“What is it?” Angela asked. She didn’t like the tone of David’s voice.
“Just get in the car!” David shouted. “Hurry!” He climbed into the driver’s seat of the Cherokee.
“What about Van Slyke?” Angela questioned.
“There’s no time for Van Slyke,” David said. “Besides, he isn’t going anywhere. Come on, hurry!”
Angela put Nikki into the back seat and climbed in next to David. David already had the car started. Before Angela could close her door, David was backing up. Then he made a quick U-turn and accelerated up the street.
“What’s happening now?” Nikki asked.
“Where are we going?” Angela asked.
“To the hospital,” David said.
“You’re driving as bad as Mom,” Nikki told her father.
“Why the hospital?” Angela asked. She reached back and patted Nikki’s knee to reassure her.
“It’s suddenly beginning to make sense to me,” David said. “And now I have this terrible premonition.”
“What are you talking about?” Angela asked.
“I think I might know what Van Slyke was talking about when he referred to ‘the source.’ ”
“I thought that was just schizophrenic babble,” Angela said. “He was clanging. He said source, force, course, and horse. It was just gibberish.”
“He may have been clanging,” David said, “but I don’t think he was talking nonsense when he said source. Not when he was talking about putting it on a conference table that had a model of a parking garage on it. That’s too specific.”
“Well, what do you think he was referring to?” Angela asked.
“I think it has to do with radiation,” David said. “I think that’s what Van Slyke was talking about when he said he’d burned his hands.”
“Oh, come on. You’re sounding as crazy as him,” Angela said. “You have to remember Van Slyke’s paranoia on the nuclear submarine had to do with radiation, so any similar talk probably has more to do with the return of his schizophrenia than anything else.”
“I hope you’re right,” David said. “But it has me worried. Van Slyke’s training in the navy involved nuclear propulsion. That’s driving a ship with a nuclear reactor. And nuclear reactors mean radiation. He was trained as a nuclear technician, so he knows something about nuclear materials and what they’re capable of doing.”
“Well, what you are saying makes sense,” Angela said. “But talking about a source and having one are two vastly different things. People can’t just go out and get radioactive material. It’s tightly controlled by the government. That’s why there is a Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”
“There’s an old radiotherapy unit in the basement of the hospital,” David said. “It’s a cobalt-60 machine Traynor’s hoping to sell to some South American country. It has a source.”
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Angela admitted.
“I don’t like it either,” David said. “And think about the symptoms my patients had. Those symptoms could have been from radiation, especially if the patients had been subjected to overwhelming doses. It’s a horrendous possibility, but it fits the facts. At the time radiation had never entered my mind.”
“I never thought about radiation when I did Mary Ann Schiller’s autopsy,” Angela admitted. “But now that I think of it, that could have been it. Radiation isn’t something you consider unless there is a history of exposure. The pathological changes you see are nonspecific.”
“That’s my point exactly,” David said. “Even the nurses with flu-like symptoms could have been suffering from a low level of radiation. And even . . .”
“Oh, no!” Angela exclaimed, immediately catching David’s line of thought.
David nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “Even Nikki.”
“Even Nikki what?” Nikki asked from the back seat. She’d not been paying attention to the conversation until she’d heard her name.
Angela turned around. “We were just saying that you had flu-like symptoms just like the nurses,” she said.
“And Daddy too,” Nikki said.
“Me too,” David agreed.
They pulled into the hospital parking lot and parked.
“What’s the plan?” Angela asked.
“We need a Geiger counter,” David said. “There has to be one in the Radiotherapy Center for their certification. I’ll find a janitor to let us in. Why don’t you and Nikki go to the lobby?”
David found Ronnie, one of the janitors he vaguely knew. Ronnie was only too happy to help one of the doctors, especially since it took him away from the job of mopping the basement’s corridor. David neglected to mention that he’d been fired from CMV and his hospital privileges had been suspended.