Robin Cook - Marker

Laurie started to reiterate her feelings about Dr. Cabreo, but before she could complete a sentence, Jazz and Elizabeth simultaneously lunged for her forearms, pinning them to the bed. Shocked by this sudden, unexpected assault, Laurie struggled to free herself, but a combination of her pain and the nurses' strength made it impossible. The next thing she knew, her wrists were secured in Velcro restraints, which were in turn affixed to the undercarriage of the bed. It had all happened so quickly, Laurie was dumbfounded.

"There! Mission accomplished!" Jazz said to Elizabeth as she straightened up. "We can now relax with the confidence the IV will stay put and this uncooperative patient will not go wandering off."

"This is an outrage," Laurie sputtered. She yanked ineffectually against the restraints, which only made the guardrail rattle. The restraints held firmly.

"Dr. Cabreo doesn't think so," Jazz said with a smile. "The stress of surgery does disorient some people, and they need to be protected from themselves. At the same time, he was concerned you might be a little upset, so he ordered a nice, strong, quick-acting sedative." From her pocket, she produced a syringe that was already prepared for an injection. She took off the needle cap with her teeth and held the syringe up to the light, tapping it gently with the nail of her right index finger.

"I don't want any sedative," Laurie shrieked. She tried again to free her hands.

"That's just the kind of response the sedative is to prevent," Jazz said. " Elizabeth, would you mind holding Miss Montgomery while I do the honors."

With a smile not too dissimilar from Jazz's, Elizabeth grasped Laurie's shoulders and leaned her considerable weight over her. Laurie tried to squirm, but it was to no avail. She felt the cold alcohol pledget swipe across the skin of her upper arm, followed by a pinch and a short, sharp pain. Jazz straightened up, replacing the cap on the used needle.

"Sleep tight!" Jazz said. She waved to Elizabeth, and the two women walked out of the room.

A helpless moan escaped from Laurie's lips as she settled back onto the pillow. Earlier, with her pain and the effects of the drugs she'd been given, she had believed it would have been impossible for her to feel more helpless than she already had, but she was wrong. She was now literally tied to the bed like a potential sacrificial victim. She had no idea what kind of injection she'd been given. For all she knew, it was a poison and the struggle was already over. If it was a sedative, as Jazz had claimed, then soon she was destined to be that much more vulnerable.

Although Jack was in superb aerobic shape from both basketball and biking, he was out of breath when he skidded to a stop in front of the elevators in the OCME. He'd heard Carl Novak yell out his name as Jack ran past the security office, but Jack didn't slow down. No one was in the mortuary office. Jack struck the elevator button repeatedly, as if doing so would speed up its arrival.

As he waited, he tried to think of what Laurie could have possibly done with the CD she'd burned in Roger's office. It had to have been on the CD that Laurie had come across the MEF2A reference. The elevator arrived and Jack jumped on. The CD hadn't been with the charts or the lists, and he hadn't seen it in her desk drawers. The only place he hadn't looked was the four-drawer file cabinet. He glanced at his watch. It was five minutes past four. He'd now been gone from the Manhattan General a little more than three hours, which he felt was the upper limit of what he was comfortable with. As he had decided, he was going to hold himself to fifteen minutes for the CD search.

The elevator bumped to a stop, and it seemed to take an inordinately long time for the door to open. Impatiently, Jack hammered at it with the base of his fist. In its own time it slid open, and Jack took off down the darkened hallway. Like a cartoon character, he almost missed the door into Laurie's office because of how quickly he was running. He had to grab the jamb to keep from sliding past on the heavily waxed floor. Once inside Laurie's office, he started with the top drawer of the file cabinet.

After five minutes of vain searching, Jack slid the bottom drawer closed and stood up. He scratched his head, puzzling over where on earth she would have put the damn CD. He glanced at Riva's desk but dismissed it as a possibility. There would be no reason for her to store it there. A better possibility was that he had missed it when he'd gone through Laurie's desk, so he sat down and searched all her drawers again. This time he was particularly thorough, believing the CD had to be in there somewhere.

Jack sat up again after closing the last drawer. "Damn," he voiced out loud. He looked at his watch. He had less than five minutes of his allotted time left. As he looked back up at the desk surface with the idea of going through the stack of charts to see if the CD had inadvertently gotten into one, his eyes noticed the tiny yellow light on the frame of Laurie's computer monitor. Although the screen was dark, the light suggested that the computer was booted but the monitor had powered itself down.

With his right index finger, Jack hit one of the keys on the keyboard. Instantly, the screen illuminated, and Jack found himself looking at a page of Stephen Lewis's record, listing the results of all his laboratory tests. The print was small, and Jack had to fumble with the reading glasses he'd secretly gotten. With the glasses on, he was able to read the print, and his eye went down the column on the left-hand side of the page. Eventually, he came to "MASNP," and running his finger along horizontally, he found "positive MEF2A."

With a shake of his head at his stupidity of not looking for the CD in Laurie's CD drive, Jack took hold of Laurie's mouse and spent the next several minutes scrolling through the digital record of various patients in Laurie's series. What he found didn't surprise him. With every case that he looked at from both the Manhattan General and St. Francis, he found that the MASNP test was positive for a marker for any one of a number of deleterious gene mutations. Some he recognized, but others he did not. When he got to Darlene Morgan's chart, he got a particularly chilling wake-up call. Her MASNP was positive for the BRCA1 gene!

For a split second, Jack stared frozen at the screen. Up until that very minute, he'd thought of Laurie's risk as a potential target for whoever was killing these patients as relatively low, since statistics were on her side. Suddenly, that was no longer the case. Whoever was doing the killing was seemingly targeting people with inherited deleterious genes, and he remembered that Laurie, like Darlene Morgan, had BRCA1.

As if propelled by a rocket, Jack leaped up, dashed out of Laurie's office, and rushed headlong back down the corridor to the elevator. Luckily, the car was still there when he pressed the down button. As he descended, he fumbled for his cell phone in his coat pocket. He looked at his watch. It was sixteen minutes after four. Quickly, he dialed the Manhattan General Hospital, but he didn't try to put the call through. He had no signal.

The moment the doors opened on the basement level, Jack ran the length of the hall, passing a surprised Carl Novak for the second time just going in the opposite direction. Again, Jack ignored the man. He had his cell phone plastered to his ear after having pressed the call button the moment he'd emerged from the elevator. The hospital operator answered as he thundered down the short run of stairs from the morgue's loading dock to the pavement. After identifying himself as a doctor and without slowing down, Jack breathlessly asked to be put through to the PACU. What he wanted was reassurance that Laurie would not be moved until Dr. Riley made rounds. Running full tilt, Jack reached 30th Street and turned west.