Death Rounds (27 page)

I’d no idea whether he believed me or thought I was crazy.

Nevertheless I barged ahead with the rest, including how I’d stupidly fallen asleep lying in wait in the dark. As I talked, I ran my fingers over my chin feeling for any patches of whiskers I’d missed with the razor. Unable to find any, I pressed the off button, putting an end to the buzzing, and in the silence between us, outlined what records at UH I thought we should go through next. When I stopped speaking, a glance at my watch told me we were ten minutes from the start of Death Rounds.

Williams remained motionless in his chair, staring at me with a fixed look of incredulity. I found his silence unnerving but said nothing. I figured this decisive man wouldn’t keep me waiting long for his verdict on whether I’d have his help.

As he sat there thinking, I took out a bottle of aftershave lotion to splash on my face. If I dumped the whole lot over my head, I thought, it wouldn’t be enough to hide the aroma from the rest of me. I reached into my office closet and found a crisp white lab coat to pull over my soiled clothing.

“How did you know about the three nurses and those other workers being cruel to patients?” Williams suddenly demanded. My back was turned to him and his voice caught me off guard.

I hadn’t mentioned Janet’s role in perceiving that the Phantom was active again. Nor had I admitted that it was nothing more than my faith in her ability to see what others had missed that formed the foundation of my early suspicions. But I decided to go for broke and risk winning him over by being as candid as possible. “My wife’s an obstetrician and gynecologist at UH. She realized her patients all had trouble...”

While I explained I watched his eyes, again looking for some hint as to how I was doing. I got none.

He leaned back in his chair when I finished, studied me some more, then asked, “And neither you nor your wife attempted to report this idea?”

“Of course we did. No one believed us. No one wanted to.”

“Do you have any suspicions about who this killer might be?”

My mind flashed on Rossit, on Hurst, on the powerful interests behind the amalgamation. “Not really,” I answered. My speculations, though disturbing, were so nebulous that I figured I’d lose Williams by even mentioning them.

He rubbed the angle of his jaw with his little finger and again seemed to consider me from head to toe. “Well, I can see why no one listened to you,” he commented after a few seconds. “Your story sounds crazy.”

I felt a resurgence of all my pent-up fear and frustration. “Goddamn it!” I blurted out angrily. “I’m sick of these sanctimonious scientific blinkers you guys wear. My best friend’s upstairs, maybe dying. He scoffed at our warning too—”

“Hey!” he commanded sharply. “Hold your horses. I didn’t say
I
didn’t believe you. I said your story
sounds crazy.
You already won me over last night when you suggested I analyze the
Legionella
cases as if an unknown vector was involved. Maybe it’s a killer; maybe it isn’t. But you were right about one thing; I would consider a carrier in any other outbreak where it wasn’t clear how a bug was being passed around.”

His measured response took a few seconds to register. Then came a surge of hope that he might become our ally in this. If Williams gave our case any credibility at all, help could be at hand. “You mean you think you can convince the CDC to investigate what’s behind these infections,” I asked, “including the possibility that they were deliberately inflicted?” We’d finally have a chance to launch a proper hunt for this murderer.

“With that story?” Williams gave a derisive laugh. “No way! But I’ve got an idea how we can get them to go over that asylum with a fine-tooth comb. It might flush out the character you’re looking for or it might not, but it’ll be a hell of a lot more effective than creeping around the place in the dark with a broomstick.”

My expectations thudded back to earth. The disappointment must have shown in my face.

“Hey, come now,” he said, pushing himself out of his chair. “There’s no time for sitting around and becoming discouraged. We don’t want to get the crowd at Death Rounds doubly angry at you by making them wait. And when we get there, stride in fast, try and sit away from the others, then keep your legs under the table. After all,” he chided with a wink and a grin, “who’s going to believe someone with B.O., dirty trousers, and a shredded cuff?”

Despite, or maybe because of, the absurdity of my position, his ribbing made me laugh. “Yeah, my mother would be shocked! Imagine, not having had a bath or a change of underwear before I head off to save my career and stop a serial killer.”

But the wisecrack didn’t ease the increasing tightness in my gut. The specter of the killings and the attempted killings had so dominated the last few days that I’d repeatedly shoved any fears I had for my job into the background. Yet I had no illusions about what lay ahead. This was undoubtedly Hurst’s most determined attempt to unseat me, and I’d never been at such a disadvantage or felt so targeted. Nor could I shake my suspicions, vague as they were, that he and Rossit were somehow involved in the murders and that they wanted my credibility in tatters in case I found out enough to try to expose them. But figuring it pointless to reveal such nebulous fears to Williams, I instead kept faking a bravado I most definitely didn’t feel. “Being a fancy dresser like you might impress the hell out of your ducks, Dr. Williams, but it’ll take more than hiding my scruffy outfit to keep the likes of Hurst and Rossit from ousting the likes of
me.
Now, if you were to pick up
those
two birds for banding and a botulism check, then release
them
back into a swamp somewhere, that would get them off my back for a while.”

His grin widened into a wicked smile as we marched out of my office and started toward the pathology department.

* * * *

In the basement corridor the number of residents clutching cups of coffee and scurrying alongside us didn’t help my apprehension any. It was a sign that attendance at the session would be good. On rounding a corner, I saw a clutch of people outside the entrance to the seminar room, some of them carrying in stacks of folding chairs. I instinctively slowed. “Quite a lynch mob,” I muttered.

“Relax,” Williams said quietly, putting his hand against my back and gently urging me forward. “Most people are probably here to find out why this case caused such a stir.”

Inside the long narrow room about twenty people were crowded around an extended central table and another group was hastily arranging a second ring of folding chairs against the wall. Some of my own staff approached me to inquire about Michael, most of them having been told about his admission as they passed through ER.

More than a dozen people were gathered around a huge silver coffeemaker parked in a corner on a steel cart. The rich aroma from its steaming contents was tinged with a hint of formaldehyde fumes. These were emanating from seven loosely covered Tupperware containers spread out along the center of the big table. Through their translucent sides I could see the dark shapes of what would be Phyllis Sanders’s major organs—lungs, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, brain, and a flat coil of something that I presumed was intestine—all marinating in a cloudy brown fluid.

Williams nodded toward the far end of the display. There sat Rossit holding a gavel, ready to chair the meeting, his eyes fixed on me. To his right was Hurst, also staring my way while leaning back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest, and the corners of his mouth giving the slightest suggestion of a smirk. Like a malevolent Mona Lisa in drag, I thought angrily. Beside him was Baker, the hospital lawyer. All three were dressed in dark suits. There wasn’t a noose on the table in front of them, but the scene reminded me of the quickie saloon trials depicted in old westerns.

Halfway down the table I also recognized the woman from the CDC’s hospital infection group who’d given me Williams’s phone number. She, too, was watching us. Free of her former protective gear and sporting a crimson pantsuit, she stood out in the midst of all the white coats and was almost as stylishly dressed as Williams.

But when I nodded hello, she scowled, jumped up, and strode over. “What are you doing here, Douglas?” she demanded frostily, facing Williams and ignoring me. Without giving him a chance
to
respond, she added, “I was designated to detail this wrap-up.”

“Just making myself available, Doris,” he answered curtly, “in case there were any complaints about how I handled the first few hours of the operation. Believe me, I don’t want your job.”

She flushed, appeared about to speak, then abruptly spun away and returned to her place at the table. Obviously turf was an issue even within the prestigious halls of the CDC.

“Everybody’s going to be fighting to grab a piece of the fame from this case,” Williams lamented, shaking his head as we found two empty chairs against the wall. “Even if we had some decent evidence to support your claim about a phantom killer, which we don’t, it would still be hard as hell to make Doris or anyone else back off from their rush to publish and get them to seriously consider the story.”

His gloomy prognosis left me trying to tuck my grotty-looking pants as far out of sight under my seat as I could while I surveyed the room and cast about for some better strategy to make people listen.

As expected, I recognized a few staff members with whom I’d had blowups in the past. More reassuring was seeing Susanne and one of our rookie nurses sitting against the wall opposite me. Susanne nodded to me, but the pale, young blonde woman at her side sat motionless, her unblinking stare riveted on the Tupperware. From her frightened expression, I figured she was the nurse who’d ignored Phyllis Sanders’s complaint of orthostatic dizziness, there to confess her mistake and face her reckoning, just as I was. It didn’t seem to be making it any easier on her that the ultimate responsibility and blame for sending the woman home fell on me.

Seeing Cam dart into the room jolted these gloomy thoughts out of my mind. He strode over to Doris, shook hands, and bent down to talk to her. Uh-oh, I thought, hoping he hadn’t already discovered my entry into his confidential records. Maybe he’d shown up only to report on the screening results from University Hospital. But as he talked to Doris, her scowl returned and she nodded toward Williams and me. He returned my gaze, then strode over to tower above me. His blue eyes were blazing, and he didn’t look happy.

“Security told me you were snooping through the minutes of my Infection Control Committee last night!” he challenged, his angry voice loud enough to make people around us stop talking and glance up at him. At their abrupt silence Cam looked around nervously and seemed to become aware of the scene he was starting to create. He moved his mouth closer to my ear. “I was also told you’d been in the archives until an hour ago,” he continued in a fierce whisper, his fury now sibilant but clearly undiminished. “I went down there. I saw the files that you were looking at! I already warned Janet to stop trying to dredge up that Phantom nonsense. But for you to pretend to be from the CDC, violate our security, and breach confidential information—that’s enough to at least charge you with unprofessional conduct, if not criminal trespassing.” He was literally spluttering, his fists clenched between us, his red face inches from my own.

“Hey, Cam, ease up,” I protested, instinctively recoiling. While I’d expected him to be annoyed at what I’d done, I certainly wasn’t prepared for him to be this angry. “I was there to find—”

“You’re no better than a lying thief—”

“Dr. Mackie!” interrupted Williams in a whisper loud enough for half the room to hear. He leaned over and placed his huge hand on Cam’s forearm. “Dr. Garnet didn’t impersonate a CDC official. I ordered him in.”

Cam jerked his arm free and retorted aloud, “You no longer had any authority over this case. Dr. Williams! I’m particularly appalled that you’d betray your fine reputation by aligning yourself with the garbage ideas...”

While he ranted I felt increasingly dismayed to see him so upset. He was visibly shaking, and under the glare of the fluorescent lights I could see particles of perspiration glistening in the pores below his blond hairline. What could be making him react like this? There was nothing so startling in his Infection Control Committee records that Janet hadn’t already told me. Perhaps it had been my going through the medical records of the Phantom’s first victims that had set him off? But why should he be so outraged about that?

Some people in the room were growing quiet again as his angry words once more started to attract attention. “Settle down, Cam!” I implored under my breath. As baffling as his behavior was, the last thing my credibility needed here was a public spat with the man.

But the sound of my voice made him worse. His blue eyes grew so dark that I feared for a second he might actually try and grab me. Instead, he again leaned close to my ear and warned, “If you think

I’m going to let you or Janet undermine University Hospital and harm me or my department by dragging up those old Phantom stories—”

“Cam!” I interjected again, determined to put an end to our scene. “Michael Popovitch was admitted last night in septic shock from what we presume is
Legionella.
Just before he went into respiratory arrest, he scribbled this.” I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out Michael’s cryptic note about the Phantom.

Cam frowned at the unfolded piece of paper as I held it before his eyes, took it out of my hand, then turned pale. “Oh my God,” he muttered.

“That’s why I went through those records. Cam,” I pressed as gently as I could. “I was trying to find what Michael saw.”

But he looked at me with such a blank expression on his face, I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me.

At that moment Rossit slammed down his gavel and brought the meeting to order.

Chapter 14

The people who’d been waiting outside found seats while some other latecomers tipped the large coffeemaker to try and dribble the final dregs into their styrofoam cups. Conversations throughout the room died down. A few more residents rushed in and found places where they could lean against the wall.