John Lescroart - The Oath

"Not really. Evidently I slept during Vinnie's game."

"It wasn't that bad. So what are you going to do?"

"I've got some reading material in my briefcase. Maybe if I blur my eyes just right, I can get it to make some sense."

He was sitting at the desk in the bedroom, five of Driscoll's purloined pages spread out before him. He wasn't completely sure why these five had made his cut-none had more than a couple of lines. But something about each of them had seemed pregnant enough with some kind of hidden meaning to warrant one more round of conjecture.

"See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24."

"Talk to MR-address complaints re: hands on at Port. PPG ult."

"Medras/Biosynth/MR."

"Foley. Invest. $$$. Saratoga. DA? Layoff? Disc. w/C."

"See Coz. re: punitive layoffs-MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?"

And then a little voice said, "Go to sleep. This is not happening." He must have made it to the bed because that's where he was when he woke up.

Glitsky kissed his wife good-bye at the front door.

"If I'm around for lunch, I'll call."

"If I'm around, I might go out with you." Treya gave him a mock-sad moue. "A year ago the mere thought of lunch with me would have made your morning. You'd have planned your whole day around it."

"I know, but we're married now, and you're pregnant and all. It's pretty natural, the romance going away with all that day-to-day stuff."

She put an arm around his neck and brought her mouth up to his ear. "What was last night, then?"

"Last night?" Glitsky scratched at his scar, pretended not to remember. "Last night?"

She swung a hard elbow and caught him in the gut. "Oh, sorry." A smile, then, "Shoot for lunch."

Rubbing his stomach, he closed the door and came back into his kitchen, where Hardy sat at the table. He'd called an hour before and offered to drive Glitsky in to work, though he usually drove in with his wife. But Hardy thought he might have something on Markham, although he didn't know what it was, and maybe Abe, now pulling up his chair, could help.

Hardy drummed his fingers. After twenty seconds, Glitsky said, "You want to stop that?" Then, "Ross looks like he's in some kind of trouble, doesn't he?" A minute later, he pulled one page over in front of him. "This one, maybe, it could be Mike Andreotti."

"New to me," Hardy said.

"The administrator at Portola. He'll talk to you if I ask him to. He's all cooperation with these homicides. I might even go with you. Where'd you get this stuff?"

"Jeff Elliot couldn't make heads or tails of it. He said if I could, I was welcome to it."

"Yeah, but where did it come from originally?"

"It was Markham's, through Driscoll, then through Elliot."

"Not exactly Tinkers to Evers to Chance."

"No, but I'll take it."

"At this point"-Glitsky was getting up-"I'll take anything."

If at Glitsky's last meeting with him, Andreotti had been at the edge of physical and nervous exhaustion, now he was the walking dead. He didn't even bother rising from the chair behind his desk, didn't wonder that the new man, something Hardy, wasn't a policeman or a DA or even a reporter. He just didn't have any more energy to expend. He'd been at work all night, dealing with a sick-out of his nurses, scared off either by the rumors or sensing an opportunity for leverage in their struggle for higher wages. He didn't know and really at this point didn't care. The ship was going down anyway, and he saw no way to stop it.

And now these men had a puzzle for him. He got a perverted kick out of that. He was so beat he'd have trouble with the rules of tic-tac-toe, and they wanted him to decipher this puzzle. It was funny, really, if he had the strength to laugh.

"See MA re: recom. on SS. Compare MR memo 10/24."

"No idea," he said.

The other fellow, Hardy, leaned forward slightly. "We believe the MR stands for Malachi Ross. Does that help?"

Glitsky had seen a lot of burnout in his job and read the signs here. He pulled the page around, facing him again. "See Mike Andreotti about his recommendations on SS. Compare with the Malachi Ross memo dated October twenty-fourth. Does that help? What's SS?"

This time, there was no hesitation. "Sinustop."

"And what was your recommendation?"

"Well, it wasn't mine. I'm just the administrator, but the PPG recommended-"

"Excuse me," Hardy said. "What's the PPG?"

Andreotti blinked slowly, took a breath, and let it out. "The Parnassus Physicians' Group. Basically, they're the doctors that work here."

"Okay." Glitsky, staying with the program, continued, "And what did they recommend about Sinustop?"

"Just that we'd been inundated with samples, and that perhaps we should make it a policy for a while to go easy on giving the stuff out until more data got collected on it. Which now, in retrospect, was a smart suggestion."

"But you didn't implement it?" Hardy asked.

"No. Ross overrode it. He wrote a long memo justifying the position-I've got it somewhere here. I gather the stuff was medically pretty substandard. I'm not a doctor myself, but some of the senior staffers were appalled that our medical director would put his stamp on anything like that. So as usual, we compromised, and Malachi got what he wanted."

"You don't like him much." Glitsky didn't phrase it as a question.

But Andreotti merely raised his shoulders a centimeter. "People become pricks around money and money's been so tight here for so long…" Another shrug. "If it wasn't him, it would be somebody else."

"Only a couple of weeks ago, it was Markham," Hardy reminded him.

"No. It was still Ross. Ross has the passion for money. Markham just wanted to make a profit. There's a difference."

"What's the difference?" Glitsky asked.

"Well, take Sinustop, for example. It didn't have to be any issue at all, but Ross saw it saving us a million bucks a year, right to the bottom line. If there might be some downside, he was willing to risk it if it stemmed the bleeding."

"And Markham wasn't?"

"Sometimes, but nowhere near the way Ross did. You think it was Markham who made the call on Baby Emily? No chance." He pointed at Hardy's page again. "Anyway, I guess that's why he wrote that note to himself. He thought Ross went too far there again."

"What about you, Mr. Andreotti?" Glitsky asked. "What did you think?"

Another weary sigh. "I know this always sounds terrible, but I'm an administrator. I resist the temptation to play doctor. I follow orders."

But Hardy had what he needed, and had already gotten a hint on something else. "If we may, sir," he began, translating the second note as Glitsky had done. "Talk to Ross and address complaints about hands-on at Portola. Parnassus Physicians' Group ult, which must be ultimatum."

"It was." This wasn't any mystery to Andreotti. He actually almost seemed to perk up slightly. "Sometime last year, Ross started coming by the hospital all the time-drop-ins, he called them. Checking up on our physicians' procedures on everything from birthing to surgeries to ER procedures first, making recommendations to save a buck here, a buck there. Later actually advising doctors what they ought to do right while they were treating their patients. Now, when you realize that even the lowliest GP has a self-image just a notch below God's, you can imagine how popular these visits were. Finally, the PPG issued an ultimatum that he had to stop and, mostly, he did. At least enough to satisfy them."

"But not completely?" Hardy wanted to be sure.

"No. But the drop-ins fell off from twenty a month to maybe five and he stopped giving orders disguised as advice."

"Do you have any record of the days he came? The actual dates?" Hardy asked.