Harmful Intent

by Robin Cook

  Devlin pointed at the elevator. “Things move at a slow pace around here. When I was in here on a drug bust five years ago, that elevator had the same sign on it.”

  “Are you a cop?” the clerk asked.

  “Sort of,” Devlin said.

  They climbed in silence. By the time they got to the fifth floor, Devlin thought the clerk was about to have a heart attack. He was breathing heavily and perspiring profusely. Devlin let him catch his breath before they went down the hall to 5F.

  Just to be on the safe side, Devlin knocked on the door. When there was no answer, he stepped aside and let the clerk open it. Devlin made a quick tour. The room was empty.

  “I think I’ll wait for Mr. Bard here,” Devlin said as he walked over to the window and glanced out. He turned back to the clerk. “But I don’t want you to say anything to him when he comes in. Let’s just think of me as a little surprise. Understand?”

  The clerk nodded vigorously.

  “Mr. Rhodes, alias Mr. Bard, is a fugitive from justice,” Devlin said. “There’s a warrant for his arrest. He’s a dangerous man, convicted of murder. If you say anything to arouse his suspicion, there’s no telling how he may react. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Absolutely,” the clerk said. “Mr. Bard acted strange when he first came in. I was thinking of calling the police.”

  “Sure you were,” Devlin said sarcastically.

  “I won’t say a word to anyone,” the clerk said as he retreated out the door.

  “I’m counting on you,” Devlin said. He locked the door behind the clerk.

  As soon as he was alone, Devlin dashed over to the briefcase and slung it onto the bed. With trembling hands he undid the latches and lifted the lid. He riffled through the papers but came up with nothing. Next he unsnapped the accordion file and went through each compartment rapidly.

  “Damn!” he yelled. He’d hoped Jeffrey would have been foolish enough to have left the money in the briefcase. But all it contained was a bunch of papers and underwear. Devlin picked up one of the sheets that had “From the Desk of Christopher Everson” printed on the top. It was filled with scientific jargon. Devlin wondered who Christopher Everson was.

  Dropping the paper, Devlin made a complete search of the room in case Jeffrey had hidden the money. But it wasn’t there. Devlin guessed that Jeffrey would have the money on him. It was the main reason he’d agreed to Michael’s deal so quickly. Devlin planned to pocket the forty-five grand Jeffrey was supposed to have, in addition to the ten Michael would be giving him.

  Stretching out on the bed, Devlin pulled his handgun from his holster. The good doctor was a constant source of surprises. Devlin decided he’d better be ready for anything.

  Jeffrey felt considerably more at ease with his disguise and new identity after his trip to Boston Memorial had gone without a hitch. If people he knew intimately didn’t recognize him, he had nothing to fear out in public, at least in terms of having his identity revealed. Bolstered by his new confidence, Jeffrey caught a cab and headed over to St. Joseph’s Hospital.

  He was still conscious of carrying so much cash, but he was a lot more comfortable toting it around in the duffel bag than he had been carrying the briefcase.

  St. Joseph’s Hospital was considerably older than the Memorial. It was a turn-of-the-century brick structure that had been refurbished several times. Set in a wooded grove adjacent to the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, its grounds and location were considerably more attractive than the Memorial’s.

  The hospital had originally been built as a Catholic charity hospital, but over the years it had been transformed to a busy community hospital. Since St. Joseph’s was in Boston’s suburbs, it lacked the gritty, urban feeling of an inner-city hospital that bore the brunt of the country’s social problems.

  Jeffrey stopped and asked for directions to the intensive care unit from one of the pink-smocked, snowy-haired women volunteers who manned the hospital’s information booth. With a smile, the elderly woman directed him to the second floor.

  Jeffrey found the intensive care unit without difficulty and walked in.

  As an anesthesiologist, Jeffrey felt right at home in the seemingly chaotic, high-tech unit. Every bed was occupied. Machines hissed and beeped. Clusters of IV bottles hung on the tops of poles like glass fruit. Tubes and wires were everywhere.

  In the middle of all this electronic hustle-bustle were the nurses. As usual, they were so preoccupied with their responsibilities they didn’t even acknowledge Jeffrey’s presence.

  Jeffrey spotted Kelly by the nursing station. She had just picked up a phone when Jeffrey stepped up to the desk. Their eyes met briefly and Kelly indicated for Jeffrey to wait for a moment. He noticed she was taking down some stat laboratory values.

  Once Kelly had hung up, she called out to one of the other nurses and yelled out the results. From across the room the nurse made a motion that she understood and adjusted the flow of the IV to compensate.

  “Can I help you?” Kelly asked once she directed her attention to Jeffrey. She was dressed in a white blouse and white slacks. Her hair was pulled back in a French knot.

  “You already have,” Jeffrey said with a smile.

  “Excuse me?” Kelly asked, clearly puzzled. Jeffrey laughed. “It’s me! Jeffrey!”

  “Jeffrey?” Kelly squinted.

  “Jeffrey Rhodes,” he said. “I can’t believe that no one recognizes me! It’s not as if I had plastic surgery.”

  Kelly brought a hand up to hide her smile. “What are you doing here? What happened to your mustache? And your hair?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure.” Kelly told another nurse that she was taking her break. “Come on,” she said to Jeffrey, pointing to a door behind the nurses’ station. She took him into a back room that the nurses used for storage as well as a makeshift lounge.

  “How about some coffee?” Kelly asked. Jeffrey said he’d love a cup. Kelly poured one for him and one for herself. “So what’s with this disguise?”

  Jeffrey put down his duffel bag and removed his glasses. They had started to irritate the bridge of his nose. He took the coffee and sat down. Kelly leaned against the counter, holding her coffee mug in both hands.

  Starting from the time he left her house the evening before, Jeffrey told Kelly everything that had happened: the fiasco at the airport, the fact that he had become a fugitive, assaulting Devlin with his briefcase, the scuffle with the handcuffs.

  “So you were going to leave the country?” Kelly asked.

  “That had been my intention,” Jeffrey admitted.

  “And you weren’t going to call and tell me?”

  “I would have called you as soon as I could,” Jeffrey said. “I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At a flophouse in downtown Boston,” Jeffrey said.

  Kelly shook her head in dismay. “Oh, Jeffrey. This all sounds pretty bad. Maybe you should just turn yourself in. This can’t help your appeal.”

  “If I turn myself in, they’ll put me in jail and probably deny bail. Even if they gave me bond, I don’t think I could raise it now. But my appeal really should remain a separate issue. Anyway, I can’t go to jail because I have too much to do.”

  “What does that mean?” Kelly asked.

  “I’ve been going over Chris’s notes,” Jeffrey said, barely able to contain his excitement. “I’ve even spent some time doing research at the library. I think Chris might have been onto something when he suspected a contaminant being in the Marcaine he’d administered to Henry Noble. And now I’m beginning to suspect the same about the Marcaine I gave to Patty Owen. What I want to do is investigate both incidents more thoroughly.”

  “This gives me a bad sense of déjà vu,” Kelly said.

  “What do you mean?” Jeffrey asked.

  “You’re sounding exactly the way Chris did when he first began to suspect a contaminant. T
he next thing I knew, he’d committed suicide.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t mean to bring back painful thoughts for you by dredging up the past.”

  “It’s not the past that worries me,” Kelly said. “It’s you. I’m worried about you. Yesterday you were depressed, today you’re a little manic. What will it be tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Jeffrey said. “Honest! I really think I’m onto something.”

  Kelly cocked her head to the side and raised one eyebrow as she looked at Jeffrey questioningly. “I want to be sure you remember your promise to me,” Kelly said.

  “I remember.”

  “You’d better,” Kelly said sternly. Then she smiled. “Now that we have that understood, you can tell me what’s made you so excited over the contaminant idea.”

  “A number of things. Henry Noble’s persistent paralysis, for one. Apparently he’d even lost function of cranial nerves. That doesn’t happen with spinal anesthesia, so it couldn’t have been ‘irreversible spinal anesthesia’ like they said. And in my case, the child had persistent paralysis with an asymmetric distribution.”

  “Wasn’t Noble’s paralysis thought to be secondary to lack of oxygen because of the seizures and cardiac arrests?”

  “That’s right,” Jeffrey said. “But at autopsy, Chris wrote that axonal or nerve cell degeneration had been seen on microscopic sections.”

  “You’re getting beyond me,” Kelly admitted.

  “You wouldn’t see axonal degeneration with the degree of oxygen deprivation that Henry Noble had experienced—if he had any oxygen deprivation at all. If he had been deprived of oxygen enough to cause axonal degeneration, they wouldn’t have been able to resuscitate him. And you certainly don’t see axonal degeneration with local anesthetics. Local anesthetics block function. They definitely aren’t cellular poisons.”

  “Suppose you’re right,” Kelly said. “How are you going to prove it?”

  “It’s not going to be easy,” Jeffrey admitted, “especially with my being a fugitive. But I’m going to give it a shot just the same. I wanted to ask you if you would consider lending a hand. If my theory is right and I can prove it, it would clear Chris’s name as well as mine.”

  “Of course I’ll help,” Kelly said. “Did you really think you had to ask?”

  “I want you to think seriously about this before you agree,” Jeffrey told her. “There could be a problem because of my fugitive status. Any aid you give me could be interpreted as abetting a fugitive. If so, it could be a felony itself. I just don’t know.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Kelly said. “I’d do anything to clear Chris’s name. And besides”—she added, blushing slightly—“I’d like to do what I can to help you.”

  “The first step will be to document that the two ampules of Marcaine came from the same pharmaceutical manufacturer. That should be easy enough. It will be more difficult to find out if they came from the same batch, which is what I suspect. Even though Chris’s case and mine were a number of months apart, it’s still possible they could have come from the same production run. What worries me is that there might be more contaminated vials out there.”

  “God! What a creepy thought! A tragedy waiting to happen.”

  “Are you still friendly with someone out at Valley Hospital who could tell you the company that supplies their Marcaine? I happen to know that the Memorial gets theirs from Arolen Pharmaceuticals in New Jersey.”

  “Heavens, yes,” Kelly said. “Most of the staff I worked with when I was at Valley is still there. Charlotte Henning is the OR supervisor. I talk to her at least once a week. I’ll call her as soon as I get off work.”

  “That would be terrific,” Jeffrey said. “As for me, I’m the newest member of the Boston Memorial housekeeping team.”

  “What!”

  Jeffrey explained how he’d gone to Boston Memorial in his new disguise to apply for a position in housekeeping’s night shift.

  “I’m not surprised no one recognized you,” Kelly said. “I sure didn’t.”

  “But these are people I’ve worked with for years and years,” Jeffrey said.

  The door to the intensive care unit cracked open and one of the nurses stuck her head in. “Kelly, we’re going to need you in a few minutes. We’re getting an admission.”

  Kelly told her that she’d be there shortly. The nurse nodded, then discreetly retreated.

  “So they hired you right off the bat?” Kelly asked.

  “They sure did,” Jeffrey said. “I’m starting tonight.”

  “What are you going to do once you’re inside the hospital?” Kelly asked.

  “One thing is to take you up on your suggestion,” Jeffrey said. “I’m going to try to explain the vial of .75% Marcaine that was found in my anesthesia machine. I plan to look up what other surgeries were performed in that OR that day. The other thing I want to try to do is see the whole pathology report on Patty Owen. I’m curious whether they did any peripheral nerve sections on her at autopsy. I’m also curious to know if they did any toxicology.”

  “All I can say is you better be careful,” Kelly said. Then she polished off the dregs of her coffee and rinsed her mug at the sink. “Sorry, I have to get back to work.”

  Jeffrey went to the sink and rinsed his cup. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with me,” he said as she opened the door. The sounds of the respirators drifted into the room. Jeffrey picked up his duffel bag, put on his glasses, and followed her out the door.

  “You’ll call me tonight?” she asked before they parted. “I’ll speak to Charlotte as soon as I can.”

  “What time do you go to bed?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Not before eleven,” Kelly said.

  “I’ll call before I go to work,” Jeffrey said.

  Kelly watched him go. She wished she’d had the courage to ask him if he wanted to stay with her.

  As far as Carl Bodanski was concerned, it had been an extraordinarily productive day. Many unpleasant loose ends that had been bothering him had been solved. The biggest had been finding an additional worker for housekeeping’s night shift. At that very moment Bodanski was busy at the big board, hanging its newest name tag. It read: FRANK AMENDOLA.

  Stepping back from the board, Bodanski eyed it critically. It wasn’t quite right. Frank Amendola’s name was slightly cockeyed. He gingerly bent the tiny metal hooks that held the name tag, then stepped back. Much better.

  There was a quiet knock on his door. “Come in,” he called. The door opened. It was his secretary, Martha Reton. She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. Something was up. Martha was behaving strangely.

  “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Bodanski,” she said.

  “Quite all right,” Bodanski said. “What’s wrong?” Bodanski was an individual who saw any change in routine as threatening.

  “There’s a man here to see you,” Martha said.

  “Who is it?” Bodanski asked. Plenty of people came to see him. It was the personnel department. Why was she making an issue of it?

  “His name is Horace Mannly,” Martha said. “He’s from the FBI.”

  An imperceptible tremor went down Bodanski’s spine. The FBI, he thought with alarm. He ran through the various minor offenses he’d committed in the past few months. There was the parking ticket he’d ignored. There was the deduction of the fax machine for his home that he’d included on last year’s income tax, even though he hadn’t purchased the machine for business purposes.

  Bodanski arranged himself in the seat behind his desk as if by looking professional he might ward off suspicion. “Send Mr. Mannly in,” he said nervously.

  Martha disappeared. An instant later, a rather obese man entered Bodanski’s office.

  “Mr. Bodanski,” the FBI man said as he sauntered to Bodanski’s desk. “Agent Mannly.” He extended his hand.

  Bodanski shook it. It was clammy; Bodanski stifled a grimace. The agent had a large dewlap that practically covered the
knot of his tie. His eyes, nose, and mouth seemed remarkably small, centered in the large, pale sphere of his face.

  “Sit down,” Bodanski offered. After they were both seated, he asked, “Now what can I do for you?”

  “Computers are supposed to help us but sometimes they just create work,” Mannly said with a sigh. “You know what I mean?”

  “Certainly do,” Bodanski said, but he didn’t know if he agreed or not. Yet he wasn’t about to contradict an FBI agent.

  “Some big computer someplace just spit out the name Frank Amendola,” Mannly said. “Is it true this guy is working for you? Hey—you mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, I did just hire a Frank Amendola. And no, I don’t mind if you smoke.” Although he was relieved not to be the object of an inquiry, he was disappointed to learn that Frank Amendola was. He should have known hiring him for the night shift was too good to be true.

  Horace Mannly lit up. “Our office got a tip from the Bureau about you hiring this Frank Amendola,” Mannly explained.

  “We hired him today,” Bodanski said. “Is he wanted?”

  “Oh, he’s wanted all right, but it’s nothing criminal. It’s his wife that wants him, not the FBI. A domestic issue. Sometimes we get involved. It depends. His wife’s apparently made a big fuss, writing to her congressman and to the Bureau and all that jazz. So his social security number was flagged as a missing person. You guys run your cross-check, his social security number rings our bell. Bingo. So how’d this guy act, normal or what?”

  “He seemed a bit nervous,” Bodanski said with relief. At least the guy wasn’t dangerous. “Otherwise, he acted normal. He seemed intelligent. He talked of taking classes at law school. We thought he was a good candidate for employment. Is there something we should do?”

  “I don’t know,” Mannly said. “I don’t think so. I was just supposed to come down here and check it out. See if he really had reappeared. Tell you what. Don’t do anything until you hear from us. How’s that?”

  “We’ll be happy to cooperate in any way we can.”