Healed to death, p.22
Healed to Death, page 22
Kenzie couldn’t hear all of what the cops said to each other as they climbed back into their cars. She could hear more sirens in the distance and wondered whether they were additional backup, or something completely unrelated.
The woman punched a code into the electronic keypad beside the gate for them, and the door swung slowly open to admit the two police cars. It stayed open rather than closing again automatically. Zachary paced back and forth, watching the police vehicles disappear behind one of the long, low buildings that housed the storage lockers. He looked down at his phone to confirm to himself that Hartfield and Maria had not moved.
They all strained their ears and waited with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety, hoping to hear something reassuring, and not a series of shots that would end in tragedy.
“He didn’t have a weapon?” Kenzie repeated.
“Might have. Couldn’t see one,” Zachary confirmed.
“Of course he didn’t have a weapon,” Cook asserted. “He would not do anything to hurt anyone. He swore the Hippocratic oath. He is sworn to protect human life, not to take it.”
Kenzie pressed her lips together and didn’t point out that he had been the cause of the loss of at least one human life already. There had been other near-misses when he had interned with Simon and worked with him in the mobile clinic. Who knows whether there had been other tragedies when he had decided to go out by himself as the Night Doctor. She immediately started mentally reviewing the cases of various homeless people she had autopsied in the past year and what their causes of death had been. Was it possible more of them could have been victims of the Night Doctor as well?
But she understood what Dr. Cook was saying. Hartfield hadn’t set out to kill those people. He had never intended that they would be his victims. It wasn’t like he had stalked them and shot them with a gun. That was a different kind of killing.
As they waited, other emergency vehicles started to arrive. As well as a couple more marked squad cars. There were some dark unmarked cars and an ambulance which parked at the entrance of the parking lot so it wasn’t boxed in by the other vehicles. The various cop cars filled the lot quickly and started to pull up onto the grass verge and an adjoining street.
They ignored the civilians for the most part. A couple of detectives went into the office to watch the surveillance feed and returned. They talked back and forth on radios and phones. The tension was building, with nothing to relieve it. Kenzie wished they were back in Roxboro, where there would at least have been some familiar faces amongst the law enforcement agents.
Zachary stopped pacing for a moment, standing beside Kenzie. “Obviously, just walking in there and talking to him didn’t accomplish what they were hoping,” he pointed out. If Hartfield had been cooperative, they would have returned by now. Hartfield and Maria in tow, telling everyone the reasonable explanation for what he was doing there with Maria.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she admitted. “I guess… he isn’t cooperating.”
“I need to talk to him,” Cook said, hearing Zachary’s and Kenzie’s assessment. He looked around for the proper law enforcement officer to talk to. “Excuse me. Excuse me! I need to talk to someone. Who is in charge?”
The cops he spoke to barely gave him a glance, irritated, moving quickly to take care of their appointed duties, but motioned toward a plainclothes cop in a collared shirt with the top button open and blazer. No tie. Did that mean he was a rebel who refused to dress up as a sergeant or captain should? Or had he had one on earlier and pulled it off when he grew too irritated to put up with it anymore?
Cook approached him. Kenzie followed, even though she was pretty sure Cook did not want her to be any part of the conversation.
“Sir? Are you in charge here? I need to talk to someone.”
The man ran a finger around the neck of the collar as if it were choking him. He scowled at Cook. “You must be Dr. Kirsch, then?”
Cook glanced over at Kenzie with a little shake of his head. “No, this is Dr. Kirsch—”
“And who are you?”
“Dr. Cook. I am the Medical Examiner in Roxboro, but more than that, I am a friend of Dr. Hartfield’s, and volunteered with him at the mobile clinic. I know him well, and you’re going about this all wrong. He isn’t a dangerous person. All of this is just going to escalate things…”
“Come over here.” The man pulled Dr. Cook to the side to a slightly quieter piece of the pavement. “I’m Captain Morrison,” he introduced himself curtly. “What do you know about what is going on here?”
“Well, I don’t know why he came here, other than… maybe to get Maria something she needed? It was Dr. Kirsch who called it in. I just wanted to talk to him. I’m sure I could get all of this straightened out.”
“Because you know this Mr. Hartfield? You think you could convince him to give up his hostage and turn himself in?”
“Hostage?” Cook repeated. “Maria isn’t his hostage. She’s just… a patient. Someone he’s treated before. We’ve both treated her. She’s had some difficult conditions to manage, especially living on the street. But she’s in transitional housing now and—”
“Dr. Cook,” Morrison said sternly, “I need you to focus here. If you think Mr. Hartfield would talk to you, we can give it a try. We won’t have a negotiator here for a while and are just trying to keep things calm for the moment.”
“Well, yes, I’m sure if I could just talk to him, we could sort this out. It’s just a misunderstanding.” Cook shot a look at Kenzie. “People jumping to conclusions. That’s not the way it is at all.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Morrison said, in a tone that clearly communicated he didn’t think it was too likely. “Come with me. You too.” He pointed at Kenzie. His eyes flicked to Zachary, but he quickly disregarded the short, scruffy-looking man and didn’t even ask him who he was.
Kenzie cast an apologetic glance at Zachary and didn’t try to explain to Morrison who he was or to try to get him included in the discussion. She was surprised at Morrison agreeing to talk to either of them.
48
Morrison led the two of them to a black van, and they all entered the cramped quarters where Dr. Cook and Kenzie finally had a close-up view of Hartfield on the large monitor, apparently being broadcast by Bleaker or his partner.
Hartfield was handsome, but looked a little worse for wear. He was not coiffed and wearing his blue scrubs, as he had been in the picture Kenzie had seen of him, the handsome soap opera version of Dr. Hartfield that had been fed to the media. But he also wasn’t the nightmarish dark figure that had haunted Kenzie’s dreams since hearing of the Night Doctor.
He was dressed in a plaid flannel shirt and khakis that looked like they had been worn for a few days. Maybe he hadn’t had the energy to change since he realized that they were closing in on him. Or maybe he had been depressed by his failure to save Jack Lane. Did he even realize Jack’s death had been his fault?
“You have his cell number?” Morrison asked.
Dr. Cook nodded. “Yeah, it’s on my phone.”
“Great. Give him a call. Put it on Bluetooth, and we will be able to hear it on the headsets.” He put on a headset and handed similar devices to Kenzie and Cook. The technicians in the van were already equipped.
Cook just stood there for a moment as if waiting for someone to give him more detailed instructions or maybe to tell Morrison that it was a bad idea and that Cook shouldn’t be allowed to call his friend after all.
Eventually, he pulled out his phone and woke it up. One of the technicians walked him through connecting it to the headset. Then he tapped and swiped it a few times until he found the contact record for Evan Hartfield and initiated the call.
Kenzie expected it to go to voicemail. Hartfield wasn’t likely to want to talk to anyone, even his friend. She heard it ringing on her headset, and then a change in tone as it was picked up.
“Jeffrey?”
“Evan,” Cook said eagerly, and then stopped suddenly, unsure what to say next, how to approach the conversation that loomed before them.
“Are you here?” Hartfield asked. His voice was stringy and high. Anxious. He sounded vulnerable. On the screen, he looked around uncertainly and wiped his forehead. “What’s going on, Jeffrey? Why are you doing this?”
“It’s not me. We’re just investigating the death of Jack Lane. You treated him, right? That’s all I’m involved in.”
“You called the police about that? Had me followed here? How did you know where I was?”
“I didn’t follow you. There was a private investigator… he followed Maria, not you. Never mind, don’t worry about that.”
“Don’t worry about it? There are all of these cops. I heard sirens, there are more of them here. How can I not be worried about that? They’re setting me up. They think that I did something I didn’t and they’re going to shoot me down.”
“They’re not going to shoot you. They’re just worried about Maria and making sure she’s safe. And she is, right? No one has to worry about her? Where is she?”
“She’s with me.”
They couldn’t see Maria on the monitor, but Kenzie assumed the police knew she was safe. Zachary had said that she was fine when he had seen them on the security camera.
“Just let her go, Evan. They think you’re holding her hostage.”
“She stays with me. If I tell her to go, they’re going to shoot me.”
“No one is going to shoot you. They just want to talk to you. Get this all straightened out about Mr. Lane. If you just let Maria go and tell them what happened, everything will be fine. We know it was just an accident. You didn’t intend to hurt anyone. You were trying to save Jack.”
“You weren’t there, Jeffrey. You don’t know what it was like. Everything happened so fast. There was nothing I could do to save him.”
“He was an alcoholic,” Cook said. “That was what killed him.”
Kenzie knew that wasn’t true. But it was pretty close, and that might be what Hartfield needed to hear. She wasn’t going to correct Dr. Cook. Arguing would only intensify things and make the situation worse. And she suspected her mic was probably muted anyway.
“He was an alcoholic,” Hartfield echoed.
Kenzie remembered Simon’s assertions that Hartfield had abused drugs. Did the mention of Lane’s alcoholism make him feel more guilty because of his own substance abuse problems? Had he been drunk that day? Was that why he had made the mistake he had? Kenzie couldn’t imagine how he had made such a mistake otherwise. It seemed impossible.
“Yes,” Dr. Cook told him soothingly. “Let Maria go and tell us about what happened. Get it off your chest.”
“People don’t understand how hard it is to be a doctor. They think it is just knowing a lot of facts. They think everything happens the way they see it on TV, when you come into the hospital, get a diagnosis and the proper treatment, and go home. And everything is fine. They don’t see how hard it is to diagnose problems properly, and then you treat it and the patient has an adverse reaction. They have allergies and side effects, or the treatment just has no efficacy. You have patients who would get better if they would stay on their medication, but they don’t.”
“No,” Dr. Cook agreed. “They don’t do the things you tell them to. They think they know better, or it is too hard, or they don’t believe you and keep looking for another doctor who will tell them what they want to hear.”
“On TV or in a good book, the doctor would tell the alcoholic what he is doing to his life and how it is going to affect his health and relationships and lifespan. And he would get it. They would send him to rehab, and he would go, and he would get better and not relapse.”
Dr. Cook agreed. “He wouldn’t keep drinking until he was bleeding all through his digestive tract, and his liver, spleen, and kidneys looked like something out of a horror movie.”
Hartfield nodded on the monitor, relieved that someone understood what he was talking about. “Yes,” he agreed in a choked voice. “Do you know how many times I had talked to Jack about doing something about his drinking? I talked to him as a doctor and as a friend; I begged him, but he would just smile and say that when it killed him, it killed him. No one would be able to stop it, and he would be at peace when he was gone. Until then, the only way for him to get any peace was by drinking, and at least it wasn’t hard drugs.” Hartfield shook his head. “Hard drugs would have been kinder. He would have been gone faster.”
“How is Maria doing?” Cook prompted.
“I told you Maria is fine.”
“Where is she?”
They watched the screen intently. The cop whose cam they were watching got the message and turned slightly so that his camera focused on Maria, a little behind Hartfield, slightly sheltered in the open doorway of the storage unit.
“Can I talk to Maria, Evan? Make sure she’s okay?”
“The cops can see she’s okay. Would she still be here with me if she wasn’t? She would have left long ago.”
“I just want to make sure.”
Hartfield scowled. He looked around, but then decided abruptly to do what his friend asked, and reached toward Maria with the phone. She flinched back when he moved, but when he offered her the phone, she took it from him.
“Hello?”
“Maria? Hi, this is Dr. Cook. Do you remember me? I volunteer for the mobile clinic sometimes. We’ve met before.”
“You’re the other doctor,” Maria said brightly. “I saw your picture.”
Kenzie winced, hoping Cook wouldn’t ask Maria where she had seen his picture. She didn’t fancy telling him they had shown Maria his photo in a photo lineup. Even though they had never intended for her to identify him.
“Yes, I’m another doctor,” Dr. Cook agreed. “How are you doing, Maria? The police are a little concerned about you.”
“I’m fine! Just leave us alone. We don’t need any help.”
“Is Dr. Hartfield keeping you there against your will? Is he doing anything to convince you to stay?”
“We came here to get a bike,” Maria told him. “Dr. Hartfield said he had a bike for me.”
It was just plausible. Dr. Hartfield turned back to Maria to get the phone back from her. It wasn’t until then that they could see the scalpel in his hand.
49
Dr. Cook swore. But he did it before Hartfield got the phone back up to his ear, so he didn’t hear it.
“You have a knife?” he demanded when he had Hartfield again. “It’s no wonder the cops are worried. What are you doing with a knife?”
“It’s a scalpel,” Hartfield said, turning his hand to look at it. Sunlight flashed off of the blade. “Tools of the trade. It isn’t a weapon. It is a tool. It is used to heal, not to hurt.”
“Yes. When used correctly. But when the police want to talk to you, having one in your hand isn’t a good idea. Just put it away and talk to the police. We’ll explain what happened, and Maria will tell them that she can leave whenever she wants, and we’ll be able to put this whole thing to bed.”
Hartfield seemed to be somewhere else. He stared off into space. Everyone waited, tense, for his next move, but he just stood there, his expression flat, not moving.
“Evan,” Dr. Cook prompted, trying to nudge him into a response.
“I just want it to end,” Hartfield groaned. “I just want it to all be over. This whole thing is ridiculous.”
“It is, isn’t it? Why don’t you just drop the scalpel? We can all sit down together and talk.”
“You weren’t there. It was terrible. Oh.” Hartfield covered his face with both hands. “It was the kind of thing I would only connect with a field hospital on the war front.”
He swore to himself. Kenzie wondered what he was seeing in his head. Whatever flashback he was living was pretty traumatic.
She put her hand around the headset mic to muffle her voice in case it was not muted. “Try an anchoring exercise with him,” she told Dr. Cook. “Do you know how?”
Cook shook his head, frowning.
“Ask him for five things he sees. Five things he hears. Five things he smells. Focusing on the concrete will help him to anchor to the present instead of getting stuck in flashbacks.”
Dr. Cook nodded. “Evan. Tell me five things you see.”
“What?”
“Just do it. Look around. Tell me five things you see.”
“The… sky. Maria. The storage unit.” He manipulated the scalpel in his hand, looking down at it. “My shoes. How many is that?”
“One more.”
“Uh… the ground. The pavement.”
“Tell me five things you hear.”
Hartfield shook his head. “What is this?” he asked irritably. “Don’t try to ‘handle’ me.”
“Are you okay? I just want to help you end this.”
“You need to know what happened, that it wasn’t my fault. I need you to know.”
“Okay… why don’t you tell me about it?” Cook suggested.
Kenzie shook her head. She didn’t think it was a good idea for Hartfield to get into the details of what had made him so agitated and had him holding Maria hostage at knifepoint, even if he denied that was what was going on. She looked at Morrison to see what he thought of this. He should be trying to manage the situation until they could get a professional negotiator there.
Morrison just shrugged. He must have had experience to get to the position he was in, but Kenzie didn’t see how he could have gotten that far without some idea that the situation they were in was dangerous and Dr. Cook might be throwing gasoline on the fire.
But what was said was said, and no one jumped in to try to back it up. As long as Hartfield was talking, that was good, wasn’t it?
“Jack was in pretty bad shape when he came to me,” Hartfield related. “I had a bunch of people to treat; he wasn’t the only one. But someone told me that he was spitting up blood, so I figured I’d better see what was going on and if I could get him to agree to go to the hospital.”
