“Sounds reasonable,” Calhoun said.
After Traynor showed Calhoun out, he returned to his desk, looked up Clara Hodges’ Boston number, and dialed.
“I wanted to ask you a question,” he said after the usual pleasantries. “Are you familiar with a gentleman by the name of Phil Calhoun?”
“Not that I recall,” Clara said. “Why do you ask?”
“He was just in my office,” Traynor explained. “He’s a private investigator. He was here to ask questions about Dennis. He implied that he’d been retained by the family.”
“I certainly haven’t hired any private investigator,” Clara said. “And I cannot imagine anyone else in the family doing so either, especially without my knowing about it.”
“I was afraid of that. If you hear anything more about this guy, please let me know.”
“I certainly will,” Clara said.
Traynor hung up the phone and sighed. He had the unpleasant feeling that more trouble was corning. Even beyond the grave, Hodges was a curse.
“You’ve got one more patient,” Susan said as she handed David the chart. “I told her to come right in. She’s one of the nurses from the second floor.”
David took the chart and pushed into the examining room. The nurse was Beverly Hopkins. David knew her vaguely; she was on nights.
“What’s the problem?” David asked with a smile.
Beverly was sitting on the examining table. She was a tall, slender woman with light brown hair. She was holding a kidney dish Susan had given her for nausea. Her face was pale.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Wilson,” Beverly said. “I think it’s the flu. I would have just stayed home in bed, but as you know, we’re encouraged to come and see you if we’re going to take time off.”
“No problem,” David said. “That’s what I’m here for. What are your symptoms?”
The symptoms were similar to those of the other four nurses: general malaise, mild GI complaints, and low-grade fever. David agreed with Beverly’s assessment. He sent her home for bed rest, telling her to drink plenty of fluids and take aspirin as needed.
After finishing up at the office, David headed over to the hospital to see his patients. As he walked, he began to mull over the fact that the only people he’d seen with the flu so far were nurses, and all five had been from the second floor.
David stopped in his tracks. He wondered if it were a coincidence that the nurses were all from the same floor, the same floor where all his mortally ill patients had been. Of course, ninety percent of the patients went to the second floor. But David thought it strange that no nurses from the OR or the emergency room were coming down with this flu.
David recommenced walking, and as he did so his thoughts returned to the possibility that his patients had died from an infectious disease contracted in the hospital. The flu-like symptoms the nurses were experiencing could be related. Using a dialectic approach, David posed himself a question: what if the nurses who were generally healthy got a mild illness when exposed to the mysterious disease, but patients who’d had chemotherapy and, as a result, had mildly compromised immune systems, got a fulminating and fatal illness?
David thought his reasoning was valid, but when he tried to think of some known illness that fit this bill, he couldn’t come up with any. The disease would have to affect the GI system, the central nervous system, and the blood, yet be difficult to diagnose even for an expert in the field like Dr. Martin Hasselbaum.
What about an environmental poison, David wondered. He remembered Jonathan’s symptom of excessive salivation. The complaint had made David think of mercury. Even so, the idea of some poison being involved seemed farfetched. How would it be spread? If it were airborne, then many more people would have come down with symptoms than four patients and five nurses. But still, a poison was a possibility. David decided to reserve judgment until he received the toxicology results on Mary Ann.
Quickening his pace, David climbed to the second floor. What patients he had left were doing well. Even Donald didn’t require much attention although David did adjust his insulin dosage again.