Shedrow (18 page)

“I don’t know about him,” Brad said. “I still question his motives. I can’t believe he came through for us. What the hell was in it for him?”

“Stop trying to understand his motives. Do you think a man who lives in the woods in Clay City is playing with a full deck? You’ve heard his rant about the thoroughbred species and how commercial breeding has destroyed the soundness of the horse. The great genetics professor! Furthermore, you mustn’t forget how Chester Pawlek screwed him on that horse deal a few years back. He wanted revenge, and he had no idea that Chet would actually benefit from the stallion’s demise. My dear brother has turned into a total loon. Just be happy that it worked to our advantage.”

“You’re absolutely sure he had no idea that Chet was in cahoots with us?” Brad said.

“No way. He would never do anything that would benefit Chet. For all he knew, Chet had all the money he needed and only stood to make a lot more if he could keep Chiefly Endeavor as a stallion—the
type of breeding that my brother was sure would further weaken the breed of the thoroughbred horse. Chiefly Endeavor was retired at three because of soundness issues. It was just the sort of thing that nut in the woods felt he had some God-given right to stop.”

Brad sat back into the plush leather sofa and toasted with his champagne glass.

“Here’s to the smartest damn hermit south of the Adirondacks.” He leaned over and put his arm around Janice, drawing her closer and whispering in her ear. “When Anthony got me into this business, I never dreamed what the rewards would be.”

“Which rewards?” she said.

He turned her face to his and kissed her. Janice took his hand, urging him off the couch and crawling onto an afghan she had placed in front of the raging fire.

“I’m Alice Bond, mind if I join you?”

Gianni looked up at an attractive blonde who appeared to be in her mid-thirties and spoke with a distinct British accent. She wore a surgical scrub top, short khaki pants that ended mid-thigh, and sandals. Her blonde, shoulder length hair had a soft natural curl. He had been seated alone at the table and she had taken him by surprise.

“Please do,” he said. “I’m Anthony Gianni. There’s certainly room.” He waved a hand over the empty table. The entire hospital dining room was mostly empty. A few people had begun to file in through the open doors. Some looked at the menu posted outside and walked away.

“Sunday nights,” she said, taking a seat across the table from him. “Just about everyone goes out for dinner. Some go to one of the local spots in Vieux Fort. A few splurge and go north to the Hilton for a very expensive feast at a four star hotel. For a lot of the
American tourists visiting the island, the Hilton is all they ever see. It is a gorgeous venue though, right next to the Pitons. It even has its own heliport so the vacationers can bypass the arduous trip on dirt roads, not to mention all those unsightly shacks.”

“But they’re missing this,” Gianni said, looking at his bowl of black bean soup and broken pieces of baguette.

“Just get in?” she asked.

“A couple hours ago. Just enough time for the quick tour with Montoute.”

“Ah, little Buddha,” she said. “That’s my personal nickname for that adorable little man.”

“He did have a certain spiritual quality about him, I must say.”

“So where is home?” she asked.

“New York. I work in Manhattan and live in Westchester, north of the city. How about you?”

“West Sussex in England. Do you know where that is?”

“Small world. I did a fellowship in East Grinstead many years ago.”

“That’s my hospital. You were actually there?”

“I did a fellowship in trauma surgery at the end of my residency,” he said.

“General surgery?”

“No, Plastics. But it was the oral and maxillofacial guys who ruled the roost there. Most of what I know about trauma surgery I learned from them. How about you?”

“How about me?” she said, with her British inflection and a bit of sarcasm.

He looked up from his bean soup and saw that she was smiling.
He liked the sparkle in her eyes and the hue, an intense shade of green that matched the green color of her scrub top. “Well…how long are you volunteering? On what service and anything else you might care to add?”

“I’ll be here three weeks in all. I just completed my first. I’m an anesthesiologist.”

“Trained in England?” he asked.

“At the Guy’s Hospital,” she said.

“So you’re a Consultant at East Grinstead now?”

“Yes. I see you remember the lingo,” she said. A consultant in the British medical system was analogous to an attending doctor in the U.S. system. A resident doctor in England was called a registrar. Gianni also knew that in a reverse form of snobbery only the British could contrive, when one ceased to be a registrar and became a full-fledged consultant, one actually relinquished the title of doctor and became Mr. or Ms. again.

“So I guess we don’t call you Dr. Bond, then?”

“They do here. In your case, I suppose Alice will do.”

He saw the same smile and the sparkle in her eyes. She hadn’t started on the soup she had carried to the table. As she tasted it for the first time, she said, “A good glass of merlot would improve this dish greatly.”

“I guess I missed that in the chow line,” Gianni said.

“Some of us keep a little supply in the dorm,” she said. “Plastic cups, broken down lawn chairs, the starry sky…it has its own charm, you know.”

“Is Andy Carr still at Grinstead?” Gianni asked.

“He is. Good surgeon, Carr.”

“Yeah. He taught me a lot.”

“Are you married, Dr. Gianni?”

Gianni didn’t answer.

“Tough question?” she said. “Generally yes or no will do.”

“I am,” he said.

“Pity,” she said.

“There’s a lot going on now, that’s all.”

“Pity,” she said again.

A thin smile crossed his lips. He wasn’t sure whether he should consider her a cold-hearted Brit, or appreciate her for not prying.

“I expect we’ll be working together tomorrow,” she said.

“How do you know? Have you seen the operating room schedule?” he asked. “Oh excuse me, I mean the operating
theatre
schedule,” he corrected himself, remembering the British traditions.

“I haven’t seen the schedule,” she said, pronouncing it ‘shed-yule’ in her proper English. “But I know we’re together because I’m the
only
anesthesiologist. Their one full-time attending quit about six months ago, so they rely entirely on volunteers, and there’s one nurse anesthetist who is an employee of St. Jude. As you might expect, they burn out pretty quickly with those doctor to patient ratios.”

“So I’ll see you tomorrow,” Gianni said. “Any advice for the new guy in the OR?”

“A surgeon is asking a gas passer for advice? Well this is a first. Sure, I can offer a bit of advice. Expect things to move very slowly. That is, until the shit finally hits the fan, which it surely will at one point or another. Expect that a lot of the equipment will not work,
or won’t be available. Most of all, be flexible and be patient. Not easy for you surgeons, I know. It will be a new experience.”

Steven Highet peered out the front window of his house at the pouring rain—rain so heavy that it looked more like thick fog. A street lamp behind a tall hemlock at the end of the driveway gave the tree just enough illumination for it to be visible. Through the downpour, it looked more spectral than real.

The lights of the Mercedes in the driveway had been turned off, but the two men lingered in the car, perhaps waiting for the torrent to let up. Highet was expecting the visit from his old veterinary colleague, Dr. Ted Frunkle, though he thought he was coming alone. The two men emerged from the vehicle with umbrellas and ran to the front door. Highet opened the door and the two men entered quickly, the umbrellas dripping on the foyer floor.

“Don’t worry about that,” Highet said. “Just leave them in the corner.” He extended his hand to Frunkle. “To what do I owe this great privilege, Congressman?”

Frunkle had left veterinary practice many years ago to run for
a seat in Congress.

A well-connected Kentuckian who was also a doctor of veterinary medicine, he had secured the seat with relative ease in a district sustained in large part by the horse industry. For a brief time years ago, he and Highet had been in the same private practice.

“We can’t stay long, and I’m afraid this isn’t a social visit,” Frunkle said.

The big man standing beside him was not introduced. He left his dark raincoat buttoned tight, the collar pulled up close around his neck. Water ran down the coat onto the floor. He stared at Highet but did not speak.

Frunkle continued, “As a former colleague and a great lover of thoroughbreds, I am very disappointed in you, Steven.”

“What are you talking about?” Highet said.

“I’m talking about the death of the stallion, Chiefly Endeavor.”

“What about him?”

“Steven, we know you killed him.”

“What!” Highet shouted.

“You heard me. You may be able to fool some of your colleagues with your phony obsession to solve the supposed mystery of the death from equine herpes virus, and you may be able to fool that surgeon friend of yours from New York, but you can’t fool us. Who else had such ready access to the virus?”

“Get out of my house.”

“Who else knew exactly where there might be an outbreak of the virus. It would be so simple for you to swab one infected horse and transport it to another. Still, you went one step further, right to the research lab at the University of Kentucky. You thought that lab
tech would never talk, but she has. She’s ready to go to the police and tell them that she gave you access to her lab, which just happened to have cultured EHV available.”

“That’s not true. The only thing I ever did at UK was to act as a clinical consultant on certain research projects. What motive could
I
possibly have?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Fame and fortune, maybe. Your name is all over the papers and the trade journals with this bogus investigation of yours. Then you were able to save a couple of younger horses who contracted the virus. You were the big hero. Did you infect them too? But we don’t really need a motive, because we have a confession from the lab tech indicating that you took live virus from her lab.”

“That’s a goddamn lie, and I still intend to find out the true cause of that stallion’s death.”

“Well, the lab tech is prepared to give a deposition under oath. I will follow up with a press conference, commending her for her courageous stance and calling for the revocation of your license in Kentucky. That would be enough to suspend your license, at least temporarily. There goes your investigation. I see a better alternative, though.”

Highet looked incredulously at the two men standing in his foyer, water still dripping off their long raincoats.

“There is a better way,” Frunkle continued. “You give your final report to the authorities and the insurance investigators now. No delays, you just end it. Conclude that the cause of death was the equine herpes virus and that there was no foul play.”

“Get the hell out of here, now!”

“I was afraid you might say that, Steven. That’s why I brought
my friend with me tonight.”

The big man reached into his overcoat. He pulled out a piece of paper and then spoke for the first time. “I got this address here, you see. It says 174 S-S-South Locust Road.”

Highet felt his face flush. It was his daughter’s address in Lexington.

“Mean anything to you, Doc.?” The man had a sickening, vicious looking smile on his fat face.

The two men turned to walk out the door. They stopped to retrieve their umbrellas and Frunkle looked back at Highet. “You see, Steven, it’s just got to end now. It’s best for everyone.”

Gianni reported to the Surgery Clinic at eight o’clock in the morning. It was a dimly lit room with four open bays containing treatment chairs with torn upholstery. Some but not all of the bays had old-fashioned medical floor lamps with gooseneck extensions; others had no auxiliary lighting.

Two nurses, native St. Lucians, greeted him cheerfully. They introduced themselves by first name, Suzana and Amara. Caribbean music was playing on a small plug-in radio.

“Your first patient is in the second bay,” Amara said. “We are here to assist in any way we can. We are so happy you are here.”

Gianni had read the background information about the hospital, the local customs and the limited resources. He knew they would be counting every last gauze pad, wasting nothing. He would be using many items that would be past their expiration dates, such as sutures and medications that had been donated from developed countries where such practices were forbidden.

Amara showed him around the clinic: the modest waiting area already full with patients, the sterilization area, and a tiny staff room with a coffee maker, small refrigerator and a metal table with three chairs.

“Every patient who comes here pays something,” Amara said. We are proud people and we expect to pay as much as we can afford. I must tell you…do only what the patient asks, only what they came here for. You may see other problems that need treatment, but those things must wait for another time. The patients only expect to get what they have come for, what they have paid for.”

Gianni thought,
I guess they don’t provide free Viagra, like Medicaid does in New York State
.

In the second bay, there was a boy who looked to be about ten years old. He sat on the tattered treatment chair and his mother stood beside him. One side of his face was distorted by a huge swelling that extended from the area just under the left eye to an area under the jaw line. The boy’s brown skin was shiny and reddened from the tension of the swelling. A portion of it looked like a water-filled balloon that was about to burst.

Gianni looked at the medical record, a single 5 x 8 index card with the patient’s name, address and a record number. There was a section for medical history that was blank. He looked at the patient’s name at the top of the card:
Lavon Gonin.