Dead Air (Sammy Greene Thriller) Read online

  Anne would know. She was so experienced. Lucy ventured, “You don’t think it’s something like, uh —?

  “Like what?”

  “Herpes,” Lucy whispered.

  Anne laughed. “No way.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Let’s just say I’m from California.” Anne bestowed Lucy with an innocent smile. “Relax, it’s probably nothing. If you’re that worried, why not stop by Student Health?”

  “I thought they were closed.”

  “I mean Monday. Just cover it with a little foundation and it won’t even show.” Anne consulted her watch. “Shit, I’ve got to pick up my dress from the cleaners before noon. Catch you later.”

  “Sure.” Lucy barely noticed her friend’s departure. She was still staring into the mirror with a worried frown. Anne was right. It was probably nothing. She touched the pink circle with disgust. Just something to make her look gross.

  As she reached for her makeup, her eyes fell on a business card lying on her bureau. Should she give that nice doctor a call? Didn’t he say he was available any time for an emergency? Day or night?

  And with a big date with Chris only hours away, this was an emergency.

  • • •

  The Student Health building stood deathly silent, the air still and heavily scented with disinfectant. An infirmary for ghosts, Sammy thought, as she tiptoed by the empty, darkened exam rooms, toward the nursing center. A single swatch of light came from the triage office where an on-duty nurse took student phone calls about medical problems when the clinic was closed.

  “Hello.” Sammy stuck her head in the door.

  Nurse Lorraine Matthews was busy on the phone. A doughy, gray-haired woman, one could easily imagine her gathering a frightened student to her ample-sized bosom to offer solace. The embodiment of in loco parentis , in the place of a parent, Sammy thought, smiling.

  The nurse raised a finger in greeting and nodded at Sammy, mouthing the words “just a minute.” Sammy entered and took a seat near the bank of phones.

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Well, the Student Counseling Center has a support group. Yes, every Tuesday, depression. Uh-huh. That’s the number. Okay, and remember, call us if you think things are getting worse. Yeah, bye.”

  The nurse put down the phone, shaking her head. “It’s been like that all morning.”

  Sammy arched an eyebrow. “Like what?”

  Nurse Matthews pointed to the lit lines. “The suicide. Students are really upset. I’ve referred at least ten over to the Counseling Center. Those are just the ones that called.”

  “Well, then, maybe our show will help,” Sammy offered.

  The nurse agreed. “We’ve got to reach out to these kids in the next few days.” She held up a finger again, as she turned to pick up another call. “Just a second. Student Health Service, Nurse Matthews. What can I do for you, Jeff? Uh-huh. It’s pretty rough, I know. No, you can’t blame yourself. Sure, uh-huh. It sounds like you tried.”

  I tried to help her.

  No one could help her.

  “So what’re you planning to do on your show?” The nurse’s matter-of-fact voice, finally off the phone, brought Sammy back to the present.

  “Sorry. We’re planning a memorial for the guy — for Sergio. We’ll have remembrances from his friends, teachers, classmates.” Sammy looked away for a moment. “And we’re thinking about getting a counselor to talk about suicide.”

  “Sounds perfect,” the nurse said.

  “Would you like to be on the air?”

  “Monday afternoon? Impossible. Monday and Friday are our busiest days. I’m covering triage.” Nurse Matthews’s face brightened. “But, look, we’ve got somebody terrific we can send over — a med student working with us who’s got a great bedside manner — and he’s not that much older than the students. He’d be perfect.”

  “Great. How do I contact him?”

  “I’ll give you his number. Hold on.” The nurse nodded at the blinking phone lines and reached for one of the buttons as she picked up the phone.

  “Student Health Service, Nurse Matthews. Yes, Lucy, uh-huh.” She scribbled the name down on the almost filled call-in log. “Where’s the rash? How long? Any fever? Well it’s probably nothing to worry about, we can see you on Monday. I’m sure it can wait. If you — Who? Dr. Palmer? Okay, just hold on a second, I’ll put you right through.”

  Matthews quickly picked up the receiver of a red phone off to one side and dialed a number. When the party answered, she patched Lucy through, then returned to the next blinking line.

  “Student Health Service, Nurse Matthews. Yes, uh, what can I do for you, Tim? Uh-huh. I know, it’s terrible, but talking helps.”

  The phones didn’t show any sign of letting up. Sammy was growing restless. The whole morning was gone and there was still much too much to do. She motioned to the nurse and quietly rose from her chair.

  “Just a minute.” Matthews put her caller on hold and looked up at Sammy.

  “I’m going to have to go,” Sammy apologized.

  The nurse shrugged. “I really thought we’d have more time to talk.” She scribbled a name and number on a loose Post-it note and handed it to Sammy as she punched her caller back on the line. “Give him a call. He can help you with your show.”

  It was only after Sammy had left the building that she examined the Post-it. The telephone number was all too familiar. Frustrated, she tossed it into a nearby trash can and trudged off.

  As the note settled among discarded greasy fast-food wrappers, only the name remained visible in Nurse Matthews’s delicate script: Reed Wyndham.

  Marcus Palmer peered down the barrels of his binocular microscope and rechecked the tissue specimen from Sergio Pinez’s brain. He had to be sure. “Damn,” he muttered, refocusing to a higher power. Just as he had in the last case, Palmer observed nodular collections of so-called “microglial cells” scattered throughout the boy’s gray matter; and small, poorly defined areas of demyelination surrounding the veins of his white matter. With these destructive changes in his brain tissue, Sergio had probably experienced memory loss, confusion, and dementia for weeks. Poor kid. If he hadn’t been driven to suicide, his lethal sub-acute encephalitis would have inexorably progressed to coma and death. There was no treatment for this complication.

  Damn. Palmer carefully recorded his findings in the experimental log. The viral studies were still pending, but the results wouldn’t change what he now acknowledged. Despite the apparent immunity of the majority of subjects thus far, at least twice, his vaccine had failed. Patient #12 and patient #14 were dead.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  Palmer knew he had only two choices. He could go to the Human Subjects Committee, stop the project, and review the original animal work. Perhaps after months of study, he’d get permission to repeat the experiment. But the ensuing investigation might uncover the fact that he’d deviated from the original approved protocol. He would lose his tenure and be banished from the university in professional disgrace.

  His second option was to continue his work, and say nothing. It was possible that both suicides were coincidental, that the two students were simply depressed. Coming forward with these data now would end his work, his life, for no reason at all.

  Palmer rose and walked to his window. Gazing out at the view overlooking the gentle slope of North Campus, he was stirred, as always, by its serenity. Ironic , he thought. Only in such a cloistered setting could this experiment take place — blessed by grant money, lax official university oversight, and the unquestioning trust of the subjects themselves. He watched now as young men and women, cheeks flushed by the cold, hurried along the crisscrossing walk-ways — laughing, talking, utterly oblivious to their potential danger should any of them be selected for his study.

  For a long time, he remained there, weighing his choices. Then, with more than a slight twinge of guilt, he returned to his desk, closing the ledger just as the telephone began to ring.

  A smor
gasbord of Mozart piano concertos, Paganini violin caprices, and Wagnerian opera arias wafted from various practice rooms, mingling into a discordant soup that was not at all to Sammy’s more modern taste. She hurried down the hallway of the music school, stifling the impulse to cover her ears.

  “This day’s already a complete bust,” she muttered to herself. None of the students she’d interviewed so far had much to say about Sergio. They were all saddened by his death, but no one admitted to knowing him all that well. Quiet, loner type. Quite the cliché.

  She knocked at yet another door without much enthusiasm. “Excuse me.” Sammy smiled at the slim black man with shoulder-length dreadlocks and a tuba wrapped around his neck who opened the door. “I’m Sammy Greene. I work for W-E-L-L.”

  “Yeah, I know, mon. The Hot Line . I listen to your program.”

  His lilting accent was Jamaican, she noted, as she entered the closet-sized cubbyhole. There was barely room for his enormous instrument.

  The musician extended a hand. “C. C. Marone.”

  Sammy reached over the music stand to shake it. “I’m interviewing students who knew Sergio Pinez.”

  Marone looked slightly disappointed, shrugged, and turned back toward his music. “Sergio was not into the social scene.”

  “So I gather.”

  Nodding, C.C. blew a series of darkly resonant notes, ranging from velvety softness to a low growl.

  “Quite a range.”

  “Surprising, eh?” The young musician tapped his tuba and winked. “For a baby this big.” He hiked the instrument up until it almost completely covered his slight body. “Takes good teeth and plenty of wind.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “To play it well. You need to have good teeth and plenty of wind.”

  Sammy chuckled as she grabbed a pen and notepad from her purse. “Did you know Sergio well?”

  “No. Only from orchestra. He was a flautist.”

  Sammy appeared puzzled.

  “Flutes sit with the piccolos near the front. Tubas and trombones, we’re herded to the back.”

  “Oh. Was he good?”

  “An artist, mon. A Jean-Pierre Rampal.”

  Sammy wrote the name on her pad for future reference. Larry would know who that was. He listened to Bach a lot. “Any idea why Sergio might have killed himself?”

  C.C. shook his locks. “He was very quiet. We only had the music together.”

  Sammy felt growing frustration. “Did he have any friends?”

  “We only had the music,” C.C. repeated. Another low growl emanated from his tuba. His eyes avoided hers. “Perhaps you might ask his roommate.”

  Finally a connection. Sammy’s pen was poised. “What’s the name?”

  C.C. hesitated for a moment, as if trying to remember. “Lloyd Fletcher.”

  “You know where I can find him?”

  “Yeah.” He opened the door and pointed down the hall. “Orchestra practice will be over soon.”

  Sammy slipped her notepad into her purse and stepped outside the room. “Thanks. You’ve been a help.”

  “Not to Sergio,” C.C. said softly. “I should not have talked to you.”

  Before Sammy could question why, the door closed in her face.

  “It’s done.”

  “You removed the bugs?”

  “Every last one.”

  “And the envelope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “Not a chance. We took extra precautions.”

  “That’s what I’m paying for.”

  “And the other situation?”

  “Keeping an eye on it.”

  “That’s good. Very good.”

  The man on the other end knew better than to respond. He merely smiled and gently replaced the receiver.

  Lloyd Fletcher played piccolo like an angel. Sammy entered the wings of the rehearsal hall just as the musician began his solo. His eyes were closed, his body swaying in rhythm to his haunting tune. For the few moments he played, Sammy had the sensation of being transported to another world — a world where all those lost were waiting once again with open arms. The rap of the conductor’s baton on the music stand signaling the end of rehearsal jarred Sammy from her trance. She opened her eyes to see the musicians packing up their instruments and sheet music to make room for the next class. Fletcher alone lingered, staring at the empty chair beside his.

  Sammy had reached his seat before he noticed her. “Lloyd Fletcher?”

  He turned slowly and nodded.

  “Sammy Greene. I work for W-E-L-L.”

  Fletcher’s dark, sad eyes were magnified by the thick lenses of his clear plastic frames. His face was a mask of pain and confusion. “Sorry?”

  “W-E-L-L. It’s the campus radio station,” she explained. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  Lloyd frowned and started to place his piccolo in his case. “About what?”

  “Your roommate. Sergio Pinez.”

  Lloyd snapped his case shut. He hesitated a moment before finally motioning her to follow.

  As she walked beside him, Sammy observed how tall and stocky he was, built more like a linebacker than a musician. A handsome man, he had dark curly hair, dark eyes, rugged features. Yet his fingers were thin and delicate, like his instrument.

  They moved silently down the labyrinthine halls of the music building. Few students acknowledged Lloyd’s presence, though Sammy got one or two nods or greetings. At a small practice room on the opposite end from C. C. Marone’s, Lloyd waved her inside, shutting the door behind her. He still had not spoken and Sammy felt uncomfortable opening the conversation. Prying into people’s private tragedies was the downside of her job. It was so much easier to chase down corrupt public figures like the Very Reverend “Shaft.” She cleared her throat. “Uh, I’m really sorry about Sergio.”

  Fletcher nodded, his eyes welling up with tears. “Thanks.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Lloyd swallowed, then nodded again.

  “Would you like some water?”

  A shake of the head.

  “I know it must be hard to talk about him, but you seem to be the only one on campus that knew him very well. I’d like to try to understand why he did what he did.”

  “Why?” The question was barely audible.

  “We’d like to . . . to . . .” Sammy stumbled over the words, “a memorial on Monday. We’d like to do a memorial for Sergio. A way for everyone at Ellsford to remember. A way to let everyone show that his life mattered.”

  Lloyd’s expression was a mixture of anger and anguish. “It mattered.”

  “Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean —” Put your foot in it again, Greene . “I know. He was very special.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, I’m sure —” Shut up, Greene, you’re digging it deeper . “Okay, you’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. Maybe if I can start over. How about if I listen, and you talk?”

  Lloyd gazed down at his hands. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, how did you come to be roommates? I mean, you’re an upperclassman, aren’t you?”

  “Fifth year senior. I asked him. Met him last summer in P-town, and thought we’d get along.” He looked off at the corner. “We did —”

  P-town. Provincetown. The penny dropped. The Cape Cod resort was well known as a favorite beach destination for gays and lesbians. Lloyd and Sergio may have been more than roommates. Sammy blushed, embarrassed by her insensitivity.

  Lloyd seemed oblivious as he continued his reverie. “Kind of a shy boy. I remember the first time we met. It isn’t often that I find someone who enjoys tackling Paganini concertos as much as I do. We rehearsed the third and fourth sonatas for two weeks. I’ve never had a partner quite as talented. Did you know that Sergio was a composer?”

  Sammy shook her head.

  “He would ad lib these passages, ‘Variations on a Theme by —’, you know, that would wrap themselves around y
our soul. Brilliant. We’d spend every evening working on his new concerto. He’d just finished two new movements last week.”

  “Sounds like things were going great. What happened?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Was he upset about anything?”

  Lloyd looked directly at her when he answered. “You mean about being queer?”

  Sammy still wasn’t comfortable with that activist word. “Uh, yeah.”

  “On the record?”

  Sammy raised an eyebrow. “No? Okay.” She put down her pencil.

  “It was harder for him,” Lloyd said. “Macho culture. Not as accepting. He only came out to a few of us. Maybe I pushed him too hard to do more.”

  “His family didn’t know?”

  “No way. They’re Catholic. It’s a mortal sin.” Lloyd’s eyes filled with tears once again. “And now —”

  Sammy pulled a Kleenex from her purse and handed it to the musician. He took it and crumpled it angrily in his hands.

  “That’s what our society demands.” His tone was bitter. “Better dead than gay. That’s why we have to come out. We have to fight, we have to let them know we’re here. Next to them, their neighbors, their friends. We have a right to be accepted as ourselves.”

  Sammy nodded. “It seems horribly unfair. Do you think that’s why —?”

  Lloyd shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I thought talking to Bill was helping him.”

  “Bill?”

  “Bill Osborne in the psych department. He helped me out last year, so I sent Sergio to see him. Thought maybe it might help him too.”

  Sammy picked up her pencil again and jotted down “Bill Osborne.”

  Osborne here. Hey, guy, I’m worried about you. Let’s talk, okay?

  That’s why the name sounded familiar, she thought, remembering Osborne’s voice on Conrad’s answer machine. She definitely needed to talk with the psychologist for background.

  “He seemed to be getting better,” Lloyd was saying. “Then just this past week, it’s like, it’s like he lost himself.” He dabbed at his eyes with the Kleenex. “And we lost him.”

  Sammy patted Lloyd’s arm gently. After a moment, he met her eyes with renewed enthusiasm. “You know, you can do something for him that I don’t think he would have minded.”