39

I rang five times in quick succession, pressing my thumb against the bell until my knuckle hurt. I pounded the brass knocker, then hit the bell again. I was ready to kick in the door when I heard footsteps and the jangle of the chain lock.

The porch light snapped on.

“Goddamn,” Keith Donovan said, hauling open the door. “This time I was sure you were Emily Woodrow.”

He wore the same blue bathrobe. Blinking back sleep, his eyes looked unguarded and very young.

I stepped inside. “Code Sixty,” I said. “I heard a Code Thirty called while I was at JHHI. Does Sixty mean it’s some other hospital?”

“They call Sixty at JHHI,” he said, looking bewildered. “Thirty’s a child. Pediatric cardiac arrest.”

“They double it,” I guessed. “Sixty’s an adult.”

“Right. Can I—”

I said, “I need your help. Now.”

He rubbed his hands over his eyes, then squinted at me as if he thought I might disappear. When I didn’t, he followed me into the living room. I fumbled with the switch of a floor lamp, lifted the receiver on his desk phone.

“Call JHHI,” I said. “Find out anything you can about a patient named Hodges. Mrs. Hodges.”

“What the hell time is it?”

The floor lamp cast shadows against the deep green draperies, illuminated barely half the room. “Past two. It doesn’t matter.”

“Hodges?”

“That’s all I know.”

“You can’t do this from your own house? In the morning?”

“I’m not a doctor,” I said. “All I can do is call patient information and find out Mrs. Hodges’s condition. Period. That’s it.”

“Have you tried that?”

I tugged at my hair. “Dammit, I should have.” My fingers hit 411. I counted the rings. Five. Six. Pick up!

Donovan said, “JHHI’s number is five five five seven three eight oh.”

“Thanks.”

I didn’t know her first name, so I decided to let a quaver creep into my voice. I referred to the operator as “dear.” I dithered and repeated myself. Yes, the operator said after a maddening pause, a Thelma Hodges was listed. Was that my friend? Yes? Well, she was in “guarded” condition.

“Over to you,” I said to Donovan, reestablishing a dial tone, then brandishing the receiver.

“What? What’s over to me?”

“Get me a room, a location. A diagnosis. A prognosis.”

“If she’s ‘guarded,’ they don’t know the outcome.”

“Get any information you can. Please,” I said.

“Is this about your friend? The one who took the wrong pills?”

“This is about Emily Woodrow. Make the calls.”

He stared at me as if I might want to make an immediate appointment for therapy, but then he leaned over the desk and started fanning through his Rolodex. I paced while he debated between two cards, dialed, and joked easily with someone on the other end of the line. Seemingly as an afterthought, he asked for Thelma Hodges’s room number.

He did it well. The man was almost as good a liar as I am.

“Fifth floor west,” he told me as he hung up. “It’s a cancer ward. Adult patients. Why exactly am I doing this?”

“Do you know anybody who works on the fifth floor? Anybody who works nights?”

“I might know a couple of nurses.”

“By name? By sight?”

“Both. Calm down, okay?”

I faced him. “Call a nurse. A specific nurse, by name. Ask her about Mrs. Hodges.”

“What should I ask?”

I spied a notepad on his desk and started scribbling. “How long has she been there? Who admitted her? What’s wrong with her?” I hesitated. “Is she confined to her room? Does she have access to a phone?”

“Anything else,” he asked sarcastically.

“Lots. But let’s start with these.”

This time, with his permission, I listened in on the kitchen extension, holding my breath. Mrs. Hodges’s care presented certain problems, he learned from a motherly sounding woman named Ava. Wasn’t it a shame? So young and in such ill health. First the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, so disorienting for the poor thing, and now the cancer as well. Hard to explain to her what they were doing, and that it was all for her own good. Like treating a child, really. But harder. Was Dr. Donovan doing some work on early-onset Alzheimer’s?

Yes, well, Thelma Hodges wasn’t confined, but they did their best to keep an eye on her. She tended to stumble around the hospital and disturb the other patients. And they were always finding phones off the hook. He probably should have placed her in a more secure facility, under greater restraint, but it must have been so hard for him, knowing that excellent care could be obtained for her right at JHHI.

He? Why, Dr. Muir, of course.

I wished I’d written more questions, different questions.

Donovan struck off on his own, started ad-libbing.

Dr. Muir? Oh, he never came to visit, but you really couldn’t blame him. They’d been very close, Ava understood. Uncle and niece, yes, but really more like father and daughter. Poor Thelma’s parents were separated, her mother dead. No one came to see the patient, no one at all. But then, Dr. Muir was such a busy man. And it would be so painful for him to see his niece the way she was now.

Yes, he’d engaged a private duty nurse. Would Dr. Donovan like to speak with her? Not now? Well, Mrs. Hodges was coping very nicely. Everything had been arranged with her comfort in mind.

And, might Ava ask, what exactly was Dr. Donovan’s concern?

Enough, I urged Donovan silently. Don’t push it. I tapped the phone stem up and down to make clicking noises, but he kept chatting away. I hung up and went after him, drawing a line across my throat with a finger to indicate that a quick farewell was in order.

“Hey, I thought you wanted to know all about her,” he said defensively, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Look, I suppose I owe you one. I barged in on you with a client, and now you get to barge in on me, but at least I phoned first—”

“She’s Emily Woodrow,” I said.

His finger stayed frozen at the corner of one eye. His lids blinked. He had dark lashes for a man with such pale hair. “What are you talking about?”

“Thelma Hodges is Emily Woodrow. Your Dr. Muir is holding her prisoner.”

“Oh, come on,” he said.

“She’s probably drugged out of her mind.”

His hair was cut so short it barely moved when he shook his head. “I can’t believe that.”

“Don’t believe it,” I said. “Come see it.”

“Try me in the morning. After you get a good night’s sleep.”

I crossed the rug, so that only the width of the desk separated us. “This nurse you just talked to, Donovan—she doesn’t exactly sound like the soul of discretion.”

“Ava? She’ll talk your ear off. You heard.”

“Think she’s gonna keep quiet about your call? Think she’s not curious about why a psychiatrist’s interested in Dr. Muir’s sick niece? She’s probably checking to see if Muir’s on duty right now.”

“It was Dr. Muir who recommended me, who brought me into this,” Donovan protested. “To help Emily.”

“And why didn’t you tell me that before?”

Donovan lowered his eyes as if he were studying the grain of the desk. “He asked me to keep it confidential. He has other therapists he generally recommends. He didn’t want them to feel that he was planning any major changes … didn’t want them to feel threatened.”

“So he doesn’t normally refer patients your way?”

“She’s actually the first. I’d hoped—”

“He chose you because you’re inexperienced, Donovan. Or else to help him keep an eye on her. Was that part of the deal? Did you report to him?”

The therapist hesitated. “He asked about her occasionally.”

“Did you tell him Emily had hired me?”

“No,” he said. “You were essentially Emily’s own idea. And I wasn’t sure he’d approve.”

“He’s got her,” I said. “He’s holding her against her will.”

“Why on earth would he? You wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me a—some kind of Gothic horror story! What? Do you think the man’s suddenly gone mad? Do you imagine he keeps some kind of captive harem in the middle of a respectable hospital?”

I paced, pressing the heels of my hands against my temples. I could feel my pulse pounding. “Okay, try this,” I said. “Come back to my house. There’s a guy passed out in my living room.”

“That’s not my problem,” he said angrily.

I softened my voice. “The man’s name is Tony Foley. He lived with Tina Sukhia; they were engaged. He’s drunk. Wake him and he’ll tell you. And I can show you.”

“Show me what?”

“Pictures of a bottling plant used to manufacture phony chemotherapy drugs.”

He shook his head again, lifted a hand to the back of his neck.

I wanted to grab his arm, force him to move. I made myself speak slowly, deliberately instead. “Someone’s manufacturing phony Cephamycin right next door to JHHI. It killed Rebecca Woodrow and four other children. God knows how many other kids have been killed.”

“Others?”

“Tina Sukhia used the wrong Cephamycin. She grabbed a package meant for faraway places, far-away deaths. Deaths where the mortality statistics are so grim that a few more deaths wouldn’t be noticed.”

Both of Donovan’s hands were active now, kneading the muscles in his neck.

With effort, I kept my voice low. “Come with me. Talk to Tony. You’re the one who told me you couldn’t understand the relationship between Dr. Muir and Dr. Renzel. Well, here’s a connection: they travel together, Chief of Staff and Chief of Pharmacy, to international conventions. They peddle phony drugs together, to backwater nations.”

“You’re absolutely wrong.”

“Tina Sukhia didn’t believe it. She’s dead. Your hero’s feet are not just made of clay, they’re made of shit, and I can prove it.”

He didn’t bother with slippers or an overcoat. If any of the neighbors peered out from behind their closed blinds, they must have raised their eyebrows at the sight of us hustling across the damp grass.

In my living room, Tony Foley snored loudly. A red light flashed on my answering machine.

“Even if we could wake him—” Donovan began distastefully.

I waved the Globe in his direction. “Here. Four years ago, the Cephagen Company voluntarily repackaged Cephamycin, at great expense, to come up with a tamper-proof package, a package sealed with a trademark hologram. Why?”

“Why? Because of Chicago and the Tylenol scare.”

“Cephamycin’s not stocked on regular pharmacy shelves.”

“So?”

“They must have had a counterfeiting problem. Or anticipated one. Do you know how much a dose of Cephamycin costs?”

“No.”

“The Globe calls it extremely expensive.”

“Research costs run high,” he said.

“Hundreds of thousands?” I asked. “Millions?”

“Hundreds of millions,” Donovan said, “to get a new drug on the market. Years of research.”

“Could Cephamycin go for as much as a thousand dollars a dose?” I asked.

“I suppose it could. Maybe more.”

Tina had mentioned fifty-dose cartons. Fifty thousand dollars a pop, I thought. Enough for expansion, a new wing, a whole new sterile floor. “Look at this,” I said.

Donovan held the shiny paper gingerly between his index finger and thumb. I watched his expression shift while he read Tina Sukhia’s appeal to the World Health Organization; he scanned it once, twice.

He lifted the silvery paper to the light, eyeing the three-dimensional C’s. “Was this enclosed with the letter?” he asked gravely. “Is this the genuine seal from a Cephamycin package?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “Emily Woodrow gave it to me, the morning you brought her over. When she said she’d lost her glove.”

“She didn’t trust me.”

“You had ties to JHHI,” I said. “When I showed the hologram to Tony Foley, he swore it was the same as the one Tina’d enclosed in her letter.”

“He’s drunk. He might say anything.”

“You want proof, help me load him into my car. The matching hologram should be at his place. You can see for yourself.”

Donovan sank into the chair near my desk, fingered the sash of his robe. “Once we’ve got that kind of evidence,” he said slowly, “we’d need to go to the authorities.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Absolutely. The minute Emily Woodrow’s out of that hospital.”

The red light on my message machine flashed accusingly. I punched the button, listened long enough to hear Mooney’s voice. Hit “reset.”

I wouldn’t call him back. I’d been a cop too long. I knew too much about bureaucratic delays and foul-ups. The police are a necessary force, not a perfect one. They’re big and sloppy and secrets have a way of spreading like wildfire through the ranks.

You don’t do brain surgery with a chain saw. It wasn’t one of my grandmother’s Yiddish maxims, but she would have agreed with the sentiment.