Lethal Practice (35 page)

“One of my guys has night binoculars.”

“Where’d he get those?”

“Souvenir from ‘Nam. Amie and Norm are vets.”

I wasn’t surprised. Over the years I’d enjoyed the quiet closeness of these two large men. Even in a crew of characters like Doug’s team, their easy humor and unflappability were a pleasure to be around.

“I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, except they don’t work so good.”

“Which, Amie and Norm or the binoculars?”

Doug chuckled. “Both. The vets are fat forty-five-year-old warriors.” I heard mock protests from somewhere in Doug’s cab. The morale was still good at his end. “And as for the binoculars, well, let’s say they worked better in ‘Nam, where it didn’t snow.”

How many killers there were had always bothered me. “So we’re missing a viper. Maybe it’s still in Buffalo, looking. Maybe we’ve confused them as planned.”

“We might get a better count on how many are here soon; the snow’s letting up. Meantime, stay ready.”

He hung up without waiting for my answer.

My pants and half-removed longjohns were twisted into partially thawed ropes that lay in a cold puddle at my feet. I stepped out of them and then extracted what was left of the computer printouts I’d stuffed around my legs from the soggy mess on the floor. They were unusable, at least for now, but might be legible if they were dried. I placed them on a marble table over an electric heater. I gathered up the rest of the clothing and carried it to the washing machine, where I dumped it.

Next I salvaged the disks from my inner coat pocket. Thankfully, they were fine. Most of what I needed to start with was on them. I’d need the printouts only if my first ideas didn’t work out.

I peeled off my sweater and T-shirt, more soaked with sweat than snow, and found that the printouts wrapped around my waist were just as wet as the others. I added them to the table and put the remaining clothes into the washer.

Naked and shivering, I quickly headed to the master bedroom at the far end of the main floor, where I’d find something dry to put on.

This room was the windowed end of the cabin overlooking the lake where, fifteen minutes ago, I’d been peering in from the outside, unable to see anything. As I found my clothes and dressed in the familiar darkness, I could see outside relatively easily. The snowfall was letting up, and the lake was becoming visible to the end. The dark trail of my tracks where I had run from the deep shadows at the edge of the woods to the outside of this bedroom wall was obvious. But I wasn’t going to worry about that at the moment. It shouldn’t matter anyway.

Warm and dry, I grabbed the disks and headed back to the other end of the house and the small room over the kitchen that held my computer. I turned the screen on, and the gray glow bathed the keyboard enough to work without turning on the room light. It didn’t make sense, but I felt better keeping in the dark.

* * * *

The sprawl of numbers and abbreviated diagnostic categories spilled down the screen and gave me a sense of security. I was back in my own realm of expertise. Here, amid the maze of a functioning emergency department, if one of the killers had left aberrant signs, I had a good chance of ferreting them out.

I entered the DOA category into the most frequent diagnosis menu so I’d be able to subject it to the same profile breakdown I’d already done for the major emergency case categories. DOAs would hardly ever command such attention, apart from a footnote as to their proportion of our overall mortalities. The killers probably counted on that too. The posts on those derelicts would be done cursorily by frazzled pathologists wondering what bureaucratic idiot was wasting their valuable time.

All pretty safe for our murderers, until Kingsly.

The screen flickered and retrieved the diagnostic categories I was waiting for. I punched in the keys to call up a coded cross-reference with individual physicians for the frequency of DOAs. The screen hummed and clicked again to follow this unusual command.

I was looking for a fiend with the knowledge of someone close to the ER. Hurst gave me the creeps, but he wasn’t part of emergency or linked to the data in front of me. Besides, he simply didn’t have the ER mentality that I’d sensed driving the work of the killer, especially the way Watts had been set up—an ER drill with a live victim.

I sure had my suspicions about Kradic, and I had to control my dislike of Jones long enough not to exaggerate what I thought she might be capable of doing, but I also thought again about other doctors and nurses I’d worked with for years. With a few exceptions, I realized I knew nothing of their private dreams, desires, hatreds, or burning causes. All I ever saw was their outward professional conduct. Did the repeated rudeness of a triage nurse mean stress and insecurity, I wondered, or a pathologic cruelty? Was the distance I’d seen some doctors take from pain and fear a blundering defensiveness or a carefully concealed sadism?

I winced, remembering an old school of so-called thought where respected emergency physicians would roughly perform a not-so-necessary gastric lavage on an overdose patient to “teach her a lesson.” Thankfully those days were over, but was one of them a fiend, hungry for a reason to inflict pain?

Surely, though, killing, repeatedly and almost clinically, went beyond any of the scenes I had witnessed.

I stopped myself, a little aghast, not because I had failed to guess who might be the monster among us but because for too many I couldn’t say for sure who or what they were outside our peculiar cell of work. The medical field had hidden murderers before. So-called doctors and nurses had performed atrocities in Dachau and gone home to play with their children. One such “healer” had dedicated his life to humanitarian clinics in the third world before being tracked down after the war. In the past year an esteemed physician in Oregon had slashed and strangled six prostitutes over a ten-month period, then moved over to Europe and was caught after a series of similar killings there. The DOA profile by individual physician popped onto the screen and pulled me back to my hunt for a current creep.

Nothing.

Fifteen physicians, identified by code numbers across the bottom of the page, me included, made up the ER roster. A black bar rising above each number indicated the number of DOA cases. No one stood out. Most had one or two, a few had three or four, and a single physician apparently had none. I shouldn’t have been disappointed, but I’d thought maybe I was smarter and more clever than whomever I was after and that a bar graph would point to the killer. Obviously not.

I hadn’t broken open the number code yet, so I had no idea who was who. I’d do it later. At least I could eliminate suspicious thoughts about the doctors with low numbers. Perhaps I’d have to look at the two or three with the higher bars. As Doug had reminded me, this was a nest of vipers, and we had at least three snakes to trap.

I pressed the copy button, and as my noisy printer started drawing up the apparently innocuous graph, I laid in the program to compare the incidence of DOAs by shift. The noise of the type head stopped, and while waiting for the new table to pop on the screen, I ripped out the first graph and dropped it unthinking on the floor.

The grid for a week of work appeared, broken into three eight-hour shifts—days, evenings, and nights—starting at seven
A
.
M
. By these hours doctors and nurses the world over live their lives.

A superimposed grid then made an hour-by-hour sub-grid, and a spatter of dots finally appeared spread out over the screen. Each spot was a corpse. The groupings told us the times and days we were most busy with the already-dead over the space of a year.

Visually I couldn’t read much into it; the picture looked like a space map with over thirty stars, a few more than I’d estimated. I then punched in the analysis program that would plot any significant time and day groupings.

This took a little longer. Carole had given me the program in a simplified version for my lowly skills and PC. The same exercise went much faster at her desk, with her machine, and, more important, with her hands tapping in the commands.

Waiting out the hums and clicks, I stared at the first graph as it had fallen upside down at my feet. I had been foolish thinking a simple flick of a computer switch would give me a singular accusing bar graph rising up over a killer’s name.

Viewed from upside down, a black bar graph changed. The white background became the bar. The white bars measured the negative finds. And seen this way, one number had a massive white bar under it compared to all the others. The negative find, no DOAs, was made significant.

The code to identify this doctor was on another disk. I didn’t want to stop the program already plotting DOA times mid-run, so I waited, growing steadily excited that the absence of bodies might be the slip-up I was looking for.

The screen sprang out an ordered collation of times and days. There was no preference of days, but twenty-five of thirty-one DOAs had arrived in the morning hours. Most of those arrivals were between eight and ten.

This was a huge bias, but it could mean nothing more than that the derelicts who had died or been killed overnight got found in the morning and were sent in then.

Our doctors worked shorter blocks of time than the nurses and overlapped their shifts. This strategy lessened the stress and fatigue inherent in ER work. I requested that the schedule of individual doctors over the last year be correlated with the exact time slots in which there’d been DOAs, and that the result be represented by a bar graph again. As I expected, no single physician worked these slots more than any other, but this time I was ready for the negative find. Long white bars rose over several numbers, distinct from the black columns over all the rest.

The numbers with white bars hardly ever worked mornings. They included the same code number that had no DOAs.

Again, by itself, there was nothing sinister about this. Some doctors simply preferred afternoons and evenings and didn’t work mornings because of competing schedules and commitments outside the hospital. That had been my own preference before I became chief.

I played some more with the schedule data and asked for a list of the M.D.s preferring evenings and afternoons. As I expected, this consisted of about half the department. This group included the number I’d started to track.

Then I played a hunch. I shifted back to the DOA time and day graph and combined it with the year’s schedule. I asked for a correlation between the DOAs and whoever worked the preceding shift.

This was a very unusual request, and the computer had to whir and click much longer than before. As I waited, a cold draft stirred at the back of my neck. I absently added this room to the list of ones that Doug was to caulk against leaks. It was an early winter routine that mercifully lessened each year as the logs in the newer parts of the cabin finished settling. The older sections, permanently cozy, gave me faith the process would end someday.

As I sat there in the dark, listening to the machine while the gray light on its screen nickered, I felt chilled despite the warm clothes I’d put on. I’d get a sweater as soon as the program finished.

Just then the screen snapped into yet another horizontal spread of vertical bars.

Except this time I had my markers, two in fact, one white and one black. The black bar rose like an obelisk above all the rest, but not over the number I now knew by heart. Above that number was a white column.

It was like looking at a positive and a negative. The physician I’d been tracking virtually never did a shift prior to the arrival of a DOA. The doctor represented by the black bar was on duty before most of them were brought in.

I spooled back over the graphs I’d constructed and tracked this new number through their grids. I began to see what it might mean.

Before changing disks and activating the program to the identity code, I wanted printed backup of what I already had. Years of being computer stupid included some bitter “save-it-while-you-got-it” lessons. I also no longer completely trusted my ten-year-old clunker; it sometimes jumbled text and then showed a little bomb sign that meant I was out of luck. Before risking yet another disaster with the drawn-out routine of switching disks to make duplicates, I started running off paper copies of all the graphs. The printer sounded like a sawmill, laboriously grinding out each line I’d just concocted. While waiting, my fingers tap-danced the passing seconds on the blue surface of the disk containing the names.

One minute; one sheet finished. Five more graphs, and five minutes to go. What a dinosaur, I thought, and decided to go back downstairs to get a sweater.

As I walked through the kitchen and started toward the other end of the house, I could hear the stutter and whine of the printer overhead. It got quieter while I made my way through the cozy sets of chairs, couches, and small tables in the darkened living room, our chatting areas and reading nooks in happier times.

Soon the noise became a dull whir in the distance behind me, stirring my thoughts. I figured I understood why one physician was never around and another was nearly always present prior to the arrival of a DOA at St. Paul’s. And if I was right, that same telltale pattern would hold for most of the other DOAs recorded around Buffalo—if I lived through the night and ever got a chance to check that data.

I walked down the hallway that led to the master bedroom. It was even darker here, and I had to feel along the walls. I still didn’t want to turn on a light.

So many DOAs; so many statistics—yet some numbers had a vague familiarity. More chairs and nooks. I felt my way by them in the dark.

What other riddle involving numbers had I looked at recently? Stats related to the emergency study? Probably, and possibly of no significance.

I entered our large bedroom. After the darkness in the rest of the house, I found the blue glow of moonlight coming through the big corner windows more than enough to see by. Outside, the snow-covered lawns and surrounding thick forest were now equally visible. Doug had been right; the storm had stopped.