by Elaine Viets
“It would be a violation if the cops went through those records. But you’re a doctor. You could look, and not tell me anything except the names of the people you think are suspects.”
“So I’d violate the rights of a handful of people instead of hundreds,” she said.
“The folks getting shot are having their rights violated, too.”
“Look, Francesca, even if I wanted to do that, and I’m not sure I do, there are too many records to go through right now. One person couldn’t do this work. You’d need an army. We need to know what kind of cancer the killer has. Then I can narrow it down.”
“How are we going to find that out?” I asked.
“Wait for the next murder,” she said.
CHAPTER 10
Dr. Hale Tachman spent the last morning of his life trying to commit adultery, according to a nurse. She told police the doctor kept coming back to the filing area and flirting with the new bleached blond secretary. Two days ago he’d yelled at the same secretary for a typo in a letter. But yesterday she’d been shimmying around in a skirt that looked painted on, in the nurse’s opinion, and the doctor had a change of heart, or something. He spent a lot of time watching her bend down for the V-Z files. Today, he’d come in all spruced up and the nurse heard him ask the secretary to lunch at the Channing Hotel, which everyone at Moorton Hospital knew was tantamount to asking her to sleep with him.
Unfortunately, the nurse didn’t hear the answer. A patient hit the emergency call button in the bathroom and needed immediate attention, but the nurse noticed the doctor was going around whistling all morning.
The secretary told police that of course she refused Dr. Tachman’s invitation. He was a married man with two little children. And besides, she added, why were the police listening to that nurse? It was common knowledge that she’d had an affair with Dr. Tachman last summer and he’d dumped her. The nurse was just jealous.
Dr. Tachman was a gastroenterologist. When he wasn’t hitting on the staff, he gave sigmoidoscopies at Moorton, using a long, flexible tube with a tiny light to examine patients’ colons. It was a primitive and painful procedure compared to a colonoscopy, and people dreaded it. They dreaded it more when Tachman worked on them. He was always in a hurry, and preferred to use the rigid sigmoidoscope, instead of the flexible one. The rigid sig was faster, but he couldn’t see as much of the colon with it, which meant he could miss a “right-sided” tumor. This never worried Tachman, and his patients didn’t know there were different kinds of sigmoidoscopes. They did know he was preoccupied, impatient, and unnecessarily rough, and complaints were made to the head of the gastroenterology department. Today, he was rushed, as usual. He finished his last scheduled morning procedure at eleven forty-five.
Dr. Tachman never made it to lunch, with or without the secretary. He was shot when he stopped in his private office to pick up his jacket around eleven-fifty. Dr. Tachman’s office was at the end of a long corridor, right by the exit to the stairs. He’d complained about this office ever since he’d been assigned it. He wanted one that was bigger and not so isolated.
The doctor was right to complain. Police believed the killer simply stepped out of the exit door, shot the doctor four times as he paused to unlock his office, then ran back down the stairs and out on some other floor, where he blended with the crowd that was always at the hospital. No one saw the killer and the new staircase security camera was malfunctioning that day. Once again, the Doc in the Box killer got away.
I heard all the details from Tina when I got back to the newsroom. Tina was on the Doc in the Box team and covered this murder, too.
Katie had told me less than half an hour ago that we’d have to wait until the next murder to figure out what kind of cancer the killer had. Another doc was dead—a gastroenterologist—so now we’d know, and know quickly. That is, if Katie and the police were correct. I still wasn’t ruling out the doctor’s wife or, after Tachman and his antics, maybe a consortium of wives, as the killer. But I immediately beeped Katie. Ten minutes later she called back.
“We didn’t have to wait long,” I told her. “There’s been another Doc in the Box killing.”
“Who did he bump off?” she asked.
“Dr. Hale Tachman. A gastroenterologist. Did you know him?”
“Yes. He was an asshole,” she said. “No wonder he specialized in looking at them. Takes one to know one.”
“We have our next dead doctor. Now can you tell me what kind of cancer the killer has?”
“I can’t talk,” she said. “Want to meet for dinner?”
“Sure. Name the place.”
“Blueberry Hill. Seven o’clock.”
I had to spend the afternoon at radiation oncology with Georgia. She had a later appointment today, because Charlie had called a long morning meeting she couldn’t miss. She was in a good mood. The doctor’s reports were excellent, her white blood cell count was good, she’d quit losing weight, and she had more energy.
I recognized some of the regulars. Mrs. Turban was looking better today, more alert. I saw a new couple, a man in his fifties, waiting with his wife, who was about the same age. She was wearing a perky blue hat to cover her chemo baldness, and looked very pretty. As she sat down, he gave her bottom a little pat. She smiled at him. He smiled back. I felt terribly alone, and thought of Lyle, then pushed that thought away.
“God dammit, give him a call,” said Georgia, who had a spooky way of reading my mind. I shook my head. I just hoped I could talk Katie into going through the hospital files tonight. I was actually looking forward to being awake most of the night looking at medical records. I’d rather go through old files than old memories of Lyle.
After the hospital, I stopped at Kopperman’s deli and picked up some bagels and chicken soup for Georgia’s dinner. Then I took her home. I got to Blueberry Hill ten minutes late. Katie was already sitting in a booth and had ordered a beer.
Blueberry Hill was in University City, an older suburb of St. Louis around Washington University. It had a delightful collection of boomer toys and memorabilia: gorgeous glowing old jukeboxes, Howdy Doody dolls, Beatles toys. Rock-n-roll legend Chuck Berry still did his famous duck walk once a month in the downstairs Duck Room, named in his honor. Even the bathroom walls were entertaining. My favorites included: “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention” and “Gravity: It’s not just a good idea—it’s the law!” Blueberry Hill also had a fast, efficient staff, cold beer, and a juicy burger.
As soon as I sat down, a waiter with an earring took our orders. Katie wanted a plain burger, medium rare, and a small salad instead of fries. I figured my fat cells would get extra credit just sitting next to a salad, so I ordered the cheddar burger with double fries. I had a long night ahead of me and needed the fuel. So did Katie, but she didn’t know it yet.
The latest Doc in the Box victim had arrived at the morgue, Katie said, but she probably wouldn’t do the autopsy. Her boss liked to do the celebrities.
“Do you know the kind of cancer now?” I asked.
“I have a pretty good idea,” she said. “I think the odds are it’s colon cancer. There are a couple of others a gastroenterologist would be looking for, but colon cancer is the most common. It’s one of the big killers, right up there with breast and lung cancers. Colon cancer is more likely to hit men. Breast cancer generally goes for women.”
“So we’re looking for a man?”
“Probably. But women get it, too.”
That was the problem with good doctors. They never gave you a straight yes or no answer.
The waiter brought our food, and I waited until the plates were on the table before I started talking. “Now that you’ve narrowed it down, you can check the patient records for likely suspects, right?”
“Wrong,” she said. “I can get fired and lose my license. Unauthorized use of patient files is illegal and a breach of medical ethics.”
“Come on, Katie. I’ve spent too much time around hospitals. Those records are not s
acred, and the staff gossips like a small-town sewing circle. Anyway, who’s going to know? You think I’m going to tell? If anyone asks me where I got the lead, I can say I overheard a patient talking. Everyone knows I practically live at Moorton these days.”
“No,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s more dangerous not to find this killer. He’s got a grudge against Moorton. You work there in the ER. Maybe you treated him. How do you know he won’t come after you?”
“Because I keep a shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot in my bedroom,” she said, and bit fiercely into her burger.
“He won’t be in your bedroom. He’ll shoot you at the hospital, where they frown on doctors toting shotguns. Even if you are carrying a gun, you’ll be dead before you can get it. Look what happened to Tachman. A gun wouldn’t have helped him. He was ambushed outside his office.”
We both chewed in silence for a while. I hoped that would persuade her. It didn’t.
Katie said, “What makes you think I’ll find anything? The information you need may not be in the hospital computer. Or we might miss something important. Unless you are at the Palace on Ballas—St. John’s Mercy to you—hospital computers are always hopelessly out of date and slow. This is especially true at Moorton Hospital. I was on the computer committee there. Did I ever tell you about that? No? I guess I was too frustrated to discuss it.”
Great. Now she had technical as well as ethical reasons not to do it.
“You have way too much faith in hospital computer records,” she said, digging into a pile of lettuce like she enjoyed it. “The buying is always done by a committee, so the system is out of date before it starts.”
“Why? The committee is too slow?”
“And stupid,” she said. “The committee I was on was run by guys in suits who spent hours discussing a subject they didn’t know anything about. They had no computer experience and there wasn’t a medical degree in the bunch. They were going to buy this big optical disk ‘jukebox’ to store data, but at the time there was no technology available to read this data. Nobody but me thought this was strange.
“I felt like I was telling the emperor he was nekkid. I stood up at this meeting and said, ‘Now let me get this straight … you want to spend two hundred grand for something to store data, but we have no way to easily retrieve this data, and we have no guarantee anyone will invent a way to readily retrieve this data?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said the guys in suits.
“ ‘Why?’ I said.
“ ‘Because we need to store it. It’s a Joint Commission requirement,’ they said.
“ ‘But if you can’t get to it, what good is it?’
“ ‘That’s not the point,’ the suits said. ‘We’re not required to be able to retrieve it. The regs only specify that we store it.’ ”
I was impressed. “That’s awesome stupidity. They could be Gazette management.”
“The only good thing about the whole experience was that it gave me an intimate knowledge of the Moorton computer system,” Katie said. “We won’t have to spend all night at the hospital checking the records.”
Did she say “we” and “checking the records”? She was going to do it. She was going to search the medical records for me.
“Nowadays most people can work from their home computer late at night using a modem and a dial-up number. I bet you do that with the Gazette.”
I nodded, but didn’t interrupt. Keep talking, Katie, I thought. Talk yourself into this. I can’t do it without you.
“I do that all the time when I’m on call. I’ll get a late-night call from the hospital and look up the patient’s lab results from home. I have to. Half the time the residents calling me don’t have a clue what the results are because they’ve been up all night and they’re dead tired.
“I can check most of the hospital records from my home. I’ll narrow down the candidates to a manageable number, maybe ten or twelve. Then we’ll have to go back to the hospital and get those records pulled. That’s the good news. The bad news is my dog Willis likes to sit on my feet when I work at home, and that makes my feet fall asleep.”
“What can I get to keep you and your feet awake? Coffee? Soda? Junk food?”
Katie finished her beer, and said, “Copious amounts of Diet Mountain Dew and coffee. No junk food. If I’m staying awake all night I have to avoid carbohydrates like the plague, or I’ll get a big rush of energy and then a big crash. My late-night snacks of choice are meat, cheese, and scrambled eggs with hot sauce. I like omelets, too, but I suspect you can’t make omelets, can you?”
“I could, but you could patch tires with them. I scramble eggs pretty good, though.”
“That’s your job, then. You can scramble me some eggs in a few hours, and throw in lots of ham, bacon, and cheese. I’ll need some beef jerky in between. I love to eat beef jerky.”
“Done,” I said. “When do we start?”
“Right now. I don’t have too bad a schedule tomorrow, and you’ll hound me until it’s done. Follow me home, so you can find my house. You can get the snacks later.”
I paid while she ducked into the john to check out the latest philosophy. She came out laughing. “There’s a new one on the wall that fits our situation,” she said. “It says, ‘To err is human, but to really screw up you need a computer.’ ”
I followed her pickup to an old white farmhouse off Manchester Road, surrounded by big shade trees and old-fashioned flowers like bridal wreath, lilac, and iris. Willis greeted us at the door, a big friendly gray-brown mutt with a lot of terrier in his genetic past. There was a great deal of tail-wagging and ear-scratching, then Katie poured out his dinner.
While Willis ate and Katie made coffee, I wandered through the house. It had four rooms originally, two on each floor. The big comfortable living room had a fieldstone fireplace. Other rooms had been added on over the years in a rambling style. The most recent addition was Katie’s, a new kitchen with cherrywood cabinets, a cooking island, and lots of sharp knives I hoped Katie didn’t bring home from work.
Willis and I followed Katie into a small home office. He sat on Katie’s feet. I moved a pile of papers and sat on a small beige sofa. Katie fired up the computer.
“Let me see if I can even get in tonight,” she said. “The system could be down.”
It wasn’t. When I left for the supermarket, Katie was punching keys and Willis had fallen asleep on her feet. At the store I bought cheddar cheese, bacon, and a big ham steak for Katie, a loaf of sunflower seed bread, a dozen eggs, a dozen packs of beef jerky, and two chilled twelve-packs of Diet Mountain Dew. I planned to carbo-load, so I picked up pretzels, onion-and-sour-cream dip, and Oreo cookies for myself.
Back at Katie’s house, I put the food away, popped an iced Dew, and set a stack of beef jerky packs by Katie’s computer. Then I brought out my own laptop, sat on the couch, and started writing the column about Irene and Bill that was due tomorrow afternoon. The Oreos, dip, and Dew powered a huge energy surge, and I had my column written by midnight, when Katie put in a request for scrambled eggs with plenty of ham, bacon, and cheese. I turned out a tasty plate for the two of us, with green onions on top and hot sauce on the side. Katie ignored the loaf of toast I fixed, so I ate that, too.
Then she returned to work, with determination and another Dew. Katie regarded a computer as a balky donkey that had to be beaten, threatened, and cursed frequently to move. She loudly cursed the hospital computer’s slowness and stubbornness. Her standard method of extracting information was to type in the commands, then during the long wait that followed, she’d flick the screen with her finger and snarl, “Cough it up, bitch” or “Spit it out, asshole.” Katie’s computer could be either sex. Once, she thumped the terminal hard on top and yelled, “Come on!” The whole hospital system must have crashed, and I thought our quest was canceled for the night. We drank Mountain Dew and stared glumly at the screen and the SYSTEM ERROR messages. Katie had been ready to print a big file wh
en the whole thing died, and now she wondered if her illegal search had been discovered.
Suddenly, the computer came back on and began spitting out the information, slowly, reluctantly, whining, grinding, and complaining. Katie was searching for colon cancer patients who had all the dead doctors. Then she looked for some problem they had that cried out for vengeance. About one A.M., I crashed on the couch, awakened periodically by Katie’s snarls and threats, plus an occasional thump. At two-thirty A.M., she woke me up and announced that she’d narrowed the killer down to twelve possible candidates, and now we had to look at the hard copy files. She called the hospital’s patient records room for the complete medical records for all twelve. Katie was remarkably alert, but so hopped up on caffeine she talked practically nonstop. I could hardly move. The couch was about as comfortable as a slab of concrete, and my back and neck ached. I stumbled out to my car. Katie packed a thermos of coffee and took a handful of beef jerky. She drove her pickup, and I followed in Ralph. I was so bleary-eyed I could hardly see. The road was a blur and the streetlights had rings around them.
We entered the hospital by an employee entrance in the back of the building. “You wait here in this room. I don’t want anyone to see me wandering around here with a newspaper columnist,” Katie said, shoving me into an office the size of a shower stall. There was barely room for a half-size desk and chair. She closed the door and I wondered how long it would take me to develop claustrophobia. Perversely, now that I was off the road, I was wide awake. There was nothing to read in the room but a memo for the hospital blood drive and “Moorton Musings,” the incredibly dull in-house magazine for patients, which featured photos of the administration sucking up to rich donors. This was an old issue. It showed a grinning Dr. Brentmoor at a party with his almost ex-wife, a lot of thin well-dressed women, and fat well-dressed men. I was reading the special bequests at the back when Katie returned with a huge pile of well-stuffed files.