In the meantime, though, steps could be taken to hasten the dinosaur's death.
Shut down clinical programs. Discourage research. Freeze salaries and keep the wards understaffed.
Encourage senior doctors to leave and replace them with inexperienced help, so that private physicians lost confidence and stopped referring their paying patients.
Then, when redemption was out of the question, give an impassioned speech about insoluble social issues and the need to move fearlessly into the future.
Destroying the hospital to save it.
If Jones and his minions pulled it off, they'd be viewed as visionaries with the courage and foresight to put a tottering almshouse out of its misery and replace it with healing grounds for the upper middle class.
There was a certain vicious beauty to it.
Thin-lipped men planning a war of attrition with flow-charts, balance sheets, computer printouts.
Printouts.
Huenengarth confiscating Ashmore's computers.
Was he after data that had nothing to do with sudden infant death syndrome or poisoned babies?
Ashmore had no interest in patient care, but a strong attraction to finance. Had he stumbled upon Jones's and Plumb's machinations overheard something down in the sub-basement, or hacked into the wrong data base?
Had he tried to profit from the knowledge and paid for it?
Big leap, Milo would say.
I remembered the glimpse I'd caught of Ashmore's office before Huenengarth shut the door.
What kind of toxicology research could be carried out without test tubes or microscopes?
Ashmore, crunching numbers and dying because of it... Then what of Dawn Herbert? Why had she pulled a dead infant's chart?
Why had she been murdered two months before Ashmore?
Separate schemes?
Some sort of collusion?
Big leap... And even if any of it was true, what the hell did It have to do with Cassie Jones's ordeal?
I phoned the hospital and requested room ~o~W No one answered. Dialing again, I asked to be put through to the Chappy Ward nursing desk. The nurse who picked up had a Spanish accent. She informed me the Jones family was off the floor, taking a walk.
Anything new?' I said. 'In terms of her status?'
'I'm not sure-you'll have to ask the primary. I believe that's Dr....'
'Eves.'
'Yeah, that's right. I'm just a float, not really familiar with the I hung up, looked out the kitchen window at treetops graying under a descending lemon-colored sun. Mulled the financial angle some more.
I thought of someone who might be able to educate me financially. Lou Cestare, once a stocks-and-bonds golden boy, now a chastened veteran of Black Monday.
The crash had caught him off guard and he was still scouring the tarnish from his reputation. But he remained on my A list.
Years ago I'd saved up some cash, working eighty hours a week and not spending much. Lou had given me financial security by investing the money in pre-boom beachfront real estate, selling for healthy profits and putting
