A pile of InStyle magazines were fanned out seductively on an end table, but Susan resisted the impulse to waste time and instead spent twenty minutes writing and then rewriting an intro to the next story in her notebook. Then she checked her messages. None. She speed-dialed Ethan Poole. Voice mail.
“Ethan,” she said. “It’s moi. Just calling to see if you’ve had a chance to talk to Molly Palmer yet. I’m starting to take this personally.” She noticed that the receptionist was giving her a very dirty look and pointing to a sign that had a picture of a cell phone with a line through it. “Call me,” she said. Then she hung up and dropped the phone in her purse.
A Herald was laid out on a coffee table over a pile of U.S. News & World Reports. Susan had just pulled the front section from underneath the Metro section and put it on top, so her story would be properly displayed for anyone interested, when Fergus appeared with a shrug of apology and a moist handshake and ushered her back past the examining rooms to his office. He was in his mid-fifties and wore his graying hair in a bristle cut, like some sort of Texas high school football coach, and he walked quickly, at an eighty-degree angle, stethoscope swinging, his shoulders slumped and his fists in his white coat pockets. Susan had to hurry to keep pace.
His office was carefully appointed in classy baby boomer–style and overlooked the downtown skyline on the west side and the battered industrial buildings of the east side, with the wide brown river curving in between. On a clear day, you could see three mountains from Portland: Mount Hood, Mount Saint Helens and Mount Adams. But when people talked about “the mountain,” they meant Hood, and it was Hood that was visible out of Fergus’s window, a perk that was not to be underestimated. Still white with snow, it looked to Susan like a shark’s tooth tearing into the blue sky. But then, she’d never been much of a skier.
An expensive handmade Oriental rug lay over the industrial carpet; a wall of bookshelves housed medical texts, but also contemporary fiction and books about Eastern religions; and a large black-and-white photograph of Fergus leaning against a Harley-Davidson hung on one wall, dwarfing the requisite medical degrees that hung beside it. At least he had his priorities straight. Susan noticed an expensive radio on his bookshelf, and bet that it was tuned to classic rock.
“So, Archie Sheridan,” Dr. Fergus said, opening a blue folder in front of him.
Susan smiled. “I assume you’ve spoken to him?”
“Yes. He faxed over a HIPAA waiver.” Fergus touched a piece of paper on his desk. “We can’t be too careful with the privacy issues today. The insurance companies get to know everything about you. But a friend or family member? Not without the proper paperwork.”
Susan set her digital recorder on the desk, lifting her eyebrows questioningly to Fergus. He nodded. She hit RECORD. “So can I ask you anything, then?” she asked.
“I am willing to talk to you briefly about the injuries Detective Sheridan sustained in the line of duty in November of 2004.”
“Go.” Susan flipped open her notebook and smiled encouragingly.
Fergus traced through information in Sheridan’s file. His tone was brusque and businesslike. “He arrived at the ER via medevac at nine-forty-three P.M. on the thirtieth of November. He was in critical condition. Six fractured ribs, lacerations to the torso, a stab wound to the abdomen, his tox levels were dangerously high. We had to do emergency surgery to repair damage to the esophagus and stomach wall. When we got in there, the esophagus was so damaged, we ended up having to rebuild it with a section of bowel. And, of course, she had removed his spleen.”
Susan was scribbling along when he got to that last part. She stopped writing and looked up. “His spleen?”
“Correct. They didn’t release that at the time. She’d done a decent job dividing the blood supply and suturing him up, but there was some minor bleeding we had to go in and clean up.”
The tip of Susan’s pen remained motionless, pressed against the paper of notebook. “Can you do that? Can you just take someone’s spleen out?”
“If you’ve done it before,” Fergus said. “It’s a nonessential organ.”
“What did she”—Susan tapped her pen nervously against the page—“do with it?”
Fergus exhaled slowly. “I believe that it was sent to the police. Along with his wallet.”
Susan widened her eyes in disbelief and scribbled a sentence in her notebook. “That’s the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, shaking her head.
“Yes,” he said, sitting forward, his professional interest clearly piqued. “It surprised us, too. It is major surgery. He’d gone into septic shock and his organs were failing. If she hadn’t treated him at the site, he would be dead.”
“I heard that she did CPR on him,” Susan said.
Fergus examined her for a second. “That’s what the EMTs said. She also used digitalis to stop his heart, and then resuscitated him with lidocaine.”