Jonathan Kellerman - Devil's Waltz

“This patient’s name?”

When I hesitated, she said, “I can’t very well answer your question without knowing what I’m looking for.”

“Jones.”

“Charles Lyman Jones the Fourth?”

Surprised, I said, “You have it?”

“No. But you are the second person who’s come asking for it. Is there a genetic issue at stake that makes this so urgent? Sibling tissue typing or something like that?”

“It’s a complex case,” I said.

She recrossed her legs. “The first person didn’t give me an adequate explanation either.”

“Who was that?”

She gave me an analytic look and sat back in her chair. “Forgive me, Doctor, but I’d appreciate seeing the identification you just showed Merilee upstairs.”

For the third time in half an hour I presented my faculty card, augmenting it with my brand-new full-color hospital badge.

Putting on gold-framed half-glasses, she examined both, taking her time. The hospital ID held her interest longer.

“The other man had one of these too,” she said, holding it up. “He said he was in charge of hospital security.”

“A man named Huenengarth?”

She nodded. “The two of you seem to be duplicating each other’s efforts.”

“When was he here?”

“Last Thursday. Does Western Pediatrics generally give this type of personal service to all its patients?”

“As I said, it’s a complex case.”

She smiled. “Medically or socio-culturally?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t get into details.”

“Psychotherapeutic confidentiality?”

I nodded.

“Well, I certainly respect that, Dr. Delaware. Mr. Huenengarth used another phrase to protect his secrecy. ‘Privileged information.’ I thought that sounded rather cloak-and-dagger and told him so. He wasn’t amused. A rather grim fellow, actually.”

“Did you give him the chart?”

“No, because I don’t have it, Doctor. Dawn left no medical charts of any kind behind. Sorry to have misled you, but all the attention she’s generated lately has led me to be cautious. That and her murder, of course. When the police came by to ask questions, I cleaned out her graduate locker personally. All that I found were some textbooks and the computer disks from her dissertation research.”

“Have you booted up the disks?”

“Is that question related to your complex case?”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly,” she said. “Well, at least you’re not getting pushy the way Mr. Huenengarth did. Trying to pressure me to turn them over.”

Removing her glasses, she got up, returned my ID, closed the door. Back in her chair, she said, “Was Dawn involved in something unsavory?”

“She may have been.”

“Mr. Huenengarth was a bit more forthcoming than you, Doctor. He came right out and said Dawn had stolen the chart. Informed me it was my duty to see that it was returned — quite imperious. I had to ask him to leave.”

“He’s not Mr. Charm.”

“An understatement — his approach is pure KGB. More like a policeman than the real policemen who investigated Dawn’s murder, as far as I’m concerned. They weren’t pushy enough . A few cursory questions and goodbye — I grade them C-minus. Weeks later I called to see what kind of progress was being made, and no one would take my call. I left messages and none were returned.”

“What kind of questions did they ask about her?”

“Who her friends were, had she ever associated with criminal types, did she use drugs. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to answer any of them. Even after having her as my student for four years, I knew virtually nothing about her. Have you served on any doctoral committees?”

“A few.”

“Then you know. Some students one really gets close to; others pass through without making a mark. I’m afraid Dawn was one of the latter. Not because she wasn’t bright. She was extremely sharp, mathematically. It’s why I accepted her in the first place, even though I had reservations about her motivation. I’m always looking for women who aren’t intimidated by numbers and she had a true gift for math. But we never... jelled.”

“What was the matter with her motivation?”

“She didn’t have any. I always got the feeling she’d drifted into grad school because it was the path of least resistance. She’d applied to medical school and gotten rejected. Kept applying even after she enrolled here — a lost cause, really, because her non-math grades weren’t very good and her M-CAT scores were significantly below average. Her math scores were so high I decided to accept her, though. I went so far as to get her funding — a Graduate Advanced Placement fellowship. This past fall, I had to cut that off. That’s when she found the job at your hospital.”

“Poor performance?”

“Poor progress on her dissertation. She finished her course work with adequate grades, submitted a research proposal that looked promising, dropped it, submitted another, dropped that, et cetera. Finally she came up with one that she seemed to like. Then she just froze. Went absolutely nowhere with it. You know how it is — students either zip through or languish for years. I’ve been able to help plenty of the languishers and I tried to help Dawn. But she rejected counseling. Didn’t show up for appointments, made excuses, kept saying she could handle it, just needed more time. I never felt I was getting through to her. I was at the point of considering dropping her from the program. Then she was...”

She rubbed a fingertip over one blood-colored nail. “I suppose none of that seems very important now. Would you like a chocolate?”

“No, thanks.”

She looked down at the truffles. Closed the box.

“Consider that little speech,” she said, “as an elongated answer to your question about her disks. But yes, I did boot them up, and there was nothing meaningful on them. She’d accomplished nothing on the dissertation. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t even bothered to look at them when your Mr. Huenengarth showed up — had put them away and forgotten about them, I was so upset by her death. Going through that locker felt ghoulish enough. But he made such a point of trying to get them that I booted them up the moment he was gone. It was worse than I’d imagined. All she’d produced, after all my encouragement, were statements and restatements of her hypotheses and a random numbers table.”

“A random numbers table?”

“For random sampling. You know how it’s done, I’m sure.”

I nodded. “Generate a collection of random numbers with a computer or some other technique, then use it to select subjects from a general pool. If the table says five, twenty-three, seven, choose the fifth, twenty-third, and seventh people on the list.”

“Exactly. Dawn’s table was huge — thousands of numbers. Pages and pages generated on the department’s mainframe. What a foolish waste of computer time. She was nowhere near ready to select her sample. Hadn’t even gotten her basic methodology straight.”

“What was her research topic?”

“Predicting cancer incidence by geographical location. That’s as specific as she’d gotten. It was really pathetic, reading those disks. Even the little bit she had written was totally unacceptable. Disorganized, out of sequence. I had to wonder if indeed she had been using drugs.”

“Did she show any other signs of that?”

“I suppose the unreliability could be considered a symptom. And sometimes she did seem agitated — almost manic. Trying to convince me — or herself — that she was making progress. But I know she wasn’t taking amphetamines. She gained lots of weight over the last four years — at least forty pounds. She was actually quite pretty when she enrolled.”