Dead Certain

paralysis-inducing anesthesia agent, and now his patients are mysteriously dying in what appears to be exactly the same way?”
    “Sort of makes you wonder why he’s never said anything about it at Prescott Memorial. You’d think he’d have figured out what was going on and been screaming blue murder months ago.”
    “So what about the nurse? Did she ever offer an explanation for what made her do it?”
    “No,” replied Elliott. “She never did. It turns out that she killed herself before the case went to trial. She injected herself with a lethal dose of succinylcholine while she was out on bail.”
    “Is that a drug that’s still in use?” I asked, wondering if it was something I should tell Julia Gordon she should look for.
    “No. Now they use something else, the next generation of the drug. The action is basically the same, only quicker. Apparently it’s marketed under the brand name Pavulon.”
     

CHAPTER 25
     
    The conference room at Joan Bornstein’s office had been transformed into a charting command center. Two physicians, both residents at Northwestern who were being paid the equivalent of a month’s salary per day in consulting fees, worked at either end of the long table. Neither looked old enough to have completed puberty. Flanking them were data techs working on their laptops, courtesy of Gabriel Hurt.
    Having heard of Claudia’s death from Jeff Tannen-baum, Hurt had called Cheryl that morning to ask if there was anything he could do. Instead of flowers or sympathy, Cheryl explained that what was really needed was technical support to complete what she’d described only as the research project Claudia had been racing to complete when she died. Four data techs and an MIS specialist from Icon’s Chicago offices had arrived within the half hour. So far they’d set up an information paradigm and were busy entering the data as it was culled from the patient charts by the doctors. The MIS expert, a young woman with close-cropped hair and a Han Solo T-shirt that read NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS, was busy writing a program to evaluate the data.
    “Can you go through the charts and quickly find the list of drugs that each patient was given during surgery?”
    I asked.
    “Are you talking about anesthesia agents?” asked one of the residents.
    “Yes. Specifically I want to know if any of them were given Pavulon.”
    “I’m sure they were,” the doctor at the other end of the table answered promptly. His name was Francis Cho, and as it turned out, he was a surgical resident from the same program at the University of Chicago where Claudia had done her training. “Pavulon is part of the most commonly used combination of anesthesia drugs.“
    “So far I’ve got drug lists for all but two patients,” volunteered one of the data techs.
    He gave the physicians the names of two patients from whom the data was missing. It took a couple of minutes to wade through all the paper, but in the end the data confirmed Dr. Cho’s suspicion. All of the patients had been given Pavulon as part of their surgical anesthetic. “Damn!” I muttered under my breath.
    “Why’s that?” asked Dr. Cho.
    “It gets us nowhere,” I replied. “Even if Pavulon was found in their bodies at autopsy, there’d be a good explanation for it.”
    “You know, speaking of autopsies,” chimed in the other resident, a young man with Oklahoma in his voice, named Larry Spader, “not all of these patients are dead.“
    “What do you mean they’re not all dead?” demanded Joan Bornstein, appearing in the doorway.
    “This one, here, that I’ve just been going through. She suffered respiratory arrest, but they were able to resuscitate her. She spent nine days in ICU, but eventually she went into a convalescent home.”
    “What’s her name?” I asked, feeling the stirrings of buried memory, but unable to make the necessary connection. “I vaguely remember the night that Claudia answered the code on her arrest. She said she wasn’t sure if the woman would ever fully recover.”
    “The patient’s name is Ida Lapinsky,” he replied, consulting the chart in front of him. “Apparently she recovered most of her neurologic functions, certainly to the point where she was able to communicate and take part in her own care. I guess the thing that caught my attention is the fact that the neurologist who examined her in ICU made a note that she might be delusional.”
    “On what basis?” demanded Joan.
    “Apparently Mrs.