Lethal Practice (31 page)

Sandy touched his neck. A beep came and went; she shook her head and started pumping again.

“He needs help.” I grabbed three ampules of Adrenalin, drew them into a syringe, and emptied it down the ET tube. Then I bagged that little cocktail home. There was another beep, then a line again. I heard loud clanking at the door. Our 99 summons was beginning to produce help. The respiratory technician struggled in with oxygen tanks, saw Watts, and silently hooked up his cylinders. In seconds he took over the ventilation, bagging pure oxygen into the lungs instead of air. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

Beep, then another, then a few staggered beats, then, like a car in winter, they started and kept coming in a steady, regular stream.

“Yes!”

“A pulse.”

“Great.”

“We got him!”

Sandy dived into the cart to start an IV. “Put some Xylo through that, will you, Sandy? Seventy bolus and two a minute drip?”

A resident touched my arm. “Did you inflate the cuff?”

I hadn’t. “Sorry, is it leaking?”

He answered by injecting a syringe full of air through a catheter running down the outside of the tube in Watts’s trachea. This would inflate a small balloon around the tube and block any oxygen from escaping instead of going on down to the lungs.

Two more residents charged in.

“Pull some bloods and a gas, you two,” I said.

I moved to take Watts’s pressure. Not bad. Hundred over sixty, and getting stronger.

Ever-increasing numbers of residents, nurses, and students swarmed over the now-alive Watts, securing lines, slipping in catheters, hooking up monitors, and cleaning up spilled blood and other bodily fluids. He even began to look a little pink, but he needed a respirator. Whether or not he still had a brain was the real question.

Stewart Deloram from the ICU arrived. I gave him the story of the resuscitation, added I’d just found him, and left out the peculiar details. He slipped the strap of the portable defibrillator over his shoulder, and I stood back as the whole chattering, caring collection clanked and bumped their way out the door. I followed them into the hallway and watched the stretcher shrouded in a web of IVs and winking monitors recede through the dark like a departing train. They reached the end of the corridor and turned into the elevator.

Alone, I stood in the antechamber. Dripping noises were coming from the dissecting room behind me. I felt a coolness at my side and turned to find the freezer door open again, this time wide enough that I could see the interior. All the racks were empty. I was about to close it when I noticed a bunch of half-melted boot prints outlined in the frost on the floor just inside. I leaned against one of the stretchers. It held a stained, rumpled sheet It took a few seconds before I remembered that twenty minutes earlier, on my way into the morgue, the stretcher had held a corpse.

* * * *

A quick call to the nursing supervisor, Mrs. Quint, confirmed my growing fear. No one had died in the last twenty-four hours. No autopsies were scheduled for the weekend.

“So far,” she added, probably thinking of Watts. “By the way, good work.” She paused, then asked, “Is it true what Sandy told me, about you finding him, hooked up and all?”

I didn’t know what to say. Tales of missing corpses and hidden killers were not going to assuage Hurst’s attempts to keep me categorized as the resident nut.

I minimalized. “I don’t know who called me, but whoever found him and hooked him up probably was goofing off and shouldn’t have been down there. Maybe a smoker.” I waited to read the silence on how this was going over. It was a pretty skeptical silence. I tried putting her on the defensive. “Maybe a nurse,” I added softly.

I heard her breath hiss in. “Now, really. Dr. Garnet, you’ve no call to implicate my girls and boys.” Some of her “girls” were forty-eight-year-old women, her “boys” about the same age, and too many of them still snuck off to smoke since cigarettes had been totally banned. At least we were arguing about who was goofing off and I wasn’t having to explain killers and corpses.

I let her run on, then picked my spot and made my pitch. “Look, relax. What I’m saying is, it was probably one of your ‘girls’ who saved Dr. Watts’s life, and she can’t come forward about it.”

The silence returned. It held a “maybe.”

I pushed.
“Whatever
she or he was doing down here, that person’s a hero.”

More silence. She knew I’d just inferred her “girls” and “boys” sometimes did other secret deeds in hidden places besides illicit smoking. Sometimes the cigarette was included, after. Long ago, as a resident, I’d had my own induction to these liaisons, and, a half century ago, so probably had Mrs. Quint.

“Amazing” was her only comment, and then she hung up.

I’d made the call from the wall phone in Watts’s lab. As I replaced the receiver, it dawned on me I might have smudged fingerprints left on it by the person who had called locating. But now I wanted out. With the dark corridor outside the door, the weight of the hospital over my head, and my second near-miss, I began to get the creeps.

An unknown killer was still hunting me, already setting up the next attack. Was it Hurst? But what did he care about ER stats? Had it been Kradic? He’d know how to set up Watts, but he had no connection with Kingsly. Yet he would have a connection with the ER data. For that matter, could it be someone else in the ER? I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Kingsly’s death and the ER stats were completely unrelated. I had to get away— had to run. My breathing was openmouthed, and I kept trying to find some saliva for my dry tongue, but fear wouldn’t have it. We learned as students in physiology how the adrenaline response mustered a fight-or-flight syndrome. I was all flight.

But I made myself do one last thing: I went to the edge of the locker and kneeled to see the boot marks better. At first they seemed indistinct and blurred together, but the warmer air through the open door increased the icy condensation over the prints and made them clearer. I could see two definite sizes.

Then I started out. The nearer I got to the stairwell leading up to light and air, the faster I moved. I heard nothing in the dark behind me, but I straight-armed the door leading to the steps and went up three at a time.

Adrenaline, we were also told, gives us a sense of impending doom. I was getting a good dose. That, and a full-blown panic attack.

I blew out of the stairs and halfway across the hospital front lobby before I pulled up to a trot. The same lone man, tethered to his IV, and the gift shop lady, equally elderly, gawked together at my noisy entrance. I could see her thinking “escaped psych patient,” but before she could reach for a phone, I waved my stethoscope at her. “It’s okay, I’m a doctor,” I said, and made for the ER. “Emergency,” I called after me, and felt like an idiot.

I managed to reach my office without the nurses getting a good look at what must have been a white and sweaty face. Had they, I would have found myself tied to a monitor and en route to the CMU. Instead, I pulled an old paper bag out of our recycling box and started breathing into it. I don’t know how long it had been there, but it still held a faint odor of onions and something fishy. Nevertheless, rebreathing my own carbon dioxide began to slow my heartbeat and alleviate the numb tingling in my fingers. I’ve treated hundreds of patients with panic attacks, but now I know why they all think they’re going to die.

My own chest finally lightened up by thirty pounds, and my breathing slowed. Okay, I thought, I’m okay. Then the fish smell and my own stress got me, and I barfed into the bag.

* * * *

“The horny-nurse story will make more sense to Bufort than a killer still running around.” It was Riley over the phone. After cleaning up my mess, I had decided, for the record, to report what happened. In case I could ever prove any of this, I wouldn’t be nailed for withholding evidence.

I’d figured the shrouded body back at the morgue was alive and well as I slipped by it heading in to find Watts. The open freezer might have held a couple more buddies, all ready to finish me off if I didn’t zap myself first. I’d inadvertently shut them in on my way past. They were wearing boots, probably rubber, to protect themselves from the water if they had to “help me” fibrillate myself. Their shrouded buddy was likely letting them out to come in after me when the noisy elevator door announced Sandy’s arrival and scared them off.

Riley interrupted these musings. “Or more to the point, he’ll like it a lot better than admitting he was wrong.”

“I know,” I replied curtly. “Just memo this, will you? So if anything comes of it, I’m officially on record as having reported it.”

Riley didn’t answer right away. Perhaps he sensed how fed up I was with his reluctance to defy his boss, or maybe he was thinking over the politics of my request. “You got it, Doc,” he said finally, but I suspected he’d probably forward the message to Bufort through channels, knowing full well it’d be lost there for weeks. “And, Doc—”

I waited.

He finally asked, “Why did they want Watts?”

“He was bait to get me” was my immediate reply, but I remembered something more. It was so speculative that I was hesitant to tell Riley.

He sensed my holding back. “Okay, Doc, let’s have it.”

I felt reluctant, but added, “Watts had started phoning around to the other ERs to see if any of them had noticed unexplained cardiac needle tracks on their DOAs.”

After a few seconds of silence, he asked, “What did he find?”

“He didn’t find out anything. The run has apparently dried up.”

“Still, Doc, it’s a hell of a thought.”

“Are you willing to follow it up?” I demanded.

I could almost hear the lid snap shut on his own moment of speculation. “Like you said,” he replied coldly, “Watts didn’t find out anything.”

I was about to hang up in disgust.

“Okay,” he added after a few seconds, “obviously I was wrong. Someone is still coming at you.”

No kidding, I thought bitterly. He was my best bet on the police force, but I wondered if someone else would have to die before he’d risk insubordination and stand up to Bufort.

“I’ll alert a patrol car in your neighborhood,” he continued, his voice no longer cold, “and ask them to make extra passes by your house. But be careful, and call me tomorrow. Maybe we can work out something else.”

Swallowing my anger, I thanked him, and hung up without further comment.

I sat at my desk, doodling on a pad of paper, and thought some more about Watts’s questions and our own dead vagrant. On impulse I made a quick calculation and wished I hadn’t. If the other hospitals had been getting DOAs at the same rate as St. Paul’s, one or two a month, there had been one helluva lot of them delivered to Buffalo-area ERs over the last year. Watts’s hunch couldn’t be right, not with the kind of numbers that could be involved. Yet I remembered his grave mood when he first raised the possibility in the coffee shop. He was earnest, almost grim, and clearly convinced it needed to be checked out. Over the years I’d found it unwise to dismiss any idea he put forward without looking at it pretty carefully first. His track record was too good. But if some of those corpses, now long buried, did have undetected cardiac needle marks in them—and those marks would be easy to miss in a routine autopsy—I hadn’t any idea how that remotely related to Kingsly, or to me.

As Riley said, it was a hell of a thought, but pure speculation. Without evidence, even I had to admit I’d be a lunatic to suggest opening a few of their graves.

I shivered and called Janet’s hospital again.

“Dr. Graceton is doing another C section. Can I give her a message?”

Janet had kept to her plan to work that weekend. She believed my suspicions that Fernandez wasn’t the killer, and had agreed to continue to take precautions.

“Just tell her I called, and that everything’s fine.” Yeah, sure. ‘Tell her I’ll call back later.”

I gave the vet yet another call. This time I got one of Sophie’s assistants.

“Good news. Doctor. The fever’s gone. Muffy’s lapping up a little liquid and starting to put out urine.”

Thank God for “gorillacillin.” “Great. Do you want me to see her?”

“No, she’s alert enough now to get overexcited. Wouldn’t do her a bit of good, so just leave her with us, Doc.”

Chastised, I thanked her and hung up. I gathered the computer disks I’d originally come for, and left. My loved ones were safe for the moment, and I was starting to get a little more sense of fight than flight. By the time I reached my car, I even had a plan.

* * * *

Over a beer, Doug listened to what I was going to do. He’d sat motionless in a quiet corner of our kitchen while I told him everything. Elsewhere in the house the comforting banter of his men mixed with the racket of hammers and saws. They were working throughout the weekend to get us back in our home as quickly as possible.

The late afternoon light gave a sheen to the top of Doug’s bald head. Explaining my plan had sounded strange and impossible, but his absolute stillness reassured me he was taking me seriously, very seriously indeed.

“I don’t want any of your guys to endanger themselves, Doug. I have to have your promise on that.” I couldn’t see his eyes. They were in shadow, but I saw his slow nod.

“I want them there only to call in the cops, to get help when it’s obviously time.” I handed him Riley’s card, the one I’d found under my wiper summoning me to our meeting.

Doug took it but played with it and looked off into the increasing dark of evening. He knew violence. He’d told me of the times when, as a private contractor, he’d had to protect his building sites with shotguns from union goons. The thugs still roamed the labor movement, but now they wore suits and used laptop computers.

“Time’s the problem.”

His sudden speaking took me by surprise. For a moment I was afraid he was going to tell me he didn’t have time for this nonsense.

“You’re too alone,” he continued, “and too far from help, even with a good response. It’ll be too long before the cops will get to you. We need something closer.”

He was with me.