Or I could stay hidden and follow after him until he reached the corridor where I’d at least see who it was. If I knew him, chances were no surgical mask would keep me from identifying him. If he spotted me and ran off, I’d give chase. If he attacked, I’d be ready. I’d also have better justification for splitting his scalp open.
While I thought about these next moves, I realized my initial fury was giving over to a colder, more critical, far more effective anger. Obviously clobbering whoever it was without warning ran the risk of letting him come up with some cock-and-bull story about why he was down here. I might even end up giving him a chance to charge me with attempted murder. I certainly had no real proof that whoever I’d seen come in here was the killer. Hell, apart from Janet, poor Michael, and maybe Williams, no one else even thought there was a killer.
I crouched down and felt the surface of the cold stones. They weren’t outright wet but damp enough to be hard on my joints as well as my muscles. I stretched out facedown, managed not to groan, and tried to fit the bony parts of my hips against uneven hollows in the rock wall at my side. I’d keep the white of my face shielded by my arms as he went by. My stick was in my right hand.
I lay there listening to the absolute silence, figuring I’d have no trouble hearing his approach, with or without his cart, but I’ d have to breathe as silently as I could to avoid detection when he was beside me. I glanced at the luminous dial of my watch, easy to read in the total darkness. It was a few minutes after 4:00. I was ready.
* * * *
I awoke with a start. The first sensation I had was of total pain the second I tried to move. I wasn’t sure at first where I was. Something scrambled over my right foot, tugging on my trousers. Then I remembered everything and bolted upright. I exhaled a loud groan as all my muscles shot into spasm, and in the dim light I saw the humped outline of a large rat scurrying about my feet.
“Shit!” I screamed kicking at it with both feet, then frenetically propelling myself backward.
It shrieked, either in surprise or rage at being disturbed, and scuttled off into the darkness. I hadn’t made contact enough to hurt it any and wondered if it would charge back at me. Keeping my eyes fixed on where it had disappeared into the black passageway, I backed up to the gate, let myself through, and slammed it behind me. I now knew what the barrier was for—to contain the rats.
I was shaking—from revulsion of that thing crawling over me while I slept, from being bone cold and stiff, from my muscles recoiling into spasms every time I tried to use them. My teeth were chattering, and besides everything else I really had to pee. I managed to get my wrist steady enough to read my watch. It was a few minutes after 6:00.
* * * *
Mist had replaced the rain but it was still dark when I raced back to St. Paul’s. My driving hadn’t improved any, and my mood was as foul as my breath.
I’d blown a God-given opportunity to put a face on this nightmare and was furious with myself.
At the entranceway to that accursed tunnel, I’d stood around as long as I could, freezing, hopping from one foot to another, and wondering what to do. Was he still somewhere up there? Or had he already gone back out, passing me in the dark as I lay sleeping? Possibly. But in the silence he probably would have heard my breathing, unless it was muffled by my head being facedown on my arms. Had he instead left the asylum through some other unguarded exit—an unlatched window or unlocked door known only to him? Maybe he needed a way to come and go without security knowing he was in the building.
I shot through the remaining pools of water in the street, sending great cascades arching away from the car all the way to the sidewalk. Despite an overnight scouring from the storm, the stone fronts of the houses remained stained and shabby in the passing glow of my headlights.
The meeting I’d arranged with Williams was to have been at 6:00 in my office. I’d intended to explain why I thought a serial killer was infecting people and hopefully to show him some specific leads from a night of going through records at UH. Now what he’d hear was how I’d armed myself with a broomstick, followed some orderly pushing a cart into an abandoned asylum, and then fallen asleep! I took my rage at my own stupidity out on yet another puddle, roaring through it and scattering it into a million droplets.
I had hoped if I could at least create the suspicion in Williams’s mind that the infections were caused deliberately, we could then use Death Rounds to sound the alarm together—convince some members of the meeting that Michael had been attacked, show them his note which I still carried in my pocket, and get them to consider that something deliberate and sinister was behind the infections.
“Bloody pathetic,” I muttered, given how hopelessly naive that idea seemed now.
I spotted Williams’s big four-by-four parked near the entrance to ER as soon as I pulled into the doctors’ lot at St. Paul’s. When I got closer, I saw the big man himself was waiting in the driver’s seat, pouring himself a coffee from a large thermos. He eyed my car suspiciously for a few seconds after I pulled up beside him, probably recognizing from my vehicle that I was the jerk who’d cut him off Friday. Nevertheless, he saluted me with his cup when I got out, smiled, and started to step down from his much higher cab. I inwardly winced when I saw how immaculately dressed he was in a blue blazer, a white shirt with crisp-looking cuffs, and a hand-painted tie of the kind I never even bothered to price when I went shopping.
My own outfit—the slacks, shirt, and sports jacket I’d spent the night in—were smudged and wrinkled from lying on the stone floor. The bottom of my right pant cuff was torn where the rat had pulled it. Even though I’d tried to brush my teeth with my finger in the first washroom I’d found back at UH, my mouth still felt like a toilet. I needed a bath, a shave, and a change of clothes, and I hadn’t time to get any of them.
Williams looked me up and down in astonishment when I walked up to him. His eyebrows arched; his nose wrinkled. “Decided to look our best for the ordeal, have we?” he commented wryly.
“Come on, we’ve got to talk,” I said, turning toward emergency. My watch told me Death Rounds started in twenty minutes. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure I could convince Williams even if I had twenty hours.
* * * *
In my office Williams sat across from me and poured us each a coffee from his thermos while I called ICU and asked about Michael.
No change—still shocky, on a respirator, and unconscious.
Then I dug out an electric razor that I kept for the times I worked overnight in ER and started to explain the connection between three nurses with Legionella and the so-called victims of the Phantom from two years ago.
By the time I got to my being attacked five nights ago in the sub-basement, half my stubble was gone, and Williams was frowning hard enough to send furrows all the way up to the front of his shiny, immaculate scalp. The furrows deepened during my resume of what I found in the archive charts and my speculation about the probable agents used in those first attacks. When I told him I’d followed someone into the abandoned asylum a few hours ago, it was enough to make him lean forward, massage the grooves in his forehead with his free hand, and mutter, “Jesus Christ!”
I’d no idea whether he believed me or thought I was crazy.
Nevertheless I barged ahead with the rest, including how I’d stupidly fallen asleep lying in wait in the dark. As I talked, I ran my fingers over my chin feeling for any patches of whiskers I’d missed with the razor. Unable to find any, I pressed the off button, putting an end to the buzzing, and in the silence between us, outlined what records at UH I thought we should go through next. When I stopped speaking, a glance at my watch told me we were ten minutes from the start of Death Rounds.
Williams remained motionless in his chair, staring at me with a fixed look of incredulity. I found his silence unnerving but said nothing. I figured this decisive man wouldn’t keep me waiting long for his verdict on whether I’d have his help.
As he sat there thinking, I took out a bottl
e of aftershave lotion to splash on my face. If I dumped the whole lot over my head, I thought, it wouldn’t be enough to hide the aroma from the rest of me. I reached into my office closet and found a crisp white lab coat to pull over my soiled clothing.
“How did you know about the three nurses and those other workers being cruel to patients?” Williams suddenly demanded. My back was turned to him and his voice caught me off guard.
I hadn’t mentioned Janet’s role in perceiving that the Phantom was active again. Nor had I admitted that it was nothing more than my faith in her ability to see what others had missed that formed the foundation of my early suspicions. But I decided to go for broke and risk winning him over by being as candid as possible. “My wife’s an obstetrician and gynecologist at UH. She realized her patients all had trouble...”
While I explained I watched his eyes, again looking for some hint as to how I was doing. I got none.
He leaned back in his chair when I finished, studied me some more, then asked, “And neither you nor your wife attempted to report this idea?”
“Of course we did. No one believed us. No one wanted to.”
“Do you have any suspicions about who this killer might be?”
My mind flashed on Rossit, on Hurst, on the powerful interests behind the amalgamation. “Not really,” I answered. My speculations, though disturbing, were so nebulous that I figured I’d lose Williams by even mentioning them.
He rubbed the angle of his jaw with his little finger and again seemed to consider me from head to toe. “Well, I can see why no one listened to you,” he commented after a few seconds. “Your story sounds crazy.”
I felt a resurgence of all my pent-up fear and frustration. “Goddamn it!” I blurted out angrily. “I’m sick of these sanctimonious scientific blinkers you guys wear. My best friend’s upstairs, maybe dying. He scoffed at our warning too—”
“Hey!” he commanded sharply. “Hold your horses. I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. I said your story sounds crazy. You already won me over last night when you suggested I analyze the Legionella cases as if an unknown vector was involved. Maybe it’s a killer; maybe it isn’t. But you were right about one thing; I would consider a carrier in any other outbreak where it wasn’t clear how a bug was being passed around.”
His measured response took a few seconds to register. Then came a surge of hope that he might become our ally in this. If Williams gave our case any credibility at all, help could be at hand. “You mean you think you can convince the CDC to investigate what’s behind these infections,” I asked, “including the possibility that they were deliberately inflicted?” We’d finally have a chance to launch a proper hunt for this murderer.
“With that story?” Williams gave a derisive laugh. “No way! But I’ve got an idea how we can get them to go over that asylum with a fine-tooth comb. It might flush out the character you’re looking for or it might not, but it’ll be a hell of a lot more effective than creeping around the place in the dark with a broomstick.”
My expectations thudded back to earth. The disappointment must have shown in my face.
“Hey, come now,” he said, pushing himself out of his chair. “There’s no time for sitting around and becoming discouraged. We don’t want to get the crowd at Death Rounds doubly angry at you by making them wait. And when we get there, stride in fast, try and sit away from the others, then keep your legs under the table. After all,” he chided with a wink and a grin, “who’s going to believe someone with B.O., dirty trousers, and a shredded cuff?”
Despite, or maybe because of, the absurdity of my position, his ribbing made me laugh. “Yeah, my mother would be shocked! Imagine, not having had a bath or a change of underwear before I head off to save my career and stop a serial killer.”
But the wisecrack didn’t ease the increasing tightness in my gut. The specter of the killings and the attempted killings had so dominated the last few days that I’d repeatedly shoved any fears I had for my job into the background. Yet I had no illusions about what lay ahead. This was undoubtedly Hurst’s most determined attempt to unseat me, and I’d never been at such a disadvantage or felt so targeted. Nor could I shake my suspicions, vague as they were, that he and Rossit were somehow involved in the murders and that they wanted my credibility in tatters in case I found out enough to try to expose them. But figuring it pointless to reveal such nebulous fears to Williams, I instead kept faking a bravado I most definitely didn’t feel. “Being a fancy dresser like you might impress the hell out of your ducks, Dr. Williams, but it’ll take more than hiding my scruffy outfit to keep the likes of Hurst and Rossit from ousting the likes of me. Now, if you were to pick up those two birds for banding and a botulism check, then release them back into a swamp somewhere, that would get them off my back for a while.”
His grin widened into a wicked smile as we marched out of my office and started toward the pathology department.
* * * *
In the basement corridor the number of residents clutching cups of coffee and scurrying alongside us didn’t help my apprehension any. It was a sign that attendance at the session would be good. On rounding a corner, I saw a clutch of people outside the entrance to the seminar room, some of them carrying in stacks of folding chairs. I instinctively slowed. “Quite a lynch mob,” I muttered.
“Relax,” Williams said quietly, putting his hand against my back and gently urging me forward. “Most people are probably here to find out why this case caused such a stir.”
Inside the long narrow room about twenty people were crowded around an extended central table and another group was hastily arranging a second ring of folding chairs against the wall. Some of my own staff approached me to inquire about Michael, most of them having been told about his admission as they passed through ER.
More than a dozen people were gathered around a huge silver coffeemaker parked in a corner on a steel cart. The rich aroma from its steaming contents was tinged with a hint of formaldehyde fumes. These were emanating from seven loosely covered Tupperware containers spread out along the center of the big table. Through their translucent sides I could see the dark shapes of what would be Phyllis Sanders’s major organs—lungs, heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, brain, and a flat coil of something that I presumed was intestine—all marinating in a cloudy brown fluid.
Williams nodded toward the far end of the display. There sat Rossit holding a gavel, ready to chair the meeting, his eyes fixed on me. To his right was Hurst, also staring my way while leaning back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest, and the corners of his mouth giving the slightest suggestion of a smirk. Like a malevolent Mona Lisa in drag, I thought angrily. Beside him was Baker, the hospital lawyer. All three were dressed in dark suits. There wasn’t a noose on the table in front of them, but the scene reminded me of the quickie saloon trials depicted in old westerns.
Halfway down the table I also recognized the woman from the CDC’s hospital infection group who’d given me Williams’s phone number. She, too, was watching us. Free of her former protective gear and sporting a crimson pantsuit, she stood out in the midst of all the white coats and was almost as stylishly dressed as Williams.
But when I nodded hello, she scowled, jumped up, and strode over. “What are you doing here, Douglas?” she demanded frostily, facing Williams and ignoring me. Without giving him a chance to respond, she added, “I was designated to detail this wrap-up.”
“Just making myself available, Doris,” he answered curtly, “in case there were any complaints about how I handled the first few hours of the operation. Believe me, I don’t want your job.”
She flushed, appeared about to speak, then abruptly spun away and returned to her place at the table. Obviously turf was an issue even within the prestigious halls of the CDC.
“Everybody’s going to be fighting to grab a piece of the fame from this case,” Williams lamented, shaking his head as we found two empty chairs against the wall. “Even if we had some decent evidence to support your cl
aim about a phantom killer, which we don’t, it would still be hard as hell to make Doris or anyone else back off from their rush to publish and get them to seriously consider the story.”
His gloomy prognosis left me trying to tuck my grotty-looking pants as far out of sight under my seat as I could while I surveyed the room and cast about for some better strategy to make people listen.
As expected, I recognized a few staff members with whom I’d had blowups in the past. More reassuring was seeing Susanne and one of our rookie nurses sitting against the wall opposite me. Susanne nodded to me, but the pale, young blonde woman at her side sat motionless, her unblinking stare riveted on the Tupperware. From her frightened expression, I figured she was the nurse who’d ignored Phyllis Sanders’s complaint of orthostatic dizziness, there to confess her mistake and face her reckoning, just as I was. It didn’t seem to be making it any easier on her that the ultimate responsibility and blame for sending the woman home fell on me.
Seeing Cam dart into the room jolted these gloomy thoughts out of my mind. He strode over to Doris, shook hands, and bent down to talk to her. Uh-oh, I thought, hoping he hadn’t already discovered my entry into his confidential records. Maybe he’d shown up only to report on the screening results from University Hospital. But as he talked to Doris, her scowl returned and she nodded toward Williams and me. He returned my gaze, then strode over to tower above me. His blue eyes were blazing, and he didn’t look happy.
“Security told me you were snooping through the minutes of my Infection Control Committee last night!” he challenged, his angry voice loud enough to make people around us stop talking and glance up at him. At their abrupt silence Cam looked around nervously and seemed to become aware of the scene he was starting to create. He moved his mouth closer to my ear. “I was also told you’d been in the archives until an hour ago,” he continued in a fierce whisper, his fury now sibilant but clearly undiminished. “I went down there. I saw the files that you were looking at! I already warned Janet to stop trying to dredge up that Phantom nonsense. But for you to pretend to be from the CDC, violate our security, and breach confidential information—that’s enough to at least charge you with unprofessional conduct, if not criminal trespassing.” He was literally spluttering, his fists clenched between us, his red face inches from my own.
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