“Hi. This is George Sparks,” the voice said. “I just got a call from the county lockup. Carolyn Donovan hanged herself in her cell.”
The matron peeked in through the observation window and went right to work. As she worked her master key with one hand, she pushed the transmit button on her portable radio with the other. “Unit Four to Central, we got a swinger in Isolation Two.” Her voice sounded hurried but not panicked.
“Fresh or stale?” a voice came back.
“Still swingin’! Get Medical down here quick!”
The prisoner’s face was purple from the increased pressure in her head, and her hands and feet were still twitching. The matron knew from her rookie training five years ago that as long as the victim’s neck wasn’t broken, and she hadn’t burst something in her brain, this one was salvageable. Kind of a waste, though. Hardly seemed worth the effort to save somebody, just so the government could later issue her a termination slip.
Working alone-although she could hear the pounding of running feet in the hallway-the matron locked her arms around Carolyn’s waist and lifted, hoping to take some of the strain off her neck. No matter how high she lifted the body, though, its torso flopped over to take up the slack. Burying her face in the victim’s clothes like this made the matron’s skin crawl. If the approaching footsteps hadn’t been so close, she might have let her sway for a while longer.
The duty paramedic arrived first, a college student named Dan. Rather than burst in, he strolled. “Hi, Gladys. Whoa!” he exclaimed with a wince, recoiling just a bit. “Ain’t she pretty?”
Gladys was too busy to laugh. “Shut your mouth, Mr. Stand-Up,” she snapped. “Give me a hand here.”
“Always the boss,” Dan sang out cheerily. Precious few people were permitted to carry knives in the cellblock, and he was one of them, in anticipation of this very event. Then again, he never went down there unless someone was either dead or dying, and even then he’d often wait until all the inmates were locked down. He preferred to work in a controlled situation.
He removed his Leatherman from its holster on his belt, fished for the knife blade, then reached high to saw through the nylon. When he was done, both prisoner and matron fell in a heap on the floor. “You okay, Gladys?” he asked, suppressing a grin.
“No, I’m not okay. Get this bitch off of me!”
Two more staff members arrived at the door, one of them wheeling a crash cart, loaded with all the equipment necessary to perform CPR.
Dan knelt next to his patient and paused a moment to don latex gloves. With the tension of the rope removed, her color looked nearly normal, other than some bruising around the area of the rope burn. He pressed two fingers deeply into the flesh of her neck, just slightly off midline, and arched his eyebrows high.
“Hey, we got a live one,” he announced. “Pulse is a little thready, but it’s there. Time to go to work, people. Anybody called Fire and Rescue yet?”
“On their way,” someone said.
Over the course of the next thirty seconds, Dan found nothing but good news. His stethoscope found good lung sounds on both sides, as well as a patent airway. One of the most critical complications of what the incident report would euphemistically call a near-hanging was the fracture of the larynx, the voice box. Vascular as hell, a fractured larynx would bleed like a son of a bitch and swell up to the size of a grapefruit, cutting off the flow of air through the patient’s windpipe. That would have required him to do an emergency tracheostomy, a procedure he hadn’t tried in over a year. As it was, the rope seemed to have avoided the critical structures of the throat entirely.
Dan plucked a penlight from his breast pocket and flashed the beam first into one eye and then into the other. The pupils performed as they were supposed to, contracting uniformly to the beam of light.
“I’ve got normal breath and lung sounds and perfect pupils,” he announced to the still-gathering crowd. None of them knew the exact significance of his words, but the banter helped him concentrate. “Quite an audience,” he observed lightly.
There wasn’t much to do, actually. The patient was stable; breathing on her own and clearly perfusing oxygen. In the world of the road doctor, that was called a save. To kill some time, he started an IV of dextrose and water, flowing at just a high enough rate to keep the patient’s veins open, in case something catastrophic happened and she decided to crash. With the line in place, they could administer virtually any drug they wanted to.
“Hey, Doc!” someone called.
Dan looked up. He loved it when they called him Doc. “Yeah?”
“I got somebody from the FBI on the phone. Wants to know if this one’s gonna get a bed or a coffin.”
Dan laughed. “Tell ’em that Dan Schearer’s on duty. I only do beds.”
Barely 6:00 A.M., and the streets of Little Rock were still deserted. That didn’t stop Irene from using the bubble light and siren, though. Paul sat planted in the front seat next to her, looking like he still hadn’t come to grips with morning. Irene had given him only five minutes to pull himself together and meet her in the lobby.
They’d got to within three blocks of the jail when George Sparks called on Irene’s cell to inform her that Carolyn was still alive and en route to St. Luke’s Hospital. The turn Irene executed in the middle of the street would leave marks on the pavement for years to come.
For his part, Paul pulled his seat belt tight. Between being ejected out of a good night’s sleep, Irene’s driving, and the absurd tale she relayed from the night before, he’d have sold his soul for a stiff drink.
“Say that again slowly,” Paul said, his tone dripping disbelief.
Irene smiled and nodded her head. “Yeah, you heard it right. I think this whole mess was started by Frankel and that he’s still running it.”
Paul gave a low whistle. “Jeeze, Irene, if I ever piss you off, will you at least give me a fair warning?”
She laughed. “This isn’t a grudge,” she insisted. “I’m telling you, it’s a solid case.”
“Referred to you by none other than Jake Donovan,” Paul finished. “At least there’s no conflict of interest.”
She changed lanes. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think we have an indictment here, but I’m telling you the pieces fit.” She ran through the coincidences of the notes and the locations. “And let’s not forget the munitions George Sparks was tracking down in the desert. But here’s the real kicker. You ready?”
“Holding my breath. You do see that parked car up there, don’t you?”
Actually, she hadn’t. She swerved violently to the left, then back into her own lane, siren and horn screaming the whole time.
“Sorry about that,” she said sheepishly. “Woke you up, though, didn’t it?”
He answered with a look.
“Okay,” she went on. “Here’s the kicker. Let’s assume that the arms were stolen and sold in the early eighties.”
“By our boss.”
She waved him off. His defeatist attitude really grated on her sometimes. “Doesn’t matter. Not for now, anyway. Just assume they’re being stolen and sold.”
“Got it. Stolen. Sold.”
“Bite me, Boersky,” she growled. “Well, what do you know? Up until then, nary an article was published on chemical warfare incidents anywhere in the world. Then, starting in early ‘84, we got incidents popping up all over the world. Iran, Iraq, Libya, even Tokyo, for crying out loud!”
Paul looked at her disapprovingly. “And because people are getting gassed, you think Frankel did it? I’m afraid I don’t see the nexus.”
She tried again. She pointed out that no one incident was enough to draw a conclusion, yet taken together, as a tapestry of events, it all started to make sense. Frankel was the common denominator. He was in the article about General Albemarle, he was involved in the right-wing rag’s prophetic allegations about Newark, and he friggin’ ran the investigation after the explosion. Then, there was the business of the notes and the inherent flimsiness of the case itself.
“Tell me this,” Irene challenged. “Why didn’t Frankel keep digging? Why doesn’t the file have interviews with friends and coworkers and teachers?”
“It does,” Paul scoffed. “The file is full of them. I’ve read them.”
She shook her head emphatically. “Uh-uh. No, you haven’t. Look again. What are those interviews really about? The investigators back then were trying to catch the Donovans; they weren’t trying to build a case against
