7
Carey McKinnon walked along smartly, conscious of the sound of his shoes on the concrete sidewalk. Instead of worrying about his wife, he tried to review in his memory an article by an orthopedist decrying the effects of shoes that forced the foot to strike with high impact on the calcaneus at each step and the further skeletal deterioration caused by leather soles and hard rubber heels.
But there was little in the article that had surprised him, so he couldn’t keep his mind on it for more than a few seconds. He turned the corner and saw the hospital building looming ahead, dominating the whole next block. He had never thought of the hospital as “looming” before. He raised his head, straightened his spine, and lengthened his strides. He had spent as much time away as he could possibly justify, and now he had to walk in, head for the third floor, and pretend to be the one who discovered that his patient was missing.
Everything he did during the next few hours would have to be deceptive and misleading. He had to delay the police, divert their attention, send them in the wrong direction, if possible. Jane was risking everything. From the second Carey had heard Dahlman say, “I came to find a woman named Jane Whitefield,” he had wished he could throw himself in front of her. He wanted to hide her, deny she existed, and let the faceless, invisible threat take him instead.
Even as the words had formed in his mind, he had known that he could not do it. For most of his life he had been learning to believe passionately in human expertise. Nearly every day he detected the approach of someone’s death and asked himself, “What is the best strategy to fight this? Who is the very best one to do it?” Sometimes he would clear his own schedule to prepare for the surgery, and sometimes he would instead make a telephone call to a superb practitioner of a particular procedure, an expert in a narrow specialty, and ask him to save the patient. When Carey had seen this patient—Dahlman—handcuffed to a gurney in the emergency room, he had known. Dahlman needed a specialist, not some clumsy amateur who would get him killed. Dahlman needed Jane.
He fretted as he walked toward the hospital. He worried that in the rush and the anxiety, he had not really explained to Jane who Dahlman was. Jane had a right to know everything, and Carey had the impression that what he had told her must have sounded incoherent. He found himself rehearsing what he should have told her.
Dahlman was truthful. Dahlman was no more knowledgeable than Carey about things that criminals did, but he had all of his faculties, and knew that he hadn’t killed Sarah Hoffman. He was certainly capable of knowing that someone had planted evidence that he had killed Sarah Hoffman. No, Carey had told Jane that much.
What he had not told her was why a rational person—any rational person who happened to be nearby when this happened—should feel that saving Dahlman was worth enormous risks. That was more difficult. In a way, it was absurd that there had to be an excuse for saving a life. People, sometimes thousands of them in a single day, unhesitatingly threw themselves into battles to preserve the lives and privileges of degenerate kings and corrupt politicians. Dahlman was something that Carey could not have said aloud, even to Jane: he was a man who might be worth more to humanity than all the kings and presidents who had ever lived.
Carey could say the easy, verifiable part: Dahlman had already saved thousands of people in his operating room and had personally trained a few hundred of the best young surgeons now in practice. But the part that Carey was torn about was an assertion with no proof. He believed that Dahlman might be this generation’s standard- bearer. Dahlman and Sarah Hoffman’s quiet clinical research on post-operative regeneration of external epithelial tissue had produced results promising enough to attract the attention of a few nonspecialist journals. But what only Carey and a few dozen others who had read the scientific articles had understood was that Dahlman wasn’t just looking for a way to help surgeons produce evenly healed, aesthetically pleasing incisions.
The doctors who knew Dahlman, who knew the way he thought and were used to the understated, terse way he spoke, knew that the articles were hints. Working on the skin was almost inevitable because a researcher could see it and touch it. But the outer skin and the membranes of internal organs were both epithelial tissue. Dahlman was after game so big that even a whisper of it did not belong in a scientific article. It was nothing less than a way of making all surgery a minor procedure. Ultimately, maybe in another generation or two, it might provide a way of treating everything from heart disease to cancer. Huge sections of damaged tissue could be removed, and the body stimulated to replace them. And if Sarah Hoffman was already dead, then the seeds of that research—not what had been done, but what paths had been rejected, what would have been tried next, and why—existed only in the brain of Richard Dahlman.
Carey walked along trying to look unconcerned, but feeling his heart pounding. A very small, incidental part of this was up to him. He had to do what he could to help Jane carry this off. He had to become a disturbing, confusing element in the mixture, make a lot of noise, and appear to raise the hue and cry while really making a mess of it and adding to the delay. He had to buy Jane more time. If she was driving, a minute could put her a mile past a roadblock; if she was flying, it might get her off a plane and out the door of a terminal.
He realized that he had been describing an urge of his own. He would like to be with her, running away, not stepping toward the bright lights of the hospital. He wanted all of this never to have happened—wished he had never been alert enough to know that if he didn’t ask the wife he loved to risk her life, then he deserved never to have been born.
He studied the building as he approached it. Was he imagining that there were more police cars than before? He probably was. When he had arrived at five there had been none, and then he had seen two out the back window. These had undoubtedly been parked in front all evening, and he had not been looking in that direction when he had slipped out through radiology.
He walked through the front door and stepped directly into a glaring light. “Dr. McKinnon?” said a female voice. “Can we talk to you?”
He had thought he had gotten past the newspeople. Their vans had been parked in the back, near his car. He looked down at the short, pretty woman beside him, and he recognized her as the one he had seen this morning when he had turned on the television to find out about the weather. She was wearing the same awful blue suit, and he felt sorry for her. Could she have been working all this time?
“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically. “I have a patient to see right now, but I’ll be around later.”
The woman’s face seemed to lose muscular control and go flat. The professional demeanor of concerned commentator had vanished, and for a second she looked confused. Then the eyes widened with excitement. Carey saw the change, and hurried toward the elevator.
“Dr. McKinnon!” she called, and he thought he heard her footsteps behind him. He went past the elevator toward the door to the stairwell, heard the elevator doors open, spun to step inside, and punched the CLOSE DOOR button.
He pushed the button for the third floor and tried to collect his thoughts. They already knew Dahlman was gone, and the newswoman had assumed he had known too, at first. But he hadn’t wanted to let her be the one to tell him, and he knew he wasn’t a good enough actor to let her record his reaction on camera.
He stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hall toward the room assigned to Dahlman. There were two men in sport coats, one gray tweed that matched the man’s gray, bristly hair, and the other a brown that looked a little like one Carey had that Jane never let him wear. The men had plastic wallets stuck in their breast pockets so they hung over to display badges, one gold and the other silver. Carey pretended not to see them as he walked to the doorway.
The younger one in brown stepped into his path. “I’m sorry,” said the man. “This is a crime scene.” He studied Carey’s face, as though trying to verify that Carey had seen his badge.
Carey turned his head to look in puzzlement at the older man, then back at the one in brown. “I understand. Dr. Dahlman is in custody, but I’m his doctor, and I’d like to see him.”
The older man was holding a little spiral notebook in his hand and he consulted it. “You are Doctor …” He flipped a page. “McKinnon.” It wasn’t a question, but he said, “That right?”
“Yes,” said Carey. He craned his neck to look in the doorway at the empty room, then looked at the policemen in surprise. “I operated on him earlier this evening, and he’s supposed to be in there. Can you tell me where he’s been moved?”
“I’m Captain Folger,” said the man. “This is Detective Kohl. I wish I could tell you where he is. He’s missing. If you’ll come with me, you might be able to help us clear this up.” He was reassuring and calm, but not quite
