Obsessed (14 page)

I leafed through the clippings. There was an odd assortment of stuff. He seemed to like ads with sailboats, beaches, or golfers in them. Why not? He'd just reached that point in his life when he and his wife should have been able to finally enjoy all the things they'd never had time for before. She wasn't supposed to die, and he wasn't supposed to come down with dementia.

I carried the suitcase and the clippings up to my office. When I opened the door the phone was ringing. It was Annie.

Quickly I told her Leonard Philbrick was dead, and that I'd been at the MRI lab. “Looks like he was alone, operating the machine himself.”

“Doing what?”

“Giving himself an MRI. They've got a remote control rigged up.” I knew that sounded pretty strange. “Hey, he's a researcher. These guys are a little nuts.”

“So who brought the oxygen tank into the room?”

“Emily says it wasn't her.”

“Emily Ryan?”

I realized I'd managed to tell my story without mentioning that Emily was the reason I'd gone over to the MRI lab in the first place.

“We were worried when Emily didn't show up to meet with one of her patients. Then when I called…” My voice trailed off. “Gloria thought one of us should go over and see what was up.”

“Gloria made you do it,” Annie said. “Test magnet. Oxygen tank. Isn't it basically the same accident?”

“Except this time it wasn't her.”

“You believe her?”

The question hung there in the air. I didn't want to admit the truth—that I was having a hard time believing Emily's story. There was the errant beeper that Dr. Pullaski insisted she hadn't found. That beeper was starting to feel like a flimsy excuse for coming in early so she could “find” the body. And now with Philbrick dead, there wasn't anyone to back up her story. Maybe there'd been some other reason that she'd gone over there so early in the morning, someone she was meeting and was now trying to protect?

“They're not getting their hands on Uncle Jack again. Assuming he survives,” Annie said.

“How is he?”

“He's really weak. This afternoon they had him on a respirator. I talked to his doctor.”

“And?”

“Hang on. I had to write it down.” There was silence on the line. “Here it is. Something about an opacity in the left lower lung. Bacterial infection. Elevated white blood count.”

None of that sounded good. “At least we caught it early,” I said, trying to keep my voice upbeat. “A bacterial infection should respond to antibiotics.”

“That's what the doctor said.”

“Nothing to do now but wait.”

“Doctor said that, too. Waiting. Now that's something I suck at.” Annie gave a tired laugh. “Listen, I've got to go. I'm way behind on work and—”

“Annie, don't hang up yet.” There was silence on the other end of the line. “You still there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know you're just barely hanging on right now, between Uncle Jack being so sick and work and all”—I took a breath—“but you're shutting me out.”

I heard a heavy sigh. Then, “Listen, I'm beat. And I've got eight million things to do. I probably won't even have time for lunch—”

“At least let me take you to dinner.”

“The last thing I want to do is drive anywhere.”

“I'll pick you up, drive you home. You have to eat anyway, right?”

“All I've got with me is jeans.”

“Jeans are fine. It's very informal. A little place in the North End.”

“I'm so tired. I just want to go home.”

This time I wasn't going to take no for an answer. “You'll see. It feels like home.”

We stepped through the gate under a glowing red neon sign:
IDA'S ITALIAN CUISINE
.

“Wow,” Annie said, looking over the fence at the back of the little alley in the North End.

Fifty feet below us, cars streamed out of the mouth of the Sumner Tunnel like water gushing from a storm drain. Behind us Hanover Street pulsed with pedestrians in this neighborhood that still boasted Boston's best Italian restaurants. The air was thick with the smell of garlic.

It felt wonderful to be somewhere with Annie other than a hospital. I held the restaurant door open. The tiny place really did feel like someone's North End apartment with its linoleum floor and red-checked tablecloths. On the walls hung framed mirrors flecked with gold, and on high shelves there were basketed wine bottles alongside piles of plastic grapes.

“Dr. Peter,” an older man said coming to greet us, his arms outstretched. He patted me on the back and seated us in the corner at the only empty table.

“How on earth did you find this place?” Annie asked, fingering the plastic-covered menu, her gaze shifting from what looked like a pair of well-coiffed Back Bay matrons in designer suits at one table, to a pair of scruffy older men wearing zip-up jackets and talking animatedly in Italian at another. An older couple had gotten up to leave and was getting hugged good-bye by the waitress.

“Actually, Kate found it.” Now I had Annie's attention. “She read that Caroline Kennedy had a party here, so she had to try it. That was about ten years ago. We came the first time, loved the food—”

“The funky atmosphere.”

“The food,” I said. The waitress, a smiling blond woman whom I knew was the owner's sister, brought us a basket of bread and a chipped earthenware carafe filled with homemade red wine. I poured some into the thick wine glasses that were on the table. I lifted my glass.

“To Uncle Jack.”

Annie smiled. “To Kate.”

Over the kind of antipasto and soup my mother would have made if she were Italian, Annie told me about her work. She and Chip had struggled for the first year and a half after they left the public defender's office. Now they had more work than they could handle.

“This is unbelievably good,” Annie said after her first bite of Ida's famous chicken—a roll of breast meat, browned and glistening in a rich sauce, stuffed with pine nuts, spinach, prosciutto, and cheese. She took another bite, leaned back, closed her eyes, and chewed. “You were right. I needed this.”

“I needed this, too,” I said, and looked up at her. She knew I wasn't referring to the food.

I told Annie about the budget I had to balance and how I was trying to convince administrators at the Pearce to let us expand some of our outpatient services. She talked about the great resumes they'd gotten for the office staff they were adding. Neither of us wanted to talk about Uncle Jack's dementia or Leonard Philbrick's death.

Annie was picking the last pine nut off her plate when the waitress came and cleared.

“I'm sorry I've been so distracted and crabby,” Annie said. “Everything feels so…”

“Chaotic?”

“Uh-huh.”

The waitress brought us some coffee.

“You don't like it when things get out of control, do you?”

Annie sat back and gave me a wry smile. “You going to analyze me?”

“No, just making an observation,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. “Holding me at arm's length isn't going to make everything else fall into line.”

“You think that's what I'm doing?” She thought about it for a moment. “Maybe. It's just that I'm feeling so overwhelmed. Uncle Jack was there for me when my father died, and the years before that, too, when my father had given up on life. Now I'm losing him.”

Annie picked up her coffee and blew on it.

“It hurts to lose someone you care about,” I said. “But keeping yourself from caring isn't the answer.”

The cup hovered an inch from Annie's mouth. She put it down.

“Believe me. I know what I'm talking about,” I added, reaching under the table to touch Annie's leg.

“I know you do,” Annie said, squeezing my hand.

Too soon, dinner was over. It felt like it had been weeks ago that I'd raced over to the MRI lab to find Philbrick dead, not just that morning.

The waitress brought the bill. I glanced at it. I fished out my wallet and slid out my credit card. But instead of putting it on the little tray, I just hung there, staring at it. It reminded me of something. Something I'd seen that morning but couldn't put my finger on.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture the room. The medical examiner was standing in front of the body. He stepped aside. There was Philbrick on the table wearing his lab coat, his skull crushed, his arm hanging off the edge. On a table were Philbrick's belongings, his shattered eyeglasses…

“I'll take that for you,” the waitress said, offering to take my credit card.

Suddenly I knew what I'd noticed but failed to register.

That night I stayed at Annie's. We made love, and then I held her until we both fell asleep.

“So?” MacRae growled when I called him from my office the next morning. “Every man I know carries a wallet in his pants pocket.”

“And credit cards in his wallet? Were there any in Dr. Philbrick's wallet?”

MacRae grunted that there were.

“He wouldn't have gone near that MRI system with those in his pocket. The magnets would have wiped them clean.”

There was silence as MacRae chewed on that.

“Dr. Philbrick was a fastidiously careful technician,” I said.

“We're waiting for the results of a tox screen,” MacRae said.

Sounded as if he was a step ahead of me. If Philbrick had been drugged or drunk, that could explain why he'd forgotten to remove his wallet before he went into the scan room.

“Lab's got a perfect safety record. You think they're reporting every incident?” He dangled the question like a piece of bait. From his tone, seemed as if he already knew the answer.

“I witnessed an incident. A near miss. Someone brought a good-sized test magnet into the scan room. Dr. Philbrick went ballistic.”

“Him and the magnet,” MacRae said.

A comedian. Now he was waiting for the punch line. Reluctantly I gave it to him.

“It was Dr. Ryan who brought in the test magnet.”

“Uh-huh,” MacRae said. “You'll call me if you think of anything else I should know,” he added with more than a touch of irony. “By the way, when we checked the exit doors in the garage, none of them were taped open.”

“But that's how I got up. I'm sure—”

“Oh, we're not doubting your story. We found residual evidence that one of the locks had been taped open. If you hadn't gotten in that way, we never would have known.”

It was the closest I was ever going to get to “thank you” from MacRae. And the implications were enormous. It meant that someone, anyone, could have been there before Emily, come and gone without passing through the lobby security.

I'd barely put down the phone when it rang. “Dr. Zak?” I didn't recognize the woman's voice. “I'm just calling to remind you. You have an MRI scheduled tomorrow at two? We've sent you a packet of information”—I gazed at the pile of unopened mail on my desk; I'd probably assumed it was junk—“with directions for getting here and instructions about what to expect.”

I flipped open my date book. There it was, at 2:00 tomorrow, “
MRI
.” I'd completely forgotten. Seemed like years, not weeks ago that Emily had scheduled the appointment for me. Now I was a whole lot less enthusiastic about getting up on that table and sliding into the narrow tube where Leonard Philbrick had died. Would I lie there wondering if someone was about to walk in the scan room with a tire iron? Was I going to pick up a smallpox or dengue fever? Annie's paranoia about the place was catching.

“Dr. Zak? We'll expect to see you?”

I thought about canceling. Then I began to rationalize. How could I pass up the opportunity? There wasn't another other system in the country as powerful as theirs. After the accident, surely the staff would be even more vigilant than usual. Worst case, I'd pick up a cold. Seemed unlikely, but even if it happened, hey, I was young, in good shape. I'd survive.