“Don’t worry,” Marissa called over her shoulder.
“Your secret is safe with me.” But of course she’d have to tell Wendy.
At the door, Marissa paused again. Turning around, she called out to Ken.
“Do you have a chart on her?” she asked.
“Not really,” Ken said.
“Just the stuff they wrote in the ER, which wasn’t much.”
“But I suppose the business office got some details for billing,” Marissa said.
“I’m sure,” Ken said.
“You didn’t happen to know if they got her social security number?” Marissa asked.
“You got me there,” Ken said.
“But if you want to look, the chart is on my desk.”
Marissa pulled open the door and left the autopsy room.
“My feeling is that we can’t assume it’s true,” Wendy said, twirling her ice cubes in her mineral water.
“Thinking Rebecca Ziegler was killed and then tossed out of a window is too preposterous.
It can’t be true. The amount of blood in a chest after an aortic rupture has to be defined by a bell-shaped curve. Rebecca Ziegler was just at one end of the curve. That has to be the explanation.”
Wendy was sprawled in the corner of the couch in Marissa’s study. Taffy Two was sitting on the floor, hoping for another Goldfish cocktail cracker. Marissa was at her desk.
They were waiting for Gustave to arrive. He’d had late-afternoon emergency surgery, but was due any moment. At Wendy’s urging, the women had decided to get together with their husbands for a casual dinner of pizza. They were hoping that if the men got to know each other, they might decide to come to one of the Resolve meetings. Wendy thought that would be extremely helpful. Marissa wasn’t so sure.
“At least I got her social security number from her chart,” Marissa said.
“If we can figure out a way to get into the Women’s Clinic records, we can see what poor Rebecca read on her last day. That is, if she read anything.”
“Here you go again with that wild imagination of yours,” Wendy said.
“So now you think they took her upstairs, bumped her off, then tossed her out the window. Come on, it’s too farfetched even to consider.”
“Regardless,” Marissa said.
“We’ll let it go for the time being.
At least we did find out that she had the same infectious process in her tubes. That we know for sure.”
Suddenly Marissa fumbled through her papers, searching for the phone numbers for Marcia Lyons and Catherine Zolk.
Calling each woman in turn, Marissa learned what she intuitively suspected: both women confirmed that their internists had talked about their taking isoniazid. The internists had been worried about TB.
Hanging up the phone, Marissa said: “Now we have five definite cases. Damn Wingate and his confidentiality. We can’t make many statistical inferences from five cases. We have to find out if there are more.”
“Ut’s be fair,” Wendy said.
“Wingate is following orders from above. Maybe he has already started looking into it.”
“I hope so,” Marissa said.
“Meanwhile, let’s check our own hospitals and see if we can come up with more cases. You take the General and I’ll take the Memorial.”
Taffy Two took off at the sound of the doorbelL barking madly. Wendy swung her feet to the floor.
“That must be Gustave,” she said as she stood up and stretched. She checked her watch; it was almost nine P.M.
Marissa was struck by Gustave’s stature. From her five-foot height, he towered over her like a giant. He was a six-foot-six, squarely built man with very blond, curly hair. His eyes were a soft pastel blue.
“Sorry I’m so late,” Gustave apologized after being introduced to Marissa and Robert. Robert had come out of his study at the sound of the bell.
“We had to wait for anesthesia before we began out case.”
“It makes no difference at all,” Marissa assured him. She told Robert to see what Gustave wanted to drink while she and Wendy called for the pizza.
When the pizza arrived, they all gathered around the table in the family room off the kitchen. The men were drinking beers.
Marissa was pleased but a little surprised that Robert was enjoying
Gustave’s company. He usually didn’t get along with doctors.
“We haven’t heard about your visit to the Women’s Clinic today,” Robert said when there was a lull in the conversation.
Marissa looked over at Wendy, She wasn’t sure if she wanted to get into a discussion about their visit, knowing that she’d have to hear Robert’s “I told you so.”
“Come on,” Robert urged.
“What happened?” Turning to Gustave, Robert explained that the women had tried to access the clinic’s computer.
“We asked and they said no,” Wendy admitted.
“I’m not surprised,” Robert said.
“Were they nasty about it?”
“Not at all,” Wendy said.
“We had to go to the director of the clinic, the same man who runs the in-vitro unit. He said it was a policy made at the home office in San Francisco.”
“I think it is shortsighted,” Marissa said, finally speaking up.
“Although we didn’t find anything out at the clinic, we did learn that there are five cases, and five cases of a rare problem in one geographical location deserves to be investigated.”
“Five cases?” Gustave questioned.
“Five cases of what?”
Wendy quickly filled Gustave in on the situation, explaining it involved her apparent TB of the fallopian tubes.
“So we went back to the clinic to see if there are other cases,”
Marissa explained.
“But they would not let us search their files for reasons of confidentiality.”
“If you were running a clinic,” Robert asked Gustave, “would you let a couple of people off the street come in and access your records?”
Absolutely not,” Gustave agreed.
That’s what I tried to explain to the ladies last night,” Robert said.
“The clinic is only operating in a reasonable, ethical, and legal fashion. I would have been shocked if they had given any information at all.”
“We are hardly ‘people off the street,” Wendy said heatedly.
“We’re doctors as well as patients.”
Being two of the five in your own series hardly makes you objective,” Gustave pointed out.
“Especially with the hormones you women have been taking.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Robert said, raising his beer bottle.
Wendy and Marissa exchanged frustrated glances.
After wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Robert turned back to Marissa.
“Five cases?” he said.
“Last night you mentioned four.”
Rebecca Ziegler had the same problem,” Marissa answered.
:
“No kidding,” Robert said. Turning to Gustave, he said, “She was the woman who committed suicide over at the Women’s Clinic. She went berserk in the waiting room just as Marissa and I arrived, the very day she jumped. I tried to restrain her but she slugged me.”
“Wendy told me about her,” Gustave said.
“You tried to restrain her before she jumped?”
“Nothing so dramatic,” Robert said.
“She was about to attack a receptionist. Seems the receptionist wouldn’t let her see her records. It wasn’t until later that she jumped out of the window.
And that was from the top floor, not the waiting room.”
Gustave nodded.
“Tragic case,” he said.
“It may be more tragic than you think,” Marissa blurted without thinking.
“Wendy and I learned something else today. Rebecca
Ziegler might not have committed suicide. She might have been murdered. That’s how reasonable, ethical, and legal the Women’s Clinic is being run.”
As soon as Marissa had mentioned this shocking possibility she regretted it. There were a number of reasons she shouldn’i have said anything, her promise to Ken foremost among them.
She tried to change the subject to tuberculosis, but Robert wouldn’t let it go.
“I think you’d better explain,” he insisted.
Realizing her mistake, Marissa decided she had no choice but to tell the whole story. After she’d finished, Robert sat back in his chair and looked at Gustave.
“You’re a doctor,” he said.
“What do you think of what you just heard?”
“Circumstantial,” Gustave said.
“Personally, I think those two pathologists are letting their forensic imaginations run wild. As they said themselves, there is no concrete proof. They have a ruptured aorta. That certainly is lethal. Probably the heart was in diastole at the moment of impact, so that it was filling when it was shocked into stopping. The only bleeding came from back flow, meaning the blood that was in the aorta itself.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” Robert said.
“Gustave is probably right,” Marissa agreed, glad to get off the subject. She wasn’t about to bring up her own question regarding the fact that Rebecca had hardly acted depressed in the waiting room.
“Even so,” Marissa continued, “Rebecca’s death makes us even more eager to access the Women’s Clinic’s computer. I’d love to read what’s in her record; what she saw had to contribute to her death.”
“Maybe we could find some whiz-kid hacker over at MIT,” Wendy said.
“It would be classic if we could get at their files from offsite.”
“That would be fantastic,” Marissa agreed.
“But what’s more realistic is for you and me to sneak in there at night and just use one of the terminals. Someone could do that at the Memorial with only a little creativity.”
“Hold on,” Robert said.
“You guys are getting way out of hand. Unauthorized access of someone’s private computer files is considered grand theft in Massachusetts. If you do something crazy like that, you could find yourselves felons.”
Marissa rolled her eyes.
“That’s no joke,” Robert said.
“I don’t know what’s in your minds.”
“Wendy and I happen to think this TB salpingitis is extremely significant,” Marissa told him.
“We think it ought to be followed up. We seem to be the only ones willing to do it. Sometimes risks have to be taken.”
Gustave cleared his throat.
“I’m afraid I’m in agreement with
Robert on this one,” he said.
“You can’t be serious about breaking into the clinic files. Despite your motivations, it would be a crime nonetheless.”
“The problem is truly one of priorities,” Marissa said.
“You men don’t realize how important this issue could be. By following up on it we are being responsible, not the reverse.”
“Maybe we should change the subject,” Wendy suggested.
“I think it should be settled before you women get into serious trouble,” Gustave said.
“Be quiet, Gustave!” Wendy snapped.
“These five cases may be the tip of an iceberg,” Marissa said.
“As I’ve already said, it reminds me of the discovery of toxic shock syndrome.”
“That’s not a fair comparison,” Robert said.
“It’s not like anyone’s died.”
“Oh yeah?” Marissa challenged.
“What about Rebecca Ziegler?”
March 30, 1990
8:15 A.M.
Robert opened the mahogany-paneled door to his private office in the old City Hall building and stepped inside. He tossed his briefcase onto the couch and stepped over to the window. His view out onto School Street was marred by rivulets of water streaming across the outside of the window. He’d never experienced such a rainy March in Boston.
Behind him he heard his private secretary, Donna, come into the room, bringing his usual morning coffee and his usual stack of phone messages.
“Some weather!” Donna said. Her strong Boston accent made the word sound like wet hah
Robert turned. Donna had seated herself to the left of his desk to go over the phone messages, which was their usual routine.
Robert looked at her. She was a big girl, almost five-ten. In her heels, she practically looked him in the eye. Her hair was dyed blonde, the dark roots clearly visible. Her features were rounded but not unpleasant, and her body was toned from daily aerobic exercise. She was a great secretary: honest, devoted, and dependable,