Robin Cook - Host

With the envelope in hand she went back to the main elevators. In the packed car, she felt a touch of paranoia and wondered why in hell she hadn’t taken the stairs. One of the passengers was a uniformed security guard who seemed to be staring at her. She wasn’t certain, but it made her uneasy. She had always found the strained silence of packed elevators mildly unsettling. On this particular day it was even more so. She was glad that the man didn’t get off with her on two.

Lynn’s plan had been simple. She would find out which room Dr. Wykoff was in and then find a circulating nurse to take the message to the doctor. Lynn even went so far as to take her name tag off her white coat to remain anonymous.

Gazing at the monitor in the surgical lounge that listed all the morning cases, Lynn searched for Dr. Wykoff’s name. When she didn’t see it, she started at the top again. Only then did she decide it wasn’t there. Apparently Dr. Wykoff was not scheduled that morning.

Lynn cursed her luck under her breath. It had been her understanding that all the more junior anesthesiologists, like Dr. Wykoff, were scheduled every day. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t to be today. Instead Lynn walked down to the anesthesia office, where she and Michael had met Dr. Wykoff the previous day. When no one responded to her knocking, Lynn opened the door and looked in. The room was empty. What she did find was a bank of cubbyholes with one for Dr. Wykoff.

For a moment Lynn debated what to do. She wanted to make sure that someone actually put her note in Dr. Wykoff’s hand rather than just leaving it, in hopes she might get it. Finally accepting the inevitable, Lynn went back to the woman’s locker room and changed into scrubs.

Although most people didn’t put masks on until they were in an operating room with a case under way, Lynn put one on in the locker room to mask her identity just as she had done Monday, looking for Carl. She didn’t know if she was being excessively paranoid, but she didn’t care. With her note in hand, she pushed into the OR proper and went to the hectically busy main desk. At that time in the morning, a number of the ORs were in the process of moving from their first cases to their second. Everybody was busy.

Lynn had to wait several minutes. She knew that Geraldine Montgomery, the OR head nurse, would be the best person to ask about Dr. Wykoff, but she was already being besieged by several other people. In the meantime, Lynn checked the white board in case there had been a change. Dr. Wykoff still was not listed. When Lynn finally had an opportunity, she said she was looking for Dr. Wykoff.

“You and everyone else,” Geraldine said with a laugh. “She’s AWOL!”

“What do you mean?” Lynn said, but she didn’t get an answer right away. She had to wait for Geraldine to shout to someone across the hall to stop dillydallying and get the patient down to four, pronto.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Geraldine said, glancing back at Lynn. “What did you say?”

Lynn had to repeat her question.

“For the first time in I don’t know how many years, Dr. Wykoff didn’t show up this morning. It was so unusual that Dr. Rhodes called the police. Apparently Dr. Wykoff had some sort of family emergency. She packed a bag and is gone to parts unknown. At least that is what we’ve been told.”

Stunned, Lynn crumpled the envelope, thanked Geraldine, who didn’t respond because she had already been drawn into another issue, and went back the locker room to get out of her scrubs. This story about Dr. Wykoff was totally unexpected and unsettling. Getting the note about the “looping” to the woman was to ease her guilt about not communicating her extraordinary discovery to anyone, but now, being unable to do it because of the anesthesiologist’s uncharacteristic disappearance, only made her that much more upset, especially since she couldn’t think of anyone else to tell.

Wednesday, April 8, 11:02 A.M.

Having to deal with this new conundrum of Dr. Wykoff’s unexpected disappearance, Lynn knew that she would find trying to suffer through the ophthalmology clinic as bad as the lecture. Instead, she had decided to use the time to solve the problem of getting a floor plan for the Shapiro. To that end, she’d gotten Carl’s Jeep out of the parking garage and headed downtown.

It seemed particularly auspicious to her to find a parking spot on Calhoun Street directly in front of the Charleston County Public Library with time still on the meter. What made it so convenient was that the library was just across the street from 75 Calhoun, the impressive and relatively new municipal building that housed the Charleston Building Commission.

Lynn hurried inside. She wanted to find the right office well before the lunch hour. From her experience with city bureaucracy in Atlanta, where she had grown up, she knew that midday was a time to avoid, as civil servants became progressively distracted and unhelpful. But she soon learned she needn’t have worried. Not only was the building commission easy to find but the people behind the counter immediately gave her the impression they were there to help, particularly a balding, jovial, and colorful fellow named George Murray. The man wore bright-red suspenders to keep his pants up despite a particularly protuberant abdomen. When he saw Lynn’s white coat and correctly guessed she was a medical student, he laughed and told her to go ahead and give him the standard lecture on potential evil consequences of his beer belly. “I like my suds,” he confessed. “Anyway, what can I do to help you?”

“An architect friend has told me that you would have plans available for public buildings, like hospitals.”

“Provided the hospital is in Charleston,” George said with a laugh. “Plans have to be submitted and approved to get a building permit. It’s all in the public domain. What hospital are you curious about?”

Lynn paused, trying to think of how much she wanted to reveal. The last thing she wanted was for it to get back to the dean or anyone at the school or the hospital that she was in the building commission asking for plans for the Shapiro. But she didn’t see any way around the issue. “The Shapiro Institute,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t regret admitting it. The trouble was that, without plans, she worried that she might not get much benefit from making the effort to break into the Shapiro other than possibly accessing the institute’s electronic medical records. She wanted to maximize the chances of finding Carl, which she knew might not be easy among a thousand or so patients unless she had a pretty good idea how the place was laid out.

“That’s part of the Mason-Dixon Medical Center,” George said without hesitation. “What kind of plans are you interested in?”

“I don’t really know,” Lynn admitted. “What kind of plans do you have?”

“There’s floor plans, electrical plans, HVAC plans, plumbing plans. You name it, we have it.”

“I guess I’m mainly interested in floor plans.”

“Let’s see what’s available in the file,” George said agreeably. He was gone for only a few minutes before returning with a very large burgundy-colored folder tied with string.

George heaved the folder onto the countertop and opened it. He slid out the contents. “We are gradually going digital, but we’ve got a long way to go.” He pawed through the material, eventually locating the floor plans. They were bound on one side with staples. “Here you go. Knock yourself out!”

Lynn flipped through some of the pages. She’d seen architectural floor plans before and knew something about how to read them. What surprised her right off was that although the building had a relatively low silhouette in real life, suggesting it was about two to three stories tall when compared with the attached hospital building, it was actually six stories, with four being below grade. “Which is ground level?” she asked.