Broken Hope, page 23
My heart sinks.
It’s Michael, Kim squatting next to him, taking a shocking, twisted, morbid selfie with the man one week ago.
I lower the picture and close my eyes. I was right. She killed him. He didn’t suffer a fatal arrhythmia as she claimed. Well, he did, but only because she injected him with an untraceable heart-stopper. What better victim than a critically ill one? Who would think to question his death? It doesn’t matter he didn’t fit her MO. He was on to her, and that was all the motive she needed.
Feeling sick to my stomach, I sort through the other pictures again, this time studying the faces more closely. When I come to a middle-aged man, recognition slaps me. It’s Ted Orenson, my former patient. Thin from his recent bout with pancreatitis and head turned sideways a bit, but it’s him. A man Kim claims was a phony, sleazy conman and for that he deserved to die.
“Oh, Ted,” I whisper. “What—”
A thump against the bedroom wall makes me jump. I’m terrified it’s Kim. Terrified not because I fear her, but because she will do whatever she can to destroy the evidence I have just found.
But no, that’s impossible. I’m not thinking clearly. She is duct taped to a chair in my barn.
Thunder cracks the sky. The rain pummels harder now, and outside the window a gust of wind sweeps a tree’s branches back and forth. With another strong blast, the limb thumps the window, the same sound I heard moments earlier.
I exhale. My muscles relax. A tree, I can handle.
Still, I get moving. I need to put these pictures back. Leave everything in place for when I tip off the police—anonymously, of course. But first, I lay the disgusting photographs on Kim’s quilted bed and take a picture of them as a group. It makes me cringe to have their death masks on my phone, but I need them as proof in case something goes wrong and she destroys the pictures before I can stop her.
When I finish, I return the horrifying images to the carved-out cubby. In doing so, I’m startled to see I have missed a few more photographs, these ones wedged deeper.
With an acidy dread, I pull them out. What depravity am I going to find this time?
When I see what they are, I’m stunned all over again.
They are pictures of me.
In the top one, I’m in Michael’s hospital room, standing next to his dead body, my medical mask on, my hand clutching his. I hadn’t even noticed Kim took the picture. It must have been after Polly, the nurse, left the room.
But why? To incriminate me somehow? I’m not the one posing with dead patients like the Grim Reaper.
The other pictures in this second collection are equally surprising. They are shots of Kim and me back in residency: sitting next to each other at Grand Rounds, standing at a patient’s bedside, listening to a lecture at a resident lunch. Who the hell took them? It’s not like Kim and I hung out together, although the accusation she lobbed at me in Quincy Market—that I ignore and dismiss her—made it clear she held more interest in being friends than I did. What was it she said? That I always made her feel inferior? That she only wanted to be my friend? It’s as if we’re back in grade school.
Maybe Dan Knudson snapped the photos. Forwarded them to Kim when they were dating, hoping his perverted wish for a threesome might actually come true.
The thought makes me gag, but the final picture in this second stack of photos makes me freeze. It’s me kissing Kim. Not in a romantic way, but during a skit at our faculty roast. I was playing the role of one of our attendings, a woman with long red locks and an infectious smile who everyone was gaga for. I can’t remember the exact details, but I think Kim, whose acting skills were about as good as one might expect from a blank surface, assumed the role of a female patient who was infatuated with our attending. It had played well for laughs but, in retrospect, was probably in poor taste.
Regardless, who took the picture? Dan again?
It’s not just the kiss in the photo that makes sweat break out on my forehead. It’s what I’m wearing in the picture that does. A long auburn wig. The same one I’m wearing in Michael’s video of me assaulting a wife beater in my barn.
Shit.
Is this Kim’s way of framing me? She clearly has some reason for keeping these photos. If it’s not to frame me, then she is far more obsessed with me than I knew.
I need to call the police, make sure they search her closet and find the pictures of her dead patients. The ones of me, however, I set aside on a shelf in the closet while I fish around the wall’s makeshift storage compartment for anything else. My fingers find a thumb drive at the bottom. It’s probably the one that holds the backup copy of Michael’s video and the letter she supposedly wrote that implicates me. With relief, I slip it into my pocket.
One last search of the hole in the closet wall reveals nothing else. If only she had kept vials of potassium chloride or other drugs inside it, but she is evidently not that stupid.
I picture the injectable sedative I keep at home, the last bit used to get Kim into my barn. Then I picture my more ample supply of roofies in an old tin can, as well as my stun gun, my Krav Maga certificates, and my pending online order for a new Taser cartridge. If anyone is stupid, it’s me.
Still, I need the police to find these photographs. To look deeper into the patients who have died under Kim’s watch. Once I’ve dealt with her and she is out of my barn, I’ll place an anonymous call to 911. I’ll tell them what I found in her house and that she is currently attacking me there. When no one answers her door, that will hopefully be enough of an exigent circumstance to allow the cops to barge in without a search warrant. Unfortunately, her laptop on the living room sofa could hold copies of the photographs of me, not to mention Michael’s video, but stealing her computer would be too suspicious. Best I can do if the police make the connection is to prove her guilt and my innocence.
To help with that proof, I return to my duffel bag which I left on one of Kim’s dining room chairs. The sad-looking jigsaw puzzle cluttering the table elicits no pity from me this time around, not after seeing those horrific selfies.
After stuffing the photos of me in a side pocket, I pull out Michael’s laptop, the one I stole from his basement apartment. I was planning to leave it in Kim’s bedroom, but after what I discovered in the closet, I decide to hide it in her secret space instead. Seems like something she would want hidden away with the pictures.
It takes a bit of elbow grease to wedge the computer into the makeshift cubby, but after a little cramming, it fits. I stand the disgusting selfies upright in front of it and then replace the drywall panel, leaving the cover off-kilter so it will be obvious to the police. I then toss the place up a bit to make it look like a struggle took place. My plan is weak, but it’s the best I can come up with on the spur of the moment.
I collect my duffel bag and Kim’s purse, but before I leave, I unlock the front door to make it easier for the police to get in. Then I exit her beige world through the side garage door and climb into her car to drive back to my barn.
My initial plan was to have a little “chat” with her. A persuasive one, using the tools in my bag to get her to change her behavior or turn herself in. Foolish, I realize now. People like her (and like you, Hope?) don’t change. If I couldn’t convince her, then I figured I would cross that barn when I got to it.
But now, after finding that sickening and damning evidence in her closet, I want to sedate her again, get her back into her Altima, and dump the car—with her in it—someplace where she can sleep it off. By the time she wakes up, hopefully the police will be raiding her place.
And when she stumbles back home, they will arrest her ass.
42
My barn is a good hour’s drive from Brighton, so it’s nearly 11:00 a.m. by the time I arrive back with Kim’s car. Rain pelted the windshield the entire way. The Altima’s wipers barely kept up, and with as dark as the thunderstorm clouds are, it could just as easily be evening.
The only thing I feel like doing is curling up with Diva in my loft and forgetting I ever saw those awful images in Kim’s closet. Unfortunately, that’s not an option. The only option is stopping her.
Before I leave her car, I take off the wig and dress and change back to my cargo pants, T-shirt, and hoodie. After covering my head, I dart out with my duffel bag and race to the barn. Thunder cracks in the distance, followed by a burst of lightening, and by the time I release the huge padlock that secures the barn door, my clothes and the canvas of my duffel bag are soaked.
Once inside, I’m relieved to find Kim is still sitting there. Still sleeping, head lolled over. Still duct taped, thick pieces encircling her dress as well as her bare ankles. The acrid urine scent is stronger, perhaps from a second accident.
No empathy this time around. She took her patients’ dignity. It’s only right I take hers.
I remove the stun gun from my hoodie and tuck it into one of my many pants pockets. The syringe I leave in the duffel bag. With its lethal dose of digoxin, drawn from all the ampules I snatched from the clinic’s treatment room, I don’t want to risk sitting on it or doing something else stupid that sends me to an earlier grave than planned. I can’t hardly check out before Kim, can I? Not after what I found in her house.
An accidental lethal injection with digoxin is unlikely. To cause a quick and deadly overdose, the drug should be injected intravenously. But I still don’t want to take the chance of getting poked. Potassium chloride would be a better pharmaceutical weapon to have on hand—just ask Kim—but we don’t stock that in our clinic. Not that I want to use either drug. Hopefully, things will not get that far.
I remove my drenched hoodie and drop it on the ground by my duffel bag. The air in the barn is still muggy, but the storm has lowered the temperature several degrees. Aside from the chair that holds Kim, the outbuilding contains only the green plastic tarp I dragged her in on earlier. It remains spread open on the dirt floor. All over, tiny puddles pool on the ground where the ceiling has leaked. When the wind hits right, rain sprays through the gaps in the wall as well.
“Kim,” I say sharply from a few feet away.
No response.
I move closer, sidestepping a puddle, and raise her head. Her skull is a boulder in my still-gloved hand.
Is she really asleep? It has been four and a half hours since I abducted her. Maybe I shocked her too long or overshot the sedative dose. Red marks from the stun gun blemish her neck.
I squat and slap her face gently, and then more forcefully. “Kim, wake up. We’ve got some interesting photos to discuss.”
Nothing.
“You’re quite photogenic when you’re posing with corpses. Seems you’re obsessed with me too.”
Again, nothing. Worried now, I check her carotid pulse. Its thrum is strong beneath my fingertips. Maybe she really is still out cold.
Thunder claps outside, and a gust of wind rattles the loose sideboards. Lightening electrifies the barn’s interior, but a second later the daytime darkness returns.
What if she’s faking? I need to drag her back out and abandon her in her car someplace while the police search her house, assuming they will come that quickly after I call them. I can’t risk her waking up and fighting me while I do that. I had planned to dose her with a bottle of roofie-infused water, which I figured she would gobble up in her thirst, unaware of its alteration, but how can she drink it if she’s conked out? My well of IV sedative runneth dry, and I need more reassurance of her compliance than simply another round with the stun gun.
I stand and pull her head back again, this time yanking it up by her hair. She is as lax as a newborn colt. I pluck up one of her eyelids. Her pupil is still small from sedation, but that tells me nothing.
Back-stepping to my bag, I retrieve the scissors. After a brief hesitation, I start cutting away the tape around her ankles. I’m almost disappointed. I had hoped to interrogate her. Of course, it’s a moot point now that I’ve found those pictures, and good God those pictures are worth a million words.
Once Kim’s feet are free, I work on the tape that binds her torso and pins her arms to her side. Before I release her, I pull the stun gun from my pocket just in case.
Once her body is free, she flops over. I reach under her shoulders from behind and heft her off the chair. The chair falls, and I nearly do too, but soon I’m dragging her back to the tarp, my stun gun awkwardly gripped in my right hand should I need to zap her.
And that’s when it happens.
The woman I convinced myself was still asleep—because she is too crummy of an actress to be otherwise, right?—suddenly comes alive. With a grunt, she uses the force of her legs to press her loafered feet against the dirt ground and propel herself sideways. Before I can even react, she grabs the stun gun in my hand and zaps me through my V-neck tee, just below the shoulder.
My muscles cramp and I fall down on my side, toppled more from the force of her sudden movement than the short zap itself.
It happened so quickly, so startling fast, and yet I wonder how I could be so clueless. Why do I keep underestimating her? She has had everyone fooled for years, killing people right under our noses, all while fading into the background like the taupe dress she wears. Of course a sociopath like that could fake sleep.
As she stares down at me, her face an unreadable slate but her breaths heavy, I understand I have at least outsmarted her in something: the use of a stun gun. While I had zapped her for a good four seconds directly on her neck, she blasted me for less than one second through clothing. It will take little time for me to recover.
Then she outsmarts me again. She bends over, places the prongs against my bare neck, and electrifies me once more. Luckily, the contact is no longer than before. She must not be aware that the quicker the zap, the shorter the incapacitation.
Regardless, with this one my bladder empties.
Fucking irony.
Slowly, Kim steps back and rights the fallen chair. She drags it closer to me and sits. The upper half of my rain-soaked body lies on the plastic tarp, the lower half on the dirt. Water drips on my face from a leak in the roof. As it does, I try to clear the voltage-triggered fog in my brain.
She shakes her head and sighs. “Did you really think you could beat me at this? Everything else in life, sure, but this?” Her impassive voice shifts to a bizarre and disturbing girlish tone. “Oh, look, I’m Hope Sullivan. So perfect and smart. Solving diagnostic puzzles. Getting picked as chief resident.” She pokes a finger in her cheek as if carving out a dimple. “Everybody loves me. Everybody feels sorry for me. Mommy dead, Daddy dead, boyfriend dead. Boo hoo, sob sob. Poor little broken Hope.” Her voice returns to its normal pitch. “You think you’re the only one to suffer personal pain?”
I strain to speak. To blink. To do anything.
I can’t.
Kim leans back in the chair and studies the stun gun. “So you found my pictures. I suppose you think you’re going to turn me in now.”
Apparently, Kim is more perceptive than I gave her credit for.
“But what proof do you really have? The only thing those pictures prove is that I get my kicks from posing with dead patients.” She makes a weird chortle. “That’s my favorite time with them, you know. That quiet lull before the orderly fetches their bodies and wheels them to the morgue. Plenty of time to pose for pictures. Sick, sure, and I’ll probably lose my job, but it’s not a crime. Not that I know of, anyway. You?”
She stares at me as if expecting an answer. A trickle of drool slides down my cheek.
“For you, on the other hand, questions will be raised. For starters, there’s that red wig. If you think the police can’t prove you’re the star of Michael Yerli’s video then you’re not as smart as I thought you were.” She flips the stun gun to her other hand. “And suppose they do think I’m guilty? Snoop through some of my patients’ charts maybe. Find the loosest thread that might point to a suspicious death. Well, then, I’ll tell them we’re in it together.” Her expressionless face now puckers at the lips, and she blows me a kiss.
My toes move inside my sneakers.
“You kissed me, remember?” she says. “I have a picture of it. Lots of pictures of you and me together. I found them at Dan’s place back when he and I were dating. Gross, right? So I took them from him. You probably found them too.” She sniffs. “He was the one obsessed with you, not me. Well, okay, maybe me a little bit too. Maybe Dan thought I’d be so desperate for a boyfriend he could use me as a stepping-stone to you.”
The tiniest wiggle of my finger. My muscles are coming back.
“He probably jerked off to that picture of us kissing—skit or not.” She grunts a laugh, and it’s frightening in its flatness.
My tongue sweeps my mouth. I’m pretty sure I could bite my lip if I tried.
“So my point is, if it comes to that, I’ll tell the police we were in it together, that you got off on that kind of thing. Miss Angel of Death, you know? After all, some of the patient notes are in your name. I made sure of it. My insurance policy, so to speak.”
As if prearranged by the gods to time with her wickedness, a round of thunder booms outside, and wind shakes the rickety barn.
“When the police watch the video of you torturing a man, they’ll know how deranged you are. You took pliers to his nipple, for crying out loud. So yeah, Miss Perfect, you’ll be the one to go down.” She leans forward in the chair, her shapeless dress bunched at the waist. “Imagine poor Ada Jackson. She’ll find out her favorite doctor is a psychopath and a serial killer.”
Kim is right, of course. It could play out exactly as she says. Even if I check myself out of this universe, she will ruin any legacy I leave behind.
“Who knows?” Kim says. “Maybe I’ll even pay Ada another visit. No telling what might happen if I do.”
It’s at this moment I know I have to kill her. No police. No carting her off to jail. She needs to die. If she doesn’t, at best we will both go to prison. At worst, she will go free and keep killing.
