would not only have noticed but commented on it. Instantly, a meteor shower of questions flashed across his mind. Could the camera angles of the mammograms possibly have cut out the BB? Possible but not likely. Could he, Grace,
Nevertheless, it appeared quite possible that some sort of mix-up had occurred.
Over two decades of working in hospitals, Will had encountered almost every imaginable permutation of error. Working under enormous time pressures, with massive volumes of patients and procedures, handicapped by human frailties, imperfections, miscommunications, and personality disorders, to say nothing of fatigue, mechanical failure, and the vagaries of biology, caregivers made mistakes. Many of those mistakes passed by totally unnoticed or caused no inconvenience of any great magnitude. Some of them altered lives, and some either devastated lives or, sadly, ended them.
Will knew he had enough problems of his own to work out without trying to track down the source of this odd conflict. Still, he also knew there was no way he wouldn’t do it.
“Guys, listen,” he said, “I don’t have a good explanation for this, but I’m sure there is one-at least I
It was only then that he recalled his unpleasant encounter over the phone with radiologist Charles Newcomber. That time he had gone over Newcomber’s head and prevailed, but it would be a pleasure to put the pompous prig on the hot seat once again.
“Please keep us posted,” Mark said.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Will replied, knowing that this time the encounter with Newcomber would occur in person, and that this time he would have the hospital X-rays tucked under his arm. “I will.”
Alone in his office, Augie Micelli sipped on a brandy, stared across the room at a spider plying its trade in the corner, and scratched boxes around words on a yellow legal pad-his way since college of working through problems. From the portable CD player on the floor by his desk, Gene Ammons’s soulful tenor sax was playing “Willow Weep for Me.” A drug addict, Ammons was known as Jug, perhaps for the way he drank, Micelli thought fondly, or maybe for the stretches he did in the jug before, at forty-nine, he died.
Although Micelli had been there at his desk for several hours with a drink close at hand, he was still far more sober than not. There was significant work to do, so he had been treading the delicate line between maintaining a clear head and keeping the shakes in check. It was a case that, when all was said and done, might not even pay the electric bill. But if Will Grant was telling the truth, if he had been framed and was now being purged from medicine much as Micelli, himself, had been, taking the case had been the right thing to do. Now the trick was seeing to it that Grant never made it anywhere near a courtroom, and that meant figuring out how he could have been railroaded so smoothly.
Spread out across the desk and on the floor around him were articles, xeroxed book pages, and printouts from the Internet, all dealing with the narcotic fentanyl. Usual dose; onset of action; route of administration; duration of action; pharmacologic effects; side effects; symptoms of overdose; chemical formula; metabolites. Gene Ammons had moved on to “I Remember You,” Micelli’s favorite on the album, which was to say the one that made him feel most blue.
“Not good,” he muttered as he considered the case, “not good at all.”
The only explanation that fit all the facts was that Will Grant was both an addict and a liar. Micelli bounced the eraser of his pencil on an article dealing with the pharmacokinetics of sufentanil, ten times more powerful than fentanyl, eight hundred times more powerful than morphine, and of carfentanil, which was nearly fifteen times more powerful even than that. He found himself thinking about a statement from one of his law-school professors, and wrote it in block letters at the bottom of the yellow sheet.
IF YOUR BELIEFS DON’T FIT WITH THE FACTS, THEN JUST POUND THE HELL OUT OF THE FACTS UNTIL THEY DO.
He snatched up the phone and dialed. Will Grant answered on the first ring.
“Okay, Doctor,” Micelli said, making a series of boxes around the words, “take me through that day again.”
CHAPTER 20
Embarrassed, angry, frustrated, humiliated, impotent. Patty couldn’t remember ever having felt more uncomfortable. For more than two months her life had been consumed by the need to find a killer and bring him-or her-down. Now, to all intents, her part in the case was over. She would be helping to keep the day-to-day operations of her unit moving along while Wayne Brasco would be working with Sean Digby, who had come on board well after she did, and a veteran detective named Brooks, who had transferred to Middlesex from Hampden just a month ago.
“Look at it this way,” Jack Court had tried to explain to her, “with me tied up with this case along with the others, you’re going to be like running this place. Brooks is too new to have that responsibility, and Digby is too green. The rest of them aren’t nearly as competent as you are.”
In some ways, it felt as if she was leaving the force altogether. She sat at her desk, grateful that the phone hadn’t rung and that no one had felt the need to stop in and talk to her. Set in neat piles on the floor around her were the tangible products of countless hours of work and thought about the managed-care killer-stacks of documents, computer printouts, interviews, newspaper clippings, photographs, and transcripts.
It wasn’t right, she was thinking as she identified each of the piles with a carefully printed sheet and bound them with heavy rubber bands. There was some sort of commission or ACLU lawyer someplace who would be more than happy to take up her banner and prove in court that she was being removed from her case without just cause. But then, even if she could find such a champion, her career on the force would be over. It was lose-lose for her all the way around. If she could just hang in and get past this disappointment and embarrassment, there would be other times for her to prove herself. In fact, although she wasn’t about to tell Court or Brasco, she wasn’t totally certain she was going to let go of this case yet.
Even thoughts of Will and the night just past weren’t enough to give her flagging spirits much of a boost. He was a bright, caring, terrific guy-totally genuine and very attractive. Making love with him was great while it was happening, but she knew, as she suspected he did, too, that both of them were stressed, vulnerable, and needy. The passion, spontaneity, and chemistry between them were real, and she had absolutely no regrets, but she suspected Will would agree that they would probably have been better off to have waited.
Stacked on top of one another, the piles of exhaustive work reached two feet or more. Reluctantly, Patty hauled them down to Court’s office. As far as she could tell, neither the lieutenant nor Brasco had looked at much of what she had amassed to this point, and there wasn’t much chance they would now. The two men were sniggering about something, but stopped abruptly when she arrived and didn’t bother to explain what it was.
“All right, Pat,” Court said with fake cheer, “let’s get this over and get you onto a couple of new cases.”
“I thought maybe we could take a few minutes and I could explain how all this is organized,” she said. “I have these areas cross-referenced. Here’s the key I put together for that.”
She passed over three sheets, single spaced-the product of hours of work. Brasco favored her with a disinterested grin and set the sheets down on the stack, where they would likely remain for eternity. Court, perhaps sensing an impending escalation in tension, cleared his throat.
“So, Pat,” he said, “is there anything else you feel we should know before we get on with business?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact there is.”
“Okay, then, go on.”
Could Court have possibly been more patronizing? Brasco clearly had one use and one use only for women, but the lieutenant had a bright social worker wife and two daughters. Surely his disregard for her couldn’t just be
