Deliver Me (Silver Oak Medical Center Book 1)

by Aiden Bates

  Finn scratched his beard. "Shouldn't that be part and parcel with the what?" He wasn't a cop, or an auditor, but he was pretty sure that he knew at least that much.

  "You'd think that, wouldn't you?" Johnston snorted. "Yeah, if it were that simple there wouldn't be a whole division of the FBI devoted to this stuff. It's going to take time, and it's going to take patience. I get that you're not exactly known for your patience, but you're going to have to make yourself deal with it this time."

  Finn looked out the window, taking in a view of the city. "Okay. I'll bite. Why aren't we turning this over to law enforcement right away?"

  Wyszniewski sat up a little straighter. "We will turn it over to law enforcement. Regent has a very strict zero tolerance policy when it comes to embezzlement. The thing is, these cases are much more easily prosecuted when we can give them the evidence and say, 'See? This person here has been stealing from the hospital, to the tune of this amount, and this is how they did it.' Then all that they have to do is test our evidence, as opposed to trying to figure out all of our systems and giving the bad guy the chance to figure out what we're doing and hide it."

  "We also want to limit our liability here." Johnston sat on the edge of his seat. "Our whole job is the mitigation of risk. If we go to law enforcement without absolute proof of that person's wrongdoing, and an accusation is made, and that person is found not guilty, they'll have grounds to sue."

  "And we definitely can't have that." Finn turned back to the auditors and glanced at the third member of the team. Freeman was the youngest, a junior auditor learning the ropes. "Do you have any ideas where to start looking for this person?"

  Freeman tugged at her collar. She always seemed to be afraid that he was going to turn around and bite her or something. "Sir, it would be wildly inappropriate for us to speculate as to a specific perpetrator. That would set up an expectation in our minds and close us off to other possibilities, even if we tried our best not to let that happen. That said, we can safely rule out anyone who doesn't have access to the payroll systems."

  Johnston gave Freeman an approving glance, and Finn melted a little. Someday his child would have a mentor like this. Maybe it would be Finn himself, teaching his child the ropes. Maybe it would be Carter, teaching their child about anatomy or about muay Thai or whatever.

  "That's right," Johnston told the dark-skinned young woman. "Because the errors hit people's paychecks, the person involved has to be able to access the payroll system. That doesn't necessarily mean that the person works in payroll. They could be someone who works in one of the departments and processes payroll for that unit, or someone in HR who makes changes to the benefits systems."

  Finn closed his eyes for a minute. "Anyone involved—anyone who participated, anyone who knew and didn't do anything about it—is gone."

  "Of course. We just have to make sure they can't sue to get their job back or worse." Wyszniewski smiled at him. "And we have to continue with our regular audit, so we don't tip that person off."

  "The good side of all of this is that we're finding some solid areas for improved efficiency," Johnston added, standing up. "We'll find your thief, don't worry."

  Asking Finn not to worry was like asking him not to be blond. He could fake it for a while, cover over it with something artificial, but he was who and what he was at the end of the day. He thanked the auditors for their help and left their office.

  He didn't go back to his own office, though. He knew that he should, but right now it felt too claustrophobic. He'd known that taking over Silver Oak would be a challenge. The place was old, and they'd evolved a lot of quirks in their hundred and seventy years of existence. Somehow his biggest issues right now weren't coming from those quirks.

  His feet aimed him toward Obstetrics without his conscious control, but he would have made that same choice if he'd thought about it.

  Regent had assigned his senior staff, and he'd have to do a lot to get rid of them. He understood the sentiment. He was younger than any other hospital CEO in the company's stable. He was untried. They wanted more experienced leaders to keep an eye on him. If they were going to have people watching over his shoulder, though, they should have had competent people to do the job. His CFO couldn't find any sign of a problem when it had taken outsiders all of a week to prove embezzlement. His CMO had been out doing something, Lord only knew what, instead of advising Finn on patient care consequences of Finn's decisions.

  What was next?

  Carter was in with a patient, as usual, but Finn only had to wait about ten minutes before the handsome doctor returned to his office. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" he asked with a smirk.

  Finn held up a hand. Carter's eyes were enough to make him want to tear his clothes off right now. He needed that comfort. "Do you have any contact at all with the payroll systems?"

  Carter scoffed and sat in his chair. "Are you kidding me? You couldn't pay me enough to take that on. I've got enough on my plate taking care of patients. I don't need administrative duties too."

  "That's what I thought." Finn sat down in one of the chairs across from the man carrying his child. "Sorry. It's been a long day."

  "I'd imagine so. Do those auditors have anything to do with it?" He rolled his eyes up to the sky. "They came down here nattering about power usage and tried to convince us to stop warming up speculums."

  "It seems reasonable." Finn looked up. "I mean, if it would be a significant cost savings—"

  Carter's glare was vicious. "Before you finish that sentence, let me shove a cold piece of metal up inside of you."

  Finn shrank back into himself. "Right. Never mind."

  "The savings would be negligible anyway. You could probably get more savings out of putting all of the lights in this place, except maybe in patient rooms, on motion sensors." Carter leaned back a little bit.

  "Excellent point." Finn found his entire body relaxing. "I don't suppose you'd consider chairing a patient care advisory board?"

  Carter dropped his pen. "Excuse me?"

  Finn chuckled. "The auditors suggested it, actually. Mentioned your name, too. It's kind of a response to that lawsuit you brought to my attention, although it's not exactly a SOP if that makes sense." He explained his interpretation of what Johnston had suggested, finishing with, "Basically the point is that while I'm the chief executive, and my decisions won't always be popular, you doctors who've been here for a while know your patients the best and know what they need. I'm not a doctor, and maybe I don't always understand patient care as well as I could. You can help with that."

  Carter grimaced. "I mean, I hate to do anything that takes me away from the patients. I really do. But I guess I can see where that might be helpful." He met Finn's eyes and set his jaw. "I will walk out in the middle of a meeting for a birth, though. That's not negotiable."

  Finn burst out laughing. He didn't try to hide it. "Our kid is going to be such a fighter," he said, gasping for air. "I can't wait."

  Carter's expression shifted, sliding through suspicion to land on confusion. "Really?"

  "Really." Finn kept his voice down. He knew he had to, but he didn't want to wait to speak his piece. "I keep seeing things and thinking, That's going to be our kid someday. I saw one of the auditors mentoring a junior auditor today and couldn't wait to teach our kid about business. Or to see you teaching them medicine, or your karate."

  Carter glared. "It's muay Thai. I guess I'm just surprised." He dropped a hand to his flat stomach. "I'm glad, I think."

  Finn reached across the desk and stroked Carter's stubbled chin. "I know it's hard for you. You're scared, and that's understandable. But I am excited for this, Carter."

  The hint of pink that sprang to Carter's cheeks warmed Finn better than the hot July sun ever could.

  Chapter Ten

  Carter smiled over at Dr. Grathwohl. "Okay. So you've been told that your pregnancy is high risk, and that sounded scary. Did anyone tell you why your pregnancy is considered high risk?"

&nb
sp; Grathwohl shook her head, her painted lips becoming a thin line in her face. "The doctor at my other practice just said that I was high risk and I needed to be seen here." Grathwohl was a professor over at the university. She taught women's studies. Carter didn't imagine that she'd responded well to such paternalistic treatment.

  "Okay. Well, you'll know that going forward, before you go back to them for any kind of treatment. When doctors tell a patient that they're high risk, all that means is that they've been categorized based on statistics. In your case, you're over forty, which automatically puts you into the high risk bucket. Women over forty, especially first-time mothers over forty, are more likely to face certain difficulties during pregnancy and delivery than younger women. Their babies are also at higher risk of certain complications."

  He held up a hand. "That doesn't mean that you're definitely going to see those problems come up. All of those potential complications are very rare. And you're an educated woman, who's done plenty of research on your own, so you already know what those risks are and what the likelihood of facing those risks is for you. You don't need some guy to sit there and lecture you."

  Grathwohl's face softened a little. "Okay. Thank you for showing me that much respect, at least. Why would the OBGYN that I've been seeing for twenty years suddenly kick me to the curb from them?"

  Carter winced. "Okay. This is the difficult part to hear, and the way that she went about it was absolutely awful. I'll point that out to her the next time I see her. The thing is, the cost to insure doctors is skyrocketing. And the cost to insure obstetricians is rising faster than any other specialty except anesthesiology. It's something that a big hospital like Silver Oak can absorb—the risk pool for me gets spread out over all of our physicians, and of course because we've got the client base that we do, and we do the kinds of procedures that we do, all of our clients could be termed high risk.

  "A physician in private practice isn't often that lucky. I've known some who make the same salary that I do, but who can't afford to pay their rent because their insurance premiums are too high. Those premiums go up if anything goes wrong, so some doctors try to mitigate that risk by booting all of the patients who could be seen as high risk." Carter held up his hands. "I don't like it any more than you do, honestly. It doesn't help patient outcomes for anyone, and it doesn't do you any favors to suddenly lose the doctor that's been treating you for twenty years. I mean, I'm going to treat you with every bit of skill that I have to offer, and there's no reason that your baby shouldn't be just as healthy and happy as any other, but it's still going to be less comfortable to you to be dealing with a relative stranger."

  Grathwohl glowered at the door. "It shouldn't be this complicated, damn it."

  "No." Carter's hand dropped to his belly. He'd felt unsettled all day, but he wrote that off to morning sickness. "You've got enough on your mind. The last thing you should be thinking about, or even aware of, is all of the administrative crap that goes on behind the scenes that makes life so much fun for us doctors." He showed her the strip of printouts from her sonogram.

  "Now," he continued. "Since your pregnancy is technically high risk, I am going to want to do another sonogram in four to six weeks, just to check on a specific part of the developing fetus. It's fairly routine and it's just a precaution. Everything that I can see on this sonogram here is showing me a perfectly healthy little critter."

  Her face relaxed into wide-eyed wonder. "That's my baby!"

  "You bet it is." Someday soon—two weeks or so—Carter would be able to see his own baby. He knew that he shouldn't get his hopes up, but Finn's enthusiasm was contagious. "And that baby is beautiful." He opened his mouth to say more, but the exam room door flew open.

  Carter scowled and turned to face the intruder. Bursting in on a doctor who was meeting with a patient was unheard of. It was about as rude as a person could get. When he saw the intruder's face, though, he bit his tongue. If Allen was interrupting him, he'd have a good reason. And if Allen's face looked like that, pale and sweaty and terrified, then he had to have a good reason.

  "We need you, bro. It's bad."

  "How bad?" Carter was already on his feet.

  "Omega, premature, no birth canal forming, complicating factors. Huntington's begging for you." Allen glanced over at Grathwohl. "I'll finish up here for you, if you want."

  "Yeah. Okay." Carter's mouth went dry. Something didn't feel right, deep down in his body, but he ignored it. "She had a sonogram, we're just at the part where we're going over it, I'll want her back in four to six." He turned back to his patient. "I am so sorry."

  She held up a hand. "It sounds like there's a life in danger, Dr. Idoni. I don't mind. Good luck."

  Carter ran to the locker room to get changed into scrubs and to put on a gown. He let a nurse get him masked and gloved, and settle a cap onto his dark hair. Then she pointed out which OR he should head to, and he didn't waste any time.

  The omega in question had been laid out and prepped for a C-section, as was proper. Carter knew that something was badly off, though, and it only took one sniff for him to figure out what it was. The man had gangrene, probably in his foot. He couldn't see the man's foot, since it was covered by a blanket, but the smell was enough to tip Carter off.

  "Drugs?" he asked, meeting Huntington's eyes over the father's prone body.

  Huntington nodded.

  Carter glanced at the anesthesiologist, but she didn't have time to look at Carter. She was too busy trying to keep her patient alive. His pulse and respiration were all over the place, and between the panic, the labor, and the drug use Carter could understand that. He grimaced. The last thing that he wanted was to lose the baby, or the patient.

  Of course, with the patient's wild stats, and the distressed sounds coming from the fetal heart rate monitor, he wasn't positive that they were going to come up with a good outcome.

  He took a scalpel. "Okay. I need everyone, and I do mean everyone, ready with a clamp. Do not pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars. We're going to have to be like lightning if we want to save this guy. Cutting on three. One, two, three."

  He made the incision as low as he could, close to the pubis. He made as clean a cut as he could; if the patient lived, he'd be happiest if his scar was minimized. Blood splashed out of the wound, but a nurse stepped in to clamp the vessel off while Huntington helped Carter move organs aside to reach the womb.

  He cut the uterus open and pulled the baby out. The poor little boy was blue, but he still had a pulse. Carter clamped off the umbilical cord and cut it, while Huntington held the baby. Huntington handed the neonate off to the pediatrician to coax back to health, while he and Carter worked on their patient.

  Carter's abdominal discomfort turned into a violent cramp, and his eyes bulged.

  "You all right there, Doc?" Huntington asked him, meeting his eyes.

  "I'll be fine." Carter was lying, and he knew that he was lying. A cramp like that could only mean bad things. He hoped that it meant the better kind of bad thing—bed rest for eight months—instead of what he suspected, but he couldn't stop what he was doing now to check. "Let's see about these bleeders. Come on, let's get them fixed."

  It took them half an hour to get the internal stitches finished on their patient, and then another twenty to get the careful external stitches done. The atmosphere was tense through the whole process. Carter could hear the pediatrics team working on the newborn, and normally he'd be chatting back and forth with them to try to keep things comfortable while he worked. He couldn't do that now. He was too busy trying to control his own breathing and keep his hands from shaking. That same cramping came back, every ten minutes, like clockwork.

  No no no no no. This couldn't be happening.

  Just as they tied off the last stitch, he felt a searing, tearing sensation in his perineum. The tear was followed by something hot, wet, and terrible. It trickled down Carter's left leg as he looked up at the patient's vital signs. They were still wild, all over the
place, but the man was alive. "All right. All right." He gripped the side of the patient's gurney. He couldn't hide it anymore. "Huntington, with me."

  Huntington frowned at him and followed him into the locker room. They both double-scrubbed out of the surgery, wanting to avoid contaminating anything with the gangrene. Carter had to hold himself up against the sink as cramps wracked his body, but he wanted to make sure that he was as clean as he could be before he put his hands anywhere near his brand-new gaping wound.

  "What's going on, Doc?" Huntington peered at Carter as he took his face mask off. "Is it that gangrene smell? Because that's what—oh my God." He looked down at Carter's bloody pants.

  Carter gripped the edge of the sink. "I'm having a miscarriage, Huntington. Could you please be a dear and page Allen?"

  Carter didn't want a big fuss or a lot of attention. He definitely didn't want a gurney to be brought to the locker room, but that was what he got. He'd underestimated the panic factor when Huntington saw the amount of blood he'd lost.