VIABLE (7 page)

Ten minutes later he pulled into the parking lot at Mount Grant, the sky to the east already slowly turning from indigo to bruised gold behind Mable Mountain. He picked up his hat from the passenger seat and climbed slowly out of the cruiser. Forensics had finished with the van and it sat, abandoned behind a thin cordon of police tape fluttering gently in the early morning breeze, the soft yellow light from the hospital’s small entrance reflecting off its paneled black sides. A nurse at reception directed him towards ICU. 

The security guard had been found strapped to the bed where the young man had been. He remembered nothing. Marks on his neck and a pounding headache suggested that his air supply had been cut off, causing him to pass out. His attacker had dragged him into the room so that he wouldn’t be noticed, removing his trousers and shirt and using the restraining straps on the bed and the guard’s own tie to bind and gag him. The blood pressure cuff had been wrapped around his arm and the pulse sensor replaced on his finger so that the monitor at the nurse’s station wouldn’t flatline, triggering an alarm. The guard thought he’d been struggling with the straps for about twenty minutes before a nurse had finally noticed the elevated blood pressure and pulse levels on her monitor and decided to investigate.

As he was taking a couple of final details Doug Whitley joined them, together with another man the administrator introduced as Lionel Keegan, the surgeon who had been about to operate on the now missing patient when he’d first been brought into the OR. Whitley had also left instructions to be contacted the moment there was any change in the man’s condition. He’d also been expecting a call informing him that the man had died and had been steeling himself for the criticism the hospital would no doubt face for transfusing a patient with the wrong blood.

Lars flipped his notebook closed, returning it to his shirt pocket.

‘Well Doug, looks like this guy wasn’t so sick after all.’

The surgeon responded before Whitley had a chance to say anything.

‘Sheriff, that’s nonsense. He must have had help. With his injuries and the complications from the transfusion he simply would have been in no condition to escape by himself. There must have been someone else.’

Lars paused for a moment before answering.

‘Well, Doctor Keegan, I’m not so sure. There’s no evidence that another person was present. The guard is missing his firearm, the keys to his Ford Taurus, his clothes, a watch and about two hundred dollars in cash. Now it’s possible that if someone else was involved they’d have taken the guard’s gun just to make sure he was disarmed, although they way he was tied to that bed they could have just left the gun in the room. They may even have taken the opportunity to rob him while they were at it, might even have taken a shine to the cheap digital watch he was wearing. But one thing I am pretty sure of is that anyone planning to bust an injured man out of here would have organized transport ahead of time, and not relied on stealing something we can put an APB out on.’

He looked at Whitley.

‘No, Doug, I think our man’s managed this by himself.’

The administrator turned to his surgeon.

‘Lionel, I suggest you have a look again at his charts to see whether anything explains this guy’s recovery. And get one of the nurses to retrieve whatever they can from the monitors. I forget how much of a patient’s history they store but you may get blood pressure and heart rate for the last few hours if nothing else. I’ll speak to Sue when she gets in and see if she found anything in his blood work. Lars, we’ll let you know the moment we find anything.’

Lars had already put out an APB on the missing man on his way back in to the hospital. When he got back to his cruiser he updated it with details of the security guard’s Ford, although he was sure that the car would soon be switched, if it hadn’t been already.

This was getting out of hand. He now had two armed men on the loose, a body in the morgue and a conspiracy theory that threatened the very future of his town. He desperately needed something to break, some piece of information that would make everything else fit into place.

8

HE
CHECKED
INTO a small motel just off I-50. He had abandoned the security guard’s Taurus in long-term parking at Carson City airport, switching the license plates with another Ford parked nearby. A taxi from the rank outside had dropped him two blocks away. He knew he hadn’t covered his tracks well, but it was all that he could manage for now. He had paid for the room for four nights, using most of the cash he had stolen. Thankfully the clerk at reception had seemed more interested in the talk show on the small TV behind her desk, barely looking up as he had filled out the form.

He found the room easily. Once inside he closed the blinds, the small, tired accommodation appearing only marginally more inviting in the dim light. The clerk had told him that the maids wouldn’t be cleaning until after Christmas but he hung the faded ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door handle anyway. The effort of overpowering the guard and escaping from the hospital had exhausted him and he longed to collapse on the small, musty bed. But there was one more thing he needed to do first.

He removed the jacket he had stolen from the security guard, letting it fall to the floor. The dressing they had applied at the hospital was still in place but blood had seeped through the bandage, soaking the shirt. He had considered finding an all-night pharmacy but that would have been too dangerous; he had to hope that the room would have what he needed. He staggered into the small bathroom, grabbing a grey, threadbare towel from the rail, and tore it in two. Wrapping his fist in one half, he broke the mirror bolted to the wall above the sink, carefully picking up a large fragment of the glass from the basin. Then he headed back into the bedroom. A small tray with a kettle and provisions for coffee and tea. A mug with teaspoons, dirty but stainless steel, not plastic. Good. He grabbed a handful of sugar sachets and laid them with the teaspoon on the bed next to the broken shard of glass and the torn pieces of the towel. The minibar was stocked and he grabbed a handful of plastic miniatures. An ice bucket sat on top of the small fridge. Ice would help numb the wound. Should he try and find the motel’s ice machine? Too risky to venture out again. Besides, in a place like this there was a good chance the machine wasn’t even working.

He lay back on the bed, pulling up his shirt. The bandage was soaked, and he lifted it clear, examining the wound. The bullet had entered his right side. Low velocity round, handgun probably. The bleeding hadn’t stopped, which meant he needed to get to the bullet. He probed around the opening with his fingers, ignoring the blood that was now flowing freely from the wound. There. A lump of metal, just below his ribcage.

He sat up, twisting the caps off two of the plastic miniatures of vodka, using one to disinfect the teaspoon. The other he used to rinse his fingers, hesitating only an instant before pouring the remainder into the wound. The alcohol burned like acid and he gritted his teeth against the pain, forcing himself to continue. He placed the broken shard of mirror beside the wound, angling it so that he could see. Then before he had time to change his mind he pushed the end of the spoon in, his other hand against his back, fingers working the bullet forward.

The pain was immense and his head swam, but he fought to remain conscious. Just a few more seconds. Blood was pouring from the wound, running down his side, but he ignored it, probing with the end of the spoon to trap the bullet. That was it. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter he worked it free until finally he could see it reflected in the mirror. The deformed slug emerged from the wound and dropped onto the bedspread, already dark with his blood. With what remained of his strength he twisted the cap off another bottle from the minibar and poured the burning liquid into the wound. He tore the corner off one of the sachets of sugar and emptied the contents in after it. The granules would stem the blood flow and promote clotting. When the first sachet was empty he tore the top off another, repeating the process.

He just managed to stuff one of the ripped pieces of towel into the wound before he passed out.

9

LARS
WAS
IN the parking lot supervising the removal of the van to the police pound in town when Doug Whitley found him.

The preliminary forensics report had come through earlier that morning but it hadn’t told him much. The van had been remarkably clean. The license plates were fake and the engine and chassis serial numbers had been removed, making it virtually impossible to trace. Other than those belonging to the two hospital orderlies, forensics had only lifted a single partial print, taken from the handgun that had been recovered from the back of the van. It was assumed that it belonged to the man who had recently fled the hospital. A match was likely to be difficult, but it was nevertheless being run through the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. There were no prints from the driver, although the techs had found traces of powder on the steering wheel that indicated he might have been wearing latex gloves. The ballistics report confirmed what Lars had suspected – all shots had been fired from inside the van. The bullet that had wounded the man who had been strapped to the gurney had come from the front of the vehicle. The man in the back wearing the Nevada Highway Patrol uniform had been killed by a 9mm round fired from the handgun that had been found on the floor next to the bench seat, powder burns on his shirt indicating that the shot had been fired at close range. Lars was staring into the back of the van, trying once again to figure out what in hell might have caused the men in the back to start shooting at each other when Doug walked over.

‘Sheriff, just got a call from Sue over in the lab, says she has something to show me. Care to tag along?’

A middle-aged woman in a white lab coat was bent over a microscope when they entered the lab. She stood up, ushering them over to a corner next to the window where a pot of coffee was bubbling over an old Bunsen burner. She offered them each a paper cup brimming with the thick, dark liquid. Lars suspected it wasn’t Sue’s first hit of the morning. She looked about as tired as he felt.

‘So, Sue, what’ve you found?’

‘Well Doug, I’m not really sure. I had no luck trying to find supplies of this guy’s blood last night so I started to run tests on the samples we’d taken, to see whether anything else might show up that would help us. The first batch didn’t show up anything other than trace amounts of methohexital. I checked with OR and they’d administered a combination of ketamine and benzodiazepine in anticipation of surgery to repair his kidney, but there was no record of methohexital having been given. I planned to check with the Sheriff here whether he found anything in the back of that van that might tell us how it got in his system.’

Lars dug his notebook out of the pocket of his shirt, flipping to the page where he had jotted down the contents of the custom cabinets in the back of the van. Sure enough, methohexital was on the list. He asked what it was used for.

‘It’s a fast acting sedative, Sheriff.’

That might indicate the man hadn’t been in the back of the van voluntarily. He scribbled a note next to where he had written the name of the drug in his notebook, returning his attention to Sue Ellis.

‘Well, anyway Doug, the last set of tests I ran last night involved checking the levels of HSCs in the man’s blood.’

Lars interrupted again.

‘HSCs?’

‘Hematopoietic stem cells, Sheriff. They replace damaged blood cells.’

Lars flipped open his notebook again. After a moment’s hesitation he wrote down the name. He was sure he’d made a pig’s breakfast of the spelling. He’d get Connie to look it up on the internet later.

‘The test takes an hour or so and I wasn’t hopeful that it would show anything relevant so I planned to go home and check the results in the morning. As I was preparing to leave I realized I’d used the last of the blood samples. So I called the nurses’ station. Janice was on last night and I explained that I needed a fresh sample. I’d already finished up here so I told her I’d walk over to collect it.’

‘Well, I arrived at the station just as she was heading for the patient’s room, so I decided to tag along. It took a little longer than usual to collect the sample, but low blood pressure’s to be expected with an acute hemolytic response and I saw they already had him on a low-dose epinephrine drip to try and counteract it. Anyway, when the vial was full I dropped the sample back to the lab, and then I headed for the parking lot. But then when I get back in this morning and check the results I find this.’ She handed a sheet of paper to the hospital administrator.

‘Well that can’t be right.’

‘I know Doug, I thought the same thing.’

Whitley passed the sheet to Lars, who looked at it for a moment before handing it back.

‘So these HSC cells shouldn’t be there?’

‘It’s not the presence of the cells themselves that’s unusual, Sheriff. With the gunshot wound and the damage that would have been caused to his blood as a result of the transfusion I would have been surprised if his body hadn’t started producing them. It’s the sheer concentration that I just can’t get over. The sample of blood I tested last night was taken only minutes after the man was admitted. Lionel estimated he’d been shot less than an hour before he got to the OR. His body simply shouldn’t have reacted that quickly to repair itself.’

She turned her attention back to Whitley.

‘Well anyway, I was now convinced that somehow the blood samples had been mixed up. Sometimes these things happen.’ She shot a look to the hospital administrator that Lars interpreted as
But not in my lab
.