While the two men talked, I overheard Fosse discussing the situation with the mayor and the chief of police in what must have been a conference call. He was requesting that every available officer be used to surround the hospital. The police were to arrive without lights and sirens and take up their positions in the dark with as little noise as possible. He then had a similar conversation with the governor, asking for the National Guard to be on standby.
By this point Williams and Riley had fallen silent and were listening along with me to Fosse’s end of the conversation.
“We’ve allowed the evening staff one phone call each to advise their families they won’t be home,” he was explaining, “but haven’t told them why yet, only that we’re preparing for an emergency. I expect the shit will hit the fan in a few minutes when we start giving information and announce the quarantine. We’ll be in much worse trouble by morning when the city wakes up. What we’ll do with the day shift I’ve no idea yet, and once the media gets hold of the story, I don’t know how we’ll handle it all.”
At that point all of us started to put in our two cents worth and, at the end. Fosse reversed his request to the governor. I heard him settle on a thousand troops, the first of them to arrive by dawn.
Never was there any mention of how much force either the police or the soldiers should use if someone panicked and made a run to escape the hospital. But Riley brought it up. He leaned over and whispered, “If any poor bastard does take off, what the Christ are we supposed to do—shoot him?”
* * * *
“Sorry, Janet, but something’s happened, something big. I’m here with the police.”
Her eyes shot open and she groggily pushed herself up off her pillow into a half-sitting position, then shielded herself from the light with one of her hands. “What?”
She sat stock-still as she learned of the threats against her and the hospital, her face a porcelain mask. She remained almost as inscrutable on hearing of Cam’s disappearance. When I told her Fosse’s revelation that Cam was once suspected of being the Phantom, she declared, “Those rumors must have been pretty few and far between. I never heard them.” Her tone was like ice, but she was suddenly blinking more, and I knew she was fighting back tears. Yet as I described the other extraordinary events cascading into place around the hospital, she seemed to bring even that subtle giveaway of emotion under control.
When I finished, she stared at me in absolute silence, her gaze now unblinking. Only her glistening eyes and her pupils widening with fear or anger or both continued to betray the depth of her turmoil. The quiet went on long enough to make Riley squirm. I could hear his leather shoes squeak behind me on the linoleum floor. Finally all she said was, “Cam couldn’t do this.”
“Why do you say that, ma’am?” the detective asked.
She looked at him as if he were an idiot for questioning her. “Because, I know the man,” she replied softly, as softly as the cutting sound a scalpel blade makes in flesh. “He isn’t insane, he isn’t a killer, and he would never even imagine something so monstrous as what’s happening here.” She looked at me. “Earl, I swear I don’t understand why he’s disappeared, but if you’ve ever trusted my instincts, trust them now. It’s not Cam! If the police waste their time pursuing the wrong man, it’s exactly the sort of thing that the real Phantom would count on, especially if he intends to continue killing!”
* * * *
While Riley questioned Janet further, I went back downstairs and met Williams scurrying off to his meeting.
“Coming?” he asked, though it sounded more like an order.
“No, I’ve got something to do down here first.” He started to frown. “But I’ll be along in just a few minutes.”
“Good,” he snapped, his forehead unwrinkling. “By the way, the police have formally taken over from hospital security. They’ve already found out that between six and nine tonight Mackie had several security guards let him into some of those same rooms and departments that Popovitch visited. It also seems Mackie was in such a hurry that every place he went he left anything he looked through in a pile for refiling.” Williams started to turn toward the stairs. “I’ve briefed the ID group as best I can about what they should keep an eye out for,” he said, speaking over his shoulder as he rushed away. “Don’t be late!”
“Best I can my ass,” I muttered, resenting Williams as he disappeared through the stairwell door. “Best for Janet would be to put me in with the ID group right now.”
I found Miller in a classroom where he was briefing his technicians on what would be required of them tonight. Telling Janet about Cam had been difficult enough, but I knew her mettle. Steeling herself for whatever had to be faced was her nature. How Miller would take what I had to tell him, I had no idea.
I interrupted his session, asked if I could have a private word with him, then took him far enough down the hall that no one would overhear.
“In better circumstances I’d wait until you had an hour to spare and take you to an office where you could sit down, but there’s no time. What I’ m going to reveal to you may start to become common gossip in twenty minutes, as soon as Fosse and Williams begin their meeting, and I don’t want you to find it out by chance. Brace yourself, because I’m afraid the news is bad.” I took a breath, and told him everything in a rush.
Despite my attempt to prepare a few phrases beforehand, the words I said sounded hard and distant, as though they weren’t my own. They seemed instead like fragments from some terrible story told by someone else.
“Cam Mackie’s disappeared...he might be behind the threat to the hospital... somehow caused all the Legionella infections...may have infected your mother with the two organisms that killed her...”
As I spoke, I kept thinking I must be ripping him apart.
But Harold Miller reacted with silence, exactly as Janet had done. His stillness was uncanny, as though he had brought every cell in his body to a standstill and focused himself entirely on listening to how his mother had been destroyed. He didn’t get angry, he didn’t cry, he didn’t even show astonishment. He seemed to absorb what I was telling him the way a black hole absorbs light.
I placed a hand on his shoulder to comfort him, but his muscles felt like bundles of high-tension wires vibrating under my fingers. I cast about for something to say that might soften the impact of what I’d just hit him with. “Janet doesn’t believe he’s done any of it. She’s convinced it’s all the work of someone else,” I told him, not fully understanding why I did. I suppose I felt if he knew someone else had believed in Cam, still believed in Cam, he might feel less singled out for betrayal.
“Do you think he murdered my mother?” was all he asked, as though he couldn’t process anything I’d said after that single revelation.
“I honestly don’t know what to think,” I admitted. “Some of what happened tonight doesn’t add up, even though I confess I’ve had terrible suspicions about Cam myself. But Janet’s adamant he’s innocent, and her instincts are disturbingly good.”
He looked at me with that dreadful torment in his eyes which I’d grown so used to seeing. “Thank you for telling me this, Dr. Garnet. You’ve no idea what your and Janet’s efforts to get at the truth behind my mother’s death mean to me. Not many people would do as much.” His voice trembled, the sound of it resonating with strain. His vocal cords must have been stretched tight as a drum.
We talked a few more minutes. He kept the forced steadiness in his voice from cracking, and his attempt to comfort me after I’d given him such devastating news suggested a remarkable inner strength on his part. But during our brief conversation, I recoiled from the darkness and pain I felt simmering beneath the surface of his disciplined manner.
He excused himself, explaining he had to get back to his staff. As I watched his powerful shoulders recede down the hall, I could still sense the extraordinary strength I’d felt in them. He was like a volcano ready to erupt.
A ripple of alarm ran through me. I’d b
een so concerned about the anguish he’d feel when he learned his mother had been murdered, I never thought what he might do about it. I hoped to hell he didn’t find Cam before the rest of us did.
Chapter 19
One of my patients once gave me a brutal insight into me bond between healers and the sick. “Doc, it’s a matter of risk. I have it. You don’t. You can empathize or sympathize as much as you’re able, but at the end of the day, it’s me who does the suffering, maybe even the dying, while you never have to agonize about getting out of here alive. None of you can know how I feel.”
I glanced at my watch as I hurried upstairs. It read 12:20. By now everyone at Fosse’s meeting knew exactly what it felt like to wonder about getting out of here alive.
The hospital sounded like a hive that had been poked with a stick. In the stairwell I could hear running footsteps echoing down at me from the floors above. Doors slammed in the distance. On entering the corridor I heard murmured conversations coming from inside a long row of offices. Phones were ringing. When I crossed the main foyer and headed toward the auditorium, I saw two uniformed police officers at the entrance, struggling into protective gear. Some of Fosse’s invitees were scurrying along with me. In our gloves, masks, and surgical gowns, we looked like latecomers to some bizarre midnight costume ball.
All of us could hear the yelling up ahead well before we got to the auditorium. Two shifts of supervisors, all the chiefs, and a complete turnout by the board members shouldn’t add up to more than a hundred and twenty people. But it sounded like Fosse had ten times that number in there, and all of them angry.
Those with me seemed hesitant to go in. I stepped up, shoved open the doors, and saw pure bedlam. Williams was up onstage with Fosse, and both men were desperately calling for quiet. Below them was a herd of people, all of them in protective gear, milling about the front of the stage, yelling.
“No way!”
“I’m outta here!”
“This is the United States, asshole!”
Scattered throughout the auditorium were a few dozen people who weren’t joining the crowd. Up against the far wall I saw Riley, huddled with three gray-haired men. They were all staring incredulously at the scene in front of the stage. One of them turned and tapped Riley on the shoulder, motioning him to lean his head closer so they could talk. Through the gaps between the back ties of the man’s gown I could see flashes of his dark blue uniform.
People in the crowd, still bellowing, started to turn and head toward the door where I was standing. A hundred and twenty people wasn’t a huge number, but as a substantial portion of them approached, they looked like a mob to me. Over the tops of their heads I saw Williams’s and Fosse’s eyes grow big as saucers.
“Wait!” yelled Fosse.
The wild bunch was no more than twenty feet from me now and seemed pretty determined to walk out and defy the two men’s authority. Riley’s comment flashed through my head. What are we going to do—shoot them ?
I hoped no police were in position yet.
I grabbed a chair, stood on it, ripped off my mask, and thought of the most outrageous thing I could say. “Hold it! I’m contaminated,” I screamed.
It was as if I’d cracked a whip over every head. The group froze, and within seconds their angry shouts trailed off until there was complete quiet in the room.
I seized the advantage. “Some of you know me. I’m Dr. Earl Garnet, and my wife. Dr. Janet Graceton, is admitted upstairs in ICU with a diagnosis of Legionella, thanks to the creep you’ve just been told about.”
The people closest to me pressed back against the rest of the crowd. “Get by him!” someone in the back murmured. “So what if he’s infected? We’re wearing protective gear!” yelled someone else. It would be seconds before they’d all start pushing their way through the doors behind me.
“Think of the people you’re going home to!” I shouted. “They’re not in any protective gear.” They kept edging toward me. “Some of you may already be carriers. Forty-eight hours, that’s all it would take to be sure you’re safe—both for yourself and anybody you touch. For God’s sake, act rationally like the health professionals you’ve always been.”
“Why should we sit around and let some maniac infect us?” demanded a man near the front.
“Right!”
“Exactly!”
“Let’s go!”
They surged forward.
“I know which of you he’s going to kill, even which of you he may already have infected!” I yelled.
That stopped them.
“What!”
“You’re kidding!”
“How can you know he’s already infected some of us?”
They still sounded hostile as hell, but they remained where they were.
“I also know how we can stop him,” I added. Seeing the lot of them ganged together in isolation dress had just given me an idea. “If you’ll all take your seats again,” I suggested, replacing my mask and stepping off the chair, “then I’ll tell you exactly what I think we can do.”
Fosse looked at me with a skeptical stare when I climbed up on the stage.
“This better be good!” Williams muttered through his mask.
I stepped up to the podium and began speaking without even waiting for people to take their seats. I knew my hold on them was tenuous. “For reasons I haven’t time to go into now, we know this killer has a very specific agenda. All his victims are what I would call punishers, colleagues who enjoy being cruel to patients.” I quickly outlined the type of abuse involved. “If we isolate them immediately, confine them all to a specific high-security ward, then I think we’d not only have taken any current carriers out of circulation, we’d also have a good chance of preventing him from infecting any others for the moment. It’s only an initial measure, but it would at least keep us safe for tonight and give us time to organize a better plan.”
At first no one spoke.
Then came murmurs of disbelief.
“...out of his mind...”
“...nuts...”
“...why would anyone kill over delayed pain meds...”
A woman glared up at me from the front row. “Supposing what you say is true, and from what you’ve told us so far that may be supposing a lot, do you know these ‘punishers’ by name?” she demanded sarcastically.
“No, but they know who they are, and I’ll lay you odds so does everyone who works with one of them.”
“Why would they step forward or agree to be locked up?” called out a man in the back row.
“The best reason in the world—self-protection. Turning themselves over to us would be their best bet to keep from being killed. Of course, if any of them don’t see it that way, I’m sure their colleagues could be persuaded to hand them over. Who wants to be near a potential target?”
“They could run,” he persisted.
“They could already be infected,” I shot back. “Without our help to decolonize them, they’re dead. The CDC also has the means to pull in any experimental therapies that might exist against this bug, in case decolonization doesn’t work.” I knew I was resorting to bold-faced lying bluff, but if I didn’t tempt the punishers into coming forward by offering them false hopes, I doubted they’d step up and identify themselves in exchange for salves and soaps. “Cooperating with us is their only chance of surviving if this killer’s already got to them,” I declared without batting an eye. I’d lost a few of my scruples during my battle with the Phantom.
More questions poured out, and Williams started helping me answer them. My ideas outraged some, brought on the derision of others, but no one left the room. The longer they discussed a plan about how to curtail carriers and prevent more killings, I figured, the less likely they were to cut and run. But it was disaster planning raised to the level of a jazz riff. I kept making up answers as they asked questions, throwing out solutions without a thought, afraid to stop in case the first hesitation would cause doubt and the whole scheme would collapse aro
und me.
* * * *
Maybe it was the result of too much coffee, too little sleep, or a whole lot of wishful thinking, but shortly after 2:00 A.M. even the lawyers in the crowd—there seemed to be a disproportionate number of them on the board of UH—were giving their cautious approval to what we’d come up with.
“Put it this way,” one of the lawyers said, “by the time we get through the screaming with the civil liberties types, you folks will have your forty-eight-hour culture results. We’ve got enough stalling power to give you that.”
We’d first concentrated on immediate measures for everyone already in the hospital—steps that were intended to get us through the night and into the next day. All staff would be screened immediately and remain quarantined on the wards where they worked. They in turn would screen all the patients on those wards. The cultures would not only be processed by the labs at UH but by every bacteriology facility in the city; this would provide resources enough to test everyone immediately and simultaneously. Those at risk for being targets, the punishers, would be rounded up and placed in separate wards; Fosse would open a wing for them that had been closed as a cost-cutting measure. They’d remain there under protective guard until all cultures were proven negative or until those who were already infected became ill. While waiting, the high-risk group would be offered prophylactic erythromycin and the sort of decolonizing procedures Williams had suggested back at St. Paul’s— bactericidal soaps, mupirocin ointments up the nose, and nasal lavages. To reduce the risk of spreading the superbug into the general population of the hospital, anyone who did fall sick in that ward would be cared for by those who remained well, minimizing the need for additional personnel to go in and out of that particular quarantine area.
It was the Phantom’s perfect irony, I thought—punishers taking care of punishers.
Throughout all this talk, Riley had been joined by more and more gray-haired men. The surgical gowns hid their rank, but each new arrival seemed to bring the ones already there to attention, and I could imagine the ever-increasing amounts of gold braid under the already bulging sleeves of their protective wear. The last of these men to enter the room stepped up to the podium, introduced himself as the deputy chief of police, and assured us that University Hospital was now surrounded with enough police officers to prevent anyone who refused to cooperate from getting through their lines.
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