Second Opinion (11 page)

Cancer of the pancreas was one of the most common of cancers, and one of the most lethal. The primary reason for such a high mortality was the lack of alerting symptoms until it was too late—until spread to distant organs had occurred.

Thea used the Internet to refresh her memory about the disease, although there really was no need. Her vast mental library held both primary journal articles, and secondary articles from textbooks:

* Major known associated cause: advancing age (majority of cases over sixty years old)

* Five-year survival: 4 percent

* Most effective treatment for disease localized to a limited segment of the pancreas: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy in combination

* Average survival in this aggressively treated group: seventeen months

Was Jack Kalishar's pancreatic cancer an adenocarcinoma, the most common type, or was it one of the more obscure types such as an insulinoma, arising from any one of a number of different kinds of pancreatic hormonal cells? Kalishar was, against long odds, a five-year survivor of an extremely deadly disease. Had he been operated on? Was he part of an experimental drug protocol, like Hayley?

Suddenly, there were so many questions, each one of them easily answerable if she could somehow gain access to his medical record, locked electronically in a cybersafe named Thor, which was, at least for the time being, inaccessible to her without disclosing her interest to Hartnett.

Thea flipped through her notes and slid them into her briefcase.

With some thought, she would find a way. And that way, almost certainly, would involve some lying—a skill at which she had never been even the least bit adept. She flashed back on an exchange with her mother when she was a young girl—one the two of them would laugh about over the years as Thea's lack of guile became apparent.

'Thea, did you brush y
our teeth?' Eleni had asked one evening before bed.

'Yes,'came her firm response.

'Thea,
I asked if you had brushed your teeth.'

'No.'

CHAPTER 19

No matter how hard he tried, Dan couldn't keep his tongue away from the stitches inside his mouth. He thought about just giving in and tearing them apart to create the permanent hole Thea had warned him about. He felt angry and embarrassed, frustrated and impotent. He had taken martial arts at the police academy and been among the most capable in his class, yet his reaction time outside the ICU had been as slow as syrup.

Since his decision to leave the force, he knew he had been living through a smoldering depression. It wasn't hard to understand. He had shot and killed a fourteen-year-old. Now, just as it felt as if his self-esteem might finally be on the rise, he had allowed himself to be beaten to the floor in the hallway of the hospital, kicked in the groin and then in the face, and his only response to the attack had been to throw up on himself.

He sat there on the bench in the locker room, staring down at the plastic bag that contained his rancid uniform. They had told him to go home, but that was the furthest thing from his mind. He needed to find the man who had done this to him. It was a matter of pride, but he knew it was something else as well. He needed Thea's respect. There was something about her, a gentleness and innocence, that appealed to him greatly. She had thanked him for saving her father's life, if in fact that is what he had done, and even held his hand as he was waiting to be evaluated in the ER. But when she asked him what the assailant looked like, and all he could say was that the man had a tan, a mustache, and black-rimmed glasses, her disappointment was nearly palpable.

Why hadn't he paid better attention? Why hadn't he been sharper? This job wasn't much, but it was a stepping-stone back toward life—back toward at least a modicum of self-respect, maybe even back to the force. Josh was a great kid and had been totally understanding about his taking the security guard job. What would he think when another disparaging story about his dad hit the papers?

Dan knew he was probably projecting too much—he had a tendency to do that. Still, he had been badly humiliated by a man and he wanted payback. That the man might have been after Thea's father just made the matter that much more acute. He had already lost several hours, but there were still things he could do. Failing at those, there was Thea's brother and his theories. If the bogus orderly was after Petros, it stood to reason he might be connected with the hit-and-run as well.

The security office was in the basement of the Sherwood Building. Dan dropped his uniform off at the laundry and then followed the yellow line through the broad main tunnel. The officer manning the twelve central video consoles, an ample, cheerful woman named Jessica, was an acquaintance if not a friend. Her concern for his injuries was genuine.

'Police gone?' Dan asked after assuring her that his pride had taken a far bigger hit than his body.

'A while ago.'

'They take any tapes?'

'We made a copy of the one from video eight that included the ICU, but we have the original.'

'Can I see it?'

'You sure you want to?'

'I can handle it.'

'It's bundled with video from every other camera on every floor in the building. A minute per site.'

'I know. What about the rest of the tapes? The guy had to get in and out of the hospital somehow.'

'At that hour, do you know how much foot traffic there is, and how many entrances? We made copies of them, too, but it may take weeks for anyone to do a decent job of reviewing them.'

Jessica motioned him to the small supervisor's office, pushed some buttons on her panel, and electronically sent the video to the screen where Dan was sitting.

He found the attack and began watching it over and over again. Unfortunately, the position of the camera made him the star and included an Oscar-worthy full-face shot as he took one for the team and sank to his knees. There was very little of the assailant besides his back, except for two shots. Dan froze them each half a dozen times. By the sixth pass, he was convinced of several things. The man was a pro—a martial arts expert with incredibly quick feet and textbook balance. He had placed a thin towel over the bar on the cart to keep from leaving fingerprints. He had enough of a contact within the hospital to be able to obtain a false ID badge, although it was not one that would have stood up to close scrutiny. The instant it was clear he wasn't going to make it into the ICU, he acted definitively, put his adversary down, and walked rapidly but calmly away, exiting the way he had come, toward the Sperelakis Institute.

A pro.

Another conclusion was that both the glasses and the mustache were fake. Dan felt almost sure of it now. They were just too obvious—a diversion, like an eye patch or a cast. A hundred out of a hundred witnesses would have remembered the mustache, but none the shape of the man's face or the color of his eyes.

Finally, there was the bundle on top of the steel cart. A weapon of some sort? A change of clothes? Something medical? Whatever it was, the killer—Dan had no doubt that the murder of a patient or nurse was the man's intent—took pains to carry it away with him. If the police had thought things through as he had, they would be checking the hospital-wide videos for the man and the bundle.

Unable to watch himself get pummeled one more time, Dan tilted back in the supervisor's chair and looked away. He had majored in criminology at Northeastern, and always knew he would someday be a police detective. His high grades in every related course reflected that goal. One of those subjects was forensic logic—a trip inside the mind of a criminal. For a time, Dan focused on the man as he had been programmed to do by the crusty, but brilliant, criminologist who taught the course.

It may seem at times as if there are an infinite number of scenarios by which a criminal could have committed his crime and escaped, but in truth there is only one
—
the real one.

On one wall of the office was a large whiteboard map of the entire Beaumont Clinic campus, with the tunnels shown as lightly dotted lines. First Dan chose the entrance that might follow the most logical movements of his assailant: through the Sperelakis Institute, then up to the third floor and across the walkway to the ICU. It was certainly the shortest route from the outside to the unit, but there was a security desk in the lobby, which was manned until the hospital entrances were shut down at the end of visitors' hours. That meant the killer would have had to enter, sign in, and then find a place to change, most likely in a restroom stall. Possible, but risky—and riskier still heading out, especially if there was trouble. No, Dan thought. The man had probably taken the crowded main entrance on Collins Avenue, changed in a restroom, then made his way someplace to where a steel cart was… was what? Waiting for him?

'Hey, Jess,' he said through the open office door. 'Where do you think the guy got the cart?'

'The what?'

'The cart he was pushing.'

'I don't know. I think the ones that aren't on one of the floors are all in the basement—'

'—of the Bladd Building.'

Dan finished the sentence with her, then turned back to the map. Assuming the killer knew where the carts were kept, and assuming he had come into the main entrance of the hospital, and assuming he had changed into orderly's whites, he would have chosen one of two men's rooms in which to do so, probably the smaller, less trafficked. In fact, Dan decided, with the trash cans screened from view in a recessed alcove in the wall, he might well have bundled his street clothes in a plastic bag of some sort and placed the bag into the trash for retrieval when he was finished.

Even though he had nearly been caught, the killer wouldn't have panicked. He would have walked quickly back to the men's room, retrieved his clothes, changed, maybe left his orderly's outfit in the same trash can, and calmly exited through the main doors, possibly carrying with him whatever was wrapped in the towel. The real question was, if in fact the glasses and mustache were fake, what he had chosen to do with them. He had made an error by not knowing that the security force was checking all employee IDs. Could he possibly have made another?

Dan used a washable marker to circle the men's room he had chosen. If he was wrong about that one, he would try another. If the janitorial staff had emptied the trash cans, there was nothing he could do. If they hadn't, he could probably get them to hold off.

'Found everything you need?' Jessica asked as he headed out of the office.

'I'll let you know,' Dan replied.

He paused for a moment by the door to run his tongue across the stitches in his cheek.

ON HIS
way through the tunnel to the main entrance of the hospital, Dan called janitorial and made sure there would be no emptying of any restroom trash cans for at least an hour. Then he took a small cutoff that dead-ended in the expansive central supply center of the hospital, open twenty-four hours. Across from the counter was a large storage area containing stretchers, wheelchairs, rolling oxygen holders, several ventilators, tray tables, and a dozen or so steel carts.

There might have been a security camera inside the supply room where the surgical instruments, procedure kits, and countless other kinds of equipment were sterilized and stored, but there was none covering the hallway or storage area. It would have been no problem for the killer to walk into the space, ensure that whoever was working across the hall wasn't watching, and simply walk off with a steel cart. Of course, such an action presumed knowledge of the hospital, but Dan already felt certain that directly or from someone else, the man had that.

He returned to the main tunnel and headed toward the front entrance. Foot traffic was heavy, accompanied by electronic cars, beeping their warning as they towed huge hampers of laundry or bins of trash. As always, Dan was amazed at how many people and how much equipment were involved in caring for the sick. He tried to imagine the complexity of running such a place as this, but simply couldn't get his mind around the notion.

Aware for the first time of the dull, unpleasant ache in his groin, he mounted the stairs to the main lobby. The bastard who kicked him had done so with surgical precision—a direct hit.

Someday,
Dan thought.
Someday
…

The men's room he had reasoned out was off the broad corridor from the Sederstrom Family Lobby toward the first of many banks of elevators. It was, as he had surmised from the whiteboard map, small—two urinals, one stall. And it was deserted. The trash can, set in the wall and accessible through a swinging metal panel, was a large steel bin, three feet high and two square, lined with an industrial-strength plastic bag, and perhaps built from the same primordial slab of steel as the rolling cart. The bag was full.

Feeling somewhat foolish, Dan pulled the container out onto the tile floor, considered rummaging through it blindly, then suddenly dropped it noisily onto its side, grabbed a small ledge on the bottom, and emptied it out. Crumpled paper towels, the equivalent of a modest-sized tree, spilled out onto the tiled floor. Along with the towels were the contents of any number of men's pockets: two sections of the
Herald,
an empty pint of Jack Daniel's, a pair of boxer shorts no longer wearable for obvious reasons, and a thin paperback western. Nothing else. Dan's enthusiasm drained. The killer's movements seemed so logical when he thought them through in the security office. He had been wrong. The other men's room candidate he had considered was past the bank of elevators at the base of the Bladd Building. Going that way would have exposed the killer to the main hospital thoroughfare rather than the less-traveled tunnel, but it was possible. Certainly it was worth a try.

Wishing he had thought to bring a pair of gloves, he was about to push the mound of trash back toward the bin with his uniform shoe, when instinct made him peer into the plastic bag. It hadn't completely emptied. He tipped it nearly upside down, and a white orderly's uniform tumbled out, along with something wrapped in a paper towel.

Dan bent down and gingerly picked up the small bundle. Even before he exposed the contents, he knew what was there. Visualizing the killer stuffing his uniform and the package down to the bottom of the bin, he laid the paper towel on the sink, opened it up, and stared down at a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a thick, bogus mustache.

His pulse hammering, he rewrapped the package and slipped it into his Windbreaker pocket.

'You should have taken this stuff with you, pal,' he muttered, already thinking of the woman at the state crime lab he could get to check his find for fingerprints. 'If you touched something here even once, I've got you.'