Chapter 60
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At 11:57 Zelda came bounding into the room. Jack ran for the stairs, thinking the worst. Zelda stopped him and said, “Meghan’s okay, I caught the fucking bitch in time. Jerome is watching her, but you need to get another nurse here, fast.”
Margaret Linden-Smith, RN, BSN, sat in the straight-backed wooden chair in Jerome and Zelda’s room. She was a small woman, and hunched over crying softly, she seemed no bigger than a child of ten. Her blonde hair was bleached almost white and the blue of her eyes so pale it was hard to tell the color. Her too-dark skin didn’t look good colored by real emotion. He had asked her about the tan and the cigarettes the second night she’d watched Meghan.
She laughed and said, “Nurses are like that, either all-the-way healthy or unhealthy. There is no correlation between how we take care of ourselves and how we take care of other people.”
He had almost become used to Jerome’s size. Seeing the man standing in front of Margaret, his muscles pumped full of blood from his workout in Jack’s iron room, it didn’t seem possible that he and Margaret were of the same species. Jerome’s massive back faced him and his latissimus dorsi stood out so wide it seemed as if he was a gargoyle come to life, ready to wrap Margaret in his wings and fly off with her.
Zelda said, “We just went over this in class. The contents will have to be tested to be sure, but I know; fat embolism. I watched her from the door. She was so nervous. I knew it. She was going to inject this into the IV.”
Zelda carefully held up a wad of Kleenex, holding the tissue as if she held a particularly brittle and precious figurine. She held the device up to the light. He could see the thick, oily contents, like something from inside a lava lamp.
Jack had more than a passing knowledge of syringes. The needle looked big, maybe a fourteen-gauge. This needle and syringe were a throwback: Glass, not plastic, with a rubber stopper and ring. The stainless steel at the base of the needle gleamed in the light, its mirror-bright surface reflecting a madman’s eyes. It was too easy to picture himself grabbing the syringe, pulling in a load of air and jamming the needle into the carotid artery in the side of Margaret’s neck.
Zelda continued. “I stayed, trying to talk to her, about how to study for the boards, which cram course to buy. Margaret was so uptight she could hardly talk. I left the room, pretending I had to study. I got a mirror; the only thing I could find was a compact. I didn’t know I still had it in my bag. I used it to spy on her over the transom. She waited and waited. I wanted to run in and open her purse. I’m sorry I took the chance. I guess she could have had a gun. Then I saw the bitch get ready. I ran in. She heard me and tried to shove it back into her clothes. She tried to keep it from me.” The last she said in amazement, that anyone, other than the mighty Jerome, would try and keep something from the fierce and strong Zelda.
“Margaret? Why?” Jack asked.
She wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t answer. He couldn’t torture it out of her. He pulled the matching wooden chair up close to hers, close enough to reach out and touch her without straightening his arm.
“Margaret, it wasn’t for money, was it?”
The question shocked her enough to get her to look up and shake her head. He couldn’t get inside her head as far as some, but he had a feel for her. She hadn’t been a killer the night when they’d had their heart-to-heart. Something happened since. He knew it wasn’t money.
“Margaret. What did they threaten to do to your boy?”
She jerked as if he’d hit her with a cattle prod, looking at him with eyes wide. Then she looked away again. Her eyes wouldn’t meet his, but focused everywhere, except on him. And, she didn’t focus on the corner of the room. In the corner were the coat rack and a couch table he used as a temporary resting place for crap he hadn’t put away yet. Margaret’s plain, black leather purse sat near the right edge of the table, partially covered by her sweater. Her purse was as big as an attaché case.
He picked up the purse and dumped the contents on the table. It was a very clean purse and smelled faintly of saddle soap. No half-empty packs of breath mints, no used Kleenex, no lip-liner stubs. What she did have was a wallet with checkbook attachment, two sets of keys, an iPhone in an OtterBox case, a new packet of Kleenex, and two flexible zippered plastic cases.
One of the zippered plastic cases was pink and neatly filled with Playtex Lite-Day Pads and Tampax brand tampons. The larger one, covered in daisies, was filled with a Phillips Sonicare toothbrush, Rembrandt paste, and Johnson & Johnson floss. Mint.
There was a small, flat, black, felt-covered case. The black case looked like the container for a precision instrument like a good micrometer. He knew it would be empty even before he opened it, the perfect cutout ready to take the syringe and keep it safe. There were too many months after he got out of the hospital the first time that he’d been way to familiar with a syringe much like it.
There was also a thin nine-by-twelve manila envelope. He picked up the envelope knowing what it had to contain. He didn’t want to open it, but he had to see what forced a good, loving woman to think seriously about killing another human being. He opened the envelope and slid the pictures out, face down, onto the slightly rough finish of the table. One of them caught on an unseen blemish on the table’s surface and flipped over.
The photo was a color eight-by-ten. Margaret’s son Raymond faced away from the camera. He had turned to look back over his shoulder. He was easy to recognize. The boy had gained weight since the other pictures she’d showed him and it looked like he’d been working out.
It was easy to see the muscle tone because he was naked. The additional muscle wasn’t going to help him. He was bent over a table, his legs spread and taped to the legs of the table, his arms stretched out, the white nylon rope that tied his arms to the front table legs biting into his wrists.
He wasn’t alone in the picture. There was a group of boys in the picture with him. One stood behind Raymond, with his left hand on a massive hard-on. The young man’s right hand pulled Raymond’s right butt cheek out to the side. There were other boys, equally hard, ready to use Raymond. He flipped through the other pictures. They were all the same sort, all of near-professional quality. The only unprofessional things were the boys mugging for the camera.
Jack turned the last picture over. It was a final variant on the rest. Her boy’s mouth was forced open. Again the young men were ready and, from their expressions, eager, to use the open mouth. Margaret still couldn’t look up.
“Margaret I don’t claim to understand how you feel. I don’t have children. I think if I did and my child was threatened with the same thing, I would consider doing anything to keep them safe. I know this sounds crazy, but this could turn out all right for both of us, maybe a huge opportunity for all of us. I can help you get your son out of CYA and you can help me find the scum who did this. Tell me how it started.”
Once she opened up it was all the way, as if she had been waiting to tell someone. “There is no way anyone could help anyone now. They will know I failed. Raymond will be, will be…” She broke down again.
She just kept going and didn’t seem to notice that Dvora placed her iPhone on the table in front of Margaret. Dvora recorded the confession as a voice memo.
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“I don’t know who it is. I’ve never seen anyone. Oh I saw them, but they were all in masks and tied me to the chair so I couldn’t get away until they left. The pictures aren’t the worst. There was a DVD. They know everything about me. Where I bank, what I do with my money, the kind of deodorant I buy. They say they have people everywhere. They say they will know if I don’t do what I have to do.”
“How long before you have to do it?” He asked.
Margaret looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. Her speech had been a monologue, an act of confession, the act itself having drained her, not really thinking about what she was saying, simply confessing.
“How much time did they give you before they hurt your son?”
“I was supposed to have done it on my last shift. I told them I didn’t know how to do it and make it look like an accident. They gave me the syringe and told me the fat was very similar to your sister’s. They said no one would suspect a thing. They said injuries as serious as your sister’s, especially the broken hip, often resulted in fat embolisms. I have two more days. I had to try tonight because the video showed them, it showed…”
He understood her motives. He couldn’t condone or forgive her. He didn’t try to comfort her because he couldn’t, no matter what her suffering. Zelda pulled another chair up next to Margaret and put her arm around Margaret’s shoulder, stroking her hair, and patting her. Jerome stood next to Zelda, knowing the threat to Meghan was now gone, at least for a little while. Jack had to have someone care for his sister and he couldn’t replace Margaret without dooming her son.
“Zelda, could you care for Meghan until we figure out how to get another nurse here without getting Margaret’s son killed?”
Zelda looked to Jerome for support. She looked smaller, as if the idea of being responsible for another human’s life deflated her.
She said, “You have to understand. I don’t have the experience. A good nurse with all that experience is ten times better than I am. Book learning and study and all the rest can’t replace it.”
Dvora had been sitting silently, taking it all in.
“I have an idea,” she said.
She had more than an idea. She had a plan. They would put everything together and go to Captain Yan. Trusting his sister’s life to a cop, any cop, wasn’t what Jack wanted, but what the hell else could they do? They couldn’t trust the Feds, and even if they could, their story was so fantastic it would probably get them hauled in for observation. They couldn’t fake Meghan’s death; that only happened in bad movies.
“What about my Raymond? What about my son?” Margaret asked quietly.
He looked at her, thinking her son had decided to end his own life a long time ago and just didn’t realize it or forgot to tell her. Trying to save him was only prolonging the inevitable.
“I have a call to make to a judge.”