Robin Cook - Coma

The laceration of her lip and the bruise on her cheek had grown more painful. Gingerly she touched her cheek to see if the swelling had increased. It had not. She looked out over the Esplanade and the frozen Charles River to her right The lights of Cambridge were sparse and uninviting. The taxi banked sharply left off Storrow Drive onto Park Drive, requiring Susan to steady herself with her arm.

She tried to assess her progress. It wasn’t encouraging. To keep within a reasonable limit of safety, she thought she had another thirty-six hours or so to press her search. But she was stymied. As the cab crossed the Fenway, Susan admitted to herself that she had run out of ideas on how to proceed. She felt she could not chance the Memorial by day with Nelson, Harris, McLeary, and Oren all lined up against her. She doubted the nurse’s uniform would work on a direct confrontation.

But she wanted more data from the computer. She needed the other charts, too. Was there a way to do it? Would Bellows help? Susan doubted it. She now knew that he was truly anxious about his position. He really is an invertebrate, she thought.

And what about Walters’s suicide? How could those drugs be tied in?

Susan paid her fare and got out of the taxi. Walking up to the door, she decided that in the morning she would try to find out as much as possible about Walters. He had to be related. But how?

Susan stood by the front door with her hand on the knob, expecting to be buzzed in by the watchman at the front desk. But he wasn’t sitting there. Susan cursed as she rummaged in her coat for her keys. It was uncanny how the man at the desk seemed to disappear whenever you needed him.

The four flights up to her floor seemed longer than usual to Susan. She paused on several occasions, because of a combination of physical fatigue and mental effort.

Susan tried to remember if Bellows had said succinylcholine was among the drugs found in the locker in the doctors’ dressing room. She distinctly remembered his saying curare but she could not remember succinylcholine. She got to the top of the stairs still very much lost in thought. It took another minute to find the correct key. As she had done countless times, she inserted the key in the lock. It took a bit of effort.

Despite her deep thought and exhaustion, Susan remembered about the wad of paper. Leaving the key in the door she bent down to look.

The paper was not there. The door had been opened.

Susan backed away from the door, half-expecting it to open suddenly. She remembered the horrid face of her assailant. If he was within the room, he was undoubtedly poised, expecting her to enter as usual. She thought of the knife he had not used the last time. She knew that she had very little time. The only factor in her favor was that if he were in the room, he would not know Susan suspected his presence. At least for a few moments.

If she called the authorities and the man was found, she’d be safe for some hours perhaps. But she recalled the threat about telling the police, the photograph of her brother. Did that suggest a burglar or a rapist? Not likely. Susan understood that the man who attacked her before was both professional and serious, deadly serious. She should run, perhaps even leave town. Or should she call the police anyway, as Stark had suggested? She was no professional; that was painfully apparent.

Why would they be after her already? She felt confident she had not been followed. Maybe the wad of paper had fallen out by itself. Susan advanced toward the door again.

“What the hell’s the matter with this lock?” she said aloud, shaking the keys, playing for time. She remembered that the watchman was not at his desk downstairs. Should she go down and knock on someone else’s door, saying that hers was stuck? Susan backed away again and moved over to the stairs. She thought that was the best idea under the circumstances. She knew Martha Fine on three well enough to knock at this hour. She didn’t know what she should tell her. It was probably best for Martha if she told her nothing. All she’d say was that she couldn’t get into her own room and she needed to sleep on Martha’s floor.

Susan stepped slowly onto the wooden stairs. They creaked mercilessly under her weight. The sound was unmistakable and Susan knew it. If someone was poised behind her door he would have heard it. Susan ran down the stairs headlong. As she got to the third floor she heard the latch on her door snap open. She went on down, not bothering to stop. What if Martha wasn’t there, or wouldn’t answer? Susan knew that she could not let the man get hold of her again. The dorm seemed asleep, although it was only a little after one.

Susan heard her door fly open and hit the wall of the hall. She heard some steps and imagined that someone had run to the banister. Susan dared not to look up. Her mind was made up. She’d leave the dorm. It would be easy to lose whoever was following her within the medical school complex. Susan felt she could run relatively quickly and she knew every inch of the area. She was at the ground floor when she heard her pursuer start down the stairs above.

At the bottom of the stairs Susan turned sharply to the left and ran through a small archway. Quickly she opened the door to the quad outside, but she did not exit. Instead, she let the hydraulic hinge begin to close the door. She turned and passed through the door into the adjacent wing of the dorm, shutting that door after her. She could hear feet running on the landing of the second floor.

Avoiding the noise her shoes would make if she ran normally, Susan moved down the ground-floor hall of the adjacent dorm, keeping her legs relatively stiff. She moved quickly but silently, passing the Student Health Office. At the end of the hall she opened the stairwell door quietly and allowed it to close behind her without a noise. She found herself on a stairway to the basement level and wasted no time in descending.

D’Ambrosio was tricked by the slowly closing door to the quad but not for long. D’Ambrosio was no novice at pursuit and he knew just how much time Susan was ahead of him. As he ran into the quad, he knew immediately that he had been duped. He would have been, except there were no other doors close enough for her to have got back into the building.

D’Ambrosio darted back through the door he had just opened. There were only two alternate routes. He chose the nearest door and ran forward down the hall.

Susan entered the tunnel connecting the dorm with the medical school. She was sure she must be in the clear. The tunnel proceeded straight for twenty-five or thirty yards, then twisted out of sight to the left. Susan moved ahead as quickly as she could: the tunnel was fairly well lit by bulbs in open wire cages.

At the end of the tunnel she reached for the handle on the fire door and opened it. A breeze of air hit her as she went through. A sinking feeling passed over her as she realized that could mean only one thing. The door behind her had to be open at the same time! Then she heard the unmistakable heavy footsteps of a man running in the tunnel.

“My God,” she whispered in a panic. Perhaps she had misjudged. She had left a dorm full of people, even if asleep, for the labyrinthine spaces of a dark, deserted building.

Susan rushed up the stairs ahead, feeling a sense of helplessness as she remembered the strength of D’Ambrosio. Quickly she tried to think of the layout of the building she was now in. It was the Anatomy-Pathology Building, which had four floors. There were two large lecture amphitheaters on the first floor as well as several ancillary rooms. The second floor had the anatomy hall with a number of smaller labs. The third and fourth floors were mostly offices, and Susan was not familiar with them.

She opened the door onto the first floor. Unlike the tunnel, the building was totally dark except for light from the streetlamps filtering through infrequent windows. The floor was made of marble and it echoed with her footsteps. The hall followed a circular pattern as it skirted the pit of one of the amphitheaters.