The Inquisitor (26 page)

Michael spun around and jabbed an index finger that felt like an iron pipe into Earl's chest. "Something that needs doing, understand! For God's sake, harness that righteous bloodhound streak of yours and quit fucking with the good guys!"

Stung, Earl took a step back. "The good guys?"

"Yeah. The ones whom you've seen fit to rag lately. Stewart, now me, even Father Jimmy."

"Jimmy told you that?"

Michael nodded. "Trust me, you don't want to pursue any of it."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

He opened his mouth to reply, seemed to think better of it, and turned toward the exit, walking stiffly, his shoulders rigid. At the blackened doors he paused and peered back at Earl. "Just remember, we're all trying to do our best." Transient as a blink, the bulky posture of Michael's upper body bunched up and reminded Earl of an animal, hunched over and about to charge, warning off an intruder. It looked so out of character that Michael might have been some stranger standing there. Then he was gone.

I had only allowed myself to remember the dream while alone.

It helped keep me invisible.

That would be more critical than ever now.

Because the dream had changed.

I walked into the lab as usual.

The water sprayed down from the broken pipes.

But when I looked up at his face, the swollen tongue lashed to and fro, angry as a trapped snake. The engorged lips pulled back in a swollen leer. The black orifice mouthed, "Do it!"

Death rounds had been the tipping point- my stage perfectly set.

If I acted quickly now, with everyone primed, they'd all draw the logical conclusion.

One, two, three, and I'd be free.

First the suicide.

Then Graceton. My perfect dry run had left no doubt about her fate.

And finally, if grief didn't stop Garnet, I'd do it myself.

And everybody would be fooled.

One, two, three…

The little ditty kept running through my head as I prepared the chloroform, then gathered up what else I'd need for the night's work.

Wednesday, July 16, 4:40 p.m.

Stewart woke with a start, only to hear a loud roll of thunder slowly die out.

Outside his bedroom window a gray fog thick as flannel cut the light and made it seem dusk, but a glance at the glowing figures on his digital alarm clock surprised him. An afternoon storm must have blown in, he thought, getting up to close the windows. But the air, much cooler now, held a pleasant scent that reminded him of fresh laundry, so he left everything open.

More thunder rumbled not too far off.

"Tocco," he called, surprised the dog hadn't stayed by his bed. She hated storms and stuck as close to him as possible whenever they occurred. If alone in the house, she'd head into the basement, and he'd find her there when he came home, huddled in the darkest nook she could find.

He pulled on his clothes and headed downstairs, his feet still bare. "Tocco, come here, girl."

Sleep had helped him. And having saved Jane Simmons. His stock had soared so much with the nurses for that one that maybe he'd have a chance to ride out Yablonsky's accusations. At least at St. Paul's.

His enemies on the Web were another matter.

His mood immediately darkened.

In that forum he'd be held guilty until he could prove himself innocent. Even then, he might never be good enough again for the kind of grant money he used to get. Awarded on merit, it could be denied on a whim. He'd have to convince everyone that crone Yablonsky had concocted the whole thing, tried to use him as a handy scapegoat to cover up her own incompetence. "Or worse," as Earl had put it.

"Tocco!" he called, entering the kitchen. His basement door yawned open as he usually left it, so she could have the run of the house. "Come on up, girl. Suppertime."

He expected to hear the click of her nails on the linoleum-covered steps and the jingle of her collar tags.

Nothing.

"Tocco?"

He flicked on the light switch near the cellar steps.

The darkness below remained.

Bulb must be burnt out, he thought.

"Come here, Tocco," he called out, and started down. The small basement windows, even with the gloom outside, would allow him enough light to see by. She must have really been scared by the thunder.

He reached the bottom of the stairs, certain she'd come out of hiding and greet him.

No dog.

What the hell? he thought, feeling his way through the semidarkness toward one of the spots she often curled up in.

A tiny rectangular window in his laundry room admitted a thin, almost yellow glow as the late afternoon sun penetrated layers of fog blanketing the city. In a far corner lay a shadow darker than the rest.

That's when he caught the first whiff of chloroform.

5:45 p.m.

The steady rumbling chased everyone else inside, but Earl stayed put. The luminous haze of the mist suggested the storm clouds were thinning out. Even if they didn't go for a brisk paddle as planned, it would be as good a place as any to talk with Jimmy alone. One thing was for certain: he wasn't about to let the priest cancel.

He stood on the worn wooden boardwalk of an area called the basin, a harbor where some of Buffalo's more affluent boaters moored their yachts. Less ostentatious sailors kept smaller craft on nearby racks. That's where Jimmy stored his sixteen-footer.

As he waited, Earl found himself carried back to a time in medical school when he and his roommate, Jack MacGregor, would seek relief from their studies by launching paper airplanes from the roof of their apartment building. They would craft various weird shapes and give them stabilizers and lift vents; though some nosedived to the street below, others would rise in the air, catch a breeze, and sail out of sight. The model that went the farthest and highest, no matter how wonky-looking, won.

Jack had always been the more daring of the two in this venture. "Your trouble, Garnet, is not allowing yourself to think outside the box," he'd accused more than once, and with reason. Medicine required pattern recognition, and that meant disciplining one's thoughts to symptoms and signs that were mired in evidence-based facts. The convention gave science its reliability but kept imaginations in check.

So Earl made himself remember those days with Jack whenever he faced a seemingly insolvable problem. Ideas, he'd realized, were often like those crazy paper planes. No matter how silly or bizarre they seemed at first, every now and then one would soar above all the others, usually to his complete surprise, and provide the answer that had eluded him.

The late Jack MacGregor- he'd died over five years ago saving Earl's life- must be proud of him now. Ever since his talk with Stewart's ex-wife and the bizarre confrontation with Michael, Earl's imagination had gone into overdrive with out-of-the-box ideas.

How could he help but look at Stewart's dilemma in a different light? If the man had had a hand in destroying another researcher's life, as odious as that might be, more and more his claim of being set up took on a different resonance.

Michael definitely required a new take, whatever he'd gotten himself into.

And since Jimmy had seen fit to label both of them "the good guys," maybe he could also explain what they were up to.

He glanced at his watch. The priest should have been here twenty minutes ago. He'd been dodging Earl the whole day, claiming to be busy. But Earl had finally cornered him with the suggestion they use Jimmy's daily hour of exercise as a chance to talk, something they'd often done in the past. Jimmy then proposed that they take out the canoe.

Just when Earl figured he'd been stood up, he heard footsteps approach, and a dark shape became visible in the yellow mist.

"We go out there with a storm threatenin'," said a lilting voice, "the good Lord is likely to zot us for our stupidity."

"We can just take a walk instead, Jimmy." No way you're evading me any longer, he added to himself.

"Only if we pick up the pace. After a day like mine, I need to run."

Earl groaned. He'd slipped into shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, anticipating a workout on the water, but jogging, especially in a city of smog, never held much appeal, let alone made sense. But what the hell. Once wouldn't kill him. "Lead the way."

They took off along a pedestrian path that curved through a grassy area surrounded by trees, but beyond that, the mist prevented Earl from seeing exactly where they were.

"So what did you want to talk about?" Jimmy asked, breathing as easily as if they were standing still.

Although Earl found the pace a bit more of an effort than Jimmy, biking, swimming, and racing around the yard with Brendan had kept him in reasonable shape. "I had an odd run-in with Michael this morning over a rather selective way he'd filled out Artie Baxter's insurance form. You remember the case?"

"I'll never forget it. What do you mean by 'selective'?"

"No mention of anything that might raise questions about the widow getting the check."

"I thought death from a heart attack would be a straightforward claim."

"Not when falling comatose from too much insulin might have been a factor."

The priest increased the pace. "What are you suggesting?"

"Artie may have deliberately taken too much."

"But you can't be sure."

"No."

"Then Michael did the right thing. Why give the insurance company an out not to pay?"

"I'd normally agree, Jimmy, except this time it seemed a bit too obvious."

"How?"

"A bunch of reasons. One, whenever you have any kind of physical stress- and from what Artie's wife said, he'd been suffering unstable angina for days- blood sugar usually rises in a diabetic. For Artie to make himself fall into a hypoglycemic coma, he would have had to do more than skip breakfast after his regular morning insulin. He would have had to have taken more than usual."

"But if his sugars were high, wouldn't an increase be called for?"

"Yeah, but experienced diabetics can tell when they're slipping into a coma. I just don't see Artie ignoring the symptoms of hypoglycemia."

"And you would have put that down on paper?"

The path tilted upward into an all-encompassing gloom, the momentary hint that the fog would disperse anytime soon vanishing like a false promise. "Probably not. But I wouldn't have gone so much out of my way to make it seem I'd never even thought of it. No physician worth his salt could look at Artie's file and claim that. Not that I would have spelled out my suspicions either, but there are ways to state them subtly. For instance, Michael could have noted that on questioning, the patient 'claimed' to have taken only the regular dose. Then it's the adjuster's problem to put two and two together, or not."

"And that game makes it all right? Sounds like covering your ass to me. And abandoning the widow to the mercies of the company."

"It's how we do it yet stay legal, Jimmy. And it still works. An agent may call and ask outright if I'm willing to say the patient committed suicide, and I'll say no one could claim that for certain, and eventually they pay up."

"Just the kind of hassle a grieving family needs."

Earl ignored the jibe. "Look, if it were just the Artie Baxter case, I would have let it go. But what really bothered me is that something's obviously been eating at Michael recently. One look at the guy says he's worried-"

"It's called SARS, Earl. Look around you. Everybody's scared shitless these days."

The image of Michael's hurt expression when he'd blurted out how the outbreak had caused problems between Donna and him made Earl wince. He hadn't realized the couple had been having such a hard time coping. "Maybe. But to be precise, he also reamed me out for, if you'll pardon my literal rendition of what he said, 'fucking up the good guys lately'- namely, you, himself, and Stewart- and practically begged me to keep my nose out of his business."

Jimmy responded by yet again picking up speed. "So the guy's stressed and he overreacted. Don't make a big deal of it."

"Do you think I'm acting like an asshole and getting in the way of the good guys?"

Jimmy started to laugh. "You want a professional opinion from a chaplain, or something more personal?"

Earl strained to keep up. Sweat had already soaked through his clothing despite the temperature having dropped with the afternoon showers. "What I want to know, Jimmy, is if you've had a talk with him like you did with me, and coaxed him into the service of some greater good, such as making certain that suitably deserving widows and orphans collect money from insurance companies without any troublesome questions or delays."

"I'd think that would be the job of any responsible doctor toward a patient."

"I know you, Jimmy. In another age you'd have been a swashbuckler, a musketeer, a wielder of the sword of justice in a fight for the downtrodden, beholden only to the laws of God."

"Sounds like my kind of guy. What's wrong with that?"

"What's wrong is that you might not be above tweaking man-made regulations, especially if they stood in the way of a righteous cause."

"I believe these days we call that civil disobedience, and a noble activity it is. But no, I've not led Michael astray. Now are you goin' to start running, or is hobblin' along like this as fast as an old man like yourself can do?" He pulled away into the gray haze until his form had no more substance than smoke.

How flippant would he be if he knew Michael might be taking favors from the damsels in distress? Earl wondered, and dug harder. He managed to accelerate up the slope and pull abreast again. "What about Stewart?"

"What about him?"

"You heard Yablonsky's accusation. Do you know if he's been up to anything in Palliative Care?"

"You're not serious."

"Something's going on up there. Increased death rates don't lie."

"They're supposed to die."

"You sound like Hurst."

"Now don't be gettin' nasty with me."

"Then what's going on, Jimmy?"

"Did you ever talk to any of the patients you brought back from a cardiac arrest?"

"Sure, sometimes."

"What did they tell you they remembered?"

"Sometimes nothing. Others gave the usual story of rising above their bodies, a bright light at the end of a tunnel…"

"And what do you make of those stories, Earl?"

"If you mean do I think they're proof of an afterlife, I'm afraid not."

"Neither do I. I made a point of reading up on it. Interesting how neurologists think it's got to do with neurotransmitters, certain parts of the brain being stimulated or losing the blood supply to the outside of the retina first, and the optic nerve last, creating the image of a dark tunnel with a bright light at the end. But there are some stories that can't be explained by chemicals, physiology, or anatomy. Did any of the patients you talked to ever tell you about the dark man?"

"What?"

"The dark man. A person dressed in black hovering around the end of their bed."

Earl chuckled. "No."

"You wouldn't laugh if they had, yet I'm not surprised they didn't. It's not in any of the published accounts either, not even Stewart's, though I suspect when researchers refer to subjects who report frightening images, had those descriptions been specific, the dark man would be as common to near-death as lights and tunnels. But people don't feel comfortable in getting too detailed about that sort of thing unless it's with chaplains, figuring we're bound by belief to be sympathetic, not scoff at it."