Doing Harm (20 page)

“Come on,” she coaxes playfully as the elevator doors open. “Just one cup. You don’t even have to drink the whole thing.”

I follow her onto the elevator, relieved to see that the other passengers—a group of chattering nursing students—will prevent us from being alone. It kills me to admit it, but she looks good this morning. Unlike me, she’s puts some thought into her appearance by taking a shower and putting on a fresh pair of scrubs. Her hair is thick and lustrous. And if she’s feeling sleep-deprived, it certainly doesn’t show on her face, which is unlined and fresh.

By the time we’ve reached the first floor, I’ve relented. I’m not exactly sure why.

After we’ve grabbed our coffees and found a seat in the mostly empty cafeteria, she says, “So about last night—when can we do it again?”

I nervously finger the sides of my coffee cup. “GG, I, uh—”

“I bet it took your mind off that whole potassium thing.”

“Yeah. Definitely. Look, I, uh … Last night … it was great, but—”

“But what?” She tilts her head to one side, studying my face. “Oh, okay. I get it. Look. I already told you, Steve: I don’t want anything serious. I don’t need the hassle. I’m way too focused on my career for that kind of distraction. Nobody has to get hurt.”

Except Sally.

I stare morosely into my coffee without responding.

“Honestly.” She rolls her eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy get so bummed out over getting laid. Tell you what. Go home. Do whatever it is you feel you have to do. And when you work through this, I’m here, okay? Or I’m not. No pressure. Think of me as a friend with benefits.”

She stands up, crisply straightens out her scrubs, and snatches her coffee, all business again. “I’m going to head upstairs and enter Male X’s orders into the computer. The ones we talked about.”

“Umm, okay.”

“Then I’ll sign out to Toby. He’s the resident who’s cross-covering. Okay?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“You’re done for today, right? Alan, the chief resident over at St. Mary’s, is cross-covering?”

“Yeah.” I’d almost forgotten I have the rest of the day off. I’m going to a barbecue with Sally and the girls.

Quality family time with the family I betrayed last night.

Then, down deep in my brain, underneath the roiling combination of guilt and fatigue, something jars lose.

Something about what GG just said bothers me, and I frown in concentration, trying to figure out what it is.

I’m going to head upstairs and enter Male X’s orders into the computer.

Eyeing my expression, GG asks, “Was there something else?”

I bet it took your mind off that whole potassium thing.

“No. Everything’s … fine.”

“Okay. See you on Monday, Steve.” She flashes an uncertain smile and starts walking toward the cafeteria exit.

I stare at the table, trying to put a mental finger on what’s bothering me, to make a connection I can’t quite explain. It’s like I have the final piece of a puzzle, but I don’t know what the puzzle is supposed to look like when it’s finished.

Male X’s orders. The potassium thing.

Then, in a flash, it’s there. The pieces fall into place.

“GG?”

She stops midstride, a few paces from the table, and wheels around with an expectant look on her face.

“What did you mean just now when you said you were going to enter Male X’s orders?”

“The ones we talked about earlier. I was just going to enter them into ERIN so that Toby doesn’t have to worry about it. No big deal. Routine stuff.”

She starts to walk away again.

The hairs on the back of my neck spring up, and my heart beats a little faster.

“But how?”

This time she takes a few steps back toward the table and shakes her head with an indulgent smile.

“What do you mean?”

“How are you going to enter the medication orders? Med students can’t do that. You can’t enter and sign patient orders. You’re not allowed to.”

“I know I’m not allowed to. That’s why I’ve been using your account and password to enter medication orders into ERIN since the middle of July.”

A frigid hand grips my stomach.

“What?”

“Your ERIN account and password. I’ve been using them. Didn’t you realize that? You gave them to Luis the first day I met you. I was there, too. I wrote them down.”

I remember that morning. The hand grips my stomach a little more tightly.

“GG, those potassium orders I was telling you about yesterday. Is it possible that you might have had something to do with them? Or could you have given my password to someone else? I’m not looking to get anyone in trouble. I just need to know.”

GG furrows her brow and lowers herself warily back into the seat opposite me. I nervously finger the sides of my coffee cup, my conscience withering under the force of her wounded gaze, wondering if I’ve made a serious mistake. The last thing I need right now is for her to get pissed off at me—it’s an extra variable in the infidelity equation I don’t think I can handle.

Then, just as I decide that I’ve screwed up, and begin to open my mouth to apologize, the most inconceivable thing happens.

GG’s lips curl into a smile.

A terrible smile.

An empty smile.

A smile that lacks even the faintest hint of humanity or compassion.

I’ve seen a smile just like it. Once. Back when I was an intern assigned to the ER, when the police dragged in a violent, acutely psychotic patient. He was handcuffed and pissed as hell, kicking and screaming and spitting obscenities, threatening to kill every last one of us with his bare hands. Maybe he could have, given the chance.

Anyway, after medicating him, we soon discovered he was a psychopath with a sadistic taste for capturing, then slowly torturing to death, cats and dogs in his quiet, upscale, urban neighborhood. Tipped off by a suspicious neighbor, the police had discovered in his basement a bizarre and elaborate medieval torture chamber for small animals, as well as an industrial-sized freezer stuffed full of their dismembered bodies. Whether he would have eventually graduated to humans is anyone’s guess.

More than anything, I remember the way that patient smiled at us as he recounted—in a bizarre, singsong lilt—the singularly cruel things he had done to those cats and dogs.

His smile looked exactly like GG’s.

Cold. Empty. Disconnected.

The frigid hand that’s clamped around my stomach tautens into a vise. My mouth suddenly feels parched, like every bit of moisture has been sucked out of it by a vacuum cleaner; my palms, in contrast, are slick with sweat. I lick my lips and run my hands up and down my pant legs in a futile attempt to dry them off.

“I was wondering when you were finally going to start to figure this out, Steve,” she says silkily, folding her hands together on the table in front of her. “It sure took you long enough.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are you asking me if I used your password to order potassium for patients who didn’t need it?” Her tone is breezy and conversational, as if we were discussing the weather; her face is a mask of tranquility, as placid as the surface of a mountain lake.

“Well, I…”

GG shakes her head in a way that is oddly patronizing, as if our roles were reversed, and she was a chief resident with nearly ten years of advanced medical training, and I was a relatively clueless medical student. Although it’s becoming frighteningly clear that GG isn’t anywhere near as clueless as your average medical student.

“Just answer the question, Steve,” she says, like a kindergarten teacher patiently prodding one of her pupils toward the correct answer. “Are you asking me if I ordered IV potassium for patients who didn’t need potassium by using your password?”

“Well, y-yes,” I stammer. “I guess I am.”

“Yes. For fifteen patients.”

Now the cold hand wrapped around my stomach is clenched so tightly, I can barely breathe.

“Why?” I rasp.

“To collect enough potassium to kill Mr. Bernard, of course.”

Reality seems to warp as my mind struggles to embrace this bizarre revelation. The room tilts, and I hear a roaring in my ears; my peripheral vision fades, and all I see now is GG, calmly regarding me as if from the end of a long, dark tunnel, and I worry that I might actually pass out.

This isn’t happening. This can’t possibly be happening right now.

But then the feeling like I’m going to faint passes; the world around us rights itself, the tunnel disappears, and the roaring in my ears fades. For one fleeting moment, I think it’s all some sick joke at Mr. Bernard’s expense. I even consider laughing.

But then I notice GG’s eyes. I mean,
really
notice her eyes. Staring into them, I can sense an impenetrable blackness hidden beneath the surfaces, like cold, inky waters lying deep under a calm ocean. They blaze with a twisted energy. Ambition. Determination. Madness. They’re all in there, tussling, jockeying for position.

The GG who followed me around like a faithful puppy for the past several weeks—the eager, enthusiastic med student and, as of a few short hours ago, passionate lover—is completely gone. She’s been replaced by something more primal—a creature that, I’m strangely certain, is entirely capable of having killed Mr. Bernard.

I open my mouth to speak, but all that comes out is an inarticulate grunt, like I’ve been sucker punched in the stomach.

She throws back her head and laughs; the sound, which once reminded me of the pleasant cadence of wind chimes, now runs up and down my spine like ice-cold fingers.

She immediately places a hand over her mouth, seemingly embarrassed by her response. “I’m sorry, Steve. I didn’t mean to laugh. But you should see the look on your face right now. You look like a fish.”

“Why?” I croak. “Why did you kill Mr. Bernard?”

“To serve a greater good,” she says mildly.

“To serve … what?”

“A greater good. But more on that in a second.” She leans forward eagerly. “First, don’t you want to know how I did it?”

She seems genuinely excited. I get the impression she’s been waiting a long time to tell somebody whatever it is she’s about to tell me. Not that it makes me any more enthusiastic to hear it.

She continues without waiting for a response. “You’ve probably noticed, Steve, that a lot of people like me. Professors. Residents. Nurses. Especially the nurses. I’ve spent a lot of time here in the hospital, working with the nurses. Learning their routines. Helping them with their work. I’ve fixed IV pumps, drawn blood, placed catheters, even changed bedpans. It’s gotten me into their good graces, and a lot of them now pretty much trust me with anything. Like giving medications.”

She sips from her coffee and grimaces. “Coffee’s strong today. Anyway, it all ended up being so easy, really. I ordered the IV potassium using your ERIN account, then went to my favorite nurses—the ones I’d really been softening up—and offered to administer it to the patients for them. They’d pull the IV bag from the electronic medication dispenser, log it into the system, hand it to me, and go back to doing the twenty other things they were trying to do at the same time. They never gave me or my poor little bag of potassium a second thought.

“And why not? They’d seen me give IV medications to patients hundreds of times. Not one of them—
not a single one
—even bothered to check to see if the patient actually
needed
potassium, much less confirm that I’d actually given it. That’s how much they trusted me. Besides, I never asked for very much potassium at one time, so why should they have cared?

“Then, instead of giving the potassium to the patient, I pocketed the bag, brought it home, and stuck it in the fridge. A little bit here, a little bit there … it didn’t take long for me to build up a pretty good stockpile of medical-grade potassium.” She points her index finger directly at me. “All ordered under your name, Doctor. Of course, I had to distill off some of the saline to achieve just the right lethal concentration. But that wasn’t too hard.”

She smiles benignly, and her gaze settles on a faraway spot somewhere over the top of my head. Her eyes glaze over, like she’s having an out-of-body experience.

“I don’t really remember exactly what I told him,” she says serenely. “As I pushed all that potassium through the central line. I probably reassured him, told him I was giving him some medication to help his ileus. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.”

She blinks, hard, and her eyes return to me. “Anyway, once I was done, I waited in a chair next to his bed. It didn’t take long for him to die. Three, five minutes maybe. Very anticlimactic. He just closed his eyes, and that was it. After he had stopped breathing, I waited a while just to be sure, injected some extra potassium into the TPN bag to set up the accidental overdose story, pocketed the empty bags, then hit the code button and started chest compressions. The rest you already know. I got rid of the empty potassium bags, all fifteen of them, after I left the hospital later.”

I recall that look on her face, right after Mr. Bernard’s code. The exhilaration that lingered in her eyes. At the time, I shrugged it off.

How wrong I was.

She enjoyed it. Watching him die.

I find my voice. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“From the beginning, I assumed that you would eventually work through a lot of this on your own. After all, there were some pretty obvious loose ends. In fact, you disappointed me. I thought you’d figure it out more quickly.” She sips from her coffee. “I wanted to move you in a certain direction. Get you to confide in me. It’s all been part of my plan.”

Plan? What the hell is she talking about?

“But aren’t you worried I’m going to tell someone?”

“You’re not going to tell anyone, Steve.”

“Why?”

“Because you have absolutely no proof. You’re the one who ordered potassium for patients who didn’t need it. If you tell people you gave me your computer password, and that I ordered the potassium in your name, I’ll deny it. Besides, giving out your password to med students violates a whole bunch of rules and laws. You could get fired.