Guest Author
September-October 2003
D.P. Lyle, M.D.
author of Devil's Playground
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Author Bio:
Douglas Lyle was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama where his childhood interests revolved around football, baseball, and building rockets in his backyard. The latter pursuit was common in Huntsville during the 1950’s and 60’s due to the nearby NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center. As a boy, when the ground shook it simply meant Werner von Braun was testing a new rocket. Now, in California, where he resides, it is more a Mother Nature thing.
After leaving Huntsville and before landing in SoCal, he attended college, medical school, and served an internship at the University of Alabama; followed by a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Texas at Houston; then a Fellowship in Cardiology at The Texas Heart Institute, also in Houston. For the past 25 years, he has practiced Cardiology in Orange County, California.He is currently working on his 4th novel and writes “The Doctor Is In,” a monthly medical and forensic Q and A column, which appears in “The March of Crime” and “Sleuth Sayer,” the newsletters for the Southern California and Southwestern Chapters of Mystery Writers of America, respectively.
Through his website The Writers’ Medical and Forensics Lab (www.dplylemd.com) he works with writers and readers to enrich their understanding of complex medical and forensic issues in the stories they write and read. He has worked with many published authors and with the writers and directors of several popular television shows, including Law and Order, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, and CSI: Miami.
His book, Murder and Mayhem: A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers is a compilation of the most interesting questions he has received over the years. A television series based on the book is currently in development. His two thrillers Devil’s Playground and Double Blind were released in 2003.
In addition to reading and writing, his current interests include blues guitar, golf, travel, and collecting vintage guitars and fountain pens. He shares his life with Nan and three cats: Missy (aka Miss Priss), a gray Abyssinian; Ozzie (aka Peanut), an Ocicat who fancies himself a member of the Raptor family; and Bennie (aka The Bean), a Bengal who is nocturnal to a fault.
Excerpt from Devil's Playground:
Chapter 1
James McElroy was into the sixteenth hour of the fifth day of his East Coast turn-around. The two Black Mollies he popped outside Gallup, New Mexico were on their downhill leg, no longer packing enough punch to keep him fully awake. Only two hours to L. A. No sweat.
His back and shoulders ached from wrestling the eighteen-wheeler since sun up in Amarillo and his butt felt as though it had grown to the seat. He had made good time, 950 miles so far, and were it not for a shredded front tire near Tucumcari, he would be home by now. Instead, he faced another 130 monotonous miles.
He fired up a fresh Marlboro with the glowing remnant of the one he had lit seven minutes earlier and tossed the dead one out the window, creating a firefly wake, which quickly dissolved into the thick blackness of the desert night. He drained the last of the Wild Turkey in two gulps and dropped the bottle in the passenger side floorboard, where it clanked against its empty twin.
He yawned, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and inspected himself in the rearview mirror. Two days growth, a thick layer of road dirt, and eyes, red to the point of bleeding, stared back. He curled his lip and ran his index finger across his front teeth, attempting to scrub the film from them. A dab of dried ketchup, left there by the greasy hamburgers he had picked up in Flagstaff, sat on his chin like a birth mark. Jesus, he looked like shit.He also needed to piss. He should have stopped at King’s Truck Stop in Mercer’s Corner a couple of miles back. Whenever he made this run, he usually did stop there for a quick piece of pie and a caffeine jolt to carry him through the last two hours. Tonight, he had intended to, remembered seeing it as he flew by, but his mind must have been elsewhere. Where? He couldn’t remember. Probably concentrating on the white line that constantly disappeared beneath his left front wheel and seemed fuzzier with each passing mile.
He sucked down the last quarter of the cigarette, tossed the butt out the window, and grasped the gear lever. The engine whined in protest as he downshifted and the air breaks squealed and huffed, hauling the beast down from eighty-five miles per hour. He eased to the shoulder of Interstate 40.
As he stepped from the cab, a twenty mile per hour wind gust pushed the cold night air through his shirt, releasing an involuntary shiver. He snagged his jacket from the truck, slipped it on, and yanked open his fly. As he urinated, he wavered, the wind buffeting him more than his alcohol sabotaged legs could handle, forcing him to lean against the truck’s door for support.
After unloading the Wild Turkey, he zipped his fly and inhaled the night air in a futile attempt to shred the cobwebs that clutched his brain. He yawned and climbed into the cab, where the smell of stale whiskey and grease wafted up from the passenger side floorboard. He gathered up the empty bottles and the hamburger wrappers and tossed them into the night. Slamming the truck in gear, he accelerated down the shoulder of the freeway, gravel flying.
After regaining the roadway, he snatched the CB mic from its dashboard mount. “Breaker 19. This is Big Dog, westbound, I-40. Need a smoky check.”
“Break 19. How you doin’, Big Dog. This is Gatorman outta Jacksonville, eastbound. All clear over my shoulder. Put the hammer down, Good Buddy.”
“Thank you, Gatorman. This is Big Dog, westbound and down.”
All clear. Maybe he could make LA in an hour and a half. The Peterbilt growled and the tires whined as he accelerated to ninety-five miles per hour. He wanted this trip to end, wanted to dump his load of gasoline in L.A. and get to Van Nuys where Lucy would be waiting with a warm shower and a warmer body. Christmas was still two weeks away, but maybe he'd give her the present he had bought for her tonight, rather than wait. She always looked good in black lace.
He massaged his stiff neck and yawned, wishing he had a cup of strong coffee to knock down the fatigue.
Soon, gravity tugged at his eyelids, tipped his head downward until his chin rested on his chest, and drew sleep into his brain. Warm, wonderful, welcome sleep.
The truck lurched as it slipped off the roadway, bouncing his chin against his chest, jerking him to wakefulness. He yanked the steering wheel to the left; the tires squealed, clutching the pavement. The truck wobbled unsteadily, and for a brief moment he thought he had lost it, but somehow managed to regain control. He gulped air while his heart did the Meringue in his chest.
Jesus, that was close.
Fatigue and somnolence evaporated as if a double espresso had been injected directly into his heart. He quickly recaptured ninety-five miles per hour, settled in his seat, and returned his concentration to the white line that led him toward L.A.
From nowhere, an unseen dagger of ice-cold pain penetrated his left temple, his brain, squeezing tears from his eyes. Through the windshield, the monochromatic night mutated into an explosion of color. The white line he followed remained white, stark white, but was now razor sharp, unwavering, as straight as a blueprint line.
The parade of red taillights, stretching before him, and the line of twinkling headlights, which delineated the eastbound lanes to his left, transmuted into smears of brilliant pastels like schools of tropical fish racing through a black ocean, their colors blending into long multicolored ribbons. Hot yellow, orange, and red fused with cool blue, green, and violet, creating a psychedelic cacophony of color in which each melted into the other while maintaining its own distinctiveness.
He blinked and shook his head. Surely, this was a dream. What else could it be? Panic swelled in his chest, but before it could take hold, it waned, sinking in the depths of the colors that swirled in his brain.
He scanned the pastel river before him, searching. For what? He didn’t know. He knew only that it was there and he must find it.
Nothing.
Panic returned with a surge of heat that expanded in his chest, whipping his heart into a gallop. His throat constricted as if snared by a hangman’s noose.
His focus shifted to the oncoming lanes to his left. Where was it? What was it? His gaze skimmed along the river of molten colors. It was there somewhere. He didn’t know how he knew it was, but he knew.
Panic and frustration smothered him. Sweat rolled down his forehead, into his eyes, as the heat within his chest swept outward, into his face, down his arms and legs. His blood felt like a boiling, bubbling cauldron. He wiped the sticky sweat from his face with his sleeve, then cranked down the window and sucked in the cold air in huge gulps.
There. That’s it. In the oncoming lanes. One pair of headlights, in the distance, neither white nor pastel nor fused with the tropical flow of color, but rather bright, crimson, penetrating, captured his gaze.
Alert, focused, he slid into the left lane and pressed the accelerator to the floor, hurling the churning Peterbilt forward.
One hundred, one hundred and five.
He moved to the right lane, passed a station wagon, to the left, nearly clipping a Cadillac.
One hundred and ten.
A Porsche swerved to the right to avoid being trampled, then waffled in the turbulence the truck dropped in its wake.
One hundred fifteen.
He aimed the truck off the road into the 100 yard wide median that separated I-40 East and West. The truck bounced and gyrated over the rough terrain, eating the thick Creosote scrub brush and the low, round Burroweed in its path like a giant locust in a feeding frenzy. Cutting across a three-foot deep, fifteen-foot wide dry wash, its massive steel bumper ripped a twenty-foot Desert Catalpa Willow from its moorings and tossed it high into the night air. The driver saw none of this, his focus locked on the ruby headlights, now 800 yards away.
That corner of his brain where reason and sanity resided, screamed at him, imploring him to turn back. He wanted to veer away from the oncoming traffic, to slam on the brakes, to stop this madness, but he could not. His hands would not turn the steering wheel; his foot would not release its pressure on the accelerator.
As he neared the roadway, the oncoming cars, swerved, sped up, slowed down, locked brakes, anything to avoid the rampaging truck. McElroy ignored them, rocketing past, focused on only one, much as a cheetah gallops past easy prey to strike at the one Springbok that is most vulnerable. The one selected by some genetically imprinted template. The one that must be taken if the cheetah is to survive.
A similar need pulled James McElroy forward. He wanted to turn away, but the tenacious urge tightened its grip, squeezing his resistance into submission.
His target was now directly ahead, 400 yards. The truck climbed onto the pavement, brush hanging from its grill, like remnants from the jowls of some large carnivore after a successful hunt. A car swerved to the left, another to the right, catching the gravel shoulder, flipping over, sliding into the night in a swirl of dust.
A station wagon jerked sharply, too sharply, spinning off the pavement, tipping onto two wheels before coming to rest against a twenty-foot boulder.
The truck moved to the left and straddled the white line, staking its claim to the roadway.
The ruby lighted car moved left, right, then left again, seeking refuge, finding none. The car pitched forward, tires screaming and smoking as the driver assaulted the brake pedal. Too late.
The truck consumed the car as easily as it had the scrub brush, flattening it like the bugs that decorated its windshield. Seven of its eighteen tires ruptured, fragmented, releasing their grip on the road. The polished aluminum petroleum-filled trailer swung forward, dragging the cab behind it as the rig jack-knifed, tipped on its side, sparks flying, and exploded, transforming the desert into an inferno.
Chapter 2
By 10 pm, Deputy Samantha Cody had spent two hours catching up on paper work. She hated it. Sitting on her butt, reading mundane reports, completing repetitious forms, was not her idea of police work. The only thing she hated more than doing the work was looking at stacks of it on her desk. She was never this far behind, but the past two months had been neither easy nor routine.
The arrest and trial of Richard Earl Garrett for the murder of three local children and his defense that “the devil made me do it” had turned the quiet desert community of Mercer’s Corner into a macabre carnival. Newspaper and TV reporters roamed the streets, sniffing for sensational stories. Visitors drove hundreds of miles just to say they had seen the town. A group of Satanic groupies had camped on the corner near the Sheriff’s Department everyday for a month. Locals were terrified. Thank God, the entire mess was about to end.
Garrett had already been convicted and tomorrow would be the final arguments in the penalty phase. Sentencing should soon follow, and then, maybe everybody would go back where they came from and life could return to normal. None to soon for Sam.
She had finished off a granola bar, two cups of coffee, and half of the paperwork when she heard the front door open. A voice echoed down the hall. “Hello? Anybody here?”
“Down here,” she called back. Footsteps approached and Nathan Klimek entered.
“How are you doing?” A broad smile erupted from his tanned, model-like face.
“What can I do for you, Mister Klimek?”
“I saw the lights on and your Jeep out front. I thought you might want to get some coffee or something.”
“I told you. No interviews.”
Nathan Klimek, star reporter for “Straight Story,” a supermarket check-out counter tabloid rag, had hounded her for three weeks for an interview. So had every other newspaper and TV reporter in town.
“Now that the trial is over, I hoped you had changed your mind.” He forked his fingers through his thick, light brown hair, sweeping it back from his forehead.
“The trial isn’t over. Or don’t you need sentencing to write your story? That’s right, I forgot. You make it up as you go along.”
“We stand behind every story we print.”
“Just not down wind.” Her brow wrinkled into a frown.
“You don’t like me very much do you?”
“Perceptive.”
“What did I do?” He gave her a look somewhere between shock and hurt. Practiced most likely, she thought.
“What did you do? Are you kidding? Look around. The chaos that has surrounded this trial.” She waved her hand toward the window. “You broke the story. You opened the door and let the flies in.”
“It’s news.”
“No, it’s not. Not your kind of news, anyway. It’s a tragedy. For the victims, the families, and this town. You made it an international event.”
“People are interested in child murders. Especially if Satanism is involved.”
“Satan, my ass. Garrett is a sicko that hacked up three innocent children. He isn’t possessed or the son of Satan or anything like that. He’s a child killer. Nothing more. But, your paper splashed his story from coast to coast and we have to bear the brunt of the morbid curiosity that followed.”
“But...”
The phone rang.
Sam waved him away and picked up the receiver. “Hello.” She listened for a moment. ”Where?” She exhaled loudly. “I’ll be right there.” She dropped the phone in its cradle and looked at Nathan. “You’ll have to excuse me. Duty calls.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing that would interest you. A traffic accident. But, if one of the drivers has three heads, I’ll call you.”
He laughed, shaking his head. She couldn’t prevent a half smile from raising one corner of her mouth.
He followed her out and she locked the door behind them.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m sure you will,” she said as she jumped into her Sheriff’s Department Jeep.
She fired up the engine and headed north through town, toward the freeway. The call had been from Sheriff Charlie Walker. A major accident, involving a gasoline truck, had occurred on I-40 East four miles west of town. She flipped on the roof-mounted flashing lights and accelerated down the on-ramp, merging onto I-40 West.
A mile from the accident site, she could see a red-orange ball of fire, which lit the night as if the sun had crashed into the desert. As she cut through the wide median, flames seemed to tower above her, licking at the low-hanging scattered clouds, painting their undersides orange. A thick plume of oily smoke churned skyward, obliterating the half moon, which peeked between the clouds, and cast the desert into an even deeper darkness, intensifying the glow of the blaze.
She eased across the east bound lanes and parked off the roadway. Stepping from the Jeep, she took in the spectacle before her.
The smoldering gasoline truck had consumed most of its cargo and been reduced to a hissing metal carcass, which glowed a cherry red. The flames, though still leaping thirty feet in the air, diminished minute by minute. Two firemen wrestled with anaconda-like hoses and directed thick streams of water at the wreck, which sputtered in protest and released clouds of steam into the sky. The air was thick and rancid with the smell of burnt petroleum, like an old service station, its floor slicked with years of dripping oil pans. The entire scene looked like an Irwin Allen disaster movie.
An overturned Camaro had cut a 150 foot long trench in the desert floor with its roof before coming to rest against a condo-sized boulder. A rusted station wagon, its right front wheel folded beneath its frame, hugged a droopy Catalpa Willow as if seeking protection much as a child pulls bed covers over its head to escape the troll that lurks in the shadowed corner of his room. A frazzled family of four huddled nearby. Sixty cars lined the freeway shoulder, their wide-eyed occupants coalesced in several groups, some talking, some staring silently, all hoping to see something gruesome no doubt.
She slipped on her leather jacket, stuffed her strawberry blonde ponytail beneath the collar, and tugged the zipper up to her chin to block the cold desert wind. She saw Charlie standing near one of the fire trucks, talking with Fire Chief Manny Orosco. She shoved her hands in her pockets and headed in their direction.
“Sam.” Charlie Walker nodded to her as she approached.
“Charlie. Manny. Jesus, what a mess. What happened?”
“Big rig crossed the median and hit a car head on and exploded. The Camaro,” he yanked his head toward the overturned car, “and the wagon over there got lucky.”
“How many killed?”
“Whoever is in the car under the rig for sure. Two kids in the Camaro and the driver of the rig were taken to the hospital.”
“The driver survived?” Sam looked at the molten mass, which continued to steam and spit, its heat puncturing the cold night air, warming her 200 feet away.
“Thrown from the cab. Or jumped. Found him about fifty yards from the wreck. Banged up pretty good. Unconscious. Smelled like a whiskey bottle.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Why don’t you get over to the hospital and see what you can find out from the kids and the driver, if he wakes up. I’ll see that the family in the station wagon are taken care of and be along in a few minutes. Not much more I can do here.”
Dr. Caitlin Roberts’ head had been on the pillow for a half hour when the phone rang. This year’s flu bug had turned her usually busy office into a nightmare and she did not escape the sniffling hordes until after 7 pm. Hospital rounds took another two hours. People were always sicker around holidays, especially Christmas, and she had twice the usual number of hospitalized patients to see. Home at 9:30, she wolfed down a tuna sandwich while talking with her husband Ray and her son Ray, Jr. Then, a hot shower and a welcome soft pillow and warm comforter.
She glanced at the clock, 10:30, hoping the call was a wrong number. No such luck.
Ten minutes later, she turned into Mercer Community Hospital’s parking lot, greeted by flashing red lights from the two ambulances, idling on the Emergency Department’s receiving ramp.
Sitting along I-40 and being the only hospital for fifty miles, Mercer Community inherited several dozen major accident victims each year, despite being poorly equipped to handle such cases. Seemed like most of them fell into Cat's lap.
“What’s the story, Rosa?” Cat asked as the automatic doors to the ER hissed open.
Rosa Gomez, the ER head nurse for longer than anyone could remember, led her to the trauma room. “It’s a bad one, this time. Dude trashed his big rig.”
Cat absorbed the scene before her. A large man of about 50 and over 250 pounds lay on the stretcher; a respiratory tech squeezed an ambu bag, inflating the man’s lungs rhythmically. One arm, strapped to an arm board, hung off the stretcher and received fluid through IV tubing. Sue Tilden, one of the nurses, struggled to place a second IV line in the other arm. Cat glanced at the cardiac monitor above the stretcher where a series of electric blips raced across the screen. Heart rate 130 per minute, but steady.
“What’s his BP?” Cat asked as she began her examination.
“80 over 50,” Rosa said.
The massive man, gray and mottled, splotched with blue-black ecchymoses and bloody abrasions, showed no response to the needle being jabbed into his arm or the tube in his throat. Dark blood, dirt, and gravel covered his chest, legs, and shredded clothing. His pupils, dilated to two oily pools, did not respond to the penlight Cat aimed at them.
She probed and examined his neck without removing the stabilizing cervical collar that the paramedics had placed on him at the scene. Better to wait until X-rays were done before moving his neck. She slapped her stethoscope on his chest. His lungs crackled, gurgled, and wheezed, but his heart sounds were normal.
After securing the second IV to his arm, Sue slipped a Foley catheter through his penis into his bladder, releasing a flow of bloody urine into the attached bag.
Cat mentally ran through a differential diagnosis: massive trauma; head injury with possible intracranial bleed; possible neck injury; lung and kidney contusions; probable intraabdominal organ damage. At least he still had a stable cardiac rhythm and an acceptable blood pressure given the circumstances.
Just then, the regular monitor blips tripped, wobbled, and fell into a chaotic pattern.
“V-Tach,” Sue shouted.
So much for a stable rhythm. Cat eyed the monitor, confirming Sue’s interpretation of the rhythm, now emergent, lethal.
“Warm up the paddles,” Cat ordered. “Lidocaine 100 milligrams IV STAT.” She smeared the defibrillator paddles with gel and pressed them against his chest. “Clear.” She depressed the red buttons on each paddle, releasing a salvo of electricity. His body lurched, then relaxed.
“V-Fib, now.”
“Great.” Cat recharged the defibrillator and again jolted the man with 400 Watt/Seconds of electricity.
“Asystole.”
Cat looked at the flat-line EKG tracing on the monitor. “Let’s get CPR going.”
Tina Flores, one of the ER techs, began rhythmic compressions of the man’s chest, creating a pattern with the ambu lung inflations--five compressions to each inflation. Though Tina was a large, stout woman, she lacked the strength to adequately compress the trucker’s massive chest and the failing heart that lay inside. Rosa hooked a foot stool with her ankle and slid it close to Tina’s feet. Tina stepped up on it, gaining better leverage. She put her full weight behind each compression.
That’s better,” Cat said. “Is the Lido on board?”
“Yes,” Sue said.
Cat continued to eye the monitor. “Give an amp of Bicarb and one of Epi.”
Sue injected Sodium Bicarbonate into one IV while Rosa pushed Epinephrine in the other.
The fire drill continued for thirty minutes but to no avail. Cat pronounced the man dead at 11:22 pm.
Sam stepped through the automatic doors into the emergency department, greeted by the aroma of alcohol, Lysol, and other unidentifiable chemicals, which mixed with the burnt oil smell of her own clothing with nauseating effect. She entered the trauma room as Rosa pulled a sheet over the dead man’s head. Purple feet stared at her from beneath the sheet’s edge. Bad news.
Cat handed the chart to Sue, shaking her head. “Sorry, Sam. He didn’t make it. Head and chest injuries were just too much.”
“Great. There are a few thousand questions I wanted to ask him.” Sam exhaled loudly. “Blood alcohol?”
“Won’t have that until the lab can do it tomorrow. From the smell, I’d guess well over the legal limit. We’ll do a drug screen also. Never met a trucker that didn’t pop uppers. Time is money and sleeping makes nothing.”
“What about the kids in the other car?”
“Few bumps and bruises, scared half to death, but they’ll be OK.”
“Can I talk with them?”
“Sure. Come on.”
Cat led Sam to the minor trauma room and introduced her to Rick and Debbie Freeman, a young couple on their way to Flagstaff, Arizona to visit Debbie’s parents. Two pale and worn faces offered weak smiles as Sam sat down.
“You guys OK?”
“Been better,” Rick said, his eyes puffy from crying. He looked to be about 19, thin, pale, long brown hair in need of washing.
“Has anyone notified your family yet?”
“Yeah,” Debbie replied. Tears had cut snail trails through her dirt encrusted face and her hair had been tossed in all directions. She wore an over-sized flannel shirt, baggy jeans, and untied black tennis shoes. “My mom and dad are coming from Flagstaff.”
“What happened?”
“It was unbelievable,” Rick said, Debbie nodding in agreement. “This truck came out of nowhere, from the bushes on to the highway. I saw it a half a mile away but thought...I don’t know what I thought...maybe that it was on a cross road or underpass or something. By the time it reached our side of the freeway, it was too late. I tried to change lanes, but it seemed to come after us.”
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know. It was all so fast. It seemed like he was after us. Or somebody.”
“And trying to avoid the truck, you flipped over?”
“Yeah. He took up the entire road, so I tried to slip by on the shoulder but my wheel caught the gravel and...after that we just hung on.”
Debbie began to cry again, burying her face into her husband’s shoulder. He wrapped a protective arm around her.
“Sam.”
She turned to see Rosa peeking around the door.
“Sheriff Walker’s on the phone,” she said. “Line three.”
Sam excused herself and walked to the nurse’s station. She picked up the phone and punched line three’s blinking button. “Yeah, Charlie. What’s up?”
“We IDed the people in the other car. It was John and Connie Beeson.”
The words struck Sam square in the stomach, pushing acid into the back of her throat. Connie Beeson. Her third grade teacher. Her mother’s close friend before her mother had died. The Garrett jury foreman.
