he won't leave any stone unturned.'
'He doesn't seem like someone you can just hook and reel in,' Daniels acknowledged. 'I'll give you that.'
'Perhaps,' Hayden offered, 'you can involve your partners in this case. Do either Mr. Hannigan or Mr. Goldstein have any expertise in this arena?'
Damn, Sarah thought. Are they ever going to let up?
'Actually,' Daniels said, 'I'm glad you mentioned that.'
'Then they do have some malpractice experience,' Hayden said. 'That's excellent. Collaboration is the key in this business.'
'Well, sir, not exactly. You see, Billy Hannigan never did like being a lawyer, but his wife wouldn't let him quit. Then last year, after she ran away with another attorney, he just took off. Last I heard he was working as a disc jockey on a radio station in Lake Placid.'
'And Goldstein?'
Daniels rubbed at his chin and then sighed.
'Well,' he said, 'the truth is, Goldstein was someone Billy made up. Before I joined him, he was in solo practice, but he called his firm Hannigan and Goldstein. Something about Billy's wanting to attract Jewish clients. I just got around to having new stationery printed up with only my name, but I keep forgetting to have our little yellow pages ad changed.'
'This is highly irregular,' Hayden blustered. 'Highly irregular.'
'Sarah,' Paris said, 'I think this deception allows you to reconsider your decision.'
'Mr. Paris, deception seems a bit strong a word,' she countered. 'Clearly, there's been no attempt to hide the truth. I think we'll do just fine with Mr. Daniels, even without Mr. Goldstein.'
'Much appreciated,' Matt Daniels said. 'Now, if we're all in the same corner, I think we ought to start putting together our case. Tomorrow morning at eight, round one begins. So let's have at it.'
'Highly irregular,' Sarah heard someone mutter.
CHAPTER 18
Except for the night clerk, Rosa Suarez was alone in the medical record room. It was nearing ten-thirty and she had not eaten since noon. Her back and neck ached from hunching over her work table. But in some ways, the discomfort was pleasurable. It had been over two years since she had put in these kinds of hours on a project, two years since she felt challenged.
The initial phase of her investigation would be done tonight, and both Alberto and her department head were anxiously awaiting her return to Atlanta. Neither stood to be very pleased with what she had to tell them. As yet she had no explanation for the bizarre DIC cases. However, two things were clear. From a purely statistical standpoint, there was virtually no possibility that the three cases were coincidental. And almost as certainly, unless the underlying cause of the tragedies was determined and dealt with, there would be more.
There were several integrations and many combinations she needed to run through the data banks at the CDC, and some preliminary culture results to be checked. Then, in all likelihood, it would be back to Boston. To date, she had unearthed dozens of demographic and physical commonalities among the three stricken women-some quite possibly significant, some too obscure to take seriously. Their blood types were all A positive and their primary residences within three miles of the hospital. All had been associated as patients with the Medical Center of Boston for at least four years, and each had been pregnant once before. On the more obscure side of the ledger, all were born in April, although in different years; all were firstborn; and none had been educated past high school. In addition, all were right-handed and brown-eyed.
There were still more data to be gathered, but by far the most persistently troublesome aspect of her research to this point was the prenatal supplements given each woman by Sarah Baldwin. A botanist at the Smithsonian and a friend on the faculty of Emory University had provided some preliminary data on the nine components. But much more detailed biochemical information was needed. Rosa's instincts were telling her that although the components of the mix might serve as some sort of cofactor in a lethal biological reaction, they were, in and of themselves, harmless. But the tools of her trade were numbers and probabilities, not instincts.
'Excuse me, Ramona,' she called out to the night clerk whose desk was on the other side of a broad bank of files. 'I just want to be sure there are no more records in the group we're working on.'
'Seven years of women who delivered here and required transfusions during or after their deliveries-you've gotten them all. Mrs. Suarez, do you know that since you came to MCB you've spent more time down here than the whole medical staff combined?'
'I'll bet I have. Well, this will be my last night for a while. Tomorrow I'm heading back to-'
Rosa stopped in midsentence and stared down at the chart in front of her. It belonged to Alethea Worthington, the second of the DIC cases. She had dissected the record word by word, just as she had the records of Constanza Hidalgo and Lisa Summer. What caught her eye at this moment, though, wasn't something on the page, but between it and the previous one. She picked up the chart and stared at it from several angles.
'Mrs. Suarez, is everything all right?' the clerk called out.
'Oh. Yes. Everything's fine, dear. Ramona, would you happen to have a pocket knife or a nail file?'
'I have a Swiss Army knife in my bag, so I guess that means I have both.'
'Perfect. And could you please bring me back those two charts of-'
'Summer and Hidalgo. I know. I know.'
'Thank you, dear.'
Using the lenses of her bifocals as magnifiers, Rosa peered along the cleft where the pages of the chart were held together by a flexible metal binder. At the spot where the arms of the binder passed through the pages, small, jagged edges of paper protruded. Rosa marked the pages on either side of the fragments and then carefully loosened the binder just a bit. Next she slid the largest blade of the Swiss Army knife along the space beside one of the arms. Two minute scraps of paper dropped out onto the table.
Rosa gently brushed the fragments into an envelope and then convinced herself that similar pieces were tucked behind the other arm. She left those in place and tightened the binder back as it had been. Pages-probably two of them-had almost definitely been torn out of the record. It took most of ten minutes to find identical fragments in Constanza Hidalgo's chart. The tiny bits of progress notepaper represented at least two and possibly three missing pages.
Lisa Summer's chart was by far the thickest of the three. By the time Rosa convinced herself that there was no physical evidence of missing pages, it was nearly eleven. She piled the record on the others and, for the first time in two hours, stood and stretched. The meaning of her discovery was not at all clear. But even though the Summer chart seemed untouched, the finding that at least two of the three DIC records had been tampered with was significant. Of that she had little doubt.
Outside, the rainstorm had ended. A few faint stars were visible in the black velvet sky. Rosa felt energized by the sudden new twist. Part of her wanted to stay up all night as she had so often done, studying and working through puzzles until the answers came. But she was sixty now, and the cost of that sort of exuberance was just too unpredictable. Facing a busy day in Atlanta, she needed to pack and get at least a few hours of sleep before her early-morning flight.
She wanted desperately to share what she had found with someone-almost anyone who could be a sounding board and give her feedback. Verbalizing her ideas and streams of consciousness with colleagues had once been an invaluable tool. But the wounds from BART, though now more than two years old, were still painful. And that refractory pain reminded her over and over to trust as little as necessary.
Rosa gathered her things, thanked the clerk, and promised to be back before too long. Then she left the building on the campus side. Two women dead of a mysterious medical complication, and both of their charts altered. Rosa searched her imagination for some sort of innocent explanation but could conjure up none. What had been a fascinating epidemiological puzzle had suddenly turned sinister.
