Just then Clayton’s cell phone rang. He leaned over and stared at its display. He wasn’t on call and couldn’t imagine who would be phoning. It was Debbie. He frowned, debating whether to answer.
“Excuse me,” Clayton said, deciding he had little choice but to talk with her. “I need to take this.” He moved away from the table to talk privately. “What?” he demanded, a little harsher than he had planned.
“Is that any way to say hello? Especially to someone who’s going out of her way to help you?”
“I’m sorry. I’m just in the middle of something.”
“I hope you’re having a wonderful time,” Debbie said sarcastically. “I’m slogging it out here in the ER.”
“Did you have something to tell me? If so, out with it. I told you I was busy.”
“I can only imagine. But you better be nice to me or I won’t share the important information I just learned, smart-ass.”
“I am being nice. I answered, didn’t I?”
“Are we still on for Spago on Saturday night?”
“Of course we are! I’m looking forward to it.” Clayton rolled his eyes.
“I just had a word with your favorite resident. Seems he is on a fucking crusade.”
Clayton winced. “You’d better explain.”
“He is still focused on those deaths because, as he said, ‘something is rotten in Denmark,’ whatever the hell that means.”
“It’s a quote from Shakespeare, which is pretty damn famous.”
“Careful, buddy. You’re on thin ice with me.”
Ignoring the comment he said, “Do you have any idea what he was referring to?”
“Amalgamated Healthcare, most definitely. He’s bent out of shape about something called a reservoir. He left the hospital with a package of surgical gloves, going to DeAngelis’s funeral.”
“Shit,” Clayton mumbled. He could feel his stomach start to suds up. This George problem was going from bad to worse. “Okay, Debbie, thanks,” Clayton said as amiably as possible. “I appreciate the info, but I gotta run now. Talk soon, and see you Saturday night.”
Clayton hung up without waiting for Debbie to say good-bye and speed-dialed Thorn. The executive’s voice mail picked up, and Clayton could only leave a message asking Thorn to call him back ASAP. It was important.
Clayton went back to the pool, smiling at his young lady friend, and tried to refocus his attention on her. But he couldn’t. There was way too much at stake to relax. Something had to be done, and done quickly.
34
George had the suspicion that Carter’s Funeral Home had been something else in its former life. Incongruously it had a steep gabled roof with windows climbing up to the apex. Maybe it had been a restaurant, he guessed, inappropriate as that was. He surveyed the U-shaped parking lot. There were only a half dozen cars, mostly toward the rear. If employee vehicles were subtracted, then that didn’t leave much in the way of mourners. From George’s perspective that was auspicious. He was counting on few, if any, visitors coming to view Sal’s body.
George went inside. As he had hoped, the place seemed empty, without a soul in evidence. Low-level, mournful organ music from hidden speakers pervaded the place. On a pedestal was a guest book. He looked at the open page. There was only one scheduled service, and that was for Salvatore DeAngelis at 2:00 P.M. He checked his watch. He would have to hurry.
The front room on the right was a reception area with overstuffed upholstered seating. On the left was a room with various caskets on display. George walked down a central corridor, which ran parallel to the long axis of the building. He came to a room with open double doors. On a pedestal in front of a makeshift altar was a closed casket. A dozen or so folding chairs had been set up. No one was in the room. He checked his watch again, unsure what to do: fourteen minutes until the service was scheduled to begin. He couldn’t tell whether or not he was looking at Sal’s casket, but, considering that the man had rocketed through a windshield and impaled himself on an LED display, a closed-casket service sounded like an appropriate idea.
Wanting to get a better lay of the land, he continued down the main hallway. Through a partially opened door on the left he spotted two women with their backs to him talking in subdued tones with a man in a dark suit and a forlorn expression. Sal’s sisters? he wondered. From the style of their clothes and hats, they looked like stereotypical old maids. A quick glance at the name on the door confirmed that it was the office of the funeral director, Myron Carter.
“May I help you?” a man whispered in George’s ear. George nearly jumped out of his skin. He spun around, confronting the chest of a hulking man in a conservative suit similar to the funeral director’s.
“Hopefully you can,” George replied in a hushed tone. “I’m here to pay my respects to Salvatore DeAngelis.”
“Back this way.” The giant gestured back down the hall in the direction George had just come.
The man silently accompanied George back to the room with the closed casket and after a bow thankfully disappeared. Unfortunately there were now two people in the room. One was an African American woman, probably in her sixties, wearing a purple dress, the other a short Caucasian man about the same age. They were not sitting together. The woman had a snippet of a veil covering the top of her face, so it was hard to make out her features, but George didn’t think he had ever met her. He knew he had never seen the man.
George decided to take a seat and figure out his best course of action. It would also give him a few moments to bow his head and say good-bye to Sal — and ask for his forgiveness for what he was about to do if he had the courage to follow through, which he doubted, what with mourners in the room.
He was convinced that if something had gone wrong with Sal’s embedded reservoir, the evidence would soon be buried with him. But if George could get hold of the reservoir, he might be able to match the dosages still in it with the approximate date Schwarz had inserted the device.
As if answering his prayers, the two other people in the room suddenly stood up and walked out. George was alone with Sal’s corpse. Checking his watch, he saw there were now only six minutes till two o’clock. If he was going to do anything, this was the time. Besides the canned music in the background, the only sound was the ticking of a grandfather’s clock out in the hallway.
With sudden resolve, George stood up. His pulse was hammering. He felt as if he were about to rob a bank. It was now or never. After looking around to make sure he was still alone in the room, he tried to lift the lid of the casket. It cracked open with ease. He was relieved it wasn’t secured.
After one more glance back toward the hallway, George raised the lid all the way and looked down.
Sal was dressed in a dark blue suit. There had been some attempt to put his face back together, but the result was grotesque. Again asking for Sal’s forgiveness for disturbing him, George donned his gloves before unbuttoning Sal’s jacket and opening his dress shirt to expose his marble-white lower abdomen. George paused for a moment to catch his breath when he caught sight of the wound where the large embalming trocar had been inserted to suck out the blood and intestinal contents and infuse embalming fluid. People assumed doctors were immune to such sights, but they were wrong.
Swallowing hard, George switched his attention to Sal’s left lower abdomen. In addition to a number of abrasions, there were a few shallow, surgical-like cuts in the skin and a deep one that could very well have been made with a utility knife. George inserted a gloved index finger in the deep one and felt around inside the stiff, lifeless tissue. Nothing! There was no reservoir! George felt again to be sure.