Fatal Cure. Chapter 18, 19
18
MONDAY, OCTOBER 25
When Angela first opened her eyes at the sound of the alarm, she was disappointed not to find David next to her. Getting up she pulled the drapes. The overcast skies held the promise of showers.
Angela went down to look for David. She found him sitting in the family room.
“Have you been up for long?” Angela asked, trying to sound cheerful.
“Since four,” David said. “But don’t be alarmed. I think I feel a bit better today.” He gave Angela a half smile.
Although Angela was still concerned about David, she was pleased with Nikki’s respiratory status. Nikki woke with no congestion. And she’d again made it through the night with no nightmares. Even Angela had to admit that David might have been right about the benefits of his silly prank with the Halloween masks.
Unfortunately, Angela herself had had a nightmare. It was a dream in which she came home from shopping, carrying bags of groceries, only to find the kitchen drenched in blood. But it wasn’t dried blood. It was fresh blood that was running down the walls and pooling on the floor.
After Nikki’s respiratory treatment, Angela listened carefully to her chest. It was definitely clear. To Nikki’s delight, Angela told her she could go to school.
Despite the possibility of rain, David insisted on riding his bike to work. Angela didn’t try to talk him out of it. She felt it was encouraging that he was able to muster the enthusiasm for it.
After dropping Nikki off, Angela drove on to the lab, eager to get to work. Mondays were usually busy since there was a pile-up of laboratory work from the weekend. Breezing into her office, Angela had her coat on its hanger before she noticed Wadley. He’d been standing motionless near the connecting door.
“Good morning,” Angela said, again trying to sound cheerful. She hung her coat up and turned to face her chief. It was immediately apparent he wasn’t happy.
“It has been brought to my attention that you did an autopsy here in the lab,” Wadley said angrily.
“It’s true,” Angela admitted. “But I did it on my own time.”
“You might have done it on your own time, but it was done in my lab,” Wadley said.
“It’s true I used hospital facilities,” Angela said. She didn’t agree that it was Wadley’s lab. It was a hospital facility. He was an employee just as she was.
“You were specifically told no autopsies,” Wadley said.
“I was specifically told they were not paid for by CMV,” Angela said.
Wadley’s cold eyes bore into Angela. “Then allow me to clear up a misunderstanding,” he said. “No autopsies are to be done in this department unless I approve them. I run the department, not you. Furthermore, I’ve ordered the techs not to process the slides, the cultures, or the toxicological samples.”
With that, Wadley returned to his office and closed the connecting door with a slam.
As usual, after one of their increasingly frequent confrontations, Angela was upset. As soon as she had composed herself, she retrieved the tissue specimens, the cultures, and the toxicological samples she had taken from Mary Ann. She then carefully packed the cultures and the toxicological material and sent them to the department where she’d trained in Boston. She had enough friends there to get them processed. The tissue samples she kept, planning on doing the slides herself.
David made the rounds of his patients, purposefully leaving Jonathan for last. When he walked into his room he was shocked. The bed was empty.
Assuming he’d been transferred to another room for some ridiculous reason as John Tarlow had been, David went to the nurses’ station to ask where he could find Jonathan. Janet Colburn told him that Mr. Eakins had been transferred to the ICU by the ER physician during the night.
David was dumbfounded.
“Mr. Eakins developed difficulty breathing and lapsed into a coma,” Janet added.
“Why wasn’t I called?” David demanded.
“We had a specific order not to call you,” Janet said.
“Issued by whom?” David asked.
“By Michael Caldwell,” Janet said. “The medical director of the hospital.”