Roger nodded while silently reaffirming his opinion about his deficiencies as a detective. After chatting with José, hearing a little about the loner Motilal, and learning about the night shift in general, he wasn't eliminating anyone as a suspect, but he pressed on. "Did you hear what José said when I asked him if he was aware of the seven deaths we've seen over the last couple of months?"
"Yeah, I heard," Cindy said with a derisive chuckle and a dismissive wave of her hand. "I don't know what was going on in his mind, because he knows about them. We all know about them, particularly the anesthesiologists. I mean, we haven't exactly been dwelling on the issue, but it's been the topic of conversation on occasion, especially as the cases mount."
"Why would he tell me he was unaware of them?"
"Beats me. Maybe you should ask him when he comes back. The anesthesiologists never stay long on codes. They just pop in if they happen to be available to intubate the patient or, if the patient was already intubated, to make sure the patient was intubated properly."
"Thanks for chatting with me," Roger said. He then glanced around the room a final time. "I have to say, no one else seems particularly friendly."
"As I said, we have our quirks, but if you came up here on a regular basis, you'd find people friendly enough."
With a final wave and appreciative smile, Roger walked out to the elevator. His finger went toward the call button, but stalled in midair. His visit to the OR hadn't been particularly helpful. He had two anesthesiologists who were potential suspects before he arrived, and he still had two after he left.
The choices were simple. He could stay on the third floor and visit the pharmacy and try to find out something about Herman Epstein, who'd transferred from the night shift at St. Francis to the night shift at the General. He could go down to the second floor and visit the lab to find out what he could about the two lab technicians who were on the same list. He could go back down to the first floor and visit security or even to the basement to visit housekeeping and maintenance, where there were two more similar transferees. Yet something told him he wasn't going to learn anything, thanks to his total lack of investigative experience. His little chat with José had made it clear that he didn't even know what questions to ask, short of "Are you a serial killer who's been knocking off patients during the night shift?" Laurie's idea was good in theory, but in reality, there were just too many potential suspects. All the transferees had access to the hospital in general by virtue of their respective job descriptions.
The thought of directly asking people if they were a serial killer brought a smile to Roger's face. It wasn't hard to guess what would happen to his reputation and job if he started asking such a question. Roger sighed and looked at his watch. It was now after three a.m. Although some of the caffeine euphoria was wearing off, the feeling of being wired hadn't. There was no way he would fall asleep if he went back to his apartment.
Impulsively, Roger pressed the up button on the elevator. He decided he'd pay a visit to the surgical floor, whose charge nurse had been mugged and killed and where four of the seven unexpected deaths had taken place. He also decided to take a quick tour through the fifth floor, which housed orthopedics and neurosurgery, where there had been two deaths. He reasoned that he'd never been in the hospital during the night shift, particularly on the patient floors, and having a sense of the ambience and locale might be helpful in his thinking.
Although he had assumed as much, the atmosphere of the surgical floor was completely different than it was during the day. Instead of controlled chaos, an unexpected and deceptive serenity reigned. Even the lighting was different, dimmed from its daytime starkness. As Roger walked from the elevator lobby toward the nurses' station, he saw no one. It was as if there had been a fire drill and everybody had run out of the building.
Reaching the nurses' station Roger looked at the bank of monitors displaying the EKGs and pulses of all the patients. With modern wireless technology, such telemetry was now easily available on regular hospital floors. The problem, of course, was that no one was there watching it.
Roger looked down the lengthy corridor in both directions. The composite floor gleamed in the half-light. At that moment, Roger heard the telltale squeak of a desk chair. Wondering where the sound had come from, he rounded the end of the nurses' station and walked over to an open doorway. It led into a utility room with a long built-in desk/countertop, under and over cabinets, and a refrigerator. Sitting at the desk with her feet propped up and reading a magazine was an arresting-appearing nurse. Her features reflected a hint of Asian exotic, which Roger had come to appreciate in his years in the Far East. Her eyes were appropriately dark, as was her cropped hair. Beneath her scrubs was the hint of a shapely, hard body.
"Evening," Roger said before introducing himself. He noticed that the nurse was reading a firearms magazine, which seemed mildly inappropriate.
"What's up?" the nurse inquired without removing her feet from the edge of the countertop.
Roger smiled inwardly. He remembered a time in the not-so-distant past when nurses were deferential to doctors to the point of acting intimidated, even in the United States. This one clearly wasn't.
"I'm just checking to see how things are going," Roger said. "I know you tragically lost your charge nurse yesterday morning. I'm sorry."
"Not a problem. Actually, she wasn't all that good as a charge nurse."
"Really?" Roger questioned. It seemed a curiously unsympathetic response. Such candor with a stranger was hardly the norm, whether what she said was true or not. He read her nametag: Jasmine Rakoczi. He remembered that she was on the transferee list.
"I'm not pulling your leg. She was a weird one, and nobody liked her much."
"I'm sorry to hear that, Ms. Rakoczi," Roger said. He leaned back against the countertop and crossed his arms. "Has Clarice Hamilton assigned a new charge nurse for the shift?"
"Not yet. We got a temp to tide us over, but just as another grunt. I kind of took charge and assigned the patients. Somebody had to do it, and the others were just sitting around, wringing their hands. Anyway, things are going just fine."
"I'm glad to hear it," Roger said. "Ms. Rakoczi, I'd like to ask you a question."
"Call me Jazz. I don't respond to Ms. Rakoczi."
"I assume you have been aware of the four deaths of relatively young, ostensibly healthy, postop patients that have occurred on this floor over the last six or seven weeks or so, with the last one just last night."
"Of course. It would be hard not to be aware."
"True," Roger agreed. "Have they bothered you?"
"How do you mean?"
Roger shrugged. The question seemed so self-evident. "Have they disturbed you psychologically?"
"No, not really. This is a big, busy hospital. People die. You can't get attached, because if you do, you'll go crazy and your other patients will suffer. You brass sitting in your fancy offices don't remember what it's like out here in the trenches, you know what I'm saying?"
"I suppose," Roger said. He detected a not-too-subtle change in the nurse's demeanor. She had started out breezy but now seemed wary and taut, almost to the point of anger.
"Are you asking me this because they occurred on my floor?"
"Obviously."
"There have been similar deaths on other floors."
"I'm aware of that."
"In fact, there was one tonight, just a half hour ago, up on the OB-GYN floor. Why don't you go up and hound them?"
A distinctly unpleasant tenseness gripped Roger's entire body, which he blamed on the caffeine. After the euphoria passed, he invariably felt as if all his nerves were exposed. Learning of yet another death right while he was there in the hospital supposedly looking for suspects, made him feel uncomfortably complicit, as if he should have been able to prevent it. "Were the specifics about the same?" he asked, hoping vainly for a negative reply.