“Yes, yes,” Matt said, a bit impatiently, “that was me. Thank you for remembering. But that’s ancient history now.”
“Remembering what?” Sarah asked.
“Nine pitches, nine strikes, three outs, ball game over,” Blankenship went on. “One of the greatest short relief performances ever. I thought the name sounded familiar when I first heard it.”
“I’m sure the ‘Matt’ part threw you off,” Daniels said more kindly. “Not many remember that I actually had a real first name.”
“Hey, do I get clued in here? I am the defendant.”
“I’m afraid I’m in the dark, too,” Paris chimed in.
“Black Cat Daniels,” Blankenship explained. “Ten years as a relief pitcher for the Red Sox.”
“Actually twelve,” Daniels said. “Now, if you all wouldn’t mind getting back to the business at—”
“Why Black Cat?” Paris asked.
Daniels sighed.
“Dr. Baldwin—Sarah—I’m really sorry about this,” he said. “I would imagine that what you’re going through is not pleasant, and is probably more than a little scary for you. Having to sit there while my qualifications get called into question, and now all this baseball talk, certainly can’t be helping.”
“I’m fine, actually,” Sarah said. “Besides, I want to know, too.”
“Okay. Mr. Paris, my nickname came from my having a fair number of superstitions back when I played the game.”
“Always stepped on first base coming into a game,” Blankenship said. “Never sat down in the bullpen. Never pitched without a piece of red ribbon tied around his belt.”
“Blue,” Matt corrected. “You know your baseball.”
“Yes, of course, it was blue. Are you still like that? Superstitious, I mean.”
“I—um—still have an interest in ritual and luck if that’s what you’re asking. But trust me, Dr. Blankenship, it doesn’t get in the way. When I’m in the courtroom, I keep that ribbon tied on my belt in the back where my suit coat hides it. Now, I think maybe we ought to get down to business. As Mr. Paris so eloquently put it, we have a lot at stake here. And unfortunately, it seems that our esteemed adversary has gotten a bit of a jump on us.”
“What do you mean?” Paris asked.
Daniels took some notes from his briefcase. “Sarah, the man who provides you with your herbs and roots, his name is Mr. Kwong?”
“That’s right. Kwong Tian-Wen.”
“Well, this afternoon Mr. Mallon obtained an ex parte discovery order to seal off Mr. Kwong’s shop. At eight tomorrow morning he’ll be there with a chemist, someone from the sheriff’s office, and God only knows who else. He plans to get samples from the place and follow chain-of-evidence procedures to have those samples analyzed.”
“Can’t you do something about that?” Paris asked.
“I’ll defer to Mr. Hayden to answer that question, sir.”
“Not at this point, Glenn,” Hayden said. “It’s just a case of being outmaneuvered. Dr. Baldwin, do you have any idea how Mallon could have gotten the name of this man so quickly?”
“A couple of possibilities come to mind,” she said.
“And?” Paris asked.
“I think I ought to do some checking before throwing out any names. Besides, I have implicit faith in Mr. Kwong. He is one of the very best at what he does. The sooner Mallon gets this thing done, the sooner he’ll learn that he doesn’t have a case.”
“I think someone from the hospital should be there,” Daniels said. “We’ll be meeting tomorrow morning at this address.” He slid the court order over to Hayden.
“Can’t do it,” the lawyer said. “I’ll be in court.”
“Eli, how about you?” Paris asked. “You’d be a perfect representative.”
“I think I can be there,” Blankenship said.
“Perfect. Extra dessert for you, Eli. We must hope Sarah is right about all this, Daniels. But do you see what we mean about Mallon? He has handled dozens—probably hundreds—of malpractice cases. He’s got a huge staff, and he won’t leave any stone unturned.”
“He doesn’t seem like someone you can just hook and reel in,” Daniels acknowledged. “I’ll give you that.”
“Perhaps,” Hayden offered, “you can involve your partners in this case. Do either Mr. Hannigan or Mr. Goldstein have any expertise in this arena?”
Damn, Sarah thought. Are they ever going to let up?
“Actually,” Daniels said, “I’m glad you mentioned that.”
“Then they do have some malpractice experience,” Hayden said. “That’s excellent. Collaboration is the key in this business.”
“Well, sir, not exactly. You see, Billy Hannigan never did like being a lawyer, but his wife wouldn’t let him quit. Then last year, after she ran away with another attorney, he just took off. Last I heard he was working as a disc jockey on a radio station in Lake Placid.”
“And Goldstein?”
Daniels rubbed at his chin and then sighed.
“Well,” he said, “the truth is, Goldstein was someone Billy made up. Before I joined him, he was in solo practice, but he called his firm Hannigan and Goldstein. Something about Billy’s wanting to attract Jewish clients. I just got around to having new stationery printed up with only my name, but I keep forgetting to have our little yellow pages ad changed.”
“This is highly irregular,” Hayden blustered. “Highly irregular.”
“Sarah,” Paris said, “I think this deception allows you to reconsider your decision.”
“Mr. Paris, deception seems a bit strong a word,” she countered. “Clearly, there’s been no attempt to hide the truth. I think we’ll do just fine with Mr. Daniels, even without Mr. Goldstein.”
“Much appreciated,” Matt Daniels said. “Now, if we’re all in the same corner, I think we ought to start putting together our case. Tomorrow morning at eight, round one begins. So let’s have at it.”
“Highly irregular,” Sarah heard someone mutter.
CHAPTER 18
EXCEPT FOR THE NIGHT CLERK, ROSA SUAREZ WAS alone in the medical record room. It was nearing ten-thirty and she had not eaten since noon. Her back and neck ached from hunching over her work table. But in some ways, the discomfort was pleasurable. It had been over two years since she had put in these kinds of hours on a project, two years since she felt challenged.
The initial phase of her investigation would be done tonight, and both Alberto and her department head were anxiously awaiting her return to Atlanta. Neither stood to be very pleased with what she had to tell them. As yet she had no explanation for the bizarre DIC cases. However, two things were clear. From a purely statistical standpoint, there was virtually no possibility that the three cases were coincidental. And almost as certainly, unless the underlying cause of the tragedies was determined and dealt with, there would be more.
There were several integrations and many combinations she needed to run through the data banks at the CDC, and some preliminary culture results to be checked. Then, in all likelihood, it would be back to Boston. To date, she had unearthed dozens of demographic and physical commonalities among the three stricken women—some quite possibly significant, some too obscure to take seriously. Their blood types were all A positive and their primary residences within three miles of the hospital. All had been associated as patients with the Medical Center of Boston for at least four years, and each had been pregnant once before. On the more obscure side of the ledger, all were born in April, although in different years; all were firstborn; and none had been educated past high school. In addition, all were right-handed and brown-eyed.
There were still more data to be gathered, but by far the most persistently troublesome aspect of her research to this point was the prenatal supplements given each woman by Sarah Baldwin. A botanist at the Smithsonian and a friend on the faculty of Emory University had provided some preliminary data on the nine components. But much more detailed biochemical information was needed. Rosa’s in
stincts were telling her that although the components of the mix might serve as some sort of cofactor in a lethal biological reaction, they were, in and of themselves, harmless. But the tools of her trade were numbers and probabilities, not instincts.
“Excuse me, Ramona,” she called out to the night clerk whose desk was on the other side of a broad bank of files. “I just want to be sure there are no more records in the group we’re working on.”
“Seven years of women who delivered here and required transfusions during or after their deliveries—you’ve gotten them all. Mrs. Suarez, do you know that since you came to MCB you’ve spent more time down here than the whole medical staff combined?”
“I’ll bet I have. Well, this will be my last night for a while. Tomorrow I’m heading back to—”
Rosa stopped in midsentence and stared down at the chart in front of her. It belonged to Alethea Worthington, the second of the DIC cases. She had dissected the record word by word, just as she had the records of Constanza Hidalgo and Lisa Summer. What caught her eye at this moment, though, wasn’t something on the page, but between it and the previous one. She picked up the chart and stared at it from several angles.
“Mrs. Suarez, is everything all right?” the clerk called out.
“Oh. Yes. Everything’s fine, dear. Ramona, would you happen to have a pocket knife or a nail file?”
“I have a Swiss Army knife in my bag, so I guess that means I have both.”
“Perfect. And could you please bring me back those two charts of—”
“Summer and Hidalgo. I know. I know.”
“Thank you, dear.”
Using the lenses of her bifocals as magnifiers, Rosa peered along the cleft where the pages of the chart were held together by a flexible metal binder. At the spot where the arms of the binder passed through the pages, small, jagged edges of paper protruded. Rosa marked the pages on either side of the fragments and then carefully loosened the binder just a bit. Next she slid the largest blade of the Swiss Army knife along the space beside one of the arms. Two minute scraps of paper dropped out onto the table.
Rosa gently brushed the fragments into an envelope and then convinced herself that similar pieces were tucked behind the other arm. She left those in place and tightened the binder back as it had been. Pages—probably two of them—had almost definitely been torn out of the record. It took most of ten minutes to find identical fragments in Constanza Hidalgo’s chart. The tiny bits of progress notepaper represented at least two and possibly three missing pages.
Lisa Summer’s chart was by far the thickest of the three. By the time Rosa convinced herself that there was no physical evidence of missing pages, it was nearly eleven. She piled the record on the others and, for the first time in two hours, stood and stretched. The meaning of her discovery was not at all clear. But even though the Summer chart seemed untouched, the finding that at least two of the three DIC records had been tampered with was significant. Of that she had little doubt.
Outside, the rainstorm had ended. A few faint stars were visible in the black velvet sky. Rosa felt energized by the sudden new twist. Part of her wanted to stay up all night as she had so often done, studying and working through puzzles until the answers came. But she was sixty now, and the cost of that sort of exuberance was just too unpredictable. Facing a busy day in Atlanta, she needed to pack and get at least a few hours of sleep before her early-morning flight.
She wanted desperately to share what she had found with someone—almost anyone who could be a sounding board and give her feedback. Verbalizing her ideas and streams of consciousness with colleagues had once been an invaluable tool. But the wounds from BART, though now more than two years old, were still painful. And that refractory pain reminded her over and over to trust as little as necessary.
Rosa gathered her things, thanked the clerk, and promised to be back before too long. Then she left the building on the campus side. Two women dead of a mysterious medical complication, and both of their charts altered. Rosa searched her imagination for some sort of innocent explanation but could conjure up none. What had been a fascinating epidemiological puzzle had suddenly turned sinister.
• • •
Sarah shook hands with the five MCB representatives and thanked each for his willingness to help in her defense. The meeting, which had gotten off to such a tense and confrontational beginning, had actually ended up accomplishing a good deal. All concurred that the key to a quick resolution of the Grayson suit lay in finding an identical case of DIC in an end-stage labor patient—whether at MCB or any other hospital—who had never had contact with Sarah.
At Matt Daniels’s suggestion, Paris and Snyder agreed to contact their associates around the country, and Blankenship to institute an in-depth search of the medical literature. Arnold Hayden vowed to stay in close contact with Daniels, and Colin Smith gave assurances that any expenses incurred by Hayden or his staff would be covered by the hospital. Finally, the group pledged to present a unified front to Jeremy Mallon and the press. Unless and until she was proven responsible beyond reasonable doubt, Sarah Baldwin was innocent of any wrongdoing. Tomorrow morning, in a show of support, Eli Blankenship would accompany Sarah and Matt to the shop of her Chinese herbalist.
“Nice going tonight,” Sarah said as Matt retrieved his coat and umbrella. “I think you handled a very difficult situation with a lot of restraint and class.”
“Nonsense. If you hadn’t gone to bat for me, I would have been out of the game.”
“I’m not much of a baseball aficionado,” Sarah said, “but isn’t it true that if someone goes to bat for you, you are out of the game?”
Matt’s grin was, for the first time, spontaneous and unstrained. And Sarah added it to the growing list of things she liked about the man.
“I still don’t know why the claims adjuster at MMPO selected me for this case,” he said, “but I’m glad he did. I’m not as slick as most of the attorneys I oppose, but I promise you, I’m a fighter and a survivor. I do my homework, and fortunately, I’m smarter than I look.”
“I’m not worried. Believe me I’m not. Besides, after tomorrow, I’m hoping we’ll be able to go out and celebrate the end of your shortest case ever. Tell me, how did you ever manage to play baseball and get through law school?”
“Well,” Matt said, “I was a relief pitcher. I always had good control, but I was never that flashy to watch. From about my second year in the majors on, the press began writing about how I didn’t have good stuff—that’s speed or movement on my pitches, and about how the Red Sox had no plans to keep me, and how I wouldn’t last another year. Finally I had read enough of my own derogatory press clippings to decide that I ought to have something to fall back on. So I started law school in the off seasons. Eight off seasons later I was done. I had been with the Red Sox several times, as well as the Expos in the National League, and Pawtucket in the International League, and I still had a year of major league pitching left in me.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Correction, that’s two rabbits’ feet, a two-thousand-year-old Egyptian amulet, and that infamous blue ribbon Dr. Blankenship talked about. Plus about a dozen other little rituals.”
“You really believe in that stuff?”
“To paraphrase something Mark Twain once said about God, I choose to believe in that stuff just in case there’s something to it.”
“A superstitious attorney who quotes Mark Twain and pitched major league baseball,” Sarah said. “You certainly can’t be called middle of the road.”
“Neither can you,” Matt said. “God, it’s nearly eleven. I promised to have the sitter home by then.”
“Sitter?”
Although their relationship was strictly professional, and Sarah knew Matt was ethically bound to keep it that way, she found the news that he was married disappointing.
“I have a twelve-year-old son, Harry. He lives with his mother most of the year.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Well, then, shall we meet tomorrow morning at Mr. Kwong’s?”
“If you think you can find it.”
“I’ve already driven past it. Like I said, I try to do my homework. I’m going over to Brookline. Do you need a ride?”
“Thanks, but I live in the North End, and I have my bike. Besides, the rain’s stopped now, and riding just after a storm is something I really enjoy.”
Matt reached across to shake her hand. Their gazes met and, for the briefest moment, connected. But just as quickly, he looked away.
“Don’t you worry,” he said. “We’re going to do fine.”
“I know. One last question, though. Before you arrived, that lawyer, Arnold Hayden, implied that most attorneys would have scheduled a preliminary meeting like this one in their office. Why didn’t you?”
Matt slipped on his coat, took his briefcase in one hand and his umbrella in the other.
“Well, the truth is, I wanted to make a good impression—on Glenn Paris and his crew, but especially on you. And my current office is hardly the largest, most opulent in the city.”
“I see,” she said again.
“And to make matters even worse, that damn partner of mine, Mr. Goldstein, can’t seem to keep the place neat. Next time maybe I’ll chance letting you see it. Meanwhile, get some sleep. We have a big day ahead of us.”
Sarah watched Matt shamble down the hall to the elevator. What apprehension she had about the next morning’s gathering at Kwong Tian-Wen’s shop was more than offset by the notion that in just nine and a half hours, she would be seeing her lawyer again.
“Are you all done in there?”
The stoop-shouldered cleaning lady had been patiently vacuuming and dusting in the corridor for most of an hour, waiting for the Milsap Room to empty.
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry,” Sarah said.
“No problem, no problem. He’s a fine-looking man, that one. A fine-looking man.” The old woman’s eyes were sparkling.
“You know,” Sarah said, “I was thinking the very same thing myself. But I have a feeling you could tell that.”
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