Deadly Care Read online

  Mariner placed his hand over the phone and smiled at Lucy. “Dr. Black told me to tell you that she’ll be by to see you this evening.”

  Lucy nodded and smiled back as the doctor returned to his phone conversation. She continued to watch him, wishing that he was her doctor, the one looking after her at Memorial, the one doing the transplant. But he wasn’t. He was the president of Health First, the HMO that Lucy’s family belonged to.

  They had not enrolled in the HMO for financial reasons but because their family doctor, Dr. Amanda Black, had given up her private practice and joined the staff at Health First. Dr. Black had seen the family through too many crises and illnesses for them not to follow her to the HMO. And it had worked out wonderfully well. They saw Dr. Black as often as needed with no delays, hassles or paperwork. When it was discovered that Lucy had leukemia, Health First was marvelous. She was treated by their staff hematologist, and when it was clear she needed a bone marrow transplant they referred her to Memorial with no hesitation.

  Mariner put the phone down. “I’ve got to run. One of our patients is not doing as well as I’d like.”

  “Thanks for stopping by.”

  “No problem. Now remember, everything is going to go just great. The transplant people here are the best in the world.”

  “I’m going to get through this,” Lucy vowed.

  “With flying colors,” Mariner added.

  “And if everything goes well, I’ll be able to go back to law school in September, right?”

  “You can bank on it.”

  “I am,” Lucy said softly.

  She watched the door close, now feeling the fear creeping back. Suppose it doesn’t work? Suppose the transplant doesn’t take? Oh, Jesus! Get me through this. Be positive, she commanded herself, be optimistic. The transplant was going to be successful. No complications. Out of the hospital in a few weeks.

  Mustn’t forget to send a thank-you card to her bone marrow donor, a big Irish cop who lived in San Diego.

  Then back to law school in September. In two years she’d have her law degree and she’d join her father’s firm. O’Hara, O’Hara, Diamond and Stem. It sounded great.

  “Lucy O’Hara?” a technician asked from the door.

  She was a stocky, middle-aged woman with a puffy face and very narrow eyes.

  “Yes, I’m Lucy O’Hara.”

  “My name is Wendy Fujiama. I’m here to draw some blood.”

  “Not again!” Lucy protested. “I just had blood taken yesterday.”

  “Talk to your doctor about it,” Wendy said tonelessly. “He’s the one who ordered the test. Now, which arm do you want me to stick?”

  “Why didn’t they get all the blood they needed yesterday?” Lucy asked, hating to have another venipuncture done. Most of her veins were scarred and thrombosed from the numerous needle sticks she’d already had.

  Wendy shrugged indifferently. “You’ll have to ask your doctor. I’m just following his orders.” She glanced at her watch, irritated by the delay. “Do you want me to draw your blood or not?”

  Lucy stared up at the technician, disliking her and her abrupt manner. She wanted to tell the woman to leave and not come back. But she didn’t have the strength, and sooner or later they’d have to draw her blood anyway. Lucy sighed resignedly and held out her arm.

  The technician turned her back as she prepared her needle. and syringe and test tubes. She held something up to the light briefly, but Lucy couldn’t tell what it was.

  Lucy closed her eyes and prayed again that the bone marrow transplant would work, that she’d never have another venipuncture, that she’d never be hospitalized again as long as she lived-except for childbirth.

  Lucy felt the alcohol swab on her skin, then a quick stick. Then another stick, followed by a stinging sensation.

  “Something is stinging me,” Lucy said, concerned.

  “It’s just the alcohol around the venipuncture site,” the technician said as she removed the needle and placed a wad of cotton over the area. “Press down on this.”

  Lucy pushed down on the cotton ball as the technician left. She hoped a little clot would form quickly at the site of the venipuncture. Otherwise it could ooze for hours because of her lack of platelets. She pressed down harder and began to count to a hundred, but her mind drifted back to her father’s law firm, which she would one day join. O’Hara, O’Hara, Diamond and Stern. It had a nice ring to it.

  Lucy felt a strange, deep burning in her abdomen.

  Then came a wave of nausea that she tried to swallow away. For a moment she was better, but the nausea and burning returned, now intensified. Suddenly her chest was tight and she couldn’t catch her breath. Terrified, she reached for the nurse’s buzzer. The room began to spin. The light dimmed. Lucy heard herself gasping, sucking for air, just before everything went silent and black.

  Simon Murdock hurried down the corridor on the B level of the hospital, fuming over the phone conversation he’d just had. The county was going to pay Memorial five hundred dollars for each autopsy the hospital performed for them. An absurdly low price. Ridiculous. But one he had to accept because the county of Los Angeles was in big trouble. Its morgue had been closed because of an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease. All of the coroners and most of the staff had come down with the disease and the corpses were piling up. And Memorial was the only other facility in the Greater Los Angeles Area with a forensic pathologist. So when the county contacted Murdock a week ago, he’d agreed to perform the autopsies for them. It was the right thing to do. But Murdock hadn’t expected the county to gouge the hospital and take advantage of his generosity. He should have known better.

  Murdock went through a set of double doors with a sign that read POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE EXCEPT FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. A secretary talking on the phone looked up and, seeing who it was, went back to her conversation. Murdock pushed through another set of swinging doors and entered the autopsy room.

  He quickly scanned the brightly lighted room with its eight stainless steel tables lined up in rows of twos.

  His gaze went to the tiled walls and floor-sparkling white-then to the individual refrigeration units in the wall where the corpses were kept. He thought back to how the autopsy room had looked when he became dean of the medical center twenty years ago. It had been like a museum, dark and dank, with cement floors and marble slab tables with bloodstains that would never come out. A two-million-dollar gift from a wealthy benefactor had transformed the room into a first-rate facility.

  “Can I help you with something, Dr. Murdock?”

  Murdock turned to a young pathologist, gloved, mask down on his neck, goggles pulled up to the top of his forehead. “Contaminated case, huh?” Murdock asked.

  “A gay heroin addict,” the pathologist said matter-of-factly.

  Murdock nodded. The AIDS virus was everywhere, homosexuals and addicts the most likely to be infected.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Blalock.”

  The pathologist pointed to the rear. “Last table on the left.”

  Murdock walked around the periphery of the room and glanced down at the corpses in varying stages of dissection. They appeared so unreal, almost all of their humanness gone and the little that did remain now being chopped away.

  He saw Joanna Blalock leaning over a corpse, magnifying glass in hand, as she explained a finding to a small group of residents. She still seemed so young to Murdock. Although she was nearly forty she could easily have passed for being in her early thirties. –_ Murdock remembered the first time he saw Joanna, when she came to Memorial to be interviewed for the position of forensic pathologist-so young and attractive, with soft, patrician features and sandy blond hair that was severely pulled back and held in place by a simple barrette. He had thought she was an intern at first, but the moment they began to talk he knew she was someone special. The glowing letters from Johns Hopkins had not exaggerated her talents. She was sharp with a quick, penetrating mind. Still he had hesitated before offer
ing her the position at Memorial, thinking she was far too pretty to have that much brain.

  He had been wrong. She had turned out to be a superb addition to the staff.

  Murdock waited patiently off to the side and watched Joanna carefully examine the big toes of the corpse. A superb addition to the staff, he thought again, but she was not perfect. There were flaws. She was far too independent and ran the division of forensic pathology as if it were separate and distinct from the medical center. And she was too ambitious and selfcentered and spent too much time away from the hospital serving as a forensic consultant for a fee of a thousand dollars a day. It made her seem mercenary and that was not the image he wanted his staff to project.

  And there was one other problem. He didn’t like her and she didn’t like him. There was no reason for it. Just a natural, mutual dislike that had built up over time.

  Murdock cleared his throat and approached the dissecting table.

  Joanna looked up from the corpse. “Hello, Simon. What brings you down here?”

  “A little business. Could I have a moment of your time?”

  “Sure.” She handed her magnifying glass to Emily Ryan, the chief resident in forensic pathology. “Study the body carefully and tell me where he’d been the day he died.”

  Murdock’s curiosity got the better of him. The telltale signs had to be on the surface. But where? He quickly scanned the dead man’s legs and trunk, seeing nothing unusual. Then he saw the head and looked away with revulsion. There was no face, no discernible facial features. The front of the head was mashed into red pulp, the eyes and nose gone, teeth knocked out, bones smashed into fragments. Murdock swallowed back his nausea. “What kind of accident caused this?”

  “It was no accident.”

  Murdock winced. “Do we know who this fellow was?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe his fingerprints will help.”

  Joanna shook her head and lifted up one of the corpse’s hands. The ends of all the fingers had been cut off.

  “Jesus!” Murdock tasted bile coming into his throat.

  They walked over to the X-ray view boxes that were mounted on the wall. The sound of an electric saw cutting through bone filled the air. A high-pitched squeal, like a dentist’s drill. They waited for the noise to stop.

  Joanna glanced at the wall clock and wondered if she was ever going to catch up with her schedule. She had two more autopsies to do, a lecture to give, slides to review. And now she had to put up with Simon Murdock. She stifled a yawn and briefly studied him. He was a tall, slender man with sharp, chiseled features.

  His hair was snow-white and the lines and age spots on his face were more obvious than ever. He was aging very rapidly. But his narrow brown eyes were still clear and cold with not even a hint of warmth. The eyes pretty well summed up the man, Joanna thought.

  Depending on whom one talked to, Simon Murdock was either Albert Schweitzer or Nicco Machiavelli.

  To the outside world he was a devoted, tireless physician whose foresight and energy had transformed Memorial into a world-renowned medical center. To those on staff he was a cunning, manipulating administrator-tyrannical and ruthless at times-who would sacrifice anyone and anything for Memorial. So which one was he, Schweitzer or Machiavelli? Joanna wondered. Probably a mixture of both. He was good and bad, just like everyone else. But she still didn’t like him, not even a little, and trusted him even less.

  The noise from the electric saw stopped.

  “How many of these coroner’s autopsies have you done so far?” Murdock asked.

  Joanna shrugged. “About ten.”

  “And you’ve been able to keep up with your other duties at Memorial?”

  “Barely,”

  “Well, if the load becomes too heavy, you must let me know.”

  Joanna nodded, studying his face and wondering what Simon Murdock really wanted. He hadn’t come all the way down to Pathology to talk about coroner cases. He could have handled that over the phone.

  “I understand they’ve located the source of the Legionnaires’ organism,” Murdock went on. “It was in the air-conditioning unit. With a little luck the morgue will be functional again in a matter of days. A week at the most.”

  “Longer,” Joanna said at once. “All of the medical examiners are still down with Legionnaries’ disease and their recovery will be slow despite the use of antibiotics.”

  The electric saw went on again and Murdock began calculating numbers in his head. Ten autopsies a week at five hundred dollars each. That came to a total of five thousand dollars, and if Memorial did the autopsies for three weeks, the grand total would be fifteen thousand dollars. A pittance. A big nothing for a lot of work. Better not to accept it, Murdock thought. Better to be generous and call the county commissioner and tell him that Memorial would accept no money from the county for performing a civic duty. Yes, call it a civic duty. And make sure the news media learned of Memorial’s generosity. The story would give them a million dollars worth of good publicity. And most important, the commissioner and the county would be indebted to Murdock. They would owe him.

  The squealing noise from the saw stopped and Murdock came back to himself. “I’m going to need another favor from you, Joanna.”

  Joanna exhaled weakly. “I’m already being stretched to the limit.”

  “This is important,” Murdock said gravely. “Very, very important.”

  “I’m not going to say yes until I know what the favor is.”

  “Yesterday a young girl with leukemia was admitted to Memorial and died suddenly. The family is demanding a complete investigation.”

  “Acute leukemia?”

  Murdock nodded. “Yes, I think so.”

  “People with acute leukemia almost always die of their disease, Simon.”

  “Suddenly?”

  “It can happen. Frequently their platelet counts are low and they can have a major hemorrhage.” Joanna gestured with her hands. “It sounds routine to me. Why not let one of the other pathologists handle it?”

  “Because the girl’s family requested you specifically. You see, her father heads a very prestigious law firm here in Los Angeles. They handle the legal affairs of the Rhodes family. It was Mortimer Rhodes who recommended you to the family.”

  Joanna thought back to Mortimer Rhodes, whom she hadn’t seen in years. The old man was a multimillionaire, rich in oil and real estate, politically very powerful. His granddaughter had been the victim of a serial killer Joanna had helped to track down. To show his appreciation, Rhodes had established the Karen Rhodes Forensic Laboratory at Memorial and funded it generously. “All right, I’ll do it. Have her chart sent to my office so I can review it.”

  “There is no chart to speak of. She died suddenly, thirty minutes after reaching the ward. The doctors hadn’t even examined her.”

  “Where would her medical records be?”

  “With her private doctor, I would imagine. I’ll find out for you.” Murdock took an envelope from his coat pocket and quickly scribbled a note to himself. “I’d appreciate it if you’d phone me as soon as the postmortem examination is completed.”

  “It won’t be until late tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That’ll be fine,” Murdock said gratefully. “Now, I’d better let you get back to your work.”

  Joanna watched him walk away and immediately regretted that she hadn’t insisted that one of the other pathologists do the autopsy. Death from leukemia wasn’t a forensic problem. Any member of the staff could have done the postmortem examination and she could have reviewed the findings. Damn it! Why hadn’t she insisted? She was already so far behind and falling further behind by the hour. And she wanted to spend more time on the man with no face and no fingers.

  Her gaze went to the X-ray viewbox on the wall. The film showed a lateral view of a skull, the bones anteriorly mashed almost beyond recognition. The chin was partially intact. One of the supraorbital arches still had some semblance of its former shape. What
instrument was used to smash this man’s face? Joanna asked herself. And why? Why was it so important to the killer that his victim not be identified?

  Joanna stretched her back and neck, the vertebrae cracking pleasantly. She looked around the room, all tables filled and busy, all conversations muted by the noise of the power drill. Glancing down at her gloves, she spotted a small hole in one of them. Cursing under her breath, she stripped the latex gloves off and inspected her hands for any scratches or blood spots.

  Satisfied there weren’t any, she snapped on a fresh pair of gloves and headed back to her table.

  Emily Ryan looked up as Joanna approached, then went back to examining the corpse. She started at the feet and slowly worked her way up. The legs and thighs were unremarkable, the buttocks negative except for a tattoo of a small butterfly. His torso was well tanned with a small old appendectomy scar. Emily didn’t reexamine the corpse’s face. Once was more than enough. She stepped back and wondered what she’d missed. Blalock had said there was something that would tell them where the corpse was the day he was killed. Was it the tattoo? The tanned skin? No. It had to be something else.

  “Tell me what you found,” Joanna said.

  “He has no face and his fingertips have been cut off.

  So whoever killed him didn’t want the victim’s identity known.”

  Joanna glanced at the corpse’s face, wondering again what type of weapon was used. “Were there any other positive findings?”

  “Not really. He’s got a pretty good tan and a tattoo of a small butterfly on his butt.”

  “Good,” Joanna said approvingly. “That’s two out of three.”

  “What’s the third?”

  “The most important. It will tell you where he was the day he died.”

  “Can you give me a clue?”

  Joanna looked up at the wall clock. A lecture had to be given in an hour. Lunch would have to be skipped.

  “Let’s start at the beginning of this fellow’s story.

  Where ‘ was his body found?”

  “In a shallow grave in the Angeles National Forest.”