The Body Shifters (Book 1 Body Shifters Trilogy): A Novel (The Body Shifters Trilogy)

by Leslie O'Kane

  “What happened?” Ellie asked as she joined them.

  “Jennifer McGavin collapsed,” an Alzheimer’s-wing nurse answered.

  “Looks like Nurse Stein was right after all,” one doctor said to another; Ellie had seen both of the doctors before, but didn’t know them by name. She was fairly certain that they were both interns.

  Ellie spotted Natalie, watching through a window in the lobby. Ellie entered the building. “Did you hear what happened to Jennifer?”

  Natalie nodded. “I’m sure it’s her cancer. She fainted in the hallway. They’re taking her to District Memorial Hospital.”

  Ethan McGavin emerged from an inner door and strode toward the lobby exit, giving Ellie a double take. “Back to work as usual, troops. The patients can’t afford for us to go on holiday.”

  “He considers this a holiday?” Natalie grumbled as the door swung shut behind him.

  Ellie continued to watch him as he walked toward his Mercedes. He barked at the five staff members who were approaching him, apparently cutting off their words of moral support. He got into his car and drove away.

  “I feel sorry for Jennifer,” Natalie said. “Here she’s got stage-four cancer, and her husband seems annoyed at the inconvenience.”

  “I doubt he believes he’s going to lose her to death,” Ellie said.

  “But they’ve known that Jennifer . . .” Natalie’s voice tapered off, and her eyes widened. “Now I get it,” she cried. “This is what you were worried about—that they would do a mind-transfer on themselves!”

  Ellie looked at the security guard. He was talking on the phone and could not have overheard. They were standing next to floor-to-ceiling windows. There was no easy place to plant a listening device. Still. Ethan had seen Ellie and Natalie together.

  Ethan has probably already downloaded Jennifer’s memories. Maybe they’ve already chosen a donor body for her. But what about Ethan’s procedure? Who will shift Ethan’s mind into someone else’s body?

  Ethan probably hedged his bets, Ellie decided. He’s probably expecting Jennifer to do the procedure, but has also told his hired hit man that he’ll only get paid once Ethan’s awoken in his new body.

  “Ellie?” Natalie said, breaking into her thoughts. “Are you coming to work?” She wiggled her ID badge on its lanyard.

  “Yes.”

  Ellie only then remembered that she’d left her own badge in her backpack, which was still at the apartment. The guard who’d been there when Ellie interviewed must have noticed the look of frustration on her face and promptly said, “It’s okay, Elizabeth. Go on through with Natalie.”

  “Thank you,” Elizabeth said. He would never have allowed her to enter the building if either of the McGavins were here, she thought, wondering if her pass key would still work. For all she knew, Ethan or Jennifer might have invalidated her badge’s access code over the weekend.

  She and Natalie walked toward the Alzheimer’s wing. “I’m going to try to learn what’s going on with the seven patients who had the memory-restore procedure. I don’t think I’ll stay here long.”

  “Okay. Let me know if . . . there’s anything I can do to help you gather information.” She glanced at the security camera, and her cheeks reddened. “I was joking about milking the clock. I want to get a lot of work done with our patients today.”

  Clearly, Natalie was worried that the hallways were wired for sound. They dropped off their things in their lockers in silence. Ellie sensed that Natalie shared her thought that the locker room would be an effective place to hide a bug; it was the type of place where employees tended to let down their guard.

  A middle-aged woman entered and smiled at Natalie as she approached. She gave a quick smile and nod to Ellie, but then returned her focus to Natalie. Judging from the shape of the woman’s chin and nose, Ellie realized this had to be Natalie’s mother—Nurse Stein.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said to Natalie. “Have you heard about Dr. McGavin?”

  “Yeah, the ambulance was here when I arrived from school.” Natalie had lowered her voice to a mere whisper.

  “She’s so depleted,” Natalie’s mom continued. “I can’t imagine how she’s going to recover from this enough to return home, let alone to work, when she’s basically refusing treatment.”

  Natalie winced and gestured with both hands for her mother to lower her voice. “Mom, this is Elizabeth Peterson. Elizabeth, my mother, Lisa Stein.”

  Lisa turned and shook Ellie’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Elizabeth. Natalie’s said a lot of great things about you.” Again she awarded Natalie with a loving smile. “This it’s such a sad day,” she said to Ellie. “Don’t repeat any of this, but Jennifer McGavin has stage-four ovarian cancer, and she’s not fighting it.”

  Ellie and Natalie exchanged worried glances. “We really shouldn’t be talking about this here,” Ellie said. “People can overhear really easily.”

  “Ethan looked scared to death,” Natalie’s mother continued, despite Ellie’s warning. “He’s gone to the hospital with her, of course.”

  “Elizabeth’s right, Mom. We shouldn’t—”

  “I practically had to drag him out of the patient-care room. He was insisting that he alone could check in the new patient.”

  “New patient?” Ellie couldn’t stop herself from repeating.

  “A young woman. Comatose. Doesn’t have a mark on her whole body. It must be an aneurysm. It’s so tragic.” She gave Ellie a sad smile. “But you’re right. We shouldn’t be talking shop, and I should get back to work.” She touched Ellie’s shoulder. “It was very nice to finally meet you, Ellie.”

  “Elizabeth,” Ellie corrected, alarmed.

  “Oh, sorry. I’m a little flustered. Anyway, Elizabeth, Natalie thinks the world of you. She talks about you all the time.”

  Chapter 31

  Ellie had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she headed toward Roger Culpepper’s room. Had it merely been a coincidence that Natalie’s mother had called her “Ellie?” Could Lisa Stein have been working with the MacGavins all along?

  No, Ellie decided, that was just her paranoia speaking. She had to draw the line somewhere; she couldn’t allow herself to mistrust her every instinct about the people she met.

  Now Ellie regretted that she’d been too thrown to ask the name of the new coma patient. Maybe that was just as well. The locker room probably was bugged and, for all Ellie knew, John Deere could be monitoring it. Ellie felt a horrible pang of guilt. She had dragged Natalie and her mother into the fray by her presence. To shift the focus away from the Steins, Ellie needed to learn the name of the patient from another source.

  A sudden, severe wave of panic staggered her. With her knees shaking from her internal earthquake, Ellie had to stop and lean against the wall, eying the security camera. John Deere could be watching her right now. The McGavins could have dozens of employees in on their plot. Regardless, she was David fighting Goliath—after David’s slingshot had broken.

  She had underestimated the ruthlessness of the McGavins. She hadn’t actually believed that they would resort to killing her mother and grandmother. Did it matter if the procedure itself caused insanity? It wasn’t as if any of her experiences since Christmas break had been sane.

  Footsteps were approaching. Unwilling to look back and see who it was, she straightened and made her way to Culpepper’s old room. Just as she knocked, she realized that he might have been reassigned rooms. “Come in,” said a woman.

  Ellie opened the door. She could tell at once that the woman was Roger Culpepper’s daughter; she looked like a younger, female version of him. She was the only occupant, standing in front of the window. Her eyes were red and puffy, and she was holding a tissue.

  “You’re Mr. Culpepper’s daughter, aren’t you?” Ellie said, trying to keep her voice calm.

  “Laura. Yes.”

  “My name is Ellie . . . is Elizabeth Peterson.”

  “Hello, Elizabeth. You work with Natalie. They’ll be br
inging my father back any moment now. I’m afraid he’ll be too incoherent to answer any of your interview questions.”

  “Is it all right if I ask you a couple of questions, then?”

  “Of course.”

  Ellie shut the door behind her, but remained standing. Deliberately putting on an officious mannerism, she asked, “Can you tell me the sequence of events, just prior to your father going downhill again?”

  She grimaced. “It was really frustrating. Dr. McGavin had signed for his release on Wednesday.”

  “Dr. Ethan McGavin?”

  “Yes. Dad and I spent two really nice days together at my home in Baltimore. He’d been doing great. I brought him in for his recheck on Friday. He seemed absolutely fine to me, and I stayed in the waiting room. The nurse escorted him in, but less than half an hour later, she came back alone and told me that Dr. McGavin wanted to speak with me. She brought me into the examination room, where Dad and the doctor were.” Laura averted her gaze, her voice growing thick with emotion. “Dad was just babbling and acting as if he was seeing things. He thought the three of us were monsters, trying to attack him. He was trying to hit anyone who came near. They had to put him in restraints. It was—” She shook her head, unable to continue.

  Ellie gave her a moment to collect herself. “But he’d seemed fine when you brought him in?” she asked gently.

  “Absolutely. He was great. He knew exactly who I was, and he joked about his visit being unnecessary—that a checkup just two days after a patient had been released to make sure he was ‘still healthy’ made about as much sense as checking a corpse at a funeral to make sure it was still dead.”

  Ellie was too upset to muster a smile at the anecdote. “Did it seem to you as if your father might have had a sudden reaction to a drug that Dr. McGavin had given your father?”

  She snorted. “It did, yes, but, that of course couldn’t possibly be the case. This was supposed to be a simple checkup. I’m the proxy for all medical decisions on my father’s behalf, and Dr. McGavin’s a great doctor. He’s always discussed medications with me before giving them to my father.”

  “Maybe he neglected to do so this one time, though.” Maybe Ethan injected Mr. Culpepper with crystal meth, or some similar drug.

  Laura gave Ellie a visual once-over that, at a glance, reminded Ellie of her place—that she was, for all intents and purposes, a sixteen-year-old candy striper. “Dr. McGavin is an excellent doctor.”

  “Yes, he is. A brilliant doctor. I overstepped my bounds. I’m sorry. I like your dad a lot and want to understand what happened.”

  “That makes two of us,” Laura said, wiping away her tears.

  #

  As Ellie left Roger Culpepper’s room, a voice in her head kept saying: Go! Go! Go! It wasn’t her own voice—it wasn’t Ellie’s voice but rather Alexis’s. Ellie felt terrified. She would rather run off a cliff than keep hearing Alexis’s voice. Alexis had been suicidal. Maybe that was smart. Saving the world from ABTC was a suicide mission.

  Saving time was paramount. The McGavins weren’t here. Even though her every keystroke would be monitored, she still needed to know the current status of the six other patients who’d undergone Jake’s procedure.

  She darted into the data-entry room, shut the door, and sat down at the keyboard. She logged in and typed in a patient’s name. A screen came up that read: You do not have access to this file. Enter password.

  All she’d done so far was to try to get into the screen that would allow her to view the data that she’d keyed in herself. She tried a second patient’s name and got the same screen. Then she entered “Roger Culpepper.” Again, her access was blocked. Finally she tried the name of the most-recent patient she’d interviewed who hadn’t had Jake’s procedure.

  Ellie gasped as someone opened the door. I’ve been caught red-handed already!

  Tyler Behuniak stood in the doorway, obviously as displeased to see Ellie as she was to see him. “I’m surprised to see you here,” he said. “Friday you were here for all of five minutes.”

  Ellie turned back to the screen. She’d been denied access yet again. “I was having a bad day.”

  “Does that mean you’ve got to hog the computer today?”

  “I’m being asked for my password every time I key in a patient’s name. I’m just trying to recheck my last report for typos,” she lied.

  “Obviously you haven’t heard about our new policy. Once you complete the status report on a patient and hit enter, you can’t retrieve it.” Tyler snorted. “The doctors probably did that because a certain teeny-bopper, named Elizabeth Peterson, kept poking her nose into patients’ confidential records.”

  “Oh, like you’ve never read them?”

  “I have. Unlike you, I had Ethan’s approval first.”

  Judging by Ethan’s brush-off of Tyler she’d witnessed on Friday, she knew that Tyler was most likely fibbing.

  She balled her fists. Alexis’s voice had fallen silent in her head. Even if John Deere was listening to her every word, she had to know what was happening to the patients. She swiveled in her seat and held Tyler’s gaze. “Roger Culpepper had a relapse of his Alzheimer’s Friday afternoon.”

  “So I heard,” Tyler replied.

  “What about the other patients? Of the Magnificent Seven, was Culpepper the only one who’s had an adverse reaction?”

  Tyler narrowed his eyes. “Two others show signs of dementia returning.”

  “As of when?”

  “Friday for one of the patients. Saturday for the other. I work weekends. I interviewed them myself.”

  “Did you talk to the other four?”

  He nodded. “They’re all doing fine. And, no, I’m not naming names. You want to make like an investigative reporter, you can go do the legwork yourself.”

  Ellie grunted in disgust. “Fine.” She pushed away from the desk and rose. “The computer’s all yours.”

  Tyler beamed at her triumphantly. “Geez, Elizabeth. You’re so easy to boss around.” He spun back around to face the computer screen. “You’ll never get anywhere by caving in at the first sign of resistance.” He started typing away, each little tap from his keyboard reinforcing his glibness.

  “You don’t know the first thing about me, Tyler! You haven’t got the slightest idea where I’ve been, let alone where I’m going to wind up!”

  He said nothing, but he’d stopped typing to listen.

  #

  Ellie quickly identified both of the afflicted patients. They were so incoherent that it was heartbreaking, which made Ellie change her mind. It was worth the extra five-minutes total that it took her to ensure that only the three patients—including Culpepper—had relapsed.

  “I don’t trust that man,” Susan Mitchell, the last of the still-lucid four patients told her.

  “Dr. McGavin?”

  “That’s right. He’s smarmy. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Or a wolf in a doctor’s clothing, you ask me. I’ve been coming here for years, off and on. I like the young doctors so much better. Dr. Thompson. Dr. Jones. Dr. Westmore. They were nice. Dr. McGavin always seems to have something else on his mind. Even when he’s looking you straight in the eye, it’s like he’s looking past your shoulder for someone more important than you to arrive.”

  “Did he give you an injection of any kind at some point during your appointment?”

  “Not as far as I can recall.” She chuckled. “Although I guess you need to consider the source.”

  “You’re doing really well, Ms. Mitchell,” Ellie said. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

  “You don’t have to run off on my account,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t stay. It was nice meeting you.”

  “You, too, Sweetheart.”

  Ellie felt a pang and couldn’t bear even to look back at Ms. Mitchell as she let herself out the door. Grammy had always called her “Sweetheart.”

  In the elevator, Ellie realized she still hadn’t gotten the new female
patient’s name. Frustrated and overwhelmed, she raced to the Brain Trauma wing. A sign next to the security door read: Employees Only. Family members press button. Ellie pressed the button.

  A female voice through the speaker said: “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so. My name is Elizabeth Peterson. I work in the Alzheimer’s section. Could you please tell me the name of a patient who was admitted today? It would reassure one of our patients in the Alzheimer’s ward.”

  “Hearing the patient’s name would reassure an Alzheimer’s patient?” the woman asked incredulously.

  “Yes. She’s got it into her head somehow that it was her grand-niece. It’s my fault, really. She was so unresponsive at first that I was babbling away and spoke out of turn.”

  Elizabeth waited. No response.

  “Please, I just need the young woman’s name, in order to reassure both her and me that it wasn’t a relative of this poor woman.”

  “What’s the Alzheimer’s patient’s name?”

  “Susan Mitchell,” Ellie lied, hoping that, if anyone repeated this lame story to the poor woman, Ms. Mitchell would forgive her.

  “And what is the name of the patient’s relative that—”

  “Elizabeth?” a second voice asked over the intercom. “This is Lisa Stein.”

  “Hi, Ms. Stein. I’m just trying to learn the name of the patient you admitted today.”

  “The police haven’t notified the family members yet. We can’t release any names. If our patient is related to Ms. Mitchell, I’ll be sure to notify her myself. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I do,” Ellie said, holding herself back from screaming. She hadn’t told Natalie that her mother and grandmother had been murdered just a couple of days ago. She hadn’t warned Natalie that her life was in immediate peril. “Ms. Stein? Can you come out and talk to me for just a minute?”

  There was a pause. “Can this possibly wait till I’m on break in half an hour, Elizabeth?”