Critical Judgment (1996) (31 page)

Dusk was already settling in when she drove back to the hospital. Even though there were still almost two weeks left in August, the air smelled like autumn. The summer that had once held so much promise was nearly over.
What next?
she wondered.

Lew’s finding in Angela Cristoforo was sure to stir up the hornets. Abby hoped he had sense enough not to disclose his discovery prematurely. Tonight, when she called him to apologize for sounding like a brat, she would warn him. The bogus autopsy report on Peggy Wheaton demonstrated that the opposition was resourceful and not about to cave in on any point without a fight.

She stopped by the ER and once again slipped the ophthalmologic black light into her clinic-coat pocket.
First Willie Cardoza, now Angela Cristoforo. Their symptoms were similar, they were both employed at Colstar, and both of them had telltale eye findings. Now it was time to see if one of the NIWWs was a member of that club.

Claire Buchanan was alone in her cubicle in the ICU. Abby was grateful to see that the NT tube had been pulled. Instead, Claire had only oxygen prongs. Mindful of having been surprised in the unit by Lyle Quinn, Abby was careful to stand facing the door.

“Hi,” she said, “remember me?”

“Dr. Dolan from the ER.”

Claire’s vocal cords, swollen from the intubation and her allergic reaction, made her voice barely audible. Her lips and eyelids were puffy, but less so than even a little while ago. Her skin remained somewhat mottled, but now with varying shades of pale and pink. The allergic reaction she had endured was one of the most virulent Abby had ever seen. But thank God she was going to make it.

“How’re you feeling?” Abby asked.

The one-time Rockette smiled weakly.

“Been better.”

“If you feel too tired to talk to me, I can come back.”

“It’s okay. I remember your trying to help me in that MRI room. Thank you.”

Claire still had to pause for breath every few words. Their conversation would have to be brief.

“It was a close call,” Abby said. “I’m glad you made it. Can I get you anything? Some water?”

“That would be great.”

Abby held the paper cup and straw for her.

“Claire, I don’t want you to try to say too much right now, but do you think you could tell me what happened down there?”

The woman shrugged.

“I really don’t know. I hated having the MRI test, so I took the tranquilizer pills Dr. Oleander gave me.”

“Pills? More than one?”

“Three, I think. I don’t really remember. Then, when I was ready to go into the tube, they gave me an eye cover—black cloth, like the one some people use to sleep with.”

She stopped to take some breaths and another sip of water.

“Claire, we can talk about this later.”

“No, it’s okay. At first I … I thought I was doing pretty well. Then, suddenly, I felt like I was having trouble breathing. The air seemed heavy, like it was liquid or something. It even had a weird taste.”

“A taste?”

“That’s just the way it seemed. All of a sudden my itching got worse. Much worse. Then I couldn’t breathe at all. It was horrible. I’ll never go inside one of those things again, I promise you that.”

“Well, try not to make promises like that. That test is coming up more and more in people’s lives.”

“Not mine.”

“Claire, I’m just grateful you’re getting better. I’ll stop back to see you later. But before I go, I want to check your eyes with this light.”

Abby glanced outside the cubicle. No one was close by. Quickly, she pulled the curtain and cut the lights. She was aware of her own heartbeat as she clicked on the black light, leaned over the bed, and looked through the built-in magnifier. Claire’s eyes were perfectly normal. No rings. No abnormal glow of any kind. Abby rubbed her own eyes and looked again. Nothing.

“See anything I should know about?” Claire asked.

“They look perfect,” Abby said, still straining to see some telltale color. “Absolutely perfect.”

Finally she flipped on the lights and opened the curtains. The movement caught the attention of one of the nurses, who left the others and approached the cubicle.

“Claire, I’ll be back to see you later,” Abby said, adding
loudly, “Just take it easy and do whatever the nurses tell you.”

She smiled at the nurse and left without waiting for questions to be asked. But now, with the lack of findings in Claire’s eyes, she had a bunch of questions of her own—and there was absolutely no one she knew of who could answer them. She was almost at the ER when her pager went off again, this time displaying a call from the 415 area—San Francisco. Abby hurried to an out-of-the-way pay phone, fumbling for her calling card as she ran. For a moment she wondered if it might be Josh. But Sandy Stuart answered after one ring.

“Sorry to take so long to get back to you, Abby,” she said. “But we ran the sample twice with two different methods. Then I got caught in a meeting. I didn’t even know the final results until just a few minutes ago.”

After the negative eye findings on Claire, Abby sensed that she was not going to hear good news. And negative findings on Willie Cardoza’s blood would mean they were back to square one. Assuming there was a square one.

“I’m ready,” she said. “What’d you find?”

“You hit it right on the button, Abby. Your patient’s loaded with cadmium. Any level of that stuff is toxic, but his was over ten micrograms per deciliter. People can get quite ill at levels of just one point five or two, so this guy has been exposed to the stuff big time. What kind of a town is that you’re living in, anyhow?”

H
ow long have you had this ingrown toenail?” … “Three weeks? Sir, it’s two-thirty in the morning. What made you come in now?” … “Of course, of course. You couldn’t sleep.…”

The steady stream of patients with nonemergency complaints would have been demoralizing under the best of circumstances. But tonight, over the seemingly endless twelve-hour night shift, Abby was in constant danger of letting her impatience boil over.

She was also in constant danger of violating a critical ER maxim: never assume anything. Almost lost among the barrage of chronic sore throats, six-day-old ankle sprains (“The doctor told me I’d be feeling better in a week, but I know I won’t feel any better tomorrow than I do tonight”), and cranky babies, was an elderly gentleman complaining of “indigestion.” Distracted by the news from Sandy Stuart’s lab, and numbed by the parade of mundane cases, Abby had examined the man too briefly and was about to give him some samples of antacids along with the usual come-back-if-you’re-not-better instructions, when Providence made her slow down a beat and look at his face. There was something there—a sallowness to his complexion or a flicker of fear
in his eyes—that caused her to back off on discharging him and instead order an electrocardiogram. The EKG showed a rather large heart attack in process. Within an hour of admission to the ICU the man suffered a cardiac arrest, which was quickly and effectively treated by the nurses.

By morning Abby knew she was hanging on by her fingernails, checking the clock every ten minutes or so, dreading the next patient, the next potential error. The news of Willie Cardoza’s cadmium toxicity and Angela Cristoforo’s eye pathology was certainly vindicating for her, and probably lifesaving for the two of them. But it was also terrifying in its implications for Josh. And unlike Willie and Angela, who were in hospitals and would soon be undergoing chelation therapy, Josh was out there someplace, on a mission of vengeance against God-only-knew-who. Willie had killed Peggy Wheaton. Angela had come close to killing herself. Could there be any doubt that Josh, too, was capable of homicidal rage?

So much of his behavior these past weeks made sense now. Yet how he and the others could have become so seriously cadmium toxic remained the darkest mystery. It had to have been a spill of some sort—a one-time release of the metal into water or air, with Josh, Willie, Angela, and probably others being at the epicenter of the accident.

While Abby was writing discharge instructions for the last patient she would see on her shift, she asked the night nurse to call the record room and ask whether Angela Cristoforo had ever had an MRI. Abby was certain that a request from Dr. Dolan to the record room for information of any kind would trigger a call to Joanne Ricci or even Joe Henderson. The nurse made the call, no questions asked. Fifteen minutes later, just as Abby was packing to leave, the woman returned with the report. No MRIs on Angela.

Instead of driving home, Abby headed for Five Corners at the other end of town. She felt desperate to find
Josh. And the only place she could think of to start was the house on Orchard Road. Unless he had come back and cleaned up, there were angry letters and parts of letters still strewn about the floor, at least one of them addressed to the President. Then there was also Josh’s computer. Somewhere among those files there had to be a clue.

But first there was the matter of breakfast. She hadn’t had anything to eat since midnight but a few packets of saltines and a dish of institutional Jell-O, probably strawberry. Having missed out on dinner at the Peking Pagoda, it seemed only appropriate to reward herself for making it through the night with an Egg McMuffin and a hash brown or two. She wasn’t proud of her eating habits, but neither was she all that upset by them. Her parents were doing well in their midseventies, despite her mother’s being a horrible and totally indifferent cook. It was ironic that of all her friends, the one who was the least appalled by her junk-food habit was Josh, who could probably count his lifetime consumption of Egg McMuffins on his thumbs.

She flashed on the cupcake wrappers and such that she had found in his Jeep, and on the Styrofoam carry-out containers strewn about the house on Orchard Road. If she ever needed proof positive that he was insane, there it was. Her feelings toward Josh as a mate for life might have been driven off for good, but she still cared about him too deeply to endure the thought of his hurting someone, or being hurt or sick himself. She simply had to find him.

She sat at a corner table in McDonald’s, sipping coffee. All around her, people were preparing to start their day. It was life as usual in Patience, California, the community perfect.

Surely, there had to be someone besides her and the three Alliance members who knew that the town was sick. Surely, Lyle Quinn or Kelly Franklin, or more likely both, were aware that some sort of environmental spill
had taken place, or was even ongoing. Surely, Joe Henderson was acting on the orders of someone to get Abby Dolan out of the hospital and out of Patience before she figured out what was going on.

She scanned the restaurant again, wondering how these people and the rest of the valley would react if they knew that Colstar had endangered their health and the health of their loved ones. The truth was, it wouldn’t be easy to convince any of them. Evidence would have to be overwhelming—airtight. And even then Lew’s story of the tire company in Texas proved how irrational people could be when their way of life was at stake.

Maybe the status quo was in most people’s best interest anyway, regardless of what it was. Maybe the best thing she could do, once she had found Josh, was to get him the medical help he needed and then get out of town for good. She could leave the infighting to Lew, the Alliance, and anyone else he could recruit.

She left the restaurant just as a busload of laughing, chattering seventy- and eighty-year-olds emptied out in front. A sign on the bus said Vegas or Bust. One of the tourists, a sprightly gent with a Forty-niners cap, looked about at the shopping center and the hills beyond.

“Nice town,” she heard him say. “Very nice.”

There was no evidence on the outside of the house on Orchard Road that anyone had been there over the past two days. The storm hatch in the back was still unlocked. The basement and upstairs were in the same awful shape. And the terrifying dried-blood message remained on the bathroom mirror.

The smell from rotting food was more intense. Abby opened some windows, then found a trash bag in one of
the kitchen drawers. First she discarded all of the carry-out containers and obvious garbage. Then she turned her attention to the balled sheets of correspondence scattered on the floor. One by one, she smoothed the letters out and read them. Forty-five minutes later she had a list of nineteen names and businesses, including the President, the governor, the CEO of IBM, and even a woman Josh identified as his third-grade teacher. According to an especially venomous letter, replete with invective that Abby had never heard Josh use, the teacher was guilty of stifling the creativity of her students and of trying to inflict her jaded view of life on impressionable children.

In every paragraph, every word, Abby could feel her former lover’s pain, confusion, anguish. But none of the subjects seemed like an actual target for murder.

Vengeance is mine
.

She threw the last of the papers into the trash bag and turned on Josh’s PC. She had used the computer for correspondence and, on two occasions, to prepare lectures, so she knew her way around it easily enough. It was almost ten. Outside, rain had begun falling steadily from a slate sky. Abby rubbed at the gritty fatigue that was beginning to settle in her eyes. Her nervous energy was starting to fade. She thought about making some coffee but decided against it and called up the first of Josh’s folders, this one labeled Correspondence A. There were similar folders alphabetically labeled through
H
.

To her absolute dismay the folder consisted of thirty-five letters, memos, and even some poems, almost all of them tirades of hatred and anger. Some were later drafts of letters she had already read. Abby skimmed each one and added names to her list where appropriate. Of necessity she had to go faster and faster. Her concentration was getting feebler by the minute. She finished
A
and went on to
B
. When she realized there were another twenty-five files in Correspondence B, she decided she could make it through C, then she would have to take a
break. She could have some lunch with Lew and maybe doze off at his place. Afterward she would hit the caffeine and keep going. She had to keep going.