement felt inadequate. Even flippant. She had never walked in a schizophrenic’s shoes, never felt the terror of their shifting, unreal world nor the mind-numbing half-life of the cure. Never faced the social rejection nor the uncertain future of broken hopes and lost dreams. Never lived under the spectre of an illness that lurked inside ready to spin their minds and lives out of control once again.

Caitlin was a highly intelligent woman. In her lucid times, she would know that every relapse could lead her further down the road of no return.

“Why am I here?” Caitlin asked.

Sharon hesitated. It was a question with layers of meaning, and she wasn’t sure which one Caitlin intended. She chose the wisest response. “You’re here to make you well again. You can be well, Caitlin.”

Caitlin frowned. “No, I can’t. I am who I am. Crazy.”

“But you can also be well. You have been before.”

“It’s all pretend. Would you have made Joan of Arc well, so she wouldn’t hear the messages she was put on earth to hear?”

The reasoning brain was returning, Sharon observed. Not only the ability to form coherent sentences but to apply logic. She sidestepped the challenge. “Did you see your doctor today?”

“My doctor? No, not mine, but my father’s choice for me. My father, who can’t see and therefore can’t believe. Just as lesser minds can’t see the warping of the universe or the relativity of time. My father’s doctor would have shot Einstein full of chlorpromazine, and there would be no atomic bomb. Just a math retard playing with blocks on the floor.”

Sharon hesitated. The woman’s mental state was still very fragile, and she had no right to shove her back over the brink with the wrong question. She tried to frame it harmlessly.

“Doctors do good things too. You must have met some who helped.”

Caitlin blinked rapidly, as if Sharon had shocked her. “Met? Yes, walking mercies. But they don’t teach that at shrink school. Only the brain, not the mind. Not the soul.”

Sharon ventured further. “It’s nice to meet a doctor who treats you like a whole person.”

Caitlin sat up at the far edge of her bed. “No one can know the whole. Even angels can’t know, but can only walk with you on the journey.”

“Have you met anyone who walked with you?”

She recoiled, her grey eyes darkening as if prelude to a storm. “Why?”

“Well...” Why indeed, Sharon thought, still feeling her way along her tightrope. “Maybe they could still help.”

“Still. All still.” The woman pressed her eyes shut, and a small moan escaped her lips.

Sharon began a mental retreat. “Do you want—?”

“No!” Caitlin’s hand shot out and knocked the water glass out of Sharon’s hand, drenching the wall and Sharon’s clothes. “Don’t trick me! Gone, gone, go, go, out, out, spots and all!”

One question too many, Sharon thought as she backed away to stand at the door, watching carefully to see whether her retreat would be enough or whether another shot of meds was in order.

It was three hours before Green could get to the hospital to check on Sullivan and the patrolman. He was delayed at the scene dealing with the duty inspector, the collision investigation unit, and various other members of the brass, including Barbara Devine, who demanded to be kept informed of every detail pertaining to Lindsay Corsin’s death. Because the girl had been waiting in the back of Green’s staff car, on his instructions, and she had been killed by another police officer, a Special Investigations team would be convened from outside the Ottawa Police Services to determine if there was any blame to be laid. Devine wanted no surprises.

Green was being peppered from all sides, including from the media, who lined the police cordon three deep in places. Zoom lenses were trained on the twisted wreckage of his car, no doubt picking up Lindsay’s blood that had pooled on the sidewalk. Green forced himself to focus. There were tasks to be done, families to be notified and reports to be given. He could help no one if he dwelled on the memory of his friend’s inert body as it was whisked into the ambulance, nor on the bloody body of the lonely young girl from Timmins who had perished because of him.

Throughout it all, he was aware of David Rosenthal, who like himself had been treated by the paramedics at the scene for hand lacerations from the broken truck window but who had refused their recommendation to go to the hospital. He chose instead to stay at the scene answering police questions and providing a far more lucid account of the crash than Green could muster. The paramedics credited him with the fact that Sullivan had even survived for the ambulance ride.

“I’ve had medical training,” he told the investigators. “I just never practiced, because I prefer research. I don’t know where the strength came from. I work out regularly, and I do a lot of sports, but nothing to explain hauling a two hundred-and-fifty-pound man through the window of a truck.”

Adrenaline, Green thought, recognizing the signs of it in his own body. The racing heart, hyper-alertness, sense of readiness and need for action. They lasted until he was finally able to climb into a cab and go to the hospital. En route, like a wave crashing on the shore, his strength crumbled, leaving him weak-kneed and tremulous. His hands throbbed beneath the bandages. He got out of the cab at the emergency entrance to the Civic Campus and paused to lean against the rough brick wall by the door. He forced deep breaths. He couldn’t let up yet. On the other side of that door, a crisis was still unfolding. Sullivan was one of the most deeply loved and respected officers on the force. Green had been fielding calls to his cellphone all afternoon from worried officers. He knew the hospital waiting room would be full.

And then there was Mary.

Mary Sullivan was Brian’s high-school sweetheart, who at eighteen had followed him to the city from her farm outside Eganville, who had put up with the stress, shift work and long, gut-wrenching hours the job demanded. Who had given him support and correction in equal measure, along with three children now in their teens. She’d learned resilience on her rocky, hard-scrabble farm, and when things got tough, Mary got fighting mad.

Mary was going to be furious. Green took a final, bracing breath, pushed open the glass doors and walked into the emergency room. The waiting area was filled with people slouched in chairs, reading a book, trying to doze, or pacing nervously. The quiet was punctuated by the rattle of carts and the staccato chatter of the hospital’s paging system, but otherwise the atmosphere was routine. There was not a police officer in sight.

“They transferred him over to the Heart Institute,” the admissions clerk told him, then fired off directions about the maze of corridors and stairways he should follow. He got lost twice and ended up wandering the back parking lot in a daze, staring at the sprawl of aging, interconnected, red brick buildings that comprised the hospital. He spotted the entranceway to the Heart Institute by chance.

Inside the surgical waiting room, he found the bedlam he was expecting. The nurses had apparently given up efforts to cull the crowd. Dozens of officers, some in uniform, others in plain clothes or off duty, crammed into every seat and stood leaning against the walls, sipping coffee and talking about anything to stave off thought as they waited for news.

Green heard snippets of conversation. “The new goalie—”, “Sens game last night?”, “The guy blew point one nine!”, “If Devine gets it—”

There was no sign of Mary, but Green spotted Gibbs and waded through the crowd to his side. A few hands reached out to pat his shoulder as he passed. A few faces registered surprise.

Gibbs mirrored the surprise of others. “You okay, sir?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I heard it was your car he hit.”

So that was one of the rumours buzzing around. Green waved an impatient hand. “But I wasn’t in it.” Gibbs looked pale and wan. Like himself, Gibbs fought grim memories when he was in a hospital. “What’s the latest news?”

“Touch and go, sir. They rushed him into surgery. That balloon thing they do.”

“Balloon?” Green tried to think through his exhaustion. “You mean angioplasty?”

“Yeah. They’re throwing everything they have at him, but the nurses here aren’t telling us much. All the guys think that’s a bad sign.”

Green dared not think too hard. In all his experiences in hospital waiting rooms, he’d found nurses only too eager to share reassuring news, but when the news was bad, they clammed up and let the doctor carry the ball.

He was still grappling to make sense of Gibbs’s words. “What’s wrong with his heart?”

Gibbs’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “He had a heart attack, that’s what caused the crash. The accident itself barely hurt him at all.”

Green’s mind reeled. He thought back over the days, indeed the weeks, before the accident. Now with the clarity of hindsight, all the warning signs had been there screaming to be noticed. The high blood pressure, the fatigue, and constant popping of antacids. But the man was only forty-six! Who thought of heart disease in a forty-six-year-old who’d been an athlete all his life?

Other officers approached him, some with sympathies and others with questions. After the fact, everyone was an armchair physician.

“I didn’t think he was looking too good.”

“I noticed his weight was creeping up.”

“It’s the stress. My uncle was only forty-two when he dropped dead, and he didn’t have an ounce of fat.”

A wave of claustrophobia washed over Green. He detached himself from the crowd and walked outside, sucking in the cool autumn air gratefully. On a patch of grass nearby, a group of smokers huddled against the cold. Green shook his head at the irony.

The door opened behind him, and he turned to see the tall, cadaverous figure of Superintendent Adam Jules. Jules had been his boss for years before being replaced by Barbara Devine, and he had been both his mentor and his chief advocate in the inner chambers of the force. He had rescued Green from Patrol and brought him into Investigations, where his intelligence, obsessive drive and unorthodox viewpoint were assets. He had also paired him up with Brian Sullivan. Now he gave Green a melancholy smile. “How are you holding up, Michael?”

“Worried,” Green said. He felt precarious and off-balance. “But Brian’s a strong man, and this is a state-of-the-art facility. He’ll pull through.”

Jules dipped his lean, equine head in agreement. The grim line of his lips was the only hint of his own distress, but Green knew that the austere, solitary bachelor felt the threat to one of his own more keenly than he would ever show. He had nurtured all their careers.

“Tragic about the young woman,” he said now. “No one’s fault, but still...”

He didn’t elaborate. Jules never said two words when one would do. Both of them knew the self-recrimination that Green and Sullivan would feel.

“Has the
OPP
located the family?” Green asked, anxious to fill the void where feelings massed. “The university only had an aunt’s name.”

Jules nodded. “The girl was an orphan. Living on her own since she was sixteen and couldn’t wait to leave the place behind. Aunt’s been milking the media and talking about lawsuits, but the
OPP
officer who delivered the news didn’t see much grief.”

“Poor girl’s probably worth more to her dead than alive,” Green said, then regretted it. A girl’s life had ended, and cynicism had no place in the mourning of her. “But I’ll call in the morning. We should send flowers and make a donation. And if things settle down around here, I’d like to attend her funeral. I feel...”

Jules nodded, then pursed his lips cautiously. “Anything that’s going to come back to bite you?”

Green shot him a quick glance. Had Jules been sent by the brass to get the whole story out of him, so they could ready their defences? Once again he felt shame for his uncharitable reaction. Jules was not a lackey. He had always stood up for his officers, even under pressure from the brass.