“Montgomery!” Bingham shouted again. “Answer me. What the hell do you think you’re up to?”
Laurie hung up without saying a word to Bingham. With trembling hand, she took the card off the board. Suddenly the pieces fit together, and what a terrible, hideous picture they formed. Laurie almost couldn’t believe it, yet from the moment everything clicked, she knew the awful, inexorable truth could not be refuted. The thing to do, of course, was to call Lou. But before she did that, there was one other place she wanted to visit.
15
* * *
4:15 p.m., Monday
Manhattan
Lou Soldano was back in the surgical lounge at Manhattan General for the second time that day. But on this visit he wouldn’t have long to wait. This time he’d called the operating room supervisor and asked when Dr. Scheffield would be through with his surgery. Lou had timed his arrival so that he’d catch Jordan just as he was coming out.
After waiting for less than five minutes, Lou was pleased to see the good doctor as he strode confidently through the lounge and into the locker room. Lou followed, hat in hand and trench coat over his arm. He kept his distance until Jordan had tossed his soiled scrub shirt and pants into the laundry bin. It had been Lou’s plan to catch the man in his skivvies, when he was psychologically vulnerable. It was Lou’s belief that interrogation worked better when the subject was off balance.
“Hey, Doc,” he called softly. Jordan spun around. The man was obviously tense.
“Excuse me,” Lou said, scratching his head. “I hate to be a bother, but I thought of something else.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Jordan snapped. “Colombo?”
“Very good,” Lou said. “I didn’t think you’d get it. But now that I have your attention, there is something I wanted to ask you.”
“Make it fast, Lieutenant,” Jordan said. “I’ve been stuck over here all day and I got an office full of unhappy patients.” He went to the sink and turned on the water.
“When I was here earlier, I mentioned that the patients who’d been killed were all waiting for surgery. But I failed to ask what kind of operations they were scheduled to have. I mean, I was told they were going to be corneal operations of some sort. Doc, fill me in. Just what was it you were going to do for these people?”
Jordan stood up from having been bent over the sink. Water dripped from his face. He nudged Lou to the side to get at the towels. He took one and vigorously dried his skin, making it glow.
“They were going to have corneal transplants,” Jordan said finally, eyeing himself in the mirror.
“That’s interesting,” Lou said. “They all had different diagnoses but they were all going to get the same treatment.”
“That’s right, Lieutenant,” Jordan said. He walked away from the sink to his locker. He spun the wheel on the combination lock.
Lou followed him like a dog. “I would have thought different diagnoses required different treatments.”
“It’s true these people all had different diagnoses,” Jordan explained. He began dressing. “But the physiological infirmity was the same. Their corneas weren’t clear.”
“But isn’t that treating the symptom and not the disease?” Lou asked.
Jordan stopped buttoning his shirt to stare at Lou. “I think I have underestimated you,” he said. “You are actually quite right. But often where the eye is concerned, we do precisely that. Of course, before you perform a transplant you have to treat the cause of the opacity. You do that so you can be reasonably sure the problem will not recur in the transplanted tissue, and with the proper treatment, it generally doesn’t.”
“Gee,” Lou said, “maybe I could have been a doctor if I’d had the chance to go to an Ivy League school like you.”
Jordan went back to his buttoning of his shirt. “That comment was much more in character,” he said.
“One way or the other,” Lou said, “isn’t it surprising that all your murdered patients were scheduled for the same operation?”
“Not at all,” Jordan said as he continued to dress. “I’m a superspecialist. Cornea is my area of expertise. I’ve just done four today.”