by Robin Cook
“You’re not suggesting . . .” Kelly couldn’t finish her sentence.
Jeffrey shook his head. “I know. I know. I’m starting to sound like one of those crazies who sees a conspiracy behind everything. But it’s such an unusual sequence. I guess at this point I’m just sensitive to anything that sounds even remotely suspicious.”
By eleven P.M. Devlin felt it was time to give up for the night. It was too late to expect people to open their doors to a stranger. Besides, he’d done enough for one day and he was exhausted. He wondered if his intuition about Chris Everson’s even being in the Boston area was correct. He’d covered all the Eversons in the southern suburbs of Boston without any appreciable results. One other person said that he’d heard there was a Dr. Christopher Everson, but he didn’t know where the man lived or worked.
Since he was in Boston proper, Devlin decided to pay a quick visit to Michael Mosconi. He knew it was late, but he didn’t care. He drove into the North End and double parked, along with everyone else, on Hanover Street. From there he walked through the narrow streets to Unity Street, where Michael owned a modest three-story house.
“I hope this means you have some good news for me,” Michael said as he opened the door for Devlin. Michael was dressed in a maroon, satin-looking polyester robe. His feet were stuck into aged leather slippers. Even Mrs. Mosconi appeared at the top of the stairs to see who this late-night caller was. She had on a red chenille robe. Her hair was in pincurlers, which Devlin thought had gone out with the fifties. She also had some glop on her face, which Devlin guessed was to retard the inevitable aging process. God help any burglar who inadvertently broke into this house, thought Devlin. One look at Mrs. Mosconi in the dark and he’d die of sheer terror.
Mosconi took Devlin into the kitchen and offered him a beer, which Devlin accepted with enthusiasm. Mosconi went to the refrigerator and handed Devlin a bottle of Rolling Rock.
“No glass?” Devlin asked with a smile.
Mosconi frowned. “Don’t push your luck.”
Devlin took a long pull before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Well? Did you get him?”
Devlin shook his head. “Not yet.”
“What is this, a social call?” Michael asked with his usual sarcasm.
“Business,” Devlin said. “What is this Jeffrey Rhodes being sent up for?”
“Christ, give me patience,” Michael said while looking heavenward and pretending to pray. Then, looking back at Devlin, he said, “I told you: murder-two. He was convicted of second-degree murder.”
“Did he do it?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Michael said with exasperation. “He was convicted. That’s enough for me. What the hell difference does it make?”
“This case isn’t run-of-the-mill,” Devlin said. “I need more information.”
Mosconi heaved an exasperated sigh. “The guy’s a doctor. His conviction had something to do with malpractice and drugs. Beyond that, I don’t know. Devlin, what the hell’s the matter with you? What difference does all this make? I want Rhodes, understand?”
“I need more information,” Devlin repeated. “I want you to find out the details of his crime. I think if I knew more about his conviction, I’d have a better idea as to what the guy’s up to now.”
“Maybe I should just call in reinforcements,” Mosconi said. “Maybe a little friendly competition between, say, a half dozen of you bounty hunters would get quicker results.”
Competition was not what Devlin wanted. There was too much money on the line. Thinking quickly, he said: “The one thing in our favor at the moment is the fact that the doc is staying in Boston. If you want him to run, like to South America, where he was headed when I stopped him, then bring in your reinforcements.”
“All I want to know is when you’ll have him in jail.”
“Give me a week,” Devlin said. “A week total. Five more days. But you have to get the information I need. This doctor is up to something. As soon as I figure out what it is, I’ll find him.”
Devlin left Mosconi’s house and returned to his car. He could barely keep his eyes open as he drove back to his Charlestown apartment. But he still had to make contact with Bill Bartley the fellow he’d hired to watch Carol Rhodes. He called on his car phone.
The connection wasn’t a very good one. Devlin had to shout to make himself heard above the static.
“Any calls from the doctor?” Devlin yelled into the receiver.
“Not a one,” Bill said. It sounded as if he were on the moon. “The only thing vaguely interesting was a call from an apparent lover. Some stockbroker from L.A. Did you know she was moving to L.A. ?”
“You sure it wasn’t Rhodes?” Devlin yelled.
“I don’t think so,” Bill said. “They even joked about the doctor in not too flattering terms.”
Wonderful, thought Devlin after hanging up. No wonder Mosconi hadn’t felt Carol and Jeffrey were lovey-dovey. It looked like they were splitting up. He had the feeling that he was throwing his money away keeping Bill on the payroll, but he wasn’t willing to take the chance of not tailing Carol. Not yet.
As Devlin climbed the front steps of his apartment building that fronted Monument Square, his legs felt leaden, as if he had been through the battle of Bunker Hill. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in his bed. He knew he’d be asleep before his head hit the pillow.
He turned on the light and paused at the door. His place was a mess. Magazines and empty beer bottles were strewn about. There was a musty, unlived-in smell. Unexpectedly, he felt lonely. Five years previously he had had a wife, two kids, a dog. Then there had been the temptation. “Come on, Dev. What’s the matter with you? Don’t tell me you couldn’t use an extra five grand. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut. Come on, we’re all doing it. Just about everybody on the force.”
Devlin tossed his denim jacket onto the couch and kicked off his cowboy boots. Going into the kitchen, he got himself a can of Bud. Returning to the living room, he sat in one of the threadbare armchairs. Recalling the past always made him moody.
It had all been a trap, a sting operation. Devlin and a handful of other policemen were indicted and bounced off the force. Devlin had been caught red-handed with the money. He was putting a down payment on a small cottage in Maine so the kids could get out of the city for the summertime.
Devlin lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Then he coughed violently. Bending over, he ground the cigarette out on the floor and flicked it into the corner of the room. He took another pull on his beer. The cold brew helped soothe his raw throat.
Things had always been a little rough between him and Sheila, but in the past they’d always managed to work things out. At least until the bribery bust. She’d taken the kids and moved back to Indiana. There’d been a custody fight, but Devlin hadn’t had a chance. Not with a felony conviction and a short stay in Walpole on his record.
Devlin wondered about Jeffrey Rhodes. Like Devlin’s, his life had apparently come apart at the seams. Devlin wondered what kind of temptation Jeffrey had faced, what kind of mistake he’d made. Malpractice and drugs sounded like a weird combination, and Jeffrey certainly didn’t look like any druggie to Devlin. Devlin smiled to himself. Maybe Mosconi was right. Maybe he was going soft.
Jeffrey cleaned with significantly less enthusiasm than he had the night before, which pleased David to no end. David even renewed the friendly overtures he had made at the outset. He showed Jeffrey a few clever cleaning shortcuts that were a cut above sweeping dust under a rug.
In light of Devlin’s visit, Jeffrey viewed getting to work as an ordeal. He was sure Devlin was out there waiting to snap him up the minute he’d left Kelly’s quiet neighborhood. Jeffrey had been so apprehensive, he entertained the idea of calling in sick.
Kelly had come up with the perfect solution. She kindly offered to drive him to work. Jeffrey liked that idea a whole lot better than trying to take mass transit or
a cab. Still, he’d been reluctant to put Kelly’s life in jeopardy. But he decided she’d be safe if he hid in her car before she pulled out of the garage. That way, if Devlin was watching, he’d think Jeffrey had remained in the house. So Jeffrey had lain low in the backseat of the automobile, and Kelly had thrown a blanket over him for good measure. Only after they’d driven a mile or so away from the house did he emerge and climb into the front seat.
Around three in the morning David announced it was time for “lunch.” Jeffrey again begged off eating, a move which earned him a long look of disapproval. Once David and the others had left for the small housekeeping lunchroom, Jeffrey took his cleaning cart down to the first floor.
Pushing the cart along, Jeffrey went by the main entrance, then turned left up the center corridor. There were a few people wandering the halls, mostly hospital employees heading to the main cafeteria for their “lunch” breaks. As usual, no one paid the slightest attention to Jeffrey despite the noise his cleaning cart made as it rolled along.
Jeffrey stopped in front of the personnel offices. He wasn’t sure if his passkeys would open the door. When he’d offered to clean in there, David had told him that all the administrative areas of the hospital were cleaned by the evening housekeeping shift.
Hoping no one familiar with the housekeeping routine would come along, Jeffrey tried the different keys on his ring David had given him. It didn’t take long to find one that fit.
All the lights were on. Jeffrey pushed his housekeeping cart in and closed the door behind him. Pushing the cart from room to room, he made sure that the place was deserted. Finally he pushed his way to Carl Bodanski’s office.
The first place Jeffrey looked was Carl Bodanski’s desk. He rifled through each drawer. Jeffrey wasn’t sure the list he was looking for existed, much less where it would be kept. What he wanted was a list of the professional staff and employees that would be accurate for September 1988.
Next he tried Bodanski’s computer terminal and played around with it for a quarter hour. But he had no luck. Jeffrey was well acquainted with the hospital’s computer as far as patient records were concerned, but he wasn’t familiar with the systems used by personnel and administration. He guessed code keys or passwords were involved, but not knowing what they were, he had little chance of accessing the right files. Eventually he gave up trying.
He turned his attention to a bank of file drawers built into one of the office’s walls. Jeffrey clicked open a drawer he chose at random and pulled it out. It was then that he heard the main door to personnel open.
Jeffrey only had time to dash across the room and tuck himself behind the open door to Bodanski’s office. He heard whoever had entered walk across the outer room and sit down at Bodanski’s secretary’s desk.
Peering through the crack between the door and the jamb, Jeffrey could just make out the outline of the figure poised over the desk.
The next thing Jeffrey heard was the phone being picked up, followed by the melodious beeps of tone dialing. Then he heard a voice: “Hello, Mom! How’ve you been doing? And how’s that good old Hawaiian weather been?” There was a squeak of the secretary’s chair and the person leaned back into Jeffrey’s view. It was David Arnold.
Jeffrey had to wait for twenty minutes while David caught up on the news from home. At long last, he hung up and left personnel. Mildly unnerved by the interruption, Jeffrey went back to the file drawer he’d pulled out. It contained individual files for each employee, filed according to department, then alphabetically.
Opening the next drawer, Jeffrey scanned the plastic tabs that served as file organizers. He was about to close the drawer when he stopped at one that read United Fund.
Jeffrey pulled it out and opened it on a nearby desk. Inside were separate folders for each of the last six years. Jeffrey took the one for 1988. He knew the hospital ran its United Fund in October. It wasn’t September, but it was close enough. In the file were lists of the hospital employees as well as the professional staff.
Taking the list out to the copy machine, Jeffrey made himself a copy. Then, after replacing the file exactly where he’d found it, he stowed the copy on the cart’s supply shelf. He was in the main corridor a moment later.
Jeffrey didn’t go directly back to the OR floor. Instead, he pushed his cart past the emergency room to pharmacy. On the spur of the moment he decided to see how far his housekeeping uniform would take him.
Pharmacy had a counter where the medications requested by the various departments were dispensed. It almost looked like a retail pharmacy. Beside the counter was a locked door. Parking his cart, Jeffrey tried his keys. One of them opened it.
Jeffrey knew he was taking a risk, but even so, he pushed his cart through the door and down the main corridor beyond. To the left and right of this main corridor were aisles and aisles of metal shelving extending from floor to ceiling. The ends of these shelves had attached cards describing the contained drugs.
Jeffrey pushed his cart along slowly, carefully reading each shelf’s card. He was looking for local anesthetics.
One of the night shift pharmacists suddenly appeared from behind some shelving and came toward Jeffrey. She had an armload of bottles. Jeffrey stopped, expecting to have to account for himself, but the woman merely nodded a greeting and went on about her business, moving on to the counter that communicated with the hospital corridor.
Amazed again at the entrée his housekeeping position afforded him, Jeffrey continued his search for local anesthetics. He finally found them toward the back of the room. They were on a low shelf. There were many boxes of Marcaine in several different-size doses, including the 30 cc variety. Jeffrey realized how accessible they were. Any one of the pharmacists could easily have had the opportunity to put a tampered vial in the supply. And a pharmacist would certainly have the kind of requisite knowledge as well.
Jeffrey sighed. It seemed that he was expanding the range of suspects, not narrowing them. How could he ever hope to find the criminal? In any case, he’d have to keep pharmacy in mind. What argued against a pharmacist being the culprit was that a pharmacist would not have the kind of mobility a physician would have. While he might enjoy complete access to supplies at one hospital, it was unlikely he would enjoy comparable access at another institution.
Turning his cleaning cart around, Jeffrey headed out of pharmacy. While he was walking, he acknowledged that not only would he have to keep pharmacy in mind, he’d have to consider housekeeping. Given the freedom he enjoyed on this, his second day in the hospital’s employ, he realized how easy it would be for any member of the housekeeping staff to slip into the pharmacy just as he had. The only problem with housekeeping was that the people wouldn’t have the requisite background in physiology or pharmacology. They might enjoy the access, but they probably lacked the know-how.
Suddenly Jeffrey stopped pushing the cart. Again he thought of himself. No one knew that he was an anesthesiologist with a wide range of knowledge. What was to prevent a comparably knowledgeable person from securing a position in housekeeping just as he had? The range of suspects widened again.
As seven finally approached, Jeffrey started to think about Devlin again, worrying that he might return and terrorize Kelly. If anything happened to her, he’d never forgive himself. At six-thirty he called her to see how she was, and to find out if there’d been any sign of Devlin.
“Haven’t seen him or heard anything all night,” Kelly assured him. “When I got up half an hour ago, I checked outside to make sure he wasn’t around. There were no strange cars and nobody was in sight.”
“Maybe I should go to a hotel just to be absolutely sure.”
“I prefer you to stay here,” Kelly said. “I’m convinced it’s safe. To tell you the truth, I feel safer with you here. If you’re worried about coming in the front door, I’ll leave the back door unlocked. Have a cab drop you off on the street that runs behind my house and walk through the trees.”
Jeffrey was touched that Ke
lly wanted him at her house as much as she did. He had to admit he infinitely preferred staying with her to staying at a hotel. In fact, he’d rather stay at her place than at his own home.
“I’ll leave the drapes drawn. Just don’t answer the door or the phone. No one will know you are here.”
“Okay, okay,” Jeffrey said. “I’ll stay.”
“But I have one request,” Kelly said.
“Name it.”
“Don’t pop out of the pantry and scare me when I come home this afternoon.”
Jeffrey laughed. “Promise,” he said with a chuckle. He wondered who’d scared whom more in that episode.
At seven A.M., Jeffrey brought his cart back down to housekeeping. As the elevator descended, he closed his eyes. They felt like they were full of sand. He was so tired, he almost felt sick.
He parked his cart and went into the locker room to change from his uniform into his street clothes. He put the lists he’d copied from the United Fund file into his back pocket.
Closing his locker and giving the combination a twist, Jeffrey stood up. David came through the door and walked up to him.
“I got a page,” he said, looking at Jeffrey suspiciously out of the corner of his eye. “You’re supposed to see Mr. Bodanski in his office right now.”
“I am?” Jeffrey felt a pang of fear. Had his cover been blown?
David studied Jeffrey, cocking his head to the side. “There’s something fishy about you, Frank,” he said. “Are you some kind of spy from administration trying to see if we’re doing our jobs?”
Jeffrey gave a short, nervous laugh. “Hardly,” he said. The fact that David might suspect such a thing had never occurred to him.
“Then how come the director of personnel wants to see you at seven o’clock in the morning? The man doesn’t usually get here until after eight.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Jeffrey said. He stepped around David and went through the door. David followed. Together they went up the stairs.
