"He thinks I'm crazy," she whispered to the empty apartment. But she'd been so certain, so damn sure that Duncan had stuck an implant into Senator Marsden. She'd seen it lying on his desk just before the surgery. Why else would it have been there?
Unless . . .
Unless Duncan had been setting her up.
But how? He had no inkling of what she knew. She'd relocked his desk drawer, erased the FDA download from the computer. She'd left no trail.
No reason in the world for Duncan to suspect she had the vaguest due.
So why would he set her up?
Maybe he had'ntr. Maybe he'd tried to jab an implant into the senator's thigh but didn't have time to complete the job, leaving a skin wound but no implant.
And maybe he wasn't up to what she thought he was. Maybe she'd misinterpreted everything.
Was that possible? Could she have been that far off the mark?
And poor Gerry. He'd stuck his neck out on account of what she'd told him. Sounded as if he'd been damn near decapitated as a result. He had a right to be hurt and angry.
But so do I, dammit.
She wandered over to the kitchenette and saw the heads of broccoli sitting on the counter, waiting to be sliced up into flowerets. Enough for three or four. And she wasn't the least bit hungry.
I've really screwed things up, haven't I, she thought as she returned to the bay window and curled up on the seat.
The streetlights were on. She stared down at the passing singles and couples. She felt utterly alone, but she wasn't going to cry.
Gerry sat in his easy chair with Martha on his lap. He had his arms around her, holding her close and warm against him in her OshKosh corduroys while she read him a story. It was the Martha Canney variation of Madeline. She couldn't read just yet, but she'd heard the story so many times that she knew it almost word for word.
So did Gerry. So his mind drifted. It would have drifted no matter what Martha was reading. What a godawful, rotten day. If only . . .
Yeah. If only. He must have had a million if-onlys since this morning when the Mr I report had come back negative.
Damn! If only he hadn't rushed it, taken a little more time to check things out. But dammit, they couldn't take too much time Marsden was supposedly in danger.
Supposedly . . .
He'd bought into Gin's scenario completely. If only he'd been a little more skeptical.
He winced as he remembered the excruciating moment when he'd had to call Ketter and tell him that they'd come up empty-handed. The little operation that was to make them a couple of fair-haired. boys had left them the big jokes of the Bureau. And then Cavanaugh, one of the assistant directors, had called them into his office and dressed them down but good. Gerry couldn't remember ever feeling so embarrassed and humiliated. He'd wanted to crawl under a rock.
But the worst of it was that lost amid all the reprimands was the fact that the operation Gerry had designed and managed had gone off like clockwork. Everything as planned, on time and under budget. Marsden's car had been hit without damage to him, he'd been whisked off to the hospital, examined, and delivered back to. his office without the slightest hint that it had all been arranged.
At least the Bureau itself had been spared any public embarrassment.
Thank God for that.
But no one would remember his well-oiled operation. Only that there'd been no poison pill in the senator's leg, and that Gerry Canney had to be the most gullible agent in the Bureau.
But what hurt most was knowing that any hopes he'd had of moving up to SSA soon had been dashed but good.
He held Martha closer.
Looks like it's business as usual, kid, he thought glumly.
Catch-as-catch-can fatherhood for the foreseeable future.
"Daddy, you're squeezing too tight!"
"Sorry, honey. What happens to Madeline next?"
"She has her operation."
"Tell me all about it." His mind drifted again. What about Gin?
What was going on inside her?
Where had she come up with that wild fantasy? From me, dammit. At least initially. But she'd pushed it a few steps further . . .
Marsden . . . that triethyl whatever-it-was . . . and he'd bought into it on the strength of her conviction, on the basis of his faith in her . . .
Looking back, knowing now that it had been the proverbial wild-goose chase, he couldn't believe he'd got sucked in like that. But thinking about it, he guessed he had been primed to believe anything shady about the uppity Dr. Lathram.
He wished today had never happened.
Gerry suppressed a growl as he closed his eyes. He knew he was feeling sorry for himself. He hated self-pity. Tomorrow was a new day. He'd suck this mess in, chew it up, spit it out, and get back on the job.
But tonight . . . tonight he was feeling pretty goddamn low.
His thoughts ran to Gin again. He'd been pretty rough on her. Hadn't meant to be, but the bitterness was like a pressure, he'd had to blow off at least some of it. Couldn'r on Ketter, who'd backed him a hundred percent, and certainly not on Martha.
That left Gin.
Maybe she needed some help. She certainly hadn't been fully connected to reality imagining that implant in Marsden.
Gin . . . he felt a need for her but didn't want to be in the same room with her. At least not tonight. Maybe he'd get past this and maybe not. Where did they go from here? The fallout from today could poison their relationship.
He shifted in the chair. Enough wallowing. He had someone very real and very important sitting on his lap. Time to focus on Martha, and on the problem of Madeline's tummy ache.
But a vision of Gin sitting alone in her apartment came to him. He wondered if she had anyone to turn to tonight. He wondered if she knew someone was thinking about her.
Duncan sat before MaeNeil/Lehrer, sipping a scotch and soda, barely listening. He was envisioning Gin. His earlier anger was gone and now he was wondering what slue was thinking.
Poor girl. Probably couldn't figure up from down at the moment.
Probably questioning her sanity.
He sighed. He wished he could feel good about hoodwinking the poor thing, but frankly, it hadn't taken much. He'd been all primed for her yesterday morning. He'd had the TPD, the trocar, and a saline-filled implant sitting on his desk where she could see them. He'd dosed her coffee with twenty milligrams of Lasix. The diuretic had achieved the desired effect, she'd had to leave Marsden's side for a trip to the john. And while she was gone he'd ducked in and given Marsden a quick jab with the tip of the trocar. After that it was simply a matter of waiting.
All to see what she knew. Obviously she suspected something, but how much?
Now he knew.
Gin knew everything. Or at least enough to go to her fellow in the FBI and convince him to save her dear senator from the wicked Dr. Lathram.
The call from the hospital that the FBI was involved had come as a mind-numbing shock.
He sipped his scotch. But he was better now. Everything was under control again.
But poor Gin. She must have been so sure.
And right now she probably wasn't sure of anything at all, except that the FBI considered her an unreliable source.
He'd neutralized her without harming a hair on her head.
Pretty slick.
So now she had to put this behind her. Write it off as a bad dream and let things return to normal. If he were smart he'd find an excuse to fire her. Play it safe and get her off the premises.
But he couldn't do that. He still remembered that skinny, raven-haired little girl with the huge brown eyes, wide with fright, asking him if she was going to die, and later his hands inside her abdomen, her blood pooling around his wrists as he fought to find the bleeders and mend her damaged arteries. As much as he hated to admit it, he missed those days. He missed the adrenaline rush of the emergencies, opening up a patient and searching for the leak, racing against the falling blood pressure, the falling he
matocrit, the impending cardiovascular collapse and shock.
Or rushing to tie off a bulging abdominal aneurysm before it blew and splashed red against the ceiling. He missed saving lives.
But McCready, Ailard, Lane, Schulz, Vincent, and the rest of them had made that impossible.
He rubbed his eyes as bitter memories rushed in. . . memories of poor Lisa . . .
Lisa Lathram . . . a euphonious name, such an up sound to it. And yet Lisa herself . . .
He remembered her as such a happy child, could still hear her dulcet laugh, see her bright eyes, her effulgent smile, Lord, that smile . . .
Lisa was always smiling, accepting everyone and everything, hugs and kisses all around.
When Brad came along, Duncan loved him equally, but as a son. There was a difference there.
Lisa remained the light of his life. At times he was sure Diana was jealous of their relationship. When he arrived home from the hospital or the office, Lisa was the first one he looked for, and she always came running when she heard his voice. How he cosseted her. Whatever she wanted, whatever she needed, a piano to play, a horse to ride, a balance beam for gymnastics practice, was hers for the asking.
But the halcyon days of her childhood evanesced as puberty took hold, and Duncan came to understand firsthand the origin of the changeling myth. As her body changed, so did Lisa's personality. At first he and Diana chalked up the moodiness to the new hormones pulsing through her.
After all, what was there to be grumpy about? With her flowing blond hair and lissom figure, she was only getting prettier.
He and Diana kept hoping their adolescent age would snap out of it, but after a while it became clear that more than hormones were at work here. She lost interest in her friends, her piano playing, her horse.
The downs kept getting deeper and longer, and there never seemed to be any real ups, only not-so-downs.
And then she swallowed half a bottle of her mother's Dalmane and had to have her stomach pumped. She was diagnosed with severe endogenous depression and the endless rounds of antidepressants and outpatient therapy began.
Nothing worked for very long. And then came that terrible night she locked herself in her room and screamed with pain. Duncan kicked the door down and found her sitting in the middle of her bed bleeding from a slit wrist.
They hospitalized her for a month after that, and tried something new called Prozac. Lisa responded beautifully. In her case it was truly a miracle drug.
Duncan still remembered the day he came home from the hospital to find Diana standing in the foyer sobbing. Immediately his heart plummeted, expecting the worst And then he heard it, floating in from the living room, the sound of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 21. Lisa was playing again.
He and Diana fell into each other's arms and wept.
Even now his eyes clouded at the memory.
After that, as Lisa brightened, so did their lives. Duncan hadn't realized how his daughter's problems had tainted their entire family life. But now that she was getting back to normal, the days seemed brighter, his own step lighter. Laughter again around the dinner table as Lisa began riding her horse and hanging out with some of her old friends. Her grades turned around and she began dating Kenny O’Boyle.
They dated for months, and Kenny became the sole topic of Lisa's conversation. She and Diana would have long mother-daughter talks about him, and Diana told Duncan she was worried that Lisa might be getting too involved. She'd just turned eighteen, true, but she'd missed a lot of growing up in those black years.
Duncan wasn't crazy about Kenny. He seemed a shifty, inarticulate dolt, but then Duncan was naturally leery about any male sniffing around his daughter. Lisa adored him. And Lisa was happy. Happy for the first time in years. So Duncan decided to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut.
And then the McCready committee reared its ugly head. He remembered the morning five years ago when it all began, in the doctors lounge at Fairfax Hospital, somebody showing him the article on the front page of the Post. He'd just come off two scheduled procedures, an abdominal aneurysm graft and a carotid endarterectomy, all after rushing in at 3:00 A. M. to close a torn femoral artery on a motorcyclist, "donorcyclist," as the E.R staff called them. He was tired. But not too tired to be furious at Senator Vincent's public condemnation of his million-dollar charge to Medicare the year before.
Every time he turned around some baseball player or basketball dribbler was signing a contract for five or six million dollars a year. How many lives did they save in a year? Barbra Streisand can get twenty million for two nights of warbling, but you, Duncan Lathram, you money grubbing bloodsucker, you charge too goddamn much.
He'd wished he had some legal recourse, but how the hell did you sue a congressional committee? And what would he accomplish but call even more unwanted attention to himself?
What did it matter? he remembered thinking. The whole brouhaha would blow over in a couple of days.
But he was wrong.
His auto-da-fe' at the hands of the Guidelines committee continued with unflagging zeal. Apparently the members thought they'd found a particularly tasty bone in Duncan Lathram and wanted to keep gnawing away at him. Then the Alexandria Banner picked up the story, followed by a patient's rights group demanding an investigation, so the State Board of Medical Examiners got involved, and soon Medicare had a team of pettifogging auditors formicating through his office records, pawing through his files, and swarming in the hospital records room, sifting his charts for pecuniary indiscretions. To hell with patient confidentiality. Those weasel-faced bureaucrats would know all the secrets of everyone he'd operated on in the past few years. But what did that matter? Spurred by the Guidelines committee, the government had declared jihad on Duncan Lathram.
Duncan was angry and embarrassed, but not too worried. His medical records were impeccable, and he'd match his morbidity and mortality stats against anyone in the country. Let them investigate. He'd come up smelling like a rose.
He just wished they'd hurry and get the whole mess over and done with.
But it dragged on, and in the ensuing months Duncan began to notice a hint of coolness from some of his colleagues at the hospital. He was getting fewer requests for surgical consults. He understood their predicament, worrying about guilt by association. They were waiting till things cooled down.
Still, he was in for a nasty shock one day as he began one of the surgical consultation requests he did receive. When he entered the patient's hospital room and introduced himself, the patient bolted upright in bed. Duncan still remembered his words.
"Oh, no. Forget it. No way I'm gonna be operated on by some knife-happy, money-grubbing quack!" Duncan was mortified, angry enough to punch a hole in the wall. And dammit, hurt. He consoled himself that most likely he had just experienced the nadir of the whole affair.
It couldn't get any worse.
The only way he could go from there was up.
Again, he was wrong.
Because all the bad press was having a devastating effect at home.
Duncan Lathram, MD, was the talk of the town . . . including the high school.
And so in retrospect it seemed inevitable that he would come home one night to find Lisa sobbing in her mother's arms. She and Kenny had had a fight and broken up. The cause of the fight? What the kids were saying about Lisa's father, saying to Kenny behind Lisa's back.
Kenny's parting shot? "Forget the prom! Forget everything! I ain't going anywhere with the daughter of no crook!" Devastating for any teenager, but to Lisa it seemed like the end of the world.
Barely able to speak through her sobs, she wanted to know why her father hadn't said anything, why he hadn't come out and defended himself.
Duncan remembered the scene as if it had occurred only a moment ago.
He knelt before his daughter and gripped her hands. "Honey, these are lies from spotlight-hunting buffoons. The way these things work, the louder I proclaim my innocence, the guiltier I look."
; "But you haven't said anything!"
"I'm letting my records do the talking. I've got nothing to hide, Lisa. When the bureaucrats finish their investigation, I'll be vindicated. And they'll be the fools."
"But meanwhile they're making you look like a crook! And making everybody hate me! And you don't care!"
"Of course I care." He realized then that he'd misread the whole situation. He'd treated it as a brief but unpleasant interlude, another in a long series of fleeting Capitol Hill cacophomes that would die down as soon as Congress, in tune with its well-earned reputation for a short attention span, moved on to the next hot topic.
So he'd done nothing to counter the accusations leveled. That had been a mistake.
Another mistake was thinking it would involve only his practice. He should have seen that his professional obloquy would have a ripple effect on his private life as well. He'd always separated the practice and the family, but there was no way of insulating the latter from the ravages upon the former, not with an assault of this magnitude.
He hurt for Lisa.
"But what could I have done, Lisa? What can I do to make this better?"
"I don't know, something. You could plea bargain or whatever they call it. Something, anything to make them shut up and get off our backs."
"Plea bargain?" He was stunned. "You don't plea bargain when you're innocent." Lisa tore her hands from his and ran upstairs, screaming, "Thanks! Thanks for nothing! My life is over! And all because of you! I might as well have AIDS! " Diana followed her, glaring back at him. "She's right, you know. You could have done something!" This was vintage Lisa, always taking everything too hard, seeing everything in the worst light. With her history, though, that kind of outburst could not be laid off to hyperbole and histrionics.
They increased her therapy sessions and kept an eye on her day and night. But a week later, when it became clear, at least to Lisa, that she and Kenny were through for good, she dug out a hoard of old pills she had squirreled away over the years, a potentially lethal combination of antidepressants like Elavil, Parnate, Desyrel, Sinequan, Norpramin, Tofranil, Nardil, and lithium, and took them all.
F Paul Wilson - Novel 02 Page 24
