Snapshot (25 page)

Like a lot of office-tower tenants, Griffith had unshakable faith in the building guards, uniformed do-nothings who could be counted on to make sure visitors signed in and out. His office locks wouldn't have baffled a toddler. Even worse, he'd lavished a key on Paco.

How does a guy who employs squirrelly ops like Sanchez rate a plush office in the Pru? It baffles me; it really does. The rents there are astronomical, and Griffith Investigations wasn't squeezed into any broom closet either. My socialist mom would have ranted on about inequality for weeks. Me, I just noted the thick pile carpet, the fancy Roman shades, the leather chairs, and got down to business.

Griffith was an organized bastard, maybe that was the key to his success. He kept his current cases at the front of a tall metal filing cabinet. Six of them. I should be so lucky. I studied the file tabs, spotted no familiar names.

I started with the first file, an assets search for a potentially messy divorce, read it through, looking for my name or Paolina's. Next case, another divorce, I did the same. Third case, also marital.

The fifth file was it. There was my name, heavily underlined. My address. My phone. My Social Security number. The file was headed
Vandenburg
. Some kind of code? No. Thurman W. Vandenburg. Of Miami Beach, Florida.

I glanced at my watch. It reminded me that I needed sleep. “Hey,” I said to Sanchez, who was folded into one of the leather chairs, chewing the ends of his moustache. “Xerox machine in here?”

“Yeah.”

“What's the warm-up time on it?”

“It's one of those little jobbies. Pretty fast.”

“Turn it on and copy this. Don't ‘forget' any pages either.”

I didn't know a Thurman W. Vandenburg from Miami or anyplace else.

Sanchez did a good job handling the copy machine. Maybe paperwork was his forte.

“Can we get out of here?” he asked when he'd flipped off the machine and tidied up.

“My pleasure,” I said.

“I dunno,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“You considering calling your boss and fessin' up?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said.

“Because you ought to think before you do it, long and hard. If you spill it, I'll tell him you sold me the file. And I'm a good liar. He'll believe me.”

We walked out of the building after signing out with the guards. We'd used names other than our own upon entering.

“Now for one last thing, Paco,” I said as we reached the sidewalk.

He said, “I'm finished doing business with you, lady.”

“My garbage cans, Paco. Where are they?”

“Huh?”

“You using them?”

“I dumped 'em.”

“Damn, that is too bad.”

“Tough,” he said.

“I expected more sympathy, Paco. I was fond of those cans. You know, you can help make up for my loss. True Value Hardware Stores. The gray wheeled cans. Two of them. By tomorrow night.”

“You're kidding.”

“Tomorrow night is garbage night, Paco. Would I kid about that?”

“You're crazy.”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “I guess I am. But if I don't get my garbage cans, the Feds get the passport, with your name, and probably your prints on it. They'll ask questions. They won't be as polite as I am.”

“Shit,” he said.

“Just put them by the side of the house,” I said. “No need to ring the bell.”

I got in my car and sped away while he was still searching for words.

I don't normally listen to the news. Usually my tape deck goes full blast, but I'd played all my tapes twenty-seven times, so I hit the radio button instead. Not a news station, a blues-and-oldies station. But even they have news breaks and I caught one. I heard talk of the thirty-seventh recent health-care proposal and slaughter in Bosnia. It sounded the same as last week's horrors, so I leaned forward to punch it off.

“A spokesperson for the pharmaceutical firm Cephagen Company has announced that a man shot dead today at the Marine Wharf Hotel in downtown Boston has been identified as company president and CEO David Menander.”

She pronounced Cephagen with a long
E
sound. Cee Co.

More, I commanded silently. More. Come on.

Three teenagers wounded in a drive-by shooting in Boston's Grove Hall area had been taken to Boston City Hospital for treatment. Police suspected gang involvement.

No! More about Cephagen with a long
E
.

The woman's voice slid into the weather forecast, fair and sunny, while rain spattered my windshield.

I drove faster, checking my rearview mirror for cop cars, and hitting fifty in the thirty-mile zones. A Store 24 had one tattered
Globe
left. I hurled my thirty-five cents across the counter top to the bored and indifferent clerk.

It was one of those inside-page late-breaking Metro stories. Splashy because the Marine Wharf is no fleabag, and soft-pedaled because tourists are easily discouraged from spending two hundred a night to endanger life and limb. Hotel PR would have been all over this one. Bad luck, the victim being a notable. That would hinder further efforts to soften the impact. My eyes skimmed the print. Possible robbery of a male Caucasian. Wallet removed. Wristwatch ignored.

I climbed back into the car. Cephagen Company. Cee Co. Cee Co. Pharmaceuticals. They had to be related. Had to be. I drove quickly through the rain. Oncoming headlights dazzled my eyes. My tires squealed on the slick pavement.

At home, all was quiet. Paolina slept.

31

I was tired enough to fall asleep in the car, but I still had one phone call to make—to Mass. General, where according to Patient Information, Marta Fuentes was in satisfactory condition and resting comfortably. “Resting comfortably” had such a nice ring to it that I hurriedly splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth, stripped, and yanked on my in-lieu-of-nightgown tank top. Then I slowed to enter Paolina's bedroom in barefoot silence, listening to her hushed, regular breathing and smoothing the rumpled sheets.

When I do fall asleep, I slumber soundly and rarely remember my dreams. I recalled this one only because the phone woke me before it ended.

“Hello?” The shrill of a phone in the middle of the night summons the elemental power of childhood terror, as well as the adult knowledge that no one calls with good news past midnight.

“Hello,” I repeated loudly. The line was open. I heard something at the other end, a crashing sound, then silence.

“Who is it?” I demanded. “Is someone there?”

I muttered a curse and slammed down the receiver.

I could hear the clock tick. Ten past four in the morning. I was drenched in sweat and my pulse drummed in my ears. I gulped deep calming breaths. My throat felt scratchy. Not from an oncoming cold, from my interrupted dream.

I'd been spinning, whirling along with my bed, which floated above the floor, abruptly released from gravity. The sheet and quilt became restraints, imprisoning my arms and legs. The mask had begun its descent, covering my mouth, my nose, choking me, stealing my breath.…

Why had I assumed oxygen, air,
anything
, in the mask? Why not the simple absence of air? Nose and mouth covered, airways blocked … would Rebecca have lashed out, squirmed, and kicked? Would Tina Sukhia have recognized her distress for what it was? Suffocation.

What it might have been, I amended. I could hardly ask Tina now, and I doubted “suffocation” would appear on Becca's medical chart. I shut my eyes and tried to force myself back into the dream, to view the resolute face above the mask.

When I woke again, my alarm clock was on the floor where I must have hurled it. Sunlight flooded the curtains.

The house was still. Paolina slept, catching up for two late nights in a row. I tiptoed downstairs, brunched at my desk on crackers smeared with peanut butter.

The phone book gave only one number for JHHI. I didn't want Admissions. I didn't want Muir. I didn't particularly want Personnel. I closed my eyes and came up with the name of the floor on which I'd spent so much time waiting: Eastman Two. I dialed and repeated the words to the operator.

I was almost certain the woman who picked up was Barbara, the dragon-lady receptionist. “May I speak to Miss Cates?” I said clearly.

“Who?”

“Savannah Cates.”

“Oh, Savannah. Right. She's no longer with us.”

Damn. “Is she ill?” I asked.

“Who is this?”

“Her sister. I've been trying to reach her at home—”

“Can you hold, please?” Barbara said, zapping me into limbo.

She was back in a minute, sounding harried. “Look, Savannah was temping with us. Try her agency, okay?”

The line went dead. There was an S. Cates in the book. I let the phone ring twenty times before I gave it up.

Harold Woodrow and Savannah Cates. An odd couple, but if Emily had hired me to prove infidelity, I'd have gone a long way toward earning my fee.

I gathered my uncombed hair into a messy topknot and yanked it, leaning way back in my chair and trying to figure a connection between Harold and Savannah that amounted to anything more sinister than sex. Could they have caused Emily's disappearance? Could they be implicated in Rebecca's death?

I didn't see it. Savannah wasn't the white male who'd entered Rebecca's room on her final day. And I couldn't buy Woodrow as the murderer of his own child. Arrogant, self-centered, yes. A killer, no. It was psychologically wrong.

Psychologically … I released my hair and hustled upstairs.

Dressed in jeans and my last clean shirt, I pushed Keith Donovan's bell, toe-tapping impatiently until he wrenched the door open with an exasperated grunt. His legs were hairy beneath a blue robe, his feet bare.

He said, “I thought it was the mailman, special delivery.”

I said, “I didn't think you'd be sleeping.”

“Thursdays,” he said. “No patients. You heard from Emily?”

“No. You?”

“No.” With that resolved, he hesitated. “Uh, how's your friend?” he asked. “The one with the pills.”

“She'll be okay. Pharmacists do that often?”

“Not if they want to stay licensed. But, yeah. There are always a few cases a year, and everybody's got a horror story about some drug sounds like some other drug, and how they were just about to pop a killer dose into somebody's vein when the internal alarm bells went off. I remember—”

“Yeah?”

“See. I'm doing it.”

“You get the medical records?”

“I did.”

“Can I see them?”

“Right now?”

“Right now,” I said. “And I'm gonna need help on the technical stuff. Also now. But I don't mind seeing a doctor in his bathrobe; my doctor's seen me in less.”

He shrugged and smiled. “Come in, then. You want coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Make some in the kitchen while I pour cold water on my face, okay?”

The kitchen, unlike the foyer and living room, hadn't been renovated or redecorated. I liked its uneven floorboards, battered oak cupboards, and faint smell of cinnamon. Green plants hid some of the cracks in the yellow plaster. One of those automatic-drip coffee makers, bristling with buttons and dials, looked out of place on a countertop. I was hunting for instant and a spoon when he came back, looping a belt through khaki pants.

“You got dressed,” I observed. His shirt was alternating bands of tan and blue, with a placket closing. I preferred it to his oxford shirt and tie.

“Professional ethics,” he responded with a grin, removing a can of coffee grounds from the freezer. He counted spoons into a filter cone, inserted it into the recesses of the clinically white machine, and pressed buttons. The gizmo gave a contented beep.

“While we're waiting for the coffee, you want to tell me your horror story?” I asked.

“The drug story? It isn't mine. A friend of mine. Anesthesiologist.”

“Like Pablo Peña.”

“Not him. Somebody else.”

“What happened?”

“He had a patient hooked up to a continuous epidural pump. On Fentanyl. For pain. It's a narcotic, side effects are nausea and itching. Had an old lady on the pump, she's complaining about itching. Nurse calls my friend, and he says give her some Narcan. Works out the dose. All set.”

“But.”

“Gets paged back right away. Lady can't breathe. So my buddy goes to check it out and he finds one frightened old woman. She's more than willing to itch, just don't give her any more of that stuff. So my friend checks, and the nurse didn't give any Narcan, she gave Norcuron.”

“Close,” I said.

“Norcuron is used to paralyze patients during surgery. Pharmacist had no business even delivering it to a nursing floor. Sent up ten vials of the stuff, enough to kill everybody who itched and then some. See, Narcan's a liquid and Norcuron had just switched over to liquid, and there was a mix-up. There's always a new form of a drug coming out. Always something new.”

“Nice story,” I said. “Remind me to stay out of hospitals.”

“Advice I try to follow myself,” he said.

“Where are the records?” I asked.

He walked toward a small desk. “I left them down here. You know it was hard enough getting access. Copies were a bitch.”

“I'm sure you did a great job.”

He offered me a stack that must have been close to a foot high. “I pulled five files.”

“Five?” I said sharply. “I asked for three.”

“Five fit your specs.”

“You're telling me
five
kids died in a small hospital on the same day and nobody rang the alarm?” I asked.

“I'm not telling you anything,” he said. “I'm just handing you some extremely private files.”

“This looks like fifty files, not five.”

“Disease generates a lot of paper.”

Each file consisted of an unburst sheaf of computer printout, with
MEDICAL RECORDS, JHHI, 259 LONGWOOD AVENUE, BOSTON, MA 02117, DO NOT REMOVE
, at the top of the first page.