Susan glanced at the clock. “Twenty-seven minutes, but I didn’t start the clock until a few minutes after he arrested.”
“Anyone have a suggestion, something they’d like to try?” Luke asked.
Megan already knew the answer, but this era of litigation demanded that the question be asked. The threat of malpractice lawsuits had changed most things about medicine. Doctors had to worry that someone — someone on their own team — might later have second thoughts. Maybe they could have done more; maybe they should have tried something else. Just the type of breach a lawyer could chisel away and expose, until it was wide enough, and deep enough, to bury everyone connected with the case.
She followed Luke’s gaze as he looked to each person. The nurses looked down in resignation. The respiratory therapist shrugged her shoulders. Dr. Fagan shook his head.
When Luke’s gaze reached her, she looked between Josue and the monitors, hoping for inspiration and knowing that it wouldn’t come. Finally, she shook her head.
Luke called out the time of death while Susan came around the table and turned off the alarms.
Megan fought back the moisture seeping into her eyes. She was not going to cry. Maybe later, but not now.
Susan patted her on the arm and mouthed the words, Good job.
An uncomfortable silence filled the room as they removed tubes and lines from Josue’s body and rolled back equipment against the wall. Someone mumbled, “We did everything we could.”
Luke asked Megan if she wanted to “talk about things.”
She turned him down.
One by one people started filing out of the room.
She was still standing next to Josue’s body when, a few minutes later, she realized everyone had left. The boy had taken on an eerily pale cast and one of his arms hung awkwardly. She took his hand in hers and held it for a long moment before placing it alongside the body.
Then she covered him with a sheet.
The moisture in her eyes turned to tears. She began to shake and grabbed the edge of the table to steady herself. The tears grew to a stream, and she wept inconsolably.
Megan realized she was crying as much for herself as for Josue, and pitying herself only made her feel all the more deficient and miserable. Whatever made her think she could save lives?
“Megan?”
She whirled around and ran a sleeve under her moist nose.
It was Luke.
“You okay?” he asked.
She wiped her eyes with both hands and tried to raise a smile. “Oh yeah, don’t I look great?” she said in a wet, hoarse voice. She could see that he was studying her.
“Someone needs to talk to the family,” he said. “Are you up to it?”
“Family?”
“The boy’s mother. She flew up with him. She’s waiting in the conference room.”
Megan grabbed her lower lip with her teeth and clamped down until it hurt. Still, tears welled in her eyes.
“Why don’t I do it?” Luke offered.
“No, I will.”
“Are you—”
“I’ll do it,” she snapped, then immediately raised a hand in apology. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” he said while glancing over her shoulder at Josue’s body. “Take your time.”
Luke turned to leave, but stopped abruptly when his eyes passed by the boy’s chest X-ray. He stepped closer to the screen.
She watched him study it. After almost a half minute, a feeling of unease swept over her. “What do you see?”
His eyes stayed on the X-ray. “I forgot to mention — let the mother know that we’ll be doing an autopsy. We don’t have a cause of death, so it automatically goes to the coroner.”
A wave of nausea hit her. “What are you looking at?”
“Not enough to explain what happened,” he said finally. Luke drew back a step, still looking at the X-ray. “There’s obviously something going on in the airways. See, here, the entire bronchial tree is involved. That’s what struck me when I saw this before, during the code. But now that I’m seeing this up close, what’s striking is the lung tissue.”
“I must be missing it. What do you see?”
“That’s my point. Not much. The lungs themselves don’t look bad enough to explain what happened.” He paused, then said, “I’m going to run this by Ben Wilson. Tell the front desk that I’ll be downstairs for a few minutes.”
Luke was almost out the door before she could acknowledge him. “Sure.”
Megan brought herself back to the task in front of her. She gathered herself, wiping her cheeks again and combing her hair back with her fingers. As she crouched to retie her running shoes, she muttered to herself, “Megan Callahan. Grim Reaper.”
“It can’t be done that quickly,” Calderon said into the cell phone headset while driving east on the Santa Monica Freeway in his black town car.
“Find a way. It has to be tonight,” his client said. “She’s been leaving messages at the hospital. She’s trying to arrange a meeting with the boy’s doctor. For tonight.”
Calderon glanced to his right while working a cheek muscle, thinking. Mr. Kong was in the adjacent lane, driving the rented green van with their equipment. The Asian was expressionless, as usual, eyeing cars on the freeway as if he were some kind of weapons targeting system.
“I know where she’s going to be at ten o’clock,” the client added. “That gives you a little over two hours to work out the details. I don’t care how it gets done.”
His client made it all sound so easy. Obviously, he had no military training.
“What about the boy?” Calderon asked.
“That’s being handled.”
Calderon tapped the steering wheel a few times with his thumb. “And who’s this doctor that Tartaglia’s supposed to meet with?”
“One of the E.R. docs. The one that took care of the boy.”
“What’s his name?”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s not connected to—”
“If I’m going to do this, I need to know everything that you know. Everything.”
“Okay,” his client said after a moment. “The doctor’s name is McKenna. Luke McKenna.”
Calderon’s eyes suddenly fell out of focus. His face flushed with heat.
7
Light spilled from an open door at the end of the basement corridor, painting the opposite wall with a yellow rectangle. The distinctive sound of Johnny Cash’s baritone voice grew louder as Luke approached the door. When the music reached the final line of the chorus, another voice, loud and off-key, joined in and sang, “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”
Ben was still in his office.
Dr. Ben Wilson, Chief of Pathology, hadn’t given back so much as a sliver of his thick drawl since coming to Los Angeles twenty years ago. Luke sometimes wondered whether Ben accentuated it just to make a statement. Jewish by heritage and Texan by birth, he had opinions on almost every subject and was quite willing to share them.
Luke tapped on the doorjamb as he entered the pathologist’s office. The place carried a vague scent of formaldehyde. Two walls were lined floor to ceiling with unfinished bookshelves that held an equal mix of textbooks and cowboy memorabilia. On top of Ben’s desk sat a fifteen-gallon dry fish tank, home to Charlotte, his pet tarantula.
Ben was sitting over a microscope when he looked up and waved Luke into the room. “What brings you down here?”
“Just lost a patient upstairs, a four-year-old boy from Guatemala. Respiratory failure — at least that’s what it looked like. I want to ask you about an autopsy.”
The pathologist ran a hand through his bushy, gray temples. “Anything else you can tell me?”
“The boy was first seen in our clinic down there about a month ago. His white count was fifty thousand, mostly lymphocytes.”