Tahoe Chase (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) Read online

  “No. She was afraid of speed. She was very delicate. Like a flower. I often called her my hummingbird.”

  “She didn’t do any sports?”

  “No. She often said that sailing looks so beautiful, but when people would invite us out on their boats, she’d decline. She’d tell me, ‘Your little hummingbird is afraid of the wind and water. I’ll have to go sailing in my next life.’”

  We pulled into the hospital parking lot a few minutes later.

  “I can drop you at the door and then go park,” I said.

  “No. I’ll walk from the parking lot like anyone else. If I didn’t walk, how would I stay in shape?”

  “I just thought you might be in a hurry,” I said.

  “I am. I’ll walk fast.”

  I parked, and we left Spot in the Jeep. I had to walk at a good pace to keep up with Joe. When we got inside, I thought that if Joe was too upset, I could be his interface and spokesperson, but it was a foolish notion.

  “My name’s Joe Rorvik,” Joe said as he walked up to the counter. “My wife is Cynthia Rorvik, and she is in a coma here in this hospital under your care and protection, and I got a call from your security person saying that someone violated that protection and accessed her room, for what nefarious purpose I cannot imagine. Please have someone take me to her room.” His impatience was palpable.

  The woman behind the counter was visibly shaken and had no doubt been informed of the situation.

  “Yes, Mr. Rorvik, I’ll have someone here in a moment.” The woman picked up her phone, pressed some buttons. “Mr. Rorvik is here,” she said, and hung up. She looked up at Joe. She was obviously intimidated by him. “Ms. Morrison will be here in a minute.”

  Joe nodded, turned, and looked around as if he expected the woman to be there already.

  When a woman walked up a minute later, he started walking in the direction from which she’d come before she could even introduce herself.

  “Hi Mr. Rorvik, I’m Jeanine Morrison.” She began to reach our her hand, but had to do an about-face. She began walking next to Joe. “I’m so sorry about this trouble, but I want to reiterate that your wife is okay. I mean, the intruder didn’t do anything to her. Her doctor, Dr. Wells, will be joining us. Oh, Mr. Rorvik, the elevators are this way, please.” She pointed to the left. People were getting off one of the elevators. Joe pushed in to their side. Jeanine Morrison and I followed.

  “Hi Jeanine, I’m Owen McKenna, a friend helping out.”

  She turned and shook my hand.

  “I can’t remember her floor,” Joe said, his voice stressed. “I can’t seem to think.”

  “Five,” Jeanine said. She reached over and pressed the button.

  Jeanine spoke as we rode up several floors.

  “The intruder came at four a.m. The nurses on duty were Gail Prescott and Marie Rodriguez. Gail and Marie heard a noise like someone bumping into a cart. They looked down the hall, and saw movement at the doorway of Mrs. Rorvik’s room. The hall lights were on the low setting, and the main light in Mrs. Rorvik’s room was off. All visitors coming from the elevator have to go by the nurse’s station, so they knew that no one other than another patient could legitimately be in that part of the floor.

  “Gail ran down to the room while Maria dialed security. As Marie watched, Gail went to the doorway. There was a thudding noise. She fell to the floor. A man in dark clothes stepped over Gail and ran to the exit stairwell, presumably the same way he accessed the floor.”

  “Rell is okay?” Joe asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is Gail okay?” Joe asked.

  “She has a nasty bruise on her face where the man hit her, and she is a little dazed, but she’ll be okay.”

  “Did Gail or Maria get a look at the intruder?” I asked.

  “No. They both just said that he wore dark clothes. Neither of them got a look at his face.”

  “Was anything disturbed in Mrs. Rorvik’s room?”

  “Nothing appeared to have been touched including Mrs. Rorvik. Gail is a fast runner. She got there in time to scare him off.”

  The elevator came to a stop. When the door opened, Joe recognized his surroundings and immediately began walking fast. We matched his pace, Jeanine struggling in her pumps. A man and a woman at the nurse’s station watched us go by.

  Joe seemed to accelerate until he got to Rell’s door. He came to a quick stop as he turned and looked in. He walked into the room and shut the door behind him. We came up behind him.

  Jeanine turned to me. “He’s very stressed,” she said.

  “He’s got a good reason.”

  “He walks fast. Faster than young people.”

  I nodded.

  “He really loves his wife, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he does.”

  “How long have they been married?” Jeanine asked.

  “I’m not sure. Around sixty years.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  We waited in silence. We could hear nothing through the thick door.

  After a long minute Jeanine said, “I’ve burned through two marriages. Twelve years on the first, and six on the second. I’m too old now to have a long marriage even if I found the right guy.”

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Of course,” she continued, “maybe the problem is that I’m not the right girl. I’m pretty self-focused. My career. My friends. My travel plans. My movies. My restaurants. My home decorating preferences.” She looked at the closed door. “Sixty years. She was obviously the right girl.”

  A man in a white coat came down the hall. Under the coat, he wore a purple dress shirt and a blue tie.

  “Mr. Rorvik is in the room with his wife, doctor,” Jeanine said.

  The man glanced at Jeanine and turned to me. “I’m Tom Wells, Cynthia Rorvik’s doctor.”

  “Owen McKenna,” I said. “I’m a private investigator Joe has hired to look into Mrs. Rorvik’s injury.”

  Wells stared at me, his eyes intense. “Which suggests that her fall may not have been an accident? Does that mean that our intruder may have been targeting Mrs. Rorvik?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The door opened, and Joe came out.

  His agitation seemed gone. Spending a few minutes alone with Rell had helped. “She seems the same as before,” he said. He looked at the three of us. “Hello, doctor. Am I interrupting?”

  “We were just discussing what you and I talked about earlier,” the doctor said. “Mr. McKenna says that there is a possibility, however remote, that the intruder in Mrs. Rorvik’s room could be the person who pushed her off your deck.”

  “And?” Joe said.

  “The assumption being that the intruder may be thinking that Mrs. Rorvik could come out of her coma and identify him.”

  “What is your thought?” Joe asked.

  Wells looked uncomfortable. “Perhaps you and I should discuss this in private.”

  Joe said, “Please say what you think. I want Owen McKenna to hear what you have to say.”

  “Then let’s go to my office.” He looked at Jeanine Morrison. She smiled and left.

  We walked the other direction, went through a series of doors, and entered a small office messy with books and periodicals and multiple computers and other specialized equipment I didn’t recognize.

  When we were sitting, Joe said, “A week or so ago you told me about Rell’s injury. You were being gentle and you talked about it in generalities. Obviously, you know from experience that spouses do not take these things well. I’ve had some time to adjust. I’d like you to tell me again with Owen here to hear it. Please give me the details.”

  Dr. Wells took a deep breath as he rubbed his eyes. It was the kind of moment that made me thankful that I was not a doctor.

  Wells began, “People who have miraculous recoveries from persistent vegetative states or even comas always have some higher brain function. We often believe that these people will never recover, and usually we are right. But
sometimes they do, and we are as pleased and mystified as anyone else.

  “Unfortunately, Mrs. Rorvik doesn’t have the type of brain function she would need in order for us to even hope for such a recovery. She scores a three on the Glascow Coma Scale, which is a basic kind of measurement of how comatose patients respond to stimuli. Three is the lowest score and means that she has no verbal, motor, or visual activity. Her lack of brain function is consistent with the scope of her trauma, skull fracture, massive intracranial hemorrhage, brain edema, and brain shift. Her EEG also shows little activity. She exhibits several of the other characteristics that we look for on the brain death exam such that I and my colleagues expect her to progress to brain death. In short, eventual recovery from a deep coma is very rare, but there is no potential recovery from brain death.”

  “How is it that her heart is still beating when she can’t breathe?” Joe asked.

  “It is common in these situations. Heartbeat is controlled by the brain stem. It is one of the last things to go.”

  Joe said, “What is the brain death exam?”

  “I already mentioned the EEG, the electroencephalogram. Brain activity is manifested by electric signals between the cells. An EEG shows whether or not the basic function is there. There are also a variety of other tests we do that reveal whether or not a person’s brain is functional at basic levels, even if the person is in a deep coma.”

  “Such as,” Joe said.

  “Vestibulo-ocular reflexes, for example.” Wells paused as if searching for an easy way to explain something to a layperson. “People have a built-in system that keeps our eyes moving opposite to the rotation of our heads so that we can focus on an object. For example, when your head turns to the right, your eyes tend to automatically turn to the left so that you can keep focusing on whatever you’re looking at. If I look at you and shake my head left and right, my eyes keep looking at you. This is so important for basic activity, that it’s hard-wired in the brain.”

  “A person in a coma has the reflex?” I said.

  “Yes. If you shake their heads, their eyes move opposite to the shake. Even in the dark. If a person doesn’t have the reflex and their eyes stay fixed in their head, we say they have doll’s eyes, and it suggests severe impairment of the brain.”

  “Rell doesn’t have it,” Joe said.

  “No, she doesn’t.”

  “What else?” Joe asked.

  “People in a coma respond to cold water in their ears. Their eyes turn toward the cold. Such patients also react to direct touch on their eyes. If you touch a cotton swab to a comatose person’s corneas, they respond. People in a coma also show significant activity on their EEGs. Your wife has lost all these brain functions.”

  Joe looked down, then raised his head again to look at Dr. Wells.

  The doctor said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this, Mr. Rorvik.”

  “Understood. Thank you.”

  “We will beef up our security,” the doctor said. “Jeanine is putting a guard on this floor. He will be stationed near your wife’s room all night long.”

  “Thank you,” Joe said. “I will be in touch with you in the next few days regarding disconnecting the life support.”

  The doctor nodded, his face long and solemn.

  We left.

  “I’d like you to meet Rell,” Joe said when we were back in the hallway.

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  Joe led me into her room. “Rell, this is Owen McKenna. I’ve hired him to find out who pushed you off the deck. He’s a good man, and he’s making progress.”

  I looked at Joe. He gestured toward the bed.

  Rell Rorvik was as tiny as her friend Simone. She lay under a white blanket. The hospital bed was tilted up at an angle. A breathing tube was inserted at the base of her throat, and the sheet curved around it and went up to cover shoulders that were as thin and narrow as those of a child.

  Rell’s eyes were closed. There was no movement except the soft rise and fall of her chest as the machine air was pushed in and out of her lungs.

  Her skin was almost as pale as off-white wall paint, and it appeared to be paper thin as it stretched over prominent cheekbones and eyes that were pronounced in their sockets.

  She had a high forehead, with soft, straight white hair that flowed down the sides of her face. It was thick enough that I imagined her to be one of those women who can proudly wear a pony tail all of their lives. On the upper left side of her head was a large bandage where they had probably operated. Below the dressing was a blue-brown bruise seeping under the skin of her temple.

  In spite of the bruising, she was beautiful, and the lack of extra flesh on her face made me think that she was like an elegant bird, regal in life and graceful as she approached death. Joe’s little hummingbird.

  I’d seen many dead bodies during my cop career. As I walked through the door, I expected that seeing Rell would be another one of those experiences. But it was different in a significant way. Her brain might be nearly dead, and when it was, she would be declared legally dead. But having her living body before me gave me a sense of the Rell that once was.

  There was a chair next to her bed. Her arm stretched under the covers so that her hand, still under the blanket, was close to the chair. I imagined that Joe had held her hand.

  So, for Joe’s benefit, I sat in the chair and reached under the edge of the blanket. As I wrapped my fingers around her tiny, warm hand, I felt a profound connection to the woman. I had been talking to Joe and Simone and others about her. I’d been learning something of her life. Now, holding her hand, I felt something of her spirit, a woman who fed the birds and searched out and befriended the abused girl, a woman who possessed a kind of magic such that everyone I had met said they felt they could say anything to her.

  It is a strange connection we make between the personality and the vessel in which it resides. I knew her brain was gone, which meant her personality was gone. And yet, as I held her hand I could sense something of the woman who’d once existed in the body before me.

  In many ways, touch is the greatest sense, the most intimate sense, the truest sense. Rell was mostly gone, but we shared touch.

  After another minute of silent touch, I let go of her hand and turned to Joe.

  He had left the room and shut the door without my knowing it.

  I turned back to Rell Rorvik. “I’ll do right by him, Rell. And by you.” I stood up and joined Joe out in the hallway.

  THIRTY

  We were quiet on the drive back up to the lake. It was dark by the time I dropped Joe off at his house.

  “I’m glad I got to meet Rell,” I said as he got out of the Jeep.

  “Me, too.”

  “I’m learning some things on this case. I’ll call as soon as I know more.”

  He nodded, closed the door and went inside. I waited until I saw lights go on, then left.

  “I know you’re hungry, largeness, but hang in a bit longer, eh?” I said, reaching into the back seat to rub Spot’s head.

  Once again, I turned on Sierra Blvd, parked a block down from Ned and Simone’s house, got out the binoculars and settled in to a boring evening of watching.

  It was the same as the previous evening. Lights on downstairs, dark upstairs, no movement outside other than the occasional vehicle going by. At one point, I was getting drowsy, and I set down the binoculars to turn on the radio. When I raised the glasses back to my eyes I saw a person moving in the street in front of Ned’s cabin. The darkness obscured any details, but the person looked to be male. He was thin and appeared to be wearing baggy jeans that bunched up around his shoes. It’s one of the more reliable qualifiers. You see baggy gangsta jeans with the waistband hanging at the bottom of their butt, you know it’s a guy between the ages of twelve and twenty-eight.

  Gangsta-wannabe turned into a different driveway, shuffled up to the door, knocked, and someone let him inside. I went back to watching Ned’s house.

  Simone�
��s Toyota was in the drive in front of the garage, which had its door lowered. Ned’s tropical fish truck was at the end of the short drive, parked in the street, blocking Simone’s car so that she couldn’t leave without his permission and help. His truck was still sans bumper. This time, it wasn’t up on jack stands, so its roof was only eight feet high.

  I imagined them in the cabin, Ned sprawled on the couch watching a game, the volume turned up high, beers lined up on the couch arm, periodically shouting for Simone to bring him food or more beer, smacking her if she didn’t jump fast enough. Simone would be in the kitchen, maybe reading a magazine or cooking a pie so that Ned would be so stuffed with food that maybe he’d hit her just a little bit less.

  The evening rebroadcast of Fresh Air on NPR came and went. Then came an hour-long jazz program with the über-laid-back announcer periodically talking about the other side of Coltrane, whatever that was. Next, we were plunged into the classical triumphs of the Baroque period, too stuffy and formal for a romantic guy like me. When the news break came, I decided it was once again getting too late for Ned to have a visitor.

  I turned on the lights, put the Jeep in drive, and cruised on past Ned and Simone’s. A casual glance in my mirror showed a vehicle come down a side street, pull in front of Ned’s place and turn off the lights.

  I drove around the block, parked in the same place where I’d just spent three hours starving both Spot and myself. Looking through the binoculars, I saw that the car was a cab. Its lights were off, but I could see the silhouette of the driver.

  The house showed no change. Whomever was visiting was already inside.

  The upstairs light turned on. I couldn’t hear the music, but I assumed, based on Simone’s report, that it was playing loud downstairs.

  Ten minutes later, the upstairs light went off. In little more than the time it would take to walk down the stairs, the front door opened. A man walked out and got into the cab. The cab’s lights came on, and it pulled away.

  I waited until it turned the corner, then I started up, turned on my headlights, and followed. Although it is hard for someone to detect a tail in the dark, I stayed back. Two turns later, the cab pulled out onto Lake Tahoe Blvd heading northeast. A few blocks down, the cab turned left on San Francisco Avenue and drove into the Al Tahoe neighborhood. Despite the snowy streets, I stepped on the gas and got to the intersection just before a knot of traffic would have cut me off. I braked, skidded into the turn, and went through the intersection.