The main lobby of the hospital was eerily quiet and a far cry from its daytime bustle. As he exited through the front door, he was pleased to see that a few taxis were patiently waiting in the taxi line. The rain that had been forecasted had started.
The cab dropped Jack off at the morgue's loading dock, and he walked in past the security office. Carl Novak, the night security officer, bounded out of his chair as if caught unawares, causing the paperback book he was reading to fall to the floor. He leaned out his door and called after Jack, "Is something up that I should know about, Dr. Stapleton?"
"Nope," Jack called over his shoulder.
The night mortuary tech, Mike Passano, had a similar reaction when he heard Jack's voice echo about the tiled morgue and Jack passed the mortuary office. While Jack waited for the elevator, Mike's head appeared. "Is a case coming in that we'll be posting?" he asked.
"Nope," Jack said. "I just love this place so much, I can't stay away."
The fifth floor was barely illuminated, such that the orange office doors appeared a muddy gray-brown. Once inside Laurie's office, Jack flipped on the overhead light and squinted in its relative glare. He sat down in Laurie's chair and surveyed all the series material on her desk. There were two neat piles of hospital charts. Next to them were Roger's lists and a ruled notepad. On the pad was a list of the ways Laurie had determined that the cases were related. On the wall above the desk were two Post-it notes: one a reminder to show Sobczyk's EKG segment to a cardiologist, and the other questioning what kind of lab test an MASNP was. Looking down on the desk was another Post-it wrinkled enough to make it hard to read. Jack spread out the wrinkles. On it was written in Laurie's handwriting: "positive MEF2A," followed by a large question mark. Jack had no idea what MEF2A stood for.
What Jack didn't see was the CD that he remembered Laurie making in Roger's office, and he briefly looked under the charts and under Roger's lists. He even opened Laurie's desk drawers, which were extraordinarily neat, in sharp contrast to his. There was no CD. He scratched his head. Where would she have put it? Then he glanced at his watch. It was almost one-thirty in the morning.
After taking a deep breath, Jack tried to organize his thoughts. His heart was racing from the coffee and his mind was going a mile a minute. It was hard to concentrate on anything. He didn't like being away from the Manhattan General Hospital with Laurie in such a vulnerable state, yet it truly would have driven him crazy to sit in the surgical lounge hour after hour, staring at the clock. As Laurie had suggested, he had it in his mind to take all the material on her desk back to the surgical lounge. But before he did that, he had another idea. He thought he could take the time to possibly get answers to the three Post-it questions. With several hospitals literally next door, it would be a quick errand and might have some significance.
Getting to his feet, Jack shuffled through the charts until he found Sobczyk's. The EKG segment was easy to find, since Laurie had it marked with a ruler. He looked at it again, and again admitted that it made no sense to him. In fact, it was his opinion that no one would be able to make any sense of it. It was essentially the serendipitous recording of cardiac conduction cells in the throes of cellular death. Carefully, he extracted the page with the recording from the rest of the chart. Taking it and the other two Post-it notes, he stepped out of Laurie's office, leaving the light on, and walked back to the elevator. When he pressed the button, the door immediately opened. That never happened in the daytime. It was as if he was the only person in the building.
As he rode down to the basement level, he mapped out his strategy, despite his mind jumping all over creation. He thought he'd run over to the NYU Bellevue medical center, pop in to the ER, and have the on-call cardiology resident paged. Jack couldn't imagine that that would take too long, as the resident might very well be in the emergency unit already. Then Jack thought he'd head to the laboratory and see if he could find the night supervisor. If anybody could tell him what kind of test an MASNP was and what a positive MEF2A meant, it would be a hospital laboratory supervisor. Vaguely, he wondered if the two unknowns were related.
It was still sprinkling outside, so Jack literally ran up First Avenue with the page from Sobsczyk's chart protected under his coat. The emergency room looked pretty much the same as Manhattan General's had looked when Jack had gone in to see Laurie. The crowds generally didn't thin out until after three in the morning. Jack went to the main desk and caught the attention of one of the nurses, who looked like he could have been a bouncer in a club. His name was Salvador, and he had on what looked like a dozen gold chain necklaces nestled on a remarkably hairy chest.
"I'm Dr. Stapleton," Jack said. "Do you happen to know who the on-call cardiology resident is?"
"I don't, but I'll find out," he said before bellowing the question to a colleague within the treatment area, which the main desk opened onto on its opposite side. He put his hand behind his ear to catch the response. The other individual was out of Jack's line of sight.
"Dr. Shirley Mayrand," the nurse said, redirecting his attention to Jack.
"Do you know if Dr. Mayrand is in the emergency room at the moment?"
The nurse shrugged his shoulders. "No idea."
"How can I page her?"
"I can do it for you." Salvador said. He picked up the phone and dialed the page operator. "Should I page her for the emergency room?"
Jack nodded. "I'll wait right here." He turned around and gazed at the scene. If nothing else, it was visually entertaining. Spread out in front of him and filling the vinyl waiting-room chairs was an egalitarian slice of New York City life in both its glory and banality. From crying infants to the tottering aged, from homeless bums to folks in fancy clothes, from the drunks to the mentally anguished, from the injured to the sick, they were all there, waiting to be seen.
"Hold your horses," Thea shouted at her jangling phone. She was trying to fill out a supply requisition form. Giving up, she picked up the phone. It was the night shift OR supervisor, Helen Garvey.
"What's your bed count?" Helen demanded without mincing words.
"Occupied or empty?" Thea questioned.
"Now, that's one of the dumber questions I've heard tonight!"
"You're in a bad mood."
"I have a right to be. According to the ER, we're about to be inundated with trauma cases, and the first wave is on its way up. There was a head-on collision with a bus and a van, and the bus went over a guardrail. As I understand it, they distributed the victims, but we got the lion's share. I've contacted all the on-call people so we can be running up to twenty ORs. It's going to be a long night."
"I've got thirteen patients with only three empty beds."
"That's not encouraging. What are the patients' statuses?" Thea let her eyes roam around her domain while she mentally reviewed each case. "Everybody is in good shape except for an abdominal aneurysm re-bleed. He's got to stay, because he might have to be opened up yet again. He's still losing blood out of his drain." "So the others are stable?" "At the moment."
"Then clean house, because you're next for this tidal wave." Thea hung up the phone. She was psyched. Challenges like this were her forte. "Listen up!" she called out to her troops. "We're switching to disaster mode, and this is no drill."
The release of the wheels jolted Laurie from her drugged slumber to a semiwakefulness. Her eyes squinted against the bright overhead fluorescent lights, and for a moment, she was disoriented to time and place. There was another jolt when the bed began to move, and the jostling brought a brief but sharp reminder that she had had intra-abdominal surgery. All at once, Laurie knew where she was, and the large clock over the PACU room's door, which she was approaching, told her the time: It was twenty-five minutes past two.