"Jesus," she said, "that's pretty far-fetched." But Quint didn't dismiss the possibility outright. "Stay by the phone. I'm on it."
An hour later she called him back. "If one of my nurses gave an extra dose of morphine, they got it out of a private supply, because there's not a vial missing in the whole hospital." Her tone, now icy, made it clear that she considered the matter closed.
Every floor had a locked narcotics cupboard that required a pair of keys to open it, just like launching a nuclear missile, and the staff counted the vials at the start of every shift. Then they repeated the ritual on signing out, logging the ones they'd dispensed while on duty.
Not a foolproof system, but it uncovered mistakes, and to beat it took planning.
"They could have already replaced the vial they used?" he suggested, hoping she might not slam the door completely on his scenario. He'd need as many allies with open minds as he could muster to counter what Wyatt had in store for him.
"They'd have had to move awfully fast. And again, where would they acquire a substitute identical to the ones the hospital uses if not from the stores themselves? As far as I'm concerned, the whole notion's a nonstarter."
Unless they'd stolen it previously, he thought. Unfortunately, he hadn't a shred of evidence to be making such serious charges.
"Earl, I'd have gone to the wall for you if you had a case," Mrs. Quint added, her tone somber, "even against my own girls." Half her "girls" were pushing sixty, but she'd called them that from the days when they were rookies together, as if choosing not to notice they'd all aged, herself included. "But without proof, I fully expect you won't be repeating your allegations against them, even hypothetically."
Tough, blunt, and putting him on notice- he'd expected nothing less from her. "Thanks, Lou, for what you did."
He replaced the receiver in its cradle.
And felt very alone.
He'd no choice now but to await the outcome of an autopsy. As VP, medical, he could push to get the postmortem done quickly, but solving the mystery of Elizabeth Matthews's death at the cellular level took time. His authority couldn't hurry the process of preparing thin slices of her vital tissues on glass slides, marinating them for a required number of hours in a sequence of solutions to color their various structural features, then examining them under a microscope one by one. His fate would be in limbo for at least a week or two.
Then odds were that the official cause of death would simply echo what everyone already suspected, including him: morphine intoxication.
And Wyatt would move in for the kill.
Yet the politics of it hardly mattered, compared to what preoccupied him most about the whole affair.
If someone had overdosed Elizabeth Matthews, whoever did it had come prepared.
Sunday, July 6, 11:52 p.m. Palliative Care, St. Paul's Hospital
Sadie Locke had had a good day.
Thanks to that nice Dr. Garnet, she'd spent several hours enjoying the evening air sitting out on the roof of the west wing. It felt cool against her face, despite having to still wear her mask. He'd insisted on that, explaining that other patients would soon be allowed to make excursions there and they had to keep the area free of contamination, just like any other part of the hospital. The rest was great. A perimeter of potted trees rustling in the breeze reminded her of the parks where she'd watched Donny play near her home in Lackawanna, a former railway town south of Buffalo. Later, as the sun dropped lower over Lake Erie, birds gathered in the branches above her head, mistaking the pretend forest among all the concrete for the real thing. They'd darted happily from branch to branch, oblivious to the artificiality of it all, filling the air with evening song. Along the lake's edge in the distance, the brick chimneys of deserted factories that hadn't belched smoke since the days when she'd been a young mother now attracted black swirling clouds of starlings above their orifices. At some unseen signal, they reared by the thousands into the dusky sky, then swooped inside, as if those towering columns had sucked them back down to their last flittering dark speck.
Now, after all that excitement, she couldn't sleep. The night noises of the hospital startled her awake whenever she drifted off, and an overhead air vent exhaled polar air that washed over her head with the chilling effect of ice water. Footfalls in the hallway as families on death watch came and went to the other rooms disturbed her further- not so much the sound, but what it evoked: the inevitable approach of that day when the steps would come for her. She thanked God Donny would return while she still had the strength for a few good hours, perhaps sit out on that roof with him. She'd like to pass an afternoon chatting about how much fun they'd had together when he'd been little and his father had been full of hope that his own dream, Lucky Locke's, would be the best restaurant in town.
She felt around in the darkness for the plastic cup of water that the nurses had left on the night table and, finding it, took a sip.
She wanted one more chance to tell Donny how much joy he'd given his father.
Otherwise she feared he would only remember the man who'd slowly withdrawn into sadness, overwhelmed by the ordinariness of what Lucky Locke's ultimately became- a dreary lunch counter that sucked eighteen hours a day from him for over twenty years until he died.
She took another sip.
God willing, she would talk more frankly than ever with Donny now, hold nothing back, make sure he understood how his own achievement must be soothing to his father's dear departed soul. Especially the name Lucky Locke Two. That had been a nice gesture on Donny's part.
A third sip.
Before the cancer tied her more and more to treatments at home, she'd visited Hawaii several times and seen the restaurant. It stood in a grove of palm trees on a street with a lot of A*s in the name that she could never remember, like a lot of Hawaiian words. Of course, any more trips there would be impossible.
A figure darkened her doorway.
She sat up.
"You awake, Sadie?" said a familiar voice.
"Father Jimmy. You're late tonight." The chaplain never failed to drop in to see if she'd fallen asleep yet, having learned of her insomnia shortly after her arrival.
He walked over and sat on the end of her bed as usual. In the half-light from the corridor, she saw that his eyes were more drawn and tired than ever.
"Thinking of Donny again?" he asked.
She smiled. He always knew. "I miss him so. And want to see him while I still can… before I…" She nodded toward the corridor where the latest visitors shuffled by, also garbed in protective gear, their muted voices already funereal.
He patted her hand and said the reassuring things he always did, but he seemed distant.
"How are you, Father? You're not your usual chipper self tonight."
"Me? Oh, thank you for asking. I'm fine- just tired after yesterday's big race. Did I tell you our Flying Angels won?"
"Yes. When you were here last night."
"Did I? Oh, sorry. I'm getting forgetful. And boastful, it appears, judging by my going on about our win. Pride goes before the fall."
"Depends on what you're proud of, Father. I'd say it's permissible to let your light shine in the matter of raising money for the hospital." She'd hoped to get a chuckle from him, but no such luck. "And you were right about that Dr. Earl Garnet. Remember I told you about his paying me a visit?" she continued, trying a different tack.
"Oh?"
"A first-rate man. He came by here again today and arranged for me to sit out on a lovely roof garden. He looked almost as tired as you, Father, yet took the time. I hope you don't mind, but he also seemed a bit down, so I said that you thought the world of him. That cheered him a bit. He laughed and said you'd put him up to coming on the ward in the first place." She'd hoped that after hearing one of the many small ways he had made a difference to her and others, Father Jimmy might relax a little. The tension around his eyes made it obvious that he needed someone to cheer him up once in a while.