The Doctor's Guardian

by Marie Ferrarella

  She knew what he meant. That the hospital, unable to do anything further for the man, was sending Sergeant Kelly to the nursing home to await death. “No, he wasn’t. But it wasn’t his heart that was the problem. He had prostate cancer—”

  “Your gut, it is talking to you?” Josef surmised knowingly.

  She smiled at his phraseology. There was something endearing about it, now that she’d gotten the hang of unraveling its mysteries. “Yes, it is.”

  Josef nodded, as if accepting the explanation. “Then this is being enough for me,” he told her. “You will be having your autopsy, Nika.”

  Relieved, happy to finally be either confirming her suspicions or laying them to rest, she threw her arms around her uncle’s neck and brushed a quick kiss against his cheek.

  “Thank you, Uncle Josef!” Slipping her arms from his neck, she said, “I’ll get the paperwork started.”

  It was all just probably her imagination, she reasoned, but until she knew for certain, she wasn’t going to be able to have any peace.

  And if it wasn’t just her imagination, she needed to stop whoever or whatever it was that was causing this senseless elimination of senior citizens at their most vulnerable.

  Two mornings later, Nika had just begun making her rounds when Shelley, one of the nurses on duty that day, poked her head into the room she was in, simultaneously knocking on the doorjamb to get her attention.

  “Dr. Pulaski, Mrs. Silverman just called the nurse’s station. She says she wants to see you in her office—her temp office,” the heavyset woman added to eliminate any confusion.

  All this and heaven, too, Nika thought. But she nodded, saying, “All right, I’ll be there as soon as I finish my rounds.” Focusing back on her patient, she removed the blood pressure cuff off the man’s rail thin arm. Instead of high blood pressure, which was what she was accustomed to running into, this patient’s blood pressure was low. So low that there was a risk of the man having hypo tension.

  Shelley was still in the doorway. The nurse looked somewhat uncomfortable as she relayed the rest of the message. “She said to come now.”

  Nika pressed her lips together. Why did she feel as if her chain was being yanked by the administrator? Was the woman still upset because of what she’d said the other day? “Did she say why?”

  Shelley laughed shortly. “Since when does Mrs. Silverman explain herself?”

  Nika hadn’t been at the hospital long enough to form a solid opinion based on experience. Just one, again, based on gut feelings.

  “From the tone of your voice, never, I’m guessing.” And then Nika smiled despite herself. She was beginning to sound like her uncle, bless him.

  Momentarily banishing thoughts of the administrator, she looked at the patient in the bed and smiled. “You’re doing fine, Mr. Peters. You’ll be going home today.”

  “Home,” the man repeated, shaking his bald head. “Wish I could go home.”

  Despite the order to put in an appearance, Nika lingered with the patient a moment longer. “Why can’t you go home?”

  The words just poured out as if he’d been damming them up too long. “Because my damn greedy kids sold it out from under me. They said it was for ‘the best.’ That I couldn’t take care of it anymore and that I was better off in a place with people my own age.” He snorted with disgust. “Who the hell wants to live with old fossils?” he demanded angrily.

  Nika laid a comforting hand on his shoulder, aching for the man. He had to feel as if he’d been cast aside, thrown on a heap and regarded as useless. It wasn’t fair.

  “I like people your age,” she told him kindly. “They have all this knowledge and experience that makes them interesting.”

  He snorted again, as if what she was saying was just so much make believe. “Maybe, but the only ones I ever seem to meet just want to talk about their last trip to the…bathroom—” the momentary pause gave Nika the impression that Joshua Peters had just cleaned up his language for her sake “—and what happened while they were there.”

  She had an alternative suggestion for him. “Did you ever think of finding yourself a roommate? The two of you could rent a place together. Kind of like two college students.”

  Thin shoulders rose and fell helplessly. “I wouldn’t know how to get started.” But it was obvious that he liked the idea. His eyes lit up. “Would you help me, Doctor?”

  Nika grinned. “I thought you’d never ask,” she told him, accompanying her words with a wink. “I’ll get back to you before you leave today. Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to get you back on your own again,” she promised.

  For the first time since she’d seen him admitted a week ago, Joshua Peters grinned and, while the expression didn’t transform him to a kid again, it gave her a glimpse of what he must have been like half a century ago when he was in his twenties.

  Nika left the room heartened, even though she had a feeling she was going down to be interrogated.

  Ella Silverman looked far from happy to see her when Nika walked into the woman’s commandeered office. Nika could have sworn she actually saw the icicles forming as the administrator looked her way. “When I said I wanted to see you, Dr. Pulaski, I didn’t mean at your leisure.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Silverman, I was in the middle of a patient’s examination and I couldn’t just leave the poor man hanging.” Nika dropped into the empty chair before the administrator’s desk. That was when she became aware that there was another person in the office with them.

  Detective Baker.

  What was he doing here? Was he registering a complaint for some reason? She couldn’t even begin to form a guess.

  So she addressed the administrator instead. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Silverman?”

  The other woman looked as if she was in no mood for banter or sarcasm.

  “You can cooperate with Detective Baker and answer his questions,” she said curtly.

  “I wasn’t aware that I wasn’t cooperating with Detective Baker.” She looked at him, wondering why he hadn’t come to her instead of taking whatever it was that was bothering him up with the administrator. He didn’t strike her as the kind of person who went over people’s heads. “Do you have some kind of complaint about the way your grandmother’s being treated?”

  “This isn’t about his grandmother,” Ms. Silverman informed her coldly before Cole had a chance to say anything.

  Okay, she was now officially confused. Nika looked from the detective to the woman behind the oak desk. “Then what is this about?”

  Mrs. Silverman’s eyes all but disappeared as she narrowed them. “Do you remember our conversation the other day?”

  She remembered being cut down royally. “Vividly,” Nika replied.

  Mrs. Silverman struggled to maintain her composure. “Well, it seems that one of your unit’s deceased, a Philip Mayer, had two children who weren’t all that happy with their father dying so suddenly, so they had a private autopsy performed on him.”

  Every fiber in her body was now alert. “And?” Nika asked, holding her breath.

  Ella Silverman’s indignation at being put in such a position was barely contained. “And his death was not from natural causes.”

  Yes!

  “It wasn’t?” Nika tried to keep the excitement from her voice.

  “No,” Mrs. Silverman practically spat out the word. “The medical examiner discovered a small puncture mark in Mr. Mayer’s neck. The M.E. said that it appeared someone had injected air into a major artery.” She looked pointedly at Nika. “I’m assuming I don’t have to explain the consequences of that to you.”

  Nika ignored the woman’s sarcasm. “Then it was a homicide.” She refrained from saying, “I told you so,” although it wasn’t easy. But her gut was right, she thought. Someone was playing Russian roulette with the patients in the Geriatrics Unit.

  “It would appear that way.” Each word out of the administrator’s mouth came grudgingly. The only publicity she wanted for the hospital w
as of the positive variety. This promised to be the exact opposite, a nightmare in the making. “Detective Baker is going to ask you some questions.”

  “I’ll do anything I can to help,” Nika promised as she shifted in her chair in order to face Cole.

  “Quite possibly you’ve already ‘helped’ too much,” Mrs. Silverman informed her angrily.

  For a second, Nika didn’t understand what the woman was talking about.

  And then it hit her. The woman thought she had something to do with the deaths. How? And for God’s sake, why?

  “Wait a minute,” Nika cried. “Am I under suspicion?” How could the administrator even think such a thing? “I was the one who brought the unusual number of deaths to your attention, remember?”

  The small eyes narrowed. “Exactly. They say that the first one on the scene of a crime usually turns out to be the murderer.” The woman’s brown eyes shifted toward the detective who had been sent from Homicide to investigate the allegations. “Am I right, Detective Baker?”

  There was no emotion in his voice as Cole replied, “If this were a crime novel, yes.” He rose from his chair. “I’d like to talk to the doctor in private, please.”

  “Anything to make this go away as quickly as possible, Detective,” the administrator said with forced cheerfulness. “You can use my office,” she told him, rising. And then she scowled at Nika again. “I have to speak to our lawyers. The Mayers are threatening a major lawsuit.”

  Silence hung in the air until Ella Silverman had left the room and shut the door behind her. The second she did, Nika started talking.

  “I don’t know what she might have said to you, but I was the one who brought it to her attention because I was uneasy about the number of people who had recently died in the unit. It didn’t seem right. Especially the last one, Sergeant Kelly. He was set to leave the hospital on the day he died.”

  The moment the last words left her mouth, Nika realized something. Stunned, she looked at Cole sharply. “Come to think of it, several of the patients died on the day they were supposed to leave. But I am not the one responsible for their deaths. I took an oath and it didn’t involve killing patients if I couldn’t cure them.” Her voice filled with passion. “I’m a doctor, for God sakes. My job is to make them better and to keep trying until I finally succeed.”

  “Are you finished?” Cole asked quietly after a beat.

  Nika did her best to try to get a grip on her feelings. “For now,” she replied stiffly.

  “Good,” he replied. “Because I don’t see you doing it, either.”

  Bracing herself for what she felt was the inevitable round two, she was pulled up short. Nika blinked. “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  He studied her for a long moment. The stare was known to cause people with guilty consciences to start confessing. His grandmother’s attending physician, he noted, merely returned his gaze.

  The only thing she was guilty of, he concluded, was invading his imagination and raising his body temperature every time he thought of that trim, supple body climbing over his.

  “Should I?” he asked mildly.

  “No!” Realizing she was all but shouting, Nika lowered her voice. “I mean, the thought is so ridiculous I don’t see why it even has to be addressed—”

  “It has to be addressed,” he informed her, his tone still without any emotion, “because everyone is supposed to be a suspect until they’re cleared. But don’t worry—I already asked around. You were with my grandmother when Sergeant Kelly suffered his so-called heart attack. So unless you can do it by remote control, that pretty much puts you in the clear. Besides, I’ve seen you with my grandmother. You’re not the killing type. Anyone who’d go out of their way to catch a spider in order to set it free wouldn’t kill another human being.”

  Their eyes met. She knew that he hadn’t been there when she’d removed the spider from his grandmother’s room. Mrs. Baker’s alarmed cry had brought her hurrying into the woman’s room, only to discover that there was a spider crawling across the blanket at the foot of her bed.

  Mrs. Baker had expressed surprise when, instead of killing the spider, she’d opened the window and allowed the “intruder” to glide out on a breeze. She’d obviously relayed the incident to him.

  Nika breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

  “Just following the evidence,” he told her simply. “But someone apparently did kill Mr. Mayer, and by your own admission you seem to believe that he’s not the only one. Who else do you think was killed—and why?”

  “I can get a printout of the deaths that have taken place in the last twelve months in the Geriatrics Unit and give it to you. As to why—” Nika raised and lowered her shoulders, the motion echoing the helpless feeling she had when it came to an explanation or a motive. “I have no idea.”

  “Well, the list’s a start.” And maybe she was wrong. He’d rather believe that than think that there was a homicidal maniac running around loose in the hospital, especially since G was here. “I’m also going to want a list of anyone who’s died while in the hospital in the last year.”

  Her eyes widened. “You think it’s gone beyond just the Geriatrics Unit?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The second list can be our control group until proven otherwise.” He took a breath, then asked a question that was far more personal. “By the way, how is my grandmother doing?”

  She knew he’d been to see the woman last night, so what he was asking for was an update as of this morning. Something she wasn’t able to give him yet. “I was just about to check on her this morning when I was summoned down here.”

  “Well then, let’s get you back to your floor,” he suggested.

  She was all for that. “Oh, I think you should know,” she began as they walked to the elevator, “my uncle claimed Sergeant Kelly’s body and he agreed to request an autopsy.”

  “What’s your uncle’s connection to Kelly?” Cole asked.

  “My uncle said Kelly trained him when he came on the force. The man doesn’t seem to have anyone. So many of the people in the Geriatrics Unit don’t,” she added. “It’s really very sad. You live your whole life working, thinking you’re making a difference, and in the end, it’s like nobody noticed.”

  They reached the elevator bank. Cole looked at her for a long moment. “That’s pretty pessimistic for you.”

  So he had been paying attention, she thought, a smile springing to her lips. “Just an observation. Anyway, I told Uncle Josef what I suspected. Until now, there’ve been no autopsies. The bodies were either claimed by family and buried, or the city stepped in and had them cremated. Mrs. Silverman wouldn’t allow me to voice my suspicions and try to get someone to give us permission to exhume a body.

  “When my uncle came to claim Kelly’s remains, I thought it was a chance to find out if anything was actually going on, or if all this was just a horrible set of coincidences. I was hoping for the latter, but I couldn’t just go on not knowing. I have an obligation to protect my patients from any harm.” She paused, waiting for him to say something.

  Cole had begun to wonder if she was ever coming up for air. “Have you always been such a crusader?” The elevator arrived and they got on. Reaching past her to push the button, he realized that she’d become rigid.

  Probably remembering the other day, he thought. He debated reassuring her that the odds of having the elevator get stuck again so soon in the same building were incredibly small, but he decided to let it go. She was smart enough to figure it out for herself. The woman, he noted almost against his will, was pretty much a total package: brains and looks. That didn’t happen very often.

  “Actually,” she was saying, “my mother always thought of me as a rebel.”

  “Really?” He couldn’t readily envision her in that role. She was far too much of a do-gooder. “And what is it you rebelled against?”

  Nika smiled. “My mother.”

  Her unexpected answer made him laugh.


  Nika found herself warming to the sound. There was something deep and rich in his laughter and if she hadn’t known better, she would have said it wrapped itself around her.

  “Sounds pretty normal to me,” he told her. And normal, he added silently, was to be envied. “So tell me more about your suspicions.”

  The doors opened on the first floor and several people came in. Nika and Cole moved to the back of the car, but they were still crowded, pushed up against one another. She could feel her body tingling in response. She stole a side glance, wondering if he felt anything as well. Probably not.

  “What do you want to know?”

  He felt her drawing in a breath. Felt her body move against his and realized it was making more of an impression on him than it should have. What was it about this woman that kept getting to him? “For starters, when did you start having these suspicions?”

  “Just with the last death,” she confessed.

  Why was she having this trouble concentrating? They were in an elevator, for God sakes. With a whole bunch of other people. Why did her skin insist on tingling like this? She forced herself to concentrate on her answer to his question.

  “It didn’t feel right to me. Then I remembered that we’d just lost someone a little more than two weeks ago. And there was a death the first day I came to work in this unit. I remember how hopeless it left me feeling until I snapped out of it. So I started going through the files of all the people who’d recently died in the unit. I kept going back, hoping what I saw as a trend was actually just a fluke. But it wasn’t. And the number was a lot higher than the national average.”

  The elevator doors opened on two and, while one person got off, three others got on. Nika was forced to move even closer into Cole. It didn’t go unnoticed by either of them.

  Their eyes met and held and, for a moment, everything else faded away.

  Cole forced his mind back on the topic. “The dead people had a lot going against them,” he told her in a low voice as he pointed out the obvious. “They were old, they were sick, otherwise they wouldn’t have been here, and there are more deaths among old people than in any other age bracket.”