Jilly picked up. “No other transplant patients here, according to files, the Levinsons, and patient report. No HIV positive patients. No one even close in immuno-status. So that gives us a set-up but what is it?” She chewed on the end of the marker she was holding. Normally that would have driven him nuts to watch, but he was too keyed up. He couldn’t sleep last night. And now he was running on pure caffeine.
“Go over Eddie’s case with me.”
Jillian nodded and started rattling stats again. She was better at that than any doctor he had ever met. “Stomach ache, reported by wife, at seven days prior to death, vomiting at six days.”
Desperately, Jordan tried to push it out of his mind that this was Eddie she was so carefully reducing to a series of numbers and isolated incidents. But that was what would solve the case. “Admitted for dehydration, in E.R., at day five. Given IV fluids and Raglan for nausea. Seemed to be doing better but was mildly disoriented and complaining of sleepiness. Nurses report that he was very sleepy and slept a good portion of his time in the ward. Nothing unusual there.
“Files indicated normal white counts, CBC and full Chem Panel show nothing out of the ordinary, in fact all numbers are very normal. Day three, patient goes to sleep and wife reports that he’s difficult to rouse. After medical intervention, a CT scan is performed and it is determined that the patient slipped into coma during sleep. On day one patient is put on ventilation due to oxygen sats being under eighty-four percent, and on day zero, all brain activity stops, and staff performs heroic measures to no avail. Patient dies at 2p.m.”
Jordan sighed.
There wasn’t much he could do at this point except sigh. He had arrows drawn to and from what he knew. Joseph Finklestein hadn’t had vomiting. His decline had taken nine days from first complaint to death. He had died at the home, with a very short delay between slipping into a coma and simply passing away while waiting for transport to a full medical facility.
Jillian opened the reports again. “Aaagh.”
He looked up, hoping that it was a good ‘aaaagh’, but apparently it wasn’t. “These guys were on so much medication that you can’t tell what changed and what didn’t. Just tracking their medication would take a whole flow chart like that!”
“Then we do it.”
Her eyes widened, and she almost looked scared, which was about the funniest thing he had thought in days. Jillian scared of paperwork.
She begged, “Only if you do it. I can’t do that . . . whatever you’re drawing. I need a spreadsheet.”
“Can you do this on a spreadsheet?”
She shook her head, her mouth moving to the straw of the supersize coke she was drinking, while she rubbed the sides to remove the sweat. Her scrubs bore the stains from the water drips where she had rested the drink on her leg earlier, and in this heat he didn’t blame her that she didn’t care.
He sat up to be close and spoke low; he didn’t want the Levinsons getting tipped off that this wasn’t an official investigation. “We still have to get Landerly’s signature on this. The only way I feel relatively assured that that will happen is with a solid diagnosis.”
She nodded.
Her voice pitched lower as well, but for an entirely different reason. “Do you think we’re seeing SuperAIDS?” She didn’t want to scare the Levinsons.
“Shit.” He barely breathed it. “I hadn’t even thought of that.” His pushed his fingers through his hair and looked again at the gaily colored chart. Immuno-compromised patients.
She shook her head. “The set-up is right. But the play-out isn’t.”
Jordan waited for her to continue, he agreed, but wondered if she was following the same angle as him. “Flu-like symptoms at onset match, but not the lack of time lag, although that’s always been hypothesized as the new trick up the virus’ sleeve. Then coma and death. The issue is, those cultures should have shown not just something but everything.”
“Right, HIV doesn’t kill you. It’s what AIDS allows to get a foothold that kills. So, no superAIDS.” He was on the floor again, spread out with his paper. He’d been here for their whole stay, getting more and more ragged looking. Jillian had stayed up at the desk, but her posture had gone to hell in a handbasket. She was slumped in the chair, bringing her head to the coke instead of vice versa. Her knees pressed together, and her sneakered feet turned at odd angles resting on the shaggy caramel carpet. Her right hand played incessantly with her ponytail and if her mouth wasn’t speaking it was gnawing something, the straw, the poor pen. He’d never seen her like this.
Then again, they hadn’t yet had anything they couldn’t solve with a report and a spreadsheet before. The only real trip they had taken had involved a case with clear answers once they looked at it from a few angles. This they’d tipped over, looked underneath, and shaken down, and only the barest of glimpses of ideas were falling into place.
“Okay.” It was just a small statement, made on a tiny breath, but it was the beginning of a change. He sat patiently while Jilly straightened herself, and pulled a well worn folder off the desk. “Clear out some papers, flow-chart-boy, here goes.”
And she rattled off a list of about thirty medications, making him mark in a different color any that had been prescribed within the last month prior to death. Joseph Finklestein had two. Increased dose of Lipitor, and Prescription Naprosyn for pain, because Ibuprofen was upsetting his stomach. Bertha Martin had one, Cephalexin for an imagined ear infection. And Beatrice Weitzman had no new scrips in that time. Between the three of them they were on forty different medications, and the number was only that low because so many overlapped.
Jillian set down her soda with a clunk and opened Eddie’s file, her fingers expertly shuffling through reams of loose paper, never letting any fall or even slip out of place. “Ready?”
She rattled off a short list. When she closed the file, Jilly joined him on the carpet, scanning the flow chart. She watched and pointed a few times while Jordan cross-referenced and drew marks and asterisks between any duplicated medications that showed up. But they didn’t seem to yield any new information. So the nursing home victims had been old? They knew that already. Not a single medication or even medication category cross referenced to Eddie. Eddie was close to med free. They checked lifestyle markers then. But as expected, the three Levinson Home victims all cross categorized nearly perfectly. Leaving Eddie the outsider, and thus the key to the whole thing.
Jillian ran her fingers down the list again. “Cephalexin.” She pointed to Bertha’s quadrant of the chart. “Why was she on it?” She fingered open the chart and looked puzzled. “Ear infection. That’s probably what tipped them off to staph.” She thumbed through the tome, coming up with the prescription date. “No good indication of an ear infection though. ‘Mild redness’ that’s all.”
Jordan frowned. That bothered him for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, and he followed a hunch out to the courtyard where Maddie Levinson was hosing down the plastic furniture. She smiled when he approached, which he had to admit was a very magnanimous gesture at this point. He and Jilly had taken over her office for three days now. But she just offered him lemonade and asked, “What can I help you with?”
“Do you have a minute? I’m looking for some of that personal information that I thought might not be found in a medical file.”
Her eyebrows raised, but she quickly set aside the hose and wiped down two chairs offering him the first before settling her large frame into the second. She still seemed wary until he asked the first question. “Bertha Martin was prescribed Cephalexin for an ear infection she didn’t seem to have, just five days before she died. Do you know why that was?”
Maddie laughed. A clear vibrant sound accompanied by her slapping her thigh. “Yes, I know why.” She wiped at her eye where a small tear had formed, although he wasn’t sure if she missed her houseguest or had just laughed too hard. “Bertha was ornery, at times. And she insisted she had an ear infection. Wouldn’t quit her caterwaulin
g until the doc gave it to her. He finally relented. She’d had enough ear infections that she probably knew.”
“And Joseph Finklestein. He was changed from Ibuprofen to Naprosyn also within the last few days before his death. Why was that?”
Her expression sobered right up, and Jordan didn’t doubt that her answers were as accurate as any could be. She knew each of these patients, and he’d lay odds that the woman couldn’t do simple algebra but could rattle off every dose of every medication every patient here was on, and put even money that she still knew the old doses, too. “Joseph started getting headaches right then. We didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
“So he said the Motrin wasn’t really helping?”
She sighed, her shoulders doing a soft heave before she went on. “He didn’t really say it. He didn’t communicate well for the last several months. But he kept grabbing his head, rubbing his temples, and . . .” She couldn’t find the words so she showed Jordan. She shoved her shoulders up under her chin, and put her hands behind her ears, shoving them forward rubbing the bone where her skull met her neck.
He watched.
Headache, maybe. Ear pain. Maybe.
“Thank you, Maddie.” He stood and offered his hand, which she shook politely.
When he entered the office, Jillian looked up at him, and Jordan launched into a shortened version of his discussion with Maddie, ending it punctuated by Jillian’s “Wow.”
“Will you call my cousin Kelly and ask her if Eddie had ear pain?” He continued. “I think we can safely say that we have something new, that isn’t airborne, and we’ve been sitting in it for three days.”
David hung up the phone. He had to. His ears were ringing. If Greer so much as got one iota more excited the earth was going to shift on its axis. The eggs were a true find. A full clutch, almost all intact. Yada yada yada.
And McCann, Tennessee was a hotspot.
He turned over a specimen, eyeing it carefully. His old man would love to get his hands on this piece of history. But that was too damn bad.
The testing was showing up just like the Warren Fault pieces. Heavy iridium layer at the KT boundary. Reversed magnetics in all the pieces. What was killing him was the size of the spot. It seemed so small.
From his father’s work he had believed, as his father always had, that the hotspots had to have a certain size, a critical mass, in order to carry a reversed magnetic field. Something there had to support it. Had to keep it out of alignment with the field of the earth as a whole. That implied some level of size.
But this didn’t come anywhere near close.
He and Greer had practically gone door to door asking if anyone had an oil rig in their backyard, which had sounded retarded as all hell the first three times he asked. But sure enough, folks were friendly, and by the end of day three, they had awful stomach aches and forty-two core samples, giving David a nice view of the strata around his dig.
And here he sat. Wishing he had stayed longer. That he had known the horrible nausea and vomiting would disappear the next day. Because every oil well sample had come up negative. No magnetic reversals in any layer.
Add in that the lab staff had done the experiment blind. None of them knew what he was looking for. Just the series of tests, and that was it. So he sighed at the core samples. They had given up all their secrets like cheap whores. And he was done with it. Depressed almost to the point of tossing it at the trash.
While he had his hotspot, none of this was going to accomplish much more than remind everyone that his father had seen it first. Damnit.
Jordan pulled his decrepit Chevy into the CDCP lot right behind Jilly’s pert Rav4. They had stayed at her apartment last night, still going over the paperwork. Landerly would be back in a day. They had to get prepared to explain. To make their case and make it stick well enough to not get fired.
Together they had hovered over Jillian’s computer, filling in the codes for the visit and symptoms. They labeled and sorted and listed evidence. They spent hours searching for linked cases and only came up with three in addition to the four they started with. And even those only looked similar. There wasn’t any evidence that was close to conclusive. Then they wrote a paper for Landerly explaining why they had forged the signature. Documenting how many times and when they had tried to get it legitimately.
And here Jordan was: pulling into the parking lot, papers printed and sitting on the passenger seat beside him. Whether or not they would save his ass was still up in the air.
He and Jillian met again in between the cars where they parked. Took deep breaths together and then walked down the hall. Reaching the office felt like they crossed a finish line. Jordan wanted to hunch over and gulp air. He wasn’t cut out for lying. Within a minute they silently took their seats and turned on the monitors on the desk, pulling up their files. Jillian looked up at him and smiled, her nod indicating that they were going to be okay.
The movement in his peripheral vision caught his attention just seconds before the loud clap of their door slamming open caused all his muscles to instantly clench. His heart plummeted when he saw that Landerly was standing inside their office. Well, those were his feet anyway. It took Jordan to the full count of ten to force himself to look up to Landerly’s face.
The voice was old and soft, and anything but calm. “You two have some serious explaining to do about a signature of mine that I don’t remember being on the continent to sign for.”
The world was going to hell.
There was a long lull, then they both began speaking. “Dr. Landerly, we had so much evidence-”
“We tried so hard to get in touch with you-”
His leathery hand, palm out, put an end to the words frothing from their mouths. “I’ll talk to you separately.” He pointed to Jillian. “In my office, now.”
As Jordan watched, she stood as though pulled by strings. Her expression that of sheer horror. And then she walked out the door followed by Landerly, who didn’t so much as glance Jordan’s way.
For long minutes, he sat there, unmoving, still digesting what had happened. Landerly shouldn’t have gotten in until tomorrow. Had someone tipped him off? Had he come back early to corral his renegade peons?
Jordan knew he was going to get fired. That was all there was to it. He considered himself too much of a man to get up and start packing his belongings, not until he was actually told that he was fired. But it wasn’t beneath him to let his gaze wander around the office, falling on various objects and cataloguing what was his.
The phone buzzer shocked him to life, his heart missing several beats before picking up a steady rhythm again. Gingerly he lifted the receiver from the cradle, “Hello?”
“Abellard. Get in here.”
He winced, “Okay,” but it was too late. Landerly had already hung up and Jordan was holding a phone that was softly buzzing a dial tone at him. He hadn’t been this afraid of getting spanked since elementary school. At least then he had put smoke bombs behind the toilets in the girls’ room and the whole thing had been fun.
The hall felt long, and Landerly’s office was closed, forcing Jordan to grip the knob and open the door on the scene of his own demise. Jillian sat in the visitor chair across from where Landerly lorded behind his desk. She was ashen and looked like she had early stage Parkinson’s, fine tremors snaked their way down her arms and out her fingers. Anger broke in a tidal wave as Jordan looked her up and down. Landerly had tormented her. He turned to let the old man have it, but was brought up short by the bark that Landerly leveled at him. “Is it true, what she tells me?”
He had to force himself to take a deep breath. “I’ve never heard Jillian lie.”
That put the old man’s eyebrows up. “So you orchestrated all this? By yourself?”
“I realize that I am not the genius here, and that this ploy may seem a bit above me. And, no, I didn’t ‘orchestrate’ the whole thing. But Jillian didn’t speak any lies to anyone. Jillian has many talents. Lying isn�
�t one of them.”
Landerly snorted. “Forgery apparently is.”
“Apparently.” Jordan knew he was shoveling the hole he was standing in. But he couldn’t stop himself. “Tell me if that paper was three years old you would have recognized that it wasn’t your signature.”
Jillian gasped, but at least it earned him a respectable nod from Landerly, who then began talking right over Jordan’s thoughts. “If you’d like to not get fired effective immediately, you had damn well better explain this and why you couldn’t wait until I got back, and it had better match Dr. Brookwood’s story exactly.”
Jordan thanked God Jilly couldn’t lie worth shit. He knew their stories would match word for word. So he took a moment to gather himself, watching her visibly relax as he did. They would be here a while.
Eventually Landerly interrupted. “Same thing she said. The two of you using company policy to support your illegal trip . . .”
Jillian paled a bit at that, and Jordan put his hand over hers where it gripped the spindle arm of the chair. They’d at least be fired together. “Are you going to hear us out or not?”
Landerly nodded and managed to not interrupt again for the remainder of the story. He was silent for several minutes after Jordan finished. Finally he placed his soft leather hands on the desk and leaned forward, somehow managing to invade Jordan’s personal space from over three feet away. “One: we never had this conversation. I don’t know about that signature. I assume someone else okay’d your trip. Two: one slip from either of you and I will suddenly find that paper, and recognize the forged signature and you’ll be out so fast your head will spin.”
Jordan digested that. It actually sounded like they weren’t getting fired.
“Three: you drive out tonight. There’s another case that sounds like the same thing in the Appalachians. You’re going to an area just south of Knoxville, McCann County.”
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