Deadly Diversion: A Medical Thriller (30 page)

“What would that be?” She played with a tuft of strawlike hair, newly dyed a darker red.

“If someone’s in danger, for example.” I squinted at her. “Do you know something about Huey’s death?”

“No. No. Nothing like that. It’s personal.”

“You’ll have to trust me if you want to tell me. If I think I have to tell someone, I will.”

She seemed to make up her mind. “You know I asked you about the license, nursing license.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t know if you know this, but the FBI does a background check on everyone applying for a license. We have to be fingerprinted and everything.”

I held my hands still on my lap, pressing curled fingers into my legs. “Really,” I said finally. “They didn’t used to.”

“They do now. It asks if you’ve ever been arrested.”

“I think they want to know if you’ve ever been convicted.”

“That’s what they used to ask. Now you have to say if you’ve even been arrested.”

I waited, dreading what probably was coming.

“I was only fifteen,” she began, her hands twisting a tattered tissue in her lap. “I didn’t know he had pot on him. But they didn’t believe me.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, really. They told Mom to keep me away from him.” A quick, cute smile. “You want to ask me if I did it, too?” When I didn’t answer, she went on. “I tried it once but it just brought me down. I didn’t like the feeling.”

“What’s this about, Serena? How can I help you?”

“The application. For my license.” She turned away and swallowed. “And then the drugs here went missing.”

“But you can’t access the cabinet where the drugs are kept, so you wouldn’t be a suspect. Besides, we know who did that.”

“You do? Who?”

“That’s not the point. I don’t think the state board cares about what you did when you were fifteen. You weren’t convicted of anything.”

“They ask if you’ve been arrested, Monika. And I was.” She bit her lip.

“But didn’t they let you go?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Besides, you were a juvenile. I don’t think that counts.”

“It doesn’t say that. Monika, I don’t know what to do. I really want to be a nurse...”

“I doubt this will keep you from getting a license.”

“What happens if I don’t tell them about it? Will they find out?”

“You can’t lie on something like this. You’d be in a lot worse trouble if they found out later.”

“I can’t see how they’d find out. Juvenile records are sealed. No one can get them, my lawyer said.”

“Serena, you’re going to have a long career in nursing. You don’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.” I smiled at her. “You’re going to be an excellent nurse. You never know what might happen later.”

“Umm.” She didn’t look convinced.

“You know what would be the worst of it?”

She looked at me expectantly.

“You’d have it hanging over you all your career. You’d always be worried about someone finding out.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Tell you what. I know someone at the state board. Why don’t I call and ask her about it?”

“No, no, don’t tell!” She jumped up. “Please!”

“I won’t tell her who. I’ll just ask her what happens if someone who was never convicted admits to having been arrested and lists it on the application. Is that okay?”

“All right. Just don’t tell her my name. Please,” she begged with a quick look back as she went out the door.

“SHE PROBABLY WON’T HAVE a problem,” Karla began, answering my question about Serena. “But I don’t speak for the board, you know.” Karla and I had gone to nursing school together, and I’d found her decision to leave clinical practice to work in a state office puzzling.

“Of course she has to tell the truth,” Karla went on. “Then she’ll have to attach a letter explaining her answer. That’s all in the instructions,” Karla said, sounding as if she’d given these directions many times. “Then the board will decide whether or not it’s been resolved, and whether or not they want to grant her a license.”

“And when they see it’s ancient history and she was never convicted, then she’s in the clear?”

“Mostly. They’ll keep the letter on file. In case something happens in the future.”

So it would hang over her forever, after all.

“How’s things with you, Monika? Still running ICU at St. T’s?”

“Umm,” I said. “Maybe you can tell me what to do about this, if it’s something I should report.”

“About the nursing student?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “About another matter.”

I told her about Bart not doing a full code on Mr. Guardino. “That sounds like an in-house discipline issue, but you’d better report it anyway.”

“He’s in grad school and I’d hate to lose him.”

“He’d probably just receive a reprimand, depending on what the investigators find out.”

“So there has to be an investigation?”

“It might be done by mail. In any case, I recommend that you report it.”

“My boss doesn’t want to.”

“He doesn’t have any choice.”

“She. The chief nurse.”

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“It’s her license, too. Yours and hers. A violation of the Nurse Practice Act, Missouri statute 335.066. If you don’t report and something else happens, you’re both in trouble. And the hospital’s certification with the state is in jeopardy, too.”

“That sounds a little excessive. The patient wasn’t expected to survive.”

“Well, that’s my recommendation.”

“Okay,” I said with a sigh. “What do I do to report him?”

“You make a formal complaint.”

“Will this do? Can I tell you?”

“It has to be in writing. I’d do it right away, if I were you. Who is it?”

I gave her Bart’s name.

“That name doesn’t ring a bell. But that’s not surprising. There are more than twenty-five thousand nurses in Missouri.”

I hung up, sorry that I had told her about Bart, especially now right after Lisa’s death.

The phone rang.

“They’ve got it,” BJ said, “that container you were looking for.” Traffic sounded in the background.

“Lisa’s?”

A horn honked and BJ mumbled something under her breath. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It was labeled ‘morphine.’ They’re testing it to make sure.”

“What about fingerprints? Are they checking to see whose prints are on the vial?”

“That’s routine in suspected suicides.”

Tires squealed.

“Son of a bitch!” BJ blurted out. Then she said, “Sorry, someone just cut me off. Hold on.” Her siren screamed and I jerked the phone away from my ear.

A few minutes later she was back.

“Okay,” she said, “I got him. I have to go write up this cowboy.”

So Lisa had found a vial of morphine. BJ had hung up before I could ask her more about it. Did it have a DEA number on it? Had it come from St. T’s?

The phone rang again.

“Your test came back,” Max said with studied calmness.

“Test?”

“Drug test.”

“And?”

“Just what I thought. You’re fine. You’re in the clear. It was a false positive.”

“With everything else that’s been going on, I had forgotten about it. Speaking of that, what about the test for succinylcholine? Have you heard from the lab?”

“They should be done by now. I’ll give them a call. But I wouldn’t worry, Monika, it’s unlikely they’ll find anything.”

“Max, do you know if we carry vials of morphine, rather than Tubex, anywhere in the hospital?”

“Sure. I think they have some in the E.R., and they use it in surgery all the time when they need to draw up extra large doses and need it in a hurry.”

“GIVE ME THAT NAME again. The nurse you told me about,” Karla asked when she reached me later.

I told her.

“He’s not licensed.”

“Of course he is. He’s in graduate school, he works here, he’s got to be.”

“I don’t know about the other states, but he’s not licensed in Missouri.”

“He came here from Kentucky. I’m sure he has a license there. It’s where he went to school. Maybe just doesn’t have a Missouri one yet.”

“I checked the pending applications. It’s not there. He hasn’t applied for a license. It doesn’t matter what he has from any other state. If he’s not licensed in Missouri, he’s not licensed.”

“Karla, that makes no sense. Doesn’t everyone take the same exam, regardless of what state they’re in?”

“According to the Missouri Nurse Practice Act,” she began, sounding more and more like a bureaucrat, “a valid Missouri license is required in order to practice nursing in this state. No excuses.”

“Does this complicate the complaint? Should I include it in my report?”

“No use sending a letter now. We can’t investigate a nurse who isn’t licensed. But you’d better call your supervisor and your nurse had better get his application in ASAP. You’re all violating the law if he’s working without a license,” she said, a note of satisfaction in her voice.

Why didn’t Bart have a nursing license in Missouri? Applying for a license in Missouri when you had a license in another state was relatively simple. And easy to put off when you’re busy. I knew about that. I’d neglected to renew my own license— required every two years—until the last minute. Now I was a week past due delivering it to human resources.

INSTEAD OF LUNCH, I had another errand to run. Cat had been lethargic ever since she’d coughed up the plant last week, and the lunch hour was the only time the veterinarian could fit us in. Thankfully, he found nothing wrong with Cat that time wouldn’t resolve so I’d dropped her off at home and hurried back again to try to find a parking spot in the garage now crowded with visitors’ vehicles. The roof had a few places left and I slid into one of them. I was hurrying toward the elevator when I spotted Noni getting out of her car.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her when she caught up with me.

“I was coming to see you,” she said. “About, uh, something I left for Huey.”

Uh-oh.

“I gave it to the clerk,” she said, “the woman at the desk. It was in a bag.”

“Huh?”

“It was in a bag,” she repeated. Black hair swung loosely around her face.

“What was?”

She looked around and, seeing there was no one nearby, she said, “The joints, marijuana. Do you have it?”

“We got rid of it.” I punched the down elevator button.

“You threw it out?”

“Listen, you shouldn’t have brought that in here in the first place.”

“I know. It’s just that I wanted to make him comfortable. He couldn’t get any booze and...I guess I wasn’t thinking very clearly.”

“Well, you put me, us, in a difficult position, leaving an illegal substance on the premises.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, stopping when we reached the elevators. “I wanted to talk to you privately anyway. I’ve thought a lot about what you said when you came to the Ambassador. I wanted to make sure Huey had died from the cancer.” She dabbed at her eyes, careful not to smear her mascara.

I wanted to reassure her, but I couldn’t. Not only did we not know why Huey died or if anyone caused his death, I wouldn’t be able to say anything even if I knew. She wasn’t his next of kin and, with the more stringent privacy regulations now in force, I couldn’t tell her anything.

The elevator doors opened and I stepped inside. “I’m sorry about Huey,” I told her. “I really am. I liked him,” I added as the door slid shut.

As I walked through the basement tunnel back to the hospital, thoughts twirled in my head. Lisa had said something was “in a bag.” Did she know about the pot Noni had left with Ruby? I shook my head to clear it. That makes no sense, I thought, more confused than ever.

“HOPE THIS WON’T take long,” Joyce in human resources said, nodding at the clock. “I have to leave for a doctor’s appointment.”

“Here’s my license and I have a question.” I’d stopped at her office on my way back to the unit.

She studied my license. “Late, aren’t you?” she said as she levered herself up and walked over to the copy machine.

“I checked on one of my nurses,” I said, following her. “The state board said he doesn’t have a Missouri license. Can you see what you have in your files?”

“Just ’cause someone don’t have a license in the file don’t mean they don’t have one,” she said, peering at me above reading glasses. “Just that they forgot to bring it in.”

“It’s illegal for him to be working here if he doesn’t have one.”

She handed my license back to me and headed over to a row of filing cabinets along one wall.

“Don’t you have them on a computer file?”

She pulled one long drawer out. “Not these, just their employment records. These are copies just like yours.”

“But couldn’t you scan them in?”

“And just where would I get the money to do that?” she asked, not expecting an answer.

‘“Mickelson, Bart,”’ she read from a folder she’d pulled out. “Here’s a copy of a Kentucky license and a note from the day he was hired that he would apply for a Missouri one immediately.”

In earlier times, we would have required the license first—that was the law—but as needy as we were for nurses, I wasn’t surprised Judyth had hired him without waiting for the license.

“That’s funny,” she said.

“What is?”

She went back to her desk and searched through a stack of files. “They asked me to pull this one. She’s the one who killed herself.” She spread a file open on her desk, putting Bart’s beside it. “I thought the number looked familiar.”

The numbers of Lisa’s and Bart’s Kentucky licenses were the same except for the last digit. Lisa’s ended in a three and Bart’s in an eight.

“Probably because their names are so close—Milligan and Mickelson. I’ll give him a call right away,” she said, closing both files.

All states had reciprocal agreements with each other. Bart only had to fill out the application and pay the fee, and he could have done that immediately. Obviously Judyth hadn’t stalled his hire date in order to wait until he had a Missouri license, regardless of what Karla had said about requirements and regulations. But why hadn’t he come in with a Missouri license yet? It had been six months.

I HAD STOWED MY BAG in my desk drawer, locked it and dropped the keys in my lab coat pocket when the phone rang.