The Second Opinion, page 12
“Hey, Jess,” he said through the open office door. “Where do you think the guy got the cart?”
“The what?”
“The cart he was pushing.”
“I don’t know. I think the ones that aren’t on one of the floors are all in the basement—”
“—of the Bladd Building.”
Dan finished the sentence with her, then turned back to the map. Assuming the killer knew where the carts were kept, and assuming he had come into the main entrance of the hospital, and assuming he had changed into orderly’s whites, he would have chosen one of two men’s rooms in which to do so, probably the smaller, less trafficked. In fact, Dan decided, with the trash cans screened from view in a recessed alcove in the wall, he might well have bundled his street clothes in a plastic bag of some sort and placed the bag into the trash for retrieval when he was finished.
Even though he had nearly been caught, the killer wouldn’t have panicked. He would have walked quickly back to the men’s room, retrieved his clothes, changed, maybe left his orderly’s outfit in the same trash can, and calmly exited through the main doors, possibly carrying with him whatever was wrapped in the towel. The real question was, if in fact the glasses and mustache were fake, what he had chosen to do with them. He had made an error by not knowing that the security force was checking all employee IDs. Could he possibly have made another?
Dan used a washable marker to circle the men’s room he had chosen. If he was wrong about that one, he would try another. If the janitorial staff had emptied the trash cans, there was nothing he could do. If they hadn’t, he could probably get them to hold off.
“Found everything you need?” Jessica asked as he headed out of the office.
“I’ll let you know,” Dan replied.
He paused for a moment by the door to run his tongue across the stitches in his cheek.
On his way through the tunnel to the main entrance of the hospital, Dan called janitorial and made sure there would be no emptying of any restroom trash cans for at least an hour. Then he took a small cutoff that dead-ended in the expansive central supply center of the hospital, open twenty-four hours. Across from the counter was a large storage area containing stretchers, wheelchairs, rolling oxygen holders, several ventilators, tray tables, and a dozen or so steel carts.
There might have been a security camera inside the supply room where the surgical instruments, procedure kits, and countless other kinds of equipment were sterilized and stored, but there was none covering the hallway or storage area. It would have been no problem for the killer to walk into the space, ensure that whoever was working across the hall wasn’t watching, and simply walk off with a steel cart. Of course, such an action presumed knowledge of the hospital, but Dan already felt certain that directly or from someone else, the man had that.
He returned to the main tunnel and headed toward the front entrance. Foot traffic was heavy, accompanied by electronic cars, beeping their warning as they towed huge hampers of laundry or bins of trash. As always, Dan was amazed at how many people and how much equipment were involved in caring for the sick. He tried to imagine the complexity of running such a place as this, but simply couldn’t get his mind around the notion.
Aware for the first time of the dull, unpleasant ache in his groin, he mounted the stairs to the main lobby. The bastard who kicked him had done so with surgical precision—a direct hit.
Someday, Dan thought. Someday . . .
The men’s room he had reasoned out was off the broad corridor from the Sederstrom Family Lobby toward the first of many banks of elevators. It was, as he had surmised from the whiteboard map, small—two urinals, one stall. And it was deserted. The trash can, set in the wall and accessible through a swinging metal panel, was a large steel bin, three feet high and two square, lined with an industrial-strength plastic bag, and perhaps built from the same primordial slab of steel as the rolling cart. The bag was full.
Feeling somewhat foolish, Dan pulled the container out onto the tile floor, considered rummaging through it blindly, then suddenly dropped it noisily onto its side, grabbed a small ledge on the bottom, and emptied it out. Crumpled paper towels, the equivalent of a modest-sized tree, spilled out onto the tiled floor. Along with the towels were the contents of any number of men’s pockets: two sections of the Herald, an empty pint of Jack Daniel’s, a pair of boxer shorts no longer wearable for obvious reasons, and a thin paperback western. Nothing else. Dan’s enthusiasm drained. The killer’s movements seemed so logical when he thought them through in the security office. He had been wrong. The other men’s room candidate he had considered was past the bank of elevators at the base of the Bladd Building. Going that way would have exposed the killer to the main hospital thoroughfare rather than the less-traveled tunnel, but it was possible. Certainly it was worth a try.
Wishing he had thought to bring a pair of gloves, he was about to push the mound of trash back toward the bin with his uniform shoe, when instinct made him peer into the plastic bag. It hadn’t completely emptied. He tipped it nearly upside down, and a white orderly’s uniform tumbled out, along with something wrapped in a paper towel.
Dan bent down and gingerly picked up the small bundle. Even before he exposed the contents, he knew what was there. Visualizing the killer stuffing his uniform and the package down to the bottom of the bin, he laid the paper towel on the sink, opened it up, and stared down at a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a thick, bogus mustache.
His pulse hammering, he rewrapped the package and slipped it into his Windbreaker pocket.
“You should have taken this stuff with you, pal,” he muttered, already thinking of the woman at the state crime lab he could get to check his find for fingerprints. “If you touched something here even once, I’ve got you.”
CHAPTER 20
The Lydia Thibideau Gastrointestinal Research Center occupied the entire fifth floor of the Cannon Building—a modern glass and steel structure built in tribute, the bronze plaque by the elevators read, to the skill and compassion of the physicians and nurses of the Beaumont Clinic. After checking to ensure that there would be restricted visitors and a guard on duty outside the ICU for at least until morning, Thea followed the directions the GI chief had given her and swiped her hospital security card to stop the elevator at Cannon 5. As Thibideau had promised, the main door to the center was unlocked, and the waiting area was now deserted.
Getting the card had taken most of a day. After numerous forms and a detailed interview with the head of hospital security, Thea had been granted Beta clearance, which she was told would get her into most common areas, her father’s office and small laboratory, plus the hematology/blood chemistry lab, and the radiology suite. She was never given the explanation as to why those particular facilities were chosen, but Niko had, at some point, let slip that his clearance level was Delta. In fact, in order to access Petros’s modest office, it was necessary not only to swipe her ID card, but to enter a password into the ten- digit keypad by his door. Not at all surprisingly, Petros’s code, printed on a wallet- sized card given to Thea by the security head, was 2- 8-4-3- 6-7: ATHENS.
Security codes . . . ID cards . . . sign-ins . . . guards . . . electronic medical records . . . staggering malpractice insurance premiums . . . malpractice attorneys recruiting clients through television ads . . . other TV ads directed at having patients badger their doctors for various prescription medications . . . managed care companies dictating how much time a physician can devote to each patient.
The practice of medicine had evolved into something Alice would have encountered had she gotten ill on her trip through the looking glass.
Thea pictured the bustling jungle hospital near Katanga, DRC, where she had worked for almost two years now after transferring from a similarly vibrant facility in the Guidan Roumdji district of Niger. Sick and malnourished patients; skilled, devoted caregivers; miracle after miracle. It was an equation, a simple, straightforward system, she could understand. Her income of around twenty thousand dollars a year couldn’t stand up to the hundreds of thousands Niko and Selene each made, but she was actually saving a reasonable portion of her salary.
Now she was trying to track down why, with only a single word available to him, her father had chosen the name of a man who had survived a brutal cancer, fatal to all but the very fortunate.
During her rotation through the Beaumont, Thea had met Lydia Thibideau once, and had attended several of her lectures. The woman never seemed particularly warm or open, but like many of the super-specialists at medical centers like this one, she was undeniably brilliant. As instructed, Thea took a seat in the empty waiting room. Twelve-hour workdays were the norm at her hospital, but she seldom felt stressed or too exhausted to go on. Now, though, she was feeling the strain of her father’s devastating condition and the tension of dealing with the twins. Most of all, she was struggling with the terrible secret her father had imposed on her by allowing no one else to know that he was awake and alert.
In spite of herself, Thea’s eyes closed. Her thoughts became disconnected fragments, many of them centering around Dan Cotton. In just the short time they had known each other, he had behaved nobly with the teen in the cafeteria and bravely with the assailant by the ICU. His rugged good looks were totally appealing to her, and although she was seldom consumed by sexual fantasies of a man, various images of them embracing and kissing and undressing each other began materializing. For a time, Dan galloped through her thoughts in full armor, carrying a lance and a shield. Moments later, he was lying next to her in the deep, rich grass of a meadow, slowly undoing the buttons of her blouse, unhooking her bra, touching her. . . .
How could this be? her mind asked over and over again. How could this be? . . . How—
“How do you do, Dr. Sperelakis?”
Thea’s eyes snapped open, but took a few moments to focus. Imposing Lydia Thibideau, wearing a knee- length white lab coat, was standing less than five feet away, her arms folded tightly across her ample chest in a position, Thea sensed, that was typical of her. She had aged some since the photo in the Bugle, and perhaps gained some weight, but her stern expression was the same. Her hair, styled short, was more red than brown, and she wore no jewelry except for a plain gold band, partially buried at the base of her marriage finger.
“Oh, I think I fell asleep,” Thea said, not feeling the least embarrassed.
“So it appears.”
In improv class, Thea would have stood up, extended her hand, and asked, “How do you do?”—a phrase she never completely understood. Now, although there was nothing in the professor’s manner that encouraged her, she did so anyway.
“How do you do. I’m Thea,” she said, rising as the last wisp of her fantasy vanished.
“I . . . knew that,” Thibideau replied, her hand like a trout. “I want to tell you how very sorry I am about your father. He was—is—a dear man and a dear friend.”
There was an all-too- familiar cadence to the woman’s speech, and Thea stopped herself at the last second from asking if she, too, had Asperger’s.
“He seems stable right now,” she said instead.
“Excellent. You said you wanted to speak to me about one of my patients. Shall we go into my office?”
“I would like that,” Thea replied.
The fifth floor was a spacious, gleaming laboratory behind a glass wall on one side of a corridor, and across from that, a conference room with ceiling-to-floor bookcases, original artwork, and a wall-sized whiteboard, as well as several examining rooms and a corner office overlooking an elegant duck pond, complete with two fountains. Aspie or not, what ever Lydia Thibideau had done in her professional life, she had done it right.
Thea flashed on the corner of a vast tent that she called her office, and barely suppressed a grin. Thibideau did not offer her anything, but simply motioned her to a chair next to the desk.
“I wish to warn you in advance, Dr. Sperelakis, that it is my policy not to share information about any of my patients, even to another doctor, without a signed release. And even then I may choose not to.”
“HIPAA, I know. Well, do the best you can.”
On something of a roll, Thea had thought through the lie she was about to tell, and even imagined the words she was going to use to tell it. Still, despite her previous success at it, manipulating and restructuring the facts felt foreign and uncomfortable.
“I’ve agreed to take over my father’s practice until he is able to resume work himself.”
“Well, that’s . . . very gracious of you. Weren’t you practicing in the jungle somewhere?”
“The Congo, yes. I expect to go back there someday. Well, last night and today I’ve been going through some of my father’s papers, and I came across a sheet with a name, a date, a diagnosis, and your name on it.”
“Can I see it?”
“See what?”
“The paper—the sheet of paper you found.”
“Oh . . . I . . . don’t have it with me. I didn’t stop back at the office after I called you.”
Thibideau rolled her eyes.
“What was the name?”
“The name was Kalishar. I wondered if he’s the Kalishar from the department store.”
“And the diagnosis?”
“Pancreatic cancer.”
Thibideau sighed.
“Dr. Sperelakis,” she said wearily, “I don’t know you beyond having your father tell me in the past that you broke his heart by going away to the jungle as you did. I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re being completely forthcoming with me. Now, exactly what is going on here?”
Thea felt the grip of panic. What was Thibideau talking about? Clearly, she had seen through the lie, but there was no way Thea could share any information about Petros’s locked-in syndrome. What was she supposed to do now?
“I . . . I just need to know about Jack Kalishar,” she stammered.
“And you expect me to answer you without knowing why?”
Thea felt frozen, unable to respond. Twisting the truth had seemed so easy the last time she did it.
“I’ve been spending time late at night talking with Hayley Long,” she suddenly heard herself saying. “We’ve been talking about . . . about her diagnosis.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Doctor, she’s my patient. I don’t know the medical customs in the jungle, but here in Boston we talk to our patients.”
Thea felt herself unraveling.
“I’m sorry,” she managed.
“Your visits have greatly buoyed Ms. Long’s spirits. Now, I can’t tell you much about Mr. Kalishar beyond that, as you surmised, he is my patient.”
“Then he’s still alive?”
“That fact is constantly reported in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, he’s still very much alive and in excellent health, I might add. We do manage to save some patients, you know.”
“I know,” Thea said, “but the review article by Lawrence and Kelleher in the 2004 issue of the American Journal of Gastroenterology reports some pretty low survival rates.”
“So, you’ve been doing your homework.”
“My homework?”
Again, a queer look.
“Yes, research. You’ve been doing research on pancreatic cancer.”
“Oh. Yes, I’ve done a little. But the Kelleher article I read some time ago—right when it came out, as I recall.”
“I’m impressed you would remember such a thing.”
“Don’t be. I remember lots of things I read. Most, in fact. The survival numbers weren’t very encouraging back then. I don’t think they’ve changed all that much since then. Can you tell me what Mr. Kalishar was treated with?”
Thibideau mulled the question for a time, then said, “It was a developmental drug we labeled SU890. We developed it right here in our lab—well, in the lab that preceded this one.”
“Is that what Hayley is getting now?”
“No. Ms. Long is on a new investigational drug, SU990, the next generation of the drug Mr. Kalishar got. I believe he got some other chemotherapy as well.”
“But you said that Mr. Kalishar was completely disease-free after five years.”
Once more, Thibideau hesitated in replying.
“He is,” she said finally, “but others . . . weren’t as fortunate. There were some deaths. We . . . had to stop the study and withdraw the drug.”
“And go back to the drawing board.”
“Not all the way back.”
“I suppose with pancreatic cancer being such a lethal condition, the FDA has given you some breaks in that regard.”
“Tell me, Doctor, are you always so . . . direct?”
Thea nodded modestly. “People have said that about me, yes. Some of them think it’s refreshing. Some of them think that I’m a bit of a jerk.”
“My Lord. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“Have you treated enough patients with this new generation of drug to have an idea how it’s doing?”
“The results to this point are rather promising. Dr. Sperelakis—Thea—I’m sorry I said what I did about you breaking your father’s heart.”
“I know that I did. But Dr. Carpenter—Paige Carpenter, she’s my therapist—helped me learn that sometimes a person has to do what they have to do.”
“Yes. . . . Well, I wish you luck in your new practice. If you are just a fraction as talented as your father, you are sure to be a success.”
“I can’t be as good as he is. I can only be as good as I can be.”
“Dr. Carpenter, too?”
“Why, yes. Good guess.”
“You are a very unusual woman, Dr. Sperelakis.”
“Unusual. I think I like being that.”
“If there’s anything further I can do for you, you may at least ask.”
“Well,” Thea said, “there is one thing.”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to bring an acupuncturist by to see Hayley.”
“A what?”
“A revered acupuncture instructor from the school I used to study at. I was hoping he might give us some idea as to how Hayley is responding to her treatment.”
“The what?”
“The cart he was pushing.”
“I don’t know. I think the ones that aren’t on one of the floors are all in the basement—”
“—of the Bladd Building.”
Dan finished the sentence with her, then turned back to the map. Assuming the killer knew where the carts were kept, and assuming he had come into the main entrance of the hospital, and assuming he had changed into orderly’s whites, he would have chosen one of two men’s rooms in which to do so, probably the smaller, less trafficked. In fact, Dan decided, with the trash cans screened from view in a recessed alcove in the wall, he might well have bundled his street clothes in a plastic bag of some sort and placed the bag into the trash for retrieval when he was finished.
Even though he had nearly been caught, the killer wouldn’t have panicked. He would have walked quickly back to the men’s room, retrieved his clothes, changed, maybe left his orderly’s outfit in the same trash can, and calmly exited through the main doors, possibly carrying with him whatever was wrapped in the towel. The real question was, if in fact the glasses and mustache were fake, what he had chosen to do with them. He had made an error by not knowing that the security force was checking all employee IDs. Could he possibly have made another?
Dan used a washable marker to circle the men’s room he had chosen. If he was wrong about that one, he would try another. If the janitorial staff had emptied the trash cans, there was nothing he could do. If they hadn’t, he could probably get them to hold off.
“Found everything you need?” Jessica asked as he headed out of the office.
“I’ll let you know,” Dan replied.
He paused for a moment by the door to run his tongue across the stitches in his cheek.
On his way through the tunnel to the main entrance of the hospital, Dan called janitorial and made sure there would be no emptying of any restroom trash cans for at least an hour. Then he took a small cutoff that dead-ended in the expansive central supply center of the hospital, open twenty-four hours. Across from the counter was a large storage area containing stretchers, wheelchairs, rolling oxygen holders, several ventilators, tray tables, and a dozen or so steel carts.
There might have been a security camera inside the supply room where the surgical instruments, procedure kits, and countless other kinds of equipment were sterilized and stored, but there was none covering the hallway or storage area. It would have been no problem for the killer to walk into the space, ensure that whoever was working across the hall wasn’t watching, and simply walk off with a steel cart. Of course, such an action presumed knowledge of the hospital, but Dan already felt certain that directly or from someone else, the man had that.
He returned to the main tunnel and headed toward the front entrance. Foot traffic was heavy, accompanied by electronic cars, beeping their warning as they towed huge hampers of laundry or bins of trash. As always, Dan was amazed at how many people and how much equipment were involved in caring for the sick. He tried to imagine the complexity of running such a place as this, but simply couldn’t get his mind around the notion.
Aware for the first time of the dull, unpleasant ache in his groin, he mounted the stairs to the main lobby. The bastard who kicked him had done so with surgical precision—a direct hit.
Someday, Dan thought. Someday . . .
The men’s room he had reasoned out was off the broad corridor from the Sederstrom Family Lobby toward the first of many banks of elevators. It was, as he had surmised from the whiteboard map, small—two urinals, one stall. And it was deserted. The trash can, set in the wall and accessible through a swinging metal panel, was a large steel bin, three feet high and two square, lined with an industrial-strength plastic bag, and perhaps built from the same primordial slab of steel as the rolling cart. The bag was full.
Feeling somewhat foolish, Dan pulled the container out onto the tile floor, considered rummaging through it blindly, then suddenly dropped it noisily onto its side, grabbed a small ledge on the bottom, and emptied it out. Crumpled paper towels, the equivalent of a modest-sized tree, spilled out onto the tiled floor. Along with the towels were the contents of any number of men’s pockets: two sections of the Herald, an empty pint of Jack Daniel’s, a pair of boxer shorts no longer wearable for obvious reasons, and a thin paperback western. Nothing else. Dan’s enthusiasm drained. The killer’s movements seemed so logical when he thought them through in the security office. He had been wrong. The other men’s room candidate he had considered was past the bank of elevators at the base of the Bladd Building. Going that way would have exposed the killer to the main hospital thoroughfare rather than the less-traveled tunnel, but it was possible. Certainly it was worth a try.
Wishing he had thought to bring a pair of gloves, he was about to push the mound of trash back toward the bin with his uniform shoe, when instinct made him peer into the plastic bag. It hadn’t completely emptied. He tipped it nearly upside down, and a white orderly’s uniform tumbled out, along with something wrapped in a paper towel.
Dan bent down and gingerly picked up the small bundle. Even before he exposed the contents, he knew what was there. Visualizing the killer stuffing his uniform and the package down to the bottom of the bin, he laid the paper towel on the sink, opened it up, and stared down at a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a thick, bogus mustache.
His pulse hammering, he rewrapped the package and slipped it into his Windbreaker pocket.
“You should have taken this stuff with you, pal,” he muttered, already thinking of the woman at the state crime lab he could get to check his find for fingerprints. “If you touched something here even once, I’ve got you.”
CHAPTER 20
The Lydia Thibideau Gastrointestinal Research Center occupied the entire fifth floor of the Cannon Building—a modern glass and steel structure built in tribute, the bronze plaque by the elevators read, to the skill and compassion of the physicians and nurses of the Beaumont Clinic. After checking to ensure that there would be restricted visitors and a guard on duty outside the ICU for at least until morning, Thea followed the directions the GI chief had given her and swiped her hospital security card to stop the elevator at Cannon 5. As Thibideau had promised, the main door to the center was unlocked, and the waiting area was now deserted.
Getting the card had taken most of a day. After numerous forms and a detailed interview with the head of hospital security, Thea had been granted Beta clearance, which she was told would get her into most common areas, her father’s office and small laboratory, plus the hematology/blood chemistry lab, and the radiology suite. She was never given the explanation as to why those particular facilities were chosen, but Niko had, at some point, let slip that his clearance level was Delta. In fact, in order to access Petros’s modest office, it was necessary not only to swipe her ID card, but to enter a password into the ten- digit keypad by his door. Not at all surprisingly, Petros’s code, printed on a wallet- sized card given to Thea by the security head, was 2- 8-4-3- 6-7: ATHENS.
Security codes . . . ID cards . . . sign-ins . . . guards . . . electronic medical records . . . staggering malpractice insurance premiums . . . malpractice attorneys recruiting clients through television ads . . . other TV ads directed at having patients badger their doctors for various prescription medications . . . managed care companies dictating how much time a physician can devote to each patient.
The practice of medicine had evolved into something Alice would have encountered had she gotten ill on her trip through the looking glass.
Thea pictured the bustling jungle hospital near Katanga, DRC, where she had worked for almost two years now after transferring from a similarly vibrant facility in the Guidan Roumdji district of Niger. Sick and malnourished patients; skilled, devoted caregivers; miracle after miracle. It was an equation, a simple, straightforward system, she could understand. Her income of around twenty thousand dollars a year couldn’t stand up to the hundreds of thousands Niko and Selene each made, but she was actually saving a reasonable portion of her salary.
Now she was trying to track down why, with only a single word available to him, her father had chosen the name of a man who had survived a brutal cancer, fatal to all but the very fortunate.
During her rotation through the Beaumont, Thea had met Lydia Thibideau once, and had attended several of her lectures. The woman never seemed particularly warm or open, but like many of the super-specialists at medical centers like this one, she was undeniably brilliant. As instructed, Thea took a seat in the empty waiting room. Twelve-hour workdays were the norm at her hospital, but she seldom felt stressed or too exhausted to go on. Now, though, she was feeling the strain of her father’s devastating condition and the tension of dealing with the twins. Most of all, she was struggling with the terrible secret her father had imposed on her by allowing no one else to know that he was awake and alert.
In spite of herself, Thea’s eyes closed. Her thoughts became disconnected fragments, many of them centering around Dan Cotton. In just the short time they had known each other, he had behaved nobly with the teen in the cafeteria and bravely with the assailant by the ICU. His rugged good looks were totally appealing to her, and although she was seldom consumed by sexual fantasies of a man, various images of them embracing and kissing and undressing each other began materializing. For a time, Dan galloped through her thoughts in full armor, carrying a lance and a shield. Moments later, he was lying next to her in the deep, rich grass of a meadow, slowly undoing the buttons of her blouse, unhooking her bra, touching her. . . .
How could this be? her mind asked over and over again. How could this be? . . . How—
“How do you do, Dr. Sperelakis?”
Thea’s eyes snapped open, but took a few moments to focus. Imposing Lydia Thibideau, wearing a knee- length white lab coat, was standing less than five feet away, her arms folded tightly across her ample chest in a position, Thea sensed, that was typical of her. She had aged some since the photo in the Bugle, and perhaps gained some weight, but her stern expression was the same. Her hair, styled short, was more red than brown, and she wore no jewelry except for a plain gold band, partially buried at the base of her marriage finger.
“Oh, I think I fell asleep,” Thea said, not feeling the least embarrassed.
“So it appears.”
In improv class, Thea would have stood up, extended her hand, and asked, “How do you do?”—a phrase she never completely understood. Now, although there was nothing in the professor’s manner that encouraged her, she did so anyway.
“How do you do. I’m Thea,” she said, rising as the last wisp of her fantasy vanished.
“I . . . knew that,” Thibideau replied, her hand like a trout. “I want to tell you how very sorry I am about your father. He was—is—a dear man and a dear friend.”
There was an all-too- familiar cadence to the woman’s speech, and Thea stopped herself at the last second from asking if she, too, had Asperger’s.
“He seems stable right now,” she said instead.
“Excellent. You said you wanted to speak to me about one of my patients. Shall we go into my office?”
“I would like that,” Thea replied.
The fifth floor was a spacious, gleaming laboratory behind a glass wall on one side of a corridor, and across from that, a conference room with ceiling-to-floor bookcases, original artwork, and a wall-sized whiteboard, as well as several examining rooms and a corner office overlooking an elegant duck pond, complete with two fountains. Aspie or not, what ever Lydia Thibideau had done in her professional life, she had done it right.
Thea flashed on the corner of a vast tent that she called her office, and barely suppressed a grin. Thibideau did not offer her anything, but simply motioned her to a chair next to the desk.
“I wish to warn you in advance, Dr. Sperelakis, that it is my policy not to share information about any of my patients, even to another doctor, without a signed release. And even then I may choose not to.”
“HIPAA, I know. Well, do the best you can.”
On something of a roll, Thea had thought through the lie she was about to tell, and even imagined the words she was going to use to tell it. Still, despite her previous success at it, manipulating and restructuring the facts felt foreign and uncomfortable.
“I’ve agreed to take over my father’s practice until he is able to resume work himself.”
“Well, that’s . . . very gracious of you. Weren’t you practicing in the jungle somewhere?”
“The Congo, yes. I expect to go back there someday. Well, last night and today I’ve been going through some of my father’s papers, and I came across a sheet with a name, a date, a diagnosis, and your name on it.”
“Can I see it?”
“See what?”
“The paper—the sheet of paper you found.”
“Oh . . . I . . . don’t have it with me. I didn’t stop back at the office after I called you.”
Thibideau rolled her eyes.
“What was the name?”
“The name was Kalishar. I wondered if he’s the Kalishar from the department store.”
“And the diagnosis?”
“Pancreatic cancer.”
Thibideau sighed.
“Dr. Sperelakis,” she said wearily, “I don’t know you beyond having your father tell me in the past that you broke his heart by going away to the jungle as you did. I’m sorry, but I don’t think you’re being completely forthcoming with me. Now, exactly what is going on here?”
Thea felt the grip of panic. What was Thibideau talking about? Clearly, she had seen through the lie, but there was no way Thea could share any information about Petros’s locked-in syndrome. What was she supposed to do now?
“I . . . I just need to know about Jack Kalishar,” she stammered.
“And you expect me to answer you without knowing why?”
Thea felt frozen, unable to respond. Twisting the truth had seemed so easy the last time she did it.
“I’ve been spending time late at night talking with Hayley Long,” she suddenly heard herself saying. “We’ve been talking about . . . about her diagnosis.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Doctor, she’s my patient. I don’t know the medical customs in the jungle, but here in Boston we talk to our patients.”
Thea felt herself unraveling.
“I’m sorry,” she managed.
“Your visits have greatly buoyed Ms. Long’s spirits. Now, I can’t tell you much about Mr. Kalishar beyond that, as you surmised, he is my patient.”
“Then he’s still alive?”
“That fact is constantly reported in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, he’s still very much alive and in excellent health, I might add. We do manage to save some patients, you know.”
“I know,” Thea said, “but the review article by Lawrence and Kelleher in the 2004 issue of the American Journal of Gastroenterology reports some pretty low survival rates.”
“So, you’ve been doing your homework.”
“My homework?”
Again, a queer look.
“Yes, research. You’ve been doing research on pancreatic cancer.”
“Oh. Yes, I’ve done a little. But the Kelleher article I read some time ago—right when it came out, as I recall.”
“I’m impressed you would remember such a thing.”
“Don’t be. I remember lots of things I read. Most, in fact. The survival numbers weren’t very encouraging back then. I don’t think they’ve changed all that much since then. Can you tell me what Mr. Kalishar was treated with?”
Thibideau mulled the question for a time, then said, “It was a developmental drug we labeled SU890. We developed it right here in our lab—well, in the lab that preceded this one.”
“Is that what Hayley is getting now?”
“No. Ms. Long is on a new investigational drug, SU990, the next generation of the drug Mr. Kalishar got. I believe he got some other chemotherapy as well.”
“But you said that Mr. Kalishar was completely disease-free after five years.”
Once more, Thibideau hesitated in replying.
“He is,” she said finally, “but others . . . weren’t as fortunate. There were some deaths. We . . . had to stop the study and withdraw the drug.”
“And go back to the drawing board.”
“Not all the way back.”
“I suppose with pancreatic cancer being such a lethal condition, the FDA has given you some breaks in that regard.”
“Tell me, Doctor, are you always so . . . direct?”
Thea nodded modestly. “People have said that about me, yes. Some of them think it’s refreshing. Some of them think that I’m a bit of a jerk.”
“My Lord. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“Have you treated enough patients with this new generation of drug to have an idea how it’s doing?”
“The results to this point are rather promising. Dr. Sperelakis—Thea—I’m sorry I said what I did about you breaking your father’s heart.”
“I know that I did. But Dr. Carpenter—Paige Carpenter, she’s my therapist—helped me learn that sometimes a person has to do what they have to do.”
“Yes. . . . Well, I wish you luck in your new practice. If you are just a fraction as talented as your father, you are sure to be a success.”
“I can’t be as good as he is. I can only be as good as I can be.”
“Dr. Carpenter, too?”
“Why, yes. Good guess.”
“You are a very unusual woman, Dr. Sperelakis.”
“Unusual. I think I like being that.”
“If there’s anything further I can do for you, you may at least ask.”
“Well,” Thea said, “there is one thing.”
“Yes?”
“I’d like to bring an acupuncturist by to see Hayley.”
“A what?”
“A revered acupuncture instructor from the school I used to study at. I was hoping he might give us some idea as to how Hayley is responding to her treatment.”
