John Lescroart - The Oath

"Well." Hardy was ready to end the conversation. "I don't know if a feeling-"

"No, no." She cut him off. "That's not it. It's…what I'm saying is that people are dying here."

Hardy had picked up his juice glass and now he put it down. His fatigue was suddenly gone. "What do you mean, people?"

"Patients. People who shouldn't die."

"What kind of patients?"

"Mostly old, I think. Mostly in the ICU."

"But you're not sure?"

"No, not a hundred percent." He could hear the exasperation in her voice. "That's what I said at the beginning. I'm not sure."

"Okay," he said, hoping to keep her moving along this trail. "That's all right. I'm interested."

"But nobody's really sure of anything, or saying if they are…"

"Right. But I'm more interested in general conditions there anyway. It doesn't have to be specific-the low morale and so on…"

"Well, all of that's true, too, the tight money, the job insecurity, all that. But really, when we were talking I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was, until tonight when I got home and it hit me…"

"What did, though?" This was pulling teeth, but they seemed to be loosening.

She paused a moment. "It sounds stupid to even say."

"Can you try? I won't think it's stupid, no matter what. Promise."

A longer pause. "Well," she said, "if people keep dying when they shouldn't…"

Hardy finished for her. "Maybe somebody's killing them."

"Yes." The relief in her voice was palpable. "That's what I was trying to get at. That's what it is."

"Do you have any idea who it might be?"

"No. Well, maybe, I don't know. As I said, I don't even know if it's true. But the first one I heard about was maybe a year ago, a man had had a stroke, but it was one of those situations, you know, where the family was hoping he'd recover, the prognosis was okay if he came out of his coma, and they didn't want to pull the plug. So they were waiting. Everybody thought he'd be long term, but then two days into it, he suddenly died."

"Okay," Hardy said. "But doesn't that happen?"

"Sometimes. Sure."

"It doesn't necessarily mean somebody killed him."

"No, of course not." She went silent again for a long beat. "If it was that one man, everybody would have probably forgotten about it by now. But he was something like the third patient to die in as many months. So one of the ICU nurses mentioned it in the nurses' lounge. There's this one weird little guy who works up there, a nurse actually. Rajan Bhutan is his name. He was on duty for all of them."

"Somebody thinks he might be killing patients?"

"No, not really. I don't even know why I mentioned that. I mean, nobody thought about it at the time, but then…it kept happening."

"It kept happening," Hardy repeated. "How often?"

"I don't know. I really don't know. But often enough." He heard her breathe out heavily, the load off.

But Hardy put another one right on. "Do you know if anyone's gone to the police about this? About this man Rajan?"

"No. I don't know. If someone had, wouldn't we have heard?"

"You'd think so."

"And…" She chopped off the thought.

And Hardy jumped on it. "What?"

"Nothing." A pause. "Really, nothing."

"Rebecca, please. You were going to say something."

The decision took a while. "Well…let's just say that it would be hard to keep working if anybody went to the police or the newspaper or anything. I mean, look at Dr. Kensing and Baby Emily. Imagine if it got out that Portola was killing its patients. There's a culture there that's"-she sought the word-"self-protective, I guess."

"Most cultures are," he said. "But I don't know if I can believe it about this. You're saying the administration wouldn't want to know if one of their staff is killing patients?"

"Oh, they'd want to know, all right. They just wouldn't want anybody else to know. It's like bad doctors."

"What's like bad doctors?"

A little laugh. "Well, basically, there are none."

"What does that mean?"

"It means every doctor on the staff is great until they're transferred to, say, Illinois. They get great references, maybe even a raise and moving expenses. Why? Because there are no bad doctors."

"And no whistle-blowers."

This was a sobering statement, and Rebecca Simms reacted to it. Her voice went hollow, nearly inaudible. "And I'm not being one now, Mr. Hardy. I've got three children and my husband and they all need me to keep this job. I don't know anything for certain. I just thought it might help you to know the general conditions, as you called them. We know Mr. Markham was killed, don't we? Maybe that changes something."

"Maybe somebody could go to the police."

"I don't think that's going to happen. I mean, what would they say?"

"They'd say what you just said to me."

"But it's all so nebulous. There isn't any…there's no real proof…"

"There would be bodies." Hardy refuted her in his calmest voice. "They could autopsy the bodies. Haven't they done postmortems anyway? At least on one or two of them?"

"I don't know. I don't think the families usually…" She trailed off, repeated that she just didn't know. "Anyway, you're not part of this. I mean here at the hospital. Maybe you can do something."

Hardy realized that this was as good as it was going to get, at least for tonight. "Maybe I can," he said. "I'll try, anyway." He thanked Rebecca for the call. "You were right. It was important. And I don't think there's really any reason for you to be afraid. I'll keep you out of whatever I do. You were brave to call me."

He heard the gratitude in her voice. "Thank you," she said. "You're a good man. I'm sorry it was so late."

When he hung up, he remained at the table, unmoving, for a long while. He hadn't been able to keep the phone call very short after all, and no doubt Frannie was by now asleep. Even if she wasn't, the mood would have passed, had already passed by the time she went upstairs. Rebecca Simms had called him a good man, but he wasn't feeling much like one at the moment.

Eventually, he finished his juice, got up, and took the glass into the kitchen, where he rinsed it in the sink. He was drying it when he heard a recognizable something behind him. He turned to see his son, one foot resting on the other one, squinting at him in the doorway. "Hey, bud," he said quietly. "Whatcha doin'?"

Vincent wasn't quite a teenager yet, but most of the little boy in him was recently gone. Now his hair was buzzed short and his ears stuck out, while the frame that had tended to a round softness had become lanky, nearly skinny. "I couldn't get to sleep."

Hardy came over, bent down to him. "You haven't been asleep yet all night?"

The boy sat on his knee, threw an arm around his neck. "No. I'm having bad dreams."

"What about?"

"Where you keep disappearing. We're all in this forest and you're just going off for a minute to do something, and then we wait and wait until Mom says she's going to go looking for you, but we beg her not to go because then she won't come back, either, but then she goes and the Beck and I are left there, and we start calling after her, which is when I wake up."

Hardy didn't have to use much imagination to come up with the underpinnings of this scenario, although Vincent certainly wasn't using it as a guilt trip. He hoped he wasn't that sophisticated, yet. If it was his sister, Hardy wouldn't have been so sure. He pulled him closer, which at this time of night his son would still accept. "Well, I'm here," he said comfortingly, "and if you woke up, that means you were asleep, doesn't it? Which means you could get to sleep after all, couldn't you?" The lawyer, arguing, making his point.

"I guess so," Vincent said.

"Come on, I'll tuck you back in."

But Vincent's bed, in the room behind the kitchen, hadn't been slept in at all. He pointed to the back of the house, Hardy's old office. "I'm in the Beck's room. Mom said it was okay."