Dying to Remember Read online

  ALSO BY GLEN APSELOFF

  Overdose

  Lethal Cure

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Glen Apseloff

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477830154

  ISBN-10: 1477830154

  Cover design by Brian Zimmerman

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959257

  To the individuals whose tragic poisoning inspired this novel.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Preview: Overdose

  Preview: Lethal Cure

  Chapter 1

  Christopher Barnes awoke in a sweat. In his dream he was about to crack open a patient’s chest, and not just any patient—Senator Brown, who needed an emergency bypass graft to save his heart. The OR lights had radiated like sunlamps, making beads of sweat run down Barnes’s face and under his surgical mask.

  Light from the street filtered through a break between the curtains, illuminating a strip of ceiling and transforming the otherwise total darkness of the hotel room into a menagerie of indiscernible shapes. Beneath him the mattress swayed, as if not on firm ground, while beside him his wife, Elizabeth, slept soundly. Then he remembered. Not Elizabeth. Cheryl—a fellow cardiothoracic surgeon who had sought him out that afternoon at the conference.

  He turned to the digital clock. The red numbers glared at him: 1:37.

  Something was wrong, something more than guilt about his wife. He had moved out of their Boston home a week ago. Six days, now that he thought about it, although right now he had other things to think about. A malaise coursed through him, as though an internal switch had been flipped, changing doctor Chris Barnes into patient Chris Barnes.

  Sitting up, he pushed aside the covers and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The sudden movement created a wave of nausea. He hurried to the bathroom, feeling his way through the darkness. His knee glanced off an upholstered chair, and a Bulgari necktie draped over the back brushed against his ankle as it slid to the floor. The tie cost more than the chair, but he didn’t stop to pick it up.

  “What’s wrong?” Cheryl’s sleepy voice trailed behind him.

  Barnes concentrated on reaching the toilet. Straining to see through the darkness past the bathroom door, he slapped at the light switch.

  Missing.

  Missing.

  Hitting it.

  The overhead light engulfed the room in a blaze. Through squinting eyes he focused on the toilet, stumbled to it, grasped the plastic seat, and retched into it. Gray-yellow liquid with remnants of seafood gushed into the water. His abdomen contracted in spasms, sucking the breath from his lungs, and his world converged on the toilet and the surrounding, unobtainable air.

  Then, as abruptly as it began, the vomiting stopped.

  Barnes gasped.

  The spinning sensation ebbed, and a headache took its place, throbbing in his temples like a hangover. But that couldn’t be, not after only two glasses of wine.

  He spat into the toilet and grabbed a towel from the rack above to wipe his face. Stomach acid coated his teeth, burned deep in his throat. He forced himself to his feet.

  “Are you okay?” It was Cheryl standing naked in the doorway, blonde hair cascading over her shoulders and breasts. Before falling asleep, he’d pressed his face to those breasts, breathing in her scent and feeling the drumming of her heart. Trying to find solace in the closeness of human contact. And trying to get back at Elizabeth.

  He’d gained little solace, and he’d stopped short of committing adultery.

  Now he wanted to be held again, but not by this woman. Cheryl was intelligent, witty, and gorgeous, but she wasn’t Elizabeth. Unfortunately, Elizabeth was no longer Elizabeth, either. The woman he thought he’d known, the love of his life, had been incapable of deception. Or so he’d thought. Until last week.

  He flushed the toilet and answered Cheryl over the rush of water. “I think I’ve been poisoned.”

  Cheryl came to him and put a hand on his chest. “From what?”

  “Dinner.” He pulled away to rinse his mouth under the faucet. The frigid water washed away some of the bitterness, but not the fear, the deep-rooted anxiety that something worse might be yet to come. Like in the emergency room during his residency training when a local university coed—a cheerleader—walked in with flu-like symptoms that turned out to be sepsis.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Barnes had assured her, even as a dark rash surfaced on her face and neck. Two hours later she died, despite antibiotics, fresh frozen plasma, and every emergency treatment the critical care team could administer.

  If he lived to a hundred, he’d never forget that woman’s face. When she’d looked into his eyes, he had felt her mortality. Now he felt it again.

  This can’t be happening, he thought. But that had been the theme of the evening. First flirting with another woman, then crossing the line—taking her to his hotel room. It had all seemed surreal. And so did having some toxin inside him that could cause God knows what.

  “It was probably the escargot or the mussels,” he said, trying to analyze his predicament. Why couldn’t he have ordered something else? The chef’s salad, maybe. But a bowl of roughage hadn’t appealed to him. So instead he’d ordered escargot in a garlic butter sauce and, as an entrée, North Atlantic mussels in a white wine broth. The mussel shells had been large, and shiny black as though they’d been buffed. Thick and rubbery, the plump mollusks inside had protruded through the open shells like tropical birds’ tongues.

  Barnes pushed the image from his mind and wiped his mouth again with the
towel. Looking at himself in the mirror, he expected to see a haggard reflection. Yet despite his illness and the effect of two decades of smoking, his off-season tan and a full head of hair lent him a ruggedly healthy appearance.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Cheryl, coming to him and gently rubbing his chest.

  Her touch sent an unpleasant shiver through him, and he placed a hand over hers to stop it. “That’s okay; I don’t hold you personally responsible.”

  His attempt at humor only made her frown. She stepped back. “What do you think it is? Staph?”

  He mulled over her question while steadying himself with one hand against the wall. Staphylococcus aureus is a common source of food poisoning, and the toxin produced by those bacteria takes effect within a few hours after a contaminated meal. But his symptoms didn’t fit. “Staph would cause vomiting but not this . . . this headache.” He took his hand off the wall to squeeze his temples between his thumb and fingers. “I think it’s the mussels.”

  “It could also be something from earlier,” Cheryl pointed out. “Something you ate for lunch.”

  He dropped the towel onto the floor and headed out of the bathroom. “I didn’t have lunch.”

  Taking his arm, Cheryl guided him to the bed. She had turned on a small lamp, and it cast jaundiced light through the room. Above the headboard hung a framed print of a harbor scene with shimmering water reflecting streaks of masts and rusty sunlight. To Barnes the water seemed to ripple within the frame.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Cheryl put a cool hand on his forehead. “I think you have a fever. We should get you something.”

  Barnes shook his head and felt the pounding increase. A resurgence of nausea accompanied it, and he pulled away to stumble back to the bathroom.

  Again he threw up, this time mostly mucous and something darker. Bile?

  “Maybe we should go to an ER,” Cheryl suggested, uncertainty in her voice. She’d put on a bathrobe and was standing in the doorway.

  Barnes wiped his mouth with another towel, then tossed it aside. Using the wall to steady himself, he got back onto his feet. “I’m okay.” He took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair, damp with sweat. Putting his head under the faucet, he let water run over his face, then rinsed his mouth. The pounding between his temples eased, giving way to dizziness.

  “I don’t believe this.” Water like icicles dripped down his neck and chest.

  “This could be serious,” Cheryl said. “We should get you to an ER.”

  “No. I’ll be all right. I don’t need some Canadian ER doc to tell me what I already know.” He was surprised to sound so self-assured, while inside him fear swelled like an aneurysm. “These things usually run their course in six to twelve hours.”

  “If it’s bacterial. It could also be a chemical contaminant or some type of algae.”

  Barnes wiped his chin and tried to remember the different types of poisoning from seafood. The last time he’d come across anything about that must have been in a journal or textbook during residency training or medical school. The information was somewhere in the recesses of his mind. He reached back into that mental library. Marine plants . . . the ocean’s poisons: tetrodotoxin and ciguatera. Both could be lethal, but those came from fish, not shellfish.

  Red tide. Every New Englander knew the risks of that, the most common deadly poison in shellfish. But the high-risk period was June to October. This was November. November 22.

  “Probably it’s E. coli,” he said finally. “That’s the most common contaminant of shellfish, from sewage. I would think if there was an outbreak from algae, somebody’d figure it out before the food ever reached a restaurant. Those things must be monitored.”

  He was far from convinced. E. coli would more likely cause cramping and diarrhea than vomiting and a headache. But algae—that could kill him. The thought of a deadly toxin coursing through his body . . . he pushed it from his mind.

  Cheryl came to him and caressed his cheek. “You’re probably right.”

  Her touch sent a cold shiver through him, but he responded by running a hand through her hair. Thoughts of his illness nearly overwhelmed him, but his hands seemed capable of functioning independently, the result of performing thousands of procedures in the operating room. Regardless of where his mind happened to be, his hands knew what to do.

  “Let’s get you back to bed.” Cheryl helped him walk from the bathroom. Barnes stumbled and nearly fell, despite her.

  He sat on the edge of the mattress and put his head between his legs, where it seemed to throb and float at the same time. “I feel lightheaded. I need a cigarette.”

  “You need a toxicologist or an infectious-disease specialist.”

  “Or maybe an attorney—I should sue that restaurant.”

  He wasn’t sure why, but he suspected the mussels more than the escargot. Maybe it was their sinister appearance in the shells, cloaked in black. At the time they’d seemed innocuous, but his attention had been focused on Cheryl. Sitting across from him in an unbuttoned cardigan and a dress with a low neckline, she’d lifted his spirits with her easy smile, then captivated him by leaning forward to pick up her wineglass and revealing a lacy black bra and the tops of her breasts. She and Barnes had first met a year earlier at the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the North American Society of Thoracic Surgeons, then again only twelve hours ago when she’d approached him after his symposium on high-risk angioplasty. She’d looked like a college kid off the beach: tanned and supple, with high cheekbones, starry eyes, and legs that beckoned to every man in the room. Now she looked like just another woman.

  “Maybe you should lie down,” she suggested.

  “No, I’m going to get sick again. Help me back in there.” He leaned forward in an attempt to stand and nearly pitched onto the floor. With her supporting him, he made his way back into the bathroom.

  She returned to the doorway as he vomited. The retching continued for some time.

  “I’m going to call an ambulance,” she finally said.

  Recovering, Barnes held up a hand, then wiped his face on a third towel. “Help me get dressed first.” He threw the towel onto the floor with the others.

  Cheryl had already picked up the telephone. “In a minute.”

  While he waited, Barnes felt increasingly heavy—his arms, his legs, even his head. A cloud settled over him, a chilly fog that robbed him of strength and blurred his thoughts. The room no longer looked familiar. How had he gotten there?

  A woman was now fussing over him. A friend of Elizabeth’s? Yes, that must be it. From seemingly far away, she pushed on his shoes, the way his mother used to on wintry days before sending him off to school all bundled up and warm. Only he wasn’t warm. Just the opposite—unable to stop shivering. Maybe in anticipation of the cold outside. He hoped she would give him a scarf.

  On the way to the hospital, Barnes fought the thickening fog.

  “Hospital . . . Hospital,” he repeated out loud, staring at the ceiling of the ambulance and affirming where he was going. Being strapped to a stretcher should have been enough to remind him, but everything was becoming less distinct.

  “Hospital . . . Hospital . . . Hospi . . .” The last syllable became lost in the fog. A cloud obliterated his thoughts. Then a bolt of lightning streaked across the expanse.

  Barnes convulsed on the stretcher.

  A paramedic, who looked too young to handle a real emergency, had just inserted a needle to start an IV in the back of Barnes’s hand. Barnes’s whole arm jerked with the seizure, and the needle lacerated the vein, spattering both Cheryl and the paramedic with blood.

  “He needs IV valium or phenytoin,” Cheryl ordered. “Hurry!”

  “I’m trying.” The paramedic’s voice had an edge to it. He snatched a syringe from a medical kit, then held down Barnes’s arm, smeared an alcohol pad on the skin, and shoved the needle and drug into a bulging forearm vein.

  The seizures stopped.

  But Barnes wasn’t breathing.r />
  Cheryl grabbed a bag and mask. “I’ll give him air.”

  The paramedic hooked him up to a heart monitor while Cheryl methodically compressed the Ambu bag. She watched Barnes’s chest rise and fall to the rhythm of the forced breaths. The mask formed a seal around his nose and mouth, and the air entered his lungs without inflating his stomach.

  She stopped long enough to feel for a carotid pulse. Strong. The monitor showed a normal rhythm.

  “He’s not breathing on his own,” she said. She found a laryngoscope and endotracheal tube. “I’m going to put in an ET tube.”

  “No, I’ll do it.” The paramedic moved to the head of the stretcher.

  She didn’t argue. Inserting an ET tube wasn’t part of her repertoire as a surgeon, and it was a procedure best performed by someone who did it every day. Inserted improperly, the tube could kill a patient—forcing air into the stomach instead of the lungs, or causing the patient to vomit and breathe in the stomach contents.

  The paramedic tilted back Barnes’s head, stuck the laryngoscope into the back of his throat, and slid an ET tube along the instrument, down into Barnes’s chest. With the Ambu bag on the end of the tube, the paramedic squeezed in air, while Cheryl listened with a stethoscope to verify that the tube was positioned correctly—into the trachea instead of the esophagus, and not past the main windpipe into a branch going to only one lung. The paramedic taped the tube into place, listened to Barnes’s chest himself, and put a blood pressure cuff on his arm.

  He’s probably done this a thousand times, Cheryl reassured herself.

  “We’re only about a mile from the hospital now,” he said.

  Cheryl took Barnes’s hand in hers. “Hang on, Chris. We’re almost there.” The ambulance sped through the cold streets of Toronto, lights flashing, siren blaring. “Just a few more minutes.” She prayed he would regain consciousness.

  But when they finally arrived at the ER of Toronto General, Barnes already looked dead.

  Chapter 2

  Elizabeth Barnes slept fitfully in her king-size bed, tossing like a child unable to get comfortable. At a distance she could have passed for a child—small, with delicate features and her hair cut in a bob. She wore an oversize T-shirt that nearly reached her knees, and she’d turned so many times it had started to twist around her legs.