2024
“I’ll never forget that day for as long as I live. In all my years nursing, I never experienced anything like it!”
Jane Temple (née Yoder) addressed Melinda and Dennis via Skype. Ironically, even though Mercy General Hospital was just a few blocks away from their apartment, the retired nurse now resided in Scotland, forcing Melinda to conduct the interview remotely. Dennis had fretted about discussing these matters over the internet, given all the clandestine precautions Halley had put them through, but she’d reminded him that they were in the podcast business after all; it was going to be hard to cover the story without going online sometimes.
And it wasn’t as though they had any other options. Before parting company with them at the Palace of Fine Arts, Halley had slipped them a list naming the members of the surgical team that had allegedly been waylaid by Gillian and her anonymous cohorts back in the day. Of the half dozen names on the list, Jane Temple was the only witness they could track down who was also willing to talk to them about the incident. For that, they could sacrifice the immediacy of a face-to-face interview—and risk letting their devices listen in.
“Take me through it again.” Melinda was still trying to wrap her head around the idea that Gillian was somehow mixed up with Russian spies and naval espionage on top of being upset over the loss of her whales. That just didn’t mesh with everything they’d learned about Gillian up to now and the picture Melinda had been forming of the missing cetologist, who hardly seemed the type to invade an operating room and make off with a critically injured patient. Perhaps Temple’s apparently vivid memories could paint a clearer picture of what happened on that tumultuous afternoon long ago?
“It’s just as I told you before.” The retired nurse, now in her sixties, had a sunny, outgoing personality. Purple hair, streaked with fluorescent green, suggested an independent soul who didn’t feel obliged to act her age. “We were in the OR, prepping for surgery, when these three strangers barged in, waved a ray gun at us, and locked us in an adjoining room while they did something to the patient, then rolled him out of the OR—and apparently the hospital as well. I heard secondhand that they somehow vanished from a moving elevator without explanation. Like a locked-room mystery!”
A well-stocked bookcase could be glimpsed behind her. Dennis, who was carefully staying out of view of the camera, mimed firing a weapon to remind Melinda to ask about something.
“Tell me more about that ‘ray gun’ you mentioned.”
“Well, it didn’t look much like a gun, to be honest. More like a boxy TV remote. But the leader of the group, the good-looking fellow from that sketch you showed me, pointed it at us as though it was a weapon, and nobody wanted to call his bluff. Then, after he herded us into the other room, he zapped the door handle with a laser beam, fusing it shut. So I guess he wasn’t bluffing after all!”
Dennis gave Melinda an “I told you so” look from off-camera, no doubt taking this as further evidence of extraterrestrial involvement. Melinda wanted to roll her eyes back at him, but had to admit that this oddball detail had her perplexed. Why not just use a plain old handgun if you’re going to break a patient out of a hospital? Why some sort of souped-up laser pointer or whatever?
“And you’re certain that was Gillian Taylor you saw that day? And the man from the police sketch?”
Temple nodded confidently. “Trust me, their faces are burned into my memory. Not every day you get taken hostage during surgery.”
“And the third man? What do you recall about him?”
“He was pretty memorable too. Argued vigorously with Doctor Ellis, the surgeon leading the operation, over the best way to save the patient. He certainly sounded like an actual doctor, and was quite heated on the subject. He wasn’t about to let Doctor Ellis perform cranial surgery on the patient to relieve the pressure on his brain.”
“What did he look like?”
“Older, somewhat weathered features, maybe a trace of a southern accent?”
Not remotely the Buddhist monk in the whale tank then. So who was this very opinionated medic? And why was a southern doctor hijacking a Russian patient?
“At first, I thought he was simply another physician brought in to consult,” Temple continued, “until the other man pulled out his ray gun and cleared us out of the OR. I didn’t get a good look at what happened next, since we were all crowding around this one small window in the locked door while hollering for help, but the doctor-ish fellow placed a blinking device on the patient’s forehead, which appeared to rouse him, but I can’t swear to that.”
“And then they took Chekov.”
“If that’s what you say his name was. We weren’t told that at the time, nor much about the circumstances of his accident. Just that it was all very hush-hush and security was tight, although obviously not tight enough! And afterwards we were all sworn to secrecy.”
Melinda asked her usual question. “So how come you’re willing to talk to us now?”
“That was umpteen years ago. What can it matter now? If you must know, it feels good to finally talk about it.”
“The authorities might not feel the same way.”
“What are they going to do? Come after an expatriate former nurse, living abroad, over some old business dating back to the Reagan years? I like to think our glorious leaders have better things to worry about these days.”
Here’s hoping, Melinda thought. She liked the old lady’s attitude.
“That was a crazy day, though. Not just because of the raid on the OR, but what with that weirdness with the magic kidney pill as well.”
“Kidney pill?”
“You haven’t heard about that?” Temple grinned. “That was a trip in itself.”
Was this case about to get even more bizarre? Melinda braced herself for whatever new wrinkle might be coming her way. “Enlighten me.”
Jane Temple didn’t have to be asked twice. “Oh, you’re going to love this. That very same afternoon, around the very same time the OR was invaded, an elderly patient, Mrs. Coates, somehow grew a brand-new kidney. Claimed a doctor gave her a pill while she was in a hallway waiting to undergo dialysis and… boom, suddenly she had a new kidney.”
“What?” Melinda had thought nothing more could surprise her about this case, but found herself startled again. “She grew a new kidney? How is that possible?”
“It isn’t, but somehow it happened anyway. They ran her through every scan possible, all of which verified the unbelievable. She had indeed grown a healthy new kidney… in less than thirty minutes.”
“And the doctor who gave her the pill?”
“Never identified, but the talk was that he was the same rogue doctor who barged into the OR and stole our patient from us. The argumentative one.”
Melinda’s head was spinning. She visualized adding this latest reveal to her case board, which was starting to look less like an organizational diagram than an exercise in surrealism. Why had Halley neglected to mention that part of the story? Because he and his bosses had been more fixated on the Cold War espionage aspects?
“What happened next to the kidney lady?”
“Coates. Mildred Coates. Milly to her friends.”
“I’m impressed you still remember her name after all this time.”
“You don’t forget a bona fide medical miracle. That was quite the medical sensation, at least for a while.”
“But then?”
Temple shrugged. “Turned out there was nowhere to go, research-wise, and nothing further to study. It was a freak, irreproducible event that defied explanation. Milly soon tired of being treated like a test animal, subjected to every test and procedure you can think of, and stopped cooperating with the researchers. And that was the end of it. No revolutionary new discoveries were made, nobody got rich and famous because it, no groundbreaking studies or reports were published; I think the whole medical establishment eventually just wanted to forget about it and pretend it never happened.” She snorted in derision. “Wouldn’t be surprised if most folks dismiss it as a hoax these days, if they remember it all, but it happened all right, swear to God, just like I told that one really pushy guy way back when.”
Melinda didn’t let that slide by. “What guy? When?”
“You’re not the first curious soul to come snooping around, although it’s been some time since the last one. Back in the eighties, not long after all that craziness, this one young guy showed up at my doorstep wanting to know all about Milly’s new kidney and the anonymous doctor who supposedly fixed her with one pill.”
That didn’t seem too surprising to Melinda, considering. “Another eager medical researcher?”
Or perhaps Halley or one of his associates?
“Maybe, but there was something kinda shady about him. He was very intense, very persistent. He offered me serious money, like lottery money, if I helped him find out where that pill came from, never mind that we’d been sworn to secrecy about the raid on the OR. At the time, I debated whether that gag order applied to Mrs. Coates’s case as well, because the money was tempting. The question was academic, though, since, unfortunately, I didn’t have any real info to sell him. Otherwise, I would have retired a whole lot earlier!”
Melinda ran through the possible suspects in her head. Not the two men with Gillian in the OR, since Temple would have recognized them on sight, so… the swimming monk? Halley? Somebody else?
“Describe him to me.”
“Young, like college-age young, if that. Short, maybe five foot one, tops. Bald head… shaved, I assume. Bushy black eyebrows. Deep voice. And like I said, very serious and determined to find out about that pill. Kinda reminded me of Javert in Les Miz, if you know what I mean, just younger and shorter.”
The description didn’t ring any bells with Melinda.
“He didn’t, by any chance, seem Russian to you?”
“Nope. And, looking back, he wasn’t all that interested in our stolen patient, your Mister Chekov. He was laser-focused on Mrs. Coates and her kidney.” Her brow furrowed as she pondered that long-ago encounter. “I don’t know. Maybe he was just a sick millionaire who was desperate for a miraculous new kidney of his own?”
“Do you recall his name?” Melinda had no idea how important or relevant this individual might be with regards to Gillian’s disappearance, but maybe it was worth pursuing?
“Perhaps, I’m not sure. I only met him once, and the circumstances were far less exciting than what went on that day in the OR.” She chuckled wryly. “Maybe if he’d pulled a laser on me, or grown a new organ, it would have stuck in my mind more. Offels? Osterman? Something like that.”
Her gaze turned inward, searching her memory.
“He gave me a business card so I could contact him if I learned anything worth paying for, but I have no idea what became of it. That was at least eight addresses, six cities, five countries, and three marriages ago. Sorry.”
“No problem,” Melinda said, concealing her disappointment.
A miracle cure for kidney disease? Strangers sniffing around trying to discover its origins? It was possible that none of that had anything to do with Gillian’s disappearance, but Melinda didn’t believe it, not at this point. Too much weird, freaky stuff had taken place over the same forty-eight hours back in ’86 for them not to be linked somehow.
Who was this new character, covering the same ground decades ago?