Deadly Diversion: A Medical Thriller (9 page)

“Then what happened?”

“She just followed him out.”

“So she never got into the med room? Or in a patient’s room?”

“Nope. I didn’t take my eyes off her until she left.”

“Jessie,” I said as she came out of Huey’s room with a wash basin, “did you and Bart do the narcotic counts this morning?”

“He got away before we could do them,” she said over her shoulder.

The same nurse’s aide who’d thought a blanket was the treatment for a reaction to a transfusion came out of Huey’s room carrying an IV bag, the PCA pump still attached, and the tubing dragging behind her on the floor.

“What are you doing with that?” I asked her.

She looked at the almost-full bag. “I thought maybe you could, like, reuse this.”

Ruby rolled her eyes and looked at me pointedly.

“We never reuse anything that’s been used on someone else. Never.” I squinted at her name badge. “Josie.”

“I just thought, like, save some money...” Her voice faded away as Ruby and I stared at her.

“Take it back into the room. Laura or Jessie will tell you what to do with everything.”

“They hiring people with no sense now,” Ruby said, shaking her head.

I sighed. Poor training and too little of that was to blame. Not the nurse’s aide.

The phone rang and Ruby told me it was E.R. Wanda filled me in on the patient, and I told her to hold up until we could have the room cleaned. She agreed but complained about having to keep other patients waiting in the hall.

“Yeah? Well, we got a dead one,” I said louder than I intended. A man waiting for Serena to finish with his mother looked up. I lowered my voice. “Sorry, Wanda. We’re all stressed out, I guess.”

“Just hurry,” she answered. “We got them piled up down here.”

The morgue attendant had left the special gumey we use to stash bodies so it can be moved through the halls without anyone realizing it is anything but an empty stretcher. The obvious effort it takes to maneuver it, though, belies our subterfuge. After Jessie and Laura had cleaned up the body, taped the dangling tubes to the body, slipped a tag on Huey’s toe and another around his neck, I had helped them lift the body onto the shelf that was stowed beneath the plain top, and we had pulled the gurney out into the open area to be picked back up by the attendant.

I was on the phone to housekeeping trying to convince the supervisor that we needed the room cleaned stat when the attendant came through the door.

“’Bout time,” Ruby said.

“No hurry, is there?” he asked, popping the wad of gum in his mouth.

“For us, they is. Now you git moving.”

He grabbed the cart and pushed it toward the entrance. He glanced back at Ruby and as he did the gurney hit the swinging doors with a bang.

I cringed.

He backed up and the doors swung open and hit the gurney again.

Mavis came striding through the door, passing right by the cart hiding her husband’s body.

For a moment no one moved. Then Mavis, glancing at each of us, headed toward Huey’s room. I grabbed her arm and asked her if she’d come with me to the visitors’ waiting room down the hall.

“Why?” she asked, jerking her arm away.

The attendant shrugged, bobbing his ponytail, and pushed the gurney through the doors as we all turned to watch.

“What’s going on here? Why’s everybody just standing around? What’s wrong?” Mavis asked.

Laura came out of Huey’s room, shoving the curtain open as she did, revealing the empty bed.

The next sound was something between a wail and a sob as Mavis slumped against me, and Serena and I grabbed her before she hit the floor. We helped her sit down on the floor and I shoved her head between her knees, my arm firmly around her shoulders. She smelled like stale cigarettes and greasy hair, and her breath came in ragged bursts. Serena stared at me across Mavis’s head as she hung on tightly to the woman’s arm. Neither of us spoke. Finally, Mavis raised her head and struggled to stand. Holding her firmly by the arms, we led her off the unit and into my office. Serena brought her a cup of water and some tissues.

“Can I see him?” she asked after blowing her nose.

“He’s already downstairs, but as soon as you have a funeral home, you can see him there.”

Beads of sweat had broken out on her forehead. She dabbed at her face with a tissue and took a sip of water. “What was it? The cancer?”

“I imagine so. It was pretty bad, as we’d talked about.”

“I want to know,” she said. “I want you to find out for sure what killed him.”

“You want an autopsy?”

“I want to know for sure. He told me to make sure.”

I called Ruby and asked her to bring the forms to order the post. By the time Mavis had signed them, she seemed composed. I asked her if I could call someone for her, but she shook her head. I insisted that someone take her home, though, explaining that she was too distracted to drive. I assigned a student to take her to the waiting room and sit with her until her friend arrived. As soon as they left, I hurried in to see the patient who had just been wheeled up from E.R.

I HAD JUST HEARD an update on the new patient when the doors swung open, and two men in suits came through followed by Father Rudolf, the hospital’s chaplain.

Rudolf smiled hesitantly. “Uh, Monika.” His hands behind his back, he shifted back and forth on the balls of his feet. He was a small man with a full head of wavy brown hair lightly sprinkled with gray, a cheerful demeanor, and crinkly blue eyes.

“Uh, these men are here to see Huey,” he said, his face breaking into a quick smile.

“You’re too late,” Ruby said, coming back to the desk.

“Was he moved?” Father asked.

“You might say,” Ruby added.

I turned to the men. “I’m Monika Everhardt, head nurse here. Why do you want to see Mr. Castle?”

I recognized the older of the two men. I’d met him a few months ago when he’d investigated another death at St. Teresa’s. It looked as if he was wearing the same navy blazer and gray pants I’d seen him in before, but he’d replaced the frayed-collared shirt with a more stylish one in wide royal-blue-and-white stripes with a solid-white collar. His wing-tip shoes could have used a shine, though.

Detective Harding nodded to me as he showed me his identification badge. “Father Rudolf arranged for us to see Mr. Castle,” he said after introducing his partner, Tom McNeil.

“What’s wrong?” Rudolf asked. He turned toward Huey’s room as the housekeeper pulled open the curtain. The room had been stripped bare, the bed was glistening with still-wet antiseptic cleaner.

“I’m sorry, Father. And detectives. Mr. Castle died earlier this morning.”

“Oh, my,” Father Rudolf said.

“It wasn’t unexpected, Father,” I said.

“It’s not that, Monika.” He looked around. “It’s just that...he wanted to take care of something first.” He moistened his lips. “And I promised I’d help him.”

“Sorry, Father. Not our timing, I’m afraid.”

Rudolf glanced upward. “His.” A fleeting smile crossed his lips.

“Hers,” I said automatically.

Rudolf looked puzzled, then asked, “When’d he pass?”

I checked my watch. “About an hour ago. I can check the record for the exact time, if you want.”

“No, no.” Rudolf turned to Detective Harding. “I’m sorry, Martin. I guess we’re too late.”

“Twenty years too late,” Harding said.

“Probably not much help anyway,” McNeil said, looking toward the doors as if he wanted to get away.

“Humph,” Ruby commented, heading into the now-clean room carrying supplies.

“But I thought he was doing better,” Rudolf said. “He’d really perked up the past few days,” he said to the officers, smiling. “He was glad you were coming.”

“That’s sometimes how it is right before they die. They seem to rally,” I explained.

“What you gonna do wit this?” Ruby asked, waving Huey’s hook as she came out of the room.

“Oh.” Rudolf seemed to crumple.

“Steady, Father,” I said, taking his arm. “That’s Mr. Castle’s prosthesis,” I explained to the officers.

“You want it?” Ruby asked them, sticking it in the younger man’s face.

He backed up.

“It belongs to his wife, Ruby. Put it in a bag out of the way.” She swung it over her shoulder like a rifle and marched out to the supply closet, the pincers flopping against her fleshy back.

“He was worried about this,” Father Rudolf said, almost to himself.

“Oh,” Harding said. “Worried about what?”

Rudolf shrugged. “I don’t know exactly, but he was afraid of something.”

Harding turned to me. “Anything unusual about his death?”

“What do you mean, unusual?”

“Unexpected. Strange. What did he look like?”

“Dead,” Ruby said, returning. “He look dead.”

“Not really. He had stomach cancer. He was terminal,” I told them.

Laura came out of the med room, gave us a glance and headed into a patient’s room.

“Was she here?” Harding asked.

“Laura?” I said.

“Don’t tell me this guy was her patient, too,” Harding said to me.

“As a matter of fact, he was.”

“She was the one I was telling you about,” Harding said to McNeil. “The one who ran out and the patient died. It was a few months ago. Now,” he said, turning back to me, “it seems as if you have another death.”

I drew myself up to my full four feet eleven inches. “She did not do anything wrong. Then or now,” I said, my voice getting louder. Harding and McNeil exchanged glances.

“Did he have any visitors this morning?” Harding asked.

“I don’t think so. Ruby?”

“I can’t watch everything.”

“Where’s the body now?” Harding asked.

“In the morgue,” I told him.

“You going to do an autopsy?”

“The wife requested one.”

The phone rang, breaking the tension. A patient’s daughter wanted to talk to me, Ruby said.

“Do you need anything else?” I asked, holding my hand over the receiver.

Harding looked around as staff members scooted in and out of patients’ rooms, stealing curious glances at us.

“I’ll walk you out,” Rudolf said to Harding, smiling an apology to me.

I CALLED OUR pathologist, Max, to ask him to save the specimen Tim had drawn for Huey’s blood gases. I’d be down later to tell him why, I told him.

Judyth came through the door, carrying a stack of paychecks. She had started delivering paychecks on Fridays to everyone who didn’t have direct deposit. She said it was to save the nurses time; Tim said it was to remind us who signed their paychecks.

She moved aside a vase of flowers in order to place the paychecks on the counter.

“I have something to talk to you about. Come to your office.”

“This is just precautionary,” she said when we were seated. “I’m worried about the amount of narcotics we’re using, and I want to take your narcotic records to match against patients’ charts.”

Uh-oh.

“I need to tell you something,” I said, sighing. I might as well get this over with. “A few times we’ve missed doing the change- of-shift counts.”

“What? With Joint Commission breathing down our neck?”

“You’re not up here, Judyth,” I said, my voice rising to match hers. “I need twice as many nurses as I’ve got. I can’t afford to have two nurses standing in the med room just to count boxes of drugs while patients need care. Sometimes two nurses to a patient aren’t even enough.”

She held up her hand. “Okay, okay. We can’t do anything about what’s happened. I’ve just noticed that your unit’s been using a lot of narcotics recently. More than usual.”

“It’s the new pain-control regs. We’re constantly checking pain levels and giving so many more dosages now to try to control it.”

“I imagine that’s it,” she said. “I just don’t want to take any chances that there are any discrepancies so I’m taking the drug books to match up with patient records.”

“What do we do in the meantime? Where do we record them?”

“I brought some blank sheets to use for now.” She released several lined sheets of paper from her clipboard. “They’re coded and numbered, so don’t lose them.”

AS I CAME BACK onto the unit, Ruby waggled a pudgy, ringed finger toward the flowers Judyth had pushed aside on the counter. “You gonna open your card?”

“Huh? What card?”

“The one on your flowers.”

“Aren’t these for a patient?” I pulled out the card tucked between the stems of roses artfully arranged in a tall, milk-glass vase. “Don’t you have anything to do but tease me?”

“To Monika, you’re as competent as you are attractive. With admiration, Phil Silverman."

I felt the tell-tale warmth of a blush as I smiled to myself. “Don’t you say a word, Ruby,” I said as she opened her mouth.

I had known since the age of eight that Rick was the only man for me. Dressed in a baseball uniform, he’d been in his front yard tossing a ball up in the air when my bike had careened into a tree and I’d been tossed off, bringing him running. Embarrassed more than hurt, I’d let him help me up. From then on I’d watched him, mostly from afar. He was two years ahead of me at St. Aloysius where we’d both been grade-school students.

We’d met up again at a dance at his high school, St. Mary’s. He’d been a junior and already determined to join the army when he graduated. We’d married when I started nursing school and shortly thereafter he shipped out to Vietnam. Even though it had been many years since he’d been killed, I’d never thought of anyone else in that way.

Ruby smothered a giggle and asked me, “So what do I do with this?” She held up a paper sack, lunch-bag size. “Bet you can’t guess what it is.”

“I don’t have time for games,” I snapped, turning toward the door with my roses.

“OK, Miss Smarty Pants. She left it.” Ruby nodded toward Huey’s room.

“His wife?”

“Nah, the girlfriend. She came back while you were out to lunch yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you give it to me then?”

“I can’t keep track of everything. I just took it. We’re supposed to keep everybody happy, ain’t we?” She spread her lips into a Cheshire-cat grin. “What you want me to do with it now?” she asked, waving the bag in my face.