A Sickening Storm, page 6
Dora and Missy looked at one another; Dora nodded encouragingly, as if to say “Well, go ahead.”
“Um, what do these three illnesses have in common?” Missy asked.
“Other than their mortality rate?”
“Well, yes. For instance, could they originate in the same place?”
“Ahh. Hard to say, but yes, I suppose it’s possible. The latter would tend to come from bodies of warm fresh water—ponds, perhaps, or poorly maintained pools. More likely in the south than here. Rabies of course could come from infected animals just about anywhere. And Balamuthia is found in soil in many places.”
“So they could potentially be found in the same location.”
“Potentially. Yes.”
“What about transmission?”
“Well, you know about rabies. Balamuthia occurs when contaminated soil comes into contact with a cut or an open wound or when airborne infected dirt particles are inhaled. But it’s just so rare. The time frame from exposure to infection would be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and for Naegleria fowleri, a few days to say, two weeks.”
“I see, and what about—”
“Check that. With Balamuthia, it would depend on the source of the infection. Typically you’d see symptoms quite some time after exposure, unless exposure came from organ transplant. Then—”
“Would it be possible for all of these to be given to people on purpose?” Missy interrupted.
There was a long silence. Then, “Excuse me?”
“Could these diseases be purposely given to the victims…I mean, patients?”
The woman on the other end of the phone sounded flustered. “Well, goodness. There would be issues of containment, and somehow ensuring that the individual responsible isn’t infected, but…I suppose so. You’re talking about murder? Do tell me more.”
After obtaining Dr. Traxle’s guarantee of discretion, Missy was able to learn that the three deadly diseases could indeed potentially be transmitted intentionally.
Dr. Traxle asked why the hospital suspected criminal intent as opposed to natural transmission. She was particularly interested in motive, at which point Dora interjected with a brief explanation of all the reasons individuals might be upset with doctors, insurance carriers, and hospitals.
As Dr. Traxle was asking a follow-up question, Dora made a polite excuse and pressed a button on Missy’s phone to end the call, then sat back and took a deep breath.
“Do you agree that her interest in this as a criminal situation was a little strange?”
Missy nodded. “Maybe so. I hope you didn’t offend her with the abrupt end to the call.”
Dora shrugged. “She’s probably already back at her microscope.”
Chapter 7
“I said I would hear you all out, and I will, but I can’t do it if you’re all talking at once!” Craig Balboni waited for the crowd that had filled the four tables at the back of Rudy’s Bar to quiet down. He was dark-eyed, balding, and on the heavy side; he was also determined to wait until the crowd quieted down before he said anything more. After a long minute, he was rewarded with something resembling silence.
“Okay then. If you raise your hands, I will call on you, but let me tell you first that my experience as the president of our city’s construction union may or may not translate into anything of value should you decide to form a hospital workers union. Now, who wants to speak?”
Seven hands shot up, and the owners of four of those hands began speaking at once.
“One at a time. One at a time!” He pointed. “Yes?”
Hakeem Woods looked around, realized he had been called upon, and stood up, nervously clearing his throat. “I think I can speak for most of us when I say that for years, our hours have been too long and there have been too few of us to properly care for patients at the hospital, but with COVID—Mm mm.” Hakeem wore a violet cap and dark, rounded sunglasses, even indoors. He shook his head.
Aliyah, his wife, shook her head along with him and echoed him. “Mm mm!”
“For years?” someone repeated. “You mean, forever!”
Keisha Williams was called on next. “I’m not even doing this for better working conditions. I’m doing this for the patients.” She tossed her head of light brown hair. Her cinnamon-colored features were tensed with stress and doubt. “I’m doing this for people like my mother.”
Next to her, Tansy Willard, a perpetually frowning blonde woman in her early sixties, looked as if she’d taken a bite of a lemon. She muttered to herself, shaking her head. “You don’t want to know about my mother, or my aunts, or my father.”
“Okay, okay!” The union leader held both hands in front of him, palms down, patting the air. “Okay, settle down. So, tell me. What’s the hourly wage for hospital workers here?”
Several people answered at once. Tansy’s voice rose above the rest. “Anywhere from $12.50 to $15.50 an hour, depending on the job and seniority.”
“You expect me to save someone’s life for thirteen dollars an hour?” Stella Malone had climbed up on her chair, hands on hips, her dyed, jet-black hair whirling about her face as she shook her head. She had, until just a year before, sold marijuana to many in Beach City, including some of those present, but the semi-legality and near-ubiquitousness of the drug had forced a career change. Now she was learning medical billing at Beach City Medical.
“Patient conditions are terrible,” agreed Nia Paulson, who was married to Big Ru and had, until two months prior, been a stay-at-home-mom, caring for Baby Ru. “Wounds aren’t cleaned, bathrooms aren’t cleaned, folks goin’ without pain meds. And the smell—woo hoo!” She waved a palm in front of her face. Several around her nodded in agreement.
“I’m not going to kid you,” Balboni responded. “Starting a union is hard. You’ll need to get signatures, and once the facility starts with resistance—and they will—you’re going to lose some of those people. And the hospital will deny that the conditions are what you say they are.”
“Maybe they need to walk around their own hospital,” Nia responded.
“Just telling you how it’s gonna be.” Balboni waited until the chatter quieted. “You’re going to need signatures from thirty percent of your workers to give to the National Labor Relations Board. Then there’ll be an election—and I’ve got to tell you. Unions rarely win.”
“So, what we supposed to do?” someone yelled.
“We can ask the facility to recognize the union voluntarily,” Balboni answered.
“Hah! Good luck with that!” Stella sat down again and folded her arms across her chest.
“Legally,” Balboni continued, “employers are not allowed to retaliate, bribe, or threaten you for organizing.”
“Keyword,” emphasized Keisha. “Legally.”
“Exactly right,” agreed Balboni. “They’ll do everything they can to stop you. It’s on you to stick with this and to get folks to sign up and stay signed up. For now, your job is to get those signatures. You all have my card. I’m available any time you want to talk. I suggest we meet at Rudy’s at this time every week, long as Rudy’s okay with it.” He glanced at Rudy, an imposing, 6’4” presence behind the bar.
Rudy nodded. “Always,” he said quietly.
The room had grown silent. Seated at the bar, three hefty young men in similarly tailored light blue collared shirts and jeans had closely followed the conversation and, now and then, given one another knowing looks. They were union busters, newly hired by George Campbell.
• • •
You walk through the hospital lobby, wearing your mask and your badge. You look around with disgust at the slogans on the shiny wall posters promising the best care modern medicine has to offer.
But you say nothing.
You again hear the music as you pass the large room with the tall windows near the main entrance. And again, the music stops you in your tracks because it is played and sung with such joy, such love, such warmth. For an instant you are transported to your earliest youth, when your mother sang to you, and you sigh inside.
Then the song ends and your insides go hard again. The memory door in your mind slams shut, and you continue on your way.
You take the elevator, making sure to sanitize your hands before and after, and to use your elbow to punch the button for the third floor.
But you say nothing.
You walk the floor, peeking into rooms, smiling at the patients, but your mind is filled with disgust at the empty hypocrisy that is everywhere in this awful place.
But you say nothing.
You glance at the nurses and doctors you pass in the halls and your breathing grows shallow, and your chest tightens with hatred for them all, for the system that produced them and purports to hold them up as wonderful examples of healing.
But you say nothing.
You arrive at the patient’s room, double check to make sure you’ve got the details right, then walk in.
And then, you take the action that will sacrifice this one life in the name of truth and clarity.
• • •
Once Dora and Missy were provided access to the three cases, they tentatively confirmed what George Campbell, Dr. Matsumoto, and just about everyone else at BCMC had already concluded—that these were tragic, even bizarre happenstances, and that other than having been at Beach City Medical Center at about the same time, none of the deceased patients were connected in any discernible way. Their diagnoses were unrelated. They did not see the same physicians. Their rooms were not in close proximity to one another; they seemed to have had no friends or family in common. Their employment histories and those of their family members did not overlap.
The only new and relevant piece of information that came to light was that Ricardo Morales had briefly been a patient at the Beach City ER two months prior to his most recent stay, which left open the possibility, however remote, that he had in fact been infected at the facility after all. He had sliced one of his fingers open while cutting vegetables in his kitchen and required stitches.
While infection at BCMC was a possibility, Dora and Missy’s conclusions and, therefore, Geller Investigations’ official finding, was that no evidence directly supported the theory that infection had occurred at BCMC, much less that it had been intentional.
The two investigators emailed their official report and explained their process of investigation and their conclusions to George Campbell via video chat.
“Mr. Campbell,” Dora paraphrased from the report, a physical copy of which she held in her hand, “we see no connection between the cases of these three patients, other than their having recently been patients at your facility. We see no evidence that anyone on the BCMC medical staff or anyone else, for that matter, negatively impacted the health of these individuals. We find no connection between their cases, a finding supported by Dr. Matsumoto and the BCMC medical team.”
Campbell, who had appeared tense at the start of the session, visibly relaxed. “Good. What about a motive? Did you find any reason anyone might want to harm these patients?”
“We did not,” Dora confirmed.
“Nor are we aware of any threats against the facility on social media,” Missy added, looking at Dora, who agreed. “Nor any mentions that rise above the grief or frustration one would usually find when a patient’s stay does not go as planned or does not end well.”
The hospital CEO sat back and folded his arms. “Just because you didn’t find a motive or connection doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. It may be that the individual is smart enough to hide their activity well.”
Dora breathed a small sigh. “What do you see as a possible motive? Why do you think these were intentional?”
“Your medical director doesn’t see anything beyond unfortunate, tragic illnesses,” Missy added.
George answered quickly, as though he’d been expecting the question. “Infections such as these, at least two of them anyway, are so rare as to be nonexistent. The fact that they occurred at about the same time in the same place is a red flag.”
“Well,” Dora said, thinking through her response as she spoke. “Is the possibility of these diseases being transmitted intentionally more or less likely than their occurring naturally?”
George looked baffled yet spoke with intensity. “I wish I could tell you. It’s awfully strange and of course these are tragedies we wish we could have prevented, for the sake of the patients and their families. Our reputation is that we stand alone at the pinnacle of healing on Long Island. Having multiple rare, fatal diseases occurring in our facility is all but impossible, and absolutely unacceptable.”
Neither Dora nor Missy stated the obvious—that the “impossible” had, in fact, occurred.
• • •
For a weeknight, Rudy’s was packed. As COVID and its ubiquitous Omicron variant waned, Rudy’s business grew, until he took out the tall, clear plastic dividers he had installed between every two seats at the bar. He also added tables in a few of the spots where he had removed them to allow for the required six feet of space between them.
Craig Balboni’s construction union crowd took up three tables and Rudy and Agatha’s personal friends and regular bar patrons took up another three, which left two tables for whomever was able to get to them first. Balboni’s crowd was sixty percent blue-collar and white, while Rudy and Agatha’s crowd was about eighty percent Black, ten percent Latinx, and ten percent white.
Dora and Missy were part of the latter ten percent.
The two groups had found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict a few years earlier, a conflict that led to a chair-throwing, window-busting, police-calling brawl. Since then, they had, with Balboni’s and Agatha Raines’s influence, learned to focus on their mutual, shared interests rather than their differences.
Everyone was reasonably happy, and peace reigned.
Hakeem Woods wore his trademark violet beret and dark, round sunglasses that would not have been out of place in the 1970s. Now and then someone told him this, but he just laughed and said that was fine. His arm stroked Aliyah’s back. His bride of seventeen years wore her black hair in long, beautiful box braids that were streaked with gold. He was talking to the Ru brothers, Big Ru and Little Ru, but everyone at all three tables, and many at the union tables, were listening, as this information concerned them all.
“That’s just it,” Hakeem was saying. “We are serious as a heart attack. We have a lot of volunteers, and we’re determined to get it done!”
Little Ru scratched his head and rubbed the sides of his bearded face. “Keem. Listen to me. It’s been tried before. And it’s failed. I don’t see how you can succeed, what with Campbell and his crowd set against any union of any kind. What’s changed?”
Keisha Williams, who was a medical coder at BCMC, answered for Hakeem. “We got God on our side.”
“Mm hmm,” Little Ru said. “Well, ’scuse me, but did the union organizers have God on their side last time? I guess not.”
Several people started arguing at once, but Hakeem held out a hand for quiet. “One difference is, we’re much more organized. Can I prove it this minute? No, but wait and see.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” said Eunice Paulson, who was married to Little Ru. Together they owned a successful construction company that worked with Craig Balboni’s union. “Hey, Ags!”
From two tables away, Agatha Raines heard her name called. “Hey Eu!” she called back, and the two friends laughed.
“How’s the little prophet?” Eunice yelled.
The little prophet was the nickname everyone had given to Samuel, Agatha and Rudy’s adopted little boy, now eighteen months old. They had tried and failed for years to get pregnant and remained over the moon about the adoption.
Agatha shrugged and held both palms in their air, close to her sides. “Doin’ the best I can.”
The men at Rudy and Agatha’s friends’ tables argued passionately about sports and even more passionately about sports betting, which was newly legal. Most of them also participated in a constantly-moving poker game, usually sponsored one way or another by Rudy himself.
“C’mon, man,” Big Ru was saying. “They made the playoffs last year and they’ll make a run this year. Trust me.”
“I do trust you,” LaChance Williams, who was married to Keisha, said. “But the Knicks are done. They won’t make the playoffs, and you can take that to the bank.” The hubbub around the table had quieted as he spoke. LaChance was a successful banker and investor who was known for only making predictions when he was certain of the outcome.
Several men immediately reached into their pockets for their phones and opened their betting apps.
At another table, some of the women were cooing over the new hairstyle of Shanice James, a hair colorist and West African beauty, with satin black skin and confident, sedate features. She was the queen of all she saw, and the queen now sported a daring faux-hawk that was universally examined and approved.
A sweet voice began to sing a familiar song and the entire bar hushed as Kelvin Franklin began his performance. The few in attendance who had never heard the beloved local performer and friend to many were momentarily startled into believing that the late Marvin Gaye himself was in attendance or was somehow performing from beyond the grave.
As everyone agreed that things truly were not “what they used to be,” Twirly McTeague, a white woman known as a “hippy chick,” despite being in her late forties, began to dance—spinning gracefully between tables, her red and yellow dress whirling around her as she moved, her arms undulating like independent ethereal beings.
Martine Franklin, Kelvin’s wife, joined her, dancing in place with a sweet, placid smile. While her day job was senior project scientist at a well-respected engineering firm, her nights saw her as the unofficial, beloved centerpiece of the crowd at Rudy’s Bar.
• • •
You had given a lot of thought to your next visit to the hospital. You had to choose the diseases, which would have to be virulent and deadly. You had to acquire and contain the pathogens and determine a means of transmission. Your work would be the contributing, determining factor in multiple patients’ outcomes and the fallout would be felt far beyond the patients and their families. Justice.
