The Second Opinion, page 24
“Your father has been fighting against the fund raising philosophy that has enabled our main hospital and its satellites to win award after award for our nursing ser vice.”
Musgrave’s exact words. She had sounded so sure of herself—so passionate. It was time for Thea to sit with Hayley, and later with Dan, and get their opinions. At this point, what she needed more than anything were allies—allies and ideas. One thing seemed certain: At the moment, Petros was as vulnerable to Hartnett and whoever else was involved as he was to the ravages of his injuries.
Hayley was not in her room.
The books were there, and her clothes, and a pile of papers on her bedside table, and a half-empty pitcher of water. Apparently, she had gone off wandering the hospital as she sometimes did. Perhaps she had even gone to see Petros, as she had in the past. Thea’s revelations about the MRIs in Thibideau’s files had to have been unsettling for the woman. A walk made perfect sense.
Feeling vaguely uneasy, Thea sat down in Hayley’s reading chair and flipped through the pages of a dry business magazine without actually digesting the words. Five minutes later, her unease had in-tensified, and after ten minutes, she was at the nurses’ station. There were four women—two aides and two RNs—on the night shift on PS-4, as the floor was known. None of them had seen Hayley leave, and it was their policy to have any patient departing the floor for any reason sign out. Thea checked the book. Nothing.
“Something’s happened,” she said, before even trying to reason out where her friend might have gone.
The charge nurse immediately called her supervisor.
“Page her,” Thea insisted. “Page Hayley throughout the hospital.”
“Can’t,” the shift supervisor said. “It’s strictly against regs to broadcast any patient’s name.”
She called security.
At this point, although she was concerned, Thea did not believe that anything untoward had happened to Hayley. Instead, she was becoming increasingly convinced that her friend had undergone a change of heart as a result of their conversation about the MRIs, and had used her vast resources to have herself simply removed from the Beaumont.
Thea couldn’t help but recall a Sunday morning during her internship at the hardscrabble city hospital across town, when an angry suburban attorney stormed onto one of the busy, understaffed female medical floors. He was on his way in to see his mother, who was hospitalized there with some sort of progressive dementia, along with a myriad of other problems. A mile from the hospital, he had pulled his car over. There, wandering in no par ticular hurry down the other side of the street, wearing nothing but a Johnny, which was totally open in the back, was his mother. Livid, he bustled her into his car, brought her back to the hospital and to her bed, only to discover that no one on the floor knew she had left.
Instant legend.
It wasn’t at all like the Beaumont to lose a patient with no one knowing where she had gone, but the place was gigantic, and those in the many private med/surg rooms had a great deal of freedom and autonomy. It was up to Amy Musgrave’s nurses to know which patients could be trusted and which ones couldn’t. Certainly there was no reason to anticipate that Hayley would be a problem.
By a quarter after one, the nursing staff and security people had come up empty. They had even bowed to Thea’s insistence that they enlist housekeeping and any available nurses and aides to check every public bathroom stall—men’s and women’s—in case Hayley had experienced some sort of med reaction, and had gone into one of them before passing out.
“She’s back home in Georgia,” Thea said to the supervisor, when the last of the negative reports had come in. “We should call her husband.”
“How would she get a flight at such a late hour?”
“It would be her plane. Or her limo. Or even her helicopter. Any helicopter takeoffs from here since she was last checked?”
“Not that I know of. And why would she leave everything in her room like this?”
“She’s a multibillionaire. She’s used to doing what ever she wants to. Can you give me her husband’s number?”
“Sorry, it’s—”
“I know. I know. Against regs. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the circumstance the HIPAA people were protecting patients against when they drafted their laws. If I can’t call her husband, then you call him.”
The nurse was flustered and anxious.
“I think I’d better call Amy first. She might want the hospital lawyers brought in.”
Thea could only groan. “Go ahead and get her in here.”
One phone call to Atlanta and the whole matter could possibly be resolved.
But that one phone call, when it was finally made, only added to the confusion, and to Thea’s concern. Hayley’s husband had spoken to her twice that evening—once when Thea was with her, and once an hour or so later. Initially, Hayley and he had decided that she would continue with her chemotherapy. But after some thought, she had completely reversed her stance and had decided to stop her treatment until a repeat MRI could be obtained. If the film showed no evidence of residual tumor, she intended to get a second opinion from a GI oncologist in Atlanta as to whether to resume her therapy. As to her whereabouts, her husband had nothing to add to the situation except his anxiety.
Musgrave, who had made the call, seemed appropriately alarmed. She spoke to her nurses as if they were the ones who had initiated the search, and more or less ignored Thea. She was about to order a second, even more in-depth search of the hospital, along with a policy-violating overhead page, when Thea had had enough.
She motioned Musgrave away from the group now clustered at the nurses’ station.
“Call the police, Amy,” she demanded in a harsh whisper, glaring at the fiery nurse. “Hayley’s either gone into hiding someplace where we’ll never find her, or she’s been kidnapped.”
“Why would she have gone into hiding?” Musgrave asked.
“You seem to be tuned in to most of what’s going on around this hospital. I was hoping you might know something about the answer to that question.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But she did.
Thea, who considered herself a weakling when it came to reading people’s expressions and their tone of voice, could see fear and uncertainty etched across the nursing supervisor’s face. It seemed for an instant as if she were going to blurt out something like How did you find out? But instead, Musgrave spun around and returned to the security officer in charge.
“Call in the police,” she said. “I’ll get a hold of Dr. Karsten. And I’ll call in Dr. Thibideau as well. Perhaps she knows why Ms. Long decided to stop her treatments when they seemed to be working so well.”
Good move, Amy, Thea silently cheered, praying that for what ever reason, Hayley had gone into hiding, but knowing in her heart that wasn’t the case.
CHAPTER 42
Thea said nothing to the police about her father’s condition or the information he had passed on to her earlier in the night. At this point there were no reasons to do so, and many reasons not to, most important among them, the constant, heightened jeopardy he would be in should word get out that he was awake and communicating what he knew. Dan would know what she should do, and whom she should trust.
He would know.
And after they talked, if he felt they could be of help to the police in their search for Hayley, and that heightening the threat to Petros was a price worth paying, they would pick a detective, maybe Dan’s friend Lockwood, and tell him everything.
Lydia Thibideau had been as difficult to read as a sphinx. She seemed appropriately concerned about Hayley’s sudden decision to stop her chemotherapy when she had been doing so well, but she also sounded like a seasoned clinician, who had encountered just about everything there was to experience from her patients, including many miracles.
Thea had listened closely for any hint of discomfort or guilt from the woman, but to the extent her Asperger’s allowed her to make such a call, she found none. Still, whether or not Thibideau was involved, something deceitful, greedy, and potentially very dangerous was going on at the Beaumont.
Hartnett was a definite player in the scam, Thea reaffirmed as she left the hospital at almost three in the morning. And now, it seemed, Musgrave might be involved as well. But the real questions, at least for the moment, involved Hayley. Was there any way her disappearance could be connected with the questionable MRI that had brought her into the Beaumont in the first place? Doubtful, Thea decided. More likely, it was simply a matter of money. Hayley was worth a fortune. It had been a mistake to isolate her without protection in the Beaumont the way they had—a mistake for her not to have brought her own security people along with her. She was like a tapir in big cat country—nearly defenseless prey for any reasonably resourceful kidnappers.
Certainly, hostages had been taken for a lot less than might be demanded for her. In Africa, kidnapping was something of a sport, and might have actually been amusing had not so many of the episodes ended in bloodshed and death.
Eyes gritty with fatigue, and thoughts totally engrossed in her concern for Hayley and what might have happened, Thea left the parking lot headed, in no particular hurry, for Wellesley. Moments after she left, a pickup truck swung away from the curb and followed at a respectful distance. The truck was large and powerful—a Dodge Ram, black with a second set of doors and a full- sized cab in the rear. Attached in front of the grille was a thick steel and wood frame, the width of the truck and four feet high, used for attaching heavy- duty equipment. The driver of the truck had pulled a black ski mask down over his face.
Thea weaved through the back streets of the city until she reached Route 9. Then she slipped in one of Petros’s albums of traditional Greek music and settled back, cruising west along with fairly light early-morning traffic. In addition to her concerns for Hayley, she found herself thinking about her experiences since her return to the United States.
At the Doctors Without Borders hospitals where she had worked, she had never once felt unaccepted or like an outsider. Back here in Boston, as it had been in her earlier life, she was an oddity—totally uncool in a world where cool was everything; more than two standard deviations from the mean in almost every measurement of fitting in. Yet in those weeks, she had managed to find a true friend in Hayley, and a lover who wore tight white underwear and kissed her like no man ever had before.
Not bad.
And now she was on the verge of helping her father gain some measure of vengeance against the killer who had harmed him more, perhaps, than could death itself. She just had to be patient—be patient and make sound decisions, searching her heart and mind, and incorporating the advice of those she trusted. Following that path, one day at a time, things would become clear to her. If she believed anything, she believed that.
Cruising into the Chestnut Hill section of Newton, with her father’s favorite music enveloping her, Thea took down the evil eye—the mati—hanging from his mirror, and rubbed it. Then she made the sign of the cross three times, and spit into the air. It was as out of character for her to do so as it was absolutely in character for most of her many Aunt Marys. Fervently, she prayed that Hayley was safe and unharmed. Frustrating as it felt, there was simply nothing else she could do.
Just past the mall, traffic began to slow. workmen ahead, a sign announced, all fines doubled. No surprise for Route 9. It seemed the busy thoroughfare was always under some sort of reconstruction, most of it done between midnight and dawn. At a rise in the road, Thea peered ahead. The double lanes of stationary brake lights seemed to extend to the horizon—far beyond Route 128. No detours that she could tell . . . no policemen directing the flow . . . just cars.
Thea was fine driving with her thoughts and the music for as long as it took to get home, but this traffic wasn’t moving at all. Impulsively, she swung off onto a secondary road and turned left—toward Needham, she guessed, although it was a road she could never remember having been on. If her sense of direction didn’t fail her, she could take the next right and be headed west again. Based on the complete lack of cars, it appeared that no one else had chosen this alternate route. Thea was pondering the significance of that fact when she felt the first contact from behind—a firm bump on her left side that snapped her head back and spun the steering wheel to the right, out of her hands.
Instinctively, she slammed on the brakes and looked up at the rearview. The truck that was forcing her off the road filled the mirror. Its windshield was so far above her that she could just see the bottom edge of it. An accident? A purposeful attack? A random thrill ride? All Thea could think of was the bone- breaking sensation her father must have experienced when a car sped out of the early-morning gloom and struck him.
Under the best of circumstances, Thea would never have been placed in anyone’s driver’s hall of fame. Her hand- eye coordination was below average, as were most of her other athletic abilities. She had waited until she was well past eighteen to go for her license, read every book she could get her hands on dealing with the dangers of driving and how to avoid or combat them, and then had barely managed to pass on the second try. On field trips from the hospital in the DRC, she seldom volunteered to drive one of the Toyotas or Land Rovers, and after experiencing the slow speeds that were comfortable for her, no one asked her to do so again. Now she couldn’t begin to know what her response to this situation should be.
The truck accelerated, forcing her to skid to her right, over a low curb and across a grassy field, straight toward a massive tree—a gray ghost in the bouncing headlights of her Volvo. She managed to grip the wheel and swung it to the left as best she could. For a moment, some space opened up between her and her attacker, then the truck rammed her again.
This was no chance accident. The driver behind her was either terribly drunk or completely committed to destroying her.
There was no way she was going to miss hitting the tree, which, she realized in an absurd moment of clarity, was a maple.
Pulling even harder to her left, fearing that her forearms were about to snap, Thea did all she could. The Volvo was lurching and skidding across the field, which was soaked from an earlier thunderstorm. At the last moment she managed to turn the wheel just enough to keep from a head- on crash with the maple. Instead, the jolting impact was against her right front, tearing off the headlight, fender, and mirror with a sickening crunch, and cracking much of the right third of the windshield. Instantly, the driver’s and passenger’s airbags snapped open. Then, as they were meant to do, they just as quickly emptied.
Actually, Thea thought, in another uncontrollable flash of knowledge, the bags didn’t deploy instantly, but in one-twenty- fifth of a second. She had read about the device and the subsequent chemical reaction when she was studying for her road test, and again, years later, when she bought her first car, an orange Volkswagen Beetle. As the airbags were unleashed from their containers inside the steering wheel on the driver’s side and in the top of the dashboard on the passenger side, pellets of sodium azide combined with potassium nitrite and silicon dioxide to produce the nitrogen gas that inflated them, and also beads of common glass, which served to neutralize the highly toxic intermediate, sodium nitrite.
Smoke filled the car a moment after the bags deflated. Talc, Thea knew, used to keep the airbags pliable. While the talc was dissipating, she was virtually helpless, unable to see ahead or behind, skidding almost sideways across the field toward what she could vaguely tell was a forest of some sort. The passenger-side airbag had slammed upward against the windshield, as it was programmed to do, further dislodging it from the frame of the car. Meanwhile, the truck, its engine screeching like a monstrous bird of prey, was continuing its merciless onslaught.
To protect her arms and hands, Thea had taken them off the wheel. Now, worried about hitting another tree and not having airbags to protect her, she brought her hands up to her face and peered between her fingers. That was when the fog of talc cleared enough for her to see water ahead of her and maybe eight feet below—a pond of some sort, approaching fast through an opening in the woods.
An instant later, the Volvo was airborne. Parallel to the ground, it sailed through the opening in the trees and off the bank, turning upside down in what seemed to Thea to be excruciating slow motion.
Its wheels and chassis were pointing directly skyward when it slammed against the black mirror surface of the pond, jolting Thea forward and snapping her forehead against the steering wheel with numbing force.
For a time, she was barely conscious—unable to connect her thoughts in any useful order. Then, she became aware of an intense, unfathomable darkness, and of a dreadful pounding behind her eyes. Finally, her situation came into focus. The lights and all other electrical capabilities of the car had ceased to work. It was upside down, bobbing in some sort of murky pond, and steadily filling with water, which was pooling below her head and approaching her eyes. Her buckled seatbelt was holding her in place. There was still air to breathe.
Then, the Volvo began to sink.
CHAPTER 43
Thea’s first thought as her consciousness returned was not that she was going to die—it was that she was going to find a way out. She fought the encroaching panic the way she had fought it during countless medical emergencies over her years as a doctor, by focusing on details and relying on system and logic. As a physician dealing with a life-and- death crisis, process was everything. In the eternal debate among docs about whether it was better to do the right thing for the wrong reason, or the reverse, she was nearly always on the side of process over gut instinct . . . except when she wasn’t.
As her thoughts cleared, despite the need for action, she found it difficult to keep from wondering who had done this to her. How had he (she envisioned the driver as a he) known that she would be at the hospital at such an hour? Finally, like moving a giant boulder from her path, she was able to shove the speculation aside and concentrate on the situation.
