The Last Surgeon

men staring at her and flirting, but something about Clemmons made her itch. To distract herself, she again fiddled with her headphones and politely nodded.

Despite his show airing at the obscene hours of 1 A.M. to 6 A.M., Jillian had held out hope that Clemmons would actually have someone in his audience who could help her. Those hopes took a direct hit when she pulled her rental car into the station’s dirt parking lot, abutting a barren, litter-strewn stretch of Highway 27 between Charlotte and Paw Creek. The producer had said nothing to prepare her for the ramshackle trailer from which WMEW broadcast.

When she first knocked on the rust-speckled trailer door, she half expected a crazed, toothless old man, shirtless in his overalls, to leap out and grab her. She knew going in that WMEW was small-market radio, but hell, this was bordering on microscopic. She wondered how a photographic study of the place would fit in with her current project on America’s back roads. It wasn’t surprising that Clemmons had to resort to tabloid radio to maintain competitive ratings, especially competing in such an ungodly time slot. But she was frustrated to the point of desperation, and it was either play this game, or don’t play at all.

“Okay, Jillian,” Clemmons said into the one working microphone. “Now, if I’m getting this right, some of the evidence you have that your sister was murdered is in her diary?”

Jillian paused to compose herself.

“Not exactly. After the police had completed their evaluation, I came to Charlotte to collect her things.”

“What things?” Clemmons asked.

“Everything. Photographs. Clothes. Files. Her computer. I boxed everything up and hired a moving company to move all of her things to my place. I wanted to go through it all one last time before I… before I started throwing things away. The police didn’t need any of it. According to them, there was nothing for them to investigate.”

“Except maybe murder,” Clemmons threw in.

“There was a diary-more like a journal, actually-but there wasn’t much in it that I didn’t already know. As you can tell, my younger sister and I were very close. Our… our parents were killed in an auto accident twelve years ago, when she was fourteen and I was twenty-four. We lived together until she started nursing school-the same school I had gone to in Washington. During vacations and summers, she stayed with me in the condo I bought with my half of the sale of our parents’ place.”

“Exactly what did you find in this diary that led you to believe the suicide note she left was somehow bogus or forced by another person?”

“First of all, I want to say that I am a psych nurse in one of the best departments in D.C. I’ve been in that specialty for a long time. It’s my job to know when someone is suicidal, and believe me, Rick, Belle was not suicidal. Not in the least.”

“The diary?”

“It wasn’t a deeply personal, from-the-heart diary; more like a journal of events in Belle’s life. It wasn’t locked up or hidden away. I found it on her nightstand while I was boxing up her things.”

“So I’m guessing the diary-I’m sorry, journal-didn’t say, ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ If it did, you wouldn’t be on this show.”

“Exactly. There was nothing in any of her entries to suggest that she was even in a fragile state. In fact, I was planning on driving down in a week. All she said the last time I… the last time I spoke with her was that she couldn’t wait to see me.”

“But there was that broken-off engagement that she was depressed about, right? Her fiance, Dr. Doug Dearing, an orthopedist at the Carolina Bone and Joint Hospital, reportedly was having an affair with her best friend.”

Jillian took some comfort in knowing that Clemmons had at least a cursory knowledge of the facts. She could handle him ogling her, but only if he gave Belle the respect she deserved. It was also great to hear Dearing’s name and actions broadcast.

“Sure, she was depressed about it,” Jillian answered. “Who wouldn’t be? She had seen a therapist and gotten the sleeping pills that-that she took. But she was philosophical about the end of the engagement, and actually grateful she found out about what he was before”-Jillian paused and cleared the fullness from her throat-“they got married. There were passages in her journal where Belle wrote about feeling stronger, more like her old self again. She even referenced her upcoming diving trip to Cozumel with her girlfriends, and how much she was looking forward to it. That’s not the writing of somebody who would take her own life.”

Jillian had read the journal several times. It brought them closer, the way e-mails or talking on the phone had done. But it was also like experiencing Belle’s death over and over again-traveling alongside her through years of hopes, joys, and disappointments, all the while knowing it would come to a tragic end.

“So, have the cops ever investigated this Dearing fellow?” Clemmons asked.

“They did. But he had an alibi. He was with his girlfriend and out of state the night Belle died.”

“Then there’s this wild psychic connection business. What was that all about?”

“I would prefer to avoid the implications of the word ‘psychic,’ and just leave it at ‘connection.’ ”

“Go on.”

“At what might have been the exact moment Belle died, certainly within the same half hour, three hundred and thirty-five miles to the north, I became as violently ill as I have ever been. It felt for a while, as I was getting sicker and sicker, on the floor in my bathroom, as if I were going to die. The horrible attack went on for half an hour or so, and then simply went away, just like that.”

“Yes, okay. Well, the Night Owl listeners to the Rick Clemmons Show might believe in such psychic connections, but we’re here to sort out the facts, and only the facts. And the facts in this case, at least as you have presented them so far, do not lend support to your contention that she was forced to write a suicide note and then forced to swallow a lethal dose of sleeping pills.”

“I disagree. That’s why I’m here.”

“You’ll excuse me for saying so, Jillian, but so far I’m not convinced. Tell me more about the journal. What about it made you think Belle was murdered?”

“It wasn’t the journal so much as it was Belle’s suicide note,” Jillian said. “In both the note, when she told me she was sorry for what she had to do, and all throughout the journal, Belle referred to me only as J.”

“So?”

“In the journal, that was just an abbreviation she used for me. She would never refer to me by an initial in something as emotional as that note. She’d write out my name, or at least ‘Jill.’ I don’t know how, or why, but I’m sure she was forced to write the note and using just the letter J was her way of telling me so.”

“Thin stuff, Jillian,” Clemmons said, glancing down at the lifeless caller board. “I guess the police didn’t make much of it.”

“Actually, they didn’t make much of anything.”

“Well, did you notice anything strange about the things you found in her apartment? Anything at all?”

Jillian hesitated. She already felt foolish enough presenting the psychic connection, and hearing Clemmons talk about the journal made most of her points sound thin. But there was something else.

I have nothing to lose by mentioning this, she decided finally.

“In a box in the back of her closet, Belle had a stack of comic books-fifty or so different issues of the same kind, and they didn’t make anything of those either.”

“Comic books?”

“I feel I know-knew-my sister very well. I had no idea she was interested in any sort of comics, and I told the detectives how odd that was, but they just shrugged the notion off. In the box, right on top of the comics, were several printouts from the Internet. Belle had been researching them. I have no idea why, and as I said, the police just didn’t care.”

Clemmons glanced once more at the naked caller panel.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well, what?”

“What were the comic books?”

“Oh, I had never heard of them before, but they were all Marvel comics called Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. And on the cover of several of them she had written ‘Doctor’ or ‘D-R period’ right before