Death Benefit (25 page)

“I want to go back to the lab,” Pia said, stopping suddenly. They had just reached the corner where 168th Street turns into Haven Avenue. “I want to see if there are any clues as to why or how he got infected. He’s so careful, I don’t understand it. He’s so detailed and compulsive about his work, his organization, his technique, it’s all flawless. It doesn’t make sense.”

Still lurking in the back of Pia’s mind was the thought that Rothman had infected himself intentionally. But why would he involve Dr. Yamamoto? It couldn’t be the case, or could it? What she wanted to do was completely eliminate the idea as even a remote possibility. If Rothman died, it was going to be a betrayal of sorts, but she didn’t want it to be his betrayal. Betrayal by fate she thought she could ultimately handle. Personal betrayal by Rothman would be something entirely different.

George groaned inwardly. Visiting Rothman had been bad enough. Visiting a lab that was off-limits by order of the CDC was something else entirely. “The lab is closed,” George said in a fashion that wouldn’t brook discussion. “Order of the CDC. Let’s head up to your room. I saved the sandwich you didn’t eat.” To prove his point, George pulled the food from his pocket.

“I’m going,” Pia said.

“What on earth do you think you’re going to turn up that the CDC hasn’t?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t do
nothing
. You can come with me or not, I’m going anyway. Of course two sets of eyes may be better than one.”

George realized Pia was asking for his help, however indirectly, which was a first. Still, it wasn’t an easy decision. He was okay with bending the rules, but not breaking them like this. He couldn’t afford to get kicked out of medical school. It had been his goal as long as he could remember, and he had his family to consider. But George had no time to ponder his decision. Pia had already turned around and was heading toward the research building.

“You’re not worried about getting typhoid fever?” he asked, catching up to her.

“I was in there this morning. And there’s protective gear we can put on just like we used in Rothman’s room.”

Pia entered the building. George followed. It was like making a decision without making a decision. They showed their IDs to the security man and headed for the elevators.

As George had expected, the door to the lab was crisscrossed with yellow caution tape. “See, just as I expected. We can’t go in.”

Pia didn’t respond. She merely peeled back the necessary tape and tried the door, which was locked. It didn’t deter her. Many times over the last three and a half years, Pia had been asked to take a reading in the lab at night, or monitor an automated experiment. She took the key she’d been given for those eventualities, opened the door, and stepped over the threshold.

“Pia, this is crazy,” George said. Reluctantly he came in after her. It was dark, and very quiet.

“Relax. The security cameras are out, they’ve been working on them again for days. Who’s going to come in now? I just want to check the refrigerated storage facility in the biosafety lab and take a peek at the logbook. And before you say it, I know the CDC has probably investigated all that. They might have even taken the logbook. Be that as it may, I need to make sure they didn’t miss anything.”

Pia turned on the minimal light necessary. It was a small lamp by the communal coffee machine. She then quickly checked her own office, and Rothman’s. George trailed after her like a shadow. As far as she could tell, nothing had been disturbed in either office. Pia pointed out Rothman’s desk to George. The in-tray, the few files, the pictures—everything was just so.

“See how orderly he is?” said Pia.

All George could think about was getting out of there. An air circulator kicked on and George jumped half out of his skin. He followed Pia to the biosafety level-3 room and they donned the protective gear once more. Pia used the coded punch pad to reach the lab itself. Since there were no windows, Pia turned on the overhead lights. The ventilation system was still running and there was an eerie calm in the place. Pia checked the logbook, which the CDC had not taken. There were the usual entries; the next to last one was Panjit Singh, when he went in that morning to set up. Then there was Rothman and Yamamoto’s entry. There was nothing abnormal. She then went to the refrigerated storage unit. Using a separate keypad, she was about to open it when she heard a noise that caught her attention.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered intently to George.

“Hear what?” George said nervously.

Pia held up a hand and went to the door and cracked it open. There were quiet sounds but unmistakable—voices in the lab outside. Voices getting louder.

“In here . . . c’mon,” she said urgently.

“Shit,” George said under his breath. He’d heard the voices. “Shit on a brick,” he mumbled to himself.

Silently but urgently Pia waved for him to follow her. George saw where they were heading and beat it out through an emergency exit in the far corner of the lab. The door complained when he pushed it open as it hadn’t been opened since it was installed back when the lab was last renovated. It had also been made airtight.

Pia followed close behind George. She might have stayed and faced the music had she been there by herself, but she was well aware of George’s utter fear of authority. Where that had come from, she had no idea.

The unit’s emergency door led to the lab storeroom where Pia and George pulled off their protective gear and stumbled out into the main part of the microbiology department that housed Rothman’s lab. Staff on the evening shift at the microbiology clinical lab were curious to see two young people running by, then stunned to see them followed a minute later by three figures in full hazmat gear.

Microbiology led into the anatomy department and George and Pia crashed through the connecting doors and into the familiar surroundings. As first-year students they had spent a good deal of time in the department. George was leading, but he didn’t know exactly where he was going. All he knew was that he wanted to avoid getting caught. He ducked into the darkened anatomy room, dimly illuminated by night-lights. For the benefit of the current first-year students who were taking anatomy at the time, the room was well stocked with cadavers, most covered with oilcloth shrouds. Several torsos sat upright on the head teaching table. They’d been cut across the upper chest and then halved in a sagittal section so that half the gullet and half the brain were visible. George was eye-level with the torsos, the exposed whites of their eyes seeming to glow in the half-light.

George and Pia ducked behind the long teaching table, but there was nowhere to hide. A moment after their arrival, the banks of ceiling lights flickered and came on. Three security guards in hazmat suits stormed into the room. Pia stood up and George, very reluctantly, followed suit.

The security men were angry, demanding Pia’s and George’s identification cards. They then made several calls on their radios before turning back to the students. George was cowering, Pia taking it all in stride. “You’re coming with us,” said the nearest figure to George, grasping his arm and marching him out of the room. Pia was escorted out behind him.

The group wended their way past the few onlookers in the clinical microbiology lab and down to the street via a service elevator. George’s mind was racing but he couldn’t think of any way Pia could talk her way out of this. As they walked across the campus, the group attracted a lot of stares and comments from passersby. Some of them wondered if they were watching some med-student prank.

George and Pia were taken through a featureless corridor in the hospital bowels to the security department. They walked past a bank of TV screens being monitored by two bored-looking men, down another corridor and into a small office with a handwritten sign on the door: DUTY OFFICER. Standing up, watching a couple of monitors mounted on the wall, was David Winston, the man who’d taken charge in the lab earlier that day. He recognized Pia, having helped her when she fainted in the street.

“Ah, you again. I see you’re feeling better than when I last saw you.”

“Mr. Winston,” Pia said. “My friend and I were just retrieving some of my belongings from my office.”

Winston referred to a list on a clipboard resting on his desk.

“Miss Grazdani, and . . .” He looked at George.

“George Wilson.”

“George Wilson. Not on my list. You a fourth-year student as well?”

George nodded.

“Well, you’ll be taking antibiotics too,” Winston said. “Folks, there’s a protocol we use in these situations. You broke into a secure, potentially contaminated area. I actually saw you do it myself, sitting right here. The cameras might not be operating inside the lab, but outside they work just fine. So I see two people go into the lab, and I have to send three of my guys in full body gear to go in and find you. And it turns out to be you two. So the protocol is, I make a call to the dean of students, who loves to hear from me, as you might imagine. It’s just a heads-up because my next call is to my friends at the Thirty-third Precinct, and I’ll have a full and frank conversation about criminal trespass.”

George was aghast. If the police got involved, he was screwed.

“I don’t know why you guys went in there, and I’m not going to ask. The CDC might have cleared it, but the caution tape was still over the door. Especially you, Miss Grazdani, as you were specifically told the lab would be off-limits. Frankly, I’m dumbfounded. But I’ve never understood medical students since I took over this job heading the center’s security.”

Pia started to speak, but Winston held out his hand to silence her and called the dean of students. He explained the situation. He then listened for a good two minutes and hung up the phone.

“She’s coming down. I don’t know who I’d rather deal with if I were you, the dean or the Thirty-third.”

Winston showed George and Pia into a small side room and closed the door. George was too agitated to speak; Pia started pacing around the room. She couldn’t sit still. After what seemed like an age but was in fact thirty minutes, the door opened and a tall, dark-haired woman in sweats and a ski jacket came in and shut the door behind her. Her name was Helen Bourse. She had been dean of students for almost a decade and was well liked but hardly a pushover.

“What the hell did you think you were doing? You two have made me cash in more favors than I actually own, stopping Mr. Winston from having you arrested. I want you to convince me I did the right thing.”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Bourse,” George said. He took one look at Pia’s defiant face and decided he should speak for the both of them.

“
We’re
very sorry.”

“So what in God’s name were you doing there? In a lab that was sealed and potentially contaminated.”

“The only part that might have been contaminated was the biosafety unit,” Pia said, interrupting George, who’d started to respond. “We took the necessary precautions. I wanted to look for myself. I just can’t understand how Dr. Rothman managed to get infected, knowing him as I do.”

“So you weren’t picking up your stuff as you told Mr. Winston. And what, you’re suddenly epidemiologists? We had a team of actual epidemiologists check out the lab today both from here and from the CDC. They combed the place, including the biosafety unit.”

“What did they find?”

“Nothing, but that’s not the point.”

“I’ve been working in there on and off for over three years. I wanted to check it out. If something was different, I might have been able to see it, probably better than strangers from Atlanta.”

Some of Bourse’s vinegar lost its acid. She realized that Pia had a point. Still, it didn’t justify what these two otherwise gifted students had done, something totally foolish and out of character. After a pause she asked, “Well, what did you find?”

“Nothing, but we were interrupted. Do you have a report from the epidemiologists?”

“Certainly not from the CDC. Not yet. But I spoke to the head of our own team. Apparently nothing was found amiss.”

Dr. Bourse knew that Dr. Rothman was closer to this student than to anyone in the whole medical community. She knew quite a bit about Pia, more than she guessed Pia surmised. Bourse had had access to all the deliberations of the admissions committee, which she had pored over in great detail. Up until the call from Winston, she’d had high hopes for her, hopes she wanted to maintain. For Pia, Bourse’s intent was to try to keep the damage from the evening’s escapade and poor judgment to a minimum. Such was the burden of being dean of students. Earlier that evening Bourse had had to deal with an even more difficult issue: A third-year student had been caught stealing prescription drugs from the medical floors. Bourse turned her attention to the second delinquent. At least he met her eye, which she couldn’t get from Pia. “So what’s your excuse?” she asked George, with a certain resignation in her voice.

“No excuses. I was helping my friend,” he said as evenly as he could.

Dr. Bourse studied George. He too was a top student, more liked in general than Pia, who could be considered standoffish. Bourse was well aware of George’s apparent infatuation with Pia, so she took his excuse at face value. Once again she marveled at how such an apparently accomplished young man like George could be reduced to such a lovelorn teenager that he’d risk his future like this. If Bourse had allowed Winston to have him arrested, it could have affected his becoming a doctor.

“All right,” Bourse said. She took a deep breath and regarded the ceiling for a moment to clear her head. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to go back to your rooms and stay there. You won’t fraternize with anyone or talk about this episode with anyone. You’ll monitor your temperatures and take your antibiotics as directed. George, I’ll make sure you get some. And I’ll see both of you in my office at seven tomorrow morning. We’ll discuss your elective then, Ms. Grazdani. Mr. Wilson, tomorrow you will return to Radiology. Both of you will also say a prayer for me and thank the Lord that I’m in a benevolent mood. I’ll now go and square this away with Mr. Winston. If I can.”