Second Opinion (25 page)

CHAPTER 47

For Thea, the rest of the day, with the minutes and hours creeping toward their
1A.M.
meeting with Scott Hartnett, seemed nearly interminable. A good deal of her time was spent explaining to people the origin of the huge bruise on her forehead, the black-and-blue under both eyes, and the limp. It made matters easier that the explanation she chose, an automobile accident, was close enough to the truth for her to deliver it smoothly.

From all she could tell, there had been no further developments regarding Hayley. Hospital lawyers were involved now, clearly expecting some sort of legal action from her camp. Detectives from the BPD were still questioning hospital employees in a luxury suite provided by the Beaumont. Thea had been called in for a second go-round, but had still withheld what information she had regarding Lydia Thibideau and Scott Hartnett, as well as her belief that certain patients of the Beaumont Clinic were being cured of serious medical conditions that they never actually had, except in their electronic records.

There was no note of Hartnett visiting his patient in the step-down unit, although both Niko and Selene had spent twenty minutes there earlier in the day. According to the nurse's log, the twins had made some efforts to communicate with Petros, and had actually removed the paper tape from his lids. Given what Thea knew of their father's obstinacy, it was going to take a lot of undoing of their bedside remarks before they got any response from the man.

Thea herself did much more talking with the Lion than she did questioning. Even though his responses were sluggish, and she was not always certain he understood her, she brought him up to date on the developments with both Hayley and Hartnett. One of the questions she did ask was whether he felt Amy Musgrave might have been involved along with Hartnett. Petros's answer seemed equivocal.

There had to be a more efficient, reliable method of exchanging information, Thea thought desperately. He just seemed so slow, so worn down.

The highlight of the difficult day was dinner with Dan. Clearly, Hartnett had invited him along to the meeting with him to put her mind at ease. What was a little hard to understand was how he knew about their relationship in the first place. The best Thea could do at tracing the hospital grapevine was that she had mentioned Dan to both Selene and Niko, and had been with him in the cafeteria for several meals as well as in the ER. Then she remembered the nurse, Marlene, in the step-down unit remarking that the two of them had become the topic of hospital gossip.

No matter. He was committed to meeting her outside the MRI suite, which occupied an expansive area off the main tunnel, and to accompany her to hear what Hartnett had to say, whether it was inside the unit or someplace else.

After dinner, with hours still to spare, Thea wandered down into the tunnels to reconnoiter the MRI suite. She couldn't help but notice the large bronze plaque beside the entrance. The Grigsby Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center, almost certainly built in memory of Warren Grigsby, the late patient of Lydia Thibideau who had died while receiving SU990 in one of her investigational studies.

All but one of the techs had gone home for the day. The one closing up, a cheerful, attractive woman in her thirties named Stephanie, said she was happy to answer any questions Thea might have. She walked her down the corridor, and gestured through the control-room window at the massive electromagnet—a chunky open-ended tube, whose business end faced the control room from ten feet away.

'This is a superconducting magnet,' Stephanie said proudly. 'Three teslas of magnetic power, although there is a self-screening system built in that keeps the truly powerful magnetism contained to the immediate area surrounding the machine. Believe it or not, the patients inside that tube are surrounded by magnetic coils that are cooled by liquid nitrogen to a temperature of four hundred and fifty degrees below zero.'

Four hundred and fifty-two,
Thea thought automatically, having just reviewed the system in the library.

'That's amazing,' she said.

'A layer of vacuum keeps the cold from reaching them. It's like a giant thermos bottle. It would be impractical and very expensive to shut our magnets down, so we keep them turned on full strength all the time. Ready and waiting.'

'That's amazing,' Thea said again.

And it was, although the information wasn't at all new to her.

'Well, welcome to the staff, Dr. Sperelakis,' the tech said, concluding the brief tour. 'Come visit us anytime.'

She led Thea out and locked the door behind them.

Thea stayed behind near the Grigsby plaque, and watched as the tech merged with the others in the main tunnel. Her mind was engrossed in wondering why Hartnett had chosen this particular place for their meeting.

It didn't matter, though, she decided, so long as Dan was there with her. Together, they would insist on definitive answers from Hartnett to some very difficult questions—questions that could and should land the chief development officer in prison.

CHAPTER 48

At nine thirty, Thea caved in to a crushing fatigue, and after setting the clock radio in her father's office, went to sleep on the leather couch. It would be all over soon, she told herself as she settled in.

All over soon
…

At twelve thirty she was up and washing her face in the small lavatory off Petros's examining room, feeling refreshed and anxious. She toweled off and swept a brush through her hair. Then she went back to the bookshelves in his office and took down a wonderful photo of her father and mother taken when they were sixty during a visit to the Greek island of Kefalonia, where he was born. The love between them was almost palpable, as was the characteristic arrogance in Petros's stance and the tilt of his head.

That was then. Now…

Thea tried without success to blot out intrusive images of the gorgeous man in the photo as he was at this moment, tethered to machines, with nurses tending to his bodily functions, and splints keeping his hands and feet from curling up.

You never know,
she found herself thinking.
You never know where it's all going to come to rest.

Alongside that thought came a mental picture of Petros's Volvo, lying on its roof embedded in the murky bottom of a pond somewhere in Newton.

You never know.

Thea grabbed her bag and hurried down the stairs to the tunnel. Again, the hospital was in deep night mode, with only light foot traffic headed from one building to another, and one maintenance man silently cruising past her on a Segway. It was ten minutes of one when she arrived at the door to the MRI suite. No Dan. No Hartnett. At five of, she was still by herself and getting concerned. She called Dan on his cell and got only a recording. The security office knew only that he was on rounds. Thea turned down their offer to call him on his radio. At two minutes past one, she called both numbers again. This time she got two recordings.

Exactly what had Hartnett said?

Thea's strength was in memorizing the written word. She was surprisingly inept at recalling the details of things that were said to her. Meet me at the MRI suite?… Meet me in the MRI suite?… Meet me outside the MRI suite? She checked her watch again. Four minutes after.

Where was Dan?

Thea peered through the glass in the hallway door and realized that the light in the outer waiting room was on. She distinctly remembered Stephanie, the MRI tech, turning it off as she left. Tentatively, she tried the door. It was open. Inside, the doorway connecting the waiting room with the inner sanctum of the unit had a small panel of glass at eye level. Through it she could just make out the repetitive flashing of a white light—a strobe of some sort, she thought. Had that been in evidence before? Had Stephanie turned it on before she left? What purpose could it serve?

One oh eight.

Thea's pulse was beginning to race. She crossed the waiting room, opened the door with the small glass window, and stepped into the corridor leading past the receptionist's cubicle and changing areas to the control room. Beyond that was the magnet itself. The flashing light intensified, pulsating off the walls of the hallway.

Dan?

She said his name out loud, but knew there would be no response.

'Dan?'

Something had happened in the hospital, she thought, an emergency of some sort. He was held up, maybe helping with an out-of-control patient in the ER, someone acutely intoxicated or having a psychotic break. Those sorts of things happened all the time— especially at this hour.

Aside from the eerie, repetitive flash, the carpeted corridor was dark. On highest alert, Thea walked slowly, carefully toward the light, which she now knew for certain was a strobe—a strobe coming from the imaging room itself. A few more steps and she was clear of the corridor and facing the solid door and two observation windows of the magnet chamber.

She gasped at what she saw inside, and raced across to one of the windows.

The massive superconducting magnet, seven or eight feet tall, looked like a spaceship in the rhythmic, silver-white light. The opening of the enormous cylinder—the powerful magnetic epicenter of the device—was directly facing her.

And held in place across the opening, fixed to the magnet by lengths of steel chain that were held in place by enormous magnetic force across his arms, was Scott Hartnett.

The sled used to transport patients into and out of the cylinder had been pushed aside. The development director's shirt had been torn away. His legs were tied together at the ankles, dangling straight down. He was thrashing his head about. His face, illuminated by the disturbing, almost supernatural strobe, was distorted in some way. It took a number of flashes before Thea realized why: there was a broad swatch of tape—silver duct tape, she thought—pulled tightly across his mouth. His eyes were eerily wide as he continued to thrash his head from side to side.

The scene was absolutely terrifying, and all Thea could think of at that moment was getting at the emergency Stop button on the wall, quenching the magnet, and getting Hartnett down. But after reviewing the process earlier in the day, she also feared doing so. Hitting the button would cause the rapid release of supercooled helium gas, which required immediate emergency ventilation to release the gas out of the building. If prepared for insufficiently, profound frostbite, asphyxiation, and death were possibilities. Still, most MRI setups were geared to clear the chamber of all cryogenic gas the moment the Stop button was hit. It was a gamble, but one she was willing to take to free Hartnett.

Halfway between Hartnett and the door, facing away from Thea, was a standard vinyl and metal wheelchair, clearly nonferromagnetic, with the letters
MRI
painted in white across the backrest.

'Scott, can you hear me?' Thea shouted. 'Can you hear me?' There was no change in the man that she could see. It seemed as if he was violently shaking his head no.

No to what?
Thea wondered.

The powerful strobe and the scene before her were hypnotic and unsettling, and were making Thea dizzy and slightly queasy. Her thinking felt pressured and unfocused. Was Hartnett hurt? Who had done this to him? With help, would it be possible for him to slip his arms out from under the chains? No, she decided. They actually seemed to be cutting into his skin. The best way, regardless of the cost and inconvenience, was to hit the Stop button.

'Scott!' she called again.

Hartnett's wild thrashing persisted, as did a continuous opening and closing of his hands.

In the control-room window, crisscrossed by fine, metallic wires to block interfering radio waves, Thea could see her own reflection, illuminated repetitively by the strobe like some macabre Times Square advertisement.

All she could think about now was getting Hartnett loose and getting to the bottom of things, including tending to her mounting fears that something might have happened to Dan. She set her watch aside and removed her earrings. Then she quickly scanned herself for anything else metallic, and located the Stop button up on the wall to the right of the magnet. Through the unsettling light, Hartnett could see her. She felt certain of that. His eyes, if anything, were wider.

Comfortable that she had nothing further on that was ferromagnetic, Thea cautiously eased open the door. Something on the floor caught her eye—a pole of some sort from a broom or mop, reaching from the base of the door to the frame at the base of the wheelchair. Slowly, impelled by the inward-opening door and the pole, the chair began rolling toward the magnet. Six feet… five feet… it began to accelerate… four feet…

Suddenly, Thea realized that the seat of the chair was not empty, but piled with sharps—all manner of them. At the moment the situation became clear, the chair rolled past the protection of the self-screening apparatus and into the full three-tesla magnetic zone. As one, in a fraction of a second, the dozens of blades and other metallic sharps, including several hatchets, breached the gap from the chair to the magnet, drawn at ferocious speed.

Scott Hartnett's death was instantaneous.

The objects piercing and passing through his body included countless nails, scalpels, needles, razors, knives of different sizes, pins, darts, and several knitting needles. Thea saw the projectiles in frightening detail as they shot through the strobe like missiles, summoned by the gargantuan electromagnet. The blade of one hatchet embedded itself dead center in Hartnett's chest. Blood, spurting from gashes in his neck, arms, and face, was frozen in stop-action by the strobe.

Thea cried out and raced across to the magnet, but there was nothing she could do. Needles and nails and dozens of pins were embedded in Hartnett's face. One of the sharps had cut through almost half of his neck. His head flopped impotently to the left. Blood continued to spurt out briskly from a severed carotid artery, forcing Thea to back away from the magnet.

The strobe, which she could now see was taped below one of the observation windows, was still pulsating, giving the scene a surreal cast that neutralized some of the hideous gore for Thea. The steel chains would be there in place until the magnet was quenched. Despite the horrible evidence before her that the maneuver was futile, she felt she had to turn off the machine.

Unable to take her gaze from the lurid scene, and unaware of the slowly opening chamber door, Thea took a single step toward the Stop button, primed to run if there was a failure in the helium evacuation system. Suddenly, a gloved hand shot out of the darkness behind her, and clamped tightly across her mouth.