“Yeah, Sara, I can hear you. Where am I?”
“You’re still at the clinic.”
“How long have I been out?”
“I found you half an hour ago,” Sara replied.
His vision focused in on two faces. One beautiful, the other thin with a mustache and long nose. “Lieutenant Bernstein?”
Max nodded. “Sara called me. Are you all right?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Harvey tried to clear his head. “In the lab,” he began slowly. “Someone was in the lab.”
Sara said, “I caught a glimpse of someone running down the hall, but I couldn’t see the face.”
“Whoever it was,” Harvey managed, “hit me over the head.”
“Why don’t we start at the beginning, okay?” Bernstein suggested, taking out his pad and pencil. “Tell us what happened.”
Slowly, Harvey told them what had occurred from the moment he heard the noise in the lab until he was knocked unconscious. When he finished, Lieutenant Bernstein stopped pacing and asked, “So what was he after? What was so precious that you forgot a prowler was in the room?”
“My private files.”
“Your what?”
“My private files. I keep them locked in there.”
“You don’t keep them in your office?”
“No. The lock and security around the lab is supposed to be much tighter than in my office. And the information I keep in those private files is usually derived from lab results. We all keep our private files in the lab.”
Bernstein stared at his pad intensely. “You keep saying ‘private’ files. What do you mean by that?”
“They contain personal information — professional secrets, if you will.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“Different things. Results from experiments, stuff like that.”
“What kind of experiments?”
Harvey lay back down. “Personal ones,” he replied. “You see, it pays to work closely with partners and to share all your findings, no question about it, but sometimes you need to work in private — alone and without any outside interference and suggestions. It’s often the best way to make headway — the one man working in solitude kind of thing. We understood and respected each other’s private work.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Bruce, Eric, and myself.”
Bernstein nodded, circling to the other side of the bed and then back again. “Did Bruce Grey have private files?”
“Of course.”
“Have you gone through them since his death?”
“Yes.”
“Was there anything surprising in them?”
Harvey hesitated. “Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really?”
“I mean there were no major breakthroughs or anything like that. Bruce wasn’t very big on independent research…” He paused. “It might be nothing.”
Bernstein leaned over the bed. “Go on.”
“Well, several of his important files were missing.”
“What sort of files?”
“Patient files. Trian and Whitherson’s, to name two.”
“How about Bradley Jenkins’?”
“That one is still there.”
Max stood back up, walked to the door, fiddled with the knob. “I’d like you to give me a complete list of the missing files, and I also want to go through Grey’s entire file cabinet as soon as possible.”
Harvey nodded. “I suspected as much. But do me a favor, Lieutenant. Don’t let anyone else go through them. The information in those files is confidential and must remain so.”
“I don’t understand something,” Sara interjected. “Why would routine patient files be locked up with the private files?”
“There is no such thing as routine patient files in here,” Harvey explained. “Everything in here is confidential. We use codes here, never names, so that no one — lab technicians, nurses, orderlies — knows a patient’s name. We often keep patients secluded from one another. Except for roommates, patients never see or get to know one another.”
“Did Whitherson, Trian, or Jenkins know each other?” Bernstein asked.
“No.”
“What happens when visitors come by?” Sara asked. “Won’t they see the other patients on the floor?”
Harvey shook his head. “This whole place is compartmentalized. First floor is offices and visiting rooms — we wheel the patients into private rooms so that the visitors never enter the actual patients’ ward, which is on the second floor.”
“Sounds like prison visiting hours,” Max added.
“The situation is similar,” Harvey agreed. “The key thing to remember is that visitors never go into a patient’s room.”
Bernstein scratched his smooth right cheek hard, like a dog with a tic near his ear. “Okay, so let me get this straight. The first floor has offices and visiting rooms. The second floor is the patients’ ward. The third floor has the lab.”
Harvey shot a quick glance toward Sara. “And highly confidential patients are also kept on the third floor,” he said. “We normally keep no more than one or two patients up here.”
“Was Bradley Jenkins one such patient?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.” Max put his pencil into his mouth and looked up at the ceiling. “So the prowler may have been trying to find out names of patients or the prognosis of a patient.”
Harvey sat up. “Could have been,” he said, swinging his feet onto the floor.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to check my files.”
“Wait a second,” Max said, snapping his fingers. “Was there any patient recently admitted? Was there anybody whose identity you wanted to keep confidential?”
Harvey stopped.
“You can tell him,” Sara said.
“Tell me what?”
It was Sara who responded. “Michael was admitted today. He has AIDS.”
Not too far from where Sara, Max, and Harvey were talking, Janice Matley, the Sidney Pavilion’s most trusted nurse, knew something was wrong the moment she opened the door. She sensed it. There was something about the stillness of the bed, the way the sheet was twisted around the body, the way the head lolled limply off the pillow. Janice felt a creeping dread in the pit of her stomach.
She knew.
Janice Matley was a heavyset black woman in her mid-fifties. She had been a nurse for the better part of thirty years and had worked for Dr. Riker and Dr. Grey for the past decade. She had been crushed when Dr. Grey committed suicide, absolutely devastated. Such a lovely man, poor thing. And a great doctor. He and Dr. Riker had been perfect partners, complementing each other like no other two men could. Dr. Grey was the heart, the team player, the one with the good bedside manner, the one who felt for every patient. Dr. Riker was the brains, the
