The Unexpected Hero Read online

  He grimaced. “I don’t think I’m going to like it, but it’s not as if I can’t do it.”

  “I’m really sorry.” Looking at him, she wished they hadn’t made the discovery. But now that they had, he was right: he couldn’t ignore it.

  He rose, turning off the flashlight. “That’s it,” he said. “I guess we clean up the paint, then find out who to call. And once they start the cleanup, I’ll have to find somewhere else to stay.”

  “You can stay with me,” she said impulsively, then colored a bit at how eager she sounded. “I mean, you already are.”

  “True.” He looked down at her, and his face gradually relaxed. “You have a very comfy couch.”

  “Wasn’t I nice to put you there instead of the air mattress?”

  “Absolutely. I mean, I like air mattresses too, but that couch is wonderful.”

  “So okay, where to stay is the least of your worries. Go start making calls while I carry this stuff into the mudroom to start cleaning.”

  He surprised her by stooping and brushing a quick, light kiss on her lips. “You’re a gem,” he said, then went hunting for his phone.

  Krissie remained squatting for another minute or two, staring at the molding and grinning to herself. Those little kisses of his made her feel really, really good.

  And she had just discovered the most profound respect for David Marcus.

  She passed him in the kitchen as she began to carry roller pans, rollers and paint brushes into the mudroom. He was scanning the yellow pages, but around here there wasn’t much to scan. Where was he going to find an experienced crew for this job? Probably from far, far away in another galaxy with the little gray men who were responsible for the water stains on the wall.

  Her attempt at humor fell flat even to her. What was there to be amused about? David was facing an expensive home catastrophe, and her life had turned into somebody else’s idea of cloak-and-dagger. It might make good fodder for a movie, at least the part involving her—because honestly she couldn’t imagine a movie about dealing with lead paint, unless it was one of those old-fashioned government informational things she used to see sometimes in school—but it didn’t make good fodder for a life.

  She used the utility tub in the mudroom to begin washing the latex paint off the rollers and pans. Hot, soapy water did a good job with a little patience, and as she went, she cleaned the worst of the paint speckles off her forearms. The activity and the hot water soothed her, seeming to ease kinks from muscles she hadn’t realized were kinked.

  Some time later, David appeared with the two paint cans and set them on newspaper, where he hammered the lids back on.

  “Any luck?” she asked.

  “Actually, yeah. There’s a local contractor, believe it or not.”

  She stopped washing and looked at him. “Surely, you jest.”

  “Frankly, I don’t.” He fell in with the old joke easily. “And don’t call me surely.”

  “So who is this contractor?”

  “A guy named Ted Gault, with County Contracting.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Why would you? He arrived since you left. Says he’s been here about two years now, ever since they built the semiconductor plant. Anyway, he is a certified lead-abatement remodeler from when he worked for a firm in Denver. He was practically champing at the bit to take this on.”

  “Will wonders never cease? I thought for sure you’d have to look over a several-state area, and maybe wait weeks.”

  “Me, too. Anyway, Ted says he’ll come out tomorrow and give me an estimate. He says it’s not as bad as it sounds, the actual cleanup. They use heat to loosen most of it to avoid excessive dust. It’s the disposal that’s the headache, but he knows where he can take it. Regardless, nobody lives here once he starts.”

  “I’m glad you found him.” She turned back to her cleaning job, and a moment later David was beside her, helping with the brushes.

  “So am I. He sounds knowledgeable about it. Me, I never would have thought of using heat to loosen the paint.”

  “That’s the last thing that would have occurred to me. But then, there’s all the wallpaper that needs to come off.”

  David shrugged. “Tomorrow we’ll have all the answers.” He paused. Then, “I’m glad you had me look at the baseboard. Honestly, I never even thought about it.”

  “It might have been perfectly safe. I mean, it was covered with later coats of paint. All sealed up.”

  “Yeah, but who knows what I would have run into when I started stripping the wallpaper? Some of that stuff looks like it’s been up there since I was in diapers.”

  “At least.”

  Painting tools clean, they set them aside to dry, then looked at one another. David cleared his throat.

  “I think,” he said, “we both need showers and fresh clothes. Because you look as if you’ve been primed, and I suspect I do, too.”

  She looked him over, head to toe. “What did you do? Roll in it?”

  “I’m a messy painter.”

  “Remind me never to let you near my brain with a scalpel.”

  “Hey, a scalpel is one thing, a paint roller is another.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  He leaned closer. “So how many doctors have you asked to leave your brain alone?”

  All of a sudden, it became difficult to breathe. Paint, lead, handmade dolls and murdered patients took backseat to a strong urge to affirm life in one of the most elemental ways possible. But even as she felt the urge overwhelm her, David backed away.

  “I’ll run and shower,” he said. “No point bringing these messy clothes over to your place. You didn’t bring a change, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t even think about it.”

  “I didn’t either.” He spread his arms. “But this won’t do. Make yourself at home inside. I’ll be as fast as I can.”

  An errant, ridiculous urge to follow him right into the shower almost gained the upper hand, but on some level, she managed to retain enough sense to stop herself and settle for coffee in the kitchen.

  Every time the man danced close, he danced away again as quickly as he could. She ought to be glad of that. After all, she was only a few months off a rocky relationship. She’d have to be insane to get involved again, wouldn’t she?

  But sitting in the kitchen by herself led her down even gloomier paths of thought, like the two murders at the hospital and the implicit threat involved in finding that horrid doll her in backpack. That doll had made it impossible for her to believe that people were leapfrogging to ridiculous conclusions. David’s initial connection of her with the deaths had occurred to him only because they were her first two nights on duty, and to give him his due, he’d quickly dismissed the idea.

  But that doll drew her smack into the middle of the mess. Two people had died, and while she’d had no hand in their deaths, that doll implicated her in some way, made it clear that, for some reason, someone wanted to hurt her, too, in some way.

  It made her sick to her stomach to think that anyone could have cold-bloodedly killed two people just to get at her somehow. Whether this person wanted to kill her or just get her charged with the murders only seemed like a matter of degree when compared to what had already happened.

  She lifted her cup with an unsteady hand and sipped coffee that had been heating just a little too long. Bitter. Like too much of life.

  The one question nobody seemed to be asking was why she should be targeted this way. And it felt horrible to even be looking at it from that perspective when two innocent people lay dead. But it was the only hook on the whole thing: who wanted to get at Kristin Tate and why?

  The boyfriend thing didn’t wash. Al had his problems, but they didn’t extend this far. The man was emotionally abusive, but he’d never laid an angry hand on her, nor even acted as if he might. His violence was more subtle and never of the kind that could have sent him to jail.

  So it had to be someone else. And since she�
�d been away from the county for so long, she couldn’t believe it was someone here with a grudge. So she must have brought something or someone with her from elsewhere. And there were a lot of other elsewheres.

  She put her head in her hands, racking her brains, trying to figure out who she might have hurt or offended. But even as she sorted through places she preferred not to visit, things she would have preferred to forget forever, it came to her that a killer like this didn’t have to be rational. He wouldn’t need a reason. He could have just seen the arrival of someone new at the hospital as a good time to start his spree, because he could misdirect.

  But how likely was that?

  Pressing her head harder into her palms, she looked at things she didn’t like to admit to herself. The young man dying of third-degree burns, with only hours left no matter what they did, begging her to kill him, to end it. She couldn’t do that. But could she be absolutely certain she hadn’t give him an additional dose of morphine? That in all the uproar and confusion she hadn’t in some way overlooked procedure and neglected to record a dose so that she or someone else had given him a fatal injection?

  No, she couldn’t be sure. There were times when the patients came so fast and furious, times when the chaos went out of control, times when you forgot to log something, or forgot you’d done something, or maybe…

  And this scared her most of all.

  Maybe you deliberately forgot.

  Dying patients were often eased on their way, quietly, with no ado. Never discussed. Never acknowledged. She knew it happened. She’d suspected it more than once, and had kept her mouth shut because when someone suffered that much, what help were you giving them by offering them another few hours of pain beyond description?

  Or because in trying to help ease their suffering, you administered just a little too much painkiller?

  The deepest, darkest gray area of medicine. Had she done it? She didn’t know. Had some doctor given directions that did it? She didn’t know. There was no way to know, because the greater the pain, the more tolerance a patient had to painkillers. Doses that would kill a healthy person often barely eased the pain of a burn victim or someone suffering from cancer.

  All she knew was that she couldn’t bear to think about it.

  “Krissie? My God, what’s going on? You look awful.”

  David came to sit beside her, and took her hand. He smelled of soap, and some corner of her clung to the sanity of the scent. “Talk to me.”

  “I was just thinking….” She hesitated. The subject was taboo, but she needed to talk about it anyway, much as it made her heart ache, much as it terrified her. She cast about for a safe way of bringing it up.

  Finally, she remembered something. “Do you recall that doctor in Miami a few years back who was charged with murder for giving a dying patient a morphine overdose?”

  He nodded. “That put a real chill on pain relief.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I hate to think of the amount of unnecessary suffering that has resulted from that.”

  He nodded and squeezed her hand gently.

  “Anyway, if you recall the case, the patient died a few hours after being administered a huge dose of morphine. Apparently some nurse objected to the dose, so the doctor administered it.”

  “As I recall, yes.”

  “So there was a complaint to the prosecutor. I don’t remember if the nurse made it, or if she told the family and the family made it. Although at that point, it was understood that the patient only had a few hours, maybe a few days at most, to live.”

  “Right. And the doctor was tried, but the case was dismissed after nationally recognized pain experts explained about pain levels, tolerance for drugs, and how that was not an extreme or even unusual dose of morphine for a patient in that condition.”

  “Exactly.”

  He waited, his gaze searching her face.

  Krissie hesitated, then drew a long, shaky breath. “I was just wondering. I mean, I honestly don’t know. But in all that chaos, what if I screwed up? What if I deliberately screwed up?”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you did?”

  “No. I’m trying to tell you that I don’t know.”

  He hesitated, as if trying to organize what she was saying in his own thoughts. After a minute or so, he spoke slowly, carefully. “We can’t always know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when you have a patient at death’s door, and you’re doing your best to keep them from suffering the tortures of the damned, you’re still dealing with an individual whose body might respond atypically. A patient who is not stable to begin with. A patient who could, literally, die from pain alone.”

  She drew another shaky breath. “That’s true.”

  “Yes, it’s true. It’s an area where so many factors come into play, that unless you can honestly say you deliberately administered an overdose, you just have to let go of it or go insane.”

  She nodded, biting her lower lip.

  “Look,” he said, giving her hand another squeeze. “I had a patient four months ago. We thought it was appendicitis from the location of the pain, we administered morphine while we ran tests to find out what was going on. You know most cases resolve on their own, so there wasn’t exactly a huge sense of urgency. The presentation was that she’d only been in pain for a couple of hours, which in ordinary circumstances would have given us plenty of time.

  “Well, we almost lost her. The morphine depressed her respiration and blood pressure, then toxic shock added to the clinical mess because we hadn’t realized that the appendix had already ruptured. It almost never happens so fast. So before we could clear the O.R. and get her into surgery, we had a nurse screaming in her face to hang on and stay awake. If she had died, we’d have been arguing about whether we gave her too much morphine which complicated the toxic shock or vice versa. As it turned out, she lived.”

  Krissie nodded.

  “But my point is, when life gets that tenuous, with everything going out of control, with death imminent from other causes, you can’t really point a finger unless you know you did something wrong.”

  “You’re right.” A short sigh escaped her as she thought over what he was saying.

  “So,” he asked, “what brought this on?”

  “I was trying to figure out why someone would hate me so much. About the patients I’ve had for whom the most merciful thing would have been to ease them on their way because they were bound to die in a matter of hours anyway. And whether I had ever done such a thing.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “No. I don’t.” And she didn’t dare ask if he ever had.

  After a moment, he answered as if he could read the question on her face. “Before I would ever do such a thing, I would have to be damn sure I could live with it.”

  She nodded again. “I understand.”

  “Because any way I look at it, I’m not God. Pulling the plug on a patient who can no longer sustain life on his own, a patient who is brain dead, that’s different. God pretty much made that decision already, and without machines, that patient would already be dead. But what I never let myself forget is that we’re mere mortals and we’re not always right about when someone will die. So if I ever made that decision, I would have to be utterly and completely convinced it was the only right one.”

  “I agree.” She closed her eyes, then popped them right open again, because she kept seeing that one badly burned soldier, the one where they could hardly find a vein to insert an IV. The one the doctor said he was going to put in a coma as soon as the line was going. The one who went from screaming to death in a shockingly short time.

  “God!” She shook herself and jumped up. “The memories!”

  “I know.”

  He rose too, put their cups in the sink, and said, “Let’s get over to your place. Maybe stop and pick up something for dinner later. The fresh air might help. We gotta shake it off our heels.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that would be good.”
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  Because, while her mind kept trying to drag her back, there was only one direction in which life allowed you to move: forward.

  “Do you mind going in the store on the way? Or do you want to shower and change first?”

  “I just look like someone who’s been painting. Let’s hit the store. I need to keep moving for a while.”

  He nodded. He understood. And maybe that was the best thing about David Marcus. He understood.

  Chapter 10

  David insisted on cooking. “As long as you’re not possessive of your kitchen.”

  “Me? No way. Help yourself.”

  “My mother considered her kitchen to be sacred territory, and woe unto anyone else who attempted to cook in there.”

  She smiled wearily. “I wasn’t raised that way. Far from it. With six daughters, my mother never had the kitchen to herself.”

  She left him to it while she went to shower and change. Some of the paint had dried on enough that she needed to scrub hard, but as a nurse she was used to using stiff brushes on her skin. This went a little further, but not much.

  With her face turned into the spray, she thought over her conversation with David and realized he had skirted the issue of whether he had ever “eased” a patient over the line. Nor, she realized, would she blame him if he had. From other things he had said, though, she felt certain that if he had ever done such a thing, it would have been under only the most extraordinary circumstances.

  And, God knew, there were times when she had wanted to, when it seemed like the only answer, the only thing she could do to help someone who was clearly dying.

  When she emerged from the shower, the subject was still on her mind. She leaned against the counter, watching David season some chicken breasts. Waiting nearby on the counter were enough fresh veggies to make a memorable salad.

  He looked up from sprinkling herbs. “You still look grim.”

  “I’m still thinking about our discussion earlier.”

  “About euthanasia?” He named it bluntly, using none of the euphemisms Krissie was used to hearing.

  “Yes.”