His wife, Mary, rocked their two-year-old daughter in her lap and softly sang her a lullaby. In spite of the cold, sweat gathered on Stone’s forehead as he strained to see the road through the blizzard.
Mary reached over and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry we had to leave the party. I know how much you enjoy the faculty teas.”
He put his hand on her knee and rubbed it without taking his eyes off the road. “Don’t be silly. The babysitter said Megan had a hundred and two fever.” He smiled, “There’ll be plenty more parties, but only one Megan.”
He put his hand back on the wheel as the road began a gentle curve to the left. Suddenly, out of the wall of white, came two blinding cones of light. Stone slowed as he realized an eighteen-wheeler was hurtling toward them, sliding sideways and jackknifing on the ice-slick road.
He looked frantically left, then right, but there was nowhere to go. At the last moment, he wrenched the wheel to the right, hoping to put the car and himself between the truck and his family. As the lights bore down on them, he screamed in frustration at the inevitability of the collision.
As the two vehicles slammed together, there was a horrible sound of screeching metal and a tremendous blossoming of light as the truck exploded in a giant fireball that blinded him for a moment before all became black . . .
* * *
Jordan P. Stone, Ph.D. and former professor of philosophy at Rice University, awoke screaming and thrashing, and he pulled feverishly at the tubes in his arms and nose. George Patterson, second-year resident in internal medicine at Ben Taub General Hospital, rushed into the room and grabbed Stone’s arms, then began to speak to him in a soothing voice.
“Hey, Doc, it’s okay. It’s me, George . . . Calm down, okay? Just relax.” As he talked, Patterson gently held Stone’s arms away from his IV and nasogastric tubes.
Slowly, Stone’s eyes cleared and focused on Patterson, then shifted to take in the hospital room and its furnishings. A dry and coated tongue emerged to lick red, cracked lips. He croaked out a garbled word, then subsided into a fit of racking, tearing coughing.
Finally, he caught his breath enough to ask, “I’m back in the hospital again, huh?”
“Yeah, you had a bad one this time. For a while there, I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”
Stone’s lips spread in a slow grin. “Aw, come on, Doc, you know there are more old drunks than there are old doctors.”
Patterson released Stone’s arms and leaned back, crossing his legs. He’d heard that old saying many times. “Now, Jordan, don’t get philosophical on me. In the two years I’ve been a resident here, I’ve managed to learn more about alcoholic cirrhosis and delirium tremens from you than in four years of med school.”
Stone struggled and finally managed to sit up in the bed, although he paled with the effort. “Yeah, George, I know, and don’t think I’m not grateful. Why do you think I haven’t charged you for all this education I’m providing for you interns and residents?”
Patterson patted him on the shoulder. “Do you think you could keep some solid food down if I ordered it?”
“If I say yes, does that mean you’ll remove this infernal tube from my nose?”
“I’ll make a deal with you. If you can keep breakfast down, I’ll take the tube out, but if you puke it up, the tube goes back down. Okay?”
Stone shuddered, then shivered violently. “Okay, but I think you’d better give me some more Librium, or a shot of Night Train, before you try to feed me. The shakes are starting, and I’d rather not have any more of those blasted seizures.”
The doctor reached up and pressed the NURSE CALL button. “Okay, I’ll increase the dose to fifty milligrams every four hours, but I’m going to keep the IV going so we can push some vitamins and antinausea medicine. I’d like to build you up a little more this time before we let you go.”
Stone stuffed his shaking hands under his arms to keep them still, then leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Okay, Doc, whatever trips your trigger. Maybe this time I’ll fool all of you and stay on the wagon after I leave here.”
Patterson gave him a wry grin. “Now, don’t promise anything rash. If you do that, how do you expect me to train these interns in the fine art of bringing someone back from the brink of an alcoholic coma?”
When Patterson walked out of the room to order the increase in Stone’s tranquilizers, he found Dr. Sheila Goodman standing there reading Stone’s chart.
“Uh, is everything okay, Dr. Goodman?” Patterson asked, worried that maybe she’d found some fault with the way he’d been treating Stone.
She smiled up at him over her half glasses. “Yes, Dr. Patterson, everything is fine. I was going over your patient’s past history and lab results.”
She closed the chart. “Rather a sad case. A long history of chronic alcoholism, liver and kidney functions in the cellar, and obvious signs of incipient heart failure on his chest X-ray and EKG readings.”
Patterson just nodded. He knew the chart well.
“I’d say it would be a miracle if the man lives another month,” Sheila said.
Patterson nodded again. “Did you have time to really look at his past history?” he asked.
“Just the list of past hospitalizations. Why?”
“The man has a doctorate in philosophy and was a tenured professor at Rice University until his wife and daughter were killed in a car wreck while he was driving. He had no history of drinking until then, but evidently that knocked the slats out from under him and he went off the deep end. It’s been downhill ever since.”
Sheila pursed her lips. Perhaps this was the man she’d been looking for. His case was certainly hopeless enough; the only question was whether it was too late for Kat’s and Burton’s magic serum to work its miracles on him.
“It is an interesting case, George,” Sheila said, handing the chart back to him. “Please keep me informed and be sure to let me know before he is discharged. I might like to have a word or two with him.”
CHAPTER 21
The next morning, Sheila met George Patterson outside the door to Jordan Stone’s room. Sheila had asked Patterson to have him transferred from a ward bed to a private room. When he asked her why, she just shrugged and said she was contemplating putting him in a research project and needed to get a better idea of his past history, both medical and social.
They entered the room to find Stone staring at his breakfast, a wistful look on his face.
“Hey, Jordan,” Dr. Patterson said. “How’re you doin’ this morning?”
Stone turned red, bloodshot eyes to Patterson. “Thinking back to when I could eat steak and eggs for breakfast and never look back. Now I look at this oatmeal—if that is what this concoction before me truly is—and I wonder what the chances are that I can keep it down long enough to digest it.”
Patterson ushered Sheila over to Stone’s bedside. “Jordan, this is Dr. Sheila Goodman. She is head of the department of internal medicine’s geriatrics department.”
He leaned over, put his hand up next to his mouth, and stage-whispered, “She is also one of my bosses, so be extra-nice to her or I might get canned.”
Sheila laughed and playfully punched Patterson on the shoulder. “Now, don’t go telling him that, George. He’ll think I’m a dreadful martinet.”
Stone stared at her for a moment, and she had the strangest feeling he could see all the way down to her soul.
“No, Dr. Goodman, I would never think that. I can see right away that you are a gentle, compassionate doctor filled with the milk of human kindness.”
He glanced at Patterson. “And, George, you and I both know the good doctor here thinks you are one of the best residents in the department. Otherwise they would never have put you on such a difficult case like mine.”
Sheila laughed. “Now I can see, Mr. Stone, why George said you had a line of bullshit a mile long and twice as wide.”
Stone held up a hand. “Please, Dr. Goodman, call me Jorda
n. I like it when beautiful women call me by my first name . . . makes me feel decades younger.”
“Then you must call me Sheila.”
He shook his head. “No, ma’am. While in the hospital, protocol must be followed, so I shall call you Dr. Goodman.” And then he winked. “Until such time as I feel well enough to ask you to dinner, since I see you are not wearing a wedding ring.”
She laughed again and signaled to Patterson he could leave. Then she pulled up a visitor’s chair and sat next to the bed. “I am here to ask you some rather personal and probing questions—if you don’t mind, of course.”
Stone looked around and spread his arms. “Is that why I was transferred from the dungeons of ward life to the presidential suite?”
This man is still mentally sharp, Sheila thought. “Yes. I thought we might do better with some privacy for our discussion.”
He grinned, exposing yellow, dirty teeth that hadn’t seen a toothbrush in quite some time. “Oh, thank goodness. I was afraid for a moment that you’d put me here so that you could have your way with me in secret.” He ran his hands down his chest to his stomach. “Because I do realize that I am fairly irresistible in this oh-so-sexy hospital gown with no back to it.”
Sheila leaned back and crossed her legs. She found to her surprise that she not only liked this man, but she was enjoying the interplay quite a bit.
“I will try to restrain myself, in the interest of good medical ethics, of course,” she replied, drawing a chuckle from Stone.
She leaned over and pulled out a small, handheld recorder from her purse. “Do you mind if I record our discussion?” she asked. “Like most doctors’, my handwriting is so bad I can scarcely read it myself.”
He waved a hand. “Not at all, Doctor. In my previous life as a professor of philosophy at Rice University, I was used to students recording my golden words for posterity.”
Sheila clicked the recorder on and said, “Let’s begin by talking about your previous life, Jordan.”
For almost two hours Sheila interviewed Stone, though, truth to tell, he elicited as much personal information from her as she did from him. Before long, she knew that they had become fast friends rather than mere acquaintances.
Before she ended the interview, she decided she would try to find out what had happened to send him so far off the normal course of his life.
“Jordan, before I go, would you mind my asking just what caused you to go completely around the bend and turn to alcohol as you evidently did? I know you lost your wife and child in an auto accident, but was there more to it than that?”
Jordan turned and glanced out the window before he answered. “Oh yes, there was more,” he said, his voice filled with sadness.
“Do you mind sharing it with me?” she asked.
“The evening of the accident, my wife, Mary, and our two-year-old daughter, Madison, and I were attending a faculty tea at Rice University. We received a call from our babysitter that our one-year-old daughter, Megan, had a very high fever and was acting lethargic, so we decided to head home to see whether or not she needed to go to the emergency room. As it happened, Houston was in the midst of one of its rare winter storms. The roads were icy, and sleet and freezing rain was blowing in a gale-force wind.”
He paused, his face pale at the memory, and took a sip of water. “On the way home, an eighteen-wheeler lost control and hit us head-on. There was just no way I could avoid the accident.”
Sheila reached over and took his hand. “I’m truly sorry, Jordan.”
He nodded, but his eyes were far away. “It was several days later when I awoke in the hospital to find that my wife and Madison had been killed instantly in the crash.” He turned to stare at Sheila. “But that wasn’t the worst of it . . . I also learned that my younger daughter, Megan, had died of bacterial meningitis while I was unconscious in the hospital. The babysitter hadn’t known to take her to the emergency room until it was too late.”
“Jesus,” Sheila whispered, wondering whether she could have withstood a double blow like that herself.
Jordan continued, speaking low. “So, it appeared to me that God had bitch-slapped me with the death of Mary and Madison, and then He had backhanded me with the death of Megan.” He shook his head. “When I recovered, I contemplated suicide many times, but I just didn’t have the courage to take my own life, so I just dove into the bottle and I’ve never come up for air.”
He laid his head back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. “When I’m drunk is the only time I don’t see their faces or think about how life was so sweet until that night.”
Sheila shook her head. “I am so sorry I made you relive that night, Jordan. That kind of blow would have been hard for anyone to survive.”
He turned his head to look at her. “I didn’t survive it. I have been dead inside since that day.”
Finally, she glanced at her watch, surprised that so much time had passed. “Oh my goodness, I’m going to be late for my office patients. May I see you again, Jordan, if I promise not to bring that subject up again?”
Stone reached over and placed a rough, gnarled hand gently over hers. “Please come again, Dr. Goodman. I haven’t enjoyed someone’s company so much in more years than I care to remember.”
She clicked off the recorder and patted his hand. “Me either, Jordan, me either.”
And, for the next three days, she did return and spent considerable time both interviewing and just talking with Jordan Stone. She found him to be a very intelligent, engaging man and someone whose company she found quite enjoyable.
After the third day, she called Burton and asked if he and his partners could come to her apartment that evening for coffee and pastries and a discussion of the man whom she thought should be their first experimental patient.
* * *
That same night, John Palmer Ashby was having a meeting of his own. Present were the two men he’d had tailing Ramsey—Matt Gomer and Doug Johnson—both ex-marines. They were working for the other man present, a private investigator named Harold Gelb, whom Ashby had hired to find out everything he could about the scientists to whom he was entrusting his life.
Once Beverly Luna had shown the men in, Ashby told her to turn off his oxygen, serve them coffee, and then make herself scarce. When she closed the door behind her, Ashby pulled a cigar out from under his blanket and stuck it in his mouth. “Light me up,” he ordered Gelb.
Once his cigar was going to his satisfaction, he leaned back against his pillow and said, “Give me your report, Harold.”
Harold, a chubby man with a corona of hair surrounding a bald pate, inclined his head at Matt Gomer, the senior operative.
Gomer took a small spiral notebook out of his jacket and opened it. “The subject we were assigned to tail, Dr. Burton Ramsey, has spent most of his time going back and forth from the lab at BioTech Laboratories to the apartment of his ex-wife, Dr. Sheila Goodman. Other than a few trips to various malls, where he shopped and bought various packages he took home to her, and a couple of nights out at restaurants with her, he has not left town or gone to any other locations, especially not any that could be used as a satellite laboratory, which we were told to look out for. Last week, he gave his notice to BioTech, telling them his research project had been unsuccessful and that he was going to take a sabbatical for a few months and then try a different research project, as yet undetermined.”
Gomer closed the notebook and put it back in his pocket. “A detailed, typewritten report was turned in to Mr. Gelb.”
Ashby narrowed his eyes and used his good arm to point the cigar at Gomer. “How did you find out what he told his superiors at BioTech?”
“Mr. Johnson and I broke into the offices at BioTech one night and found the personnel file on Ramsey, and that was what his boss, Captain John Sohenshine, had entered into it. It further stated that his failed research project had concerned an attempt to find a chemical way to cleanse the blood of toxins, whatever that means.”
&nb
sp; “And you are sure he hasn’t managed to elude you and set up some other laboratory?” Ashby asked.
Gomer shook his head. “Not unless he walked to it. We planted a GPS monitor on his car and we have never lost its position. Even when he went to the malls to shop, we maintained visual sight on his car while he was in the stores.”
“Did you follow him into the stores while he was shopping?”
Gomer shook his head. “Too dangerous, sir. There is no way we could do that and not be observed following him, and we were told not to let him become aware he was under surveillance.”
“Okay. What about the other subjects, Kaitlyn Williams and Kevin Palmer?”
“We also put a GPS monitor on Dr. Williams’s car, but we have not maintained visual surveillance. Her car has only gone back and forth from the lab to her apartment with a few side trips to grocery stores or small restaurants. Her car has also not left the city limits.” He grinned. “She evidently doesn’t have much of a life outside of her work, as there are no indications of any close friends or boyfriends.”
“And the boy, Kevin?”
Gelb interrupted. “I did not assign any surveillance on the young man, since he is only a lab assistant and not intimately involved in their research. Spot checks have confirmed that he pretty much spends all of his time either at the lab, his apartment, or at the University of Houston, where he currently attends college. Gomer and Johnson did ascertain that his attendance at his classes has been good, with no unexplained absences, and his grades are excellent.”
Ashby nodded. “Any idea why Ramsey has been spending so much time at his ex-wife’s apartment instead of his own?”
Gomer smiled again. “From what we have been able to learn by using a parabolic microphone to listen to some of their conversations, they are attempting a reconciliation. They have been very lovey-dovey and have had sex on most nights he spends there. There have been no suspicious conversations that we have overheard and no mention of his work.”
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