Michael Palmer - Side Effects

" was all Jared could say. The ball, a white star, arced into the blue-black summer night sky.

On the base paths, four runners dashed around toward home. There were two out in the running, the ninth running. The scoreboard at the base of the left field wall in Fenway Park said that the Red Sox were ahead of the Yankees by three runs, but that lead, it appeared, had only seconds more to be. Kate, enthralled by the lights and the colors and the precision of her first live baseball game, stood frozen with the rest, her eyes fixed on the ball now in a lazy descent toward a spot beyond the fence. Then into the corner of her field of vision he came, running with an antelope grace that made his movements seem almost slow motion.

He left the ground an improbable distance from the fence, his gloved left hand reaching, it seemed, beyond its limits, up to the top of the barrier and over it. For an instant, ball and glove disappeared beyond the fence. In the next instant, they were together, clutched to the chest of Bobby Geary as he tumbled down onto the dirt warning track to the roar of thirty thousand voices. It was a moment Kate would remember for the rest of her life. This, too, was such a moment. The body that had once held the spirit and abilities of Bobby Geary lay on the steel table before her, stripped of the indefinable force that had allowed it to sense and react so remarkably. To one side, in a shallow metal pan, was the athlete's heart, carefully sliced along several planes to expose the muscle of the two ventricles-the pumping chambers-and the three main coronary arteries-left, right, and circumflex. Images of that night at Fenway more than four years ago intruded on Kate's objectivity and brought with them a wistfulness that she knew had no place in this facet of her work. "Nothing in the heart at all? " she asked for the second time. Stan Willoughby, leprechaunish in green scrubs and a black rubber apron, shook his head. "Must a bin somethin' he et, " he said, by way of admitting that, anatomically at least, he had uncovered no explanation for the pulmonary edema, fluid that had filled Bobby Geary's lungs and, essentially, drowned him from within. Kate, clad identically to her chief, examined the heart under a highiotensity light. "Teenage heart in a thirty-six-year-old man. I remember reading somewhere that he intended to keep playing until he was fifty. This heart says he might have made it."

"This edema says no way, " Willoughby corrected. "I'm inclined to think dysrhythmia and cardiac arrest on that basis. Preliminary blood tests are all normal, so I think it possible we may never know the specific cause." There was disappointment in his voice. "Sometimes we just don't,

" Kate said. The words were Willoughby's, a lesson he had repeated many times to her over the years. Willoughby glared at her for a moment, then he laughed out loud. "You are a saucy pup, flipping my words back at me like that. Suppose you tell me what to say to the police lieutenant drinking coffee and dropping donut crumbs right now in my office, or to the gaggle of reporters in the lobby waiting for the ultimate word.

Ladies and gentlemen, the ultimate word from the crack pathology department you help support with your taxes is that we are absolutely certain we have no idea why Bobby Geary went into a pulmonary edema and died."

Kate did not answer. She had grabbed a magnifying glass and was intently examining Geary's feet, especially between his toes and along the inside of his ankles. "Stan, look, " she said. "All along here. Tiny puncture marks, almost invisible. There must be a dozen of them. No, wait, there are more."

Willoughby adjusted the light and took the magnifier from her. "Holy potato, " he said softly. "Bobby Geary an addict? " He stepped back from the table and looked at Kate, who could only shrug. "If he was, he was a bloomin' artist with a needle."

"A twenty-seven or twenty-nine gauge would make punctures about that size."

"And a narcotics or amphetamine overdose would explain the pulmonary edema." Kate nodded. "Holy potato, " Willoughby said again. "If it's true, there must be evidence somewhere in his house."

"Unless it happened with other people around and they brought him home and put him to bed. Why don't we send some blood for a drug screen and do levels on any substance we pick up?"

Willoughby glanced around the autopsy suite. The single technician on duty was too far away to have heard any of their conversation. "What do you say we label the tube Smith' or Schultz' or something. I'm no sports fan, but I know enough to see what's at stake here. The man was a hero."

"What about the policeman?"

"His name's Detective Finn, and he is a fan. I think he'd prefer some kind of story about a heart attack, even if the blood test is positive."

"Schultz sounds like as good a name as any, " Kate said. "Are these the tubes? Good. I'll have new labels made up."

"I'll send Finn over to the boy's place, and then I'll tell the newsnoses they will just have to wait until the microscopics are processed. Now, when can you give me a report on the goings on at the WMHT' "Well, beyond what I've already told you, there's not much to report. We've got some sort of ovarian microsclerosis in two women with profound deficiencies of both platelets and fibrinogen. At this point, we have no connections between the two, nothing even to tell us for sure that the ovarian and blood problems are related."

"So what's next?"

"Next? Well, Tom Engleson, the resident who was involved with Beverly Vitale, is trying to get some information from the roommate of the WMH woman."

"And thou?"

Kate held her hands to either side, palms up. "No plan. I'm on surgicals this month, so I've got a few of those to read along with a frozen or two from the OR. After that I thought I'd talk to my friend Marco Sebastian and see if that computer of his can locate data on a woman named Ginger Rittenhouse."

"Sounds good," Willoughby said. "Keep me posted." He seemed reluctant to leave. "Is there anything else? " Kate asked finally. "Well, actually there is one small matter."

"All right, let me have it." Kate knew what was coming. "I… um… have a meeting scheduled with Norton Reese this afternoon. Several members of the search committee are supposed to be there and well… I sort of wondered if you'd had time to Willoughby allowed the rest of the thought to remain unspoken. Kate's eyes narrowed. He had promised her a week, and it had been only a few days. She wasn't at all ready to answer. There were other factors to consider besides merely "want to" or "don't want to." Willoughby had to understand that. "I've decided that if you really think I can do it, and you can get all those who have to agree to do so, then I'll take the position, " she heard her voice say.

The girl's name was Robyn Smithers. She was a high school junior, assigned by Roxbury Vocational to spend four hours each week working as an extern in the pathology department of Metropolitan Hospital. Her role was simply defined, do what she was told, and ask questions only when it was absolutely clear that she was interrupting no one. She was one of twelve such students negotiated for by Norton Reese and paid for by the Boston School Department. That these students learned little except how to run errands was of no concern to Reese, who had already purchased a new word processor for his office with the receipts from having them.

Robyn had made several passes by Sheila Pierce's open door before she stopped and knocked. "Yes, Robyn, what can I do for you?"

"Miss Pierce, I'm sorry for botherin' you. Really I am."

"It's fine, Robyn. I was beginning to wonder what you were up to walking back and forth out there."

"Well, ma'am, it's this blood. Doctor Bennett, you know, the lady doctor?"

"Yes, I know. What about her?"