Robin Cook - Crisis

As Jack drove, he mulled over his promise to check in on Craig, who was probably at that time already in a deep, drug-and-alcohol-induced slumber. Jack wasn't excited about the idea and thought it unnecessary since, in his estimation, Craig was not suicidal in the slightest, and, as an intelligent physician, Craig was well aware of the power of the medications he was taking. On the other hand, the good side of making such a visit would be a chance for Jack to check what kind of biomarker kit Craig used and whether it was outdated. Until he had that information, he couldn't intelligently decide whether or not there was a higher than usual chance the result had been a false positive.

For almost five minutes Jack had watched the hands of the institutional wall clock as they implacably jumped staccato-fashion toward one thirty a.m. With the final leap of the minute hand, Jack took a breath. He hadn't realized he'd not been breathing for the final seconds, since the time was a mini-milestone. Exactly twelve hours hence he would be married, and all the years he'd avoided the issue would be history. It seemed inconceivable. Except for the relatively recent past, he'd practically institutionalized being by himself. Was he capable of marriage and thinking of two people instead of one? He didn't really know.

"Are you all right?" Latasha asked, yanking Jack back to reality by reaching out and briefly gripping his forearm.

"Fine. I'm fine!" Jack blurted. She'd startled him.

"I thought you were having an absence seizure. You didn't move a muscle for the last few minutes. You didn't even blink. What on earth were you thinking that had you so mesmerized?"

Despite being an intensely private person, Jack almost told Latasha what had been on his mind to get a fresh viewpoint. Such a reaction surprised him, even though he acknowledged having developed a strong affinity toward the woman. Except for his detour to the Newton Memorial Hospital, they had been closely working together for some six hours and had fallen into a natural familiarity. When Jack had arrived at the Boston medical examiner's office, they'd taken over what was supposed to be the library, but the shelves were mostly empty, in hope of future funding. The room's major asset was a large library table, onto which Jack had spread the contents of Craig's malpractice file and organized them so he'd be able to find anything in particular if there was a need. At the far end of the table were several open pizza boxes, paper plates, and large cups. Neither had eaten much. Both had been consumed by the conundrum of Patience Stanhope.

They had also carried in the dual-headed stereo-dissecting microscope and, sitting on opposite sides of the table, had spent several hours opening and tracing all the coronary arteries. Like their larger and more proximal brethren, all the distal vessels were normal and clear. Jack and Latasha had paid particular attention to those branches serving the heart's conduction system.

The last stage of examining the heart was to be the microscopic. They'd taken specimens from all areas of the heart but again concentrated in and around the conduction system. Before Jack had arrived, Latasha had made a series of frozen sections from a small sampling, and the very first thing they had done on his arrival was to stain them and then put them out to dry. At the moment, they were in the wings waiting for their cue.

Just after they'd finished staining the slides, Allan Smitham had called. He apparently had been pleased to hear from Latasha, at least it seemed so to Jack from the side of the rather personal conversation he was forced to hear even though he was trying not to. He felt uncomfortable that he was intruding, but the good news was that Allan was eager to help and would run the toxicology screen immediately.

"I didn't come up with any new ideas," Jack said in response to Latasha's question about what was on his mind. Back when his eyes had strayed to the clock and its staccato movement had hypnotized him into thoughts of his intimidatingly imminent marriage, he was supposed to have been trying to think up new theories about Patience. He'd related to Latasha all his old theories by essentially repeating what he'd told Alexis on the phone en route to the hospital. Throwing all pretenses of self-respect to the wind, he included the drug overdose/wrong drug idea even though in hindsight it sounded inane, almost dim-witted, and Latasha had responded appropriately.

"I didn't have any eureka moment, either," Latasha admitted. "I might have laughed at some of your ideas, but I have to give you credit for creativity. I can't come up with nothing, you know what I'm saying?"

Jack smiled. "Maybe if you combined what I've told you with some of this material, you would," Jack said. He gestured at the case-file material on the table. "There's quite a cast of characters. There's depositions here of four times the number of witnesses actually called."

"I'd be happy to read some if you could tell me which you think would be potentially the most helpful."

"If you were to read any, read Craig Bowman's and Jordan Stanhope's. As defendant and plaintiff, they occupy center stage. Actually, I want to reread both their recollections of Patience's symptoms. For sake of argument, if she had been poisoned as we're considering, subtle symptoms would be crucial. You know, as well as I, that some poisons are nigh impossible to find in the complicated soup of chemicals that make up a human being. More than likely, we'll have to tell Allan what to look for in order for him to find it."

"Where are Dr. Bowman's and Mr. Stanhope's depositions?"

Jack picked them up. He had placed them in their own stack. Both were thick. He reached across and gave them to Latasha.

"Holy shit!" she exclaimed, feeling their weight. "What is this, War and Peace? How many pages do we have here?"

"Craig Bowman's deposition went on for days. The court reporter has to take down every word."

"I'm not sure I'm up to this at nearly two a.m.," Latasha said. She let the volumes thump down on the table in front of her.

"It's all dialogue with lots of spacing. It's actually easy to breeze through them for the most part."

"What are these scientific reprints doing here?" Latasha said, picking up the small stack of scientific publications.

"Dr. Bowman is the lead author in most of them and a contributing author in the rest. Craig's lawyer had considered introducing them as supporting evidence of Craig's commitment to medicine as a way of blunting the plaintiff's stratagem of character assassination."

"I remember this one when it came out in the Journal," Latasha said, holding up Craig's seminal article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Once again, Jack was duly impressed. "You find time to read such esoterica?"

"This isn't esoteric stuff," Latasha said with a disapproving chuckle. "Membrane physiology is key in just about every field of medicine these days, particularly pharmacology and immunology even infectious disease and cancer."

"Okay, okay!" Jack said, holding up his hands as if to protect himself. "I take back what I said. My problem is that I went to medical school in the last century."

"That's a lame excuse," Latasha said. She flipped through the pages of Craig's paper. "Sodium channel function is the basis of muscle and nerve function. If they don't work, nothing works."

"All right already," Jack said. "You made your point. I'll bone up on it."

Latasha's cell phone suddenly sprang to life. In the silence, it made both of them jump.

Latasha snatched it up, glanced at the LCD screen, and then flipped it open. "What's happening?" she said without preamble, pressing the phone to her ear.