Doing Harm (45 page)

For a brief moment, the words hang in the air between us. Then she straightens out her dress and purposely brushes her lustrous brown hair out of her face, all business again. “So. What do you want?”

“For what?”

“Steve,” she growls. “Don’t insult both of our intelligences. What do you want? For keeping quiet? I’m calling your bluff.”

“I’m not bluffing, GG.”

“But what about your job? What’s Collier going to think when he finds out about us? Your career will be
over
, Steve.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“You’re lying.” But she doesn’t sound so sure.

I glance at my watch.

Anytime, now.

“Tell you what. Let me show you just one more video.” I walk back to the lectern and hit the
PLAY
button on my computer. The picture of my daughters disappears and, with it, any remaining semblance of GG’s poker face, which completely collapses, like a sand castle erased by the rising tide.

She gapes, incredulous, at the screen, on which is now projected the resident call room. It’s nighttime, and the contents of the room are cast in the greenish hues of a night-vision camera. But everything’s clearly visible. Bunk bed. Sink. Rickety nightstand with phone.

Everything but the kitten poster.

Luis lies on the lower berth of the bunk bed. The door opens, and a figure pokes its head into the room. There’s no mistaking GG’s willowy form and flowing dark hair, even with the mask covering her mouth and the lower part of her face. Her eyes glow eerily in the night vision, like a cat’s reflected in the headlights of a car. The mask is attached to a thin, clear-plastic hose running to a small box clipped to a black belt at her waist. She pauses in the doorway, body taut, as if she’s ready to run away at any moment. But Luis doesn’t react.

I freeze the video. “At first, it didn’t make sense to me how you could have ever managed to murder Luis. I mean, a big strong guy like him, probably trained to kill people using his bare hands dozens of different ways. Somehow, you engineered your way around the door lock. But asleep or not, the Luis
I
knew would have been on his feet the moment that door opened. Unless you had somehow already incapacitated him before ever setting foot inside.”

I pick up the laser pointer and, on the screen, trace the mask secured snugly to her mouth and nose. “With a gas, maybe? How about nitrous oxide? Colorless. Practically odorless. Disperses quickly.” I shift the laser pointer to the ventilator grate imbedded in the wall almost directly over Luis’s face. “I went back and traced the origin of that shaft. You could have selectively pumped medical-grade nitrous into the call room at any number of different points. The nitrous would have initiated a state of mild anesthesia and dissociation. Not nearly enough to put him all the way under, of course, but certainly enough to take the fight out of him. Make him disoriented and vulnerable. And if the final results of the autopsy detect trace levels of nitrous in his body, as it probably will, it plays nicely with the drug-abuse cover story.”

I restart the video and, like the two previous ones, the images flash by at increased speed. GG creeps up to Luis and jabs a needle into his thigh. He flails out at her, but even in this fast-forwarded version, his movements appear uncharacteristically slow and clumsy, and she springs away, well out of his reach.

Once more, I pause the video. “They found ketamine with Luis’s body. Ketamine is an anesthetic. It’s usually given IV, but it can also be delivered IM to patients who won’t let you get close to them: like a screaming little kid who needs stitches. That’s why ketamine is also an effective animal tranquilizer. The nitrous allowed you to get close enough to Luis to give him an injection of ketamine; the ketamine put him the rest of the way under. And, like the nitrous, ketamine is popular among drug addicts.”

The recording resumes. Luis jumps up, hits his head on the metal railing of the top bunk, stumbles to the center of the room, and falls to the floor. He thrashes about, trying ineffectually to rise again, like a punch-drunk boxer on the mat after taking one too many hits, as GG watches from where she’s pressed up against a wall.

And then Luis lies still, his eyes wide open and jaw slack. GG tosses an open duffel bag on the floor next to him, rolls him onto his back, yanks his scrub pants and underwear down to his ankles, unwraps a prepackaged central venous catheter kit she removes from the duffel bag, and drapes his left groin with towels. All the while, Luis lies there, dead to the world.

Even now, as I again watch GG effortlessly slide the fifteen-centimeter-long catheter into Luis’s left femoral vein, I can’t help but be impressed. She makes it look so easy. Many junior surgical residents, let alone med students, have difficulty mastering this skill. Once the catheter is secured, she pulls several medication vials from the duffel bag and injects them, one after the other, into the catheter. The rise and fall of Luis’s chest slows, then stops. In quick succession, she checks each of his major pulses: the radial at the wrist, femoral in the right groin, and, finally, the carotid in the neck. She nods, drops an envelope and several vials of medicine on the floor around him, grabs the duffel bag, and leaves.

And Luis Martínez—ex-Marine and battle-hardened survivor of some of the meanest streets in the world—lies dead, in the most unlikely of places, at the hands of the most unlikely of people.

“How?” GG says quietly to Katie and Annabelle, whose smiling visages have replaced the call room on the screen.

“Luis.” I turn the computer off and check my watch again. It’s taking longer than I expected, and I’m running out of things to say.

Damn. Maybe I shouldn’t have sped the video up so much.

I move out from behind the lectern. “He installed a camera behind the kitten poster, with the lens pointed through one of its eyes. It was streaming images to the same offshore server holding the SICU camera data.” An additional fail-safe mechanism, should anything ever happen in the call room.

GG rises …

… and then sways, ever so slightly.

She places a hand on the back of a chair to steady herself. Confusion flashes across her face.

Finally.

“It’s over, GG.”

She laughs, but weakly, and at the same time frowns in concentration. “What—makes you say that?”

“The ketamine. It’s starting to take effect.”

Her eyelids, which had been drooping, spring open. Her hand flies to her shoulder.

“Yes, GG.” I hold up a syringe filled with clear fluid, identical to the study medication, and labeled with the numbers
00134.
“You’re not the only one with access to ketamine. Remember when the researcher dropped the syringe on the floor out in the hallway tonight, and I helped him pick it up? Forgive me for stealing your idea, GG, but I used the opportunity to switch your syringe—the one you were supposed to receive tonight for the research study—for a duplicate one filled with 150 mg of ketamine, enough to put a typical person down within about ten minutes.” I place the syringe on the lectern and point to my watch. “It’s been over fifteen since he injected you. But you’re not a typical person, are you?”

She clutches the chair in front of her with both hands. “I’ll … deny everything.” She looks pained; her frown knits deep lines across her brow.

I almost feel sorry for her. Almost. But not quite. “Sure you will. Except that, very soon, you’ll be sending out a dozen e-mails, compliments of me, confessing everything. They’ll include copies of those videos and explain how guilty you feel and how you’ve decided to come clean before committing suicide here”—I sweep my hands around the room, toward the portraits of the dead surgeons gazing down upon us around the Dome—“in one of the cradles of American surgery. Very dramatic. The media will eat it up.”

“I’ll tell them it was you.”

“I doubt it. In a few seconds, once you’re out from the ketamine, I’ll be giving you a healthy dose of this.” I hold up another syringe, this one attached to a capped needle. “Midazolam. A benzodiazepine. It’s an amnestic. But I probably don’t need to remind you of that. You’re a star med student.” I slip the syringe into my right pants pocket. “I figure you’ll remember everything right up to the part when you went out into the hallway for the shot.”

She staggers out from behind the row of chairs and collapses into a sitting position on the floor at the front of the hall, several feet away from me, swaying slightly and breathing hard.

“Why would … I confess? Nobody will … believe … any of that.”

“Oh, I think they will. Suicide attempts in women tend to be a cry for help. Psychiatry 101. That’s why women take pills and slash their wrists. Gives other people plenty of time to save them. It’s the suicidal guy who decisively splatters his brain matter all to hell with a handgun to the temple.” I shake my head and smile thinly. “And, besides—are you
kidding
me? With your kinds of issues? They’re going to have an army of psychiatrists working on you for years.”

“But … that video … of you and me,” she gasps, her eyelids half-closed. “I’ll them you … were … my lover … tell them … you were involved…”

“Right.
That
video.” I walk over and pluck her smartphone from her white coat pocket. “Earlier tonight, I erased the copy you downloaded onto the server. Once I get rid of the original”—I wiggle the phone back and forth—“the police—and Dr. Collier—will never know I was ever involved with you. You go to jail, and I get to go back to my life.” I squat down to her level, all the better to look directly into her eyes. “Why do you think I’m even here tonight, talking to you? Stalling for time? I needed to steal your phone to close the loop.” I lean in a little closer. “Besides, I wanted to see the look on your face at the exact moment you realized I had beaten you, you psychotic bitch.”

What comes next happens with astonishing speed.

I don’t even have time to be surprised as she leaps up and charges into me. Despite the ketamine, she’s as fast and silent and graceful as a cat.

With all of my planning, all of my meticulous preparations for tonight, a physical attack was something I had not anticipated. After all, she’s supposed to be in a fucking ketamine-induced stupor by now, sprawled out on the floor in a lifeless heap, just as Luis had been. But the ketamine doesn’t seem to be working.

In one fluid motion, she knocks me off-balance, and the two of us tumble backward. The lectern topples over, along with my computer and the syringe labeled
00134
. Her smartphone clatters across the floor. GG ends up on top of me and shoves her knee into my chest, knocking the wind out of me. I try to gulp some air but manage only a thin, reedy whistle, like I’m sucking my breath through a straw.

And then I’m on my back lying on the floor, and she’s straddling me, pinning my arms to my sides with her long and powerful legs. I thrash my body around violently, but it’s no use. I can’t move. She’s a lot stronger than she looks and, despite the ketamine, seems to be putting her black belt in tae kwon do to pretty good use right now.

Oh shit.

I must have miscalculated the ketamine dose. Or maybe I didn’t give it enough time to work. That’s the problem in a situation like this. Tranquilizers are imprecise. It’s not like what you see in movies or on TV. Unless someone’s hooked up to an anesthetic-gas machine, or an IV drip, there’s
nothing
that will instantly knock someone out. How could I have been so stupid?

She grins down at me, looking well and truly
insane.

“Oops,” she says. “Poor Steve. I’m still awake.” I strain impotently against the powerful grip of her legs. “And now … I’m going to kill you.” She slurs her speech, speaks a little haltingly, and sways a bit, but with her hands free and mine pinned helplessly against my sides, she can easily make good on her threat. She tightens her legs against my arms, pushing my right hand against the outside of my pant pocket.

Through the fabric of pants, I can feel the outline of the midazolam syringe I placed in my pocket a few moments ago.

“And then…” She licks her lips. Her ponytail has come undone, and her hair falls into her face. She flips it away with a toss of her head. It lands across her right shoulder, leaving the left side of her neck exposed. “I’m going to kill Sally … and Katie … and Annabelle.” She strokes my cheek with the back of her fingers. “What do you think?”

No!
I writhe and twist even more violently than before. My right arm is still trapped at my side by her left leg, but in the process of struggling, I manage to slip her grip and slide my right hand inside my pants pocket without her noticing. I wrap my hand around the syringe.

“And then,” she breathes, “I swear to
God,
Steve … I’ll turn … everything back on …
you.
”

Carefully, by feel only, having performed this task a thousand times before, I slip the hypodermic needle in my pocket free from its protective plastic sheath.

“You don’t think … I can’t … deal with a few pathetic psychiatrists?”

At the apex of her left sternocleidomastoid muscle, I can see the pulsations of her internal carotid artery. Just behind it, underneath the muscle, lies the internal jugular vein. If I can inject the midazolam into the vein, she’ll be out within fifteen seconds. I’ll never get a better shot at this.

“I’ll have … them eating … out … of my hand.”

She shifts her weight briefly as she reaches her right hand into the right pocket of her white coat.

It’s all I need.

Clutching the syringe, I lurch my body abruptly to my left. It knocks her off-balance just enough for me to jerk my right hand out of my pocket, away from her leg, and stab the needle toward her neck.

For a fraction of a second, I think it’s going to work.

The syringe travels in a perfect arc, the point of the needle aimed squarely at the center of her left internal jugular vein.

But it never reaches its target.

With the needle just inches short of the skin, she catches my right wrist with her left hand and slams my hand down against the marble floor. The shock of the impact sends pain lancing up my arm. I gasp and let go of the syringe, which flies out of my grip and rolls away to rest out of reach a few feet away.