“You and everyone else,” Geraldine said with a laugh. “She’s AWOL!”
“What do you mean?” Lynn said, but she didn’t get an answer right away. She had to wait for Geraldine to shout to someone across the hall to stop dillydallying and get the patient down to four, pronto.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Geraldine said, glancing back at Lynn. “What did you say?”
Lynn had to repeat her question.
“For the first time in I don’t know how many years, Dr. Wykoff didn’t show up this morning. It was so unusual that Dr. Rhodes called the police. Apparently Dr. Wykoff had some sort of family emergency. She packed a bag and is gone to parts unknown. At least that is what we’ve been told.”
Stunned, Lynn crumpled the envelope, thanked Geraldine, who didn’t respond because she had already been drawn into another issue, and went back the locker room to get out of her scrubs. This story about Dr. Wykoff was totally unexpected and unsettling. Getting the note about the “looping” to the woman was to ease her guilt about not communicating her extraordinary discovery to anyone, but now, being unable to do it because of the anesthesiologist’s uncharacteristic disappearance, only made her that much more upset, especially since she couldn’t think of anyone else to tell.
39.
Wednesday, April 8, 11:02 A.M.
Having to deal with this new conundrum of Dr. Wykoff’s unexpected disappearance, Lynn knew that she would find trying to suffer through the ophthalmology clinic as bad as the lecture. Instead, she had decided to use the time to solve the problem of getting a floor plan for the Shapiro. To that end, she’d gotten Carl’s Jeep out of the parking garage and headed downtown.
It seemed particularly auspicious to her to find a parking spot on Calhoun Street directly in front of the Charleston County Public Library with time still on the meter. What made it so convenient was that the library was just across the street from 75 Calhoun, the impressive and relatively new municipal building that housed the Charleston Building Commission.
Lynn hurried inside. She wanted to find the right office well before the lunch hour. From her experience with city bureaucracy in Atlanta, where she had grown up, she knew that midday was a time to avoid, as civil servants became progressively distracted and unhelpful. But she soon learned she needn’t have worried. Not only was the building commission easy to find but the people behind the counter immediately gave her the impression they were there to help, particularly a balding, jovial, and colorful fellow named George Murray. The man wore bright-red suspenders to keep his pants up despite a particularly protuberant abdomen. When he saw Lynn’s white coat and correctly guessed she was a medical student, he laughed and told her to go ahead and give him the standard lecture on potential evil consequences of his beer belly. “I like my suds,” he confessed. “Anyway, what can I do to help you?”
“An architect friend has told me that you would have plans available for public buildings, like hospitals.”
“Provided the hospital is in Charleston,” George said with a laugh. “Plans have to be submitted and approved to get a building permit. It’s all in the public domain. What hospital are you curious about?”
Lynn paused, trying to think of how much she wanted to reveal. The last thing she wanted was for it to get back to the dean or anyone at the school or the hospital that she was in the building commission asking for plans for the Shapiro. But she didn’t see any way around the issue. “The Shapiro Institute,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t regret admitting it. The trouble was that, without plans, she worried that she might not get much benefit from making the effort to break into the Shapiro other than possibly accessing the institute’s electronic medical records. She wanted to maximize the chances of finding Carl, which she knew might not be easy among a thousand or so patients unless she had a pretty good idea how the place was laid out.
“That’s part of the Mason-Dixon Medical Center,” George said without hesitation. “What kind of plans are you interested in?”
“I don’t really know,” Lynn admitted. “What kind of plans do you have?”
“There’s floor plans, electrical plans, HVAC plans, plumbing plans. You name it, we have it.”
“I guess I’m mainly interested in floor plans.”
“Let’s see what’s available in the file,” George said agreeably. He was gone for only a few minutes before returning with a very large burgundy-colored folder tied with string.
George heaved the folder onto the countertop and opened it. He slid out the contents. “We are gradually going digital, but we’ve got a long way to go.” He pawed through the material, eventually locating the floor plans. They were bound on one side with staples. “Here you go. Knock yourself out!”
Lynn flipped through some of the pages. She’d seen architectural floor plans before and knew something about how to read them. What surprised her right off was that although the building had a relatively low silhouette in real life, suggesting it was about two to three stories tall when compared with the attached hospital building, it was actually six stories, with four being below grade. “Which is ground level?” she asked.
George turned the plans around so that he could read all the small print. “Apparently it is the one labeled the fifth floor,” he said, comparing the floor plans with their accompanying elevations. He turned the pages of the floor plans until he was on five. “Doesn’t look like it has many external doors leading outside. Strange, but I’m sure it was cleared by the fire department. Must have a damn good sprinkler system. What kind of hospital is this?”
“It’s for people in a vegetative state,” Lynn said. She turned the plans back around and, by looking at the fifth floor, was able to locate the connection with the hospital proper and see the conference room she had been in for her tour during second year. She could also see the three patient visiting rooms. She was also able to locate the door Michael had used when he entered the building with Vladimir. Down a short hall from the door was a room labeled NETWORK OPERATIONS CENTER. She guessed that was what Michael had called the NOC. Immediately adjacent to it was a room for computer servers, and across the hall was a room labeled LOCKER ROOM. So far, so good.
“What’s a vegetative state? You mean people in a coma?”
“Yes, but they are not all in a coma. Some of them have sleep-wake cycles, which unfortunately often gives families unjustified hope they are going to wake up completely. Anyway, the hospital is for people with brain damage who cannot take care of themselves in even the most basic ways. They all need a lot of attention. It takes a lot of effort on the part of the nursing staff.”
“Sounds terrible.”
“It is,” Lynn agreed. She noticed that beyond the NOC was a hallway off of which was a profusion of rooms. Some were labeled as SUPPLY ROOM. Many were labeled AUTOMATION ROOM, whatever that meant. One was labeled AUTOMATION CONTROL. A few weren’t labeled at all. Two of the largest rooms were named CLUSTER A and CLUSTER B and also could be reached from the same hallway. Lynn remembered that Michael had said that on the first page of Ashanti’s record it had Cluster 4-B 32. Lynn now guessed that these were the spaces where patients were housed. Apparently Ashanti was on the fourth floor, or the first subterranean floor in the B cluster room.
“What do you think Cluster A and B refer to?” Lynn asked, just to see what George might say.
“No idea,” George said. “But I can tell you one thing: they are good-sized rooms and look like they need a lot of electrical power.”