Death Rounds (40 page)

I hoped no police were in position yet.

I grabbed a chair, stood on it, ripped
off
my mask, and thought of the most outrageous thing I could say. “Hold it! I’m contaminated,” I screamed.

It was as if I’d cracked a whip over every head. The group froze, and within seconds their angry shouts trailed off until there was complete quiet in the room.

I seized the advantage. “Some of you know me. I’m Dr. Earl Garnet, and my wife. Dr. Janet Graceton, is admitted upstairs in ICU with a diagnosis of
Legionella,
thanks to the creep you’ve just been told about.”

The people closest to me pressed back against the rest of the crowd. “Get by him!” someone in the back murmured. “So what if he’s infected? We’re wearing protective gear!” yelled someone else. It would be seconds before they’d all start pushing their way through the doors behind me.

“Think of the people you’re going home to!” I shouted. “They’re not in any protective gear.” They kept edging toward me. “Some of you may already be carriers. Forty-eight hours, that’s all it would take to be sure you’re safe—both for yourself and anybody you touch. For God’s sake, act rationally like the health professionals you’ve always been.”

“Why should we sit around and let some maniac infect us?” demanded a man near the front.

“Right!”

“Exactly!”

“Let’s go!”

They surged forward.

“I know which of you he’s going to kill, even which of you he may already have infected!” I yelled.

That stopped them.

“What!”

“You’re kidding!”

“How can you know he’s already infected some of us?”

They still sounded hostile as hell, but they remained where they were.

“I also know how we can stop him,” I added. Seeing the lot of them ganged together in isolation dress had just given me an idea. “If you’ll all take your seats again,” I suggested, replacing my mask and stepping off the chair, “then I’ll tell you exactly what I think we can do.”

Fosse looked at me with a skeptical stare when I climbed up on the stage.

“This better be good!” Williams muttered through his mask.

I stepped up to the podium and began speaking without even waiting for people to take their seats. I knew my hold on them was tenuous. “For reasons I haven’t time to go into now, we know this killer has a very specific agenda. All his victims are what I would call punishers, colleagues who enjoy being cruel to patients.” I quickly outlined the type of abuse involved. “If we isolate them immediately, confine them all to a specific high-security ward, then I think we’d not only have taken any current carriers out of circulation, we’d also have a good chance of preventing him from infecting any others for the moment. It’s only an initial measure, but it would at least keep us safe for tonight and give us time to organize a better plan.”

At first no one spoke.

Then came murmurs of disbelief.

“...out of his mind...”

“...nuts...”

“...why would anyone kill over delayed pain meds...”

A woman glared up at me from the front row. “Supposing what you say is true, and from what you’ve told us so far that may be supposing a lot, do you know these ‘punishers’ by name?” she demanded sarcastically.

“No, but they know who they are, and I’ll lay you odds so does everyone who works with one of them.”

“Why would they step forward or agree to be locked up?” called out a man in the back row.

“The best reason in the world—self-protection. Turning themselves over to us would be their best bet to keep from being killed. Of course, if any of them don’t see it that way, I’m sure their colleagues could be persuaded to hand them over. Who wants to be near a potential target?”

“They could run,” he persisted.

“They could already be infected,” I shot back. “Without our help to decolonize them, they’re dead. The CDC also has the means to pull in any experimental therapies that might exist against this bug, in case decolonization doesn’t work.” I knew I was resorting to
bold-faced lying bluff,
but if I didn’t tempt the punishers into coming forward by offering them false hopes, I doubted they’d step up and identify themselves in exchange for salves and soaps. “Cooperating with us is their only chance of surviving if this killer’s already got to them,” I declared without batting an eye. I’d lost a few of my scruples during my battle with the Phantom.

More questions poured out, and Williams started helping me answer them. My ideas outraged some, brought on the derision of others, but no one left the room. The longer they discussed a plan about how to curtail carriers and prevent more killings, I figured, the less likely they were to cut and run. But it was disaster planning raised to the level of a jazz riff. I kept making up answers as they asked questions, throwing out solutions without a thought, afraid to stop in case the first hesitation would cause doubt and the whole scheme would collapse around me.

* * * *

Maybe it was the result of too much coffee, too little sleep, or a whole lot of wishful thinking, but shortly after 2:00
A
.
M
. even the lawyers in the crowd—there seemed to be a disproportionate number of them on the board of UH—were giving their cautious approval to what we’d come up with.

“Put it this way,” one of the lawyers said, “by the time we get through the screaming with the civil liberties types, you folks will have your forty-eight-hour culture results. We’ve got enough stalling power to give you that.”

We’d first concentrated on immediate measures for everyone already in the hospital—steps that were intended to get us through the night and into the next day. All staff would be screened immediately and remain quarantined on the wards where they worked. They in turn would screen all the patients on those wards. The cultures would not only be processed by the labs at UH but by every bacteriology facility in the city; this would provide resources enough to test everyone immediately and simultaneously. Those at risk for being targets, the punishers, would be rounded up and placed in separate wards; Fosse would open a wing for them that had been closed as a cost-cutting measure. They’d remain there under protective guard until all cultures were proven negative or until those who were already infected became ill. While waiting, the high-risk group would be offered prophylactic erythromycin and the sort of decolonizing procedures Williams had suggested back at St. Paul’s— bactericidal soaps, mupirocin ointments up the nose, and nasal lavages. To reduce the risk of spreading the superbug into the general population of the hospital, anyone who did fall sick in that ward would be cared for by those who remained well, minimizing the need for additional personnel to go in and out of that particular quarantine area.

It was the Phantom’s perfect irony, I thought—punishers taking care of punishers.

Throughout all this talk, Riley had been joined by more and more gray-haired men. The surgical gowns hid their rank, but each new arrival seemed to bring the ones already there to attention, and I could imagine the ever-increasing amounts of gold braid under the already bulging sleeves of their protective wear. The last of these men to enter the room stepped up to the podium, introduced himself as the deputy chief of police, and assured us that University Hospital was now surrounded with enough police officers to prevent anyone who refused to cooperate from getting through their lines.

Left unsaid, again, was how they’d stop anyone who tried.

He then explained that each supervisor would be accompanied back to his or her ward by two police officers. More could be summoned in an instant if the so-called punishers didn’t agree to come along to the wing that Fosse had designated for them.

We even managed to convince ourselves that we could avoid transferring out the patients, for the moment. While new admissions and emergencies would be directed to other hospitals as of now, in the morning Fosse would stress to the media that these safeguards were precautionary measures only, that the patients already here would be perfectly safe, and that staff using reverse isolation techniques would continue to care for them. The “threats,” he would emphasize, were only against specific hospital personnel, all of whom had been taken off duty and placed in isolation for their own protection.

Planning for beyond the morning was more problematic.

“...direct the day shift away from UH to alternative quarantine facilities...”

“…what about separating out the punishers from this group as well—they’re most at risk to be carriers…”

“…live-in contacts of all our staff should be screened, maybe quarantined…”

“...contact all workers who are at home before they start coming in. Instruct them where to report...”

“...we’ll need a communications team. Some clerical staff will have to be called in to help us here...”

The strategy slowly took shape, the amount that needed doing outside the hospital being clearly greater than what we had to accomplish within, with one exception.

“But the killer may be locked in quarantine here with us,” protested a young nurse in the front row. Her lone voice brought absolute silence to the room.

Then someone else asked, “Do the police know anything about who’s doing this or how he’s managing to infect people?”

“The police are investigating,” Fosse replied coolly.

The evasion prompted someone to yell, “There’s a fucking maniac on the loose. Fosse. We’ve got a right to know when the police think they’ll nab him.”

“Right!”

“What are the police doing about this psycho?”

“How the hell can you say it’s safe for any of us to stay here?”

Noisy shouts of agreement and demands to be told what the police knew continued to come from everywhere in the room. Unruliness was threatening to erupt again when Riley got a nod from one of his superiors and hopped up on the stage.

“Hold it!” he yelled, his hand up to the group as if they were oncoming traffic. “I’m Detective Riley and am leading the investigation into who’s responsible for the threats made against people in your hospital. We’ve got two jobs to do here. One’s in your hands— to keep everyone safe from this bacteria. Mine’s to nail the creep, as Dr. Garnet so appropriately called him. I also think Dr. Garnet’s plan is the best way for the moment to keep everyone safe from this killer. Within the confines of your own wards, you’ll immediately know if an outsider has entered your area and we can grab anyone who shouldn’t be there in seconds. I suggest the sooner you get back to your floors and get organized, the quicker we’ll make it impossible for whoever’s doing this to get to you. To answer your question about what we are doing to apprehend him, we’ve called up every available police officer in the city to work on this case and have even alerted the FBI, requesting that they check their national files for any individual or group with a history of terrorizing hospitals. As for pursuing local leads, we intend to start interviewing your staff in groups, floor by floor, tonight”

He must have had a lot of practice in settling down a crowd. A low rumble of mutterings rolled through the room, then once more voices of reason replaced voices of rage.

“...what if we also move the staff that is here now away from UH, once outside sites are provided for everyone not yet in quarantine. That would take away the killer’s hunting ground...”

“...pull all our staff from patient care immediately...”

“…It’ll take days to round up enough staff from other institutions to replace them all, but if the patients knew we were working toward that end, they might be reassured enough we wouldn’t have to move them at all...”

“Where’s Dr. Mackie? Why isn’t he here by now?” someone called out from the middle of me audience. I recognized him as one of the department heads at UH but couldn’t recall his name.

Fosse answered without hesitation, the lie at the ready. “We haven’t been able to locate Dr. Mackie to inform him what’s happening yet.”

The meeting was then adjourned, and everyone started to file out the door. Out of the general noise I heard one voice murmur, “Doesn’t this sort of remind you of that Phantom business two years ago?”

                           * * * *

“It’s not how the Phantom infected all those people that I’m asking you about. I want to know how
you two
would do it,” Riley demanded. He’d asked Williams and me to stay behind in the auditorium for a few minutes. While Williams was half sitting on a large table at the far end of the stage sipping a coffee, I was leaning against the podium, and the detective was pacing the distance between us. All three of us were squabbling over the best way to stop a killer.

“Shit!” growled Williams. “How
he
did it or how we’d do it, what’s the difference?” He kept glancing at his watch, making it obvious he had far more pressing things to do. “I told you; we don’t know.”

I also had no time for whatever distinction Riley was trying to make, its usefulness escaping me entirely. I was already angry that the meeting had delayed my own attempt to discover Michael’s find.

“Look, Riley,” I began, trying to keep my impatience from souring what little civility was left in the room, “I told you before that lives may depend on our figuring out how he plants the staph organism on his victims. What little time we may still have to use that information is running out fast. If either Dr. Williams or I have any new ideas, we’ll page you immediately—”

“No, you look, damn it!” Riley interrupted.
“Catching
this creep will save lives. Mackie’s nowhere to be found in the hospital, and we had no better results when a dozen of my men searched the asylum. Unless this Phantom of yours is so stupid that he’s hanging around waiting to get caught, the only way we’ll get him is if you two help me learn how he works. I’ve got to know what he thinks, what he needs, and how he has to prepare in order to strike his victims. With information like that maybe I can anticipate his moves and ambush him.”

“But that’s why you’ve got to let me at those records—”

He cut me off with an impatient wave of his hand. “I’ve got a man checking regularly with that group of ID specialists who are down in the archives. They keep saying it’s slow work. Hell, your friend took two days to find whatever it is we’re after. I need information right now!”