Hoda and Jake Page 8

  “I interviewed your father,” Lane continued, “and as a result had the attending physician prepare these notes for you. They’re about your mother.” Lane turned to Jake. “Doctor Hassan says you’re a federal agent.”

  “You might say that,” Jake admitted. “I work for Homeland Security.” It wasn’t strictly true, but it worked as a cover story.

  “That might make you useful to our investigation,” Lane said. “That’s why I decided to accompany Trooper Gorham on this detail. Besides”—he glanced at the young trooper—“these family visits are never easy. Part of the job.”

  Jake turned to Hoda, who was reading the note. “How is it?”

  “Jake, I don’t understand,” she said, incredulity—and a tremor—in her voice. “She was shot.”

  “How?” Jake asked. There were gunshot wounds, and gunshot wounds.

  “Shotgun,” Hoda said, scanning. “Buckshot. Big buckshot. There’s a pellet lodged near her heart. They’re going to operate.” She looked up at her husband. “They’re probably operating now.” She clasped Jake’s arm, her head resting instinctively on his shoulder. He put his arm around her.

  “She’s at Dartmouth,” Jake said. “It doesn’t get much better than that.” He was already making calculations. Buckshot. That pointed toward intentional. But why would someone shoot Maryam? “You say her husband was shot, too?”

  “The way it’s playing out,” Lane said, “was someone ran their car off the road, then sprayed it with buck. All the windows were blown out. We have empty casings. They fired over 20 rounds.”

  “This was no road rage,” Jake said, “no hate crime against Arabs.”

  “No, we think this was an assassination of some kind. He took some hits, but fate found a way to keep any of them from being fatal. Do you know what Doctor Hassan does?”

  “He’s an anesthesiologist. Works in Boston.”

  “Any particular hospital?”

  “No, I think he’s at several.”

  Lane paused. He was about to cross a line few law enforcement officers would, but his gut told him something about Jake Holman. “Your instincts and experience suggest anything? We don’t get many cases like this around here.”

  “My first thought,” Jake said, “was that they’re amateurs, whoever did this. Anger had a part, and knowing what they were doing didn’t. Otherwise, Hoda’s parents would both be dead. No loose ends. How’d you find them?”

  “On-Star.”

  Jake smiled thinly. Dr. Hassan loved his Lincoln Navigator. It had paid for itself in one night. Gauging Jake’s face, Lane asked, “You see this kind of thing much? We get a lot of domestics, things like that. Hunting accidents. Stupidity. But this is a little out of my experience.”

  “I have to say,” Jake told Lane, “I’ve been around my share of gunplay, and probably enough for a lifetime.”

  “Well, I was thinking,” Lane said, glancing at Hoda, who was watching him intently. “We’ve preserved the scene. Perhaps you could look at it. Trooper Gorham here will take Mrs. Holman”—Lane didn’t know Arab women kept their last names—“to the hospital to see her parents.”

  “I’ll stay with Hoda,” Jake said firmly.

  Just as firmly, a now-collected Hoda told him sharply, “No, Jake. You’re going with Sergeant Lane. I’ll take care of my Baba and Mama.” Her implication was clear: she wanted her capable husband involved in any investigation.

  Jake lifted a laptop from the kitchen table. “Honey, would you put my computer in our bedroom?”

  “Of course,” Hoda said. The laptop was her father’s.

  Hoda and Jake dressed quickly. Jake left his gun at home. Before they left, Jake told Hoda to ask her father something.

  ***

  Jake was back at the camp, as Northern New Englanders called their vacation homes, long before Hoda. He suspected he would be. There hadn’t been a lot to see at the scene, which Lane couldn’t describe: the Navigator in a ditch, no windows, pockmarked by buckshot divots. There was blood on the inside, but not enough to be obviously fatal. Obviously. If he had to guess, Jake would say Maryam got the worse of it, and Abdul saw to it she didn’t bleed out. Then just waited for help. They were far enough out into the rural road so as not to attract much attention late. It was easy for assailants to strike and run.

  To Jake it looked like the gun or guns used were set to wide choke: set so the shot didn’t hold together after leaving the barrel.

  “We’ll have the empty brass analyzed by tonight,” Lane told Jake, “so we’ll at least know how many shotguns.”

  Only shotgun rounds were discharged, too, another clear indicator to Jake that amateurs did it. Of course, New Hampshire, like next-door Maine, was gun crazy. Everyone had one, and of every kind. A sportsman’s paradise, but in Jake’s experience a recipe for mayhem, as well.

  The Navigator’s left front had a good-sized scrape on it. That looked like how they did it: pull up as though to pass, swerve in, and push the Hassans off the road. Once off, just blow and go. How neither of his in-laws was hit squarely by a pellet—a fatal pellet—in the head was a miracle of Allah.

  Meanwhile, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Maryam was still in surgery. Hoda spent the time with her father, doing her best to keep him in bed and from harassing every hospital staffer within reach of his voice. Finally, out of patience, she barked, “Baba! Stay in bed! You’re not helping!”

  So shocking was Hoda’s departure from dutiful daughter, Abdul gaped. But the gambit worked; he calmed down, at least for the moment.

  “There’s a perfectly competent anesthesiologist attending,” Hoda said soothingly.

  Her Baba lay back, feeling the effects of the medication they’d given him when he arrived, weak from blood loss.

  “They said you saved Mama’s life,” Hoda whispered. “They wanted to know how you knew what to do. I said your name, and know what? The attending had heard of you,”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You’re famous, Baba.”

  The doctor sniffed. “Well, if I was, they’d pay more attention to me.”

  “Baba, all their attention right now is on Mama. As it should be.” Hoda’s cell beeped: text from Jake. She checked it.

  The message read, “Don’t forget.” She replied, “Won’t.”

  “Baba?”

  “Yes?”

  “Jake wants the passwords to your laptop, and medical accounts.”

  “Why does he want those?”

  “He didn’t say. We were with the police when he asked me, at the camp.”

  “I can’t give you those. What about…” he couldn’t think of the word. “Privacy?”

  “Confidentiality,” Hoda helped. “I don’t know why he wants them, Baba. But it’s Jake, and if I know anything, he has his reasons. He deals with secrets bigger than yours for a living.”

  Abdul Hassan pondered for a moment. Hoda got out her notebook; she knew her father’s decision before she did. And he gave her the passwords. Hoda texted Jake:

  “Got them.”

  “Need you.”

  “Not now.”

  “Soon as Mama out.” Meaning, out of surgery, Hoda knew.

  “Okay.”

  Hoda was pretty sure why Jake needed her, and it wasn’t only the passwords. When you’re poring through a doctor’s records, it helps to have another doctor help you. Jake wanted Hoda Abdelal, M.D. to fill that role.

  ***

  “What are we looking for?” Hoda asked Jake.

  Maryam was still in intensive case, though the surgery to remove the shotgun pellet proved successful. Hoda had been impressed by the lead surgeon’s briefing, his calm clarity without arrogance. That was rare in thoracic surgeons, in her experience. Her father was still in the hospital, but expected back in the camp tomorrow. They didn’t have all the time in the world.

  “Something like a list of adverse outcomes,” Jake said. “Perhaps even fatal ones.”

  Anesthesiology was not a simple practice
of putting people to deep sleep; far from it. Any number of things could go drastically wrong, and as it was the common element in virtually all surgeries when things went south—and in surgery anything could, at any time—the lawyers always checked. That’s why they paid high malpractice premiums.

  “Here, let me try,” Hoda said, and Jake stood up. Abdul’s laptop was on the huge kitchen table at the camp. She slid into the chair and her fingers began dancing. Before long, she had it: a list of adverse outcomes for the past three years, together with names and Dr. Hassan’s case numbers. He kept a careful relational database, with medical notations. Hoda made a subset of the records and saved them to a file.

  “I have the same DB on my computer,” she said. “We can open this up on it.”

  “Burn one while you’ve got it open,” Jake said. “How many pages is it”

  “The summary is only six pages. My father’s good at his job.”

  The wireless HP laser in the master bedroom was already warming up. Jake strode to get the print.

  “Make sure you get them all,” Hoda said. “We don’t want to leave a paper trail, or Baba will blow a gasket.”

  Jake smiled. “‘Blow a gasket’? You’ve been too Americanized,” he said.

  Despite the circumstances, Hoda laughed. She couldn’t help it. Jake made her laugh often, it was part of his charm. He was back with the list, scanning it with an eye practiced at seeing paperwork like a detective. Much detective work was done on paper, and boring as it was, attention to detail mattered.

  “Three likely ones,” he said. “Assuming our hunch is right, three New Hampshire patients had adverse reactions. Two fatal. Hmmm. One was a 90-year-old woman, that was a death. And then there’s this 30-year-old woman. What happened with her?”

  “What’s the number?”

  Jake dictated Dr. Hassan’s unique case number, and Hoda had the individual report on screen in seconds. The printer whirred again—and kept whirring. Jake retrieved the pages. It looked like ten or twelve. He tried reading it. Some he could manage, but between all the technical jargon and acronyms he was stymied. He handed the report to Hoda, who sat back to read it carefully. Jake began closing down his father-in-law’s computer, so convinced was he they had found the smoking gun. Or, shotgun, as it were. Could it be that simple?

  Hoda’s perspicacity startled him—again. “Are we sure we’re on the right track, Jake? You seem to be on a one solution quest here.”

  “Well, we need motive. Why shoot up a stately couple in an expensive SUV? The two motives that come to mind are road rage and revenge.”

  “We’re flatlanders, Jake,” said Hoda, using the expression locals had for the summer folk who owned camps or drove to New Hampshire and Maine in the autumn as “leaf peepers.” New Hampshire’s economy depended on tourism, and many of those tourists were upper middle class Massachusetts people—“Massholes,” as the expression went. Dr. Hassan and Maryam fit the bill perfectly.

  “I don’t see it, Hoda. It was dark out. Sure, whoever it was could make the plate for Mass, but even your mother’s hijab wouldn’t ordinarily light off that kind of violence. Maybe a gesture, or the horn, or something. But these people were serious.”

  “If there was more than one.”

  “Touché.” They hadn’t yet heard from the state police lab on the shells. They should theoretically tell whether one perpetrator, or more than one, was involved.

  “What’s up with our 30-year-old fatality?” Jake asked.

  “Cutting through all the big words, Jake,” and she smiled warmly at her husband, “it says here she didn’t mention heavy opiate abuse before having a C-section on her preemie. Both were lost.”

  “Any other details?”

  “Yes, it says survivors include her husband and a 14-year-old son.”

  “Well, that paints a picture. Do the math. She gets pregnant at fifteen, delivers at sixteen, and spends the next 14 years living with her redneck New Hampshire boyfriend in some tarpaper shack, where she swallows pills all day. Or worse.”

  “But we don’t know that,” Jake.

  “No,” he admitted. “We don’t. But this isn’t an agency operation. We brief Lane on what we think, and let him get a warrant for your father’s records.”

  “What about HIPPA? Doctor-patient privilege?”

  “I don’t think so. Not for dead patients.”

  “Baba still isn’t going to like it,” Hoda said, unconvinced.

  “I’m willing to take that risk. The risk I won’t take is having the father of the woman I love get hurt because we didn’t do something we knew we should.”

  The struggle showed in Hoda’s face, but Jake also saw something there he’d seen in her mother’s face—in other Arab women’s faces—many times since he’d known Hoda: submission. She was his wife. He was the husband. Obeisance was his by right.

  ***

  Sergeant Lane agreed the lead was promising. Jake was pleasantly surprised that the detective didn’t just demand the information outright. He wondered why, and said so.

  “Fruit of the poisoned tree,” Lane said over the phone, simply. “If you give me something you don’t have a right to have, we risk having it inadmissible later. This way, we know exactly what to look for, and there’s no way—based on what you told me—a judge won’t grant us the writ.”

  “Whew,” Jake pronounced the word. “Well, we did our part. Keep us in the loop? Let me know when the writ comes through.”

  “Will do. Your mother-in-law coming home today?”

  “No, just dad. We’re going to get him in Hanover as soon as I hang up with you.”

  “Well, best of luck. He’s something.”

  Jake smiled. “He’s okay, for an Egyptian doctor.”

  “See you.” And the phone clicked off.

  Jake and Hoda rented a nice Accura for Dr. Hassan to drive until the insurance replaced his totaled SUV. Jake dropped Hoda off and she drove the rental to Dartmouth Hospital, where they picked up her father and visited her mother, who was already out of recovery Abdul was on a tear about American violence, but Jake just let him rant. Egypt and its neighbors had no place complaining about violence to anyone else, and Jake should know; he’d traveled there. He kept his wallet in his front pocket, his eyes moving and, on more than one occasion, his handgun where he could find it in a hurry. He’d actually had to display it once, in Cairo of all places, to dissuade some urban youth from helping themselves to his cash with the aid of pipe sections.

  But he was thoroughly prepared to play the role of dutiful son-in-law. Jake Holman was a dutiful son-in-law, a fact that had already made itself plain to Maryam.

  The sun was setting. They wished Maryam well, promised to visit the next day, and set off in the two vehicles for Lebanon. Jake smiled at that: Egyptian Couple Assaulted in Lebanon. Only, the assault hadn’t happened in Lebanon itself. Still, it made a catchy headline.

  Hoda made a nice light supper, and it was plain Dr. Hassan was delighted to be free of the hospital, including its food. He set about checking all his various messages. Jake had to admit, for a man of his age and background Abdul Hassan was right up to speed with modern communications: e-mail, texting, social media, the works. He was a vibrant man professionally, and spoke in English enough of the time for Jake to be impressed with the breadth of his practice. He felt like Judas for pilfering his records—then ruefully remembered Judas was a reference from the Bible. Not very appropriate for a Muslim? He smiled inwardly. Converts!

  The doctor had been through a lot, though, and eventually the activity took its toll. He drained visibly, and told Hoda—he didn’t address Jake directly too often—he was going to bed. He did condescend to say goodnight to Jake, and kissed Hoda before matching deed to word. Soon he was snoring loudly. At least he was human in that.

  Hoda and Jake got ready for bed, falling into deep, contented sleep an hour later.

  ***

  “Get up, you sand nigger!”

  The voice was a thun
derclap in the little camp home. Jake’s eyes were instantly open, but he made no overt move—didn’t do to act with no data. Slowly, gradually, against a background of muffled noises from outside the room he shared with Hoda, he lifted his head. From the foot of the bed, he stared straight down the barrel of a Winchester automatic 12-gauge shotgun.

  Down the barrel, he saw a boy’s face: about fourteen, a thatch of straw-colored hair.

  “Don’t move,” said a boyish voice. The muzzle trembled.

  “I won’t,” Jake said, calmly. “Take your finger off the trigger.” To Jake’s immense relief the boy did. His mind was long since registering sounds elsewhere in the house: another voice.

  It was a home invasion, and given the first words Jake heard, one wrought with personal overtones. His first assessment was they’d been right: the husband and son of the 30-year-old woman. The father was with Abdul, evidently. If he killed him outright—and he might, as the doctor’s English was not the best, so any misunderstanding could tip the balance—there’d be little time for action. Time. They needed to buy it.

  “Good morning!” said Hoda brightly. She’d awakened, of course, and rolled so as to lie on her pillows. She wasn’t talking to Jake, but to the boy. And she had his attention. He was paying no attention to Jake whatsoever, but staring at Hoda, drinking her in. Jake almost actually smiled: Hoda was indeed the Breakfast of Champions. What red-blooded teen boy would not stare, given the opportunity, at his gorgeous wife in night clothes? Hoda made no move to cover her décolletage, an unthinkable thing in a Muslima—unless facing a boy with a shotgun, and a plan in mind. Excellent! She was thinking.

  “You killed my wife!” That came clearly through the door.

  “What’s your name?” Hoda asked. Her voice was very soothing. Motherly, Jake thought.

  “Jessie,” said the youth without thinking.

  “Jessie, I’m Hoda,” she said. She pronounced rhyming with “soda.”

  Jessie nodded. There was a loud thump outside. Jake was getting anxious. He didn’t want to take Jessie on, one of them would get hurt—maybe even Jake. But he would if he had to. Though her father was likely being beaten thirty feet away, Hoda held her cool. Jake was proud of her.