league. Until now I have made a number of allowances for the fact that aside from a misplaced molar or whatever, this is your first malpractice case…
Matt took a yellow marker from his desk and highlighted Mallon's words. How could his opponent have known about his only other malpractice case? There was one answer to that question that made sense-but only one.
Matt snatched up the phone and dialed the Mutual Medical Protective Organization.
'Mr. Phelps, please. Attorney Matt Daniels here… Phelps, listen. I've spoken with Sarah Baldwin, and I think she's willing to reverse her position on this settlement thing. How about you and me meeting to talk out the details first thing tomorrow? Eight o'clock, my office?… Perfect, Roger. That's great. It'll be a relief to finally get some of this business cleared up.' He set the receiver back in its cradle and then added, 'Beginning with why in the hell you hired me in the first place.'
Matt hefted the plastic eight-ball once again.
'Am I the turkey of the decade for not seeing what they were doing to me?' he asked out loud.
The answer is most definitely yes.
CRV113 in Lisa Grayson's bloodstream at the time of her DIC and three and a half months later. Seated at the nurses' station on the obstetrics floor, Sarah scratched out the characters 'CRV113' on a progress notepad. CRV113-a man-made virus, constructed years before by a lab in Cambridge. She had rounds to make, and a number of notes to write, but the remarkable discovery of the virus was making it next to impossible to concentrate. As had been the case for months now, most of the nurses were keeping their physical and emotional distance from her. Sarah was quite conscious of their coolness. She always was. But this afternoon, it did not affect her as much as usual. The pieces were finally coming together. The end of the nightmare was drawing closer. CRV113-created to speed the clotting of blood. How could infection with such a microbe not be somehow responsible for Lisa's DIC?
'Dr. Baldwin.'
The nurse speaking to her, Joanne Delbanco, was about Sarah's age. At one time they had gotten along quite well and had even gone out once for dinner. Now there was never any extraneous conversation between them. Another casualty of CRV113.
'Oh, hi, Joanne,' Sarah said with exaggerated cheer.
'Dr. Baldwin, you have a visitor. A woman. She's very anxious to see you, and she's very upset. I put her in your call room. She won't tell me what the problem is.'
'Thank'-the nurse turned and headed off-'you.'
The obstetricians' on-call room was at the far end of the hallway. As she hurried there, Sarah ticked through a quick mental list of women who might be waiting for her. The list did not include Annalee Ettinger.
'Oh, God, I'm so glad you're here,' Annalee said.
She was lying on her back on the narrow bed, dressed in a nightgown and quilted housecoat. Her knees were drawn up. Tracks of tears glistened on her cheeks. Sarah sat beside her and instinctively laid her hand on Annalee's gravid abdomen. Even through the housecoat, she could feel the solid, irregular mass of a uterine contraction.
'Just squeeze my hands until it's over,' Sarah said. 'Don't be frightened, Annalee. Everything's going to be all right.'
Nearly a minute passed before the tightness in Annalee's womb began to abate. During that time, Sarah calculated from their conversation following the July 5 press conference, trying to determine how far along her pregnancy had come. Thirty-three weeks, perhaps thirty-four, she guessed.
'How often are your contractions coming?'
'Every eight or nine minutes,' Annalee said. 'I've been having them off and on for weeks. But it's been like this for about twelve straight hours.'
'Your water break?'
'No.'
'Fever, chills?'
'No.'
'Bleeding of any kind?'
'No.'
'Where's Taylor?'
'Believe it or not, he's in East Africa. The band's touring for two more weeks. I have no idea exactly where they are right now. He wanted to cancel the tour and stay home because I was having those off-and-on contractions. But I told him to go. How stupid of me.'
'Easy does it, Annalee. Don't be so hard on yourself. You did the right thing. And what about Peter?'
'He-he doesn't know where I am. He refused to take me to a hospital, even though I told him it was too early for me to be delivering. I ended up calling a friend and then climbing out through my bedroom window. She picked me up on the road and took me here. Sarah, Peter's crazy.' Her eyes filled with tears. 'He has those two midwives he flew in from Mali at the house. They've been giving me some sort of tea that they say will stop my labor. I mentioned your name once, just once, and he exploded. He said if I saw you for any reason, I needn't bother coming home.'
Sarah took the sobbing, frightened woman in her arms.
'Annalee, don't even think about Peter or anything else. Let's just think about your baby. You're definitely in labor, and you're still six or seven weeks early. Delivering now is a concern, but it's not a crisis. Ideally, we'd like to see the baby stay where it is for a couple more weeks.'
'What can I do? Can you stop labor? I–I don't have any health insurance. Peter's been paying for… Sarah, I think another one's coming.'
'Okay, easy does it, Annalee,' Sarah whispered again, stroking her forehead. 'One contraction at a time and one question at a time.'
She glanced at the clock. Six and a half minutes since the last contraction. This time, responding perhaps to Sarah's reassurance, Annalee closed her eyes and quietly breathed her way through the contraction.
'Annalee, don't worry about the insurance,' Sarah said. 'Don't worry about anything. I'm going to get you admitted here, and I'm going to get one of our staff obstetricians to care for you. In fact, I think I can get the chief of the service. His name's Dr. Snyder.'
'What will he do?'
'Well, my guess is he'll put you on an IV and give you some medication to try to stop these contractions and prolong your pregnancy. That depends, though. There are ways we have for finding out not only how far along you are, but how far along the baby is in terms of its lung development. The status of the lungs is the key to when a woman in premature labor should be allowed to deliver.'
'You can measure the baby's lungs before its born?'
'We can,' Sarah said. 'Actually, we're pretty good at it.'
Annalee pushed herself up and threw her arms around Sarah's neck.
'I knew I did the right thing in coming to you,' she said. 'I knew it.'
Sarah called the hospital operator and put in a page for Randall Snyder. Then she called admissions and asked to have someone sent up to the obstetrics unit. Finally she took a fetoscope from a hook on the door and listened to Annalee's belly.
'The baby's doing great,' she said after half a minute or so. 'Just great.'
'That's wonderful. I can feel it kicking. Listen, Sarah, please don't call Peter.'
'Hey, kid, I work for you. That means you give the orders. You may want to find a way to call and let him know you're okay, though. You don't have to say where you are. I know he really loves you a lot. It's me he can't stand.'
'Well, that's his problem. You know, while you were on the phone, I was looking at you and thinking about the incredible things you can do. And I was remembering what you were like when you first came to live with us.'
'And?'
'Let's just say you've come a long way, baby. A hell of a long way.'
Sarah hugged the woman once again. Save for her moderately prominent abdomen and engorged breasts, there was virtually no bulge on her body-no loose skin; no fat whatsoever.
