Devil’s Waltz. By: Jonathan Kellerman

death.

Shut down clinical programs. Discourage research. Freeze salaries and

keep the wards understaffed.

Encourage senior doctors to leave and replace them with inexperienced

help, so that private physicians lost confidence and stopped referring

their paying patients.

Then, when redemption was out of the question, give an impassioned

speech about insoluble social issues and the need to move fearlessly

into the future.

Destroying the hospital to save it.

If Jones and his minions pulled it off, they’d be viewed as visionaries

with the courage and foresight to put a tottering almshouse out of its

misery and replace it with healing grounds for the upper middle

class.

There was a certain vicious beauty to it.

Thin-lipped men planning a war of attrition with flow-charts, balance

sheets, computer printouts.

Printouts.

Huenengarth confiscating Ashmore’s computers.

Was he after data that had nothing to do with sudden infant death

syndrome or poisoned babies?

Ashmore had no interest in patient care, but a strong attraction to

finance. Had he stumbled upon Jones’s and Plumb’s machinations

overheard something down in the sub-basement, or hacked into the wrong

data base?

Had he tried to profit from the knowledge and paid for it?

Big leap, Milo would say.

I remembered the glimpse I’d caught of Ashmore’s office before

Huenengarth shut the door.

What kind of toxicology research could be carried out without test

tubes or microscopes?

Ashmore, crunching numbers and dying because of it. . . Then what of

Dawn Herbert? Why had she pulled a dead infant’s chart?

Why had she been murdered two months before Ashmore?

Separate schemes?

Some sort of collusion?

Big leap. . . And even if any of it was true, what the hell did It

have to do with Cassie Jones’s ordeal?

I phoned the hospital and requested room ~o~W No one answered. Dialing

again, I asked to be put through to the Chappy Ward nursing desk. The

nurse who picked up had a Spanish accent. She informed me the Jones

family was off the floor, taking a walk.

Anything new?” I said. “In terms of her status?”

“I’m not sure-you’ll have to ask the primary. I believe that’s

Dr….”

“Eves.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I’m just a float, not really familiar with the I

hung up, looked out the kitchen window at treetops graying under a

descending lemon-colored sun. Mulled the financial angle some more.

I thought of someone who might be able to educate me financially. Lou

Cestare, once a stocks-and-bonds golden boy, now a chastened veteran of

Black Monday.

The crash had caught him off guard and he was still scouring the

tarnish from his reputation. But he remained on my A list.

Years ago I’d saved up some cash, working eighty hours a week and not

spending much. Lou had given me financial security by investing the

money in pre-boom beachfront real estate, selling for healthy profits

and putting the gain into blue-chip securities and taxfree bonds.

Avoiding the speculative stuff, because he knew I’d never be rich from

practicing psychology and couldn’t afford to lose big.

The income from those investments was still coming in, slow and steady,

augmenting what I brought in doing forensic consults.

I’d never be able to buy French Impressionist paintings, but if I kept

my life-style reasonable, I probably wouldn’t have to work when I

didn’t want to.

Lou, on the other hand, was a very wealthy man, even after losing most

of his assets and nearly all of his clients. He split his time now

between a boat in the South Pacific and an estate in the Willamette

Valley.

I called Oregon and spoke to his wife. She sounded serene, as always,

and I wondered if it was strength of character or a good facade. We

made small talk for a while and then she told me Lou was up in

Washington State, hiking near Mount Rainier with their son, and wasn’t

expected until tomorrow night or Monday morning. I gave her my

want-list. It didn’t mean much to her, but I knew she and Lou never

talked money.

Wishing her well and thanking her, I hung up.

Then I drank another cup of coffee and waited for Robin to come home

and help me forget the day.

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