"Jesus," said Lucas. Sloan had said that Bekker was known as "Dr. Death" in Vietnam. "He enjoyed it?"
"Yeah." Merriam turned back and leaned over his desk, his hands clenched on the desktop. "The people who were working with him said he seemed to become… excited… as a death approached. Agitation is common among the medical people-you take a kid and he's fought it all the way, and you've fought it all the way with him, and now he's going. In circumstances like that, even longtime medical people get cranked up. Bekker was different. He was excited the way people get with an intellectual pleasure."
"Not sexual?"
"I can't say that. There was an intensity of feeling on the order of sexual pleasure. In any case, it seemed to people who worked with him that it was definitely pleasure. When a kid died, he registered a certain satisfaction." Merriam stood and took a turn around his chair, stopping to look down at the parking garage. A patrolman had pulled the BMW back into its parking place and was standing beside it, writing out a note to its owner. "I don't know if I should say this, I could expose myself to some criticism…"
"We're off the record. I mean that," Lucas said.
Merriam continued to look out the window and Lucas realized that he was deliberately avoiding eye contact. Lucas kept his mouth shut and let the silence stretch.
"There's a rhythm to death in a cancer ward," Merriam said eventually, and slowly, as though he were considering each word. "A kid might be an inch from death, but you know he won't die. Sure enough, he improves. Everything backs off. He's sitting up again, talking, watching TV. Six weeks later, he's gone."
"Remissions," Lucas offered.
"Yeah. Bekker was here, off and on, for three months. We had an agreement: He could come in anytime, day or night, to watch. Not much to see at night, of course, but he wanted complete access to the life on the wards. There was some value in that, so we agreed. Remember: He's a university professor with excellent credentials. But we didn't want a guy wandering around the wards on his own, so we asked him to sign in and out. No problem. He understood, he said. Anyway, during his time here, a child died. Anton Bremer. Eleven years old. He was desperately ill, highly medicated…"
"Drugged?"
"Yes. He was close to death, but when he died, it came as a surprise. Like I said, there seems to be a rhythm to it. If you work on the ward long enough, you begin to feel it. Anton's death was out of place. But you see, sometimes that does happen, that a kid dies when it seems he shouldn't. When Anton died, I never thought much about it. It was simply another day on the ward."
"Bekker had something to do with the death?"
"I can't say that. I shouldn't even suspect it. But his attitude toward the deaths of our patients began to anger our people. Nothing he said, just his attitude. It pissed them off, is what it did. By the end of the three months-that was the trial period of the project-I decided not to extend it. I can do that, without specifying a reason. For the good of the division, that sort of thing. And I did."
"Did that make him angry?"
"Not… obviously. He was quite cordial, said he understood and so on. So two or three weeks after he left, one of the nurses came to me-she doesn't work here anymore, she finally burned out-and said that she hadn't been able to stop thinking about Anton. She said she couldn't get it out of her head that Bekker had killed him somehow. She thought the kid had turned. He was going down, hit bottom and was stabilizing, beginning to rally. She was a second-shift nurse, she worked three to midnight. When she came in the next afternoon, Anton was dead. He died sometime during the night. She didn't think about Bekker until later, and she went back to see what time he had signed out that night. It turned out our log didn't show him signing in or out. But she remembers that he was there and had looked at the kid a couple of times and was still there when she left…"
"So she thinks he wiped the log in case anybody ever went back to try to track unexplained deaths."
"That's what she thought. We talked about it, and I said I'd look into it. I talked to a couple of other people, and thinking back, they weren't sure whether he was here or not, but on the balance, they thought he was. I called Bekker, gave him this phony excuse that we were looking into a pilferage problem, and asked him if he'd ever seen anybody taking stacks of scrub suits out of the supply closet. He said no. I asked him if he'd always signed in and out whenever he visited, and he said he thought so, but maybe, at one time or another, he'd missed."
"You can't catch him in a lie…" Lucas said.
"No."
"Were there any other deaths? Like this kid's?"
"One. The second or third week he was on the wards. A little girl with bone cancer. I thought about it later, but I don't know…"
"Were there postmortems on the kids?"
"Sure. Extensive ones."
"Did he do them? Do you know?"
"No, no, we have a fellow who specializes in that."
"Did he find anything unusual?"
"No. The fact is, these kids were so weak, they were so near the edge, that if he'd simply reached out and pinched off their oxygen feeds… that might have been enough. We'd never find that on a postmortem-not enough to separate it from all the other wild chemical shit we see in cancer cases: massive loads of drugs, radiation reactions, badly disturbed bodily functions. By the time you do a postmortem, these kids are a mess."
"But you think he might have killed them."
"That's too strong," Merriam said, finally turning around and looking at Lucas. "If I really thought that, I'd have called the police. If there had been any medical indication or anybody who actually saw anything or had a reason to believe he'd done it, I'd have called. But there was nothing. Nothing but a feeling. That could simply be a psychological artifact of our own, the insider's resentment of an outsider intruding on what Bekker called our 'rituals of death.' "
"Did he publish?" Lucas asked.
"Yes. I can give you the citations. Actually, I can probably have Clarisse scrounge up some photocopies."
"I'd appreciate it," Lucas said. "Well… You know what happened. The other night."
"Bekker's wife was killed."
"We're looking into it. Some people, frankly, think he might have had a hand in it."
"I don't know. I'd kind of doubt it," Merriam said grimly.
"You sounded like you thought he'd be capable…"
"I'd doubt it because if he knew his wife was going to be killed, he'd want to be there to see it," Merriam said. Then, suddenly abashed, he added, "I don't know if I believe that, really."
"Huh," Lucas said, studying the other man. "Is he still in the hospital, working with live patients? Bekker?"
"Yes. Not on this ward, but several others. I've seen him down in the ORs a couple of times and in the medical wards where they deal with the more extreme varieties of disease."
"Did you ever mention to anyone…?"
"Listen, I don't know anything," Merriam barked, his soft exterior dropping for a moment. "That's my problem. If I say anything, I'm implying the guy is a killer, for Christ's sakes. I can't do that."
"A private word…"
"In this place? It'd stay private for about thirty seconds," Merriam said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "Listen, until you've worked in a university hospital, you've never really experienced character assassination. There are ten people on this staff who are convinced they'll be on next year's Nobel list if only some klutz in the next office doesn't screw them up. If I suggested anything about Bekker, it would be all over the hospital in five minutes. Five minutes later, he'd hear about it and I'd be fingered as the source. I can't do anything."
"All right." Lucas nodded. He stood, picked up his coat.