Intensive Care

Chapter Three

“I hope this is Whistler’s idea of a joke,” Cage muttered as the elevator descended. His beeper read 911C-B110, which translated to “emergency—contamination in room B110.” Nukes in the basement? That didn’t make any sense.

Aware of two nurses and a civilian sharing the car, he didn’t ask about Ripley’s phone call, but she was headed down to the basement on the double. The thought that they were bound for the same place bothered him, though he couldn’t have said why.

“Coming?” Ripley held the door with obvious impatience. He stepped out into the long, damp hallway, aware of the faint hum beneath his skin, a tingle left over from the intimate press of her knees beneath the café table. He frowned.

This was neither the time nor the place for desire. And it certainly wasn’t the right woman.

Still, he moved closer to her side as they strode down the hall. Harris had said something about a phone call, and her file was missing from his desk. His instincts, which he’d learned to heed, gave him a sharp poke, a hint of suspicion. What if Ripley Davis wasn’t a sloppy doctor after all?

What if she was in trouble?

His mind rejected the idea, but his heart wasn’t so sure. And he’d be damned if he let another woman be hurt while he concentrated on other things.

“Rip!” Tansy Whitmore was waiting in the hall, and Cage thought she looked even worse than she had that morning, when he’d noticed the dark shadows beneath her eyes and the deep grooves beside her mouth. Pretty and blond was one thing. Pretty, blond and haunted was another. It made him wonder just what Dr. Whitmore might be hiding. What she knew. “Ida Mae’s body is—”

“Tansy!” Ripley interrupted with a quick look back at Cage. A line had just been drawn with him on one side, the women on the other. Inclining his head in acknowledgement, he opened the door to B110 and gestured them into the autopsy room. He grimaced when the smell hit.

Death, with a pathetic overtone of air freshener.

“Hey, boss.” Whistler leaned over a body bag with no apparent regard for the funk in the room or the smear of…something on his shirt. Cage had thought before that his nominal second-in-command was a tad strange. Now he was sure of it.

“What’ve we got?” He hadn’t meant to bark the question, but it echoed in the fetid room and battled with the cheerful hip-hop blatting from a radio sitting high above the metal slabs.

Whistler straightened unhurriedly. “We started the radiation sweeps you ordered down here in the basement. You know, work the hospital from bottom to top?”

Cage noticed that the pathologist and the women were huddled at the end of the room. “You paged me for contamination. Where is it?”

And why the hell was there radiation in the morgue?

Whistler jerked his chin at the body, which had been only partially unzipped from its bag. “Right here. Ida Mae Harris is hotter than a Las Vegas showgirl.”

What the—? “Then stand back,” Cage snapped. “You’re not wearing a protective suit, you idiot.” No wonder the others were plastered against the far wall. When Whistler obligingly ambled out of range, Cage said, “Where’s she contaminated?”

“Not ‘where,’ boss.” The tech shook his head and shrugged to indicate that he didn’t understand it. “She’s hot everywhere, and I don’t think it’s surface contamination.” He picked up a portable Geiger counter, cranked it on and waved the wand toward the body bag.

The machine’s howl drowned out both the music and Ripley’s gasp. Cage looked over at her and their eyes met and held. He saw surprised horror. Confusion. And…guilt? Then she glanced over at her friend, and Cage saw the curtain drop over her emotions.

He’d get no more from Ripley Davis. Her priorities were clear. Herself first, the members of her department second and the hospital third. Then maybe the patients fourth or fifth.

Just like every other R-ONC he’d ever dealt with.

With unaccountable disappointment sliding through him, Cage glanced down at the pathologist’s notes. The woman’s name jumped out at him. Ida Mae Harris.

This was the wife of the man who had attacked Ripley the day before. Coincidence? He thought not. Suddenly, the distraught husband’s words in the atrium took on a far more sinister meaning.

Dr. Davis killed my wife.

Cage glanced over at her. It was difficult to see the slender brunette as a killer, but he’d learned the hard way that death in a hospital was not always a simple thing. There were often many players. Many mistakes. In his mind, she slid back from “victim” to “suspect” as he reached for his phone and called the Rad Safety Office. “We need all of you down here, pronto,” he barked when one of the techs answered, grouchy at having his card game interrupted. “We need to isolate the morgue, decontaminate everything in it, and dispose of this body.”

“You can’t do that!”

He glanced over at Ripley. She’d advanced to the center of the room with her hands fisted as though she’d fight him for the body. Her breasts lifted with the force of her agitated breathing, and he fought the elemental sexual awareness that clawed at him when she took a step closer.

He leaned down and had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes widen a fraction, though the surge of heat between them was less satisfying. “Yes, I can and I just did. Dixon may have used the RSO job to harass the female doctors who turned him down for dates, but I’m here to keep this hospital safe. That includes isolating radioactively contaminated items.”

Ripley snapped, “That’s not an ‘item.’ It’s a woman’s body. Her name was Ida Mae Harris, and her husband wants to know why she died. Remember him, Cage? Are you going to tell Harris that he can’t bury his wife because she’s going to spend the next thirty half-lives in a fifty-five-gallon drum in the subbasement? Are you going to tell him we won’t autopsy her because we’re afraid of contamination? He doesn’t care about any of that. Frankly, I don’t care about it, either. I want the autopsy done as quickly as possible.”

Why was she arguing for the autopsy? He’d have thought she would want the whole incident buried. Or cremated. It was the surest way to cover a mistake.

What was her angle, then? There had to be one. Doctors didn’t do anything without an agenda, but what was hers? Because she was absolutely right. For the good of the patient and the hospital, they’d have to find a way to examine the body without nuking anyone. He frowned, confused.

Whose side was Ripley Davis on?

“What was wrong with Mrs. Harris?” Whistler interrupted, “Besides the obvious.”

“Breast cancer,” Ripley answered. “She had a small lump removed.”

Thinking fast, Cage asked, “What radiation treatment?” Some of the newer methods involved implanting a radioactive seed in place of the tumor. If the seed hadn’t been properly removed, it could account for the woman’s contamination.

“She’d had two treatments under the A55,” Ripley replied, and Cage’s heart iced at the reminder of another linear accelerator. Another patient. Heather. His wife had gone in for a simple radiation treatment and died mere days later. He barely heard Ripley say, “But that couldn’t account for the contamination. The accelerator beams radiation into the body. There’s no residual source.”

Whistler chimed in from across the room, “And that’s not all, boss. There are hot spots all over the room with varying count levels.” He grinned at the pathologist, who looked as though she might faint. There was a strange, unsettling fascination in Whistler’s expression. “I’ll bet they’ve autopsied radioactive bodies here before and never even knew it.”

“OH, GOD. THAT WAS AWFUL.” Once she and Tansy were back in the R-ONC inner office, Ripley sank to the sofa and covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t believe Ida Mae’s body was radioactive. What the hell had gone wrong?

She’d sat and talked with Ida Mae, just as she visited with each of her patients. She waited with them. Agonized with them. Loved them. And now this? It was unthinkable.

“Nothing was…odd about her treatment, right, Ripley?” Reluctant doubt edged Tansy’s tone. Just back from an overseas assignment with her partner, she hadn’t been in town when Ida Mae had started her treatment.

“It was textbook, Tans. I swear. I have no idea how this could have happened.” Ripley dropped her hands and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. “No idea at all. Damn it.”

“What about the other spots Whistler found in the morgue?”

That discovery had chilled Ripley to the bone. She shook her head. “I hope he was wrong. If not, then…” She faltered. If not, it meant radioactive bodies had been processed in the morgue before.

She took a deep breath. R-ONC was her department. Everything that went on inside its walls was her responsibility. Ergo, it was up to her to figure out what had happened to Ida Mae Harris. With a little help from Tansy.

But when she lifted her head to make the suggestion, Ripley saw that her best friend was practically dozing on her feet. She looked terrible. Quick concern rose. “Tansy, you look like you’re ready to drop. Why don’t you head on home? Better yet, page Dale and let him take you home and put you to bed.” Dr. Dale Metcalf, infectious disease specialist, was Tansy’s partner on overseas assignments. And her lover. Though Ripley didn’t believe in happily ever after for herself, it looked as if Tansy and Dale had a pretty good shot at it.

“We broke up.”

“You what!?” Ripley stared at her best friend, finally realizing that the red tint to Tansy’s eyes and the hollows in her cheeks weren’t all due to her friend’s habitual insomnia. There had been a good dose of tears as well. “When? Why?”

“It doesn’t matter.” When Ripley would’ve argued, Tansy held up a hand. “Not now, okay? I think you’re right about taking the rest of the day off, though. I’ll be back on Sunday for rounds.”

Ripley nodded, knowing that for all her outward cheerfulness, Tansy had a private streak that ran deep. She’d talk about her problems when she was ready to and not before. “See you Sunday, then.” Ripley would simply have to work on Ida Mae’s case herself. There had to be a clue in the clinical notes.

“Dr. Rip?” The breathy voice from the doorway had both women turning.

Milo sagged in his wheelchair with a jumble of pens in his lap. At Ripley’s wave, the volunteer, Belle, pushed him in and took the markers from the sleepy boy’s hands.

“Livvy’s gone home, but Milo wanted to return these to you personally. Shall I put them in your office?” Belle was a tiny woman of indeterminate age who had been volunteering at Boston General for many years. When her father had died the year before, leaving her comfortably well-off but alone, she had begun spending more and more time at the hospital. Now, she divided her time amongst her favorite patients and the hospital chapel.

“Thanks, Belle. You can just leave them on my desk. I’ll sort them and put them away later.”

By the time the volunteer had completed her errand and wheeled Milo back out into the hall, the little boy was fast asleep.

“He worries me,” Ripley said to Tansy, thinking that the chemotherapy and radiation treatments were hurting Milo more than they were hurting the cancer. The boy was simply tired, and his family’s continued absence wasn’t helping Ripley keep his spirits up. If she had a precious child like that…

“You should be more worried about your A55 right now, Dr. Davis.” The dark voice was a shock, but it was the touch of his hand on her shoulder that had Ripley jolting and spinning around.

“Cage!” She’d been so caught up in watching Milo slump toward sick, exhausted sleep that she’d missed both Tansy’s escape and the RSO’s entrance. That was why her heart was racing, she told herself, not because the imprint of his hand burned her shoulder like fire. Then she processed his words and the heat of surprise shifted quickly to anger, both at his disregard for the child and for his implication. “And why should I worry about the accelerator? You checked it yourself this morning. It’s fine.”

“A patient that you irradiated is dead, Dr. Davis, and her corpse is contaminated. I think you should worry a great deal.”

He shouldn’t be so appealing, Ripley thought as her eyes glanced over his stubble-shadowed jaw, when he was threatening her. But for some reason, his antagonism was compelling. Perhaps it was the taint of grief at the back of his eyes. She wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to him. Why did he work in a hospital and hate doctors? Who had he lost, and how had it scarred him so?

Why, thought Ripley to herself with a mental shake, are you trying to romanticize him when he’s being a jerk?

Aloud, she replied, “Of course I’m worried about Ida Mae’s contamination.” He had no idea how worried she was, just as he had no idea that Ida Mae shouldn’t have died. “But I can’t see how the linear accelerator could be involved.”

“It’s killed before.”

The flat pronouncement startled her, as did the menace behind the words. The glimmer of an idea formed in the back of her mind, prompted by the tendril of grief she sensed within him. “True,” she said cautiously, “but the last of those lawsuits was settled years ago. The technology’s improved and the linear accelerator doesn’t leave a source behind. Can you honestly think of a way this machine could cause the sort of Geiger counter reading Whistler was getting off Ida Mae today?”

She had to give him credit. He actually thought about it for a minute before his shoulders relaxed a fraction. “No. I can’t.”

Ripley blew out a breath. “Which means she wasn’t contaminated by her treatment.” It was only a minor relief, because that still left two questions. What had killed her, and what had contaminated her?

“Well, in that case,” Cage began, “if we agree for the moment that the A55 isn’t capable of leaving a radioactive source behind, we have to assume that Mrs. Harris was either fed, injected or washed with something contaminated.”

The list was chilling. Ripley suppressed a shiver. “I guess we’ll know more tomorrow, once your lab has done some preliminary tests.” She switched gears. “You are going to allow us to autopsy, right? I mean, the radioactivity didn’t kill her, so we need to find out what did.”

Cage looked at her sideways. “Worried now? Starting to hear the M-word in the back of your mind?”

It took her a moment before she realized what he was talking about. Malpractice. She bristled. “Contrary to what you think, Cage, not every doctor focuses on covering his or her ass. Some of us are focused on doing the best we can for our patients.” She fisted her hands at her hips. “Yes, I’m worried. Damn worried. But radiation poisoning is a slow process, and Ida Mae didn’t show any symptoms. The radiation didn’t kill her.”

Cage made a sound that could have been a growl, could have been a curse, and he spun to pace across the outer office. “So it’s no big deal that she was contaminated? Since she didn’t die from it, we don’t need to be upset?”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. Don’t put words in my mouth!” Now Ripley was angry, pure and simple. “Do you see me trying to sweep this under the rug? Am I pretending nothing is wrong? No. I care what happened to Ida Mae, and I’m going to figure it out if it kills me.”

“Forgive me if I find that hard to believe,” he growled, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was glaring toward the outer office doors, where the R-ONC label could be read backward through the glass. “You’re all the same. Money first, acclaim second, righteousness third and patients somewhere down around tenth or so.”

Ripley drew breath to blast him into next week, but something about his profile stopped her. His throat worked once, twice, and his hands balled into fists as though he wanted to lash out, yet the grief etched on his face was that of someone who’s been lost for a long, long time.

All of a sudden, he reminded her of Milo.

She crossed the room and touched his shoulder. “Whatever happened to you, Cage, I’m sorry. Maybe you have good reason for thinking this way, but it’s not fair. I’m a good doctor. I’m not in it for the money or the fame. I’m here to help people. You shouldn’t try to blame me for that or twist my motives. You don’t have the right.”

He lifted his hand and it hovered for a moment above hers, until she thought he might return her touch. But then he let his hand fall and stepped away from her.

“I apologize, Dr. Davis.” He was talking to the glass door, and she saw the muscles in his jaw bunch and flex as he swallowed hard and straightened to his full height. “That was unprofessional of me, and you’re right. We need to work together to figure out what happened with Ida Mae Harris.”

“That wasn’t quite what I had—”

He interrupted, “If you’ll get me a copy of her workup for the radiation treatment, I’ll study it tonight.”

Ripley wasn’t sure what to say. For a moment, she’d thought she’d seen something sad and lonely beneath the fierce brows and black eyes. But it could have been her imagination. The man standing before her looked as though he’d never had a weak moment in his life.

In fact, at that moment Cage reminded Ripley quite strongly of her father—the most angry, domineering, perpetually correct individual on the planet. The comparison quickly killed her moment of pity.

She ground her teeth. “I’ll get the paperwork.” And then you can get out of here.

When he was gone, she sat at her desk for a good five minutes, waiting for her system to level. She imagined steam coming out of her ears, and the mental picture was satisfying. But as anger slowly drained, she was left feeling empty and alone.

The sore spots from Harris’s fingers ached down to the bone, and the outer office echoed strangely when footsteps walked past in the hallway. Ripley shivered and heard a muted tinkle from the pocket of her lab coat when the broken glass stem chimed against a pair of pens.

The sound seemed unnaturally loud. Even the vents were shut down.

“I shouldn’t have sent Cage away,” she said into the quiet. “Being aggravated is better than this.” Her words didn’t even echo. They seemed to fall dead the moment they left her lips, but there was a slide of answering motion out in the hallway.

“Hello?” Suddenly desperate for the sight of another human being, Ripley stood and walked across the outer office to poke her head into the hallway. “Hello, is there someone out there?”

The corridor was deserted, but the door to the broom closet was ajar.

“Hello?” she called, walking to the closet. “Mr. Frank, are you in there?” The maintenance crew generally worked the late evening shift, but perhaps the janitor was starting early today. Ripley was so thoroughly freaked out by the bad vibes in her office that even the dour old man’s company would be a relief.

She peeked inside the storage room, where a small army of cleaning supplies was shelved beside a collection of mops and a hulking floor waxer. The overhead light was on. She stepped inside and said, “Mr. Frank?” though it was obvious that the tiny space was empty. She was turning to leave when a faint hiss and a whiff of something nasty drew her to the far corner. She crouched down and sniffed. Her heart picked up a notch.

“Mr. Frank,” she called, readily identifying the odor and its cause. “One of your bottles is leaking!”

The only response was a soft clicking sound and a sudden deadening of the air. Ripley froze. She turned and stared at the door.

It was shut.

The hissing grew louder, and in the light of the single bulb above her head, she saw a cloud of vapor rising from the corner. The smell grew worse. Her eyes watered and the back of her throat started to burn. She grabbed the doorknob and twisted.

It didn’t move.

Ripley stared at the knob in disbelief. She rattled it. Numb shock poured through her and she coughed. The bitter air scorched her throat. The pain spurred hot, hard panic.

“Help!” she yelled, “The door shut behind me and there’s gas. Let me out.” She rattled the knob harder, barely able to see it through a river of tears. She thought she heard a footstep in the hall and yelled louder, “Mr. Frank? Anyone? Open the door!”

She pressed her ear to the wood and heard nothing over the hiss of bubbling chemicals.

Chemicals. She wrapped the lab coat over her face and slitted her eyes against the sting as she crouched down and peered behind the waxing machine. A pair of bottles leaned drunkenly against each other. Drain cleaner spread from one in a garish blue pool. Bleach leaked from the other, and where the two puddles merged, vapor bubbled and hissed.

Chlorine! She had to get out of there. Fast.

Galvanized, yet already weakened by the foul air, Ripley grabbed a broom from the corner and beat the handle against the door. “Help! Help, there’s gas in here. Let me out!” She inhaled to yell again and choked.

It hurt to breathe. It hurt to keep her eyes open. It even hurt to beat on the door. Oxygen. She needed oxygen. Ripley crouched down and sucked at the narrow crack beneath the door, but the seal was tight.

Holding the lab coat over her face, she battled back through the thickening fog and tried to nudge the bleach bottle away from the drain cleaner. But the gas had fuddled her coordination. She pushed too hard, and the bottles tipped over. Bleach splashed into the blue puddle and the reaction was instantaneous.

A gout of vapor erupted. Ripley reeled back and fell against the door, sinking to her knees as her strength failed. Blackness crowded her vision as she gave a few feeble whacks at the door and called, “Help me. Somebody, please help me!”

She thought she heard another footstep in the hall.

Then she thought nothing.

Chapter Four

The anger swirled deep inside Cage as he stalked the halls of Boston General. He didn’t like the effect Ripley Davis had on him. He didn’t like the things she made him remember. Made him want. She wasn’t anything like Heather had been, yet he was drawn to her. It didn’t seem to matter that she was everything he despised.