Death Rounds (18 page)

I braced myself.

“How do you explain his selecting only people who punished patients?” she asked.

I couldn’t.

Chapter 10

That Friday morning I was driving into St. Paul’s an hour later than usual. It was stop and go on the so-called freeway, and as far as I could see, row on row of taillights, three abreast, blinked the on-and-off rhythm of our progress toward the stumpy skyline of downtown Buffalo. A few shafts of sunlight penetrated the otherwise leaden sky and roved over the city like silver beams searching out first one building, then another. I didn’t mind the slow pace much, because I had a lot to think about.

Janet and I had talked long into the night about Rossit. “You’re simply pinning motives onto the parts of his behavior you can’t explain,” Janet had declared. “Apart from giving me nightmares, it does nothing.”

“But that’s exactly how you started with the three nurses,” I’d protested.

“Earl, don’t take this personally, but you’re just not as good at intuitively seeing things as I am,” had been her reply.

I’d nearly slipped an ice cube down the back of her dress. Then I’d come up with another possibility, equally dark and troubling.

“What if Rossit has resurrected the Phantom, taught him whatever is the lethal ID technique that’s being used here, then put him to work seeding infections at University Hospital? That way the motive would be Rossit’s, but the killings would still have the hallmark of the Phantom, selecting victims who were punishers.”

“Still a problem,” Janet had promptly replied in that same cutting tone. “Why would Rossit have his Phantom infect Stewart Deloram? And from what you described, Rossit seems as shocked as you are about that infection.”

She had me stumped again. “Maybe the monster he’s created is out of control,” I’d mumbled.

At that point she’d declared, “You’ve been watching too many horror movies,” and had ordered us to bed.

Before obeying I’d called ICU to check on Stewart.

“He’s coughing more and experiencing some increased difficulty breathing. But his pressure’s holding,” his nurse said.

“If he’s awake, say hello from me.”

Then we’d overslept until 7:00—a rare event, only possible because neither of us had gotten called...by Brendan or our hospitals.

I crawled through an interchange where I turned onto the Kensington Expressway, but the switch in routes didn’t let me drive any faster. I spent five minutes passing a golf course, then another five contemplating an adjacent cemetery. I wondered if it were some kind of weird retirement package. I halfheartedly listened to the radio and continued to brood over my thoughts from last night.

There was no denying Janet’s observations. Just as I’d learned to trust her insights, I’ d grown to respect those same instincts when she declared something didn’t make sense. But I couldn’t ignore my own intuition either, whatever Janet thought of it. Maybe parts of my ideas about Rossit were right, I thought. Maybe I had only some of the motives wrong, or the motives right and some of the players wrong. In the light of day I had to admit that the idea of Rossit recruiting a murderous Phantom to advance his career was a bit much. Surely there’d have to be a hell of a lot more at stake for someone to be that crazy, even Rossit.

After I finally reached the exit ramp, I inched toward the hospital through congested streets and listened to the news, the weather, the sports scores—it took one block for each—and then a business report. Some spokesperson for the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce prattled away for five minutes about the booming economy, low unemployment, and billions in investment that the business community hoped to attract to the city in the coming years. Except nobody can get to where they work, I muttered, leaning impatiently on my horn after a delivery truck blocked my way. A cacophony of other horns joined in. I winced at the noise and thought that maybe the bunch of business leaders at the meeting yesterday could do something about traffic.

I recalled the sight of them all sitting there behind Hurst and smiled at how I’d thwarted him and Baker, the hospital lawyer. Except the forces behind the merger were nothing to smile at. There had been a lot of power on that stage and a lot of money. It was the kind of board hospitals liked to have these days—made up mainly of CEOs, best suited for the business of medicine, and loyal to the chain of command. This usually meant they saw the hospital CEO as one of their own and would back him to the hilt.

“Hurst’s kind of people,” I said aloud, breaking the monotony of the traffic noise, and wondered if our little revolt yesterday would really accomplish anything. Again I thought of Hurst huddled with Rossit, and Rossit’s angry warning.
Fuck up this merger, and you’ll make yourself a lot of powerful enemies.
I don’t know why he was so worded about my little speech having any lasting effect. Seemed to me he should have also given the same advice to the other six hundred doctors in the room.

Unless it was exposing the Phantom that threatened the amalgamation or at least Rossit’s own interests in it, or Hurst’s, or others like Hurst. If I were going to consider other motives, the merger itself represented a huge opportunity for power and money. The resulting complex would have an operating budget of half a billion a year. That was a lot of influence and a lot of motivation for a whole new group of players. Hurst and his cronies would be wanting to come out of the amalgamation process with the upper hand and as much control as possible over the new venture. It was a pretty heady prize, but was it dazzling enough someone would commit murder for it? I found myself revising who might have recruited whom and set off on an even more macabre chain of thought. What if it were Hurst, or Hurst and members of the board, who had recruited the Phantom to help destabilize University Hospital, to give St. Paul’s a huge advantage in the amalgamation? Rossit might have been persuaded, in exchange for the promise of the chair, to develop and then teach the Phantom the infection technique. Later, when things went wrong, he would have been ordered to prevent Janet and me from exposing the Phantom at all costs.

Loud honking behind me made me realize I was still stopped after the light had turned green. I hit the accelerator, sped across the intersection, then immediately was back in my stop-and-go routine, not unlike the way I was thinking over my latest bizarre scenario. While there was enough power and money at stake to make a motive for murder seem feasible and the ghoulish scheme was consistent with Hurst’s and Rossit’s recent behavior to discredit me, it still failed to explain why Stewart Deloram had been infected. Besides, I figured Janet would be about as enthralled with a conspiracy theory as she had been with the monster-out-of-control idea. “Now it’s too much
X-Files,”
I could imagine her saying.

I quickly snapped back to reality at a few minutes before 8:00 when a bulletin cut into the regular chatter on the radio. “The administration of St. Paul’s has just announced a temporary closure of its emergency department due to some unscheduled maintenance problems. Ambulances are currently being rerouted, and the public is advised to use ER facilities in other hospitals until the situation is rectified. And now back to the weather. More rain will be...”

“What the hell?” I muttered, reaching for my car phone. It rang before I could start punching in the number of ER. “Garnet here,” I answered briskly.

“Have you been told what’s up?” It was Susanne.

“Not a goddamned thing! What the hell’s going on?”

“We don’t know. The radio announced we were closed about the same moment Hurst’s office called looking for you a few seconds ago. His secretary said to get you pronto!” As Susanne spoke, I could hear the PA in the background asking a string of names, all of them chiefs, to report immediately to the boardroom. “What do they mean, ‘unscheduled maintenance’?” she demanded, obviously upset. “There’s nothing broken here.”

“I’ve no idea. I’ll call Hurst’s office right now. I should be arriving in five minutes, traffic permitting.”

I one-handed the steering wheel, kept an eye on the road, and managed to dial a bakery before I finally got the number right for Hurst’s private line.

Busy!

The light at Main and High Streets was unusually long. I kept pressing my redial button, my frustration rising as each repeated attempt ended with that same annoying buzz. The light changed, and once again I shot across an intersection only to get ensnared in yet another tangle of cars halfway up the next block. Stone and brick office buildings loomed over me on each side of the street, adding to my sense of being blocked in. Exasperated, I called back to ER. The clerk passed me to Susanne immediately.

“I can’t get through to Hurst. Do you know what’s up yet?”

“No, but somebody’s really spooked,” she reported, sounding shaken. The change in her voice from minutes earlier was alarming. “All the patients in the department are suddenly being moved to an empty ward that was closed down during last year’s budget cuts. And get this. We’ve all been ordered not to leave ER, while every orderly transferring patients is wearing gloves and a mask. Somebody better tell us damn quick...”

As her words continued to come in a rush the radio suddenly caught my attention again. “...My, the gremlins are certainly plaguing Buffalo’s hospitals this morning. We have news of another closure. This time University Hospital is advising all its obstetrical patients that the delivery rooms and attendant wards are going to be out of service until at least this afternoon. Any of their patients who go into labor during...”

“Susanne, I’ve got to hang up. I’ll be there in minutes.” I cut her off, not even having heard her last few words. I did some more one-eyed, one-armed driving while punching in the number of Janet’s case room.

“Just a minute, Dr. Garnet,” answered a clerk who sounded as rattled as Susanne. In seconds Janet was on the line. “I’ve no idea what’s up. Patients and babies are being taken to another wing in the hospital, the orderlies and nurses accompanying them are wearing gloves and masks, and it’s scaring the shit out of everyone.” She sounded furious.

“No one’s told you anything?”

“Nada! We’re waiting for Cam now. Waiting, hell! We’ve been ordered to stay here until he comes.”

My car was finally nosing into the entrance of St. Paul’s. “Did you hear they’ve done the same thing with my ER?” I asked while cutting off a red four-by-four with tires as big as my car and slipping into one of the few remaining parking spaces ahead of it. The driver honked angrily and roared off to another part of the lot.

“Oh my God. You don’t think—”

“I don’t know, Janet.” I cut her off. “I’ve got to run. I’ll call you as soon as I learn what’s happening here.”

My mounting sense of alarm made me fumble my car keys and drop my briefcase while I hurriedly locked up. The elements— Janet’s case room, my ER, and people in both places running around in gloves and masks—had only one thing in common, Phyllis Sanders. Thoughts of more
Legionnella
victims swept through me like a chill as I ran for the entrance to emergency. On the other side of the lot I could see the huge red RV still circling, presumably trying to find a spot.

Everyone in the department immediately surrounded me.

“...some official from the state health board took our patient lists from Monday until now.”

“...ordered a call-up of all our staff that have worked during the last five days.”

“...labs called and said we’re going to get our hands, fingernails, and noses cultured.”

The barrage of comments was coming from a group of twenty doctors, clerks, nurses, and residents who were all understandably angry, some quite wide-eyed with fright and a few already wearing masks and gloves.

“Look, I don’t know anything more than you guys do,” I said, pushing through them and moving toward the nurses’ station, “but if you’ll let me through to a phone, I’ll find out.”

Orderlies wearing protective gear were wheeling patients on stretchers past us and out of the department. Susanne was trotting alongside, reassuring, “It’s just a precaution, until they get some maintenance problem checked,” but the patients looked bewildered anyway. A security guard at the door pointedly stopped Susanne before letting the others through. “I wasn’t going to leave!” she said impatiently, pivoting away from him and striding back to the nurses’ station. “By what authority can they keep us here?” she demanded when she got up to me.

“I don’t know,” I answered her. On my way in I’d already been warned by a security guard not to try to leave. He couldn’t tell me why and had refused to say what would happen if I did. I turned to the clerk. “Where’s this state health official who took your patient lists?”

“Search me,” she said. “He wouldn’t come near us without gloves and a mask on. He even put the books in a plastic bag. Are we quarantined or something?”

Without answering, I stepped over to the counter behind us and grabbed a phone. I finally got through to Hurst’s secretary.

“Oh, Dr. Garnet,” she said, her voice drenched with disapproval. “Dr. Hurst definitely wants to speak with you.”

As I waited on the line, through the windows of the nurses’ station I saw a group of men and women wearing masks, gloves, and gowns enter the department carrying baskets of culture tubes. Some I recognized as our own lab techs, even with the protective gear, while the others, about a dozen in all, were strangers to me. Four of them went immediately into the resuscitation room. The rest walked up to Susanne and started talking to her and pointing to the cubicles where we normally see patients.

Hurst finally came on the line. “Well, Garnet, you really put your foot into it this time,” sneered that familiar harsh voice. “If you’d spent nearly as much effort attending to emergency cases as trying to sabotage my efforts to run St. Paul’s—”

“What the hell’s going on?” I roared.

Out in the hallway Susanne, the rest of our staff, and the lab teens all swung around to stare at me.

“I suppose you’d better join us,” continued Hurst on the phone, “but you’re about as welcome as the plague. I trust you’ll wear suitable clothing to protect the rest of the hospital from being contaminated further by your carelessness!” He slammed the phone in my ear.