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Jason looked at Cassie, and she shrugged. It wasn’t up to her. And it wasn’t up to Jason, either. Vanessa had made her choice. She could live with the consequences. And if they found their next lead, the risk would pay off.
“Okay.” Jason picked up a fry and shoved it into his mouth. “Lunch first. Then we break the law.”
19
After lunch, Vanessa had led them to a private room in the back of the E.R. and left them while she gathered the information they needed. Jason and Cassie had waited in near silence, scared to make a sound lest they draw attention to themselves. Cassie read through the posters on the wall to waste time. For the most part, everything was ordinary as long as you ignored the ghosts drifting in and out every few minutes.
At least Jason had no idea what was going on. Ignorance really was bliss.
There was a tiny knock on the door. Cassie and Jason exchanged looks before the door swung open, and Vanessa slipped through. She closed it with a click behind her and pressed the lock on the handle. They weren’t about to take any chances.
“We have fifteen minutes until I’m needed elsewhere,” Vanessa explained. “If someone catches us, I can lie and say you two wanted to speak to me privately about an issue, but they’ll be expecting documentation of your visit afterward, and I’d rather avoid any kind of paper trail if we can.”
“The sooner we’re out of here, the better.” Jason pointed to the file in her hands. “Ready?”
“No.” But she placed the folder on the bed between them anyway. “But it’s too late now.”
All three of them pulled up a chair as Vanessa flipped open the folder. The first piece of paper held a list of names. There had to be at least fifty of them. “These are some of the patients who died of complications within the last six months.”
Jason ran a finger down the page. “Have you noticed any connections?”
“Connections, no. But there were some interesting cases.” She flipped the page over to reveal individual patient information. If someone caught Vanessa sharing this with them, they’d undoubtedly fire her. “Here are some people I remember coming through the emergency room. People who seemed to stabilize and then crash. Obviously, that can happen from time to time, but this was more frequent than it should’ve been. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed.”
“Other people were talking about it, too?”
&nb
sp; She nodded. “A couple. A few of my friends. Martin, one of the nurses, overheard a doctor yelling about it in the breakroom. Then Stacey mentioned something, and I realized it wasn’t just here. It was happening all over the hospital.”
“Which means there’s less likely to be a connection between the patients,” Cassie offered.
“Right.” Vanessa gestured to the notes. “Different doctors. Different nurses. Different wings of the hospital. Their conditions were different. The ways they died were different.”
Jason picked up the first two pages and scanned them side by side. “Even if something is going on here, and the hospital is trying to cover it up, a few of these patients have to be the real deal. The question is how we separate the real ones from the suspicious ones.”
“Have any of the patients jumped out at you?” Cassie asked. “Even if you couldn’t find a connection, have any of them seemed stranger than the others?”
“Strange how?”
Cassie caught Jason’s look of warning out of the corner of her eye, but she ignored him. They needed answers. “Abnormal in any way. Maybe a doctor went against procedure and the risk didn’t pay off. Or a patient was halfway out the door when they collapsed. Or the family made a scene because they didn’t think the staff was doing their job. Something that tells us the person died when she shouldn’t have under normal circumstances.”
“Lots of families make scenes.” Vanessa sounded tired. “You can’t blame them, but it doesn’t make our jobs any easier.”
“So, that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.” Cassie kept her voice gentle, but she could feel the desperation building. “Anything else?”
Vanessa flipped through the paperwork. She pulled out a few charts. “Here’s Jasmine and Mark.” She handed them to Jason, who took them like they were made of glass. “And a third patient that I remembered coming through here.”
Cassie took that one. “What was so memorable?”
“He’d been stabbed. The blade had perforated his lung and his liver. He was left to bleed out on the sidewalk, but someone found him and brought him in.” Vanessa shook her head at the memory. “We almost lost him on the table, but they stemmed the bleeding and patched him up.”
“Let me guess,” Cassie interrupted, “he died of complications a few days later.”
“Exactly.” Vanessa sat up a little straighter. “But the strange part was that he still had stitches in from his last fight. I went looking through his charts, but we hadn’t operated on him the first time. He’d been to the Tulane Medical Center. I called and talked to a nurse over there.” She rolled her eyes. “Not an enlightening conversation.”
Cassie lifted an eyebrow in question.
“Every time we go to a function or a convention or a seminar, he hits on me. His name is Alan Wolcott.”
