Second Opinion (18 page)

CHAPTER 32

With security people and police throughout the lab, there was no way Dan could chance bringing Thea out of the cabinet. He promised to be back for her as soon as it was safe, then softly eased the door closed.

Thea lay in the cramped blackness for another three hours. The terrible throbbing in her arm gave way to a stinging numbness, and finally to no sensation at all. Twice her legs cramped up so ferociously that she had to risk opening the door just to stretch out. Each time she could hear voices not that far away, and each time she pulled her legs back before she was ready.

She knew Dan would do whatever he could to protect her, but she also knew that in terms of seniority, he was low man on the pole, and in no position to give orders. There was no choice but to battle the increasing pain in any way she could and to give her mind work to do. For a time she tried meditating—something she had never done with much success or enjoyment in the past, and didn't succeed at now. For a while she sang silently—native Congolese songs mostly. And for a time she tried to reason out the significance to what she had found in Lydia Thibideau's office.

She was in the midst of those thoughts when Thibideau's voice suddenly intruded from not far away.

'How did they handle the glass like that, Detective Putnam?'

'Glass cutter, suction devices. Not so difficult if you know what you're doing. Whoever did it were professionals, and bold ones at that. It was pure chance that one of the security people, who happens to be a former cop, was working a double shift and remembered the bucket truck parked at another location after working hours.'

'Professional thieves? I… I just don't understand.'

'You have no idea what they might have been after?'

'We have a number of anticancer agents under investigation or in development. It's possible one of the pharmaceutical companies is involved in some way. If even one of these treatments is approved for general use, there could be a great deal of money involved.'

'Industrial spies are everywhere, especially in the drug industry. Could someone be after something in your patient records?'

'I can't think of what, and at first glance I didn't see any sign they were tampered with. But just in case, I've got maintenance here right now moving my files to a secured area until we get to the bottom of this.'

The voices faded away. How ironic that Dan was probably the one who blew the whistle on her and Flowers. She probably should have told him what they were planning, but the truth was, she really didn't want to compromise him in any way. Now, if he could somehow get her out of there with Hayley's films before her arms and legs permanently stopped functioning, she would have what she needed, and Dan would be something of a hero for thwarting the robbery. Thea waited as long as she could stand, and finally eased open the cabinet door just long enough to move one leg a few inches. Her arm seemed beyond saving, but continuous flexing of her fingers suggested she wasn't giving her body enough credit.

She returned to the darkness. The lab was again completely silent. Had the police left? What plan did Dan have for getting her out? How big of a chance was he going to have to take? Should she just ignore his orders and try to get off the fifth floor and out of the building?

Their conversation in Wellesley had made it clear Dan wasn't ready to reapply for the police force yet, and may not be ready ever. The job here was important to him for a number of reasons, including making his child-support payments. If she were in any way responsible for him getting fired, she would have trouble ever forgiving herself.

Another long stretch of time passed during which she heard nothing but her own breathing and an occasional involuntary groan of discomfort from deep in her throat. For a while, she tried to focus on Hayley, and what she should tell her. Someone, somehow, had created an MRI with her name on it, taken at a private radiology center in Atlanta, and showing her to have a lethal cancer. How could that be? Was Thibideau responsible—drumming up business, perhaps? Was some doctor or other employee at North Central Georgia Imaging being paid off to switch films? Or had there simply been a terrible, terrible mistake in labeling or filing?

The unanswerable questions kept piling on top of one another.

There was just too much for her brain to get around. She needed to get out and she needed to talk with someone who knew medicine, and who understood the deviousness of people, and the lengths to which some were willing to go in order to… to what? The perfect person to help her was lying in a dense coma just a few buildings away. But in all likelihood, he was there because he had learned the very same things that she was in the process of discovering.

Strained near to coming apart, Thea closed her eyes tightly and began humming a Congolese lullaby—her favorite of all the music she had learned during her years in Africa. Her mind followed the tune to the village nearest her hospital—a simple, vibrant place where beautiful people woke up each day to profound poverty, illness, and uncertainty, yet still managed to smile… and to sing.

My
little black dove Curled up in your nest of love, The moon is a charm To keep you from harm Asleep at my breast…

Humming, a coping strategy dating to her earliest days of therapy, when ferocious meltdowns were nearly a daily occurrence, brought her an almost immediate calm. Her breathing slowed, and the tightness in the muscles of her face abated. She had drifted off to sleep when the door to the cabinet was eased open. This time, a flashlight was shone not in her eyes, but up into the regal face of a man in his thirties. The concern in his expression was genuine. He was extremely handsome, with features and coloring that reminded her of a Congolese surgeon she had worked with a year or so ago. From what Thea could tell from where she lay, he was wearing the gray uniform of hospital maintenance.

'Dr. Sperelakis, I presume,' he whispered. His voice was a rich bass.

'You presume right.'

'My name is Lockwood. Dennis Lockwood. I'm a friend of Dan Cotton's. I'm also a cop.' He flipped his wallet open and shined the light on his badge. 'I'm going to get you out of here.'

'That's okay with me.'

'Can you move?'

Thea tried and was surprised at how easily her arms and legs responded.

'Here I come,' she said, setting her knapsack and the MRIs onto the floor and squirming out after them.

There were no overheads on in the lab, but the walls of windows let in a good deal of light from outside streetlamps.

'It's just the two of us,' Lockwood said, continuing to whisper as he helped her to her knees, 'but I don't know for how long. Stay low just in case someone shows up or looks in from across the alley. Here, I brought you a limo.'

He reached behind him and pulled over a large canvas laundry cart. Thea tumbled gracelessly over the edge and dropped onto some blankets on the bottom.

'Did you work with Dan on the force?' she asked. 'Is that why you're here?'

'No. He saved my life.
That's
why I'm here. If he told me to roll on hot coals, I would seriously consider doing it.'

'I don't think he would, though,' Thea said.

'No,' Lockwood said curiously, 'I don't suppose he would… Okay, Doc. Hunch down and pull those blankets over you. We're going to meet Dan outside.'

Thea did as she was asked, and used a corner of one blanket to wipe the greasepaint from her face. It was a miracle that she was about to get away unscathed from what had been an absolutely horrible idea. And even more miraculous, she was coming away with serious, credible evidence as to what might have caused someone to try to kill her father. All she needed now was to figure out how best to use what she had gathered, what it actually meant, and what to advise Hayley to do.

Dennis Lockwood wheeled Thea out of the building without incident. When he finally told her it was safe to stand, they were in a secluded grove in the far southwest corner of the campus. Dan was waiting, and held her firmly against his broad chest.

'Thank you for rescuing me,' she said to Lockwood.

'Anytime.'

'I hope not.'

'Pardon?'

'I hope you don't have to rescue me again.'

'We need to get going,' Dan said, making no attempt to explain Thea to his friend. 'Lock will take you to your car. I don't want you to get caught now after all we've gone through, and I think the BPD are still nosing around.'

'Did they catch Sean?'

'That's your cat burglar partner?'

'It's a long story, but yes.'

'Well, he seems to have outrun the law. I think I could have had him, but my boss wanted the glory of making—'

'—the bust.'

Thea joined him saying the words, and they both grinned.

'It's another long story,' Dan said to Lockwood. 'Thanks for doing this, my friend.'

'You call, I come. You and me are still a long way from being even. We're saving your place at work, you know.'

'I know, Lock. I know.'

Thea could feel the sadness in his voice.

CHAPTER 33

Through the faintest gray of early morning, Thea rode with Dennis Lockwood to the Sperelakis Institute parking lot on the exact opposite side of the Beaumont campus. It had taken Thea some time and thought to decide to park there and not in one of the high-rise garages on the other side of the campus. But in the end, she was determined not to have her actions dictated by the animal who had assaulted her.

'Do you think Dan did the right thing?' she asked Lockwood.

'Right thing?'

'Quitting the force the way he did after he was forced to shoot that boy.'

'I've never killed a kid, killed anyone for that matter, so I really couldn't say.'

'I have.'

'You have what?'

'Killed a kid. Sometimes, in my business, when patients are really, really sick, we have to make choices and make them quickly. Sometimes the choices we make don't work. Sometimes they actually make a bad situation worse. Sometimes…'

Her voice trailed away.

'I understand,' Lockwood said. 'And I suppose you could say Dan should have rolled with the punch of what he had to do. But I was there.

I saw how crazed that poor kid was after being picked on and bullied the way he had been. He didn't know up from Thursday. From what we learned later, he never did anything wrong except for trying to be himself. That got him chased and beaten up again and again. Some of the gang who did it didn't even go to his school. Some were several years older.'

'That's so ugly and so sad.'

'Dan yelled at him to drop his gun or he would shoot. That's when the kid whirled with the gun pointed right at my chest from like twenty feet away. His eyes were glazed over. There's no way he saw me as a person.'

'Dan had no choice. Just like if he was a doctor. You do your best and then live with the consequences.'

'I suppose that's one way of looking at it,' the policeman said coolly.

Thea sensed that her statement didn't sit well with Lockwood—hard to believe since it made perfect sense to her. She sensed as well that there was something missing in her response—something else she should be saying.

'Is there anything I could do or say to help Dan out now?'

The moment she heard her words, she pictured Dr. Carpenter smiling at her and nodding from across her desk.

You're getting it, Thea. You're getting it.

Lockwood shrugged, but his expression said clearly that her question met
his
approval as well.

'Just be there, I guess,' he said. 'Be there and be patient. Don't try and force him into any decisions before he's ready.'

Thea hugged Lockwood, thanked him again, then asked him to wait until she had locked herself into her car. She drove out of the parking lot behind him, and headed up Route 9 toward Wellesley, wondering if Dan was thinking she might be the woman he had been waiting for—if, in fact, he had been waiting for a woman at all.

It was after five when she pulled into the drive. The lights in the carriage house were on as usual, although she knew they were no guarantee Dimitri was awake. After she showered and changed, it might be worth asking his opinion as to how she should approach Hayley with the news of her MRIs, and also any speculation as to what the disturbing findings might mean. His contribution to any situation was always hit or miss, but his unquestioned genius often allowed him to think outside any box.

Perhaps she could even talk him into accompanying her to the barbecue Niko and his wife were having that evening in honor of her return. Niko promised that a full complement of Aunt Marys would be there, and it would be the first time all four of Petros's children had been together in years.

She set the knapsack and films on the kitchen table and showered upstairs. Toweling off in front of the bathroom mirror, she couldn't help but notice the change in her appearance since her departure from Africa. True, she had been up all night, and in difficult circumstances, but she couldn't begin to count the nights she had stayed up with a sick or dying patient. There was a pallor to her skin and a hollowness surrounding her eyes that were stark departures from what she had grown used to in the healthy, oxygen-rich air and uncomplicated work environment of the jungle.

It was, she knew, nothing more or less than stress or strain, whatever the difference was between the two. She was Valentine Michael Smith in Robert Heinlein's
Stranger in a Strange Land,
marooned on Mars, raised by Martians since infancy, and now returning to Earth. The book had been one of her absolute favorites from the first time she read it. If challenged, she could probably recite much of it by heart.

Now, in some ways, she was Mike Smith. She could only hope her story had a less violent ending than did his.

She threw her cat burglar clothes into the hamper, and put on khakis, a tank top, and a lightweight, frayed flannel shirt that dated back to high school. Even her body seemed less muscular than it had been, similar to Mike Smith's initial weakness caused by a reaction to the atmosphere of Earth.

'You can do this,' she said, vowing that, at least, she would begin jogging every day. 'You can do this.'

Her bed began beckoning, but she sensed if she lay down now, that would be it for the day, and she had things to do. The shower, fresh clothes, and the resolve to get more exercise had a buoying effect, and the moment she stepped out of her bedroom, she felt energized—ready for the day, and excited to examine the spoils of her raid on Lydia Thibideau's fortress.

Singing the sweet lullaby out loud, she danced down the back stairs to the kitchen, put a pot of water on for tea, picked up Hayley's films, and held them up to the window.

Then her heart stopped.

One of the films was the negative MRI that had been taken of Hayley almost a year ago at the Beaumont Executive Health Center. The other one was of a man named Fitzgibbon, with wildly metastatic pancreatic cancer, taken three years ago. In her haste to gather the films and records together, and to replace them in Thibideau's file cabinet, she had grabbed the wrong MRI.

In an instant, Thea's upbeat mood was gone, replaced by the exhaustion she had so successfully held at bay, and by a cavernous melancholy.

All that effort.

All that pain.

All that risk.

'Dammit!… Dammit!… Dammit to hell!'

Making no attempt to stem a flood of tears, Thea slumped forward, her face pressed against her arm, sobbing mercilessly.

'Hey, what gives? Something happen with your squeeze?'

Dimitri, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt that read
SAVE A TREE; EAT A BEAVER,
sank down on the seat across from her.

'N-no,' she stammered around sobs. 'He's v-very sweet.'

'You need a towel or some Kleenex or something?'

'N-no. I'm allowed to c-cry, you know. It's not such a b-bad thing.'

'Hey, I know. I did it once myself. But I stopped when Mom finally backed the car off my foot. Go ahead. Let it flow. Then you can tell your old bro who's gone and done you wrong.'

The teapot began to whistle, and by the time Thea had filled a tea ball with some black chai and let it steep, she had regained a modest amount of composure.

'You want some of this?' she asked.

'Yaargh! Never drink tea before the sun's above the yardarms, matey. Yaargh!'

Dimitri was clearly tuned in to how upset she was, and as genuinely anxious to help as he was capable of being. Thea liked him like this, although she couldn't actually remember when she had last seen him so. She set her tea down and took him step by step from her initial meeting with Hayley Long to the negative exam by acupuncturist Julian Fang, to her decision, after being assaulted in the parking lot, to allow Sean Flowers to get her into Lydia Thibideau's office, and finally to her disastrous error while replacing Thibideau's patients' records and X-rays.

Her story was choppy because she had decided to omit her communication with their father, and his giving her the name of Jack Kalishar. If her brother picked up on that, he gave no indication. Instead, probably overwhelmed by the situation, he shifted restlessly in his seat, jiggled his leg constantly, and tore several paper napkins into tiny bits. She asked for any theories he could come up with as to why Thibideau might have padded her caseload of cancers, but he had no interest in speculating. Only when she tried to show him the two MRIs did his interest seem piqued. He immediately took one of the films, the one of Edward Fitzgibbon, and held it up to the window with one hand.

'This his cancer?' he asked, correctly indicating the largest portion of the tumor.

'It is.'

'And this is his liver, and here's his spleen, right? Destroys old red blood cells, pools new red blood cells, helps build the immunity strength of the body through the reticuloendothelial system…'

Thea sat quietly while Dimitri correctly identified virtually every structure in the MRI, and even provided a tidbit or two about each one.

'Hey, I'm impressed,' she said when he had run out of organs.

'I couldn't get into med school like the rest of you Sperelakis kids. Hell, I couldn't get out of community college. So a while back I decided to teach myself medicine. It was like toe-tally bor-ring.' He said the words with a Valley girl accent and gesture.

'Well, I'm impressed just the same, Dimitri. I should have had you take my boards for me.'

'Or better still, Niko. He barely passed his.'

'How do you know?'

'I hacked into the National Medical Board's computer, just for fun. I could have made him flunk, but I didn't.'

Thea giggled at the notion.

'Good thing. He's become a very good surgeon.' It you say so.

'What I say is thanks for cheering me up a little.'

'Glad to be of service. Say, tell me, do you happen to have a cell phone?'

'I've been using Petros's. It's in that knapsack. Why?'

'Because you've got it on vibrate and it's going off, that's why.'

Only at that instant did Thea hear the faint buzz from among her burglar implements.

'You're like a mutant with that hearing of yours,' she said, fishing out the phone and flipping it open. 'Hello, this is Thea.'

'Thea, it's Marlene in your father's room.'

Thea went cold.

This was it… She just knew it… It was over.

'What happened to him?' she managed.

'Happened? Oh, nothing, really. No change. I'm sorry, Thea. I should have said that right away.'

Thea exhaled.

'That's okay, Marlene. What's going on?'

She glanced over at Dimitri, who, completely lost in his own world, had poured half a shaker of salt onto the table and had begun dividing it into piles with a butter knife. She had once been told that no one at the busy neuropsychological evaluation service had ever seen anyone test as high for raw intelligence as he did.

'Well, you asked me to call if anything strange happened with any of Dr. Sperelakis's visitors,' the nurse was saying.

'Yes.'

'Well, something just did. I don't know what to make of it, but it involves Dr. Hartnett.'

'Dr. Hartnett?'

Thea flashed on the thank-you note in Jack Kalishar's record from the director of development.

'He just left here,' the woman said. 'He comes in several times a day.'

'I know. He's one of my father's closest friends, and he is also his primary care doctor.'

'Well, he said he wanted to do a brief exam on Dr. Sperelakis, and for me to wait outside.'

'Well,' Dimitri said, standing up suddenly, and speaking as if Thea was not involved with a phone call. 'It's time for me to get back to my
World ofWarcraft
encounter. I'm up to level sixty-eight and rising. The baddest man on the planet. See you later, sis.'

'See you… Sorry, Marlene. I was interrupted. He asked you to leave.'

'Yes, exactly. Well, I went out of Dr. S.'s room, but I stayed near the door to the step-down unit.' G
O
on.

'I couldn't see much because I was shielded by Dr. Hartnett's back, but I swear I saw him inject something into your father's central line.'