Lethal Practice (30 page)

Chapter 14

It was only 1:30 when I left the Horseshoe. The afternoon light had dimmed to premature dusk. I hadn’t seen the sun in weeks and knew how the dinosaurs must’ve felt at the end. Maybe we were having an eclipse. Hell, was there even still a sun out there behind all those clouds?

Riley had done the bureaucratic shuffle as far as I was concerned. He’d made it clear he’d enjoy taking on his boss, but it was also clear that I’d have to provide him with more than hunches to get him to do it.

As I got back to the hospital grounds the rain began falling again.
It was cold, and the drops were like sludge on my glasses.

I paused by my car and realized I had nothing to do for the rest of the day. I wanted to see Janet, but she was on call at her hospital. I unlocked the driver-side door, slipped the key in the ignition to activate my car phone, and dialed the case room. They informed me Dr. Graceton was busy in the OR. I called the vet and learned Muffy was sedated, afebrile, but still fragile. So, I couldn’t even drive over and give comfort to my dog.

I sat staring out the windshield stained with rain. Without the women in my life, I was at loose ends. The parking lot was foggy, and I couldn’t see past the few cars parked nearby.

But out there, somewhere, was a killer. Was I safe for now? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. Not until I figured out why I’d ever become a target. Fact was, I still didn’t even know how to “be careful,” as everyone advised.

Again I thought of the ER stats. If I was a threat because of some information hidden in the those studies, then I wasn’t safe at all.

It wasn’t only because I loved an excuse to go to the cabin that I did my computer work there. I was so electronically stupid that Carole wouldn’t let me use our office computer unless she was physically present. I’d once crashed a complete hard disk attempting to find something on my own. Since then she wouldn’t even trust me with the pass code. She routinely duplicated all departmental information with a separate set of disks formatted specifically to work on my clunker at the cabin. I knew how to work the routine programs for the terminals at the nursing station. In fact, any innovations there were tried on me, on the principle that if I could do it, anyone could. But getting into the hospital network without Carole to guide me, code or no code, was beyond my trying. Yet I didn’t want to call her in to help. This wasn’t going to be the conventional analysis of QA data she’d helped me with two days ago. Now I was going to use those numbers to go after a killer. She’d have to work along with me and know what I was doing, and until I figured out what was going on, I wasn’t about to endanger her or anyone else.

To be alone in the woods on this shrouded weekend was not a soothing thought, but I needed my own computer again. If I was going to unravel anything today in private, it would be in front of that forgiving relic in my beloved cabin. I pocketed my keys, got out of my car, and headed toward my office. The QA material was still in my trunk, but I needed some other disks for an idea I was getting.

I stopped by the coatroom to check my mailbox. Behind the coat racks was a wall of open mail slots, each with a doctor’s name over it. For once I could see easily into mine. Usually the slot above, which was Jones’s, was so stuffed, the overflow flopped in front of mine. Today hers was empty. Mine held a notice for a hospital bake sale.

Emergency was bustling, but the nurses were smiling. A steady stream of orderlies and nurses were pushing gurneys along the corridor to the elevators that would empty those patients into real beds upstairs. Hurst’s beds, finally. The vacated hallways and stretcher stalls had the debris from a week of crowded living. It looked like the morning after a wild party. A small group of cleaning people waited to move in.

“Congratulations, Chief!” It was Sylvia, in for the evening shift, but three hours early.

The nurses echoed their relief at the reprieve. I didn’t tell them it was only for a day.

“Where’s Jones?” I asked. She should still be on.

“She got a phone call, some personal business. She asked if I could come in early. Baby was asleep. Daddy was sitting around; no sense both of us watching the angel. Besides, someone has to put her through college.”

Graceful as usual. I knew she’d love to have spent a few extra hours just watching their new daughter. Like most older parents, she and her husband treasured the additional joy of affirming and reaffirming that “Yes, it’s finally, really true.” I wondered if Jones’s lonely life left her incapable of realizing what she cost others.

* * * *

The call came minutes after I’d entered my office. “Dr. Garnet, you’re wanted two-three in the morgue.” I needed a second to get it. “This is a joke, right?” “No, sir. Call came a few seconds ago. Said you were in your office and wanted you called, to come down two-three.”

“Who?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Why?”

“Just said it was urgent.”

A 2-3 call would get me running, normally, no questions asked. But this was weird. A macabre joke in hospitals is about mistakenly sending a live one to the morgue. Had one of Watts’s tenants suddenly sat up?

“Sir, are you going?”

“Yes, operator, but have security meet me there right away.”

I grabbed my stethoscope and was out the door and halfway through emergency before I saw a nurse.

“Sandy, grab the resus cart and meet me in the morgue!”

She was taken aback. Obviously she also presumed this was a bad joke.

“I mean it!” I snapped, and headed for the door. I grabbed a ventilator mask and intubation gear hanging there for resuscitations off the premises.

The stairwell was empty for my run to the basement. The echoes of my own steps followed me down. I had a bad feeling about this. The only way someone could have known I was in my office at that minute on a Sunday afternoon was by watching.

The thin line of overhead bulbs led off into the distance toward Watts’s lab. No one else should be here on a weekend, but I listened and peered down that string of light pools inviting me farther in. I had thoughts of a spider and a fly. I took a breath, remembered with relief that a security guard and a nurse were on their way, and picked up my pace.

The anteroom was just a pocket off the hallway right in front of the lab doors. Two stretchers were parked on either side of the narrow passage. There were no bulbs suspended above this area, but there was enough light from the hallway behind to show me that one of the stretchers was occupied. To me, the shrouded figure was more suggestive of death than an uncovered corpse would have been. Obviously Watts planned a weekend dissection. I edged my way around the body and approached the lab entrance. To my right was the heavy wooden door of the walk-in freezer, where bodies waiting to be picked up are kept. It was ajar. Instinctively, I clicked it shut. My mother had always taught me to close the refrigerator. Ahead were the double swinging doors to the dissection room. Light seeped under the sill. I knocked, feeling foolish, especially for still keeping an eye on the sheeted figure behind me.

“Hello? Anyone there? Robert?”

There was no reply, but coming from inside the lab I could hear a fast, steady beeping that was familiar, yet out of place.

I opened the door and stepped into the bright interior.

Watts was spread-eagled on his own autopsy table, naked from the waist up, white, not breathing, and wired to a portable monitor. He had a large bruise on the side of his head, but it was his sightless stare, the wet mark at his crotch, and the stench of fresh excrement that told me he was clinically dead. The jagged run of ragged peaks across the monitor screen meant ventricular fibrillation. I could still bring him back.

At the far end of the counter that surrounded the room a tap was open full, and water was sloshing over the edge of the sink, spilling onto the floor. Damn, but the place would be flooded soon. What the hell was going on? I didn’t have time for that question—or anything else, if I was going to save Robert.

Quickly, but still moving carefully so as not to slip on the wet floor, I stepped to the monitor and grabbed the paddles. They were already greased, and the machine was charged to 360 joules, ready to fire. None of this made sense. But my training took over. Though hardly necessary, I checked his neck pulse and verified its absence. I placed the paddles at the appropriate landmarks on the chest and got ready to attempt to recapture a normal heart rhythm with a jolt of direct current. These moves in preparation for discharge were automatic. I leaned over Watts to assure a good electrical contact, but inside I was recoiling. What monster had set this up, made Watts a specimen, like a drill dummy, and then readied everything to lead me through his resuscitation like a training exercise?

Positioned, not even having to think about it, I moved my thumbs over the red discharge buttons. Even though I was alone, I automatically glanced around the table. We give our residents holy hell if they miss taking a look around and calling “stand back” to prevent a member of the team who may still be touching the patient from getting shocked. This omission can result in having two cardiac arrests to deal with. In spite of myself, to no one I muttered, “Stand back.” The harsh dissecting light glinted off the steel surface of the autopsy table and the wet floor as I completed my look around. Maybe that glint was what broke my unthinking rush through the steps.

“Shit!” I shouted, slapping the paddles back in their holders as if they were snakes.

I had to insulate him—and myself—from the water and steel. An uninsulated shock would hit me and stop my own heart.

Far off down the hall I heard the distinctive crashing noise our elevator makes to announce its arrival. Then came the excited chatter of the security guard and Sandy running down the long tunnel pushing a squeaky resuscitation cart.

To buy time, I positioned Watts’s head, sealed his lips with my own, and gave him two quick breaths. Then I moved my hands to his midchest and gave fifteen brisk compressions. At one moment I felt the dry snap of his ribs, but if he lived, I knew he’d forgive me. It took three cycles of this before Sandy and a puffing, fat security guard pulled the cart inside the room.

“Sandy, call a ninety-nine. You, sir, we’ve got to insulate him, and us.” I was speaking between puffs. Watts’s chest rose each time I blew into his lungs. “Grab that backboard!”

The guard moved to the cart. On it was a folded six-foot board for lifting people with back injuries. Sandy made the call, then came to Watts’s side. She started pumping his chest. That left me free to assemble the bag and mask, slip in a curved airway to keep his tongue from blocking his throat, and start ventilating him. The guard wrestled the board to the table. Sandy pumped. I bagged. The rigors of giving compressions loosened a few buttons on Sandy’s blouse. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. The guard slipped on the floor trying for a better angle.

“Okay, here’s what we’ll do.” I got his attention away from Sandy. “On three, we’ll stop, roll him toward us, and you’ll slip the board under him.”

We got the count right, but rolling Watts on the narrow table nearly dropped him over the edge. The guard dinged the overhead light and then nearly hit me trying to get the board into position while watching the developments of Sandy’s blouse. With our feet sliding in the water and all three of us pushing Watts onto the board, we landed on his stomach, but at least the board was between Watts and the metal table.

“Right, Sandy, keep pumping.” I kept bagging. The guard kept ogling.

“You!” I snapped. “Quit that crap.” He went red. Sandy rolled a stare of contempt his way but kept quiet and continued pumping.

“We have to insulate our feet!” I ordered. “We’re still too wet to shock him. Turn off the water, then go out to the hallway and grab a mattress from a stretcher. Hurry!”

I was watching the monitor. The ragged activity persisted, but it was weaker. We were running out of time.

The guard went without protest. He didn’t seem to mind that he’d be alone with a corpse out there.

Sandy was getting flushed and breathing hard.

“You want to switch?” I asked her.

“No! Just keep that bozo away from me.”

“You’re just too sexy when you save a life.”

“Creep. Watch it or I’ll tell Janet.”

The banter. Whistling past the reaper.

While pumping, she took a look around the room. “What’s the story here?”

I kept bagging. “I don’t know. I found him like this.”

“Like this!” The surprise interrupted her rhythm.

The guard stumbled in the door with the mattress and plopped it at our feet.

We stepped up on it. I took a final glance at the monitor; the tracing was a mere flicker. I reached for the paddles, placed them, and glanced around. “All clear!” Sandy stopped pumping and stood back, still on the mattress. I pressed the red buttons.

The charge arched Watts’s back. He smacked back down on the board like a slab of sirloin hitting a butcher block. But I was watching the monitor. The zigzags flattened into a wandering straight line, nothing else. “Come on, Watts, come on!” Still a flat line. The steady whine of the machine mocked our effort.

“Shit! Keep pumping.”

Sandy resumed chest compressions.

“Grab that high stool over there,” I told the guard.

He dragged it over. “Up you go. Sandy. You’ll have more downward force on your push.”

I squeezed four full puffs of air into Watts, then dropped the bag and foraged in the cart for an ET tube and a working laryngoscope. I found the size I wanted, flicked the blade of the scope open to activate the light, and stepped to Watts’s head.

“Hold it, please!” I ordered.

Sandy stopped pressing down on his chest. The guard held his breath. I scissored Watts’s mouth open with the fingers of my right hand, inserted the blade with my left, and slid it back to the base of his tongue. There were the cords, clear, no vomit. I threaded them with the tube. The monitor was barely quivering now, almost flat. “Okay, pump.”

Sandy moved to compress, and I’d just hooked up the bag to give more air, when we heard the first beep, and a healthy complex leaped to the screen. “Hold on,” I said quietly. This would be it. A few salvos and then death was sometimes all we got. Another beep, another complex, then more line, then another beep. “Any pulse with that?”