The Children's Ward (14 page)

Fifty-eight

“You’ve got to be mistaken.” The coroner spoke into the mobile radio. “I’ve just come from Valley Memorial.”

The dispatcher, in a voice that sounded as dead as many of his clients, repeated, “It’s Valley Memorial Hospital. The call was logged at 1545 hours. A drowning victim.”

“Drowning?” He slowed the car, pulling off onto the shoulder of the road. “I’m on my way.”

“Ten-four.”

He had to wait for traffic to pass before he made the U-turn and headed back to the hospital.

How could someone drown in a hospital?

As if in answer, the rain began to pour down and he had to drive slower. The one nice thing about having bodies as clients was that they were never really in a hurry, he thought.

“In here.” A security guard, swollen with self-importance, showed him into physical therapy. “In the pool.”

The body of a woman floated in the water face down.

He looked at the guard. “You didn’t pull her out.” It was not exactly a question.

“I didn’t want to disturb the crime scene.”

“What makes you think there’s a crime?” He nodded to his assistant who began to prepare to pull the body out of the water.

The guard didn’t answer.

He turned his attention back to the woman in the whirlpool. She was dressed in dark slacks, a blouse, and a white lab coat. She was wearing shoes. And a watch.

Not what he would choose to wear to take a swim.

When she was out of the water he squatted beside her to take a look at her hands. Nails were not broken. He slipped plastic bags over her hands and secured them with rubber bands. They would collect the nail scrapings at the morgue.

All of the color had been bleached out of her face by the water but there were no marks to indicate that she had been beaten. The buttons on her blouse were secure, her slacks fastened, nothing was torn or in disarray.

Her eyes were open.

“What’s her name?” he asked, not taking his eyes from her face.

“Anne Rossi. She works…worked here.”

The sleeves of the lab coat were too wet to push up easily but he managed to get them up to mid-forearm. On her right wrist there were faint discolorations which somehow struck him as being too small for fingermarks.

He looked back at her face. Water was coming from her mouth.

He straightened up. “Okay, let’s get her out of here.” He moved to the whirlpool, staring into the water. “Drain it with filters in place. Print the outside rim, controls, whatever surface can hold a print.” He took out his notepad, wrote down her name and what he had ordered to be done. The crime scene photographer flashed pictures as accompaniment to his thoughts.

“Suicide?”

He turned to look at the guard who stood, arms folded across his chest, watching as they prepared to lift the body onto the stretcher.

“Drowning in four feet of water is not one of the easier ways to go.”

The sound of the body bag being zipped caught his attention. It was the most final sound he’d ever heard. He watched sadly as the bag closed over the woman’s face.

“It’s well documented,” the guard intoned, “that suicides increase during the holidays.”

“Is it?”

“I’m surprised you wouldn’t notice when the body count goes up.”

“I never count them.” He was aware that the tone of his voice had grown steadily colder. It was hard for him to imagine why some people were given to equating human tragedy with statistics.

“Excuse me…I’m Dr. Harrington, the chief of staff.”

The doctor looked exactly like a kindly old country doctor. Except for his eyes, which surveyed the room and its occupants with quick precision. “Anything you can tell me?”

“Nothing aside from the obvious: the body of a female employee was found floating in the whirlpool, presumably a drowning victim.”

“Presumably.”

“That’s all I can say at this point.”

The doctor, unlike the security guard, did not press the issue.

When, for the second time in the space of a few hours, he left Valley Memorial Hospital, he was profoundly depressed.

The body of Anne Beverly Rossi had been taken off to the city morgue where, tomorrow, he would perform an autopsy. The body of Lloyd Marshall was probably under the knife at the moment, assuming that the deputy coroner had started without him when the second call had come.

They might discover something. That Marshall suffered from arteriosclerosis or was a smoker or was in the early stages of one disease or another. Things that might have cost him his life eventually, now only mildly interesting clinical findings.

That Anne Rossi had never borne a child and never would. That she drowned in four feet of water in the middle of the day in a busy hospital.

There might be someone’s flesh under her fingernails. There might be a brain hemorrhage from a blow to the head.

Whatever they learned, it wouldn’t bring either of them back.

Fifty-nine

Abigail’s eyes opened.

She had not moved in her sleep and she was looking out the window at the last traces of light. It was still raining.

She yawned and stretched, turning onto her back.

She felt very good.

“Hey, Abigail.” Russell had one arm hooked through the trapeze and was sitting up in bed. “We thought you were going to sleep forever.”

“Did I miss dinner? I’m hungry.”

Tessi shook her head. “I think it’s late because of the rain.”

“They feed us last because we’re all the way out here.” Russell grinned. “Whatever no one else will eat, they bring to us.”

Abigail sat up in bed. “We could complain.”

“Nobody ever listens to kids,” Tessi said.

Abigail smiled to herself and got out of bed to go to the bathroom.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror.

There was so much she understood now. So much that no one else knew. Russell didn’t know, although he had used the power himself. She had felt it flow from him, weaker than her own but still enough to strike out…

Courtney was using it but, strangely enough, only when she was asleep.

Tessi was the only one who hadn’t demonstrated the force of her will. But she would, in time.

Abigail tilted her head back, looking into her own eyes in the mirror.

She was the only one who
knew
.

When she went back out, dinner had arrived. Her tray was on the bedside table, silver covers still keeping in the heat.

She was hungrier than she’d ever been in her life.

A standard hospital meal: baked chicken, tiny boiled potatoes, string beans, a roll with butter, milk, and a square of frosted white cake for dessert.

All else forgotten for the moment, she began to eat.

Her sense of taste and smell were much stronger than usual, and she savored every bite of the meal. Rather than cutting the chicken with knife and fork like her grandmother had taught her, she picked it up in her fingers and sank her teeth into the meat. Chicken juice ran down her chin.

The plates were spotless when she was finished and she pushed the tray away. She looked across at the others; they too had eaten all of their food. Tessi, usually a fussy eater, was looking at her plate as if disappointed there wasn’t more.

The evening nurse had cleared away the trays and was taking Russell’s blood pressure.

Abigail did not like this nurse. She always pumped the blood pressure thing too full of air until it felt like it was going to cut off all the feeling in your hand. Likewise, taking the pulse, she pressed too hard on the inside of the wrist and held tight for an awful long time. Abigail thought it was a good thing that the hospital used digital thermometers because otherwise this particular nurse would break the old-fashioned glass type by jamming it between someone’s teeth.

There was no expression on Russell’s face, nothing to indicate whether the nurse was hurting him.

The nurse had better hope that Abigail didn’t see a look of discomfort on anyone’s face.

As the only one who knew, she felt responsible for the others.

She would take action if she had to.

Sixty

“Joshua, what are you still doing here?” Simon looked at his watch.

“I might ask you the same thing.” Joshua crossed the room and sat in a chair opposite Simon’s desk.

“Ha!” He indicated the papers strewn across the desk. “I’m being buried in incident reports.”

“I heard…terrible. Have they any idea what happened?”

“If they do they’re not sharing that information with me.” Simon picked up a single sheet of paper from the pile. “Days like this make me extremely grateful that I’m not the administrator and have to go through this…this garbage on a full-time basis.”

“Speaking of Maggie, when is she due back?”

“Next week sometime. She’ll be welcome to it, I can tell you. Why I ever volunteered to do this in her absence, I’ll never know.”

“You’re a sucker.”

“Thank you for those kind words.” Simon smiled, nodding. “So, what are you doing here at this time of night?”

“Finishing charts. Medical records threatened all kinds of nasty things if I didn’t comply.”

“I’ll tell you in the old days, medical records never had such power. It just shows you how respect for our profession is eroding.”

“I think we’re all going to be replaced by computers.” Joshua closed his eyes, leaning back in the chair.

Simon peered at the younger man. “Is that disillusionment I hear?”

“Exhaustion.”

“Then why don’t you go home?”

“I will. I’ve got to go tell Quinn…”

“Is she still here?”

Joshua nodded. “She was hung up with the coroner for a couple of hours and she wanted to finish at least the first tapes.”

“I think you’re both crazy. Go home.”

Quinn was sitting with the clipboard poised, watching the screen.

“How’s it going?”

“A little slow.” She reached over and stopped the tape. “I don’t think I ever realized how boring being in a hospital must be for the patient. Especially for children.”

“Children…yes. You saw Abigail’s scans?”

“I did. Normal, aren’t they?”

“Normal,” he agreed. “I’ve had copies made and they’re on their way back to her neurologist in Baltimore. I hope he can make some sense of all of this.”

“I wonder. Do you think we should tell her that the scans were negative?”

“I think I’d consult with Dr. Campbell first.”

Her eyes searched his face. “Do you think it’s psychological?”

“I don’t know what to think. I suppose anything’s possible, although I find it hard to believe that she could fool all the experts. How could she
know
enough about brain tumors to be able to mimic the symptoms so convincingly?”

“Is there a chance that she knew or knows someone who does have a brain tumor…knows them well enough to be familiar with the symptoms?”

“I don’t think she could consciously plan a deception like that.”

“Not consciously then.”

He frowned. “It’s an interesting theory. She’s scheduled to see Dr. Campbell Monday morning; maybe you should suggest it to him.” He considered further. “You know, you might have something there. We take the family history during a work-up but it wouldn’t have to be a family member…”

Quinn nodded. “So for now?”

“Just maintain the status quo.”

For a moment neither spoke, then Quinn stood, placing the clipboard on top of the video player.

“It’s odd…it seems so long ago that I was looking at her scans but it was only this morning…”

“A lot has happened since then.”

“The engineer. I wish I could have done something more. It happened so fast.”

“From what I heard I doubt if there’s anything anyone could have done for him.”

“I called the coroner’s office…they weren’t finished with the autopsy, but apparently the impact of the saw striking his chest and then him striking the scanner was enough to tear the pericardium. There was massive internal bleeding.”

“Poor man.”

“He never even cried out.” She stared out the window. The rain blurred the hospital grounds lights into a smear of color. “All this rain.”

“I hear they’re expecting thunderstorms some-

time during the night,” Joshua said.

“I used to love thunder when I was a kid.”

“But not now?”

“I think it lost its magic when I heard the scientific explanation for it.” She rubbed her upper arms and smiled sadly. “There’s not much mystery left. Explanations for almost everything.”

“Almost but not quite everything,” Joshua said, looking into her smoky eyes. “Come on, it’s time to go home.”

FRIDAY

Sixty-one

Hortense had always been an early riser. In all of her fifty-three years she could never recall having slept past five a.m. It was something that had caused a few conflicts—her mother had insisted, awake or not, that she stay in bed until seven—and may have even influenced her decision not to marry. Regardless, she liked to be up and busy before the sun rose.

She had, years before, found her niche; working early morning shifts at the hospital. She had worked briefly as a transcriber before transferring to admitting, where she had established herself as something of a fixture. Monday through Friday, six-thirty to three, and never a sick day in her life.

She had a routine. Arrive at six, lock her purse in her desk drawer, go to emergency to pick up the admitting logbook and any paperwork from night admissions, then a quick tour of the hospital for the latest gossip.

This morning, as she had expected, there was a lot of it. She had heard about the engineer moments after it happened and even knew about the therapist although Hortense was home when the body was discovered. The evening admitting secretary had called her with the news although with very little detail.

Now the hospital was bursting with speculation. How could things like this happen?

Hortense had her own theory: the engineer’s death was clearly an accident, but the therapist may have killed herself in grief at his loss. Yes, the man was married but even having spent fifty-three years as a spinster, Hortense knew that married was not the same as…dead.

In fact, given a moment to think about it, Hortense could probably name at least ten married men working at the hospital who were carrying on with someone else.

It was one of the things about working at the hospital that had shocked her at first; there was an atmosphere of blatant physical lust which, sooner or later, culminated in sin.

Hortense was one of the lucky ones who was above such goings on. But she knew about them.

And strongly suspected that there was some kind of a relationship between the dearly departed.

The consensus in the hospital, however, was that it was nothing more than a coincidence. There was no proof that the therapist had even been aware of the incident in Radiology.

Hortense listened skeptically as the night shift engineer (who everyone knew spent most of his time sleeping on the job) suggested that the girl had been trying to retrieve something from the whirlpool and had fallen in headfirst, striking herself unconscious.

Not likely, she thought, pursing her lips and keeping silent. Hortense read murder mysteries and she knew that the center of gravity in the woman’s body was low enough that she’d have to be maybe two feet off the ground to have had the momentum to fall in that way.

It was almost six-thirty and Hortense, with one last smirk at the night engineer, hurried off to punch in.

Admitting was always quiet on Friday mornings, so Hortense was a little surprised to hear the computer printer tapping away in the back room.

Ignoring it for the moment, she began her morning’s work by pulling the forms for the scheduled admissions. There were only two and both were “regulars,” patients who had long-term illnesses and were in and out of the hospital as often as once a month.

Neither of them would be in before noon but she completed their paperwork, assigned rooms and made their plastic identity plates. The official procedure was not to make the plates until the patients were actually in the hospital, but Hortense, as the senior admitting secretary, preferred to have everything done so that when the patient arrived it was sign the consent form, sign insurance forms, put on the I.D. bracelet, and up to the room.

Finished, she went into her office and turned on the computer. It took a few seconds for the screen to come up. She typed in her identification code.

The computer ignored her.

She repeated the command.

Access denied.

Hortense did not approve of cussing, so it was with some surprise that she heard herself say “Damn.” She also heard the printer, still working at full speed.

The system had to be overloaded or else someone had erased her identification code from the memory.

She would see what was being printed out. It might provide a clue as to who was messing up the system.

Unlocking the door to the print-out room, she flicked on the light.

Piles of computer paper covered the floor.

She hit the interrupt key and waited for the buffer to be emptied. The printer stopped.

Bending over, she picked up an armful of papers, tearing the last printed sheet from the machine.

It took her a minute before she realized what she was seeing.

The computer had discharged every patient in the hospital; it was printing out itemized bills on more than four hundred patients.

Someone would have to go into each patient’s computer file and correct the errors.

“God damn computer.”