Dead Certain

with you, Mrs. Estrada wasn’t your patient, she was Gavin McDermott’s. What if those deaths weren’t caused by something that happened in the operating room? What if it was something that happened after?”
    “You mean like an infection or a bad drug interaction? Believe me, Kate, the first thing they did was rule those things out,” protested my roommate.
    “What I’m suggesting is much worse,” I said slowly. “I think somebody is going around Prescott Memorial Hospital killing off Gavin McDermott’s patients.”
     

CHAPTER 10
     
    That night I slept so badly that it almost didn’t feel like rest but rather just an inferior form of waking. Claudia and I had stayed up until the small hours of the morning discussing what she’d dubbed my angel-of-death theory. It’s true that talking about something can make it seem real. By the time I finally went to bed, I found myself fearing for the helpless patients at Prescott Memorial.
    Usually I’m not prone to flights of fancy, but Claudia had had no trouble coming up with any number of ways to keep an already weakened patient just recovering from surgery from taking their next breath. She ticked them off on her fingers—everything from a pillow over the face to an overdose of morphine, all unlikely to be suspected or detected, especially in the absence of an autopsy.
    But what I found really chilling was the matter-of-fact way that Claudia had accepted the idea of the deaths being caused deliberately. Claudia went to work every day in a world where mothers set fire to their children and fathers raped their daughters. To her, the idea that someone was wandering the halls of Prescott Memorial killing off patients hadn’t seemed far-fetched. Indeed, murders of this kind were not uncommon. Exhausted caregivers, burned-out nurses, and the occasional psychopath had all been known to systematically help patients ' into the great unknown.
    However, how any of this was related to Mrs. Estrada— much less the other deaths at Prescott Memorial—was pure conjecture. Claudia had no idea whether the bodies of any of the other patients who’d died had been autopsied, much less what the results had shown. She also couldn’t say whether Mrs. Estrada and the other patients had anything in common other than the fact that they were patients of McDermott. When I asked her whether the hospital had conducted any kind of inquiry into the other deaths, she’d replied that as a mere trauma fellow, she would be the last to know and suggested that I talk to the chief of staff, Carl Laffer.
    But when I woke up the next morning, talking to Laffer—at least about patient deaths—was the last thing on my mind. Indeed, in the light of a new day my entire discussion with Claudia seemed absurd—the product of my desire to offer an explanation that would exonerate Claudia from responsibility for Mrs. Estrada’s death and Claudia’s eagerness to embrace it.
    As I made my way to the kitchen to start the coffee I stopped long enough to peek into Claudia’s room, but she’d already left for the hospital. As I went about the business of getting ready for my day I found myself wishing her a quiet shift. It had taken a fair amount of courage for Claudia to just go into work. By now there wasn’t a dietary or maintenance worker at Prescott Memorial Hospital who hadn’t heard about yesterday’s tongue-lashing from Dr. McDermott.
     
    Saturday-morning traffic was light going downtown, and the lakefront was already filling up with people who were out enjoying the beautiful day. I wondered what it would be like to wake up and have a whole weekend to myself. To get up and look out the window at the weather and then sit on the sunporch sipping coffee and considering the alternatives—a leisurely run by the lake, window shopping, reading a novel in the park... It was an agreeable fantasy, like daydreaming about being a ballerina. In my line of work, Saturday was a workday, distinguished from the rest of the week only by the facts that the phone didn’t ring quite so much and I didn’t have to put on stockings and high heels.
    When I arrived at Callahan Ross, I found Sherman in the library in exactly the same place I’d left him the night before, only this time with his face pressed to the keyboard, fast asleep. I shook him by the shoulder and told him to meet me in my office. Then I sent out for coffee. Sherman and the coffee arrived at the same time, and we got right down to work.
    It