Robin Cook - Foreign Body

“You’re in luck today,” Sumit said. “I have yet to see Miss Hernandez, although I did see her companion.”

“Is he staying here as well?”

“Absolutely.”

“What is his name?”

“Neil McCulgan.”

“Are they staying in the same room?”

“No, separate rooms.”

“Did he go out already?”

“No. He was in exercise clothes. He’s down in the spa.”

“I believe Miss Hernandez spotted me yesterday, so I think I’ll have to wait in the car.”

“Very good,” Sumit said. “We will try our best to keep you informed.”

“Thank you,” Naresh said. “Meanwhile, I’d appreciate if you brought me some tea.”

“Of course. Coming right up.”

“It’s a travesty that the Indian civil service can sleep in their beds at night and allow those children to beg in the streets,” Laurie said indignantly, as she and Jack entered the Queen Victoria Hospital. She had been incensed by the plight of the children on the ride over to the hospital. Remembering her hormonal sensitivity, Jack had been careful to agree wholeheartedly with her response.

“What do you think of this hospital?” Jack asked, trying to get her to change the subject.

Laurie looked around the large sumptuous lobby with its modern furniture and marble floor. “It’s very attractive.” She looked into the coffee shop. “Very attractive indeed.”

“Here’s the deal,” Jack said. “While you head up to your appointment with Dr. Ram, I’m going to check out Maria Hernandez’s body.”

“You’re not coming up to see the ultrasound?” Laurie asked plaintively. “You’ve never seen it.”

“I’ll be there,” Jack assured her. “I just want to check out the body so we’ll know what we’re dealing with. Then I’ll be up to see the ultrasound. I promise.”

Reluctantly, Laurie let Jack go to the elevators while she approached the busy hospital front desk.

Jack was very impressed with the hospital. From his perspective it was not only modern but constructed with great care and with superior materials. It was obvious no money had been spared when the hospital had been designed. As he waited for the elevator, he noticed that the nurses were dressed in old-fashioned white uniforms, complete with hats. There was something nostalgic about it. Since most people were going up in the elevators, Jack had a car to himself going down.

Emerging onto the basement level, Jack walked down the hall and peered into the modern cafeteria. There was a handful of doctors and nurses having coffee. No one paid him any heed. Backtracking toward the elevators, Jack opened the first of two walk-in coolers. There were no bodies. Closing the heavy door, he stepped on to the next. The fairly ripe aroma told him he was in the right place.

There were two gurneys and two bodies, both covered with sheets. Luckily, the temperature was fairly cold — Jack guessed just about freezing. Grasping the edge of the sheet on the first gurney, he flipped it back. The patient was an obese man who appeared to be in his mid-fifties. Jack assumed it was Herbert Benfatti.

After re-covering Benfatti, Jack moved to the second gurney. He pulled back the sheet and found himself staring at Maria Hernandez. Her broad, full face had collapsed somewhat, pulling her mouth down in a grimace. Her color was a mottled greenish-bluish gray. Pulling the sheet down more, Jack could see that she was still wearing her patient’s johnny. Even her IV was still in place. Jack returned the sheet back over her. For a minute he pondered how to handle the situation. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t feel he had a lot of choice.

Returning to the door, Jack stepped back outside. He looked down the long corridor and saw a guard in an oversized baggy uniform sitting in a chair next to a pair of double doors he was ostensibly guarding. Without hurrying, Jack walked down to the elderly man, who’d watched him approach but otherwise didn’t move.

“Hello,” Jack said with an insouciant smile. “I’m Dr. Stapleton.”

“Yes, Doctor,” the aged guard said. Except for his eyes, he was motionless. He was like a statue until Jack caught a partially suppressed pill-rolling tremor. Jack surmised the man had Parkinson’s disease.

Jack pushed through the doors and stepped out onto the loading dock. There was one van in the small parking area. On its side in careful lettering it said Queen Victoria Hospital Food Service. Satisfied, Jack turned back inside. He smiled again at the guard, who smiled back. Jack was confident they were now old friends.

Back on the elevator, Jack pressed the button for floor four. He wasn’t particularly choosy; he just wanted a patient floor, and when the door opened, he knew he’d chosen wisely. He walked over to the busy central desk. The first wave of patients had been sent up to surgery a little more than an hour earlier, and the second wave was being readied. It was mild pandemonium.

“Excuse me,” Jack said to the harried ward clerk. “I need a wheelchair for my mother.”

“The closet next to the elevators,” the clerk said, pointing with the pen in his hand.

Without hurrying, Jack went to the designated closet and wheeled out one of the chairs. It had a waffle-weave blanket folded on its seat, which he left in place. He took the chair to the elevators and brought it down to the basement. Once there, he wheeled it into the cooler with the two bodies and left it.

Returning to the front door of the hospital on the lobby level, Jack walked out into the parking area, climbed into the van that the Amal Palace Hotel concierge had arranged, and drove it around the back of the hospital and down the ramp. He parked it next to the hospital’s food-service vehicle with its rear butting up against the freight dock.

When he entered the hospital from the loading dock, he again smiled and said hello to the elderly guard. Jack was confident they were even better friends now. The guard’s toothless smile was even broader.

As he walked down the hall to the elevator, which was going to take him to the lobby so that he could get directions to Dr. Ram’s office, he took out his mobile phone and the piece of paper with Neil McCulgan’s number and dialed it.

“I hope I’m not waking you guys,” Jack said once Neil had answered.

“Not at all,” Neil said. “I’m in the gym riding the stationary bike. I’m supposed to meet up with Jennifer at nine.”

“You asked if you could help last night.”

“Absolutely,” Neil said. “What do you need?”

“I imagine they’ve already given Jennifer her grandmother’s belongings. What I need is a set of her clothes. Could you ask Jennifer for them and then run them over here to the Queen Victoria Hospital? Laurie and I will be in seeing Dr. Arun Ram. I don’t know where his office is, or I would tell you.”

“Clothes? What do you want clothes for?”

“She needs them, not me. She’s being discharged in an hour or so.”

When Veena had left the bungalow for work that day, Cal had given her specific instructions to artfully find out at some point what had transpired with Maria Hernandez’s body. He’d asked her to do this even though last evening he’d specifically told her, Samira, and Raj not to call attention to themselves in regard to their victims’ remains. But with the American forensic pathologists coming, he knew that it was going to be the critical day.

As he laced up his jogging shoes in preparation for a run, his mind was busy mulling over what Veena might tell him that evening. He hoped and was reasonably confident that the day’s events would be the end of the problem. He wanted to hear that the body was cremated or at the very least embalmed.

While he was thinking about Maria Hernandez, he couldn’t stop obsessing about Jennifer Hernandez, either, and what it was that had aroused her suspicion. During the morning meeting in the conservatory he almost brought up the subject of what he was planning, but at the last minute changed his mind. He was afraid of Petra’s and Santana’s responses, particularly Santana’s, in relation to the necessity of having the Hernandez woman disappear after he had learned from her what he needed to learn.