Robin Cook - Godplayer

Cassi reached out to give Robert a friendly shake, but he eluded her by pushing back on his chair, which glided smoothly out of the way. They both laughed. Cassi sighed and realized she felt better than she had all day. Robert was like a tonic.

“Did your husband tell you he saved me at the last surgical death conference?”

“No,” said Cassi, surprised. She’d never mentioned Thomas’s antipathy to Robert, but it was all too obvious the few times they’d met.

“I made a big mistake. I got this crazy notion that the cardiac surgeons would be overjoyed to hear about SSD, and I decided to make a preliminary presentation at yesterday’s conference. It turned out to be the worst thing I could have done. I suppose I should have realized their egos are such that they’d consider the study a form of criticism. Anyway, when I finished talking, Ballantine started to chew me out until Thomas interrupted with an intelligent question. That sparked a few more questions, and what could have been a total disaster was averted. I did get a lot of heat this morning from the chief of pathology. It seems George Sherman had asked him to muzzle me in the future.”

Cassi was impressed and grateful for her husband’s intervention. She wondered why he hadn’t mentioned it to her until she remembered that she hadn’t given Thomas a chance. She’d brought up her eye surgery the second she’d seen him.

“Maybe I’ll have to take back some of the nasty things I’ve said about your husband,” added Robert.

There was an awkward silence. Cassi did not want to get into a discussion of her own feelings just then.

“Well,” said Robert, rubbing his hands together enthusiastically. “To work! As I said on the phone, I think I found a new SSD case.”

“Cyanotic like the last?” asked Cassi, eager to change the subject.

“Nope,” said Robert. “Come on, I want to show you.”

He leaped to his feet and dragged Cassi out of his office and into one of the autopsy rooms. A young, light-skinned black was laid out on the stainless steel table. The standard Y autopsy incision had been closed with heavy sutures and clumsy bites of tissue.

“I asked them to leave the body so you could see something,” said Robert, his voice echoing in the tiled room.

He let go of Cassi and inserted his thumb into Jeoffry Washington’s mouth, pulling down the lower jaw. “Look in here.”

With her hands behind her back, Cassi bent over and looked into the patient’s mouth. The tongue was a mangled piece of meat.

“Chewed hell out of it,” said Robert. “Obviously had one hell of a grand mal seizure.”

Cassi straightened up, a little sickened by what she’d seen. If this was an SSD case, he was the youngest yet.

“I think this one died of an arrhythmia,” said Robert, “but I won’t know for sure until the brain is fixed. You know, seeing this kind of case doesn’t help my anxiety about my own surgery.” Robert glanced over at Cassi.

“When are you going to have it?” she asked. Robert’s statement sounded definitive.

Robert smiled. “I told you, but you wouldn’t believe that I was going to get it over with. I’m being admitted tomorrow. What about yours?”

Cassi shook her head. “It’s not definite yet.”

“You chicken,” accused Robert with an air of superiority. “Why don’t you schedule yours for the day after tomorrow, too, so we can visit together in the recovery room.”

Cassi didn’t want to tell Robert about her difficulties talking the matter over with Thomas. Reluctantly her eyes went back to the corpse.

“How old?” asked Cassi, motioning toward Jeoffry Washington.

“Twenty-eight,” said Robert.

“God, that’s young,” said Cassi. “And it’s only been two weeks since the last case.”

“That’s a fact,” said Robert.

“You know, the more I think about it, the more disturbing these cases are.”

“Why do you think I’ve persisted?” said Robert.

“With the number you have now and the apparent increase in frequency, it’s getting harder and harder to ascribe the deaths to chance.”

“I agree,” said Robert. “Ever since the last, I’ve had the nagging suspicion that these deaths are more closely related than we suspect. The only trouble with that idea is that it suggests a specific agent, and as your husband pointed out, the deaths are physiologically different. The facts don’t fit the theory.”

Cassi walked around the table to Jeoffry’s right side. “Does this look swollen to you?” she said, reaching out and running her hand up the body’s forearm.

Robert bent down to look. “I don’t know. Where?”

Cassi pointed. “Was the patient on IV?”

“I think so,” said Robert. “I think he was on antibiotics for phlebitis.”

Cassi picked up Jeoffry’s left arm and looked at the IV site. It was red and puffy. “Just for interest’s sake, how about getting some sections of the vein where the IV was?”

“Anything if it will get you to come up and visit.”

Cassi replaced Jeoffry’s arm as carefully as if it were still sensate. “Do you happen to know if all the SSD cases were on IVs?” asked Cassi.

“I don’t know, but I can find out,” said Robert. “I have an idea what you’re thinking, and I don’t like it.”

“The other suggestion I have,” said Cassi, “is to collate the supposed physiological mechanisms of death and see if there is any pattern. You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” said Robert. “I can probably do that today. And I’ll get the sections of the vein, but you have to promise to come up and look at them. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Cassi.

As Cassi pressed the elevator button in the corridor outside the pathology department, she was aware she was dreading her upcoming session with Maureen Kavenaugh. Without doubt, Maureen’s depression exacerbated Cassi’s own. The fact that Cassi had reason to be depressed, as Joan had pointed out, did not make the symptoms easier to live with.

Dreading the meeting with Maureen bothered Cassi because it forced her to admit that as a psychiatrist she was going to have to deal with her own value judgments. In other areas of medicine, if you were forced together with a patient you disliked, you concentrated on the pathology and cut the personal contact to a minimum. In psychiatry that was not possible.

Happily, when she entered her office, Maureen still was nowhere to be seen. Cassi knew she was going to have difficulty concentrating on what Maureen had to say because Robert’s decision to have his surgery brought up the issue of her own. She knew Robert was right. After a moment’s indecision, she dialed Thomas’s office.

Unfortunately, he was still in surgery.

“I don’t know when he will be out,” said Doris. “But I know it will be late because he called me and told me to cancel his afternoon office hours.”

Cassi thanked her and hung up. Blankly she stared at her Monet print. Joan’s comment about the “impaired physician” disrupting his appointment schedule flashed into her mind. Then she dismissed the thought. Thomas had obviously canceled his office hours because he was stuck in surgery.

A knock interrupted her thoughts. Maureen’s listless face appeared in the doorway.

“Come in,” said Cassi as cheerfully as she could. She suspected that the next fifty minutes were going to be a good example of the blind leading the blind.

It was Doris, not Thomas, who called Cassi in the middle of the afternoon to say that Dr. Kingsley would meet her at the front entrance to the hospital at six o’clock sharp. She insisted Cassi be on time because of the party that night. Cassi was in the lobby promptly, but when the clock over the information booth showed twenty after six, she worried that she may have gotten the message wrong.