29

THEY GOT TO HOLY CROSS shortly before noon. Graciela parked in the front lot and they went into the hospital through the general admissions entrance. She did not want to go through the emergency room, since that was where she worked. She explained on the way over that she had been taking a lot of personal days off with little notice to be with Raymond since Gloria’s death. But the patience of her supervisors was wearing thin. She didn’t think it would be wise to take the day off on one day’s notice and flaunt it by walking through the emergency room. Besides, what they were about to do could get her fired. The fewer people who saw her the better.

Once inside the hospital, Graciela, her nurse’s uniform and her familiar face, got them where they needed to go. She was like an ambassador for whom all barriers were lifted. No one stopped them. No one questioned them. They took a staff elevator to the fourth floor, arriving a few minutes past twelve.

Graciela had told McCaleb her plan on the way over. She figured they could count on having fifteen minutes to do what they had to do. That was the maximum-just the time it would take for the blood supplies coordinator to go down to the hospital cafeteria, get her lunch and then bring it back up to the pathology lab. The BSC actually had an hour lunch break but it was routine in that job to eat lunch at your desk because there was no replacement while you were gone. The BSC was a nursing position but because the job did not involve direct patient care, no one filled in the spot when the BSC went on break.

As Graciela expected, they got to the path lab at 12:05 and found the BSC desk empty. McCaleb felt his pulse quicken a little bit as he looked at the flying toasters floating across the screen of the computer sitting on the desk. However, the desk sat in a large open lab station. About ten feet from the computer desk was another desk where a woman in a nurse’s uniform sat. Graciela showed nothing but ease with the situation.

“Hey, Patrice, what’s the haps?” she said cheerfully.

The woman turned from the files she was dealing with in front of her and smiled. She glanced at McCaleb but then looked back at Graciela.

“Graciela,” she said, drawing each syllable out and overdoing the Latin inflection like a television news anchor. “Nothing’s happening, girl. How ’bout you?”

“Nada. Who’s the BSC and where’s the BSC?”

“It’s Patty Kirk for a few days. She went down to get a sandwich a couple minutes ago.”

“Hmmmm,” Graciela said as if it had just dawned on her. “Well, I’m going to make a quick connect.”

She came around the counter and headed toward the computer.

“We’ve got an SCW down in emergency with rare blood. I have a feeling this guy’s going to run through everything we got and I want to see what’s out there.”

“You could’ve just called up. I would’ve run it for you.”

“I know but I’m showing my friend, Terry, how we do things around here. Terry, this is Patrice. Patrice, Terry. He’s pre-med, UCLA. I’m seeing if I can’t talk him out of it.”

Patrice looked at McCaleb and smiled again, then her eyes studied him in an appraising way. He knew what she was thinking.

“I know, it’s kind of late,” he said. “It’s a midlife crisis sort of thing.”

“I should say so. Good luck during residency. I’ve seen twenty-five-year-olds come out of that looking like they were fifty.”

“I know. I’ll be ready.”

They smiled at each other and the conversation was finally over. Patrice went back to her files and McCaleb looked at Graciela, who was seated in front of the computer. The toasters were gone and the screen was awake. There was some sort of template with white boxes on it.

“You can come around,” she said. “Patrice won’t bite you.”

Patrice laughed but didn’t say anything. McCaleb came around and stood behind her chair. She looked up at him and winked, knowing that he was blocking any view Patrice had of her. He winked back and smiled. Her coolness was impressive. He looked at his watch and then held his arm down so she could see it was now seven after twelve. She turned her attention to the computer.

“Now, we’re looking for type AB blood, okay. So what we do is log on here and connect with BOPRA. That’s short for Blood and Organ Procurement and Request Agency. That’s the big regional blood bank we deal with. Most hospitals around here do.”

“Right.”

She reached up and ran her finger beneath a small piece of paper taped to the monitor above the screen. There was a six-digit number written on it. McCaleb knew this was the access code. On the drive over Graciela had explained how little security was attached to the BOPRA system. The code to access the computer was changed monthly. But the BSC position at Holy Cross was not a full-time position, meaning that nurses assigned to it were put through on rotation. This rotation was also routinely disrupted because nurses who had colds, viruses and any other maladies that did not require them to miss work but required that they be kept away from patients were often assigned to the BSC desk. Because of the high number of people working in the slot, the BOPRA code was simply taped to the monitor each month when it was changed. In eight years as a nurse, Graciela had worked at two other hospitals in Los Angeles. She had said that this practice was the same at each of those hospitals as well. BOPRA had a security system in place that was circumvented in probably every hospital it served.

Graciela typed in the code number followed by the modem command and McCaleb heard the computer dial and then connect to the BOPRA computer.

“Connecting to the mother station,” Graciela said.

McCaleb looked at his watch. They had eight minutes at the most left. The screen went through some welcome templates before settling on an identification and request checklist. Graciela quickly typed in the needed information and continued to describe what she was doing.

“Now we go to the blood request page. We type in what we are looking for and then… hocus pocus, we wait.”

She held her hands in front of the screen and wiggled her fingers.

“Graciela, how’s Raymond doing?” Patrice asked from behind them. McCaleb turned and looked back but Patrice was still working with her back to them.

“He’s good,” Graciela answered. “It still breaks my heart but he’s doing good.”

“Ah, that’s good. You gotta bring him in again.”

“I will but he has school. Maybe spring break.”

The screen started printing out an inventory of the availability of type AB blood and the hospital or blood bank location of each pint. While BOPRA was a blood bank itself, it also served as a coordinating agency for smaller banks and hospitals throughout the West.

“Okay,” Graciela said. “So now we see that there is a pretty good supply of this around. The doctor wants to have at least six units on standby in case our patient with the sucking chest wound needs more surgery. So we click on the order window and put the hold on six. A hold only lasts twenty-four hours. If it’s not updated by this time tomorrow, that blood is up for grabs.”

“Okay,” McCaleb said, acting like the student he was supposed to be.

“I’ll have to remember to tell Patty to update this tomorrow.”

“What if you called this up and there was no blood?”

On the drive over she had told him to ask the question if there was anyone else in the nurses’ station when they connected to BOPRA.

“Good question,” she said as she began moving the computer mouse. “This is what we do. We go to this icon with the blood droplet on it. We click and that gets us to the donors file. We wait again.”

A few seconds went by and then the screen began filling with names, addresses, phone numbers and other information.

“These are all blood donors with type AB. It shows where they are, how they can be contacted and this other information shows when they gave blood last. You don’t want to keep going to the same person all the time. You try to spread it out and you try to find someone either near to us, so they can just come in here, or near to a blood bank. You want it to be convenient for them.”