Dead Certain (36 page)

CHAPTER 29

Just like Claudia, I found myself alone with the devil. The same devil who had come into Mrs. Lapinsky’s room with not an enormous “eye,” but an enormous
I
for Indiana basketball. McDermott hadn’t been the only Prescott Memorial surgeon who’d been in Indiana at the time of the VA Hospital deaths. Carl Laffer, the man who loved nothing more than opera and Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers, had played basketball there as an undergraduate. Not McDermott, Laffer.

What a mistake it had been to think that just because Laffer seemed nice that he was actually kind. Surgeons were, by necessity, capable of ruthlessness, in the operating room and when it came to their own careers.

I must really be my mother’s daughter after all, I thought bitterly to myself. I’d been blinded by good manners, tricked into applauding Laffer’s ambition as diplomacy and his ruthlessness as pragmatism because he wore a mask of perpetual geniality. What a fool I’d been to think that a hospital would be that different from a large law firm. If I’d bothered to take the time to look beneath the surface, I would have seen that they are both the same—Darwinian systems where survival belongs to the fittest and where leadership, just like in a pride of lions, is earned through successive challenges of nerves and blood. Carl Laffer hadn’t beaten out McDermott and Davies for the chief of staff’s job by being a white-haired elder statesman. He’d gotten it by being the fiercest and most cunning of the three—something I was afraid I hadn’t realized until it was too late.

Laffer had spent his entire career in the shadow of McDermott’s superior surgical skills. He’d had the difference in their talents publicly thrown in his face in the malpractice suit involving the ten-year-old boy, and he’d paid a heavy price for covering for his colleague. No doubt when HCC approached him, Laffer recognized the company’s plan as not only an opportunity to definitively best his rival, but to finally reap the financial rewards long overdue him.

Laffer was the one who’d cut a deal with HCC, which is why Packman knew all about the patient deaths. Indeed, telling Packman had been the whole point. With stakes that high, Laffer was leaving nothing to chance. He knew what an attractive figurehead Gavin McDermott would make for HCC, the instant credibility affiliation with the famous surgeon would bring to the company’s efforts in Chicago.

But Laffer wasn’t about to let that happen, not when it was so easy to tip the scales in his own favor. If HCC was successful in gaining control of health care in Chicago, then whoever they chose to be chief of medical services would wield tremendous power not just over patients, but physicians in the system. My guess was that that was the deal that Laffer had cut with HCC—appointment as chief of medical services in exchange for handing them Prescott Memorial Hospital on a platter. I didn’t think that he’d commit murder for anything less.

The killings themselves had been easy. Surgeons spend the best part of their fives up to their elbows in gore. They deal in the currency of life and death every day. For most, like Claudia, it makes them appreciate the value of human life, but for a much smaller percentage, their familiarity cheapens it.

No, for Laffer, the tricky part had been maintaining an equilibrium. On the one hand, the deaths of McDermott’s patients had to be public and conspicuous enough to insure widespread whispers about something being amiss. On the other, he had to avoid any kind of public inquiry that might sour the deal between HCC and Prescott Memorial. No doubt he figured that as chief of staff he’d be able to control any kind of investigation in the guise of overseeing it. What he hadn’t counted on was Mrs. Estrada.

The identity of undercover patients was, of necessity, a closely guarded secret. Only Kyle Massius and Farah Davies knew the true circumstances of her admission. And while Laffer was undoubtedly aware of the existence of such patients, they posed no threat to him, since their complaints invariably “cleared up” prior to their actually having to go through surgery. Even someone as calculating as Carl Laffer could not have foreseen an undercover patient legitimately requiring emergency surgery, much less the set of circumstances that led to its being performed by someone other than McDermott.

I’d signed my roommate’s death warrant the day I’d told Laffer that Claudia was my roommate. He knew then and there that there was no way the hospital would be able to pressure her into accepting the blame for Mrs. Estrada’s death, and Joan Bornstein would never rest until the facts behind the other deaths were fully revealed. I’m sure he figured he had no other choice.

Just like now.

I was surprised to hear my own voice saying something about the cornices of the bookshelves and how the wood had been imported from Italy. I tried desperately to focus on what Laffer was saying, sickened by the sudden realization that the man who had stabbed my roommate in cold blood had no doubt come to try to silence me.

Laffer didn’t seem to notice. He was talking about Claudia and her love of books, and how we really needed to plan some sort of memorial service. The people who had worked with her needed a forum in which to express their grief.

Killing Mrs. Estrada had been Laffer’s only mistake. Not only did he have no way of knowing that she wasn’t what she seemed, but he didn’t find out that it was Claudia who’d done the actual operation until after he’d slipped the Pavulon into her IV. His sympathetic treatment of Claudia at the M&M conference hadn’t anything at all to do with compassion, but rather the desire to not deflect blame from McDermott.

“Do you think she would have liked the idea of a rabbi officiating?” he asked.

I wanted to tell him that she would have preferred to be alive and see him dead, but what I managed to say was, “I don’t think it would have mattered to her one way or the other. I think she would have just liked the idea of all the people she’d worked with coming and paying their respects.”

“Maybe just the hospital chaplain then,” Laffer mused. “He’s new, but a nice young man. I’m sure he would be happy to oblige.”

“Would you mind excusing me for a moment,” I said, trying to make my voice sound natural. Instead I was afraid that I sounded like a terrified ingenue uttering wooden lines in her first play. “I’d just like to run to the ladies’ room for a moment. But go ahead, make yourself at home. Look around. I’ll come and catch up with you.”

Instead of heading to the powder room, I quickly made my way into my little office adjacent to the kitchen. I closed the door behind me and, with trembling hands, picked up the receiver and dialed Elliott’s cell phone number. The call went through, but instead of Elliott answering I got a voice-mail recording. My terror made it difficult to breathe, but I managed to rattle off a message explaining that I figured out not only who the mole was, but the identity of Claudia’s murderer. From the other room I heard the shrill cry of Laffer’s beeper, and I hastened to finish off my message to Elliott with an explanation of where I was.

Just as I was about to hang up the phone, I heard the soft, yet unmistakable click of an extension being eased into its cradle in some other part of the apartment. Suddenly I was afraid. Not nervous, or anxious, or filled with foreboding, but flat-out, in-your-face, the-metallic-taste-of-adrenaline-running-down-the-back-of-your-throat afraid.

I told myself to breathe, as I rapidly calculated the odds. My purse, and the gun, were by the front door in the apartment. I stood a better chance of slipping quietly out through the kitchen and making a run for it down the back service stairs. I told myself that with any luck I’d be safely in the basement before Laffer even realized that I was gone.

As quietly as I could, I turned the handle of the study door and cautiously stuck my head out. The apartment seemed quiet, the hallway empty. Breathing something very close to a sigh of relief, I stepped through the doorway, turning toward the kitchen.

Carl Laffer’s hands, meaty like hams, grabbed me from behind and pulled me off my feet. I felt the wind go out of me as I hit the floor, heard the hiss of profanity as Laffer grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shook me like a doll. I tried to scream, but I could not find my voice. Instead I kicked and clawed with all the strength that I had, miraculously managing to kick free of him. I hit the floor in a disorganized pile and rolled over onto my hands and feet into a kind of impromptu runner’s crouch, meaning to take off toward the service exit in the kitchen, but Laffer’s legs were in front of my face, effectively blocking my escape.

I rolled over until I was facing the other direction and took off at a dead run, not knowing where I was going but blindly trying to put any kind of distance I could between myself and Claudia’s killer. After a couple of seconds I realized that I was in the main hall of the apartment, heading toward the front door—the front door and the gun.

For a minute I thought I’d made it, I felt I was almost clear, I
was
clear, but even as I thought that, I felt my legs go out from under me as Laffer hooked me from behind. My head hit the hard marble of the entrance hall, and I saw stars, but I still frantically clawed along the ground, hoping to make it to my purse.

For a fraction of a second I felt Laffer’s grip loosen, and my fingertips touched the soft leather of my purse. I rolled over on my back, groping blindly in the dark recesses of my bag. As my fingers grappled with lipstick tubes and packages of tissues, my mind registered the syringe in Carl Laffer’s hand.

I felt the sting of the injection at the same moment I felt the hard barrel of the gun in my hand. I scrabbled desperately to get it turned around, groping for the pistol’s walnut grip. As I turned the gun in my hand my brain registered quite calmly the fact that Laffer had injected me with Pavulon. Indeed, I felt the blackness of paralysis starting in my thigh and working its way up my left side. I watched him stand up slowly, put the cap back on the syringe, and tuck it into the pocket of his warm-up jacket, waiting for the drug to take effect. It was only a matter of seconds before I was completely helpless. I thought about the pristine block of Henckel knives on the counter in the kitchen. I wondered whether he’d risk it or if he’d brought something with him to do the job.

I knew that I was almost out of time when I squeezed the trigger. I managed to get off three rounds through the bottom of my purse before the blackness enveloped me completely like a kind of dark ice. I realized with horror as Laffer collapsed noisily on top of me that the drug was not going to make me lose consciousness. Instead I was going to lie there and watch Carl Laffer’s sightless eyes staring into mine as his warm blood oozed over me and as every oxygen-starved molecule of my body screamed out for air.

I remembered thinking that this is what drowning must be like. The agony of running out of air was unbearable. I felt the darkness closing in around me like the aperture of a camera closing down and knew that this is what it must feel like to know that you are about to die.

CHAPTER 30

Another Monday morning, another press conference on the courthouse steps. This time my mother wore a telegenic suit of fuschia silk. I was dressed in black.

I’d spent the night at Prescott Memorial under observation for shock and any possible adverse effects from having been injected with Pavulon. Elliott had stayed the night in the armchair beside my bed, and when the sleeping stuff they’d given me wore off, he’d come upstairs with me to say hello to Bill Delius.

This morning Mother was triumphant. Not only had she announced to the assembled reporters that the board of trustees of Prescott Memorial Hospital voted to refuse to sell the hospital to HCC, but they had agreed to join in a class-action suit with Northwestern Memorial Medical Center and the Archdiocese of Chicago against HCC. Among other things the suit alleged that the company had engaged in unlawful business practices.

She said nothing about Carl Laffer. When I asked Elliott about it, he said that Blades had already spoken to the D.A., who’d agreed to handle the whole thing with a minimum of publicity. That was fine with me. I figured I’d already had about as much of the spotlight as I could handle.

If you liked

DEAD CERTAIN

by Gini Hartzmark,

don’t miss the other Kate Millholland novels.

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The First Kate Millholland Novel

Although she’s an heiress, Kate Millholland works hard for her money as a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer in Chicago. When Azor, the high-tech, high-profit pharmaceutical company founded by her sometime lover, Stephen Azorini, faces a takeover, Kate will do anything to stop it from happening.

The stakes rise even higher when Stephen’s teenage niece, Gretchen, is killed. Everyone knows that if Gretchen’s shares go to the corporate raider, Stephen will lose everything.

by GINI HARTZMARK

FINAL OPTION

When lawyer Kate Millholland arrives at the home of Bart Hexter, one of Chicago’s most powerful players in the futures market, she finds him behind the wheel of his Rolls-Royce, clad only in a pair of red silk pajamas, with two bullets in his head. This scheduled meeting with the dead man places her at the top of the suspect list.