CHAPTER 22
For the second time in six hours, Will entered the hospital from which he had been professionally and physically suspended. This time, though, the security guard in the lobby merely looked at him and nodded. He was expected. The phone in his condo was actually ringing when he arrived home, shaken and bewildered from the bizarre encounter with Charles Newcomber. As with every call now, Will lifted the receiver expecting to hear the killer’s unsettling electronic voice.
“Grant?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Sid Silverman.”
Sid, listen, Will came close to blurting out. I’m really sorry I came into the hospital this morning. I had to see a patient of mine.
“What’s up?” he managed instead.
“We need you to come into the hospital for a meeting. Three o’clock.”
“What’s this about?”
“I’d rather everyone learned about this at the same time, but I can tell you that just a little while ago, your friend the serial killer called Jim Katz.”
“But why would he-”
“Sears Conference Room, third floor, three o’clock.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll be there. Should I bring my lawyer?”
“You can do what you want, but you won’t need one.”
“Sid, I trust you so much that I won’t bring one,” Will replied, with syrupy sarcasm.
What now? Will wondered as he entered through the lobby and headed downstairs to radiology. What can the psycho possibly do to me now that he or someone else hasn’t already done? Surely the killer couldn’t have selected Jim Katz as Will’s replacement. Katz was a political conservative, who had nothing to do with the Society, and in fact was on the board of one of the managed-care companies. He was independently wealthy and was just playing out the string in his surgical practice because he loved the hard-earned stature and universal respect he enjoyed throughout the hospital. In fact, Will, Gordo, and Susan often wondered if Katz would be one of those whose health collapsed shortly after his retirement or who took to drinking for lack of anything stimulating to do.
It was two-thirty, and always the multitasker, Will had taken advantage of his free pass into FGH by making an appointment to review Grace’s chest X-rays with Rick Pizzi, the radiologist on duty. Disappointed that there was no message from Patty waiting for him at the condo, he had called from a pay phone and spoken briefly with her.
“That was a really nice night, thanks” was the extent of her comment on their lovemaking.
“For me, too,” he’d replied, wanting to say much more.
Patty, having spent much of her day on the case to which she was no longer assigned, was behind in chasing after those cases to which she was, including the wounding of a shopkeeper during a holdup. There wasn’t time for more than the brief exchange of reports of her interview with the widow of Ben Morales and his encounter with Charles Newcomber.
“Let’s talk later if we can,” she said, “but with the shooting they just set on my plate and this next interview, I think I’ll be working most of the night.”
The too-brief conversation had left Will with an aching emptiness in his chest. He left for the hospital reminding himself that over the past fifteen years, Maxine was the extent of his serious involvement with women. That hardly qualified him as an expert.
Radiology was, as usual, busy. Rounding a corner, Will nearly collided with Gordon Cameron. The Scotsman was a spectacular vision in a boldly striped dress shirt, paisley tie, and deep burgundy trousers, held up by a pair of broad plaid suspenders. Each of the colors seemed to clash with every one of the others, as well as with his thick, red-orange beard.
“Will, me boy, you’re off a couple of floors! We’re meetin’ in the conference room on three.”
For years, any contact with Cameron raised Will’s spirits. Today, though, he had to hold his niggling concern about the man in check. It was hard to look directly at him without demanding to know if he was the one who had somehow managed to poison him with fentanyl.
“Gordo, you have really cloaked yourself in sartorial splendor this day,” Will said. “You are positively intimidating. If Braveheart had dressed this way, I believe he’d still be charging through the heather, slicing off heads, and mooning the British.”
“Trust me, lad, you don’t know the half of it. The hard part of pulling this outfit together was finding a set where the suspenders and thong matched.”
“Ouch! So, do you know what this meeting is about?”
“Just that it has to do with Jim and you. Listen, Will, I need to tell you that I’m really sorry I haven’t been in better touch. Things have been so hectic around here without you that I haven’t called to see how you were doing.”
“Nonsense. I’ve been far too busy living the high life to make time for anyone.”
“Well, it may not seem it, but I have been thinking about you.”
“Duly noted and appreciated.”
“Thanks. Now, what are you doing down here in the bowels of the hospital?”
“I’ve run into an interesting problem with a film. Rick Pizzi’s going to go over it with me.”
“The only suspended doctor in the history of the hospital who manages to run into an interesting problem with a film. Now, that’s what I call devotion to the profession. Want company in there? We can’t start this meeting without you anyway.”
“Come along.”
Pizzi, stocky and higher strung than most radiologists, had come to FGH at almost the same time as Will. However, their career paths, as least from an economic standpoint, then quickly diverged. Radiology, without much patient contact, wasn’t a specialty Will would have chosen, but it certainly had things to recommend it. An avid pilot, Pizzi now owned a pressurized Cessna, as well as a snazzy fishing boat and a Porsche. He also was still in his first marriage and spent most of his infrequent on-call nights asleep at home.
Two sets of Grace’s chest X-rays, taken a day apart, were in place in four panels of the ten that filled the wall behind Pizzi’s desk.
“So,” he asked, “were you able to get ahold of Mrs. Davis’s mammograms?”
“Not yet. They’re at the mammography center of her HMO. I will, though, I can promise you that.”
“And you feel certain there was nothing like this in any of the views?”
“As you may have heard, Rick, I’ve been under a little stress lately, so I’m not going to claim to be one hundred percent certain about anything. But I did look at the mammograms carefully when Mrs. Davis first came to my office, and I never noticed anything like this. Her husband doesn’t remember seeing anything in her films, either. He’s a teacher, not a doc, but he claims to have an unusually sharp eye for details. The question is,” Will said, “is it possible for every one of the views of a standard mammogram series to miss this?”
Pizzi considered the question, then shook his head.
“I don’t believe so,” he said. “Depending on technique, it would be present in three standard views, maybe four.”
“And if it wasn’t?”
Rick Pizzi’s expression darkened.
“Then,” he said, “I would have to adopt the position that the mammograms weren’t hers.”
“Mammograms that weren’t hers. Mother of God, Will, what have you gotten yourself into?” Cameron asked as they trudged up four stories from the basement.
“This time.”
“Pardon?”
“You mean what have I gotten myself into this time. This is the woman who almost died from an anaphylactic reaction to her first dose of chemotherapy.”
“I heard about this case. The rescue-squad paramedic did a trach on her, yes?”
“Exactly. Saved her life from all I can tell.”
“Fascinating.”
“Actually, she’s a patient of our practice. Susan did the biopsy and excision.”