CHAPTER FOUR
Resuscitative attempts on Dr. Carey had failed, even though the paramedics had labored over him for an hour.
After that, I’d been up all night, going between the police station for questioning and the hospital to check on Elizabeth Keyes. She’d been transferred from my surgery center to Jackson City Hospital, and even after twelve hours she still hadn’t awakened from her surgery, which concerned me. I had recounted in my mind every detail of the procedure on Keyes but I couldn’t think of anything that had gone wrong.
The surgery had gone smoothly. It wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t reconstructing an accident victim’s entire face — this was just a routine cosmetic procedure. I’d placed silicone implants in Elizabeth Keyes’ cheeks and chin and had taken a little fat from her neck. I didn’t think she really needed any of this done. She was beautiful before surgery. I did it because she insisted. But it was just a minor thing — nothing to it. The procedures I’d done on her didn’t even require bandages, and generated little bruising.
But I stood now in the ICU and took in the whole nightmare. I almost felt like breaking down and crying. Boyd Carey was dead. And Keyes wasn’t waking up. I couldn’t believe what had happened.
I again called my wife. “They haven’t done the autopsy,” I said to her, “but it’s definitely a homicide. Someone jabbed a needle into Carey’s neck, and probably shot him with a big bolus of a drug. It might take a few days to resolve all this.”
“Who…?” Her voice was suspicious. “Why would someone… kill… Dr. Carey?”
“I don’t know”
“Who…?” She paused. “You should have just kept doing your surgery at the hospital. You should have never spent all that money building your own surgery center. And operating on that girl in your office… after hours. Is there something going on between the two of you?”
“Alicia — please… You know there’s nothing between us, or between me and anyone.”
“I know that? No. I don’t know what you’ve been doing at the office late every night. Maybe this explains a lot of things.”
“Please believe me Alicia. I’ve never lied to you.”
Alicia didn’t respond.
“Please believe me”
“Hmmp. I hope everything works out at the hospital. I mean, you’ll need to still see patients and operate even though your office is closed… I need money to pay all the bills.”
“I know.”
She hung up. I called her back twice and even texted her, but she didn’t respond.
I did not want to hear that.
Regardless, I went back to Keyes’ bedside and waited.
I’d been dealing with the police almost constantly since Dr. Carey’s death, but none of that had really meant anything. It was just a prologue. I knew it was only a matter of time before I would have to talk to Harris — Detective Sergeant Pete Harris. He and I had always been on friendly terms. Until now.
Harris nodded to me as he walked into the ICU. He strolled up and stood at Elizabeth Keyes’ bedside. Harris was wearing his orange and brown-checkered sport coat and his usual embroidered western shirt, with string tie. He never used his police uniform. Harris’ father, “Pop” Harris, had been a cop in town and always treated his son as he would a police academy student. His dad taught him that, “It’s a cop’s job to see things that other people miss.” Pete benefited from his father’s teachings when he attended the Police Academy. While his high school grades were marginal, he made straight A’s in the Academy.
He was offered a job first with the Raleigh Police Department, about twenty miles away, then offered one at Chapel Hill, which was slightly closer, turned them both down, and took a job on the Jackson City Police force, instead. His promotions came quickly. With just eight years under his belt, he was asked to be police chief, a job he turned down. Despite a large salary differential of the two positions, he kept his rank and his job just as it was. All he wanted to be was a homicide detective.
There was a long period of silence as Harris considered his words before speaking. He looked at me through slits of eyes narrowed by thick, bushy eyebrows and heavy eyelids that gave him the look of a bulldog. He was a large man, six foot one inch tall and, though muscular, was overweight at 264 pounds. In a low, gravelly voice, he said, clearing his throat first, “Ahem… You know anything about Doc Carey’s death?”
He stared at me until I looked away. His look was accusatory. I hadn’t done anything wrong. “As I said last night, I heard an odd noise—”
“Why don’t you just step over here with me.”
I followed Harris out of the privacy curtains and to the reception area. “Now,” he said, “what were you saying?”
“We had just finished operating on Keyes.”
“This is you and Dr. Carey.”
“Yes. It was just the two of us. We were operating on Keyes. We were waiting for her to wake up from sedation.”
I told him about the whole incident, the loud thumping noise of the body hitting the floor, my attempts to save him, as well as the reason I hadn’t been in the OR when the murder occurred.
Harris asked, in a quiet, calm tone, “Do you know this Duke woman? Is she a member of your staff?”
“Anna Duke? No. I’ve never met her. Of course, Elizabeth Keyes is my office manager. But I don’t know Anna Duke. And there was no record of her in the patient’s files, either, which is kind of strange. Anyway, she wasn’t there.”
“Well,” Harris said, “the two needle marks in Dr. Carey’s neck are tellin’ me drugs were injected by the killer. Someone with ‘nough medical skill ta hit the big artery.” He paused as he stared at me. I was really uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be there.
A man wearing a white lab coat over police-issued black trousers and shoes ran down the hallway toward Harris. He stopped short of the detective and said, as he breathed hard from his exertion, “Mr. Harris, I have to see you right away.”
Harris and the police lab technician huddled in a corner, and I was alone again with my thoughts.
CHAPTER FIVE
A spokesman for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS, is claiming responsibility for the bombing of the offices of an American defense contractor in Abu Dahbi on Sunday. A spokesman for the group called the office “a control center for American drones.” American officials have repeatedly denied using civilian contractors to operate missile-firing drones. The Brookings Institution released a report on Tuesday accusing the U.S. Government of operating so-called “black sites,” or secret drone control centers, inside the United States. The U.S. State Department, addressing accusations of the existence of drone-operating black sites inside the U.S., said, in a prepared statement, “Those types of rumors are extremely irresponsible.”
In a small, dimly lit room, Charlie turned his attention to the thickly padded executive office chair, still in its factory wrappings. He stripped the bubble wrap and neatly folded and stuffed it in the trash. The chair tilted in all directions. The two armrests were fourteen inches wide and featured dials, black plastic knobs, and detachable control handles. He sat in the chair and twisted his body all around. It leaned back too much and not far enough to the right. Manipulation of control buttons on the chair arms corrected these problems.
He leaned from side to side and adjusted the comfort panels on the seat and back. Lifting two heavy rubber handles, grooved to fit his fingers and thumbs, he touched the rounded tops, and activated his computer screens. The two hand pieces were magnetically held to the armrests but otherwise had no restrictive attachments. He moved his arms in every imaginable position and touched each finger to its own control. Every finger touchpad activated controls on the screen and boxes that magnified sections of the landscape on the primary screen.