Eleanor didn't pay much attention to them. She just made her way through the crowd, trying to suppress a gag reflex that was gradually rising in her throat. She got close enough that she was practically standing in between the two men, staring into the maw of the pickup truck.
Last night, the four children of Carlos and Anna Ramirez had lain down on that sleeping bag to sleep while their parents, sitting up front in the truck's cab, had driven them across the high plains southeast of Denver. They had gone to sleep quickly, and slept well, not because it was cozy but because the back of the truck was full of carbon monoxide leaking from the truck's exhaust. Three of the children had died. One was in the hospital in critical condition, with irreparable brain damage. Carlos and Anna Ramirez had not known what was going on until they had arrived here, early this morning, at the home of Anna's sister.
She knew all these things from her phone conversation with Roger. He had run through the story quickly and tersely and she had listened in much the same spirit, looking at it as a political problem to be solved. But now that she was here in the middle of a sniffling and wailing crowd, looking into the bed where the innocents had died, the emotional impact suddenly hit her like a truck. Eleanor put her hand over her mouth, closed her eyes, and tried to suppress the urge to become physically ill.
"Eleanor," Ray del Valle said, "come on, let's talk somewhere else. You don't want to dwell on this." Eleanor felt Ray's arm tightening around her shoulders. He led her around the truck and into the backyard, gently but surely, like a ballroom dancer leading his date around the floor.
She took the opportunity to rest her head on his chest for just a moment. She didn't exactly cry, though tears were in her eyes.
"It's a hard thing for a parent to look at, isn't it?" Ray said. "It's our worst nightmare come to life. Like an image from the Holocaust."
Eleanor took a half step away from Ray and drew a few deep breaths. "Are the parents inside?" she said.
"Yes. Anna has been sedated. Carlos is drinking a lot and vowing to kill himself. Anna's family is trying to keep him on an even keel. It's very difficult."
"I heard that there is a problem with the surviving child's medical care and I am here to inform the Ramirez family that Senator Marshall is at their service in whatever capacity is needed. Do you think that you could go in and relay that message to them?"
Ray snorted with just the tiniest hint of amusement and glanced down at his wristwatch. "The Senator runs a tight ship. As always."
Ray went into the house and came out a couple of minutes later with Anna's sister Pilar. From a distance Pilar seemed utterly stonefaced, but from arm's length her eyes were swollen and red and she looked stunned, rather than impassive.
"I told her what you said," Ray said. "She has authorized me to explain the child's medical situation."
"Okay."
"When they arrived this morning and found their four children unresponsive, they called the ambulance. Three children were pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth, the eight-year-old girl Bianca, still had a pulse. The ambulance took her straight to Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center."
"Why there?" Highlands was a private hospital, well endowed, certainly not the closest to this bungalow. Not the kind of place where migrant workers ended up.
"Carbon monoxide poisoning was obviously the culprit here. And Highlands has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. It is the best treatment. So that's where they went. The emergency room staff at Highlands treated Bianca but they refused to admit her for hyperbaric oxygen treatment. Instead they dumped her back to Denver County, where she is now."
"How can they justify that?"
Ray just shrugged. "As we say in the Third World, Quién sabe?"
Something clicked in the back of Eleanor's head. Maybe it was her temper breaking. She squared her shoulders and flared her nostrils. "Would you please come with me, Ray?" she said.
"Okay. Where we going?"
Eleanor realized that she didn't even know. "We're just going to take care of a few things, that's all."
The two of them got into Eleanor's car and headed in the direction of Denver County Hospital, were Ray knew some doctors.
"This happens hundreds of times every year," Ray said. "All over North America."
"What happens?"
"Exactly this situation. Remember what a migrant worker is: someone who migrates. These people cover a lot of territory and the vehicle of choice is a pickup truck. It's always the same: the parents sit up front in the cab and the kids lie down in the back and try to sleep. The exhaust comes up through holes in the floor, or else it leaks through the crack under the tailgate. In warm weather they open the windows and survive. But if it's chilly, like it was last night, they close the cab up and suffocate."
"You'd think that they would have gotten some indication before. That their kids would have gotten headaches or felt woozy."
Ray snorted. "If you drove for eight or ten hours in the back of a truck, you'd feel that way even without carbon monoxide."
At the county hospital, Ray tracked down Dr. Escobedo, a young internist who was looking after Bianca. They all sat around a table in the corner of the cafeteria.
"Should Bianca be here, or at Arapahoe Highlands?" Eleanor said.
"At Highlands," Dr. Escobedo said without hesitation, and without rancour.
"Why?"
"They have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber."
"And that is the standard treatment for this kind of thing?"
"Not exactly," he said. "That's the problem."
"What do you mean, not exactly?"
"Well, for example, there are a lot of migrant workers up in Washington State, and this kind of thing has happened up there on a fairly regular basis. Now, there is a hospital in Seattle that has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, which is basically used to decompress divers with the bends. When you put a patient with carbon monoxide poisoning into such a chamber, it helps get oxygen into their tissues, which is what such a patient needs. So people up there have learned that when an unconscious kid is pulled out of the back of a pickup truck, you send them straight to the one hospital with the hyperbaric chamber. But this is kind of a new practice, and in the eyes of some, it's experimental."
"And that's what the people at Highlands think."
"Exactly. If this treatment were standard medical practice, they'd have no excuse not to admit Bianca. But because they can label it experimental, there's no way they'll admit her. Because they know they'll lose money."
"Why does Denver have a chamber like this?" Ray said. "We don't have many scuba divers around here."
"It's used for diabetics and other people with poor circulation," Escobedo said. "So it's popular in areas with a large middle-aged and elderly population that's well insured. It's an expensive treatment with a high profit margin for the hospital. Which is why they don't want to tie up the chamber with a charity case."
"Okay, I get the picture," Eleanor said. "Now, who is in charge of Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center?"
"The chief administrator is Dr. Morgan," Escobedo said.
Eleanor stood up and yanked her jacket off the back of the chair. "Let's go kick his white ass," she said.
Ray and Escobedo looked astonished and glanced at each other, a bit nervously. "You might want to call ahead and find out where he is first," Ray suggested.
"I'm sure that an important man like Dr. Morgan has a secretary who is very good at putting people like me off - over the phone," Eleanor said. "The more I get in that secretary's face, the more helpful she'll be."
"This may not be an appropriate time for me to get political," Ray said, after they had been driving in silence for a few minutes, humming down Broadway toward the rolling, prosperous southern suburbs. "But this is going to be a long drive and I can't help myself."