Blindsided Read online

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Fatal Analysis

  1

  About The Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also By Tom Bierdz

  Blindsided

  Copyright © 2017 by Tom Bierdz All rights reserved.

  First Edition: February 2017

  Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  1

  I sat in my office, if it could be called that, in my cramped Seattle flat, studying for my psychiatry finals. If I passed, I could begin my private practice and earn some decent money and then we could move out of this crowded, overpriced apartment. My office was also storage for bicycles that belonged to my wife and son, an antique sewing machine, a trunk full of outgrown toys destined for Goodwill, boxes of clothes, knick-knacks, a potpourri of household items, my books, and office supplies. Text books were spread around my computer and desk. The desk was scratched, dented, and carved with a heart and a Cupid’s arrow uniting D.T. & C.J. I didn’t know, nor care who C. J. was; I knew D. T. stood for my wife’s niece.

  My long and arduous degree pursuit demanded sacrifice that in some ways was far more difficult for my family.

  The downstairs door slammed and I heard nine-year-old, Kevin shoot up the stairs, two at a time, as Hanna yelled, “Don’t bother your father. He’s studying for his exams.”

  Moments later Kevin edged into the room. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.” I put my book down. “What is it?”

  He stepped inside. “How long do you have to go to school? Tim says his Dad don’t have to study.”

  “That depends upon what you want to do with your life.”

  “I’m not going to be a shrink. That takes too long.”

  “Okay.”

  He started to walk away.

  “Is that what you came in here for?”

  Kevin padded back. “The principal wants to see you.”

  “Oh? And why would that be?”

  “I got into a fight with Tim.”

  “In class?”

  “In the corridor. Tim took a picture out of my locker and was waving it around.”

  “What was the picture?”

  “A selfie of Susan Hogan that she took on a picnic with her family.”

  I suspected the photo wasn’t risqué if it was taken at a family event. I assumed Tim was teasing him with it. “So you hit him?”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and studied the carpet before looking at me. “Yeah.”

  “Anybody get seriously hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll try to see your principal if I have time after my exam. If not, your mother will represent us. You and I will talk after we hear from your principal. Now, come here and give me a hug goodnight.”

  He did, then left to get ready for bed.

  I smiled to myself. I didn’t know that Kevin was already into girls. Hanna and Kevin made my life worthwhile. I couldn’t wait to start earning some big bucks so I could give them the things they deserved.

  I got back to the books for a couple of hours. Then, Hanna peaked into the room and said, “Come to bed. It’s after 11:00 pm.”

  “I have to stay with this. It might mean another semester if I don’t pass.”

  “Another semester?” A pained expression crossed her face. “You said the magic words. I’ll leave you be.”

  “Come here.” I patted my thighs.

  Wearing a light blue tee, her outfit for bed, with San Diego Zoo in dark blue script, she ambled over and sat on my lap.

  “How are those house plans coming?”

  She lit up. “I’ve made some changes in the kitchen. I can’t wait to show them to you.”

  “How about tomorrow after my tests. We’ll have a couple of drinks and you can show them to me.”

  “Did you forget about the meeting with the principal? Besides, I need to work and you have to get to the hospital.”

  “No hospital tomorrow. We’ll play it by ear.” I saw Hanna wince. I knew that play-it-by-ear thing had worn thin.

  We kissed goodnight. When she got up I gave her a little tap on her backside and noticed the upturn on the corner of her mouth.

  2

  SIX YEARS LATER

  My name is Grant Garrick. I’m a psychiatrist. It was a late afternoon in May when my world came crashing down. I was in my office on the upper floor of a refurbished Victorian on the outskirts of downtown Seattle, sitting across from Mary Burlington, an engaging, long-term bi-polar patient, who had been making positive strides. She hadn’t been seriously depressed for several months. I had even decreased her medication expecting her gains to stabilize. Divorced, she was a dark haired beauty in her late thirties, an OR nurse with a bawdy sense of humor who frequently entertained me with amusing stories of doctors I knew during surgery. I enjoyed our interviews when she was in a good mood because she was fun-loving, witty, and oozing with sex appeal. I was in a similar euphoric mood, feeling like I was sitting on top of the world. I had a thriving psychiatric practice and could boast of my many successes. I was married to Hanna, bright, beautiful, and loving, the complete companion, and I had a clever, fifteen-year-old son, Kevin, raw with potential but currently stuck in the quagmire of adolescence. We had just built our lovely home on acreage overlooking the Puget Sound. My life couldn’t get much better.

  Mary had been telling me, radiating a very positive energy in her humorous way, about the litany of men she had dated who were all losers.

  “You’ve got a lot going for you, Mary. The right one will come along.”

  “You need to clone yourself, Grant. Shame to waste yourself on one woman.”

  Transference where the patient has romantic feelings for the therapist was operating here. As long as I was aware of my counter-transference feelings and did not let them interfere, the process could lead to productive sessions because Mary would try to please me and follow my directions.

  There was a knock on my door. Startled, I looked up at Mary, my eyes widened with alarm. My secretary, Grace, interrupts my sessions for an emergency by buzzing my phone. Who was knocking? The knock continued, this time it was followed by Grace wedging her head through the opening crack. “It’s your wife?”

  I excused myself to Mary, jumped out of my seat, and followed Grace down the hallway. Hanna, her ashen face locked in distress, had fainted and was sprawled out on the floor of the waiting room in front of the receptionist window. I dropped down on my knees, gently slapped her face to revive her. She was breathing.

  “I think she hit her head when she fell,” Grace said.

  “Hand me that child chair,” I ordered, “I need to raise her legs to get blood flowing back to her head.” When Grace handed it to me, I lifted Hanna’s legs and placed them on top of the chair seat. Her blue skirt slid down her thighs.

  Mary, who had come out of the office to see what the commotion was, pulled her skirt back down her legs.

  Moments later, Hanna opened her eyes, and g
asped, “They found Kevin.”

  Disoriented by Hanna’s fainting fall, I didn’t connect the dots. “He didn’t come home?” The chilled expression on Hanna’s face jogged my memory a nano second later. “Yes, of course.”

  “He’s dead!”

  Shocked, I started to fall backward before righting myself with Grace and Mary’s support. “What are you saying?”

  “His body washed up…by a houseboat.”

  “He jumped?”

  “Off the Aurora Bridge.” She sobbed, streaming tears and convulsing in pain. I reached to comfort her. She pulled away, pummeling me with her fists, screaming. “You didn’t stop him.”

  Hanna sat in the conference room with a cup of tea that Grace had made. I was in a daze. My world had been shattered and I was running on pure adrenalin. I ordered Grace, my sixty-year-old secretary-receptionist, to cancel my next day appointments and ask Dr. Lewis to cover for me. She also needed to set up an appointment for Hanna with her doctor. I wanted her evaluated since she hit her head when she fell. Although it was evident to me she fainted because of her tragic loss, I wanted to eliminate any physical reasons. I recommended an electrocardiogram and blood work.

  “If you need anything. If there’s any way I can help?” Mary said, as she left.

  My head ached. I felt totally drained as I drove us in my Porsche to the morgue to identify the body. I couldn’t imagine how Hanna felt as she slumped down in her seat, her head cradled in her hand. There was an unmistakable chill in the thick, suppressing air. I drove silently past lonely crowds mingling with humanity, their thoughts private as they hustled to their targets. Were their thoughts happy or sad? Had any of them been blindsided like me? Forced to step on a land mine? Lose an appendage? Kevin was like that. He was an appendage of the Garrick nuclear family. He was part of us, part of me. I watched a child chase a balloon that had escaped, nearly running into street traffic had the father not intervened. Wasn’t that my role, to intervene and protect my child? Hanna believed that. I did, too.

  I glanced at Hanna who blotted her eyes with a tissue. She deeply inhaled, fighting to steel herself for the morgue.

  Helpless and impotent, with no strength to offer her, I parked the car and opened her door.

  She exited, in her own world, maintaining her distance from me.

  Deep down I knew we needed to be there for each other, to unite in strength, but for the moment I could not reach out to her. I was crushed that she had blamed me for Kevin’s death.

  We climbed the stairs to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office and followed the sign. Hanna’s shoes made a sticky, sucking sound as we trudged along the hallway. I held her arm as she was still unstable, teetering, and I had to support her weight. When we reached the entrance, I took both of her arms. She was pale as if all the blood had drained out of her face. “I think you should wait here.”

  She nodded, grateful for the reprieve.

  I squeezed her hand, smiled empathically, and turned to enter as the swinging door bumped her. She had changed her mind and followed me up to the pathologist. The room was cold like a meat locker and that added to my fear, chilling me to the bone. Wearing a white lab coat, Dr. Eugene Stafford entered the room. He pulled down the green mask that covered his bulbous nose and narrow mouth. “Are you Dr. Garrick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Garrick?”

  She nodded, visibly shaking, a tear snaking down her cheek.

  He offered a rueful smile. “I won’t prolong your agony.”

  How many times had he been placed in that awkward position of showing a family member’s remains to a loved one? I suspected the process took an emotional toll and was never easy.

  Stafford pulled on light-blue rubber gloves, snapping them against his wrist, stepped over to the wall of drawers, and rolled out the sheet-covered body. As he lifted the tarp, and revealed Kevin’s head, Hanna bent over, gagging, and spewing a stream of vomit onto the floor.

  “It’s okay,” he said, then nodded to me to remove her from the room.

  Bile rose in my throat as I put my arm around her and ushered her out to a bench in the hall. “Will you be okay here?”

  She nodded.

  I re-entered the room. Stafford pulled back the tarp and Kevin stared back, his eyes slightly open. A chill sliced through me. Stafford turned the body sideways. Kevin wore a Mariner’s navy T-shirt and blue jeans. His shirt was up around his chest, and his pants were pulled up around his knees.

  “He probably hit feet first,” the M. E. said. He was lucky. Usually when you hit the water at 70 to 80 mph the organs are torn loose and lacerated, bones are broken–“

  I squeezed my fists and fought to keep my mouth shut. Kevin was dead. He was anything but lucky…”

  “These scrapes along his midsection. Probably occurred when he was pulled from the water onto the houseboat. The only other sign of trauma was a purple discoloration covering most of his abdomen and midsection. He’d suffered massive internal hemorrhaging.”

  I felt lightheaded, nauseated. Children are not supposed to die before their parents.

  The pathologist continued talking to me as a colleague, not as a father. “He couldn’t have been in the water long as the sea reclaims the bodies quickly. Fish eat them. Not just sharks, but even little fish. They eat the eyes and other tender parts. As the body decays and opens up, all manner of sea creatures move in to feed. Eventually, the body comes apart. A body floats because decay causes gases to form within its cavity. If that cavity is breached for any reason, the gas escapes and the body sinks.”

  I missed most of what he said. My mind was on Kevin. I kept asking why. Why did he end his life?

  “Is he your son?”

  “Yes. How do I know that someone didn’t kill him or push him off?” I was still unable to accept the reality of the situation.

  He gave me that comforting look reserved for parents in denial. “I can’t say with one-hundred per-cent accuracy, but I checked for wounds or evidence that might suggest an accident or even homicide. I also checked for needle marks or other signs of drug use. There were none. Was there a suicide note?”

  “None found.”

  “His only identification was the address on this key in his pocket along with a twenty dollar bill and twenty-six cents in pocket change.”

  I picked up the key, turned it over and looked at it. It had the tag with our address on it. I remembered arguing with Hanna that it was like giving the thieves an invitation to take anything from our home they wanted. Hanna argued she was tired of having keys made for Kevin each time he lost the key. This way a lost key would get returned. I grimaced as I thought I had won that argument. Had I known, I wouldn’t have let Kevin keep the address attached. Without it we may not have been called to identify the body for days and Kevin’s body might have deteriorated beyond recognition, requiring a DNA match. So it had worked out.

  Hanna had a naive sense of the world. She believed the best in people. Maybe because of my profession I had a more realistic view. Also, because of Hanna’s idealism, Kevin’s suicide could have a deepening, permanent effect. A child’s suicide would prove devastating for any parent, but those that had been hardened by life’s disappointing realities might be able to cope better. “It’s Kevin’s house key.” I began to pocket it when the coroner held out his hand.

  “I still need to keep that. When the investigation is completed, the police will return it to you.”

  “May I have a moment with him?”

  “Sure.” He removed his gloves and stepped out of the room.

  I inched over to Kevin, bent down and kissed the top of his head. My stomach fluttered like the flapping wings of a bird of prey. “Why, Kevin, why? Why didn’t you tell me how bad it was? I didn’t know. I would have done anything to make the pain go away.” Amid the flowing tears, I locked the image of him lying there into my mind knowing it would haunt me for the rest of my years. Finally, I turned away, left the room.

  Hanna was
outside leaning against the car. When I clicked the remote, unlocking the door, she crept inside.

  Silence ruled as we drove home merging into the rush hour traffic. Were there other travelers like us who would come home to a vacuum, missing a loved one? I switched on the radio for music to cheer me up.

  “No music,” Hanna growled.

  I shut it off, glanced at my wife. Her face was contorted with pain, locked in an aimless stare. I worried about her. She was Kevin’s favorite. They were very close. As a psychiatrist I knew the lethal damage a broken heart could cause. Hanna wasn’t a frail woman, but she wasn’t particularly strong either.

  Inside the house I went directly into the kitchen and grabbed my bottle of scotch. I put a couple of ice cubes in a glass when Hanna did the same. She placed her glass next to mine and asked me to pour her one too.

  “You don’t drink scotch,” I said.

  “Today, I do.”

  I poured the drinks and took them into the family room where Hanna sat holding a black T-shirt of Kevin’s that had been lying on a hassock. She lifted it to her face and smelled his scent.

  I stopped in the middle of the room not wanting to interrupt the moment.

  She put the shirt down and reached for her drink. “We have to make funeral arrangements.”

  Nodding, I said, “But not now.”

  “What do you think, a brief affair or a full mass?”

  “I need some time, Hanna. We just learned…”

  “I need to put some order to my life.”

  “We will, just not right now.”

  She drained her scotch. “You win, Grant, as you always do.”

  Why did she want to pick a fight with me? I bit my tongue. I needed to weigh my response, not accentuate the argument. “It’s been one hell of a day.”

  “Make me another.” She held out her glass.