Snapshot (34 page)

“Muir's a fool.” The Chief of Pharmacy's voice seemed harsh, grating. How could I have ever thought it appealing? “He's been losing it for years, but they all cover up for him. They know what his name's worth.”

Dr. Jerome Muir. An M.D. doctor, a medical doctor, like Renzel's father, the well-known surgeon. Was that the root of Renzel's delight? That he'd put one over on the substitute old man?

If I survived, I'd ask Donovan.

“Dr. Muir never knew you were holding Emily Woodrow prisoner? Even though you used his name,” I said, my voice full of pretended admiration.

“I sign his name better than he does,” Renzel said.

“But how did you manage the drugs, the medical chart? You're not an M.D.”

“I'm as good a doctor as anyone here,” he said. “Better than most.”

Renzel's glasses had sidepieces that curved firmly around his ears. It would take more than a quick sideswipe to dislodge them.

“Now stop jabbering and walk fester,” he ordered.

“Where's the staircase?”

“Keep going. There's one around the next corner. Not many people use it.”

We were walking down a broad, empty corridor. If someone had found Mooney, the place ought to be a hive of police activity. I imagined Renzel's profile in cross hairs, a target for unseen sharpshooters. Suddenly I envisioned them everywhere, siting just a little off, high and to the right, at my head.

“Backward,” I muttered, my mouth dry as dust, speaking to keep my mind off the shooters.

“What?”

“I got it backward,” I said. “Once I started to believe Emily's statement, to accept what she'd seen—a man shoving a mask over her daughter's face—I called it all wrong. I assumed the man—I assumed you were trying to kill Rebecca, not save her.”

Renzel said nothing, kept walking.

“Why did you bother?”

“I don't expect you to understand.”

“I'd like to understand.”

He swallowed. “It … the children here … Rebecca's death was different.”

“You ran into the chemotherapy room. You pushed Emily Woodrow out the door. You risked your entire operation.”

“Look, the other stuff I do … No one cares. Everyone does it. I ship bogus high-tech drugs to sink-hole countries with no sewage treatment. Sick people—people who'd have died anyway, from bad water or third-rate physicians—die a little sooner. Keep it off the U.S. market and nobody cares. The profits are unimaginable. Millions. I would have gotten everything I wanted.”

“What?”

He stared at me blankly.

“What?” I repeated. “What was it you wanted?”

“Everything.” His eyes blinked rapidly behind his thick glasses. “Money,” he said carefully, as if he were explaining a difficult concept to a child. “Here we are. Now shut up and open the door.”

The stairwell was cool. Silent. Gray walls. Gray steps.

“You're nuts,” I said.

He held more tightly to my arm. I didn't think he'd do anything while we were actually on the stairs. The landings, where he'd have better footing—I'd have to watch for the landings.

“I would hate to have to kill you,” he said softly, his face so close I could feel his breath on my neck.

“Like you killed Tina,” I said.

“If she hadn't taken the carton off my desk—if she'd followed standard procedure, none of this would have happened. But she was in a hurry and she grabbed the first carton she saw.”

“Why was it on your desk? Why not keep the mess over at six thirty-two? Why risk contaminating your own hospital?”

“I needed to check the bar codes, make sure the packaging was current. It was her error. Not mine.”

“Why didn't you kill Emily Woodrow?”

“I could have. I found them prowling the hospital together: proof that Tina'd never keep quiet no matter how much I paid her. But it would have been too many deaths too fast. Even old Muir might have woken up and asked questions. And I had plans for Emily. You might call her a little pharmaceutical research project of mine. The police will probably find her quite willing to confess to Tina's death. Any death. Even her daughter's.”

I studied the concrete-block walls, listened for approaching sirens, ascending or descending footfalls. Nothing.

“The black nurse,” Renzel said confidingly, “Tina. Killing her … I have no regrets about it. No feelings. Except possibly …”

“Yes?”

“That I'd have preferred to kill a black doctor. Yes. A minority M.D. Someone my own age … But I do regret the children
here
. I regret Emily Woodrow's child.”

I stared down at Renzel's feet, left, right, left, right. He wore brown loafers, well polished, expensive. Leather soles, I thought. No traction. I watched my own feet in conjunction with his. I couldn't do anything obvious, but I tried to match my stride to his, to measure the distance my foot would have to kick in order to trip him up.

“The doors are probably guarded,” I warned, just before we reached the landing. “You'll need me. You'll need me, as your ticket out.”

I could feel his hesitation.

“You might not be so lucky with your next hostage,” I said hastily. “Cops are very careful when a woman's taken hostage.”

“We'll go out the ER,” he said.

How many steps could I fall and still get up? How quickly would he have to stab with the syringe? Could I count on his impulse to throw out his arms and save himself? Would his damn glasses fall off?

I watched and counted, felt his rhythm. When he was between steps with his right foot I lurched as far away from him as I could, hurled myself down the stairs.

He shouted, toppled as well.

Seven steps was all I wanted to fall. And I was ready for it. And it hurt like hell.

When I dive on the volleyball court, my knees and elbows are padded, and the floor is level, forgiving wood. Dammit, dammit, dammit. The staircase was cold concrete and hard right angles. It's the knees and elbows that get it every time. Knees and elbows because I was rolled in a ball to protect my head.

He wasn't holding on to me. Even as I was falling, I knew that. And somebody was yelling. Me.

I grasped my handbag to my chest and hugged it. I could feel the outline of the gun.

Would the tiny syringe break? Would he squeeze it inadvertently? Disarm it? Would he break his goddamn hand?

We landed in a tangle of limbs and I found I could move. I threw myself on top of him and I kept yelling and thrusting my hand in my handbag until I could bring out my weapon and hold it at the base of his skull.

I couldn't see the syringe.

“Just lie there,” I told him.

He squirmed and I dug the barrel into his neck. “Don't move!” I yelled, my mouth an inch from his ear.

He lay still.

“I can pay you,” he said.

“Like you paid Tina Sukhia?”

“Listen,” he said softly, like he was imparting a great secret. “There's nothing you can't fix with money.”

“Yeah,” I said. My knees ached. I could feel wetness under one of them and hoped the cut wasn't deep. I felt bruised and shaken. Time for some cop to open the door.

“Nothing money can't fix,” I said. “Be sure and tell that to Emily Woodrow.”

43

It took two days for the fallout to hit. I don't mean the newspaper headlines; those were fast and immediate, and mostly inaccurate as hospital PR kicked into overdrive, handing out misleading press releases by the bushel. But the reaction to my role in Renzel's arrest came more slowly.

Part of the delay was due to Mooney's hospitalization. Some of it was weekend inertia. Another element was jet lag, but I didn't know anything about that until after my Monday morning summons to Mooney's office.

Mooney had taken a 1-cc intramuscular jolt of a drug called Ketamine. Hospitals don't keep Ketamine under lock and key; you can find it on any anesthesia cart. It's what they call a dissociative anesthetic. Keith Donovan told me about it.

He stayed at the Brigham, camping outside Emily Woodrow's door, leaving only to see his regular patients. I don't know if he acted out of guilt; I don't much care. I just liked the way he remained after others went home, noting the changing shifts of nurses and police guards, reading psychiatric journals, chatting.

We talked about anesthesia, third-world medicine, general topics, skating-on-the-surface stuff. He brushed my hair back from my face once, when the arguing got a bit heated.

He offered to see me to my Toyota when I left. In the descending elevator he asked if I wanted to talk about it.

“What?” I said.

“Did you feel tempted to use the gun? When you had him down on the floor, when you had him cornered?”

I considered possible replies. I thought about dating, even sleeping with a very attractive guy who'd analyze my every move.

I got in the car and drove away, watching Donovan grow small in my rearview mirror.

The next day, while I was at JHHI waiting to visit Mooney, a bouquet of wilting jonquils in my hand, Pablo Peña, the sleepy anesthesiologist, told me more about Ketamine. They use it on kids. Horses, too, he believed. Unless given supplemental drugs to offset its effect, patients wake from Ketamine-induced sleep soaked in sweat, screaming of gruesome nightmares. A biker he'd once sedated had specifically requested Ketamine, asking for that “angel dust stuff.” He'd come down shrieking, “They're ripping my flesh off! Man, I'm charred by fireballs!”

Over the weekend I wondered about Mooney's dreams.

Monday morning, at headquarters, I thought I might actually be offered a congratulatory handshake, a collegial pat on the back. Mooney hadn't died. Emily Woodrow hadn't died. The poison plant at 632 Longwood had been shut down. A receptionist at David Menander's hotel had picked Renzel out of a lineup as the “flower delivery man.”

“Mooney? In a meeting,” I was told when I arrived. I waited long enough to drink one cup of coffee. Long enough to hunt for doughnuts, tracking their cinnamon smell to an empty box in the trash.

Through a slit in the shade on Mooney's door, I could see that he was entertaining two suits. They didn't look like plainclothes cops. They looked like politicians or businessmen. Possibly lawyers. Maybe I ought to take a hike, call, and reschedule.

“Hey, thank goodness,” JoAnn Triola said when she caught sight of me.

I glanced behind me. We went to the police academy together and we get along okay, but Jo doesn't usually offer up prayers of thanksgiving on making visual contact.

“What?” I said cautiously.

“You'd better go right in.”

“Why?”

“Mooney's been asking for you every five minutes,” she said.

“Maybe I'll leave,” I said.

She took two long strides across the floor and rapped on his glass before I could stop her. He glanced up, startled, saw me and pushed back his chair.

The door opened.

“Carlotta, get in here.”

“I hope you're feeling better,” I said sweetly.

One of the men in the office popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. He was wearing a pinstriped navy suit. A crisp white handkerchief peeped from his breast pocket. On his lap, he cradled a small round hat with a flipped-up brim. The other man rose more slowly. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a brown suit.

If I'd known it was going to be formal, I'd have worn a suit, too.

“Sit down,” Mooney ordered firmly, nodding me into a chair. “This is Mr. Kuh—”

“Kurundi, madame.” The man who'd popped had a clipped, almost British accent, dark skin.

Mooney said, “Mr. Kurundi is a representative of the World Health Organization, and this is Mr. Wiley from the FDA.”

“Food and Drug Administration,” I said warily. “Hi. Carlotta Carlyle. Let me guess. You got a letter from a woman named Tina Sukhia.”

Wiley said, “We should have been contacted immediately.”

I shrugged, gestured at Mooney, said, “He was in the hospital. I was busy sitting on a killer.”

Mr. Kurundi spoke in a high voice with a melodic lilt. “You read a letter which was intended for the World Health Organization.”

“It hadn't been sent,” I said. “I didn't exactly tamper with the mail.”

His tone became more severe. “Nevertheless, once you read such a letter, we should have been informed with utmost speed.”

“In Switzerland? What's going on here?” I asked.

“Exactly this,” Wiley, the Food and Drug man said. “If the proper authorities had been activated at the proper time, we would now know the names of Renzel's suppliers, wholesalers, middle men, exporters. The whole bag.”

“And Emily Woodrow would be dead,” I pointed out. “Unless she was getting ready to stand trial for multiple murder. Sounds to me like your beef's with this Kurundi guy. Ask him what the hell he's been doing with the letter Tina Sukhia sent him months ago.”

“Excuse me, madame,” Kurundi said, fiddling with his hat, “but you did not read that letter. It was, shall I say, both a vague and confusing communication. Also, the World Health Organization is a large tree with many branches. Prompt action was indeed taken once Miss Sukhia's letter reached its correct destination. However, we began our investigation from the other end, you might say. We were grateful to Miss Sukhia for pointing us toward Cephamycin. We discovered it was, as she implied, arriving into several third-world countries in a contaminated form—”

“I'm sure she appreciates your gratitude,” I said. Mooney fired me a warning glance.

“In conjunction with the Food and Drug Administration of your country, we were working with the Cephagen Company's president—”

“Menander? The guy who got shot?”

“Yes,” Wiley admitted.

“I'm sure he appreciates your work as well,” I said.