The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (17 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

GILL
Pickens was faceup on a gurney that hugged the wall in a hallway some distance from the emergency ward, somewhere between radiology and the cafeteria, but he was not alone. The ER, and the adjoining examining rooms, had not been able to accommodate the huge influx of patients, and there was no space in any of the hospital rooms, so the spillover had left the sick languishing throughout the building. Patients lined both sides of the hallway, which resulted in a lot of shifting and squeezing as staff and family members jockeyed for position.

So when Marla, with Arlene Harwood at her side and Matthew in her arms, finally had an opportunity to talk with Dr. Clara Moorehouse about her father’s condition, there was little in the way of privacy. The discussion was held at Gill’s side. His skin looked like concrete and his eyes were closed, but he was alive.

“Surely you can find a room for him somewhere instead of dumping him here,” Arlene said.

“We’re doing the best we can,” Moorehouse said.

“You would think, for someone who was married to the woman who used to run this hospital, that you—”

“Please, Aunt Arlene,” Marla said. “It’s okay.”

“The word we’re receiving,” the doctor said, “is that it’s some kind of chemical poisoning. There’s no treatment. We’ll do everything we can for your father. But it’s out of our hands. He’s luckier than many, who clearly consumed much more water than he did. It’s wait and see.”

“But he
might
make it?” Marla asked, shifting Matthew from one arm to the other.

The doctor said, “I don’t know if you’re a religious person. I’m not. But if I were, I’d say a few prayers for him, because it’s out of our hands. He might very well make it. But if he does, you need to know that there may be some permanent effects.”

Arlene put her arm around her niece. “Thank you,” she said. “Can we stay here?”

“Stay as long as you want,” Moorehouse said. “If a room opens up, we’ll move him, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. We may even end up transferring him to one of the hospitals in Albany. I’ll let you know.”

The doctor excused herself to talk to some other equally anxious family members farther down the hall, including a woman wearing a hijab that covered her hair and neck who was attending to a sick man who looked Middle Eastern.

Matthew, who had been crying off and on ever since they’d arrived at the hospital, started up again.

“He’s hungry,” Marla said. She took a sniff of him. “And he needs to be changed.”

“You need to go home,” Arlene said. “You need to look after Matthew and yourself. You must be starving.”

“I can’t leave,” she said. “What if they move Dad to another hospital? I have to stay with him.”

Arlene said, “I have an idea. I’ll call Don to come pick you and
Matthew up and I’ll stay here with Gill. If anything happens, I’ll call you right away.”

Marla’s face had grown long with weariness. “I don’t know. Maybe I—”

“Marla!”

She whirled around, and standing there in the middle of the hallway, his eyes red, arms outstretched, was Derek Cutter. The recently graduated Thackeray student and father of Matthew.

“I’ve been looking everywhere!” he said. “I tried to call you, and I went to your house, and I didn’t know what had happened to you or to Matthew and—”

Marla burst into tears, kept hold of Matthew with one arm, extended the other, and wrapped it around Derek. His hug encircled mother and child. But then he saw Gill, released Marla and Matthew, and said, “Oh no.”

Marla said, “He’s hanging in there.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“What about you, and your parents? Are they okay?”

Derek nodded, said his parents were out of town, and he’d heard the loudspeakers from a passing fire truck while still in bed. Marla filled him in on how her cousin had brought them to the hospital, what the doctor had said, how she was thinking of going home to change and feed the baby.

“I can take you,” he said.

Arlene thought that was an excellent idea. “I’ll stay here,” she said. “Go.”

Marla made a token protest before allowing herself to leave. Derek, slipping an arm around Marla, whispered, “I don’t think . . . I didn’t realize how big a part of my life you and Matthew are until I thought maybe I’d lost you.”

It was the first thing in several hours that made Arlene Harwood smile. She said to Gill, “I don’t know if you can hear me or not, Gill, but I think things are going to be okay with Marla. I really do.”

Gill’s lips appeared to move slightly, although his eyes did not open.

“What was that?” Arlene said, bending over, putting her ear close to his mouth. The lips moved again.

Arlene reversed things, shifting her mouth close to his ear. “I’ll tell Marla no such thing. You’ll tell her yourself when you’re better. And she knows, Gill. She knows.”

She stood back, hoping he might open his eyes. She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.

At the far end of the hall, a man in his forties who was standing over a silver-haired woman parked on yet another gurney caught sight of the woman wearing the hijab. She was speaking in whispers to the patient Dr. Moorehouse had been attending to moments earlier.

The man raised a hand, pointed, and said, “You’ve got your fucking nerve.”

He spoke loud enough that it was hard for anyone not to hear. Heads turned, looked his way. The woman in the hijab looked, too, and realized quickly she was the one being pointed at.

The man said, “Being right here, among us. That takes some gall, lady.”

The woman, with a pronounced accent, said, “Are you talking to me?”

“You see any other terrorists around?”

The woman clearly didn’t consider that worthy of a response, and returned to comforting her loved one.

“You think we don’t know what’s going on?” the man said, taking measured steps up the hallway.

The woman turned her head again. “Please leave us alone,” she said.

“You know who that is back there?” he said, pointing to the woman he’d been looking after. “That’s my mother. She’s only sixty-six years old, and yesterday, she was the healthiest woman in this goddamn town. But now, she’s just clinging to life. I don’t know if she’s going to make it or not.”

“This is my husband,” the woman said. “And he is dying.”

“But isn’t that what you people do? You sacrifice a few for the cause? Like when you send a woman into some public square with dynamite strapped to her chest?”

“Stop it!” Arlene said.

The man looked past the woman he’d been harassing to take in Arlene. “Don’t you see? They’re hiding in plain sight. They’re here—they’re everywhere. This is how they’re doing it.”

“Shut up!” Arlene shouted. “Go take care of your mother and leave that woman alone.”

A door halfway up the hall opened and Angus Carlson emerged.

“What’s going on?” he asked, glancing first in Arlene’s direction, then at the man who was still pointing. Except now there was something in his hand that was not there before.

He was waving around a gun.

People started screaming. Those who had been standing next to gurneys either dropped to the floor or used their bodies to shield the sick, except for the woman in the hijab, who stood tall and straight and stared directly at her accuser.

Carlson immediately drew his own gun, and as he pointed it at the man, he shouted, “Police! Drop your weapon!”

The man did not. He said, “Arrest her!”

“Sir, you need to lower your weapon right now.”

“Don’t you see?” he said. “What’s happened today? It’s an attack! First it was the drive-in, and now this.” The man’s eyes were filling with tears. “My mother is dying.”

Carlson’s voice came down a notch, but remained firm. “Sir, you need to lower your weapon immediately. If what you’re saying is true, then that’s good, that’s good, you bringing it to my attention.”

The woman glanced at him, anger and fear in her eyes.

Carlson met them for half a second, then said to the man, “You can be certain a full investigation of your allegations will be made. If you turn out to be right, I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to give you some kind of medal. But so long as you’re waving that gun around, we can’t get started on any of that.”

“They get off,” the man said. “They always get off.”

“We’ll have to make sure nothing like that happens.” Carlson moved closer, extended his left hand. “Why don’t you just hand your weapon over to me? Let’s put this behind us. We’re all under tremendous stress today. We’re all on edge.”

The man’s eyes darted back and forth between Carlson and the woman, but the gun remained trained on the woman.

And Angus Carlson had his weapon trained on the man.

“Please, sir. I don’t know how good a shot you are, but if you pull that trigger, there’s a chance you may hit someone else. Maybe someone else’s mother. Or father. A son or daughter. And I have to tell you, if you pull that trigger, I’m going to have to do the same. I’ll have to shoot you. And even though I’ve had training, there’s a good chance I’ll hit someone
I’m
not supposed to, too.”

Everyone was frozen. No one in the hall was breathing.

“Think about your mother. Think about when she gets well. She’s going to need you. And how are you going to help her with her recovery if you’re sitting in jail someplace waiting to go to trial?”

Arlene said, “He’s right. What would your mother want?”

Carlson gave her a look that said
I don’t need your help
.

But Arlene continued. “If my son shot an unarmed woman, for any reason, I would be ashamed of him.”

A silence that felt eternal followed. But it didn’t go on for more than five or six seconds.

At which point the man said, “I don’t care.”

He raised the gun a quarter of an inch, looked at the woman in the hijab, squinted.

Carlson fired.

The shot was deafening, and in its wake came a chorus of simultaneous screams. The bullet caught the man in the upper thigh and blew him back, as though he’d been brought down by an invisible football player. As he fell, the gun slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor.

Carlson dived for it, scooped it up, then reached into his pocket for a set of plastic cuffs.

“You shot me!” the man said. “Jesus Christ, you shot me.” The screams lasted only a few seconds, and now some people, at least those who were not on gurneys, had switched to applause. Carlson holstered his own gun, tucked the man’s into the pocket of his sport jacket, then, as blood streamed from the man’s thigh, rolled him onto his side so that he could cinch his wrists together behind his back.

“The good news is,” Carlson said, “we don’t have to worry about how long it will take to get you to the hospital.”

A pretty good quip, considering his voice was trembling, and his heart pounding so hard it felt like it would come right out of his chest.

TWENTY-NINE

Duckworth

ONCE
the water treatment plant had been evacuated, I put a call in to Rhonda Finderman.

“If you haven’t already,” I told her, “you need to call the governor. If those Homeland Security guys who were here looking at the drive-in explosion can be called back, send them to the water plant. Tell them to bring their hazmat suits. The state has a spills response program for dealing with hazardous material, which is exactly what it looks like we’ve got here.”

“Is that the chief?” Randall Finley, who was several steps away from me, was trying to listen in on the conversation. “Because I have a complaint!”

Finderman said, “Who’s that?”

“Never mind. Did you get what I said?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I just got a call from the state environmental unit. They think they may have a handle on what’s in the water.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Sodium azide.”

“Jesus, yes. How did you know?”

“It’s spilled all over the floor in the plant, around where the fluoride tanks are.” I lowered my voice. “I’ve been downplaying terrorism with all the shit that’s been going on, but if this isn’t a terrorist act, I don’t know what is. But what the hell is sodium azide?”

“It’s bad, bad stuff,” Finderman said. “At least, when it’s added to water, it is. They use it in automobile air bags, among other things. When it’s triggered by an electrical charge, it turns into nitrogen gas and blows up.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not how it’s being used here.”

“It’s got no odor or taste, and if it’s added to water, it causes all the symptoms we’ve been seeing at the hospital. Convulsions, respiratory failure, dropping heart rate.”

“What can they do for it?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Say again?”

“
Nothing
, Barry. There’s no magic pill, no antidote. You either live or you don’t. Severity of symptoms depends on exposure, or how much is ingested. If what you swallowed didn’t quite kill you, you could end up with permanent lung or brain damage.”

“Whoever put this into the water killed one of the workers here,” I said.

“Who?”

I told her.

“What’s killing one guy when you’re ultimately planning to kill hundreds, or thousands?” Finderman asked.

She had a point.

“What’s the death toll?” I asked her.

“It’s gone up. It was a hundred and twenty-three, but I just heard we’re revising that up to one hundred and thirty-one.” A pause. “I lost my niece. Esme. She was seventeen. My brother and his wife, they’re beyond devastated.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I want who did this,” Rhonda said. “Whoever he is, or whoever they are, I want them.”

“There’s more,” I said.

“More what?”

I told her about Lorraine Plummer, the murdered student at Thackeray College. “I had to leave the scene,” I said regretfully. “I couldn’t get Wanda or anyone else to get there. We need a crime scene unit there.”

“We’ve had to bring in coroners from other jurisdictions,” the chief said. “It’s like we’ve had a flood, a hurricane, and locusts all at once. A few years’ worth of bodies in a single morning.”

“The Thackeray thing, even in light of what else has happened today, is big, Chief.”

“Go on.”

“Our guy is back.”

“What guy? What—no, come on.”

“Wanda will have to do a full autopsy, but I had a good look at the body. The wounds are the same as on Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor.”

“Goddamn it, Barry. When are you going to let this go?”

“I’d be more than happy to take you to look at the body and let you judge for yourself.”

There was quiet at the other end. The Fisher and Gaynor murders were evidently still a source of friction between us, but I’d already admitted to myself there was plenty of blame to go around.

“Duncomb’s dead, and Gaynor’s in jail,” the chief said. “Your two lead suspects.”

“Yeah.”

“Shit,” Finderman said. “If you think it’s the same killer . . . I trust your judgment.”

“There’s nothing I can do here right now,” I told her. “I can’t even have anyone get near Tate Whitehead’s body. The whole area has to be closed off until it’s been given an all clear. I’m going to spend the next few hours working the college homicide.”

“Just keep in touch,” Rhonda Finderman said.

Finley, who’d been watching me this whole time, said, “I want to talk to her! I want to talk to her right now!”

I put away my phone.

Finley waved a finger at me. “You’re going to be sorry when I’m mayor.”

“We don’t agree on much, but I think you’re right about that.”

“I don’t forget.”

I closed the distance between us, put my face in his. “I don’t forget, either, Randy. I
never
forget. The other day, when you called me to check out all those dead squirrels, and you hinted around, wondering whether I had anything on anybody, I thought, no, I don’t play that game. I don’t have anything on anybody. Except maybe that’s not true. Maybe I have something on
you
.”

He took a step back. “Me? What the hell have you got on me?”

“I was on the phone a few minutes ago and learned something kind of interesting. Something interesting about you, Randy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I heard you did your good deed before coming back up here. You set up by the falls and handed out hundreds of cases of bottled water.”

“Yeah,” he said, puffing himself up. “I did. You should have come by. I’d’ve given you one even if you are a horse’s ass.”

“It’s kind of amazing how you were ready to go so fast.”

Randy shrugged. “You do what you have to do when people are in trouble.”

“How’d you know?”

“How’d I know what?”

“How’d you know you were going to need so much bottled water?”

He was shaking his head. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You cranked up production this week. Before any of this happened.”

“Where the hell did you hear that?”

I’d heard it from David Harwood. A comment just in passing. But it had been bothering me for a while now.

“Did I hear wrong?” I asked.

Finley’s mouth opened like he was going to say something, but he hadn’t figured out yet what it was going to be.

“Yeah, that’s wrong,” he said.

“So it’d be okay if I started asking around, checked that out. Because if it’s true, it raises a question. Why would Randall Finley, just as he’s on the comeback trail, start bottling more of his famous springwater on the eve of a catastrophic poisoning of the town’s water supply?”

“You fat fuck,” he said.

“You want to make life difficult for me?” I asked him. “Go ahead. Meanwhile, I’m going to go whisper in the ear of one of those CNN or
New York Times
reporters swarming all over town. Then I wouldn’t even have to start nosing around. I’d just let them do it for me. See how long it takes before someone puts a camera in your face and asks if you’d actually be willing to let hundreds of people die to advance your half-assed political career.”

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

“I didn’t mind ‘fat fuck.’ I gotta admit, that’s pretty accurate. But now you’re casting aspersions on my mother.”

“You saying I did this?” he asked, pointing a thumb back at the plant.

“Did you?”

I should have been ready. I should have seen it coming. But I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m the first to admit I could be in better shape. So when Randy charged at me, I didn’t move as quickly as I could. I didn’t take a defensive stance, like shifting my weight forward so he’d have a harder time taking me down.

But take me down he did.

He rammed his body into me, put his arms around me, and tackled me to the ground.

“You fucker!” he said.

We turned slightly as we fell, which was just as well, because it meant I hit the pavement on my side, my left shoulder taking a lot of the impact. If I’d fallen straight back, I’d have probably cracked my head open. And I’d already hit it on a curb a few days earlier when that Thackeray College professor had gotten the better of me.

Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this anymore.

We rolled on the parking lot, a couple of overweight—Randy, less so, I admit—middle-aged guys duking it out. Not the sort of fight you could sell a lot of tickets to.

I was worried he’d go for my gun, which was holstered and attached to my belt on my left side. It wasn’t that I believed Randall Finley actually wanted to murder me, but in heated moments, sometimes people lose their heads. So I had to deal with this quickly before things spiraled even more out of control.

He’d lost his grip on me when we went down, so my arms were no longer pinned. I made a fist with my right hand, swung it as fast and as hard as I could, and aimed it where I thought it would do the most good.

At Randall Finley’s nose.

Our former mayor’s nose was something of a legend in Promise Falls. It had been punched before—at least two times that I knew of—and both times by his former driver, Jim Cutter. The second time, Cutter had broken it.

I connected. Not quite dead center, I’m afraid. A little off to one side. And I didn’t hear the crunch of broken cartilage that I was hoping for. But it did the trick.

Finley yelped in pain, put both hands over his face. Blood trickled out from under them and from between his fingers.

“Jesus!” he screamed. “Not my nose!”

“Should be used to it by now,” I said, getting to my knees, and then forcing myself back up onto two feet. Finley lay on the pavement, writhing.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Did you do it?”

“You’re crazy, you know that?” he said, taking his hands from his face, looking at the blood as he drew himself up into a sitting position. “Batshit crazy!”

“You know your way around this water treatment plant,” I said. “Ottman told me. You drop by here regularly.” I dusted myself off. “Is that what you did with Tate Whitehead? Jumped him? Before you went in there and poisoned the water?”

I didn’t know that I believed what I was saying, but as the words came out of my mouth, I realized the man I was looking at was not just an asshole that I’d had more than enough of.

He was a suspect.

“It was for the summer!” Finley said.

“What was for the summer?”

“The increase in production! Demand goes up in summer, just when we have people off on holidays! We up production in the spring to be ready, you dumb fuck!”

“That’s a good story,” I said. “I guess we’ll see how that holds up.”

I didn’t offer to help him to his feet. And I didn’t have the energy to charge him with assaulting a police officer. I could always do that later. So I left him there on the pavement and headed for my car.

I was going to take a short break from the Promise Falls water tragedy and go three years into the past.

It was time to think about Olivia Fisher. It was time to go back to the beginning. I just hoped Walden Fisher, whom I’d last seen in the emergency ward of Promise Falls General, was well enough to talk about what had happened to her.