Oath of Office by Michael Palmer

gathered their things. “’Cause you never know.”

CHAPTER 8
    The final battle for Dr. John Meacham’s life was over almost before it began. On a vent, with IV blood pressure support and other meds, he was essentially being resuscitated before his heart stopped beating. Dr. Schwartz, the salaried intensive care specialist, who had deferred to Lou for the insertion of the chest tube, administered some cardiac stimulants without any success, and then, after no more than ten minutes, turned to Lou.
    “Do you see any reason to continue, Doctor?” he asked.
    Lou flashed on the day when he and Meacham had first met at the Physician Wellness Office. Meacham was as tight as a drum skin, and positive that he would never be allowed to practice medicine again. Lou, as a survivor of disaster in his personal and professional lives, knew otherwise. Most of that first session had consisted of him exposing his new client to the life strategies of AA—strategies that he had ridiculed at first as being naïve and simplistic—until he actually began to use them in his life.
    Meacham had caught on quickly. With the help of an AA sponsor and people at the rehab, his need to drink ceased almost immediately. Following that, his hair-trigger temper gradually came under control.
    Now this.
    “I can’t think of anything else we should be doing, Dr. Schwartz,” Lou heard his voice saying as if from down a long tube.
    Schwartz looked up at the clock and nodded toward Sara Turnbull. “Seven forty P.M. ,” he proclaimed.
    And just like that, John Meacham’s life was done.
    “Has his wife, Carolyn, been around?” Lou asked, realizing that in the craziness of the hours just past, he had lost track of some of his own civility.
    “She was in the family room a little while ago,” Sara said. “Should I check?”
    “No,” Lou said. “I know her. I’ll go.”
    “Out the sliding doors and down the hallway to the left.”
    Head down, consumed by heavy sadness at the senseless deaths of so many, Lou stepped through the unit doors.
    The husky detective was still at his post. “So, Doc, how’s it going in there?”
    “It’s not,” Lou said.
    “Dead?”
    “Dead.”
    The cop nodded. “Whether it’s cops’ bullets at the scene or a shiv in the back in the slammer from one of the other inmates, these things almost always seem to end this way. Well, there go the answers.”
    “I suppose,” Lou replied, wondering how easy it would be for him to let matters drop.
    The cop was right. There was still a boatload of unanswered questions, starting with the meaning of the words no witnesses .
    Lou opened the lounge door. The modest room, furnished in vinyl, with dog-eared magazines scattered about, was deserted. His eyes went first to a television set mounted catty-corner, high up on the far wall. The volume was turned off, though Lou could easily read the CNN news flash graphic from across the room.
    BREAKING NEWS: SUSPECTED MASS MURDERER IN CRITICAL CONDITION.
    “Not anymore,” Lou murmured, wondering if the grim outcome would have been any different had the local neurosurgeon not gone probing blindly for a bullet in or near the area of the brain dealing with cardiac rhythmicity.
    He averted his gaze from the broadcast just as the door to the family room opened and Carolyn Meacham entered. She was slight woman with carefully trimmed gray hair and more makeup than Lou felt she needed. It was surprising that there were no family or friends with her, but perhaps some were on the way. Her makeup did nothing to disguise her pain. Without a word, she raced across to Lou and threw her arms around him, burying her face against his chest.
    She was a spirited woman—a New Yorker, Lou thought he remembered, with a hard edge. He had liked her from the very beginning. In all the time he had dealt with her and Meacham, he had never once seen her cry. Now, her tears flowed liberally. It was impossible to imagine what she must have been experiencing since