It is unresponsive to drugs, it doesn't generate a heartbeat, and it bears absolutely no relationship to life as we know it. What do you want me to do, Reed?'
'I don't know,' Reed said. 'I just wanted your opinion on a pacemaker before I made a decision.'
Berger laughed out loud.
'Have there been any signs of life in this woman?'
He tried once again to work his arm around the medical student's waist, but this time she managed to spin out of his reach.
'Just what you see,' Reed said.
'So she's dead. I can slip a wire into her if you really want me to, but I promise you it win be an exercise in futility. what does her family want?'
'She has none.'
'None at all?'
'Apparently not,' Reed said.
'Reed, I have two caths waiting for me and a fun clinic this afternoon.
You really want me to put a wire in her?'
'What about that?' Reed gestured to the monitor.
'That?' Berger said disdainfully. 'My friend, you know as well as I do that you could just stand here and do no CPR, and watch that rhythm pop along for half the fucking morning. There's no heartbeat under there.'
'Thank you,' Reed said.
'Then we're free to go?'
Reed hesitated. 'You're free to go,' he said finally.
'That's it, everybody. Thank you very much.'
The cardiologist led his small entourage out of the room as the team backed away from the bed. Reed reached up and flicked off the monitor:
On the litter, Loretta Leone's open eyes stared blankly at the ceiling.
'Who's the nursing supervisor?' Reed asked.
'It was Norma. Irene Morrissey's taken over for her.
'Get her, please. Have her call the M.E. Thank you once again, everyone. You all did a good job.'
Reed Marshall felt the gnawing tightness in his gut begin to abate.
Berger was an asshole, but he was also right. There was simply nothing to work with.
And even if they did somehow manage to generate a pulse, all they would have created was a vegetable with no next of kin, and nothing to go back to except a bunch of empty bottles.
He glanced at the motionless body. There was a waiting room full of patients needing his attention, and a member of the search committee camped out in the E.R probably already blaming him for the chaotic backup. With a shrug he turned his back on Loretta Leone and left the room. For as long as he had been in medicine he had hated this part of the job more than any other.
The crystal morning had the Toyota off the East Boston ir drive from the rearview mirror for any car that seemed to be following them.
But as far as he could tell, none was.
Although he had never been on the docks, the area was one he knew fairly well. At one time he and Reed Marshall had split a weekly moonlighting shift in the East Boston satemte emergency clinic run by White Memorial.
Most of the staff at the clinic was hard-nosed Italian, like East Boston itself, and the spirit in the place was the best of any such facility in which he had ever worked. He smiled at the memory of one battle-hardened night nurse named Falano, who had taken to referring to him and Reed as 'Dr. Hot' and 'Dr. Cool.'
Cradling the hundred or so remaining posters on her lap, Laura sat quietly in the passenger seat, gazing out at the panorama of Boston Harbor and the city beyond. After calling Donald Devine and making an appointment to see him that afternoon, they had stayed in her room for more than an hour, talking and holding each other in ways that made her more certain than ever that there was a future for them together.
She had expected Eric, as a never-married doctor in a large city, to be experienced and worldly. But in fact, with most of his life spent getting himself educated and then trained, he was in many ways still very young and tentative.
'It's ironic,' he had said as his shyness and uncertainty were becoming clear to her, 'that they take a bunch of twenty-four or twenty-five-year-old kids who have spent most of our lives in school or summer camp, Present us with diplomas, and pronounce us M.D.'s, and suddenly we're supposed to be qualified to help people with the most difficult and deep-seated problems in intimacy and sex. The most frightening moment I think I've had in medicine wasn't from some traffic accident or shooting. It was two months into my internship, when a bank president with a wife and two kids suddenly started unburdening himself to me about discovering he was homosexual.'
In many ways, Laura began to realize, the two of them had led similar lives. Countless people had passed through their worlds, yet both of them remained isolated. White Memorial was no less a haven, no less an escape for Eric than Little Cayman had been for her.
'Whatcha thinking about?' he asked.
'Oh, nothing, everything,' she said. 'I keep picturing Scott and me as children, working in the field by the house, or running down to swim in the lake.
Only all of a sudden, I realize it's not Scott I'm with in my mind at all. It's you.'
'Well, just don't go in over your head unless you're sure it's with Scott,' he said. 'I'm not such a great swimmer.'
'We'll have to work on that.'
They drove along a high chain-link fence, past a phalanx of huge oil-storage tanks, and parked in a broad dirt lot not far from the main entrance to the dock area. The lot was empty except for several tractor trailers-two of them up on blocks, and all in various stages of rust and disrepair.
'How do you think we should do this?' she asked.
'well, if that note you got is valid, I think we're going to have to be a little pushy. why don't we just find out where Warehouse Eighteen is and set about making pests of ourselves? At the very least, we can paste these fliers up all over.'
Eric opened the hatch of the Toyota, pulled out a blue woolen watch cap, and put it on.
'This is just so I won't be too threatening to the longshoremen,' he said.
Warehouse 18 was a huge corrugated-aluminum Quonset hut, surrounded by stacks of shipping containers, pyramids of oil drums, and loading equipment. There were a few men at work around it, and some equipment operating not far away, but in the main, the whole area seemed fairly quiet.
'Why don't we just wander around for a bit and sort of work up our routine,' he said… Laura?'
She had walked away from him and was staring off down the row of freighters, each tethered to a pier.
'Do you see something, or are you just ignoring me?' he asked, approaching her.
'Just thinking about Scott, that's all,' she said.
Eric stood beside her, his arm just touching hers.
Overhead, and as far as they could see, gulls were crisscrossing through the cool morning air, their shrill cries punctuating the background rumble of heavy machinery.
'How old were you when he took over for your parents?' Eric asked.
'Fourteen. The accident was two days after my birthday. Eric, I'm going to get to the bottom of all this. I'm going to find out who he was and exactly what's happened to him.'
'Well, if he worked here,' Eric said, 'sooner or later someone is going to recognize this picture.'
And not ten minutes later, in the shipping office, someone did.
The woman, an attractive if overly made-up blonde, paused in her gum-chewing. 'Yeah, I seen him around,' she said in a heavy Boston accent. 'His name wasn't Scott, though. It was Sandy something.
And of course he didn't look quite like he does in that photo.
What's that he's wearing?'
'A wet suit,' Laura said. 'He was scuba-diving.'
'Well, here he wasn't any scuba diver,' the woman said, tugging at one of her bra straps. 'Here he was just a grunt.'
