Chapter 3 - The ER Waiting Room
The emergency room at St. Jude’s Memorial smelled of industrial bleach, cold floor wax, and human misery. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly greenish hue over Mark’s pallid face as he paced the linoleum floor of the private waiting alcove.
Greg sat with his head buried in his hands, his knuckles raw from rubbing his temples. "They said her heart rate spiked to two hundred before dropping down to thirty," he muttered for the fourth time. "They had to push atropine twice. They don't understand why her nervous system is crashing."
I sat quietly in an uncomfortable vinyl chair, my purse held firmly on my lap. Inside that purse was a plastic Ziploc bag containing a clean paper napkin. And inside that napkin was a tiny swab of broth I had secretly dabbed from the bottom of Judith’s bowl before we left the house.
Mark stopped his pacing right in front of me. He looked completely unraveled. His tie was undone, his hair disheveled, but beneath the disarray, his mind was racing, trying to calculate his odds of survival.
"Diane," he whispered, leaning down under the pretense of offering me a paper cup of water. "We need to talk outside."
"I’m not going anywhere, Mark. Judith needs us."
"Now, Diane." His fingers pinched into the meat of my upper arm—a grip tight enough to leave bruises tomorrow. A grip that told me the polite mask had cracked beyond repair.
I looked down at his hand on my arm, then slowly raised my eyes to his. "Take your hands off me before I ask the security guard at the door to remove you."
He let go as if burned.
Before he could speak, the double doors of the trauma bay swung open. Dr. Robert Vance, Judith’s longtime cardiologist who happened to be on call tonight, walked out. His surgical cap was pulled off, his brow deeply furrowed.
Greg jumped to his feet. "Dr. Vance? How is she?"
Dr. Vance sighed, looking between Greg, Mark, and me. "We managed to stabilize her rhythm, but she’s in a medically induced coma. Her system suffered a catastrophic cholinergic crisis. Her lungs were filling with fluid, her heart was failing, and her nervous system was essentially short-circuiting."
"A stroke?" Mark asked instantly, leaning in, desperation bleeding through his tone. "A massive stroke, right?"
"No, Mark. Not a stroke," Dr. Vance said, narrowing his eyes slightly. "Her CT scans are clean. There’s no hemorrhage, no ischemic blockages. But her blood work came back with severe organophosphate markers. It resembles an extreme chemical toxicity."
The air in the room vanished.
"Toxicity?" Greg echoed, stunned. "Like... food poisoning?"
"Not Salmonella, Greg," Dr. Vance said gravely. "This looks like a concentrated synthetic cholinesterase inhibitor. In plain English: something resembling heavy-duty agricultural insecticide, or a controlled paralytic compound. We’ve sent her blood samples to the state toxicology lab for urgent mass spectrometry. We should have the exact chemical compound identified by morning."
Dr. Vance paused, his gaze lingering on Mark’s twitching fingers. "The hospital is legally mandated to report unexplained neurotoxic poisonings to the police. Two detectives will be arriving shortly to take statements regarding everything she consumed in the last twelve hours."
Mark’s knees visibly buckled. He had to reach out and brace himself against the doorframe to keep from falling.
"Of course," I said, standing up smoothly and smoothing the wrinkles from my skirt. "We will cooperate fully, Doctor. In fact, Clara kept the remainder of the soup in the kitchen, and Mark and I made sure the dining room was left completely untouched. For evidence."
May you like
Mark turned his head slowly toward me. The terror in his eyes had turned into an abyss. He realized that the noose he had spent six months weaving around my neck had just been tied firmly around his own.
***
