Trauma (27 page)

“What's that?” Carrie asked.

A shadow crossed Rita's face. “His soul,” she said.

Carrie stood, crossed the room, and put her hand on Rita's shoulder. The woman gazed up, clutched Carrie's hand, and batted back some tears.

“He was a good boy,” Rita said, looking at the framed picture in her lap. “The sweetest.”

Carrie stooped and pointed to the thin, muscular man in the photograph who had his arm around Steve. “Who is that?” she asked.

A sad smile of some memory deepened the wrinkles on Rita's face.

“Why, that's Roach,” Rita said. “Stevie's best buddy. They called him Roach on account that nothing ever could kill him. Nothing. Then he died in Stevie's arms. Honestly, I think that's when it all began to go bad for him.”

Roach.

The name meant a lot to Carrie, but she kept quiet about the terrifying ordeal during which Steve had asked for his departed friend. Carrie's eyes fell on another man in the photograph, this one taller than most, with broad shoulders and a handsome face. He had the neck of a football player, but without the asymmetry of the stimulating wires she had observed during her examination. Ram
ó
n Hernandez's dazzling smile contradicted the photograph's harsh setting.

Carrie's thoughts reeled. How was it two people who'd had contact with each other over in Afghanistan ended up in the same DARPA DBS program? Did Hernandez refer Abington, or was their involvement coincidental?

“Did Steve know this man?” Carrie said, pointing to Hernandez.

Rita shook her head. “If he did, he didn't mention it to me.”

As Carrie studied the photograph one more time she noticed a figure in the background, tall and lean, shirtless and rippling with muscles, his face partly obscured by shadows. She could not make out the visage, but the man called to mind Lee Taggart, the nurse working the neuro recovery floor the night Eric Fasciani disappeared.

*   *   *

THE GREEN
Garden Inn was just off the highway, and was the kind of roadside motel Carrie's father seemed always drawn to on long family drives. It was nothing special: green vinyl siding, black shutters, and landscaping that looked like a PGA golf course compared to Rita's place. Night had fallen and Carrie was ready to let go of the day, the endless, fruitless search—put on some bad television and drift off into oblivion. David brought in the plastic bag with two toothbrushes, some sweatpants, and T-shirts they had bought at Walmart, and the paper bag with takeout Chinese food.

Though she was ravenous, Carrie took a fifteen-minute shower. She thought about Ram
ó
n Hernandez. She'd told David about seeing him in the photo and he thought it could be a coincidence. If she'd been sure the other man was Lee Taggart, she wouldn't have let David convince her.

Out of the shower, Carrie put on her new sweats. Her hair was tangled and stringy, and a quick check in the bathroom mirror confirmed she looked as exhausted as she felt. Not the impression she had wanted to make. Not even close. When she emerged from the bathroom, David was slurping noodles from a paper carton and drinking Heineken from a glass bottle, lying on one of the two twin beds and watching ESPN.

“Your dinner is on the table,” he said. “Happy to change the channel if you want.”

Carrie scooped up a bowl of chicken and broccoli, grabbed a Heineken David had opened and set on ice, and climbed onto the empty bed, feeling better than she had all day.

“Do you want me to change it?” David asked.

Carrie looked up at the television and shrugged. “It's fine,” she said. “I've been watching a lot of ESPN with Adam since I moved back home.”

“You know, I was going to ask you about that.”

“About why I'm twenty-nine and living with my parents?”

“You forgot brain surgeon.”

“You really want the whole story?”

David gave Carrie a sidelong glance. “I'm a reporter. I may write the CliffsNotes version, but I don't ever ask for it.” He shut off the TV.

For the next twenty minutes Carrie provided a detailed accounting of everything that had happened at BCH, starting with Beth Stillwell and ending with her resignation. She could not fathom why it felt so comfortable, so natural to share with him, but it did. Once she started to open up, she could not stop.

David sat on the bed facing Carrie, with his feet on the floor and his food going cold. On occasion, he'd sip from his beer, but mostly his eyes were on her the entire time, and Carrie thought that was just fine. When she finished, Carrie gave a little shrug because she had nothing more to say.

David took a final swig of his beer. “You didn't have to quit,” he said. “Dr. Metcalf was in charge. You were just a resident.”

“It was my fault,” Carrie said.

“But you're a damn good doc.”

“You can't say that for sure. I've never operated on your brain.”

“But if I needed brain surgery, I would totally want you to do it. I have a really good gut instinct for this sort of thing.”

Carrie chuckled. “Yeah, well, talent isn't everything. You were good at your job and look where that got you.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you were a great stringer, if that's the right term, putting yourself at risk, doing more than the others, always pushing the boundaries. And because of that, you were taken captive, held hostage, and suddenly your maverick ways turned you from an asset to a liability. Our stories aren't so dissimilar, if you think about it.”

David gave this some serious thought. “We both pushed ourselves out of the jobs we loved.”

“And now here we are in a motel room in the middle of Maine.”

“Yeah, here we are,” David said.

A lengthy silence followed. David swung his feet back on the bed and turned up the volume on the TV a couple clicks to hear a report on how the Pacers had outlasted the Celtics in a grueling overtime match. The scrollbar along the bottom of the screen was nothing but a string of abstract letters and numbers. Carrie had no focus, and her thoughts became fuzzy as her arms and legs seemed to melt into the bed. Her eyelids were shutting, voluntarily or not. They snapped back open when David spoke up.

“Goodwin,” he said.

“What?”

“Why doesn't she want you to see the patients post-op?”

Carrie shook her head and dislodged a few of the cobwebs.

“I don't know,” she said. “It's her policy. She's a control freak, I guess.”

“What if she's not,” David suggested.

“What do you mean?”

David returned to his earlier position, feet on the floor, eyes on Carrie.

“I guess what I'm getting at is what if the palino—you know.”

“Palinacousis,” Carrie said.

“Yeah, that. What if it only happens in a few patients, not all of them? And that's why Goodwin doesn't want you or Dr. Finley to look after her charges. She doesn't want you to know.”

Carrie mulled this over. “But there's been a lot of patients, David. Somebody would have found out by now.”

“Not if it's temporary,” he said. “She makes sure nobody knows about it. Or if they do, it gets reported to her or Navarro, and that information doesn't get back to you.”

“But why?” Carrie asked.

Here David shrugged. “That's the big question, isn't it?”

“So why did Abington and Fasciani check out AMA?”

“Maybe something was different with those two, and Abington and Fasciani had to disappear. Something about their symptoms wasn't going to be temporary.”

“Then explain to me how she got them to leave?” Carrie asked.

“She could have paid them off. Or maybe she took them.”

“Kidnapping?”

“It's a possibility.”

“Goodness, you're a conspiracy theorist, David. Who knew?”

David held up his hands, evidently pleased to embrace the label.

“I think there's a reason Goodwin wants to keep you from looking at those patients, and that it goes beyond protocol. That's all I'm saying.”

“We would need a motive. Why would Goodwin want to hide a potential side effect, and then purposefully work to remove patients not only from the program, but the hospital?”

“I know a way we could find out,” David said.

“How? By asking her?”

“As a reporter I've had to learn things about people they wouldn't say directly to my face,” David said almost apologetically. “So, let's just say I have access to some devices that could aid our effort.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“If you want to know Goodwin's private conversations, you've got to listen to them.”

“You want to bug Goodwin's office?”

“Think about everything you've experienced so far. It all points back to Goodwin. She's up to something, Carrie. The question is, what?”

“I'll think about it,” Carrie said.

“You can help get me inside, and I can set it up. The offer is on the table.”

“I appreciate it,” Carrie said, and she meant it.

David went back to watching television. Carrie turned her gaze to the ceiling. She was not thinking about bugging Goodwin, or any possible motive for hiding the patients. She was thinking about David. Part of it, she knew, was driven by loneliness. While Carrie did not regret putting her career first and foremost in her life priorities, she was also a woman with needs. But she was not ready to act on the impulse—not yet, anyway. The focus had to be on Abington and Fasciani. It had to be on saving her career.

Mind reading, Carrie knew, was nothing but a parlor trick; even so she caught David looking at her and sensed he was having similar thoughts. Carrie held his gaze a moment, then said, “Well, it's late and I'm pretty tired. I'll see you in the morning. Thanks for being there for me, David. It means a lot.”

Carrie shut off her bedside lamp and turned her back to David.

David said, “You know, I would have helped you even without getting the story.”

In the darkness, Carrie smiled.

 

CHAPTER 37

Carrie used the VA locker room to change into her running clothes. Her sneakers, size nine Newton's the color of watermelon with electric blue piping, felt stiff from nonuse. Soon enough, she imagined, her legs would be aching from nonuse as well. She had no particular destination in mind, just a desire to get out there and slap some pavement. Her body ached from a bad night's sleep on a crummy mattress, plus all those hours of driving, and a good run would hopefully loosen her up.

She and David had returned from Maine late morning, and Carrie had gone straight to the VA to visit with Gerald Wright for his pre-op consultation.

Wright, a sixty-five-year-old grandfather of eleven and a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, had been on the surgical schedule for months. His advanced-stage Parkinson's disease couldn't have cared less about two missing vets and Carrie's growing concern about DBS therapy. She had contemplated backing out of the surgery altogether, but worried that might make Goodwin overly suspicious, more careful of what she was willing to say behind closed doors.

On the drive south, Carrie had given David the green light to get whatever equipment was necessary to conduct the surveillance. She trusted his instincts about Goodwin, among other things, including his belief that the Wright operation would go without a hitch.

“It's not Parkinson's that's the problem,” David had said. “There are too many DBS procedures involving patients with that condition. Something would have surfaced by now. It's got to be related to PTSD.”

It was strange to be back at the VA. Everything felt so normal. Dr. Finley had joined Carrie for the pre-op consultation and he seemed to be in a jovial mood. Immediately following her meeting with Wright, Carrie gave Dr. Finley a briefing on her search, and expressed regret at not having made more progress.

“I appreciate your efforts,” Dr. Finley said. “But as I told you back in my office, not everybody who has had the procedure returns for follow-up appointments. We are dealing with very fragmented individuals here.”

When Carrie mentioned seeing Ram
ó
n Hernandez in a photograph with Abington, he did not seem at all fazed by the discovery.

“It could be that's how Steve got involved. I can check with Ram
ó
n, or Cal Trent, but there is a referral component to the DARPA program, so it's not entirely surprising to find a connection between them.”

Something that was probably nothing.

All this did was get Carrie's thoughts churning even faster. Maybe what she had observed in Abington and Fasciani was an aberration, and her theory about palinacousis was entirely groundless. After all, Fasciani never actually articulated what she assumed was the condition. It was his behavior that had made her suspect it. Perhaps she was projecting symptoms on these two men to fit a puzzle she'd created.

Her doubts were not enough to call off David's plan to bug Goodwin's office. She was willing to accept Ram
ó
n's connection to Abington as potentially coincidental, but there were too many other unusual happenings for Carrie to discount. In any event, a good run might pound some clarity into an increasingly murky situation.

After some light stretching in the parking lot, Carrie tightened the laces of her shoes and set off at what she thought was a ten-minute-mile pace. The cityscape provided the perfect backdrop. She had enough to look at to keep her interested, but not so many cars and pedestrians to make it dangerous or distracting.

She turned right on Brynmar Street, thinking it might be nice to run through Healey Park. Evidently, she was not the only one with this idea. It was not the starting line in Hopkinton on Marathon Monday by any stretch, but plenty of joggers, bikers, and walkers were catching the final rays of sunshine on what had turned into a pleasantly cool afternoon.