Appearing exhausted, she still lifted her right hand vertically from her lap and closed the hole in her trachea without help. It was a far more demanding feat than the horizontal maneuvers she'd been accomplishing in bed, but Richard's move to assist her received a sharp shake of her head. "I'm to put . . . my muscles ... to use," she told him, sounding cross. "If I have any."
McKnight gave a soft whistle of appreciation. "Boy, you're one tough woman." He pulled a chair into the cubicle and drew the white curtains closed, as if that would keep their conversation private. "Where are the kids? And come to think of it," he added, glancing around, "Where's my officer?"
"She took Chet and Lisa down to the cafeteria for supper," Richard said.
"But I ordered her not to leave Dr. Sullivan—"
"And I made her go with them, so blame me. Now what about this Legion of the Lord?" He wasn't in any mood for more delays.
His bluntness seemed to catch the detective by surprise. Mc Knight cocked his head, and gave Richard a who do you think you're talking to? look. It lasted but a second, then vanished as he leaned in close toward the two of them. "First I have to ask you both a personal question," he whispered.
Richard couldn't remember any other time the big man spoke so quietly. Normally he projected across whatever room he was in. "Okay," Richard replied. "Try me first."
"Have you ever been involved in giving abortions?"
"What?"
"Keep it down," said McKnight, putting a finger to his lips.
"You mean therapeutic abortions? Terminations?"
Mc Knight nodded.
"No, at least not since I assisted in a few as a resident twenty years ago. Why?"
"Have you been a vocal advocate for the pro-choice movement, speaking out about it, participating in marches, that kind of thing."
"Not really."
"Would you say you're more outspoken on the topic than other doctors in ER?"
"No, except as chief I have a higher profile. I sure as hell have made my opinions known to the residents though."
"And that opinion would be?"
"That the issue should remain a medical matter between a woman and her doctor. What the hell has this to do with all that's happened?"
"Humor me for a minute." He turned to Kathleen. "How about you, Dr. Sullivan? Has your name ever been associated with abortion clinics or causes."
"Not as a spokesperson ... or in any official capacity. ... I certainly agree . . . with Richard . . . about a woman . . . with an unwanted pregnancy . . . having a right . . . to safe options. . . . But I don't ... go out of my way ... to preach it."
McKnight leaned back and rubbed his forehead. "This doesn't make sense." He had mumbled, but whether to himself or to them, Richard couldn't decide.
"Please, tell us what's going on, Detective," he said, ready to scream if the man resumed the Q&A routine.
McKnight leaned forward again, this time perched on the very edge of his chair. "Do both of you remember that abortion clinic in the East Village that got blown up two years ago?"
"Oh, my God, yes," Richard said, completely caught off guard by McKnight's bringing up such a horrible incident out of the blue. The blast had gone off at night, and there was one victim— a cleaning lady who'd been working in the building after hours. They brought what was left of her to his ER. She was a grandmother, and her son kept telling everyone how she'd had nothing to do with the politics of abortion, didn't even believe married couples should use birth control, as if that should have protected her. She'd been nearly skinned alive because the bastards had used nails, yet she lived three more days. They practically had to anesthetize her to stop the screaming. "You're not telling me ..." A sickening coldness congealed in his throat.
"I'm afraid so. Whoever did that job chose a pipe packed with nails and plastic explosives, then triggered it with a device made from an electronic car lock using a remote key. Mallory knew about it because he worked on the case. Hell, a hundred of us did, because we were afraid the attack was the start of a terrorist campaign. Similar explosions were going off in Boston, Seattle, and L.A. at the time. No one claimed responsibility for them, though the reasons were obvious. It was only later when the ramblings of a group calling themselves the Legion of the Lord began to appear on the Internet advocating violent actions against abortion clinics and touting the same type of bomb that we realized who we were up against."
"Jesus," said Kathleen. "I saw a . . . documentary on them . . . last year. . . . They're hideous . . . righteous control freaks . . . who've got a . . . real problem . . . with women's independence . . . and no problem . . . with killing."
"You're saying the guy who attacked us was part of all that?"
"We have to consider it. The particular piece of shit who planted the package in the village was never caught, and I just got a preliminary lab report confirming the creep who did your house stuffed his little present with nails identical to the ones we found at the clinic— four-inch spirals."
"But why would an antiabortion nut come after me?"
"Or me?" Kathleen said.
"Or Hamlin and Lockman?" Richard added.
"As I said, it doesn't make sense for you two. And unless Hamlin and Lockman were secret abortionists, it doesn't add up for them either. This bunch doesn't target doctors who aren't somehow directly involved. Mind you, it wouldn't have to be big time. There was a woman gynecologist in Rochester they shot to death a few years ago who hardly did any abortions at all, performing them only occasionally and in a hospital as part of her obstetrics practice." He shrugged. "So you never know."
"Wait a minute," Richard said. "This same group did that?" The case had made headlines across the country and resulted in gynecologists everywhere wearing Kevlar.
"It's real tough to get a handle on these types. They don't have designated leaders, no membership lists, and they only meet on the Internet. It seems that nobody even gives an order to make a hit. They simply encourage individuals filled with like-minded poison to launch campaigns as they see fit. 'Soldiers' they call themselves. To me, they're cowards by any name. In practice they're more like urban guerrillas. That's what makes them so damn elusive."
Kathleen raised her hand to cover her tube. "Could their . . . targeting us ... be a mistake?"
"I'd say the deliberateness of this guy and his coming after Dr. Steele a second time makes that seem pretty unlikely. He wants you two, no doubt about it."
"Could whoever he is . . . have copied the bomb . . . yet have nothing ... to do with . . . Legion of the Lord?"
"Possible, but unlikely. For obvious reasons none of the police departments involved with the cases published much detail about the mechanism, and the type of nails they used wasn't listed on the Internet. I figure it's more probable he was once part of them, or at the very least knew someone who was."
"Now I understand why this nut kept talking about 'destroyers of the Lord's seed' and 'killers of the Lord's innocents,' " Richard said.
"But what's he after then?" McKnight asked. "Why has he gone off on some tangent that doesn't fit the group's usual antiabortion agenda and gotten himself entwined in whatever Hamlin and Lockman stirred up?"
Richard flashed back to a tableau of angry faces staring at Hamlin, and focused on one in particular. "Paul Edwards," he said out loud.
The heavy lines of McKnight's forehead deepened. "Who?"
Richard's mind was already miles ahead. "Hell," he muttered, all at once realizing what that odd group might have in common. What they might have done to Kathleen. What could cause miraculous recoveries and why the Legion of the Lord would want to kill them for it. "I think I got it," he said, still incredulous at having stumbled onto a common thread that seemed to pull the nefarious parts of the puzzle together. He even thought he knew what those little branches the killer left were supposed to mean.
"Pardon?" McKnight asked. His expression had grown more quizzical by the second.
Kathleen was also eyeing Richard stran
gely. But he remained lost in thought, quickly testing his idea to verify if it held up— checking it against Hamlin's actions, seeing if it jibed with what was in the patients' charts, racing through scenarios that might profit a cardiac surgeon, a rehabilitation specialist, and a chief of gynecology with a reproductive center at his disposal. Everything just kept flying together, piece after piece. It all fit!
But how to get proof? What would convince others to take his hypothesis seriously?
That eluded him.
The only thing he came up with was yet another way to test his theory.
It wouldn't sway McKnight to take police action, but it might help get someone at the hospital at least to consider the possibility that had brought his brain to such a boil. And he had just the person in mind.
"Stay here!" he said. "I've got to check something out."
"Wait a minute. Shouldn't I come along?" McKnight called.
"No!" he shouted over his shoulder. "This is doctor to doctor stuff." And he rushed from the room, leaving McKnight and Kathleen staring after him.
Chapter 15
Paul Edwards sat staring at a mahogany statue of a pregnant woman. He'd received it nearly twenty-three years ago from a patient's husband. Prillo was the man's name, and the couple had been trying to conceive for ten years. The fertility drugs of the time didn't work, and in vitro fertilization techniques were still in the experimental stages, yet the man begged for something new to be tried on his wife, sliding an envelope with ten thousand dollars in it across the desk as he spoke.
The guy's promises of more to come had made it seem worthwhile to explore the idea, and a few phone calls led to a young researcher who'd been working on surgically extracting eggs from an ovary. Several months later, James Norris helped him successfully fertilize Mrs. Prillo's egg with Mr. Prillo's sperm and implant it back into her uterus. For his trouble the "more to come" turned out to be the statue, but since the future proud father, along with a few of the new baby's uncles, showed up to express their appreciation driving black limos and dressed like the cast of Guys and Dolls, Edwards decided to keep any complaints he had about remuneration to himself.
Mr. Prillo had sensed his disappointment. "The way I see it, Doc," he said, leaning over the desk between them, supporting his weight on as big a set of hairy knuckles that Edwards had ever seen, "this fertility racket I got you started on is going to pay off big." And it had.
Until HMOs started to rewrite the financial rules in the nineties, declaring war on doctors in general and fertility superstars in particular. Fees plummeted or weren't covered at all. No matter how many hospital endowments he brought in, research grants he won, or office perks NYCH awarded him in recognition, it didn't keep his personal income in the stratosphere he'd gotten used to. So he'd expanded the range of his work with Jimmy Norris, and was so close to what could be the biggest payoff in the history of medicine.
Except now he was about to run away from it all. Tonight.
Five-thirty that afternoon Mabel Brown, his secretary, had rushed into his office. "Paul," she said, "did you hear the latest rumors?" The woman, habitually dressed in gaily colored jumpsuit outfits that resembled haute couture battle fatigues, had been a lieutenant in the army before joining the health care ranks, and seemed to be in a perpetual crisis mode. She announced even the most mundane pieces of news as if they were "Incoming!" But they were rarely harbingers of anything important, so he wasn't prepared for what indeed would be the equivalent of a mortar shell going off. "The police think the attacks on Dr. Steele are by that antiabortion group that goes around blowing up clinics."
A tightness gripped his ample gut. "What!"
"The LOTL, they called them. Something about 'Legion of the Lord.' The cops are saying they're behind the murders of Lockman and Hamlin as well."
"But that doesn't make sense," he'd protested, trying to cover up his horror at how much terrible sense it did make. "Steele doesn't have anything to do with abortions. Neither did the other two."
"Maybe this bunch thought they did. Their blowing up those clinics certainly was crazy. Why should people like that be logical? Hell, what with all the frozen embryos you keep down in the fertility clinic, it's a wonder one of them hasn't already come in and started shooting at us."
"What do you mean?" he'd snapped, all at once fearing she'd discovered what he'd been doing.
"Oh, I know those kinds of people are supposed to think we're the good guys, that we make babies here, not destroy them, but the way they're also going on these days about embryos being used in research—"
"What research?" The instant he'd blurted out the question he wanted to take it back. He was overreacting. She couldn't know about his supplying Norris.
"Oh, come on now. All the public controversy over using embryos to get stem cells, and nutty assholes like the LOTL running around? Who knows what one of them might do?"
Oh, my God, she'd figured it out. But how could she have? "We're not doing any research with embryos," he had said lamely, trying to keep his voice steady.
"You and I know that, but the whole world is aware that fertility clinics routinely supply labs with embryos otherwise slated for destruction. Just because we don't, do you think that's going to stop one of those wackos from using us to make a statement? All they're liable to see is that the potential of using fetal tissue to harvest stem cells is here. Why wouldn't they be as likely to blow us up as anyplace else."
That was twenty minutes ago. She had left him sitting alone in his office, pinpoints of perspiration welding his shirt to his back as he considered his options. If the cop rumors turned out to be true he was a dead man, because the only way a bunch of fanatics like the LOTL could have found out about Hamlin and Lockman would be if someone fed them the information.
Who? That bitch Downs of course. Instead of making a side deal with the cops as she'd threatened to do, she was using that pack of mad dogs to wipe them out. She probably figured they wouldn't go after her because she was no longer using embryos. "Vicious murdering cunt!" He picked up his private phone and dialed an eleven-digit number he knew by heart. An hour later he'd concluded the terms of a radically altered deal with Fountainhead Pharmaceuticals. Hanging up the phone he looked at his watch. Seven P.M. What remained was to steal Norris's and Downs's backup records from their office in the basement, if they hadn't already moved them. He wrote off Hamlin's files, having convinced his new partners at Fountainhead they didn't need them because the late neurosurgeon's technique was too wonky for anyone else to try.
Then it would be home to pack and an early flight to the offshore island he and his contacts had agreed upon, a place where U.S. cops, internal revenue agents, and rabid bombers wouldn't find him.
His own staff, including Mabel, were long gone for the day, but he thought it better to wait another couple of hours, since researchers often hung around into the night, tending to their experiments the way some parents doted on their children. In the meantime he slipped out to the parking lot and got a tire iron out of his trunk, figuring he'd be doing a fair bit of breaking locks tonight. 7:30 p.m. NYCH Department of Cellular Research
Ralph Coady squinted into the binocular eyepiece of the microscope. Eventually he got the knack of how to focus, merging the two round images into one, and saw what looked like a mat made from tiny red strips of meat. Except it pulsed, contracting and expanding as regularly as a heartbeat. "What is it?" he asked, looking up at Francesca Downs.
"You tell him, Jimmy."
The researcher flipped a switch, and the image from the microscope filled a screen mounted behind it. "This is functioning human heart tissue, Ralph, brand new, and grown in a petrie dish," he said, his voice sounding rather flat compared to the enthusiasm he'd shown during their first conversation together. "Have you ever heard of stem cells?"
"I'm not sure. It sounds familiar."
"They're the cells in an embryo that hold the potential to become every type of tissue there is in the human body— heart, b
rain, liver, lung, blood, bone— you name it, these cells can transform into it."
"Yeah, I remember now," said Coady. "It's in all the papers. Talk of growing new organs, never having to wear out or get old." A wild surge of excitement flew through him. "Holy shit! Can you grow me a new heart?"
Norris, pretty grim-faced up to now, gave a chuckle. "No, we can't do that yet, but the same way we grew these cells in a culture, we can grow new myocardial muscle in your heart."
"You see, Ralph," Downs said, "a heart attack blocks the blood flow to a portion of the heart muscle, killing it off and leaving rigid scar tissue in its place. Damage enough of the heart wall that way, it no longer functions as a pump. That's why your lung filled up with fluid."
"You mean how the basement floods if the sump quits."
She smiled. "Exactly. Except in your case, I can give you an infusion of stem cells into that scar tissue, and new tissue will fuse with the old to work in sync with the rest of your heart. Your failure will be significantly reduced, if not eliminated."
"You're kidding," Coady said. He looked from Downs to Norris, and back again.
"No I'm not. I've already done it, experimentally, of course, on mice. You'd be my first official human subject. But believe me, I know what I'm doing."
"Is it an operation?"
"It's nothing you haven't already endured. Without getting involved in arcane technical details, we basically go in with an angiocath, the long arterial line I used when we Roto-Rootered you. Except this time, guided by X ray, I deposit an infusion of stem cells around the edge of the scarred area, injecting them through a set of microscopic needles."
Critical Condition Page 24
