He had been diplomatic and appreciative and apologetic, stroking their bruised egos at the same time he’d pulled rank to force them to end the case, but Diane’s name was now up in lights, and in effect she was now a minor target for the San Francisco police. The department had been embarrassed, and someone needed to pay.
“Hello?”
The male voice on the other end snapped Ralph Lacombe back to the moment.
“Bill?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“Ralph Lacombe. I know it’s been a while…”
“Been a while? Jeez, Ralph, that was a previous life, for God’s sake! How are you? I hear you’re a highfalutin’ state senator now?”
“Yes, and I need an off-the-books favor.”
“Well, hell. I thought you were calling for friendship.”
“I am. My little girl’s in trouble, and I need some help finding out who, what, where, when, and why.”
“So, you turn to an old spook?”
“Who better?” Lacombe asked, appreciative of the self-deprecating CIA reference.
“Okay. Fill me in. Who do you want me to shoot this time?”
Chapter 7
OLYMPIC HOSPITAL, SEATTLE SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 26TH, 12:40 A.M.
The brief flight to the Olympic Hospital heliport and the short hop to Boeing Field had been completed by midnight, but there was an injured employee in the same hospital and Jennifer had changed back into her cocktail dress and driven the brief distance to check on him. Tim Paretsky, was still in the emergency department conscious, but embarrassed and apologetic. Satisfied he was going to be okay, she started for the door, but found herself unable to resist checking on the accident victim they had just transported.
The little girl was clinging to life after a transfusion, and Jennifer watched from a distance as the battle continued and the emergency team prepped her for surgery, unprepared for the empathetic self to take over as she left the ED.
Medical professionals kept their distance and their emotions in check. She knew the routine all too well. But occasionally the trauma would leak past the personal firewall, and when the battle was over, an emotional tidal wave could hit, embarrassing the clinician with a sudden venting of all the fear and angst stored during the emergency.
Jennifer stepped into a corridor to deal with the sudden tears and then dried her eyes, glad no one had been watching. She was aware that the turbulent evening with Doug was the major contributor, and she was also suddenly in need of a comforting environment.
Jennifer found herself moving automatically to the twelfth floor and the familiarity of 12 West, the unit where she’d spent six years of her professional life as a nurse and a nurse manager. It was like coming home, something you do unconsciously.
Being back on the floor completed the feeling. She found herself gliding through a time warp into her old domain, relaxing in the normalcy and familiarity. There was a comfort about Olympic she could never define, a feeling of need and belonging and purpose—of safety and security—all of which contradicted the very real problems that had driven her out. The dreary truth of how frustrating her time at Olympic had been was something she actively suppressed. Even as a nurse manager she’d been unable to change this small part of the world where finances ruled over patient safety and staff satisfaction. It wasn’t at all what she’d expected when she left nursing school with her RN degree in hand. Caring for the sick and injured had simply become an industry, and a surprisingly archaic one at that. Even faceless manufacturers in the most basic of industries understood the need for respecting and caring for their employees. But to healthcare it seemed a mystery. She had tried hard with her MBA to meld the knowledge of medicine with the realities of business and forge a common language. She’d spoken out when others kept silent, rattled cages and made friends and powerful enemies, but to no avail. There had been a flirtation with professional depression, too as she came closer and closer to burnout trying to convince everyone that they couldn’t run things by financial considerations alone without killing careers and patients, if not the hospital itself. And ultimately, her respect for the system had hit bottom.
Jennifer smiled at the charge nurse on 12 West as she passed, keenly aware that the woman was staring back with suspicion at her outfit.
It was probably all the same, Jennifer thought. Indeed, so many of her friends still in practice confirmed it with every conversation. Year after year little in the American hospital changed: the nurses still burned out, doctors still felt powerless, and patients were still not as protected as they could be from mistakes fostered by the flawed process of running health care as a business. Despite her best efforts, despite the vision and enthusiasm of her team on 12W, they had never quite achieved the level of quality care they were reaching for.
Jennifer had taken each defeat personally during those years. But Sven’s stroke had changed everything, and suddenly it was apparent that either the reins of Nightingale Aviation were going to be passed to an outsider, or Sven’s sole heir would have to leave nursing and take over.
Her decision had taken little more than a nanosecond.
It really had been a resurrection of sorts, an instant, if dark, relief. A way of giving up while pretending to move on. The professional change had sparked renewed meaning at the same moment it had brought Doug Lam into her life, with all his energy and joy of living and exasperating work ethic.
The floor felt different somehow. Cold and antiseptic and sterile, and she wondered why. Visually, nothing seemed changed.
Doug.
As she walked past another room, Jennifer caught sight of him on the local PBS channel, a rerun of an interview on his controversial theory that had later been broadcast nationally, to the chagrin of his USGS leaders. She shook her head. She couldn’t escape him if she tried. The diagrams of the Cascadia Subduction Zone were on screen as well, including the area around Cascadia Island where she would be tomorrow night. She should think about his warning, but right now the two realities refused to intersect.
She turned into one of the rooms from which Doug’s voice could be heard. The patient, an elderly woman, was engrossed in the interview. The room, Jennifer noticed, was bare of any get-well cards, and only one small vase of flowers sat on the nightstand.
“Hi,” Jennifer said. “Mind if I watch with you a second?”
The woman smiled, her eyes taking in the cocktail dress.
“So, this is the new uniform?”
Jennifer sat down, laughing easily, feeling even more of her old life as a nurse taking over as she fell into conversation. The woman introduced herself as Hilda Bromberg. She was the eighty-one-year-old former owner of a local broadcast empire, sharp, feisty, and recovering well from surgery, but achingly lonely.
“I don’t recall hearing your name for a long time, Miss Bromberg.”
“The name is Hilda, please. And of course you wouldn’t be hearing about me. I sold out fifteen years ago and everyone thinks I’m dead and living in Florida.”
They talked for nearly half an hour, Jennifer relaxing at last in the grateful presence of the fascinating woman who had once been a feisty fixture in Seattle’s somewhat boisterous social world. Jennifer remembered how much she had loved the process of talking with her patients when the floor was hers, touching them as human beings, finding out as much about them as possible, and trying to help on more levels than just the clinical. It was something she sorely missed in emergency medicine, and something that was apparently absent on 12W.
“Is there really someone out there?” Hilda joked. “I heard rumors of a nurse having been spotted in the lobby the other day, but I sure haven’t seen one in person.”
“Really?”
“Well, not a human nurse. These are Stepford Nurses. Must be a factory back east where they stamp them out. Wish I owned stock in it.”
There was the soft squeak of a rubber sole on a polished floor and Jennifer looked up to see the charge nurse walk by for the second time. She
was orbiting, undoubtedly working on the question of who the woman in the red cocktail dress was, and whether to challenge her.
Not a lot of courage, huh, Sweetie? Jennifer thought. The nurse was making the dangerous assumption that a woman moving as confidently among her patients as Jennifer had must somehow be authorized to do so.
“You see,” Hilda was saying as she pointed toward the door. “That’s one of them. She’s been gone for hours, probably to recharge her battery pack.”
“Stay here.”
“I have a choice?”
“Of course. But I’ll go see if she’s human,” Jennifer said, a finger to her lips.
The charge nurse had reappeared at the door. Jennifer moved into the hallway and introduced herself, giving a shorthand version of her years there.
The nurse was decidedly unimpressed.
“Miss Lindstrom, may I ask you a question, with no offense intended?” The tone was edgy and guarded. No offense perhaps, but no friendliness here, either, Jennifer thought.
“Sure.”
“When you were the nurse manager, would you have let someone like you wander around the floor?”
Jennifer had written the rules about strangers on the floor to comply with a mind-numbing federal law called HIPPA. But then she’d quietly bent those same rules if they clashed with the need for positive human contact. And here she was simply smiling at patients and being pleasant. But, the nurse had a valid point.
“You’re right. I wouldn’t want someone wandering around without being challenged. And I apologize. I really should have introduced myself first.”
“Yes, you should have.”
“I have to go, anyway,” she said, turning back toward Hilda’s room. “But first, if you don’t mind, I’m going to say good-bye to my new friend.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“I remember who she reminds me of, that one,” Hilda said when Jennifer reentered the room.
“Who?” she asked, glancing back to make sure the charge nurse wasn’t listening.
“Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Hilda chuckled, pointing a finger at Jennifer as if sighting a pistol. “Okay, Honey, I can tell you need to go, but first you tell me what’s troubling you.”
“Me?”
“All over your face. I’m an experienced woman with built-in radar, remember? And I used to boss hundreds of employees and do it well.”
“No, I’m fine. Really. Just tired.”
“Bull. Who is he and what did he do to you? The guy on TV you were watching?”
Jennifer smiled and adopted a puzzled look. “Hilda, why, if you perceive me to be upset about something, does it have to involve a relationship with a male?”
“First, because I don’t think you’re lesbian. Second, because you didn’t jump in here to learn about earthquakes on TV. Third, because what else is there for a woman to be upset about? Everything but men we women can more or less wrestle into compliance.”
Jennifer sat and gave her a brief synopsis of Doug’s divorce anxiety.
“So,” she concluded, “what do you think? Ignore my worries and stay with him, or give him an ultimatum?”
Hilda smiled at her and patted her arm. “Dear, there are 280 million people in the U.S., that we know about. About half are male, although in some cases it’s arguable. But at least a tenth of that half form a reasonably eligible smorgasbord from which a gal like you can choose.”
“You’re working up to a point, Hilda. I can feel it.”
“Damn right. Stick to your guns, that’s the point.”
“Were you married?”
“Three times. Never got it right and don’t believe in it anymore.”
“And no children?”
Sadness crossed Hilda’s features like a passing cloud, and she shrugged it off. “When I get out of here, let’s get together and I’ll answer that question. And, in case you run into any of my kin, you didn’t see me here.”
“No one knows you’re here?”
“No. And I have my reasons.”
Jennifer exchanged numbers and bade her good-bye, leaving the floor under the baleful, if safely distant stare of the charge nurse. She descended four flights of stairs letting Doug’s face swim into her thoughts once more. He was there at the lab tonight, undoubtedly immersed in his scientific world and probably alone. She wondered if it had dawned on him yet that it was past midnight, or that his lover had probably tired of waiting at the Breakwater.
I should call, she thought.
CASCADIA ISLAND HELIPORT
The unscheduled midnight charter from Boeing Field to Cascadia Island’s heliport had been arranged at the last minute. Mick Walker had offered no explanation for cancelling the much cheaper reserved flight earlier in the evening, but for the Nightingale charter pilot, no explanation was needed.
“One of those urgent matters,” Walker had explained with a smile as he climbed aboard and accepted an offer of the copilot’s seat. The pilot, Kevin Chapman, nodded without comment, aware that the “urgent matter” was no doubt a beautiful woman. He’d agreed to handle the pop-up flight after returning from another charter, hoping to see again the stunning, statuesque brunette in an ermine coat and spike heels who’d met Walker’s business jet earlier in the evening. He’d watched mesmerized from the operations center as she unfolded herself from the back of a white stretch limo with the poise of a woman serenely secure in her wealth and privilege. Kevin had expected to see the same car pull onto the ramp again, but much to his disappointment, Walker had appeared alone, climbing out of the back of a garden-variety taxi to board the charter operation’s Sikorsky S-76.
Fifty minutes after liftoff and safely around the north end of the ten-thousand-foot peaks of the Olympic Peninsula, Kevin began his approach to the tiny outcropping that had sparked so much controversy among environmentalists, and aligned himself with the bright rotating beacon at the helipad.
Transitioning a helicopter from forward to vertical flight was a gradual process that often scared fixed-wing pilots on a very primal level, and the pilot in command of Sikorsky N344NT was watching the passenger in the copilot’s seat for that kind of reaction.
As the speed dropped, Kevin could see his passenger’s feet move forward defensively, the man’s glances at airspeed becoming more frequent and his breathing more accelerated as his fixed wing instincts began bellowing for more speed.
Kevin was used to explaining that while speed equals life in fixed-wing flying, the same wasn’t true for helicopters, and he repeated the explanation now.
The lights of the island were just ahead, the lighted heliport all but lost in the sea of illumination around it. Now the speed was decreasing below fifty knots as the pilot slowly nudged the cyclic control stick backward slightly between his knees, diminishing the percentage of the Sikorsky’s engine power that was going to produce forward momentum, and transitioning it into vertical lift. The collective, a floor-mounted lever with a motorcycle throttle grip in the pilot’s left hand, was being nudged steadily downward in almost undetectable increments, lessening the engine’s output at the same time the rotor blades were being unloaded of excess lift.
The lighted pad was beneath them now and Kevin was maneuvering around to land into the southwest wind when a large hand cupped his left shoulder.
“Can you fly me completely around the island once?” Mick Walker asked.
“Sure,” Kevin replied, stifling the impulse to add that a full excursion around the tiny rock might take all of thirty seconds.
The circle done, he resumed his approach and worked the controls almost imperceptibly to bring forward and downward vertical speed to zero at precisely the same moment with the craft fifteen feet above the pad. Satisfied with his motionless hover, Kevin lowered them vertically to the surface.
Walker shook his head, a large smile on his face as he unlatched his seat belt and shook the pilot’s hand. “I gotta learn how to do that!”
“Well, if anyone
can afford it, I imagine you can.”
Mick Walker nodded, his expression carefully unchanged despite the old familiar twinge of apprehension that had just twisted his stomach. Long ago he’d learned how to keep such reactions off his face, in poker and in business.
“Yeah, you’re right,” was all he said in response, adding his thanks as a black limo pulled up to the helipad.
Chapter 8
SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA 1:45 A.M.
For some perverse reason, Diane Lacombe thought, she was almost enjoying this clandestine escape.
Almost.
And now I’m the anonymous woman in 28D.
Her soon-to-be-gone career with Chadwick and Noble had flashed through her mind twice since she’d slipped aboard Amtrak’s Coast Starlight while it sat in the Oakland station Thursday night. She’d left the train with equal stealth in Sacramento in the wee hours Friday morning, darting between shadows for the nearly two dozen blocks to a friend’s apartment, as if she were a downed pilot escaping from the Viet Cong.
And now she was back aboard the Coast Starlight, her plan intact, if changed.
Thank God for Debbie, Diane thought. There was very little chance of anyone connecting Debbie Hill’s Sacramento flat with the name Diane Lacombe, and as luck had arranged it, Debbie was on vacation in Mex-ico—although Amtrak’s records would show that it was Debbie Hill who had fled Oakland Thursday night.
A dozen times Friday, Diane had considered calling her in Puerto Vallarta just for moral support, but always pulled her hand away from the phone. The less Debbie knew, the safer Debbie was, but she was helping by just being absent.
Diane always smiled at the thought of time with Deb. She was truly her best friend, and, almost from the time they met at college, they’d shared everything from problems with boyfriends to clothes and classes and lots of laughs and tears along the way.
She shivered at the memory of the time Debbie had been stalked by an unhinged college hacker who had been able to follow her through her credit card usage, even by the hour. It was three years ago, and Debbie had ended up panicked on Diane’s doorstep in San Francisco and merged into Diane’s identity for several days until the stalker was caught. Ever since then they’d had a mutual-aid pact, carrying each other’s apartment keys, credit cards, and carefully fabricated IDs with each name under the other’s picture, all for a quick getaway if ever needed. Someday, Diane figured, marriage would probably cancel or modify the pact, but so far they were just as dedicated to it.
Saving Cascadia Page 7
