Critical Judgment (1996) (42 page)

“I thought you were postulating some sort of interaction
between the cadmium in the patient’s system and the MRI.”

“I was. But that requires a coincidence—first the exposure, then the test. The truth is, except for Willie Cardoza, we have no definitive lab proof of anyone being cadmium toxic.”

“Colstar rigged the testing. You know that.”

“I know they’re capable of it, that’s for sure.”

“And what about the rings in Angela’s eyes? And the other cases of violent behavior?”

“I don’t know, Lew. But I do know I want to take a look at that MRI machine. And if I don’t find anything, I’d like one of my radiologist friends from St. John’s to come up here and check it out.”

“When are you going to try to look at it?”

“As soon as I see that Kelly is settled in upstairs.”

“I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Maybe. But ever since I started accumulating data on our cases, something’s been bugging me. I think this is what.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Do you have a good penlight I can borrow?”

“I do.”

Lew unclipped it from his pocket and passed it over.

“Courtesy of Coulter Pharmaceuticals,” he said, reading the printing embossed on the side.

Abby laughed sardonically.

“Believe it or not, that’s one of Ezra Black’s companies. Listen, as soon as I’m ready to go to the MRI unit, I’ll need you to occupy the X-ray tech for twenty minutes or so.”

“No problem. Hector Ortega’s on tonight. He was born and raised in the Napa Valley, and he’s sick of people thinking he should know Spanish. He loves it when I take a few minutes to speak it with him.”

“Excellent.” Abby motioned out the glass to where the nurses and a transportation worker were loading Kelly onto a gurney for transfer to the unit. “I’m going
to go up with them and then I’ll call. She shouldn’t have gone down there by herself, Lew. I shouldn’t have let her.”

He turned her by her shoulders to face him. His dark eyes were deadly serious.

“Abby, we told you at the Alliance meeting that this was a war against corporate killers. We meant it. David Brooks was a casualty. So were Peggy Wheaton and Ezra Black’s kid, and those people in the casino in Las Vegas. And possibly even Josh. And now, maybe, so is Kelly. I’m sorry it’s happened this way. But at least you and I are still here to fight back.”

Abby wiped at the tears that had suddenly materialized at the corners of her eyes.

“You’re right,” she said. “I have to stay focused on that. One more thing just occurred to me.”

“Yes?”

“If, as I think, Kelly discovered something beneath Colstar, she may be in danger even now. Shouldn’t someone be guarding her?”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Listen, I’m sure that once she understands what’s at stake, Barbara Torres from the Alliance will do some special duty. She’s the associate head of the VNA. I’ll call her right now. After Jill Anderson relieves me tonight, I can make some excuse for relieving Barbara. We’ll try to have someone watching her continuously.”

“Great. I’ll do a shift, too, although I hope that by morning Kelly will be out of here.”

“Just give me a call when you want me to start Hector’s Spanish lesson. And in the meantime,
buena suerte.”

“Quinn shouldn’t have done this,” Abby said, balling up a blank progress note sheet and snapping it into the trash. “And I promise you he’s going to regret it.”

U
nwilling to leave, Abby stood beside Kelly Franklin’s bed in the ICU. Kelly’s condition remained essentially unchanged in that she was unresponsive even to painful stimuli. But a slightly more hopeful sign was her pupils, which were not excessively dilated and were slightly reactive to light. Her cardiac status had largely stabilized, although high doses of antiarrhythmic medications were still needed, and her blood pH was up to 7.42—normal. The cardiologist’s opinion was essentially the same as Abby’s—persistent central-nervous and cardiac-oxygen deprivation due to carbon monoxide clogging the hemoglobin-carrying sites. The most likely explanation for her depressed consciousness was increased pressure within her skull caused by swelling of her brain. The high doses of intravenous steroids seemed to be helping to reduce the swelling some, but how much permanent brain damage she had already sustained was impossible to know.

Abby found herself praying that there hadn’t been time for Kelly to experience much terror before the narcotics knocked her out. In the report she had given to the police a short while ago, she had strongly suggested that Kelly’s blood would reveal a drug overdose. But she
hadn’t shared her belief that this was attempted murder. And she certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about Colstar or Quinn. By doing so all she would have accomplished was to place herself in danger at a time when she needed, above all, to be mobile.

Quinn was going to pay for this, she vowed. She had never felt strongly enough about any cause to believe she was ready to die for it. But if Quinn and Colstar were responsible for this tragedy, as well as for Josh and the others, she would do whatever she had to—take whatever chances were necessary—in order to bring them down, along with anyone else who was involved. She checked the time. Just nine. It seemed a lifetime ago that she was sitting by the dilapidated park, waiting.

She looked about helplessly. She could stick around to be sure no one came in bent on finishing the job that was started somewhere in or beneath Colstar. But, otherwise, there wasn’t much she could do—except take a close look at the MRI machine. She paced to the nurses’ station and back, then pulled the blinds apart and checked the weather. The rain and the blackness seemed as before. There was no way Kelly was going to get to a decompression chamber before morning.

She went to the phone beside the central monitoring station to call Lew, hoping he had been able to reach Barbara Torres. If she had agreed to come in, Abby would wait until she arrived before going to inspect the MRI unit, provided that the ER was still slow enough for Lew to divert the night X-ray tech.

At that moment, as if in answer to a prayer, Barbara Torres marched into the unit. She was wearing her blue VNA uniform and carrying a clipboard and stethoscope. Her expression and nod to Abby said that she knew everything and was ready to insert her not inconsiderable bulk and determination between Kelly and any threat. She walked right past Abby to the charge nurse and greeted the woman warmly.

“Kelly Franklin’s an old friend,” Abby heard her say. “It would mean a great deal to me to special her.”

“No problem, Barb,” the unit nurse replied. “We never turn down good help. I’ll clear it with the supervisor and be in to give you the lowdown in ten or fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, just keep an eye on her vitals and urine output, and do a neuro check every fifteen minutes.”

Barbara met Abby by the door to Kelly’s cubicle.

“I came in as soon as Lew called,” she whispered. “It doesn’t look good in there.”

“It isn’t.”

“Well, my husband’s got a virus, so I may or may not stay the night depending on how he is and how Lew feels after his shift is done.”

“I can special her, but I’m on the schedule for tomorrow at eight
A.M.,”
Abby said. “A sixteen-hour shift, no less.”

Abby had started her day with the visit to Dotty Schumacher and her Strudel. She’d been sleep deprived when she’d gone to bed late the previous evening, and not much less sleep deprived when she awoke. Now, with all that had happened today, she was operating on raw, nervous energy. There was no way to guess how much fuel remained in her tank. But it was a safe bet that without five or six hours of decent sleep, she would never make it through her shift tomorrow without crashing.

“Don’t you worry,” Torres said. “Lew or I will handle things here. I stopped by the ER. He said for you to call as soon as you’re ready to go down to the MRI unit. What’s that all about?”

“Maybe nothing. I’ll tell you as soon as I get back. Meanwhile, don’t let anyone near her who doesn’t have an ID tag.”

“I used to do some per diem, and before that I was a med/surg nurse on two. I know a lot of the staff here.”

“Any doubts about anyone, just bring them over to be eyeballed by one of the unit nurses.”

“Done.”

Barbara Torres moved into Kelly’s room and set to work. Abby called Lew in the ER. Spanish class for Hector Ortega would commence in three minutes.

The air seemed heavy, like it was liquid or something. It even had a weird taste.…

Claire Buchanan’s words played over and over in Abby’s head as she made her way cautiously down the back stairs to the radiology unit. The lights in the main corridor were dim, and the place seemed totally deserted. Several years ago she had bought herself a running watch as part of a pledge to jog more. The pledge lasted only a few weeks, if that, but the twenty-three-dollar watch was like Old Man River. Now, as she entered the blackened MRI unit, she put the watch in countdown mode, set it for twenty minutes, and began.

She first entered the control room, which was connected by a door to MRI radiologist Del Marshall’s office. The area, housing the huge, complex electronic console and monitoring screens, was the purview of the imaging technologist. Beyond it, in a room the size of a large closet, was the integrating computer itself. The control area was separated by a heavy glass wall from the room housing the MRI machine.

The entire unit, including Marshall’s office, was totally dark. Abby flipped on the lights in the main room and pulled the print curtains closed on the control-room side of the glass, cutting down on much of the glare. Then she stepped inside the pitch-black radiologist’s office and closed the door. There was no light filtering in from the control room. As a last precaution she pulled a wastebasket over and left it by the door from the office to the main hall. The noise of the door bumping it might give her a few seconds of advance warning.
Of course, doing anything beneficial with those seconds would be something else again.

She closed Marshall’s office door behind her and passed through the control area to the actual MRI unit. The watch read 18:43.

As a resident Abby had taken a tour of the MRI unit serviced by the St. John’s radiologists. Now she wished she had paid more attention. The machine was massive—a seven-foot-long tube, less than two feet in diameter, set inside the housing of the electromagnet, which was a huge gleaming cube, seven feet on a side. Extending from the cylinder was the track and movable platform on which the patient was placed to glide electronically into the machine.

Abby examined the track quickly, then peered into the tube. The opening was wide enough to admit an average-sized person. She suspected that anyone above 250 or so would have a problem even fitting inside, let alone fitting inside and remaining sane for three-quarters of an hour with shoulders pressed against the sides and nose just inches from the top. Claire Buchanan wasn’t large, but she
was
claustrophobic. Abby’s estimation of the woman’s determination went up several notches. Claire had wanted so much to be well again that she was willing to enter the lair of her dragon.

“What went wrong, Claire? What went wrong?”

Abby sang the words softly, tunelessly as she crawled around the base of the machine, looking for something, anything, out of place. At the rear of the unit the track extended several feet so that patients could be positioned with their torso and head outside and their lower body inside. In that way the pelvis and legs were easily scanned. Below the opening were the hydraulics that helped move the sled along the track. Nothing among the cables seemed unusual. Abby cursed herself for having absolutely no idea what she was looking for.

Suddenly, from beyond the control room, she heard the soft sound of the office door striking the waste can.
She was as far away from the door to the waiting room and hallway as she could possibly be. There was no chance she could make it. She huddled behind the scanner and peered over the track, through the long cylinder. The door from the office to the control room opened, backlighting the curtains she had drawn. Seconds later they were pulled apart. From her position it was impossible to see who was there. She glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes left. Unless Lew had failed miserably, it wasn’t the X-ray technician.

She held her breath as the door from the control room slowly opened. She could see who the intruder was only if he or she passed directly beyond the cylinder opening. Abby sensed the footsteps moving around toward where she was crouched. Silently, she pulled herself facedown onto the track and then into the narrow cylinder. The footsteps continued around to where she would surely have been seen had she stayed crouched next to the hydraulics. Then they turned and headed back toward the front of the room. Abby pushed herself backward again until only her upper half was in the cylinder. She extended her neck, lifting her head so that she could see in front of her.

Suddenly, a man’s broad back appeared to the left of the track. He was wearing white. Abby’s mind was swirling. Was this a radiologist? If so, what was he there for? An emergency MRI? The man stepped away. He was wearing bright white coveralls, not a clinic coat. He began singing a woeful rendition of the “Folsom Prison Blues” as he dusted the floor. Abby barely took a breath as the janitor sang and dusted around her. She watched the time flash down on her watch. Eleven minutes. Ten. The singing stopped. Moments later the lights went out. The doors opened and closed. Soon the silence and the darkness were total.

Abby waited an extra thirty seconds, then managed to roll over so that she was facing upward. How on earth
had claustrophobic Claire allowed herself to be scanned even once, let alone a second time?

The air seemed heavy, like it was liquid or something.…

She took Lew’s penlight from her breast pocket and ran the beam over the white enamel inside the tube. Inch by inch, she worked her way out of the cylinder in the direction she had entered, keeping her body extended by keeping her feet on the track. She was about eighteen inches from the opening when she saw them—a single row of minuscule pores in the enamel, extending in an arc directly over where a typical patient’s nose or mouth would be. She held the light inches away from the openings—a row of, perhaps, thirty holes that were little more than pinpricks. Were they standard in an MRI? If so, what would they be for?