Death Rounds (13 page)

“How’d Rossit like that?” she asked, her sarcasm evident.

“Speechless!”

“Does that solve your problem with him?”

“Not really. I found out he’s linked up with Hurst to nail me at Death Rounds.”

“What! How’d you find that out?”

I told her about the call Len had gotten from Hurst.

“Jesus Christ,” she exclaimed. “Rossit and Hurst—those two lizards deserve each other. But if you were right about the diagnosis, won’t that shut them up?”

“It’ll take some of the steam out of Rossit, but I did send the woman home, Janet. He’ll push that to the max, and whichever way you dress it up, at the very least I made a lethal error in judgment. As for Hurst, well, you know how dangerous he can be if anyone or anything threatens the good name of St. Paul’s. He’d love to get rid of me at the best of times, so I’m sure he’d be particularly willing to throw me to the wolves over this.”

Complete silence was Janet’s answer to that reminder. Hurst had once gone as far as to make me a suspect in a homicide investigation at St. Paul’s to divert the police from discovering some of the more sleazy secrets in the place. As things turned out, the real killer was eventually discovered, but I’d exposed just how ruthless Hurst could be in pursuing whatever he thought would protect the hospital’s reputation and his place of power. We’d been wary enemies ever since and probably would remain so for life.

“It stinks!” Janet said vehemently, interrupting my gloomy musings. “How can Hurst get away with that kind of crap? Why don’t all the other wienies who call themselves chiefs over there stand up to him? Are you and Sean the only two with...”

Her outburst went on for more than a minute. Whenever she sprang to my defense like that, it meant she thought I was in a lot of trouble. But right now I was a whole lot more worried about her safety than my career.

“.., more women on that council of yours would put an end to his smarmy nonsense—”

“Janet,” I interrupted, “the only important thing right now is what’s going on at your hospital. I’m even beginning to think it’s dangerous for you to continue working there.” I hadn’t intended to blurt out my worst fears. But I kept seeing Sanders’s corpse, and I couldn’t shake the sounds of that creeping figure in the dark. My pacing the carpet last night hadn’t helped either. I’d imagined enough “what if” nightmares for a Wes Craven festival.

“Earl!” she exclaimed, sounding appalled, “I
couldn’t
leave my practice!” Her silence made me feel I should have known better. “Besides,” she added in a much softer voice, “those nurses became ill away from the hospital.”

Startled to hear her echo my own thoughts from earlier that morning, I reexperienced the same panicky fear I’d had then; there was no safe place for her. I felt my courage collapsing in a rush.

“Don’t think I haven’t taken precautions,” she quickly added, “and Cam’s insisting everybody in the hospital pay strict attention to isolation procedures until this business is sorted out.”

I wasn’t at all reassured, and Janet must have sensed it.

“Look, Earl, there’s nowhere we can run to,” she persisted. “Our best chance is to see if we can find out how those two women were killed. There’s got to be a common link, someone with a connection to all those cases.”

It sounded hopeless. “But you couldn’t find it. That may mean it’s not there.”

“I won’t accept that until you go over the files of the Phantom’s victims with me.” Her voice was getting a clipped edge to it that warned she was digging in her heels.

But out of fear, I could be stubborn too. “Hell,” I persisted, “if there was something incriminating in those files, they may have been stolen last night.”

“They’re fine. I checked first thing this morning after I had the same worry.”

The thought of her going back down to that basement, even during the day, abruptly refilled my head with nightmares.

“Janet! I thought we had a deal! You agreed you wouldn’t do anything alone—”

“Relax. I had security accompany me to open the room.”

I tried another tack to dissuade her. “Well then, if those records held such incriminating evidence, don’t you think whoever’s behind this would have taken them last night to keep you from looking at them anymore? Maybe the fact he left them is proof that further checking is pointless.”

“Maybe he couldn’t risk going back to get them, what with all the excitement you caused down there and electricians prowling around the place,” she replied sweetly.

I knew I wasn’t going to budge her. Her determination was steel once she made up her mind about something important. Clearly she’d decided we were continuing the hunt.

She listened to my silence for a moment, then added, “Earl, I know last night scared you, deeply, just as it scared me. And the autopsy today must have been gruesome for you. I can only guess at how all that has left you terribly frightened for me.”

She paused, giving me time to mutter, “You got me pegged again, lady.”

“But I’m not being stupid,” she continued, ignoring the wisecrack. “One thing I’ve done today is broadcast that Michael and I found nothing. I’ve told everyone here that the investigation was a complete waste of time and that’s why I’m back at work. Even what happened at the elevator, I said, was the result of your imagining noises and having a panic attack.”

“What!” I couldn’t believe I’d heard her right. “Janet! You didn’t,” I protested. “I don’t want people at UH thinking I get panic attacks. I’m a chief of ER, for Christ’s sake. Wild Bill Tippet will have a field day teasing—”

“Well excuse me!” she interrupted, laughing. “One minute you’re worried about my life, but the next, your reputation takes a little ding, and you get all upset!”

She’d gotten me. “I’m not upset,” I objected, feeling foolish. But within seconds I’d joined her in laughing at myself. With one yank of my own ego she’d distracted me out of my fear. For a brief moment I felt my anxiety lessen a notch. God, she knew how to handle me.

“Good, because it’s a small price to pay,” she concluded. “Now, whoever’s behind the infections won’t see you or me as a threat.”

Still pretty thin protection, I thought. But thanks to Janet, I was a little calmer. Maybe I
was
prone to panic attacks. If so, Janet was a better remedy than Ativan any day.

“Have you talked to Michael yet?” she asked in a firm voice, making it clear we were switching away from the topic of her safety. Part of her remarkable spirit was her capacity to not dwell on a problem that nothing more could be done about for the moment. “Things we cannot change,” she would repeatedly remind me when I bogged down in worry that was futile. It was one of the ways she had of finding enough courage for us both.

“No, I’ m phoning him right now,” I replied. Determined to match her bravery, I added, “Either he lets me in officially, or I do a B&E on all your records tonight.”

“Not alone you won’t!” she snapped. “Our deal goes both ways.”

“Hey, just kidding,” I answered. “There’s no way I’d go back into that basement by myself.” But I’ d thought about it if Michael balked on me and if that’s what it was going to take to identify a murderer. Along with the return of my nerve came resignation. Until this killer was caught, neither Janet nor I could be safe. I said good-bye, then tried to reach Michael through locating. They couldn’t find him.

* * * *

By midafternoon I’d worked through the usual menu of a busy day in ER—heart attacks, asthmatics, hemorrhagic shock, and a half-dozen complaints of abdominal pain. The MVAs had kept rolling in, a few strokes arrived, and the psychiatric emergencies—some of them violent—were many, due to the storm. Between these big cases were the legions of minor problems, everything from colds to VD. But it was a good thing no one asked me the patients’ names. I’d like to think I’d been kind and reassuring, yet in the heat of restoring breath, restarting a stalled heart, or replenishing lost blood, I remained obsessed with Janet’s safety.

I returned to my office again and again to try to reach Michael but each time had no luck. I kept wondering if I should head over to UH after my shift to look for him. Sitting at my desk, puzzling over what to do, I absently flipped through a pile of mail my secretary had left for me. Most pieces—notices of various meetings, bureaucratic shuffles, receptions— I tossed into the recycling bin. I’d scrupulously attended all these things in my greener years but long since learned they were a total waste of time. However, today a memo intended to summon me to a special meeting at 4:00 that afternoon, with hospital physicians, the chiefs, and Hurst regarding “the pending amalgamation and the growing dissent of the medical staff at St. Paul’s” caught my interest, especially the sole item on the agenda: a threat from physicians to withdraw services if the merger process continued.

Maybe Hurst had finally gone too far, I thought. He could play us off one against the other individually and had done so successfully for years, but perhaps with all the doctors angry at him at once about the same thing, he’d be in for a rough ride. Maybe some of the wienies Janet had alluded to were finally going to stand up to him.

My phone interrupted this fantasy. Hoping it was Michael, I answered before the first ring was complete. “Yes?”

“Dr. Garnet?” was the startled response. I recognized the voice of one of the residents.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else,” I explained. “What can I do for you?”

“Well,” she started, sounding embarrassed. “We’re all waiting for you in the classroom. You’re supposed to give us a talk at three today?”

Shit!

I quickly glanced at my calendar and saw I was scheduled to give the residents a session on “The weak and dizzy patient in ER” from 2:45 until 4:00. My watch said I was already a quarter of an hour late.

“Yes, on dizziness, right? I’m just getting my notes together,” I lied. “Tell the others to have a coffee and I’ll be with you in five minutes.”

We plan such seminars weeks in advance, and it was a topic for which I’d already built up quite a file of teaching cases. I’d even planned on including Phyllis Sanders’s story to demonstrate the importance of checking for orthostatic hypotension and at least ensure others would learn from my mistake. But today the whole thing had slipped my mind.

I’d need her chest films, I thought as I headed for the door. They were probably still in pathology. Len would have used them to correlate the radiology findings with what he discovered in the lung itself. I decided on the run that I’d pass by the morgue and retrieve them before meeting the residents. Damn Michael anyway! Why couldn’t I reach him? Not knowing if he’d now agree to let me help Janet was one of the reasons I was so distracted.

I descended a back staircase to the basement and came to the dimly lit corridor leading to me dissection room—and halted. I always found it oppressive walking through this passage, set apart from the busier and newer sections of the hospital. But after what happened last night, I felt my heart start to pound and my respirations quicken. “Not again,” I muttered. I’d had the same reaction going into the post early this morning but had overcome it. I stood there a moment, once more trying to slow my breathing. No way was I going to give credence to Janet’s cover story by giving in to the flutterings of panic I was beginning to feel.

I fixed my thoughts firmly on getting the X rays and meeting my residents, brought my respiration back to a respectable rate, and stepped into the corridor. To tell the truth, it was nowhere near as cramped or as old as the one at UH—the initial construction of St. Paul’s began in the late thirties—but it still pressed in on me. I had to concentrate to keep from thinking that the lights would suddenly go out or that someone was waiting for me in the darkness at the end of the passage. It didn’t help any that the tangle of pipes, conduits, and ducts just above my head seemed coated with sixty years of dust and spiderwebs. Every now and then I could hear scurrying noises from deep within this jumble, but in all the time I’d been coming down here, I’d never seen for certain what lived up there.

I passed the heavy wooden doors of the walk-in freezer where bodies were kept pending an autopsy or a pickup by a funeral home and peeked into the brightly lit room where we’d been working earlier. The empty tables, counters, and floors were gleaming from a recent cleaning, but no one was there.

The adjacent changing room was also empty, so I walked farther down the hallway toward the pathologists’ and secretaries’ offices. Len’s cubicle was one of the first in a long line of doors. I could see a light under the sill, so I knocked and let myself in. “Hi, Len, sorry to disturb—”

It wasn’t Len in the office. I immediately recognized the broad shoulders and closely cropped blond hair of Harold Miller who was standing in front of Len’s desk with his back to me. As he turned at the sound of my voice, I saw he was holding a sheet of paper with the format and familiar outlines of the human form used for our autopsy synopses. He seemed mildly surprised to see me, but returned his gaze to the document in his hand and went on reading it.

“Mr. Miller,” I said, appalled to have barged in on the last person I’d have either expected or wanted to see here, “I’m sorry, but I was looking for Dr. Gardner.”

“So was I,” Miller answered without looking up.

I felt uncomfortable just standing there.

He added, “I was here arranging the release of my mother’s body to the funeral home and wanted to know what he’d found during the post.” He still didn’t look up.

I started backing out of the office when he suddenly tossed the paper he’d been reading onto Len’s desk, looked me directly in the eye, and said, “I see you were probably right all along about there being two infections.”

“Pardon?” I asked, not immediately catching on.

His expression remained frozen, revealing neither the hurt nor the anger I’d seen in his face the morning before.

“It’s in Dr. Gardner’s preliminary report on Mother’s autopsy this morning,” he explained, gesturing with his thumb back toward Len’s desk.

“You took it from his desk?” I asked, dismayed, then quickly feeling foolish. Reading a person’s notes on his mother’s autopsy might not be too polite or appropriate, but it was a hell of a lot less an offense than sending a sick woman home from ER.