Back at work I called Tobias Fausset about the CME program. He wasn’t available, so I left a message.
Next I called the Quality Assurance office, where I had better luck. Rocky Taylor confirmed that TMC’s urologic surgery outcomes had slipped over the past several months. Nothing that would raise eyebrows in most hospitals, but not up to TMC’s usually high standards. More complications, even a death. One of Phyllis Poole’s patients. A man. Rocky didn’t seem surprised about the CME program, so I figured it was legit, and not something Cleo had manipulated. I told Rocky that Quinn wanted Cody O’Brien’s chart included in the review.
“Seems like there wouldn’t be much to review,” she said. “Didn’t he split the night before his surgery?”
“He did, but Quinn’s interested in the indications for surgery.”
Rocky hesitated a moment. “Did you know an attorney subpoenaed a legal photocopy of O’Brien’s chart? Maybe that’s why Quinn wants to rush the review.”
“I heard the rumor, but not from Quinn. That definitely explains his hurry.”
Rocky agreed to email all the stats we would need, and we ended the call. The subpoena would complicate my efforts to see Cody’s chart. In any case with lawsuit potential, the medical record was copied immediately by the hospital’s records room staff before a legal photocopy service from outside was allowed to copy it for an attorney.
The library was empty, so I put a sign on the door and hiked over to the fourth floor of TMC’s modern tower, where the administration suite was located. Varsha Singh, Quinn’s executive assistant, looked up from her computer. With her glossy black hair and elegant East Indian features, she looked more like an exotic model than a California-born soccer mom with four adolescent children.
“Is he in?” I said.
“For you, probably.” She punched a button on her phone and announced my name. After a pause, she smiled up at me. “Go on in.”
“Aimee. What brings you?” Quinn stood behind his desk. After a month or so on the job, I’d gotten over being distracted by his disarming smile and rugged good looks, but I still enjoyed the view. He stepped around his desk. “Coffee?”
“No thanks. I have to get back, but I have a question about Cody O’Brien, and I wanted to ask you face to face.”
Quinn tapped a sheet of paper on his desk. “You heard about the subpoena, right?”
“Right. Why didn’t you tell me about it when you were in the library this morning?”
“You’re not going to like my answer.” Quinn got up and came around his desk toward me. He gripped my shoulders with both hands and steered me toward the small couch across from his desk. “Let’s sit for a minute.”
I sat at one corner of the couch, and he took the other. “Okay, let’s hear it.” I was pretty sure I knew what was coming.
“You told me about your family friendship with the O’Briens. I figured if you knew the O’Brien clan was filing a wrongful death suit against TMC, at the very least you’d be stuck in a conflict of interest that could affect your job.” Quinn got up and walked back to his desk. “I don’t want to lose you, Aimee. You’re a superb employee. Please tell me you’ll stay neutral in all of this. If I hear otherwise, I’ll have no choice but to put you on administrative leave. Do you understand?”
His words hit me like a slug to the stomach, and I lost my breath for a moment. Quinn was supposed to be more than my boss. We were friends, and we’d been allies during a difficult time a few months earlier involving the death of Dr. Beardsley’s wife. I managed a response.
“I understand.”
“Good.” Quinn continued. “I was informed as well by the O’Brien’s attorney. Apparently she wanted to make sure your job doesn’t offer you any access to O’Brien’s medical record.”
“I don’t see how I can include Cody’s chart in the urologic surgery review if I don’t have access to it.”
“Cleo can take care of that.”
That was good enough for me. “Okay,” I said. “That should work.”
Back in the library, I opened an email saying Tobias Fausset planned to drop by the library after his four o’clock surgery. I checked the time—three thirty—then glanced at the TMC surgery schedule. Nothing for Dr. Fausset. A call to his appointments clerk confirmed he was doing the surgery as an outpatient procedure in his office. He would drop by the library as soon as he could after he finished.
An hour later, my notes on the CME program were taking shape when I heard the library doors open. I looked up, expecting Dr. Fausset, and instead saw Phyllis Poole advancing toward my desk, white coat flapping and Kabuki-white face scowling. Twin dots of color in her cheeks were the only sign that blood actually ran through her veins.
“Where’s Beardsley?” she said.
“He doesn’t work here in the library, but—”
“I know that. I just came from his office. That silly girl hasn’t a clue where he is. I certainly hope you’ll be more helpful.”
“I’ll try. What is it that you need?”
“I need to talk to Dr. Beardsley.” She placed both hands, palms down, on my desk and looked me in the eye. “Now.”
Instead of reacting in a way I’d savor in the moment and regret later, I kept calm by imagining how she’d look lying on the floor with my knee on her chest. Good thing ‘the gentle art’ disciplines the mind as well as the body.
“Dr. Beardsley is still taking personal time,” I said. “He’s asked not to be disturbed.”
“Then who’s responsible for this CME program I’m hearing about? I want to know why TMC’s urologic surgery cases are under attack.”
“I’ve been authorized to carry out his duties until he returns.”
“You? Since when are you qualified—”
“Hello, Phyllis,” Tobias Fausset’s rich bass broke in. He walked up to Poole and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Code Blue rehearsals start at seven. Will you be there?”
Poole might have been smacked in the face with a magic wand, her transformation was so complete. Her eyes widened and her complexion brightened to a delicate shade of pink. The smile she offered Fausset proved there was fire inside this woman that had nothing to do with her work.
“I’ll be there,” Poole said. The seductive timbre of her voice made me blush. I cleared my throat in case either of them wanted to be reminded why they were in the library.
“Aimee,” Dr. Fausset said, “I’m told we have business. I have ten minutes.”
“You’re not going to wait for Beardsley?” Poole said.
“That isn’t necessary. I’m sure Aimee can handle the preliminaries. Why don’t you finish up at the office? I’ll see you at seven.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.” His words were smooth and sweet as chocolate mousse, and the intimate way he looked into her eyes suggested he was sure of any number of things.
“Seven, then.” Watching Phyllis Poole’s retreat, I marveled at the graceful sway of her hips. Something I’d never seen before. Tobias Fausset was watching, too.
Fausset’s calm, efficient approach let us work out the details of the urologic surgery review and CME presentation in record time. In half an hour I closed up and headed home.
Chapter 5
That evening I helped Amah and Jack with llama worming and pedicures. Amah and I kept the animals as calm as possible while Jack emptied a large syringe filled with milky fluid down each of their throats. Next, Jack trimmed the toenails on their split hooves with a pair of sharp shears. The cria’s hooves were still small, so she was exempt.
I scrubbed off the dust and perfume of the barnyard with a quick shower in time to help with dinner. Amah and I put together salad and garlic bread while Jack seared steaks on the grill.
Over a dessert of peach pie à la mode, I tried again to offer them a rent check.
“No, sweetie,” Amah said. “Put it toward your school loans.”
“Or use it to pay off your new tires,” Jack sai
d. “You’re not paying rent until you’re out of debt.”
“By then you’ll want a place of your own,” Amah said. “It can’t be ideal for you living in a barn out here in the foothills.”
“It’s not so bad.” I got up and gave each of them a hug. “I’m still a country girl deep down.”
Jack huffed a little cough and glanced at Amah. “You’re welcome as long as you want to stay. You’ve been a big help watching things around here when we’re gone.”
The truth is I loved living in Coyote Creek. It was only a ten minute drive to Timbergate, and I’d become attached to my homey little apartment over the barn. With Mom and Dad living in the Azores, and Grandpa Machado and his wife Tanya in New York, Amah and Jack were the only family Harry and I had close by. Although they were vibrant and active, they were getting older. I liked that we were there for each other.
I walked down the lane toward the barn with a full stomach and a sense of peace that lasted only until I checked my message machine. One message. I hit the PLAY button.
“It wasn’t Game Boy.” A woman’s voice whispered the words. Then silence.
Game Boy? What kind of message was that? A wrong number? Curious, I replayed it. The second time, listening carefully, I realized the voice was Laurie Popejoy’s. She sounded distraught or exhausted, and the Game Boy reference made no sense. Was it some kind of code? What could this second message from her mean? And where was she?
My knee-jerk reaction was to call Cleo, but I hesitated. She was so wound up over Cody O’Brien’s death and so freaked out about Phyllis Poole operating on Sig, she couldn’t be objective. I needed Harry’s impartial take on this. He was much better at thinking outside the box, and he’d always been a whiz with Game Boy.
Harry wasn’t answering, so I left a message telling him to call me. I hadn’t told him about Laurie’s disappearance, so it would take some explaining to bring him up to speed.
That left one more call. I stared at the card James O’Brien had given me that morning in the TMC library. I wanted to be at Margie’s Friday night to observe Phyllis Poole and Tobias Fausset. A date with James would look less suspicious than dropping in alone. For James that would be some thrill: a hot Broadway producer living it up at Margie’s Bean Pot with a hospital librarian. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—before I heard about the O’Brien lawsuit against TMC. Still, I could kill two birds with one date. I made the call.
“James here. Talk to me.” His quick answer took me by surprise. “Hello?” James said again. He sounded impatient, but still polite.
“James, it’s Aimee Machado.”
“Aimee, great to hear from you.” Definite change of tone. “I hope you’re calling to collect on that rain check.”
“I am.”
“So when can we get together?”
“Friday night. There’s a thing.” Suddenly this seemed like the worst idea I’d ever had.
“Friday night is good. What’s the thing?”
“A blues combo from the hospital. They’re playing at a small restaurant.”
James laughed. “A hospital blues combo? Did I hear that right? What do they call themselves, The Arrhythmias?”
“Close. They’re called Code Blues.”
“Clever. So, young lady, are you inviting me out on a date?”
“I guess I am.” No big deal, since he would soon be back in New York. With any luck I’d find out what was behind the O’Brien’s lawsuit before the evening was over.
“Excellent. Tell me when and where to pick you up.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell James I lived in my grandparents’ barn. “Let me meet you there around eight o’clock. I have a family commitment earlier.”
“All right,” James said, “and speaking of family, I’d like to get copies of Cody’s hospital records. What’s the protocol there?”
Why was he asking me about Cody’s medical records when they had already been subpoenaed? I kept my response neutral, remembering Quinn’s warning.
“I’m not sure, but I’ll see what I can find out for you.” I gave James directions to Margie’s and finished the call so I could leave another message for Harry, a call he didn’t return before I went to bed. Laurie’s mysterious message about Game Boy had me tossing and turning most of the night.
Harry called my cellphone the next morning while I was driving to work. I answered anyway, avoiding eye contact with glaring motorists while I told him about the strange message.
“Game Boy?” he said. “You called me because some ditzy runaway nurse left you a message about Game Boy?”
“She’s not ditzy. She’s smart and level-headed.”
“Then why call me?”
“She sounded distressed. I think she’s in danger. Just meet me somewhere and let me explain.”
“Come to my job site at noon and bring lunch. It better be good. And expensive.”
As soon as I reached the library, I called the Health Information department with a hypothetical, not identifying myself as a TMC employee.
The clerk rattled off a practiced answer. “We provide a copy of the deceased patient’s hospital record only to the person named as next of kin on the death certificate.” She emphasized that there were no exceptions.
Was Cody’s father the official next of kin? Would Seamus cooperate with James and request the records? I made a mental note to ask James about his relationship with his father, even though I knew none of that would matter if the record had already been subpoenaed.
Harry’s favorite food is practically anything edible, but he said expensive, so I picked up two Big Macs and stopped off at a dessert shop for a caramel pecan cheesecake.
I hadn’t seen the Timbergate Mall project for several weeks, and it now rose three stories high, a magnificent skeleton formed of beams and girders. It looked as if Harry’s most ambitious childhood Erector Set creation had come to life. A small group of men and women in dust-powdered work clothes and yellow hard hats sat in the shade of a portable canopy talking and laughing while they munched food from lunch boxes and poured coffee from thermos bottles.
Harry appeared in the open doorway of his job site trailer as I pulled up and parked. Wearing a dark green polo shirt, creased khakis, and immaculate suede boots, he seemed immune to the dust and grime of the construction site.
“Hey, Aimless, what did you bring?”
“Big Macs and cheesecake.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m on a budget. So are you going to let me in or not?”
“What kind of cheesecake?”
I pushed my way inside the trailer, once again marveling at his perfectly organized home away from home. A custom-built rack held dozens of rolls of blueprints. His laptop sat open, displaying a spreadsheet. A high-tech printer rested on a nearby table. Books on architecture filled a shelf over his settee.
He moved a blueprint off his drafting table to make room for the food.
By the time we had finished our burgers, I’d brought Harry up to date on Laurie Popejoy’s disappearance and her phone messages. I filled him in on my visit from James O’Brien and our impending date. I even mentioned Cleo Cominoli’s growing fears for Sig’s fate if he went under Phyllis Poole’s knife.
Harry cut two slivers of cheesecake and licked the knife. He stuffed the remaining cheesecake in his mini-fridge and brought our dessert to the small table.
“Why are you getting involved in all this? It’s none of your business.”
“Cleo asked me—”
“Cleo’s boyfriend is a grownup. He can make his own decisions. If he needs an operation, it’s up to him to decide who’s going to do it.”
“But he doesn’t know what we know about Poole.”
“What do you know?”
That stopped me. What did we know?
“We know she was going to operate on Cody O’Brien and now he’s dead.” Hearing myself, I realized I sounded as paranoid as Cleo.
“So what?”
> “So why did Laurie Popejoy turn up missing right after Cody checked out against medical advice? And why is she calling me saying it wasn’t Game Boy? What’s that about?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“You’re the Game Boy expert. I thought it might mean something to you.”
Harry reached for his laptop. He typed a few keystrokes, nodded at the screen, and gave me a pitying look. “And you’re supposed to be the research whiz.”
I got up and looked over his shoulder. He had pulled up a website for Cody O’Brien. There, under a picture of Cody and his horse, was a caption: Former bull rider Cody O’Brien pins hopes for a new career on his palomino cutting horse, Game Boy. The text of the accompanying article, written two weeks earlier, mentioned injuries that had finished Cody’s career as a bronc rider but didn’t go into detail about his injured testicle.
Harry pointed halfway down the screen. “Did you see this?”
I looked where he pointed. Cody bought the horse at auction for two hundred thousand dollars.
“Holy horse flesh,” I said.
Harry printed the page and handed it to me. “Game Boy is a horse. A hell of an expensive one. Now what?”
“That’s what Laurie meant. ‘It wasn’t Game Boy.’ She knows Cody wasn’t killed by his horse. She must know what really happened to him. What if she witnessed something? Maybe Cody’s killer is after her and she’s hiding out.”
“You’re doing a lot of speculating. If she knows something, why doesn’t she go to the police?”
“I don’t know, but she’s called me twice. What if she’s in danger? I can’t ignore that, but I can’t reach her.”
Harry got up and rinsed our cheesecake plates in his small sink. “What are you planning to do?”
“Find Laurie. But I need your help.”
“Why me? Why not Nick? Why don’t you give him a call?”
“I don’t know …. Nick and I aren’t … we’re not—”
“I know what you’re not. Nick keeps me informed. I don’t have time and Nick’s available. Call him.”
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