Last Surgeon (5 page)

The scene as comatose Mike Campbell was carried to the aft examining room of the Helping Hands Mobile Medical Unit would most certainly not have made the final cut in any Norman Rockwell selection process. Everything in the RV was wet-either with rainwater, mud, coffee, or blood.

Seated at their spots by the table, the two remaining students from Nick’s small class looked considerably more sanguine than Phillip MacCandliss, who was slouched in the driver’s chair, wrapped in a blanket that Junie had probably provided for him. His jaunty cap was gone, and his thinning, razor-cut hair was matted with mire. Janus Fielding stood to his right, leaning against the window, his expression appearing as if he might have dropped from the sky and landed in the Emerald City of Oz.

Comfortable with Junie’s ability to handle this, or almost any other medical situation, Nick paused as he was about to head to the rear of the van.

“Sorry about that,” he said to MacCandliss. “You okay?”

“No, I’m not okay. Do I look okay?”

“Nope. Now that you mention it, you don’t look okay at all. Sorry I asked.”

“Mr. Fielding is taking mental notes on all this, Garrity. He’ll be filing a report on the bush league operation you two are running here. He knows, as do I, that every one of these unfortunate men and women would be better off in an emergency ward or a city-run clinic. I don’t think that even in the weakest ER in the city you would find a doctor chasing his patients out into the street. You could have gotten any number of people killed. And for what? To save that… that cave dweller.”

“Well, we can talk about this another time. I’ve got to get back there and see what I can do for our patient.”

“What you can do, Garrity, is what you should have done when that wretched fellow first walked into this sad excuse for a clinic-you should have called nine-one-one.”

Nick took several steps toward the rear of the RV, then paused and looked back over his shoulder.

“You know, that’s an excellent idea, MacCandliss. I’m glad my nurse did it as soon as we realized how bad off the man was.”

At that instant, the heavy night was pierced by the sirens of an approaching rescue squad and police cruisers.

“WELL, DOC,” Junie said, “these Steri-Strips will hold until we can get you to a surgeon-maybe even a plastic surgeon. That is some impressive gash you gave yourself.”

“Nonsense. This mug needs a plastic surgeon like a warthog needs a beautician. Let me dismiss my class and check on the people who stayed around in the bus stop. Then we can talk about whether or not I need to be sewn up.”

“It’s still oozing. Look, do what you want. There’s just too much testosterone floating around here for me.”

As usual, the paramedic and EMT had done a stellar job under difficult circumstances. In what seemed no time at all, they had gotten Campbell onto oxygen, cleaned up his old IV and redressed it while simultaneously starting a second one, evaluated and dressed the wound in his side, and begun treatment to raise his blood pressure and oxygen saturation.

“We’re not going to have to intubate him at this point,” the paramedic said. “I think you saved his life by getting the Narcan and flumazenil into him when you did.”

“Aw, shucks,” Nick said.

“And I agree with you that the wound doesn’t look too bad.”

“Stand over here and say all that again,” Nick responded, gesturing toward the front of the RV where MacCandliss and Fielding were preparing for the arrival of a cab. “Nice and loud.”

By the time the police finished at the accident scene and entered the van, the cab had arrived and the two men were gone. The cops, grateful that no one had been seriously hurt, and citing that they had more than enough statements to type up already, agreed to have Nick and Junie stop by the precinct house on their way to the hospital.

The eventful stop at Jasper Yeo’s auto lot was almost over.

The van would be significantly late for the last two scheduled stops of the evening, but their patients would probably be waiting.

With no particular place to go, Nick’s three students, Thompson, McBean, and Riddick, sprayed and wiped down the interior of the Fleetwood while Nick and Junie worked their way through the patients who had chosen to remain in the bus stop waiting room. Outside, the rain had finally begun to taper off, and inside, the tension generated by MacCandliss, Fielding, and Campbell had begun to dissipate. Lost in the pleasure of taking care of patients, Nick felt the unique, almost indescribable rhythm of the van settle back in. Finally, with the last of the cases tended to, and Junie readying the exam room for the trip across town, he came up to the front and sat down with his class.

“If we had tuition, I’d offer to refund it,” he said, pouring himself a mug of coffee.

“If we had tuition, I’d double it,” McBean said. “It was worth the price of admission just to watch that jerk try and shake you down.”

“Don’t ever underestimate MacCandliss; people who do end up with fang marks on their butts.”

“No need to tell me. I know the man from way back.”

Nick felt his interest immediately perk up. He knew that MacCandliss had not been the one who rejected McBean’s request for increased benefits.

“What do you mean, Matthew?”

“I had a buddy named Ferris-Manny Ferris. You might have run into him.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m a little surprised because he had-
has
-PTSD like the rest of us. MacCandliss rejected his petition for an increase in his benefits. Ol’ Manny was depressed in the best of times. The ruling sent him onto the street and into the bottle. He went from a little room to a flophouse, and finally to a cardboard village. I used to visit him there from time to time. Then one day, after a couple of months had passed, I stopped by. The guys told me Manny was a new man. He had cut way back on his drinking and left the village. Kept talking about how the Marines had called him back and were planning to activate him for some sort of top-secret covert mission. Then he vanished.”

Top-secret covert mission.

The words hit like a missile. Umberto had been sitting right there at that table when he said them to Nick. He was a man reborn, his countenance beaming.

I’ve been called back by the Marines for a top-secret covert mission.

That’s what he said. Maybe those exact words.

Not long after that, like Manny Ferris, he disappeared.

“Matthew,” Nick said, “has Manny resurfaced since then?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know for sure, except that once, maybe a couple of years ago, one of the guys said that Manny was back on the street. I’m embarrassed that I never tried to find him, but for me life had changed. First I managed to get a job, then I met a terrific woman and we got a place together. Then I got into that eye therapy for my PTSD. I just sort of let Manny slide.”

“Listen, don’t be so hard on yourself. Life is all about living.”

“I suppose.”

“So tell me, how long has it been since you actually saw him?”

“Manny? A while. Let me think.”

Four years
, Nick was thinking.
It’s been four years
.

“I know when,” McBean said. “It was right after I got the job at the body shop. Four years. Give or take a couple of months, it was four years ago.”

“The police ruled it a suicide. But could it have been murder? Hello, all you Charlotte Night Owls. You’re tuned in to WMEW, 82.5 FM, home of the Rick Clemmons show, starring me, Rick Clemmons.” The rotund DJ, draped in an orange-and-white Hawaiian shirt, wearing loose-fitting cargo shorts and a straw cowboy hat, pressed a yellow button on the eight-channel mixing board, cuing his show’s signature heavy-metal guitar theme song. “For those of you just joining us, our in-studio guest this morning is Jillian Coates, from… Virginia?”

“That’s right. Arlington.”

“Jillian… do you go by Jill or Jillian?”

“Jillian… with a
J
.”

“Jillian with a
J
is a photographer and the sister of Belle Coates, the Charlotte resident and nurse at the Central Charlotte Medical Center who died three weeks ago in an apparent suicide from a drug overdose.”

“Nurse, Rick. I’m a nurse just like my sister. I just do photography as a hobby. Once in a while I sell a piece or have a show, but-”

“Yes. Well, the police called the death of Belle Coates an open-and-shut case. Our guest this morning, a nurse currently working at…?”

“Shelby Stone Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.”

“… Shelby Stone Memorial Hospital, isn’t so sure. Separating fact from fiction is what the Rick Clemmons Show is all about, and this juicy tale has more twists to it than a Twizzler. Bogus suicide? Botched investigation? Delusional sister? Psychic connection? You be the judge. But you know that Rick Clemmons always gets to the truth. So remember, our phone lines are open. Call anytime, boys and girls. Let’s get to the bottom of this thing!”

Jillian balled her fists and reminded herself that media exposure was what she was after.
You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas
, her mother always said.

The weeks since Belle’s death had been a living hell. With one terrible call from the Charlotte police, Jillian’s life had come to an abrupt stop, and then made a sharp right-angle turn. Nothing would ever be the same. Not an hour passed that she didn’t think about her younger sister and imagine what the final minutes of her existence must have been like. It made no sense that Belle, though hurt by her decision to break things off with the philandering jerk she was close to marrying, would be despondent enough to take her own life. She was all about adventure, discovery, and a love of people. Even in the infrequent troublesome times of her life, she had never even hinted at suicide.

Jillian was the volatile, eccentric one-the lone eagle with the spontaneity, the artist’s eye, and the unpredictable temper. Belle was a warm breeze-a zephyr, making everyone’s life she touched feel better.

You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Who in the hell could have done this to her?

When Jillian agreed to come to Charlotte for the radio show, Rick Clemmons’s producer made it clear that the host, though genuinely caring, made his living by being outspoken and feeding the insatiable schadenfreude appetite of his audience. But at this instant, having to endure the man, she wished that he could know exactly what it felt like to lose somebody whom he loved as much as she did Belle. She wanted him to feel his stomach knot up at seeing his loved one’s photograph-to endure a sadness so profound it threatened to stop his breathing.

Sadly, out of more than a hundred requests she had made to local, regional, and national media outlets, Rick Clemmons was the only broadcaster who agreed to air her story. Like it or not, she had to play by his rules. As desperate as she was, she probably still shouldn’t have come. But she had to do something. There was no way she could just turn and walk away. This was her sister… her best friend. Somebody, someplace, had to know something. What else could she do but keep looking, even if it meant having to deal with a bottom-feeder like Rick Clemmons?

Clemmons pressed Mute on his mixing board, then turned to her and asked, “You ready to keep going, little lady?”

“I am,” Jillian said, adjusting her headphones.

“We gotta share a mic, remember. The AKG is on the fritz. Means you gotta lean in real close, now.”

His gaze traveled downward and Jillian could feel him unbutton her blouse with his eyes. She was used to men staring at her and flirting, but something about Clemmons made her itch. To distract herself, she again fiddled with her headphones and politely nodded.

Despite his show airing at the obscene hours of 1 A.M. to 6 A.M., Jillian had held out hope that Clemmons would actually have someone in his audience who could help her. Those hopes took a direct hit when she pulled her rental car into the station’s dirt parking lot, abutting a barren, litter-strewn stretch of Highway 27 between Charlotte and Paw Creek. The producer had said nothing to prepare her for the ramshackle trailer from which WMEW broadcast.

When she first knocked on the rust-speckled trailer door, she half expected a crazed, toothless old man, shirtless in his overalls, to leap out and grab her. She knew going in that WMEW was small-market radio, but hell, this was bordering on microscopic. She wondered how a photographic study of the place would fit in with her current project on America’s back roads. It wasn’t surprising that Clemmons had to resort to tabloid radio to maintain competitive ratings, especially competing in such an ungodly time slot. But she was frustrated to the point of desperation, and it was either play this game, or don’t play at all.

“Okay, Jillian,” Clemmons said into the one working microphone. “Now, if I’m getting this right, some of the evidence you have that your sister was murdered is in her diary?”

Jillian paused to compose herself.

“Not exactly. After the police had completed their evaluation, I came to Charlotte to collect her things.”

“What things?” Clemmons asked.

“Everything. Photographs. Clothes. Files. Her computer. I boxed everything up and hired a moving company to move all of her things to my place. I wanted to go through it all one last time before I… before I started throwing things away. The police didn’t need any of it. According to them, there was nothing for them to investigate.”

“Except maybe murder,” Clemmons threw in.

“There was a diary-more like a journal, actually-but there wasn’t much in it that I didn’t already know. As you can tell, my younger sister and I were very close. Our… our parents were killed in an auto accident twelve years ago, when she was fourteen and I was twenty-four. We lived together until she started nursing school-the same school I had gone to in Washington. During vacations and summers, she stayed with me in the condo I bought with my half of the sale of our parents’ place.”

“Exactly what did you find in this diary that led you to believe the suicide note she left was somehow bogus or forced by another person?”

“First of all, I want to say that I am a psych nurse in one of the best departments in D.C. I’ve been in that specialty for a long time. It’s my job to know when someone is suicidal, and believe me, Rick, Belle was not suicidal. Not in the least.”

“The diary?”

“It wasn’t a deeply personal, from-the-heart diary; more like a journal of events in Belle’s life. It wasn’t locked up or hidden away. I found it on her nightstand while I was boxing up her things.”

“So I’m guessing the diary-I’m sorry,
journal
-didn’t say, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ If it did, you wouldn’t be on this show.”

“Exactly. There was nothing in any of her entries to suggest that she was even in a fragile state. In fact, I was planning on driving down in a week. All she said the last time I… the last time I spoke with her was that she couldn’t wait to see me.”

“But there was that broken-off engagement that she was depressed about, right? Her fiancé, Dr. Doug Dearing, an orthopedist at the Carolina Bone and Joint Hospital, reportedly was having an affair with her best friend.”

Jillian took some comfort in knowing that Clemmons had at least a cursory knowledge of the facts. She could handle him ogling her, but only if he gave Belle the respect she deserved. It was also great to hear Dearing’s name and actions broadcast.

“Sure, she was depressed about it,” Jillian answered. “Who wouldn’t be? She had seen a therapist and gotten the sleeping pills that-that she took. But she was philosophical about the end of the engagement, and actually grateful she found out about what he was before”-Jillian paused and cleared the fullness from her throat-“they got married. There were passages in her journal where Belle wrote about feeling stronger, more like her old self again. She even referenced her upcoming diving trip to Cozumel with her girlfriends, and how much she was looking forward to it. That’s not the writing of somebody who would take her own life.”

Jillian had read the journal several times. It brought them closer, the way e-mails or talking on the phone had done. But it was also like experiencing Belle’s death over and over again-traveling alongside her through years of hopes, joys, and disappointments, all the while knowing it would come to a tragic end.

“So, have the cops ever investigated this Dearing fellow?” Clemmons asked.

“They did. But he had an alibi. He was with his girlfriend and out of state the night Belle died.”

“Then there’s this wild psychic connection business. What was that all about?”

“I would prefer to avoid the implications of the word ‘psychic,’ and just leave it at ‘connection.’ ”

“Go on.”

“At what might have been the exact moment Belle died, certainly within the same half hour, three hundred and thirty-five miles to the north, I became as violently ill as I have ever been. It felt for a while, as I was getting sicker and sicker, on the floor in my bathroom, as if I were going to die. The horrible attack went on for half an hour or so, and then simply went away, just like that.”

“Yes, okay. Well, the Night Owl listeners to the Rick Clemmons Show might believe in such psychic connections, but we’re here to sort out the facts, and only the facts. And the facts in this case, at least as you have presented them so far, do not lend support to your contention that she was forced to write a suicide note and then forced to swallow a lethal dose of sleeping pills.”

“I disagree. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’ll excuse me for saying so, Jillian, but so far I’m not convinced. Tell me more about the journal. What about it made you think Belle was murdered?”

“It wasn’t the journal so much as it was Belle’s suicide note,” Jillian said. “In both the note, when she told me she was sorry for what she had to do, and all throughout the journal, Belle referred to me only as
J
.”

“So?”

“In the journal, that was just an abbreviation she used for me. She would never refer to me by an initial in something as emotional as that note. She’d write out my name, or at least ‘Jill.’ I don’t know how, or why, but I’m sure she was forced to write the note and using just the letter
J
was her way of telling me so.”

“Thin stuff, Jillian,” Clemmons said, glancing down at the lifeless caller board. “I guess the police didn’t make much of it.”

“Actually, they didn’t make much of anything.”

“Well, did you notice anything strange about the things you found in her apartment? Anything at all?”

Jillian hesitated. She already felt foolish enough presenting the psychic connection, and hearing Clemmons talk about the journal made most of her points sound thin. But there was something else.

I have nothing to lose by mentioning this
, she decided finally.

“In a box in the back of her closet, Belle had a stack of comic books-fifty or so different issues of the same kind, and they didn’t make anything of those either.”

“Comic books?”

“I feel I know-
knew
-my sister very well. I had no idea she was interested in any sort of comics, and I told the detectives how odd that was, but they just shrugged the notion off. In the box, right on top of the comics, were several printouts from the Internet. Belle had been researching them. I have no idea why, and as I said, the police just didn’t care.”

Clemmons glanced once more at the naked caller panel.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, what?”

“What were the comic books?”

“Oh, I had never heard of them before, but they were all Marvel comics called
Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
And on the cover of several of them she had written ‘Doctor’ or ‘D-R period’ right before his name, or ‘Ph.D.’ right after his name. Maybe that means something to your listeners.”

“Well, it doesn’t to me, except that your little sister may have been more eccentric than you knew. Maybe she had a secret life. Listeners, what’s your opinion?”

As if on cue, a blinking light appeared on the studio’s small call-in panel.

“There’s one,” Jillian said, forgetting for the moment that their mic was on.

“Thanks for the help,” Clemmons said sardonically. “Hey! We got ourselves a caller. Hello to Troy from Weddington. You’re on the Rick Clemmons Show, whatcha got?”

“Yeah, this here’s Troy, from Weddington,” the caller said in a dense, backwoods patois.

Inwardly, Jillian groaned.

“What’s up, Troy? You’re on air with Rick Clemmons. You got thoughts on the Belle Coates case?”

“Nah,” the caller said. “I’uz just driving west on Seventy-four. Thought yer guest sounded hot. Figured I’d call.”

Clemmons looked over at Jillian as though he were making an assessment, offering an apology, and issuing a warning, all at the same time.

“Hey, numbnuts,” he said, “this isn’t the dating game. We’re doing real investigative reporting here. And yes, Troy from Weddington, for your information Jillian Coates is hot-tall and slender and absolutely gorgeous. But she ain’t interested in you, Troy, and guess what, neither am I.” Clemmons disconnected the call and cued the sound effect of an exploding bomb. “Look, folks, you got opinions, share ’em. You got information, especially about a Marvel comic hero named Nick Fury, or Dr. Nick Fury, give it up to us. You got a big woody like that idiot who just called, well, that’s what your bedroom’s for.” Clemmons laughed.