Chapter 14
Northwestern Memorial Hospital
A paper cup of vending machine coffee steamed between Julia’s hands. She’d yet to take a sip. Even though she needed the caffeine—this long night was growing longer by the minute—she knew the stuff would taste like swill.
She was a bit of a coffee snob. Espresso machine at home. Peet’s Coffee if she was out and about.
But beggars can’t be choosers.
“They said his heart gave out. That the trauma of the bullet wound and the subsequent surgery was just too much for him.”
Bethany Chastain still wore her cocktail dress. It was one of those matronly numbers, emerald green, long-sleeved, and form-fitting without being revealing. At one point, it’d probably looked elegant and festive. Now, stained with blood and frayed at one seam, it just seemed sad and macabre.
Of course, most things in an ICU waiting room seemed sad and macabre, even when they weren’t damaged or bloodstained.
“But I’m the one with the bad heart,” the senator continued, her voice hoarse from the tears she’d shed over her dead husband, tears that’d left trails in her makeup. Senator Chastain didn’t look a day over fifty and Julia gave silent kudos to the woman’s plastic surgeon. “Bill had the heart of racehorse and the blood pressure of an Olympian,” she insisted. “I just can’t…”
She shook her head and glanced forlornly at the glass door leading to the hallway. It looked like she hoped a doctor would come in and tell her it’d all been a giant misunderstanding. That Professor Chastain wasn’t dead. That she hadn’t lost her husband of forty years.
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Senator,” Julia said quietly. “And I can assure you, Agent Douglas and I are doing everything we can to figure out exactly what happened tonight and why.”
Dillan took that as his cue to interject. “Did the chef appear agitated or otherwise out of sorts to you, Senator?”
Bethany Chastain blinked uncomprehendingly, and Julia took a hasty swig of the scalding-hot, bitter-has-hell coffee to keep from saying, Duh, Dillan. The man went on a murder spree. Of course he appeared agitated.
“You mean while he was spraying bullets around the patio?” the senator scoffed and then spoke Julia’s own thoughts out loud. “Yes. He appeared agitated.”
“You had no contact with him before he came onto the patio?” Dillan persisted.
Senator Chastain hadn’t exactly been slouching. Years spent in front of reporters and having to present a strong, confident fa?ade to her constituents meant she had near perfect posture. But her shoulders had been drooping. Now she straightened them.
“What are you implying? That I make a habit of sculking around my host’s kitchen?” Her keen gaze narrowed as she turned from Dillan to Julia and back again. “Or that I am under suspicion here? Do you think I had something to do with tonight’s?—”
“Not at all, Senator,” Julia was quick to cut the woman off. She didn’t like the deep flush that stole up the senator’s chest and neck. “We’ve just learned some interesting information about the suspect and?—”
“He isn’t a suspect,” Senator Chastain said with a snarl as she shoved to a stand. “He’s a murderer.An assassin.” Her voice rose as she began to pace angrily around the room. “And I wish he was still alive so I could kill him myself!”
“Please, Senator.” Julia set aside her coffee so she could guide the senator back to her chair. Bethany Chastain had worked herself into a tizzy. Her chest rose and fell with harsh breaths. She was running her hands through her blond hair until it stood out from her head in frantic tuffs. “Come sit back down and let’s?—”
“I don’t want to sit.” The senator skewered Julia with a killing look. “I want to rage! I want to drag God down from Heaven and scream into his face for letting this happen. I want to?—”
Senator Chastain stopped and blinked myopically. Then she grabbed her chest and stumbled forward.
“Senator Chastain?” Julia squeaked in alarm as she caught the woman by her forearms. “Dillan! Help!” she cried when the senator’s full body weight crashed into her.
Bethany Chastain wasn’t a large woman. But she was larger than Julia. And even though Julia worked out regularly, she wasn’t up to the task of holding up another human being who seemed hellbent on crumbling to the floor.
Dillan, forever slow on the uptake, didn’t manage to gain his feet before Julia was forced to her knees, trying her best to control the senator’s descent.
“What the hell?” Dillan asked when he finally made it to Julia’s side and was able to catch the senator by the waist.
“I think she fainted,” Julia grunted. “Help me get her on her back.”
With the senator safely on the floor, Julia was able to get a look at the woman. She immediately knew it wasn’t a simple fainting spell.
Something was terribly wrong.
The skin over the senator’s face was mottled and waxy looking. Her eyes were open, but she stared unseeingly at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling. And the way her mouth opened and closed reminded Julia of a fish out of water.
Fear and adrenaline spiked through Julia’s bloodstream to have her raising her voice higher than was necessary in the quiet emptiness of the waiting room. “Go get a doctor, Dillan! I think she’s having a heart attack!”
She didn’t wait to see if Dillan did as ordered. Instead she grabbed the senator’s hand and reassuringly patted bones that felt as fragile as snowflakes. Glancing down at their clasped palms, she noted the senator’s liver spots, snarled veins, and enlarged knuckles.
Plastic surgeons had yet to find a good way to address hands. And that’s where Bethany Chastain showed her age.
“Hang on, Senator.” Julie did her best to instill confidence in her voice. “The doctors are coming. You’re going to be fine.”
The senator’s eyes shifted from the ceiling tiles to Julia’s face. In the weeks to come, Julia would recall the fear in the woman’s gaze, the way the senator seemed to beg her without words to do something.
But there was nothing to be done. And Julia watched helplessly as the senator dragged in one final breath and then let it out in a slow wheeze.
“Oh, god. Oh, no.” She used two fingers against the senator’s throat to check for a pulse. “Don’t do this to me, Senator. Come on!”
When only a thready fluttermet her searching fingertips, she got ready to do chest compressions. But she was saved the effort when two medical professionals burst into the room with flapping stethoscopes and a rattling crash cart.
She stumbled out of the way, tentatively settling onto the edge of her chair as the nurses went to work checking the senator’s vitals.
The nurse with curly black hair and a five-o’clock shadow yelled, “We have V-fib!”
Julia realized Dillan had followed the hospital staff into the room when he dropped into the chair next to her. His voice was a bare whisper, meant only for her ears. “What are the odds?”
She cut him a questioning glance.
“That two of the three eyewitnesses would croak within a few hours of the shooting,” he clarified.
“Senator Chastain isn’t dead,” she hissed in disgust at his lack of feeling for the drama playing out in front of them.
“Looks that way to me,” he muttered, and she turned back in time to watch the nurse with the long, blond ponytail take a pair of scissors to the bodice on the senator’s dress.
There was no such thing as modesty in a medical emergency. And after the bodice was flayed open, the senator’s bra was sliced in two without a second thought.
Julia felt like a voyeur. But she couldn’t look away as the curly-headed nurse fitted an oxygen mask attached to a bellows-like device over the senator’s face and proceeded to blow air into the senator’s unresponsive body. A small, plastic case was placed on the ground next to the prone woman and Julia recognized it immediately for what it was.
Defibrillator.
“We have a pacemaker here!” Nurse Ponytail yelled and she was careful to avoid the device as she placed the defibrillator’s sticky paddles on the senator’s chest.
A pacemaker. So that’s what the senator meant when she said she was the one with the bad heart.
“Clear!” cried Nurse Ponytail and Julia watched as the two medical professionals pulled away from the senator.
The defibrillator delivered its jolt of lifesaving electricity. But the movies got it all wrong. The device didn’t make a loud kathunk. Nor did Senator Chastain’s back arch off the floor. Instead, there was an eerie silence as the senator simply…stiffened.
Julia’s own heart thundered in her chest as she watched Nurse Curly Hair go back to pumping oxygen into the senator’s lungs. At the same time, Nurse Ponytail checked the senator’s pulse.
“Still in V-fib. I’m increasing the joules,” Ponytail declared.
A doctor—or, at least, Julia assumed the woman with the cropped brown hair and lab coat was a doctor—hurried into the room and dropped to her knees.
“What have we got?” she asked, her tone calm and efficient.
Nurse Curly Hair gave her the scoop using medical terms Julia had only heard on Grey’s Anatomy. The doctor nodded and pulled out a tray from the crash cart.
“Administering epi,” she declared with a clenched jaw as she shoved a needle into the senator’s arm.
Whatever the syringe carried didn’t work. Because the senator was shocked twice more.
“Damnit!” Ponytail snarled after the final try. “We’ve lost her. Starting chest compressions.”
Julia sat helplessly. All she could do was numbly watch as the hospital staff valiantly attempted to save the senator’s life. And after what felt like an eternity, but could only have been a handful of minutes, the doctor sat back on her heels and blew out a shaky breath.
“Stop.” She placed a hand on Ponytail’s shoulder. “She’s gone.” Glancing at the large analogue clock that hung on the wall above the doorway, she added, “Time of death 3:04 AM.”
“Like I said,” Dillan murmured beside Julia.
She shot him a censorious look.
“What?” He lifted a hand. “I was right, wasn’t I?”