Extreme Measures (42 page)

“I take it, then, that every phantasmagoric thing you’ve been telling the press and the police is true.”

“Everything.”

“And the cocaine?”

“Do you know a straighter arrow about that stuff than I am?” Eric asked.

“But why would someone set you up like that?”

“That, my furry friend, is what I was hoping you might help me figure out.”

“Well, then, that being the case, my computer is at your disposal, along with my somewhat limited knowledge of its applications. But first, how about telling me what we’re looking for?”

Eric set the copies of Donald Devine’s ledger on the desk.

“Settle back, big fella,” he said. “This ain’t gonna be pretty.”

Starting from the day in February when he failed to resuscitate the man named John Doe, Eric took the biochemist step-by-step through his initial meeting with Laura, their encounters with Thaddeus Bushnell and Donald Devine, and finally to the tie-in with the horrible events surrounding the death of Loretta Leone. Subarsky listened thoughtfully and without comment. When Eric finished describing Laura’s break-in at the Gates of Heaven, and the conclusions suggested by Devine’s notes and the basement intensive-care room, Dave whistled softly through his teeth.

“You have gotten yourself into
some
shit, my man,” he said. “I will say that.”

“Laura’s in even deeper than I am. Some organized-crime types think she’s a threat to unearth this video showing them in a drug deal. Apparently her brother did the filming while he was undercover. Yesterday the bastards tried to run her down. They actually killed a guy in the process.”

“She doesn’t know anything about the video?”

“Nothing.”

“Like I said, you are really into some shit.…” Subarsky crumpled a sheet of paper and lofted it into the wastebasket ten feet away. “So,” he said, “where do you want to start?”

“Look at this list, Dave. If we can find WMH patients whose names correspond to these initials, we’ll have at least forged the link from Devine to the hospital.”

“And you think one of the three bigwigs on that search committee is part of this Caduceus thing, and whoever that is tried to recruit you and may be at the bottom of this whole business?”

Eric shrugged. “Maybe. At this point I’m only guessing.”

“Well, then, Don Quixote,” Subarsky said, booting up his terminal, “let’s have at it.”

Using the FILE-RITE password, Dave quickly worked his way into the main menu of the record-room computerized data system. As Eric had suspected, White Memorial had gone into electronic data in the most comprehensive way. The menu of available functions and maneuvers was exhaustive. Subarsky retrieved from his desk a manual describing in detail the hospital’s computer capabilities and codes.

“Here,” he said, handing the manual over, “you do the brain work; I’ll do the grunt work.”

Eric studied the screen, and then the book. “Type
RETRIEVE
,” he said.

With Eric issuing the commands, they moved
like mice in a maze from one menu to the next, into dead-end alleys and then back out again. Their goal, the reward waiting at the far side of the maze, was a list—a compilation of those patients seen in the emergency room on February 25, the first date noted beside the initials PT. Twenty minutes passed.

“We could always just call the record room and ask them what we’re doing wrong,” Subarsky said.

“Not unless we absolutely have to. I don’t know for sure if Caduceus is behind this, but if they are, there’s no telling who’s with them. And if someone from the record room just happens to be, and we alert them, we’ve lost everything.”

“Pardon me for saying so, laddie, but you’re startin’ to sound just a wee bit paranoid.”

Eric held up his bandaged wrists.

“Make that a whole bunch paranoid,” he said. “Please, Dave, just bear with me a little longer.”

“It’s your dime,” Subarsky said, polishing off a custard-filled doughnut in three bites. “It’s a good thing we spent all those late nights together locking horns over the laser, ’cause I can always fall back on those one or two times when you were actually right.”

“Try
SYNTHESIZE
again,” Eric offered.

“We’re just gonna end up the same place as last time.”

“No, I don’t think so, Dave. The command’s coming
after
the date this time. Just try it.”

Subarsky typed in the word and then hit the return key.

ALPHABETIZED OR SEQUENTIAL
? the screen asked.

“We’ve got it,” Eric cried. “We’re in!” He hunched over the biochemist’s broad shoulders. “Tell the beast to alphabetize our list.”

Seconds after the command was typed in, a list appeared, headed by the date
25 February
, and set in computer-perfect alphabetical order. The name
Trainor, Phillip
was on the list, along with his birthdate and hospital number.
Was he Scott Enders?

They scanned 27 February, the day of the actual resuscitation, but could not find a Phillip Trainor.

“Don’t worry,” Eric said. “He probably was entered as John Doe.”

He wrote the name
Phillip Trainor
next to the initials ET, and then had Dave call up an image of Trainor’s E.R. sheet.

“Near drowning, hypothermia, contusions … David, this was Laura’s brother. I just know it was. He was here two days before I pronounced him dead. Can you print that sheet?”

“Given half an hour, maybe.”

“Never mind,” Eric said excitedly. “I’ll take notes. We’re onto something, Dave. Just watch.”

Eric noted down all the information he could, and then began searching for the other initials on Devine’s list. In minutes, the pattern began to come clear. Over the past two-plus years, certain patients were seen in the White Memorial emergency room for problems varying from colds to broken bones. Within forty-eight hours those same patients were brought back to the hospital essentially dead on arrival.

Every one of them was signed out as acute heart failure secondary to myocardial infarction, and every one of them was transferred to the Gates of Heaven Funeral Home pending examination by the medical examiner. And in every case, that medical examiner was Thaddeus Bushnell.

“Why didn’t someone ever pick up on this?” Eric asked. “Sooner or later, a nurse or doctor—” He stopped in midsentence and began flipping rapidly through his notes.

“What is it, pal?” Subarsky asked.

“What it is, David,” Eric said grimly, “is the answer to my question. Look, look here. Except for the last three cases, Craig Worrell and Norma Cullinet were involved with every one. That’s Worrell as in W., and Cullinet as in C.—the abbreviations in Donald Devine’s record book. The reason Worrell wasn’t part
of the last three cases is that he got arrested and then disappeared.”

“I’m impressed,” Subarsky said. “I really am. But we still don’t have the answer to the sixty-four-dollar question. Why? What would anybody want with a bunch of corpses?”

“That’s the point. They weren’t corpses. They looked dead enough to get pronounced dead with no one raising an eyebrow, but—Dave, don’t you see? That’s the tie-in! That’s the goddam tie-in with everything!”

“What?”

Eric paced across the room and back.

“Can I take over there for a second?” he asked. “The EKG department records are totally computerized. We call up tracings all the time.”

“Help yourself,” Subarsky said, pushing himself up. “Listen, I’ve got a little experiment going on in the lab next door that I need to rerun with some new reagents. Give a holler if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll be back in ten or fifteen minutes. By then, I expect you to have all the answers for me.”

“David, keep all this between us, okay?”

“That goes without saying, my friend. Congratulations on unearthing all this.”

“Nice choice of words, Subarsky,” Eric said, summoning up an EKG. “Real nice.”

Subarsky lumbered off as the first tracing appeared on the screen. It was the EKG taken during the resuscitation of patient P.F.—a forty-eight-year-old woman Eric now felt certain was named Pamela Fitzgerald. The pattern was one Eric knew all too well: broad, slow complexes at the rate of six to eight per minute. Checks of two other cases showed the same.

Eric set the keyboard aside. On a sheet of paper he wrote the questions:

Beside the first, he wrote:

Beside the second:

And finally, by the third, he could write only a large question mark.

Sickened and frightened by what he was discovering, Eric wandered out into the corridor. Through the high plate-glass windows, he could see the ambulance parking area far below and the entrance to the emergency room. Everywhere, it seemed, business was as usual. Patients and nurses, uniformed EMTs, and white-coated physicians bustled in and out of the buildings, proud or relieved to be associated with the hospital considered by many to be the world’s best.

And no place was there even a hint of the terror their august institution had spawned.

Eric felt unsettled and anxious about what lay ahead—about the possibility of making a mistake that would alert the wrong people too soon. Timing was everything—timing and an airtight case. His credibility, for the moment, was all but destroyed in everyone’s eyes except, he hoped, Dave Subarsky’s. If Caduceus realized how far he had come, there was no telling what countermeasures they would take.

Already they had seen to the removal of Loretta Leone’s body and tissue samples. That move in itself
spoke of resourcefulness and power, just as surely as the deaths of Thaddeus Bushnell and Donald Devine spoke of the lack of moral boundaries. The worst thing he could do would be to tip his hand too soon. Records could be removed as easily as had Leone’s specimens. People could be bought off or silenced altogether. Incriminating evidence could be planted. And of course, he and Laura could simply disappear.

“Give up?”

Dave Subarsky moved in beside Eric and stared down at the E.R. lot.

“Hardly. I’m just deciding where to head next.”

“And?”

“The nurse I kept mentioning, Norma Cullinet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s a patient on the neurosurgical service. She fell and fractured her skull.”

“So?”

“So, I don’t know what shape she’s in, but I think I’m going to try and talk with her.”

“Neurosurgery, huh? Well, I hope she’s better off than most of the neurosurgical patients
I’ve
seen. Most of those you couldn’t communicate with at all unless you had an English-Vegetable dictionary.”

“Not true and not funny,” Eric said.

“Sorry. You know me—nothing’s sacred.”

“I know. Sorry for snapping. It’s just that this stuff is so damn ugly, I can’t handle any sicko humor right now, even yours.”

“I understand,” Subarsky said. “Sometimes my mouth just has a mind of its own. Well, listen, pal, I’ve got a slew of errands to run in town. Let me shut off my terminal and I’ll walk you down.”

The two of them were headed down the stairway toward the tunnels when Eric looked back at Subarsky.

“I appreciate your help this morning, David,” he said. “Now I want you as far away from all this as possible, okay?”

“Sure.”

“I mean it. I don’t want to be the cause of anyone’s getting hurt, especially a friend.”

“Okay, but you know I’m here if you need me.”

Eric hesitated, and then stopped and handed over the Xerox ledger sheets and his notes.

“David, if anything happens to me, I hope you’ll try to break this thing open,” he said.

“Nothing’s gonna happen, but if it does, you can count on me doing just that.”

“Thanks,” Eric said. “Thanks for everything.”

Once in the basement, the two men shook hands and headed in opposite directions.

Five floors above, in Dave Subarsky’s office, the telephone was ringing. It rang more than a dozen times before it stopped.