Authors: Daniel Kalla
I hadn’t forgiven Kyle either. “We’re no angels,” I said quietly.
“No,” he said, dropping his hand and sinking deeper into his seat. “But it’s not all black-and-white. Look at you. You help people every day with the work you do in the hospital. And even I like to think I’ve turned over a new leaf in the past few years.”
“Since you found God?”
“Don’t make it sound like some kind of jailhouse conversion.” He laughed. “I got a second chance, like Scrooge in
A Christmas Carol
.” He nodded to himself. “I did some very bad stuff in my day, including trading in human misery. But God or no God, I caught a big break after my diagnosis. I just want to share a little of my luck.”
Though Kyle hadn’t ever told me, I’d heard how much time, money, and sweat he had poured back into the city’s frontline battle against drug addiction. His efforts had reclaimed some of my respect.
Kyle rose to his feet, grabbing the armrest for momentary support. Then he began for the door. He stopped before reaching it and turned back to me. “Ben, can I help you?”
I stood up and met him at the door. “I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Kyle wrapped his pencil-like arms around me and gave me another hug. “You deserve better.”
I hugged him back without comment.
So did Aaron and Emily
.
I woke with a start. Disoriented, I grappled for the ringing phone, concerned that the anonymous whisperer was calling again. The cobwebs cleared and I realized with relief that the ringing came from my alarm clock, not the phone. Climbing out of bed, I shivered slightly in my boxers; I resolved to turn my house’s heat back on for the fall.
Slipping into my riding gear, I vacillated between the mountain and the road bike, opting in the end for the inherent risk of the mountain bike.
Seattle was still dark at 6:30
A.M.
And for the first time since the spring, my breath froze in the moist air. I was glad for my Lycra jacket, but I attributed the chill I felt to more than only the changing of seasons. I cycled hard for the park, trying to outpace my morbid thoughts.
I reached the parkland in record time, but the slippery trails were particularly punishing in the drizzly morning. About a mile in, I lost control of my bike when trying to jump a log and slammed shoulder-first into a tree. The awkward collision ended up bruising my ego worse than my shoulder. With its new three-hundred-dollar front wheel bent beyond repair, I had to walk the bike out of the trail carrying the frame, along with the shame of my wipeout, past my fellow mountain bikers.
By the time I returned home with my crippled bike, I was too late to catch the Grand Rounds lecture at the hospital. I wasn’t heartbroken about missing the lecture, but I was sorry that I would miss seeing Alex. Coffee following rounds was one of our few sanctioned get-togethers.
Probably for the best
, I thought, as I had a mental flashback of Alex with her hair up and wearing a form-fitting black business suit with pumps and an open-collar blouse. It dawned on me that even a morning coffee wasn’t nearly as safe as we assumed.
Leaving my road bike in the garage, I climbed into my black Smart Car. Since the prices of gas had soared, I’d faced far less teasing from friends and colleagues about my highly fuel-efficient, compact vehicle. Rarely was I asked anymore when I was going to upgrade my toy car, or what happened to its training wheels. Most of the medical staff’s ridicule was now saved for the two surgeons who drove gas-guzzling Hummers. Much as I would have liked to plead eco-friendliness for my choice in cars, truth was the boxy little car struck me from the first. The convenience of its miserly fuel tank, combined with a body that could be tucked into nonexistent parking spots, turned me into a full Smart Car convert.
I pulled up to the Seattle P.D. headquarters on Fifth Avenue, sliding my car with great satisfaction between two cars in metered spots. I was willing, almost eager, to face the prospect of challenging a parking ticket for my improvised spot.
With nods to a few familiar faces, I wended my way through the building to Homicide. I walked through the open door into Helen Riddell’s office. She wasn’t there, but mug in hand, Rick Sutcliffe stood staring out the window into the Seattle fog. In another of his seemingly endless supply of expensive suits (gray this morning), Rick turned slowly to me. His face broke into an automatic but unwelcoming smile. “Morning, Ben. Were we expecting you today?”
“Rick.” I nodded, laboring to match his smile. “Where’s Helen?”
“She’ll be here soon.”
Rick’s steaming cup reminded me that I’d missed my coffee after my bike crash. Like any self-respecting coffee-deprived Seattleite, my mouth watered for a java, but Rick didn’t offer and I wasn’t about to ask. After a few more seconds of awkward silence, I said, “I have a potential lead for your investigation.”
“Into your fiancée’s murder?”
I inhaled slowly. “Emily hasn’t been my fiancée for five years.”
“How would I know?” Rick said with a helpless shrug. “You’ve been so secretive about it.”
I kept my mouth shut and dug my thumb into my palm.
“So what’s this lead?” he asked.
“Philip Maglio.”
Rick’s face showed no recognition, but he didn’t ask for clarification. “And he’s connected to the murders how?”
“J.D. used to work for him.”
“As a dealer?”
I nodded.
“How do you know?”
I hesitated, unsure whether I had the right to drag Kyle into the mess. But I felt cornered. “My cousin used to be in the business. He knew J.D.”
Rick’s smile grew. “This whole murder investigation is one big old Dafoe family affair.”
I dug my thumb harder into my palm. “What’s your point, Rick?”
“My point, Ben,” he said, articulating each syllable as if explaining to an intellectually challenged seven-year-old, “is that you are far too closely tied into all of this to be anywhere near this homicide investigation.”
I took a long slow breath. “Don’t know if you remember, but Helen called me.”
“I remember,” he said pleasantly. “But I’m telling you that it’s time for you to disengage yourself from the process.”
“My pleasure,” I grunted. “If you see Helen, mention the Philip Maglio connection to her.”
As I was about to turn, Helen’s voice boomed from behind me. “What about Philip Maglio?”
I spun to see Helen gliding into the room and caught the lavender scent of her overpowering perfume. I was struck again by the incongruence of how lightly she moved for someone of her bulk and larger-than-life presence. She glanced from Rick to me. I suspect she either had heard or intuited the crux of our confrontation but she didn’t comment. “You were saying about Philip Maglio…”
I relayed what Kyle had told me about J.D.’s association with Maglio.
“Interesting.” Helen smiled, flashing the gap between her front teeth. “I would hate to miss an opportunity to visit an upstanding pillar of our community like Mr. Maglio.”
“So you know him?”
“Phil and I go way back.” Her smile faded. “Markets himself as the local poor-boy-made-good entrepreneur, but we know Maglio is a key figure in the city’s drug trade. Unfortunately, he’s our West Coast Teflon Don. Nothing ever sticks to him.”
“Because he’s smart and careful,” Rick said with a hint of admiration. “He doesn’t go gutting people like a couple of fishes in their own apartment. That’s not his style.”
I fought off a shudder at the cruel but accurate description of Emily’s murder.
“People change.” Helen’s gray eyes twinkled. “Maybe Philip has expanded his horizons.”
“Doesn’t fit,” Rick said.
“And what about Michael Prince?” I asked.
Helen squinted at me. “What about him?”
“Has he defended Philip Maglio before?”
“Far as I know, Maglio hasn’t needed Prince’s services.”
“But he could have hired Prince to defend J.D. or one of his subordinates,” I said.
“And how do we find that out? Ask Prince?” Rick asked.
“Worth a try,” I said quietly, ignoring the mockery in his tone.
“Wouldn’t be worth the cost of gasoline to go see Prince.”
“Rick’s right. Prince couldn’t tell us even if he wanted to.” She chuckled sympathetically. “And trust me, helping the S.P.D. would be right up there with a colonoscopy on the Prince of Darkness’s wish list.”
I nodded my defeat. “Well, now that I’ve done my civic duty and reported what I heard, I’m going to get back to being a doctor.”
“Fair enough.” Helen glanced at Rick with an unreadable expression before turning to me. “We still may need your help down the line.”
“You know how to find me.” I turned for the door.
“Ben,” Rick called out. “That right hand of yours still looks pretty raw.”
I glanced down at the gash over my knuckles. The sight caused it to ache anew. I’d scraped my hand again during my crash on the trails. The scab had peeled off and my knuckles were freshly crusted with dried blood. “From my bike chain,” I said with a shrug, wondering why I suddenly felt defensive.
I hurried out of Helen’s office and through the S.P.D.’s headquarters. I pulled out of the parking space in front of the building determined to distance myself from this investigation. While the urge to punch Rick still simmered, I had to admit he was right: I had no business being anywhere near the investigation. I was once wildly in love with one of the victims. In some ways, I still was. And less than a week before, I had threatened the other victim. Unsolicited and unwelcome, the scene from Emily’s apartment seeped back into my head.
When I reached Emily’s apartment, the door was already ajar. I rapped softly. Nothing. Taking the open door as an invitation, I pushed it open wider and walked in.
They stood in the middle of the living room. J.D.—whose name I was to learn only after his death—had his back turned to me. But I had him pegged the instant I saw him. Emily looked over to me in embarrassed surprise. J.D. spun to face me, a stack of greenbacks still in his hand. Emily had one bill left in hers.
Suddenly the whole scene registered. “What the hell, Emily?” I snapped.
Her eyes widened. “No, it’s not that, Ben.”
I strode straight for them, the fury rising with each step. “Do I look that stupid to you?”
A sneer contorted J.D.’s square face and he shot out a finger at me. “Who the fuck are you?”
“He’s a friend.” Emily grabbed J.D.’s wrist. J.D. scowled. “Doesn’t look like much of a friend.”
Ignoring the drug dealer’s comment, I stormed up to within two feet of them. “This is what you do with the money I give you?” I growled at Emily. “You’re buying drugs with it?!?”
The skin around her eyes wrinkled with distress. “Ben, if you’ll just hear me out—”
The familiar urge to protect her welled, but it was no match for my anger. “No! I’m not listening to your bullshit anymore.” I pumped my fist. “I can’t believe that after all these years you duped me into funding your habit again!”
J.D. made a move toward me, but Emily held him back with a grip on his wrist. “Ben…” She shook her head, her eyes misting.
J.D.’s eyes darkened menacingly. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of here, asshole?”
Adrenaline coursing through me, I leaned my face nearer to his. “Why don’t you?”
J.D. snorted.
“If I see you here again…”
A vicious smile crossed his lips. He pulled back his jacket, revealing the handle of the gun tucked into his waist. He blew out his lips. “You won’t do jack.”
Reckless with rage, my voice rose to a shout. “Trust me, asshole. You come back here, and I’ll kill you!”
Two days passed without word from Helen or Rick. My life returned to a semblance of normal, but the pain of Emily’s death burned deeper.
Closure
.
That stupid cliché!
Just as with Aaron’s loss, closure eluded me again. The need to know what had happened to Emily was an unrelenting hunger. Even a hundred miles logged on my bike couldn’t quell it. Especially since I kept seeing similarities and imagining connections to Aaron’s mysterious and violent end.
Only two frantic back-to-back shifts at St. Jude’s ER prevented me from trying to contact Michael Prince or Philip Maglio myself. And now, as I stood in St. Jude’s ER Trauma Room waiting for the ambulance with the rest of the team, I knew I wouldn’t be making any investigative queries any time soon.
I took the call. The receiver froze in my hand when the gravelly-voiced dispatcher told me, “I got a crew on its way with a neck stabbing. A drug dealer. Twenty-year-old male Hispanic…”
I swallowed away the dryness. “Status?”
“He lost a liter of blood at the scene. He’s begun to compromise his airway.”
“ETA?”
“Three minutes.”
I looked at the clock. 11:40
A.M.
“Who stabs anyone before lunch?”
The dispatcher chuckled. “No such rules in the drug trade.”
“Okay, got it,” I said, but my mind was already elsewhere.
Could this stabbing be related to Emily’s?
I’d barely hung up the phone when I heard the faint
wa-wa-wa
of the siren. Overhead the page of “Trauma—two minutes!” bellowed from the speakers. I raced down the hallway to the Trauma Room. The siren’s wail grew steadily. As I stepped into the room, one of the nurses handed me a yellow waterproof gown, gloves, and the clear face shield we always wear when facing the risk of spraying blood or body fluids. I had just slipped on the second set of gloves when the siren’s noise abruptly stopped.
There was a moment of quiet—the calm before the storm—and then shouts echoed down the hallway. Seconds later, the stretcher burst into the room. One paramedic propelled the stretcher; the other had his hand clamped against the patient’s neck, no doubt trying to plug a leaking dyke.
The Hispanic boy lay remarkably still on the stretcher. His color was dusky, his eyes bulging. He breathed in panicky short bursts, producing the kind of high-pitched gasps that brought an instinctive cringe. Thoughts of Emily evaporated as I hurried over to the critically ill patient.
The able paramedic—who I knew only as Juan—had his hand stapled to the boy’s neck. Without looking up, Juan said, “Kid’s name is Enrique Martinez.” Then he muttered something in Spanish to his patient.
“No English?” I stood on the other side of the hospital stretcher waiting for Juan and his partner to swing the boy over from the ambulance gurney.
“He does.” Juan nodded. “Just trying to reassure him. I told him that everything is okay. The doctor is here.”
I wondered.
Enrique had barely touched the stretcher when the nurse had the rest of his shirt (already cut open by the paramedics) off completely. The spaces between the ribs of his skinny gray chest sucked in with each small grunting breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Juan’s hand pulsed back and forth against Enrique’s neck. I didn’t need to lay a hand on the patient to know he had an expanding traumatic aneurysm of his carotid artery. Untreated, the only question was whether the wound would cause him to suffocate or bleed to death first. My money was on suffocation.
“We’re intubating. Now!” I said to the charge nurse, Grace. “Tell ENT and Vascular Surgery. He’s going to the OR stat as soon as we’ve tubed him.”
“Which drugs, Ben?” Grace asked.
“None.” My heart pounded and my mouth dried. I elbowed my way to the patient’s neck. “No time for drugs. And we can’t risk paralyzing him. His vocal cords might be totally obscured by the aneurysm.”
With monitors now attached to Enrique, alarms blared their concern that his pulse was too fast, his blood pressure too low, and his blood critically deprived of oxygen. All the while, Enrique lay wide-eyed and still on the stretcher, his nostrils flaring with each high-pitched gasp.
I leaned closer to him. “Enrique, we need to pass a tube into your lungs to help you breathe. You’re going to feel discomfort in your throat. You might even gag. But it will help. Trust me.”
Enrique either nodded or his head just bobbed in sync with his desperate breathing. I had no time to sort out which.
I took the laryngoscope from the respiratory tech’s outstretched hand, aware of its sobering weight. Enrique didn’t fight as I eased his head back into the “sniffing position” on the stretcher. I opened his mouth and slid in the laryngoscope’s blade. When I pulled his tongue forward with the device’s handle, the sight of a pulsing red glob of tissue met my eyes. As I’d feared, the expanding aneurysm had pushed his normal structures out of the way. All I could see was the relentless pinkish mass.
Sweat beaded on my brow. I repositioned the blade to my left and pulled harder. Enrique groaned in response but his head held still. I caught a glimpse of white—not the usual “pair of white running shoes” view of the vocal cords, but enough to orient me.
Afraid the streak of white might disappear like a ship in dense fog, I barked to the respiratory tech: “Tube!” She slapped the clear snorkel-like device into my right hand. Without waiting, I snaked it into the mouth and aimed it for the white patches. I had to rock the tube slightly before I felt the reassuring thuds of the tracheal rings as it glided down his windpipe.
Enrique coughed, and the sound whistled from the tube, confirming that it was in the right location. Even before the tube was attached to the ventilator, his breathing quieted and his chest relaxed because he finally had an unobstructed passage to breathe through.
While the respiratory tech taped and stabilized the tube and attachments, I turned to Juan. “I want to have a look at his neck wound.”
Juan frowned. “You sure?”
I nodded.
He hesitated and then slowly peeled his hand off Enrique’s neck. A few inches below the angle of his jaw, the skin swelled out like a baseball cut in half. In the center, a tidy incision, no more than a half an inch, cut horizontally across his neck. A drop of blood oozed from the base of the laceration as the wound throbbed in rhythm with the baseball below it.
I glanced at Juan. “Okay, you can put your hand back. Meantime, Grace, let’s get a pressure dressing on the wound while we transfer him up to the OR.”
Before either could respond, a geyser of blood erupted from Enrique’s neck. I stumbled back as it hit me square in my upper chest and splattered my face mask.
“Resume pressure!” I yelled.
Juan’s hand slapped noisily against the patient’s neck. But even with the aid of his other hand, he had trouble holding his grip. The blood swelled between his fingers and cascaded over the top of them, making the skin of his neck as slippery as ice.
“Blood pressure is falling!” Grace said.
Enrique’s eyes rolled back in his head. I knew he didn’t have enough blood reaching his brain to maintain consciousness. “To the OR now!” I shouted. “Let’s go!”
Someone unclamped the brakes to the stretcher. As soon as I heard the click, I shoved the stretcher and hurtled it toward the door. The staff fell into a well-choreographed routine, moving IV poles, bags of blood, and the ventilator in step with the stretcher. We sprinted as a group for the end of the hallway.
At the doors of the surgical suite, Juan shouted, “I’ve lost the pulse!” Like a pole-vaulter, he hopped onto the stretcher. Knees straddling Enrique’s chest, Juan knelt over the patient and began urgent chest compressions.
The surgical team met us at the door. “Okay, we’ve got it from here,” the anesthetist said as he moved into my spot and assumed control of the stretcher. He tapped me once on the shoulder to let me know my job was done. He turned to his OR nurses. “Let’s get him in the room!”
Nodding, I took a step back and watched as the stretcher was wheeled away. With Juan still riding Enrique’s chest, the procession soon disappeared behind the operating room’s closing doors, but I knew they were fighting a battle that was already lost.
I sat at the desk scribbling my notes in the ER’s disheveled and stretcherless Trauma Room. I’d washed my face and neck, but I still had stains on my scrubs from the blood that had leaked around the neck of my gown. The room’s floor had been hurriedly mopped but was still awaiting a proper decontamination. I could see splatters of missed blood. They reminded me of Emily’s apartment, and that solitary arc of AB-negative blood on her wall.
Her killer’s blood
.
Grace poked her friendly round face through the curtains covering the entry of the room. “Enrique didn’t make it,” she announced softly.
“Yeah.”
“We did all we could,” Grace said soothingly.
“You figure?”
“You secured his airway. There was nothing else you could do, Ben.”
“I should have never told Juan to release his grip on the boy’s neck. He should have gone to the OR with that hand in place.”
“He wasn’t bleeding at that moment.” Grace’s voice wavered before regaining its conviction. “The artery could’ve erupted at any time. You can’t plug a burst pipe with the palm of your hand. You know that.”
“True.” I mustered a smile, grateful for her support but wishing I believed her more. “Thanks, Grace.”
“It’s not your fault, Ben.” She withdrew her head from the gap in the curtains.
I turned back to the chart. Grace had a point. Regardless of my decision to expose his neck, Enrique was unlikely to have survived. The odds had been stacked against him. And long before the knife pierced his neck, too. Enrique wasn’t so much a victim of my medical mismanagement as he was of his unsavory and lethal trade.
Fucking junk!
“Dr. Dafoe?” The small voice grabbed my attention through the curtain. It sounded familiar, but I had trouble placing it. “It’s Lara Maxwell. I’m on my way home. The nurse out front said I could find you here.”
“Of course, Lara,” I said, genuinely pleased to hear her. I stood up and pulled back the curtains.
In a T-shirt and sweats, with her hair tied in a ponytail and a mouth full of gum, Lara could have passed for even younger than fourteen. After having seen her suffer through some very adult afflictions, both an overdose and associated heart attack, I was tickled to see the childlike innocence back on her face.
Lara’s jaw fell open as her wide eyes took in the messy surroundings. “Is this where I was…when…after the ambulance?”
“Only for a couple of hours.” I smiled and folded my arms across my chest, conscious of the bloodstains on my scrubs. “A long tense couple of hours, mind you.”
She appeared dumfounded.
“How are you?”
“Good.” She chomped on her gum, unable to take her eyes off the floor. “I’m going home today.”
“I’m glad.”
She looked up at me shyly. “Dr. Dafoe, I just wanted to say thanks again for…” She cleared her throat. “You know…”
“I know.” I nodded. “You’re welcome, Lara. Cases like yours make this job feel worthwhile.”
“That’s good,” she said vaguely. Her eyes fell to the ground again, and her feet shuffled in place.
“Lara? Is there something else?”
“You know what you told me and Isabelle about…um…your brother?”
I tensed at the mention of Aaron. “Yes?”
“Did that one time using drugs…” She cleared her throat again and looked up at me plaintively. “Did it really ruin his life?”
I inhaled slowly. I studied the spatters on the floor. Now they reminded me more of Aaron’s burned and bloodstained car. “I was exaggerating, Lara.”
She squinted at me in confusion. “The drugs didn’t ruin his life?”
“It was more complicated than that,” I said, struggling to explain. “It wasn’t just one time with him. Aaron got heavily into drugs. And if not me, someone else probably would have introduced him to the junk. But it’s still hard not to feel responsible.”
“Okay,” she said, but her eyes begged for more reassurance.
“Lara, you don’t need to worry,” I said. “You dodged a bullet—granted, a big and pointy one—but you’re going home healthy. I suspect you’ll never look at those ‘harmless’ rave drugs the same way.”
“I’m not going to look at them at all!” Lara spat. Her eyes moistened and her voice cracked. “I’m going to warn my friends, too. No one tells us that this stuff can kill you.”
“You’ll make a good spokesperson.”
She flung her arms around me and gave me a quick hug. Embarrassed, she turned away without making eye contact. “I’m sorry about your brother, Dr. Dafoe,” she mumbled. “But thanks for saving me.” Without waiting for a reply, she hurried out of the room.
I tallied the week’s ER scorecard in my head: one win, one loss. Batting five hundred might be a good stat in baseball, but it wasn’t very impressive in an Emergency Department. Still, Lara’s visit lifted my spirits after Enrique’s demise.
I felt even better when I stepped out of the Trauma Room and bumped into Alex heading the other way. She stood close enough that the floral scent of her shampoo drifted to me. She pointed to the collar of my scrubs. “What the hell, Ben?”
“Neck stabbing.”
“Oh.” She nodded. For a fellow ER physician, that was explanation enough.
“You got time for a coffee?”
“Depends.” She grinned. “You got a new shirt?”
“You’re so damn superficial.” I chuckled. “But yeah, I’ll go slip into something less conspicuous. I think I’ve got another one in my locker with only urine and vomit stains.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “You’re all class, Benjamin Dafoe.”
I grabbed a T-shirt from my locker and slipped it on. Heading out of the hospital in the steady rain, I regretted not taking my jacket. The late afternoon was even colder than the morning. I was shivering by the time we stepped into the coffee shop across the street and grabbed a booth.
Sitting with coffees in front of us, I asked, “How’s kindergarten working out for Talie?”
Alex’s eyes lit up. “Much better than preschool!”