Obsessed

by G. H. Ephron

  “Hello?” It was a man’s voice, a little breathless. For a moment, I thought I’d gotten the wrong number. Then I recognized the voice. It was Dr. Shands.

  “This is Peter Zak,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was looking for Dr. Ryan.”

  “She”—there was a pause—“she’s unavailable right now.”

  “She has a patient—” I started. That’s when I heard a woman scream. At first it was loud, then muffled, as if Shands put his hand over the receiver. “Dr. Shands? Is everything all right?”

  There was scuffling sound. Then, “I’m sorry.” His voice was emotionless. “Something’s happened. We have an emergency situation here.”

  “I just need to talk to her for a moment….”

  The line had gone dead.

  12

  “WHAT? WHAT?” Gloria said, leaning over me.

  I stared at the receiver. “I talked to the guy who runs the place. Emily can’t come to the phone. He says there’s an emergency situation.”

  “Emergency situation—what’s that supposed to mean?” Gloria demanded, echoing my own question.

  “And I heard a woman scream.”

  “Do you think it was Emily?” Gloria asked, her voice taut. “One of us needs to get over there.” She gave a quick glance at the clock. “I can’t leave, so it’s got to be you.” I’d always known which one of us was more dispensable. “You and I have a meeting with the head of plant and operations at ten, but that can wait. I’ll send someone up to apologize to the patient.”

  I didn’t even bother to go up for my jacket. Without thinking what I’d do when I got there, I raced out. As I drove toward Central Square, I ran the brief phone conversation through my head. Why wasn’t the receptionist answering the phone? Did “emergency” mean there’d been an accident—another accident, this one with graver consequences than a flying hockey puck? Who was screaming? And what was Emily doing at the MRI lab when she had an appointment with Mr. Black at the Pearce?

  Traffic backed up on Mass. Ave. as I approached Sidney Street. At the corner, I could see flashing lights reflecting off the building. Several police cruisers, a fire truck, and an ambulance were parked in front. Traffic was taking forever to crawl past. I stayed on Mass. Ave. and parked at a meter. Then I sprinted back.

  I approached the building. There was a crowd of gawkers gathered outside. Firefighters were getting back into their truck.

  I edged up to the cop at the entrance. “I need to go inside,” I told him.

  “Sorry, no one goes in,” he said, his face impassive, his eyes in shadow under the visor of his cap.

  “What happened?”

  “We need to keep this area clear, sir,” he said. “Please move along.”

  Through the glass doors I could see the lobby. The doors to the MRI lab were propped open and another officer was stationed there. An EMT came out through the lobby and into the street. I followed her to the ambulance.

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  She didn’t answer, her face impassive. She grabbed for a metal suitcase from the back of the ambulance.

  “I have a friend who works in there,” I said. She paused. “A good friend.”

  She gave me a quick glance and shook her head. “Sorry.”

  I watched her disappear into the building. If someone had been hurt, they’d have been rushed to the hospital already. Police and EMTs still there meant something worse had happened. Had Emily’s stalker followed her and finally struck?

  I had to get inside. But short of tackling the officer at the door, there was no way I was going to get past him. I walked around the corner. They hadn’t blocked off the garage entrance. I ducked inside and trotted down the ramp.

  Taking the elevator up wasn’t going to help. I’d just end up being turned away again at the lobby entrance. Then I remembered the stairway exits in the MRI lab. Did any of them end down here?

  I tried to orient myself. I moved to the part of the garage under the lab. There was a sign on the door to the stairwell: NOT AN ENTRANCE. In smaller print below, it directed people to the elevator. I tried the door. It opened. Someone had taped the latch over to keep it from engaging.

  I took the stairs two at a time and stopped at the exit door painted with a big numeral one. The handle on the door creaked as I pushed down on it and pulled the door open a crack. I listened. There were voices, but not nearby. I slipped into the corridor.

  I hadn’t been in this part of the place before. There was what looked like a pathology lab—a large room with a couple of stainless steel tables, sinks. There were plastic buckets and containers stacked on the floor, plus all kinds of lab equipment including oversized microscopes jury-rigged with lights and cameras. Shelves held hundreds of jars with paper labels. Probably stains and fixatives for making slides.

  I continued along the hall to a pair of fire doors. I looked through a window in the door. There was Shands’s office. As I pushed through, Shands came out into the hall.

  “How the hell did you get in here? I thought they had this place—”

  “What happened? Is Emily all right?” I asked, cutting him off.

  “Dr. Ryan?” His eyebrows came together in a question. “Dr. Ryan—” His voice hardened.

  Just then two police officers came striding up the hallway. “Dr. Shands?” the taller one said, ignoring me. “I have a few questions. Is there somewhere we could talk?”

  Shands hung there. He looked at me, then back at the police officers. Then, like a light switch, he turned on the charm. “Sure,” he said with a benign smile. “Be happy to answer any questions you have.” He took them into his office.

  I continued down the hall into the central area with its warning signs and desk. Amanda the receptionist was sitting there, looking pale and in shock. The double doors to the inner areas were propped open. The sawhorse barriers had been overturned. The door to the scanning room was open, too. The EMT I’d seen outside strode past me and into the room. I moved closer.

  I barely noticed the swarm of police officers and medical technicians. I was riveted by the blood on the white linoleum floor.

  A man, probably a medical examiner, stood with his back to me, hunched over the table. I knew there was a person on the table, the same person whose blood had pooled beneath the system and been tracked across the floor.

  I took a step into the room. A dented oxygen tank lay on the floor near the machine. I felt sick to my stomach, remembering how the magnet had hurtled toward the machine. An oxygen tank would be just as lethal.

  I was pressing forward. I needed to see. A police officer came at me. He put his hands up. “Sorry, sir. I’m going to have to ask you to wait in another room.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  Now the medical examiner was turning. He was stepping aside. As he reached into his bag for something, the victim’s arm slipped and dangled off the edge of the table. The armpit of the white lab coat was stained with sweat.

  “Dr. Zak?” said a woman’s voice behind me, uncertain and tremulous. It was Emily. I turned and exhaled a huge sigh of relief.

  Emily moved toward me hesitantly, her face streaked with tears. Then she paused, wobbled, looking as if she might collapse. When I took her in my arms, her muscles went limp.

  “Poor Lenny,” she said. “It’s so awful.” She gave a deep, wracking sob. She hugged me tighter, her breathing quickening. “Thanks for being here.” Then she righted herself, struggling to regain control before pulling away and giving me an odd look. “Why are you here?”

  She wasn’t alone in that thought.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” It was Detective Sergeant Joseph MacRae.

  I wasn’t surprised to see MacRae standing there in his rumpled brown suit. After all, he was a homicide detective.

  “Christ almighty,” he said, rubbing his hand back and forth across the side of his red buzz cut and eyeing me with distaste. His ears burned with annoyance. I’d ended up in the middle of far too many inves
tigations for his taste…or mine.

  When I’d first met MacRae, he’d been smitten with a crime victim who claimed to remember who shot her in the head. I liked to think that over time we’d developed a grudging respect for one another. Maybe. It didn’t help that he and Annie were old friends, and at one time may have been more than that.

  “Hey, Mac,” I said.

  He eyed me suspiciously. “I didn’t know you worked here too.”

  I barely missed a beat. “I’m involved in a research project with these guys.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. He sounded less than convinced. “Ms. Ryan seems to have found the victim,” MacRae said, his tone implying something more than his words. Emily stood there trembling.

  “Dr. Ryan,” I said stiffly. “She works here.” I knew she’d have been badly overmatched against MacRae.

  Emily took another look at Philbrick’s body and her lower lip quivered. She bit on a knuckle.

  “How about I take Dr. Ryan somewhere she can calm down a little?” I offered.

  “Just don’t take her too far,” MacRae said. “We’re going to want to talk to her. And you too.”

  I took one last look at Leonard Philbrick. Even from across the room, I could see that his skull had been crushed. His personal belongings had been laid out on a rolling stainless steel table. Shattered eyeglasses. A couple of pencils. Wallet.

  As I put my arm around Emily and shepherded her to the control room, I wondered why Philbrick had called me yesterday—three times. Damn. I could hear his voice. Had the call just been a routine follow-up on Annie’s uncle? That made no sense. Why not just call the floor nurse and get it? Had he been reluctant to say why he was calling because he’d been calling from here and didn’t want to be overheard? He hadn’t answered his phone when I called him back—had he ended up staying here all night?

  Through the glass panel we could see the police and the medical personnel working. We sat at one of the tables. Emily’s face was swollen, her eyes bleary. She winced as a camera flashed next door.

  “You want to talk about it?” I asked.

  Emily hiccupped. “Lenny called me last night to tell me—”

  “When?” I asked, cutting her off.

  She gave me a surprised look. “At around eight, I think.”

  “He called me too. Three times yesterday afternoon. When I tried to call him back he didn’t answer his phone. Here or at home.”

  “That’s odd. He called me to say that Dr. Pullaski found my beeper,” Emily said. “I was sure I had it with me but when I went to look, it wasn’t in my bag. I told him I’d have to come in early because I had an appointment with Mr. Black at…” Her eyes widened. “Oh my gosh. Mr. Black.” She rose to her feet.

  “Don’t worry. We sent him home, told him you were held up by an emergency.”

  Emily groaned. “I hope he’s okay.”

  “So you found Dr. Philbrick?”

  She nodded. “I heard the scanner going. Seemed odd, that early in the morning. I came in to see what was up.” Emily’s gazed through the window. They were shifting Philbrick’s body from the table. “I saw the blood.”

  Emily looked down at her feet. I wondered if she had blood on her shoes.

  “I could barely breathe.” She swallowed. “I knew someone was inside.”

  “So you stopped the scan and slid the table out?”

  “I tried to. But it was stuck.” She started to cry again. “I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get it to budge. Finally I shut everything down and turned off the magnetic field. Quenched the magnet.” She pointed to a red button, marked EMERGENCY RUNDOWN, set apart from the others on the control panel. “I’d been drilled, over and over, never to do that except in a dire emergency when someone’s pinned in the machine.”

  “You came in here to shut it down?”

  “No. There’s another panel on the wall beside the scanner. There was this loud noise, like a jet plane. Scared me half to death. Then the thing shut down. The helium vented to the outside. No explosion, thank God.”

  I looked into the scanner room. There was a sort of aluminum smokestack connecting the scanner to the outside wall. That must have been how the cryogenic gasses vented.

  “The table still wouldn’t move. The tank was wedged in there.” Emily looked at back of her hand. The nail on her index finger was broken down to the quick. She put it in her mouth and sucked. “That’s when Dr. Shands came in. He called the police. They managed to pry the tank out of there.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you bring oxygen tanks into the scanner room all the time. You brought a tank in for Mr. O’Neill.”

  “That one was MRI-compatible. It’s the only kind we use to avoid just this kind of accident. I don’t know where that tank came from.” Her eyes widened as she realized the implications.

  “If that oxygen tank got here by mistake,” I said, “and you happened to be the one who brought it into the scan room, no one would—”

  “That’s not what happened. Besides, we never assume—we always test before bringing one into the scan room.” Her eyes beseeched me. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about how careful Philbrick was. He’d been working around powerful magnets for years. Emily had been working around them for only a few months.

  MacRae came to the window. He looked at Emily and jerked his thumb in the direction of the hall. Behind him a technician was dusting the MRI system for fingerprints. They’d find Emily’s prints on top. Now he moved on to the oxygen tank. He’d find her prints on that, too.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is what the police believe. You shouldn’t be talking to them without an attorney.”

  “If I get a lawyer then they’ll think I have something to hide.” She reached for the door.

  “That’s the kind of thinking that gets innocent people in trouble. I know an excellent criminal attorney.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said quietly, and pulled the door open. “I’ll just tell them the truth.”

  MacRae was waiting. “Don’t you go anywhere, either,” he growled at me, and led Emily away.

  I leaned against the door. Blood on her shoes. Her fingerprints everywhere. She was a novice at working with these big magnets. She’d brought a dangerous metal object into the scan room before. The only person who might have been able to vouch for her was dead.

  It wouldn’t be long before the police understood how the system worked—that the magnetic field was never off even when the machine wasn’t scanning, even if you pulled the plug and cut the electricity. They’d quickly grasp the implications. This “accident” couldn’t have been caused by someone accidentally leaving an oxygen tank in the scan room. If Philbrick had carried it in himself, then it would have been drawn into the system before he could get in it.

  No, the oxygen canister had to have been brought into the room while Philbrick was in the machine. While he was giving himself an MRI. Poor devil probably never even knew what hit him.

  13

  TWENTY MINUTES later Emily hadn’t returned. My head felt like a jackhammer was going after my prefrontal cortex.

  I wandered until I found a small room with a refrigerator, a sink, and a Formica table with some folding chairs. There wasn’t any aspirin, but on the counter there was a coffeemaker. In one of the wall cabinets I found packets of coffee. I started a fresh pot, then sat down to wait.

  The pot was sizzling as the last drops of water dripped through when I heard footsteps in the hall. Dr. Pullaski came in and reached into the cabinet for a coffee mug. No blood on those cream-colored high-heeled pumps. She nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw me.

  “Peter Zak, Dr. Peter Zak,” I said, in case she didn’t remember. “I started a pot.”

  With an unsteady hand, she poured herself some coffee. “What a horrendous day. I still can’t believe it. It’s too awful.”

  “Looks like a terrible accident.”

/>   She leaned against the counter, held the mug in cupped hands and inhaled the coffee aroma, then took a sip. “I called Leonard’s sister to let her know. I would have gone over there to tell her but the police want me to stay here. I didn’t want her to hear it on the news. He’s been with us since the beginning. I never thought—” Her voice broke off. She closed her eyes and leaned back, her lips trembling. Then she gave me a sharp look, a combination of suspicion and maybe a little fear.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. Her look turned speculative and before I could come up with an answer she said, “Were you meeting Dr. Ryan? Poor thing. I’m sure she didn’t mean to.”

  “Mean to what?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” She took a sip of the coffee. “She must have brought the oxygen canister into the scan room, not realizing that it was a ferrous container.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Who knows.”

  “And why would there be a tank like that here in the first place? One that could be drawn into the magnet?”

  “Sometimes the suppliers slip up. It’s happened before. The tanks are usually labeled but we always check. At least that’s standard operating procedure”—she pursed her lips—“which everyone is supposed to follow. And why was she here? She’s not scheduled to be here this morning.”

  “She said Dr. Philbrick called her, said you’d found her beeper. She came in before work to get it.”

  “Me? She must have misheard him. Of course I’m not surprised. She’s a bit scattered.”

  “Did you make those calls?” Shands asked, sticking his head into the room. His voice was steady and even, a man used to giving orders.

  “I’m taking care of it.” Dr. Pullaski gave a nudge of her head in my direction.

  “Damage control,” Shands told me. “I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course we’ll mount a full investigation,” Dr. Pullaski said. “We’ve never had a serious incident. Shouldn’t affect our funding. After all, with our track record, and the services we provide—” She was practicing some of that “damage control” on me. “It’s a one-in-a-million accident. Of course, we’ll reassess our training procedures.”