Stuffed-face grins broke out as David and Jill approached. “Fresh!” Ramu held up the bagels. “I ran to the bakery.”
“Don’t you guys ever eat real breakfasts?” David flipped through patient charts, put them back in the chart rack, and gave it a shove. The interns followed, Ramu bitching in his lilting British accent about runny scrambled eggs and dreadful coffee, Ortega extolling twenty minutes’ extra sleep and having cold pizza in your room. The two had a tendency to yak simultaneously.
Tricia dropped back to tell Jill she’d had a snakes nightmare, and Jill described her getting burned at the stake dream. Both groaned and hugged each other as Gary Phipps, up front, told David about a breech he’d helped Sam and George Mackey deliver during the night. “Talk about ass backwards!” he said. “And this kid was big!”
The night had been slow, with just four new babies born. Healthy babies and healthy moms, who still had to be visited and checked. Outside the first patient’s room, David stopped for a moment and looked up at the ceiling.
“What?” Phipps asked, peering up too. “Falling ceiling tiles?”
Jill edged closer. David glanced at her and said, “I’d really like to go up to see Jenna Walsh first.”
Ortega winced. “Oh jeez, the snake.”
Jill said, “The neurosurgery bunch must be with her now.”
David nodded. “Two rounds groups is a crowd. I want to check her incision, make sure there’s no infection.”
“We’ll go after this.”
“Yeah.”
Chart in hand, David led the way into the first patient’s room where he greeted new mom Kim Withers. Asked her how she felt. Did the physical, checked the pulse and blood pressure, and felt the belly to make sure the uterus was contracting on schedule. It wasn’t.
“So?” he asked the interns. “What do we do about that?”
“Ergotrate intramuscular,” chorused five voices.
“Oh, such smart interns I have,” David said, smiling at Withers, writing an order for the nurse and clamping it to the outside of the chart.
“Stat,” Tricia and Charlie said simultaneously. David grinned. “Already done,” he said, red-flagging the note with a red stickie.
Kim Withers had turned down the sound of her TV when they entered. It still burbled.
Suddenly: “Oh look!” Her eyes darted from David to Jill and back to the TV. “Omigod, you’re them!” She turned the sound up.
Tired gazes went to the TV. The same footage as yesterday. Last July, Jill and David somberly approaching the hospital after three days off to recover from the roof trauma. Then footage of the smiling nurse holding “the miracle baby, who our sources say staff for now have been calling Jesse…”
Withers fluffed her hair and got emotional. “Jesse! I love that name!”
Ramu turned the TV sound back down, but Withers didn’t notice. Was emoting higher-voiced about how tough her pregnancy had been.
“Morning sickness when I had to be in court, I almost threw up on a client, and the delivery -omigod, the pain...and I’d like to have another child. Uhh…”
They must have all realized what was coming.
“Would it be possible for me to have my next baby that way?” She pointed to the TV, now soundless, showing yesterday’s Willard Simpson, Bill Rosenberg, and the other white coats before mikes trying to answer reporters’ questions.
David shrugged. Repeated what he remembered Rosenberg saying.
“We really don’t know how this was done. The hospital’s studying the notes of the deceased doctor who did this-”
“Arnett!” Withers said. “Clifford Arnett. I’ve so been following this.”
“Right. His notes are incomplete.”
The interns shifted impatiently.
Withers got impatient too. “Well, if it was done once…how long before they figure out how to do it again? Science, right? Who ever thought we’d have people walking on the moon? Scooping soil samples from Mars? Surely you can…”
As gracefully as possible, David got them out of there. Time was important; diversions from teaching the interns had to be ducked.
The second patient didn’t ask, but the third one did. “Just wondering, that’s all,” she said defensively. “I mean, I loved my pregnancy, feeling my baby grow and move inside me, but that delivery was hell, and it’s just kinda fascinating that now there’s a choice.”
“Not in the near future,” David said. “Now about your stitches…”
When they left the fourth patient’s room, he called and got a nurse on seventh floor surgery. Yes, she said, neurosurgery interns and residents were with Jenna. He asked her to check Jenna’s night chart. She came back to the phone to report that Jenna’s vital signs were okay, ditto her abdominal incision, and there was no sign of infection or vaginal bleeding.
“They’re concerned about her neuro signs, though.”
“The Babinski?”
“Right foot not reacting. No response.”
“Pupillary assessment?”
“Both pupils sluggish response to light.”
He hung up and looked grimly at his interns, who’d been listening grimly.
“So sad,” Tricia said softly. Ortega stared sorrowfully at David’s phone.
Which rang again in his hand.
It was Hutch, sounding upset.
16
“Security called me,” Hutch said, huffing. “Seven snakes were just caught in the chapel.” He gulped air. “Seven. One of the security guards got so freaked trying to catch ‘em he shot one.”
David stared at the hall floor. Phipps’ Nike laces were untied. Ramu’s socks were red. He looked up to Jill’s eyes, worried, questioning.
And blinked at her, hearing Hutch.
“…in a paper bag, which also held yesterday’s newspaper photo of the nurse holding Jesse. That’s a clear threat. No more guesswork after this, huh?”
“No.”
“Security has extra guys watching Neonatal, but they had a couple last July and a killer got in there anyway. Parents – strangers - come to visit the babies. They’re in patient rooms, crowding the nursery view glass. How the hell do you know who’s who?”
“Hutch? How’s your blood pressure?”
“Bad. I just took it. Gotta lose weight.”
“Try to calm.” David spoke in the softest voice imaginable.
“The snakes are in the Security office waiting for Animal Control or detectives, or both. God help us!”
Hutch stammered a bit more and hung up.
David scanned the interns’ faces. Only Jill knew a frantic call from Hutch meant something bad. Her face was taut. The others didn’t know, but their expressions mirrored David’s.
Which wasn’t good. One of the first things you learn in med school is, if you have a problem and emote - you have two problems.
David pocketed his phone and got out his clipboard. “Okay, we’re done,” he said a bit tightly. “What’s the schedule? Hey, two of you are needed in the clinic.”
The mood changed instantly. They started bickering about trading clinic duties.
“Somebody take mine, please?” Gary Phipps whined. “I was up all night.”
“I was too,” Charlie said. “Can I nap right here on the floor? I’ll just lie down-”
“Find a gurney,” David said. “Okay Jill, Tricia, you do clinic duty.”
Tricia said fine. But Jill shook her head.
She turned to Ramu. “Switch with me?”
“Sure,” he said. “I owe you a couple.”
Seconds later she was following David through the heavy fire door to the stairwell - which already meant trouble. The elevators were slow.
“What did Hutch say?” She tried to keep up as he thundered down the stairs. “Where are you going and why’d you try to stick me in the clinic?”
“’Cause I know what scares you,” he said, rounding a landing.
Jill stopped. Only one thing scared her, terrified her, and David k
new what it was.
“Hutch…more snakes?” she gasped. “Please don’t say it’s-”
“’Fraid so.” David pounded down, barely turning as he told her about the chapel.
Breath stopped. Made it harder to catch up, to speak. “That’s the third…snake event.” Jill’s heart hammered. “The anatomy lab, attacking Jenna, and now, my God, psycho’s been in the hospital.”
“On the first floor. Chapel’s just off the lobby.”
“I’m aware of that! So what’s to prevent him sneaking up the stairs? Riding up the elevator like any visitor?”
“Nothing.” Their voices echoed in the stairwell.
“Any creep with a good haircut can walk right past the security guys - oh!” Jill stumbled on a step. Righted herself. Called down over the railing, “Do they have surveillance in the chapel?”
David was now two flights below. “Probably. Ha - what’re the odds Snake Guy wore a disguise?”
“But…evidence? Maybe he left prints or fibers or-”
“Hutch says the cops can so far only treat it as vandalism.”
David reached the first floor. Whammed open the fire door and held it for Jill to catch up.
“C’mon, slow poke.”
“Shaddup. What can you do anyway?”
“You’ll see.”
They hurried through halls and more halls and then down a ramp into an older part of the hospital.
Security personnel wore gray uniforms but looked like cops. Many of them were former cops, in what looked like a squad room but with a wide bank of monitor screens at the rear. Three uniformed men and a woman watched the monitor screens. Jill and David moved past busy desks to the office at the end of a hall, where Mike Sivak, the hospital’s Chief of Security, rose to greet them.
“Three months of quiet and now another nut job,” he said with a grimace. He was in his late forties, muscular and barrel-chested.
“Any Jesse excitement brings them out of the woodwork,” David said; and Jill, looking back from the doorway, said, “You’ve got more monitors.”
“Not enough.” An impatient gesture. “We’re expecting more. It’s slow, nothing gets done fast enough.” Sivak motioned them over to a large, open cardboard box a few feet from his desk.
Jill peeked in, and jerked back cringing. Black snakes writhed and slithered, some trying to climb up the box’s sides, and flopping back. A shallow bowl of water was surrounded by bits of lettuce and bacon and what looked like broken up cheeseburgers.
“We ordered out for ‘em,” Sivak said drily. “The cops said hold off giving them to Animal Control until they decide if they’re evidence.”
“Of something worse than vandalism?” David asked.
“Yeah. The vandalism thing was just from the responding uniforms. Detectives are en route, said it looks connected to that attack on the Walsh woman. Doctor Hutchins filled me in on the anatomy lab snake when it happened.” Sivak grimaced. “Seven heads … I’ve heard of that. It’s from the Bible, right? Hey! Get back down, mister!”
He reached bare-handed and popped back down a snake who had reached the top of the carton. Jill cringed further back, and sank unsteadily into a chair. Sivak shot her a look and grinned thinly. David almost smiled too.
“Garter snakes,” Sivak told her. “They’re harmless. I used to play with ‘em.” He hesitated, looked at David. “Oh damn, I should have used gloves. Those snakes might have prints on them.”
“Nah,” David said. “More likely the guy wore gloves.” He was glancing around the office.
In her chair Jill made an overdramatic shiver-shudder. ““I haaate snakes. Yech! Why did it have to be snakes?”
David looked from a cabinet back to Sivak. “Carl Hutchins said one of them was shot?”
“Oh, yeah, our Miguel was trying to chase ‘em and went nuts. Tough guy with people but also hates snakes. Feel better?” Another friendly glance to Jill, then Sivak went to a shelf and held up a big Ziplock bulging with … snake. Dead, black, coiled and bloodied.
“Miguel blew his head off, poor thing. The snake, I mean. Miguel’s out in front there, still recovering.”
Sivak leaned to his door, still holding the Ziploc. “Hey Miguel, feeling better? No more culebras!”
Raucous laughter and one protesting male voice answered.
Sivak turned back. David was eyeing the Ziploc.
“The cops won’t need all the snakes, will they?” he asked. “I’d like to take that dead one.”
Sivak frowned a little, unsure.
“Same guy, they must all be from the same source,” David pressed. “The cops’ll have the six in the box to examine.”
Sivak shrugged, and gave him the stuffed Ziploc. “Sure. If they want ‘em all, I’ll tell them you have the seventh. What are you going to do with it?”
David said autopsy it, holding up the bloody bag for a closer look.
Jill squirmed and grimaced at the bag. “Argh, I don’t even want to look at that!”
The two men traded looks. Sivak fished a big McDonald’s bag out of the wastebasket, and they stuffed the Ziploc into it.
“Want a napkin?” Sivak asked. “Lemon-scented hand wipes?”
17
Their cell phones didn’t buzz and they didn’t get called in the dash up to Peter Gregson, in Pathology on the ninth floor. David had called him from the elevator.
“You just caught me,” Peter said near the lab door, lightly hugging Jill and greeting David. “With you two, I know it’s never going to be boring.”
Gregson was the pathology resident who had taught Jill how to grow out a tissue culture to further examine a cadaver’s cause of death. Now, bitching about examining boring benign skin moles and leading the way past counters and microscopes and residents working separately, he stopped at his workstation and looked back.
“An autopsy of what?” he asked. “Did I hear wrong?”
“Nope,” David said, pulling the bulging Ziploc from the McDonald’s bag. Watery, bloody liquid sloshed at the bottom.
Jill sank down onto a stool. Stared into Gregson’s open slide box, her mind still seeing all that writhing and slithering in Sivak’s box. She shuddered again.
“Ignore the gunshot,” she heard David say. “What else can you tell us about this snake? Like, where’d it come from, if possible.”
“Tall order. They’re common.” Gregson took the Ziploc and peered in. “This from that chapel fright scene?” he asked somberly.
“Yep.” David crossed his arms.
“It’s already on cable and online, and the whole hospital’s talking about it like it’s connected to the Walsh case.”
“Ya think?”
Jill made a face at the Ziploc. “This one missed out on a Big Mac. Security ordered out for the others.”
For a second Gregson thought that was funny. David didn’t and pulled up a stool next to him. “So the Walsh attack and the chapel snakes – yeah, this has to be the same whacko. Which means the snakes are likely from the same source.”
Peter looked somber again. “How’s the Walsh patient doing?”
“Not well.”
A sad headshake. “Hey, I’m happy to help with this.”
Peter propped the Ziploc against a flask on the counter next to Jill. It was open, starting to smell. She rolled her stool further away. Fought nausea watching him push aside glassware, tug on latex gloves, and haul his microscope closer.
He screwed up his face. “They should have refrigerated this guy. The soft tissue’s already starting to liquefy.” He opened the Ziploc wider, and dipped a pipette to the red ooze below the black coils. From the pipette he placed a drop of snake squish onto a fresh slide, and pushed the slide below his microscope.
“Wow,” he said, looking in. “Teeming.”
David picked up the still-bulging Ziploc and closed it carefully. “So refrigerate it now?”
“Oh! Yeah, right.” Excited, not looking up.
David opened a little fridge
on the shelf above Peter’s microscope and shoved in the Ziploc. Next to a sandwich.
Jill didn’t see that. She found herself suddenly fixed on Gregson, peering down into another world at only one hundred times magnification, and already fascinated. He was muttering, “Next I’ll dissect its organs, soft tissue. Use the microtome to cut some really thin slices, then stain them with-”
David’s cell phone buzzed.
He answered, listened, muttered questions.
“We gotta jet,” he told Jill, hanging up. “Two women in labor just came in.”
They thanked Gregson, who thanked them for the chance to help. “Hope they catch this sonofabitch,” he said.
“They?” David echoed. “For the snakes, you’re it. The problem is, despite the seeming tie-in the cops may have to consider the chapel just vandalism, and Walsh just” – he hated air quotes but grimaced and made them – “an assault. Only homicide scrambles their jets.”
“Meanwhile,” Jill said intently, “the baby and the hospital have been threatened.” Adrenalin surged back. “The bag those snakes were left in also contained a photo of Jesse, the one with the nurse holding him. We’re worried. I’m frantic.”
Peter shook his head gravely. Who didn’t remember last July?
“Fingers crossed I come up with something,” he said. “I’m on it if I have to work all night.”
Bullet holes in the chapel wall, and snakes, writhing…and the SPAWN OF THE DEVIL sign. Jill couldn’t push the images from her mind. The creep had been here, was taunting, would be back…
She and some of the others stood before the OB nurses’ desk as David fast-skimmed new Admissions Forms. Her mind whirled. The images collided in her head like frightened birds unwilling to settle.
A ruptured ectopic pregnancy - a serious emergency – had just been brought in. Added to the two women in labor, suddenly everyone available was needed.
“Can I help with the ectopic?” Ortega asked. “I’ve never seen one.”
David’s face was tight. “Wait. I need two of you for the first delivery, and two for the second. First one looks routine but is further along. Lemme see…” He was scrolling his schedule. “Trish and Ramu are where?”
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