Obsessed (13 page)

“If I get a lawyer then they'll think I have something to hide.” She reached for the door.

“That's the kind of thinking that gets innocent people in trouble. I know an excellent criminal attorney.”

“I don't think so,” she said quietly, and pulled the door open. “I'll just tell them the truth.”

MacRae was waiting. “Don't you go anywhere, either,” he growled at me, and led Emily away.

I leaned against the door. Blood on her shoes. Her fingerprints everywhere. She was a novice at working with these big magnets. She'd brought a dangerous metal object into the scan room before. The only person who might have been able to vouch for her was dead.

It wouldn't be long before the police understood how the system worked—that the magnetic field was never off even when the machine wasn't scanning, even if you pulled the plug and cut the electricity. They'd quickly grasp the implications. This “accident” couldn't have been caused by someone accidentally leaving an oxygen tank in the scan room. If Philbrick had carried it in himself, then it would have been drawn into the system before he could get in it.

No, the oxygen canister had to have been brought into the room while Philbrick was in the machine. While he was giving himself an MRI. Poor devil probably never even knew what hit him.

T
WENTY MINUTES
later Emily hadn't returned. My head felt like a jackhammer was going after my prefrontal cortex.

I wandered until I found a small room with a refrigerator, a sink, and a Formica table with some folding chairs. There wasn't any aspirin, but on the counter there was a coffeemaker. In one of the wall cabinets I found packets of coffee. I started a fresh pot, then sat down to wait.

The pot was sizzling as the last drops of water dripped through when I heard footsteps in the hall. Dr. Pullaski came in and reached into the cabinet for a coffee mug. No blood on those cream-colored high-heeled pumps. She nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw me.

“Peter Zak, Dr. Peter Zak,” I said, in case she didn't remember. “I started a pot.”

With an unsteady hand, she poured herself some coffee. “What a horrendous day. I still can't believe it. It's too awful.”

“Looks like a terrible accident.”

She leaned against the counter, held the mug in cupped hands and inhaled the coffee aroma, then took a sip. “I called Leonard's sister to let her know. I would have gone over there to tell her but the police want me to stay here. I didn't want her to hear it on the news. He's been with us since the beginning. I never thought—” Her voice broke off. She closed her eyes and leaned back, her lips trembling. Then she gave me a sharp look, a combination of suspicion and maybe a little fear.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. Her look turned speculative and before I could come up with an answer she said, “Were you meeting Dr. Ryan? Poor thing. I'm sure she didn't mean to.”

“Mean to what?”

“Isn't it obvious?” She took a sip of the coffee. “She must have brought the oxygen canister into the scan room, not realizing that it was a ferrous container.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Who knows.”

“And why would there be a tank like that here in the first place? One that could be drawn into the magnet?”

“Sometimes the suppliers slip up. It's happened before. The tanks are usually labeled but we always check. At least that's standard operating procedure”—she pursed her lips—“which everyone is supposed to follow. And why was she here? She's not scheduled to be here this morning.”

“She said Dr. Philbrick called her, said you'd found her beeper. She came in before work to get it.”

“Me? She must have misheard him. Of course I'm not surprised. She's a bit scattered.”

“Did you make those calls?” Shands asked, sticking his head into the room. His voice was steady and even, a man used to giving orders.

“I'm taking care of it.” Dr. Pullaski gave a nudge of her head in my direction.

“Damage control,” Shands told me. “I'm sure you understand.”

“Of course we'll mount a full investigation,” Dr. Pullaski said. “We've never had a serious incident. Shouldn't affect our funding. After all, with our track record, and the services we provide—” She was practicing some of that “damage control” on me. “It's a one-in-a-million accident. Of course, we'll reassess our training procedures.”

“Poor Leonard,” Shands said. For a moment his eyes went empty and his face sagged. Then he shook himself out of it. “The regulators are going to be all over us.”

Dr. Pullaski took out a container of cream from the refrigerator and added some to her coffee, licking a drop that fell on a manicured fingernail. “We'll deal with it.”

MacRae closed the door of the office where he'd set up shop. He'd finished with Emily and now he was ready for the next course. He had his pad open, pen poised.

“So when did you get here?” His look said,
And don't bullshit me
.

“A little after nine.”

“A little after…” he repeated, his face impassive except for a little twitch in the jaw muscle. “That's after we got here—you must have broken the sound barrier getting over here.”

“Busted my ass.”

“And how the hell did you get in?”

“I came up the stairs from the garage.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “The lock on one of the doors was taped open.”

“Damn,” he said, making a note. I suspected the officers securing the scene were going to get reamed. He finished writing and slowly looked up at me. “Taped open?”

“Go look for yourselves.”

“We will. So Dr. Ryan doesn't show up for an appointment, and you rush over here to investigate. You go this protective on all your post-docs?” I reminded myself he wasn't being obnoxious just for the hell of it—it was his job to find chinks in people's stories.

“Look, someone's been stalking Dr. Ryan,” I said. “She's had several incidents, one of them here. If you don't believe me, look it up—the police responded. Naturally we were concerned that she might be the one who was hurt.”

“So
we
rushed over to save the day?”

I knew he was jerking my chain, but that was about the size of it. I folded my arms across my chest.

“You knew Dr. Philbrick?” he asked.

“A little. I'd met him twice. Both times here.” I told MacRae about the scan Philbrick had done on one of our patients. Reluctantly, I gave him the patient's name. “Jack O'Neill.”

MacRae's eyebrows went up. “Annie's uncle?”

I nodded.

“Great guy. One of the best beat cops in Somerville. Worked with juveniles better than anyone I've ever seen. Used to have kids actually come to the station asking for him. Kind of took over when Annie's dad died.”

It bothered me a lot that MacRae knew all this. I reminded myself he and Annie had grown up together. They'd gone to the same high school; their families were close. Still, I wanted to be the one that knew what mattered to Annie, not MacRae.

“Is he sick?” MacRae asked.

“He's being evaluated.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. Would you let Annie know I asked after him?”

I nodded, having not the slightest intention of doing so.

“What can you tell me about Dr. Philbrick?” he asked, getting back to the business at hand.

I rattled off what I knew. That he'd worked with Shands for a long time. That Dr. Pullaski said he had a sister. And he'd taken his own MRI before.

“Do-it-yourself MRI?” MacRae said, sounding incredulous.

“He was an expert on MRI technology.”

“An expert.” MacRae mulled the word. “So he knew it would be dangerous to bring that oxygen tank into the room?”

“The magnetic field is never turned off,” I said, giving an oblique answer.

MacRae blinked at me. He knew this was important information, he just didn't know why.

I went on, “So you see, Dr. Philbrick couldn't have brought that oxygen tank into the scanning room himself.”

I could almost see the wheels turning as MacRae grasped the implications. “So someone else had to have brought in the tank while Dr. Philbrick was in the machine,” he said. He made another note. “And what was the victim's relationship to Dr. Ryan?”

“Professional.” I felt a bit uncomfortable adding, “And they sometimes went out after work.”

I could tell this was something he hadn't expected.

“Dr. Philbrick called me three times yesterday,” I told him.

“He did? What for?”

“I don't know. We never talked.”

“Had he ever called you before?”

“No.”

“Did it seem odd to you, his calling you like that?”

“Not until now.”

MacRae scratched his head. “Did you like him?”

It was such a bizarre question, it took me a moment to find my answer. I could hear Emily's take on Philbrick:
He's not so weird, once you get used to him
. I remembered him with Uncle Jack, how gentle and compassionate he'd been.

“Actually, I did.”

I drove back to the hospital in a fog, barely aware of anything outside my head. My mind kept flashing pictures of Philbrick's body and the blood on the floor. I turned on the radio loud and tried to flood my head with music.

When I got back I checked in with Gloria. When she heard the news, she glanced uneasily about the nurses' station. “The minute you let your guard down, that's when accidents happen.” She got up and checked that the door to the med room was locked. “I'm glad you went over there. Poor Emily. I hope you sent her home.”

“I tried to. But she insisted on coming here when they finished with her. Said work was better than staying home alone.”

“Now where have I heard that before?”

In the weeks after Kate died, I'd stalked the unit like a zombie. Gloria and Kwan had tried to get me to go home, but alone was the last place I wanted to be.

“How about you? You okay?” Gloria asked.

“I'm fine,” I said. I actually thought I was.

I went up to my office. A few weeks ago I would have grabbed the phone and called Annie. Now I hesitated. This news would only confirm Annie's conviction that University Medical Imaging was an evil place where basic safety procedures were ignored, where patients came out sicker than they went in. And I'd been the one who'd recommended it.

I dialed her number. When she didn't pick up, I left a message for her to call me back.

At least I had plenty of work to bury myself in. I opened a spreadsheet and started on a budget revision. The room felt stuffy. I got up and opened the window, sat down again, and tried to concentrate. We'd be increasing our patient count by two, and decreasing staff by one. Welcome to the new millennium. I adjusted the numbers. Then I had to upload the new reimbursement schedule from the main computer and generate a forecast. I knew the results were going to be depressing.

The window shade flapped in the breeze. I got up and half-closed the window. I'd just gotten back to work again when the
beep-beep-beep
of a truck distracted me again. I watched out the window as it backed up to the side of the building.

I gave up and went downstairs. I found Kwan making himself a pot of tea.

“I can't get any work done,” I told him.

“Work? You do work?” he asked, in mock amazement. He must have seen something in my look because his sardonic grin vanished. “Something's getting to you.”

“Feels like all the stars are out of alignment,” I said, and told him about what had happened that morning.

“She was the only one there when it happened?” he asked.

“She says she came in after.”

“You mean someone caused a horrendous accident and then cleared out, leaving her there holding the bag? I'm not sure we should send any more patients over there for testing.”

Of course this was exactly what Shands and Pullaski had been concerned about. For a medical lab, an unblemished safety record was an asset as important as any state-of-the-art machine.

Kwan urged me to go to the caf with him for an early lunch. I had a salad and an omelet that could have been made from recycled Silly Putty. When I got back, I checked to see if Annie had called. She hadn't.

I couldn't face the spreadsheet, so I went back down to the unit. I walked the corridors, checking in on patients as I went. There was a reassuring familiarity to the routine.

Emily was in one of the rooms working with a new patient. I caught her eye. She gave a little nod.

I wandered down the hall and into what had been Uncle Jack's room. We couldn't afford to keep beds empty. A new patient would be moved in there tomorrow. The only vestiges of Uncle Jack were a suitcase into which the staff had packed his belongings, and a stack of clippings from magazines and newspapers. I suspected Gloria was responsible for saving them. The sugar-packet collection, pens, and assorted other items that he'd amassed were gone.

The suitcase was an old leather one, good quality, plastered with peeling travel decals. Yosemite. Mount Rushmore. It occurred to me how little I knew about Uncle Jack. Only that he was Annie's uncle, a widower, and that he'd been a cop. A good cop. I thought about all the things he'd saved in his apartment and here. Hoarding. It was like trying to keep your footprints from washing away.