Robin Cook - Marker

"Perfectly comfortable. You should get some sleep."

"I'm telling you, I'm not going to sleep! I'm charged up, ready to do a triathlon."

"Okay! Calm down! Then go back to my office so you can at least keep yourself busy. Bring everything back here."

"You're sure you're comfortable?"

"I'm very sure."

"Okay," Jack said, giving Laurie's forehead a kiss before straightening up. "You can get some sleep for both of us. I'll be back and try to come in here in a few hours if that Brunnhilde lets me." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

"I'll be fine," Laurie said. "Don't worry!"

With a final squeeze of Laurie's hand, Jack walked back to the central desk. While Thea was on the phone, standing behind her desk chair, Jack wrote down his name and cell phone number.

"Thanks again for letting me come in here," Jack said when she hung up and looked at him.

"Don't mention it," Thea said. She went up on her tiptoes, looking at something over Jack's shoulder, and shouted: "You got it, Claire. That's the line I was talking about. I don't think it's running right." She looked back at Jack. "Sorry! Don't worry about your wife. We'll take good care of her."

"I've written down my cell phone number," Jack said. He handed the paper to Thea. "If there is any change in her status in any way or form, I'd appreciate hearing about it."

"We'll do our best," Thea said. She glanced at the paper, then tossed it onto the desk in front of her. She flashed Jack a brief smile and a quick wave, then turned to one of the nurses who'd approached with a question.

With a final look in Laurie's direction, Jack walked out of the PACU. He crossed through the surgical lounge. The faces had changed, but the scene hadn't. Inside the men's locker room, he quickly changed out of the scrubs and put on his clothes.

The main lobby of the hospital was eerily quiet and a far cry from its daytime bustle. As he exited through the front door, he was pleased to see that a few taxis were patiently waiting in the taxi line. The rain that had been forecasted had started.

The cab dropped Jack off at the morgue's loading dock, and he walked in past the security office. Carl Novak, the night security officer, bounded out of his chair as if caught unawares, causing the paperback book he was reading to fall to the floor. He leaned out his door and called after Jack, "Is something up that I should know about, Dr. Stapleton?"

"Nope," Jack called over his shoulder.

The night mortuary tech, Mike Passano, had a similar reaction when he heard Jack's voice echo about the tiled morgue and Jack passed the mortuary office. While Jack waited for the elevator, Mike's head appeared. "Is a case coming in that we'll be posting?" he asked.

"Nope," Jack said. "I just love this place so much, I can't stay away."

The fifth floor was barely illuminated, such that the orange office doors appeared a muddy gray-brown. Once inside Laurie's office, Jack flipped on the overhead light and squinted in its relative glare. He sat down in Laurie's chair and surveyed all the series material on her desk. There were two neat piles of hospital charts. Next to them were Roger's lists and a ruled notepad. On the pad was a list of the ways Laurie had determined that the cases were related. On the wall above the desk were two Post-it notes: one a reminder to show Sobczyk's EKG segment to a cardiologist, and the other questioning what kind of lab test an MASNP was. Looking down on the desk was another Post-it wrinkled enough to make it hard to read. Jack spread out the wrinkles. On it was written in Laurie's handwriting: "positive MEF2A," followed by a large question mark. Jack had no idea what MEF2A stood for.

What Jack didn't see was the CD that he remembered Laurie making in Roger's office, and he briefly looked under the charts and under Roger's lists. He even opened Laurie's desk drawers, which were extraordinarily neat, in sharp contrast to his. There was no CD. He scratched his head. Where would she have put it? Then he glanced at his watch. It was almost one-thirty in the morning.

After taking a deep breath, Jack tried to organize his thoughts. His heart was racing from the coffee and his mind was going a mile a minute. It was hard to concentrate on anything. He didn't like being away from the Manhattan General Hospital with Laurie in such a vulnerable state, yet it truly would have driven him crazy to sit in the surgical lounge hour after hour, staring at the clock. As Laurie had suggested, he had it in his mind to take all the material on her desk back to the surgical lounge. But before he did that, he had another idea. He thought he could take the time to possibly get answers to the three Post-it questions. With several hospitals literally next door, it would be a quick errand and might have some significance.

Getting to his feet, Jack shuffled through the charts until he found Sobczyk's. The EKG segment was easy to find, since Laurie had it marked with a ruler. He looked at it again, and again admitted that it made no sense to him. In fact, it was his opinion that no one would be able to make any sense of it. It was essentially the serendipitous recording of cardiac conduction cells in the throes of cellular death. Carefully, he extracted the page with the recording from the rest of the chart. Taking it and the other two Post-it notes, he stepped out of Laurie's office, leaving the light on, and walked back to the elevator. When he pressed the button, the door immediately opened. That never happened in the daytime. It was as if he was the only person in the building.

As he rode down to the basement level, he mapped out his strategy, despite his mind jumping all over creation. He thought he'd run over to the NYU Bellevue medical center, pop in to the ER, and have the on-call cardiology resident paged. Jack couldn't imagine that that would take too long, as the resident might very well be in the emergency unit already. Then Jack thought he'd head to the laboratory and see if he could find the night supervisor. If anybody could tell him what kind of test an MASNP was and what a positive MEF2A meant, it would be a hospital laboratory supervisor. Vaguely, he wondered if the two unknowns were related.

It was still sprinkling outside, so Jack literally ran up First Avenue with the page from Sobsczyk's chart protected under his coat. The emergency room looked pretty much the same as Manhattan General's had looked when Jack had gone in to see Laurie. The crowds generally didn't thin out until after three in the morning. Jack went to the main desk and caught the attention of one of the nurses, who looked like he could have been a bouncer in a club. His name was Salvador, and he had on what looked like a dozen gold chain necklaces nestled on a remarkably hairy chest.

"I'm Dr. Stapleton," Jack said. "Do you happen to know who the on-call cardiology resident is?"

"I don't, but I'll find out," he said before bellowing the question to a colleague within the treatment area, which the main desk opened onto on its opposite side. He put his hand behind his ear to catch the response. The other individual was out of Jack's line of sight.

"Dr. Shirley Mayrand," the nurse said, redirecting his attention to Jack.

"Do you know if Dr. Mayrand is in the emergency room at the moment?"

The nurse shrugged his shoulders. "No idea."

"How can I page her?"

"I can do it for you." Salvador said. He picked up the phone and dialed the page operator. "Should I page her for the emergency room?"

Jack nodded. "I'll wait right here." He turned around and gazed at the scene. If nothing else, it was visually entertaining. Spread out in front of him and filling the vinyl waiting-room chairs was an egalitarian slice of New York City life in both its glory and banality. From crying infants to the tottering aged, from homeless bums to folks in fancy clothes, from the drunks to the mentally anguished, from the injured to the sick, they were all there, waiting to be seen.