Chương 4
“I know.”
“You don’t know anything.”
Harrison’s voice lowered.
“I was in the operating room when they stabilized your spine. I sat beside your father when the surgeon said you might never walk again. Your father had been dead nine years.”
Adrian blinked.
Harrison looked down.
“I meant I sat where he would have sat. That’s how tired I was.”
It was the first time Adrian had heard Harrison make that kind of verbal mistake.
The older man removed his glasses and cleaned them with the edge of his tie.
“I know enough to be afraid,” he said.
At the hospital, fear became paperwork.
Nothing dramatic happened.
No physician ran through the doors announcing a miracle. No nurse gasped when Adrian’s toe moved. Nobody used the word conspiracy.
A neurologist Adrian had never met spent almost an hour examining him.
She introduced herself as Dr. Elena Park, asked permission before touching him, and refused to look at Harrison’s notes until she had completed her own assessment.
Adrian disliked her immediately.
Then respected her for the same reason.
She tested temperature, pinprick, pressure, position, reflexes, and voluntary effort.
On the right side, Adrian detected cold inconsistently below the ankle and pressure more reliably near the heel.
On the left, he felt less.
When she asked him to move his right toes, nothing happened.
He tried again.
Nothing.
Sweat formed under his shirt.
“Take your time,” Park said.
“I am.”
“You’re holding your breath.”
“I’m concentrating.”
“You can do both.”
He almost snapped at her.
Then the second toe moved.
Barely.
Park did not react.
“Again.”
He could not.
Twenty minutes later, after repeating parts of the exam, she sat down.
“You have sensory and possibly trace motor function that was not reflected in the most recent records I was sent.”
Adrian stared at her.
“How much?”
“I’m not going to turn one examination into a prognosis.”
“Can I walk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could I have walked six months ago?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has someone been drugging me?”
“I don’t know.”
He gripped the side of the examination table.
“What do you know?”
Park did not flinch.
“I know your current exam does not match the diagnosis of complete functional loss that appears in the summary from your rehabilitation practice. I know that discrepancy needs to be investigated. I know some drugs or procedures can temporarily alter sensation or motor response, but I’m not going to guess what you received until we know what was administered.”
Harrison stood near the window.
“Can you test for local anesthetics?”
“Some compounds or metabolites, depending on timing. Toxicology is collecting samples.”
Adrian laughed once.
It sounded ugly.
“So that’s it?”
“No.”
Park folded her hands.
“That’s the beginning.”
Adrian hated beginnings.
He had become good at endings.
End the meeting. End the therapy. End the conversation. End the relationship before somebody decided his chair made them uncomfortable.
Beginnings required hope, and hope had humiliated him before.
“What happens now?”
Park glanced toward Harrison.
“You stay overnight.”
“No.”
“That wasn’t a negotiation.”
Adrian almost smiled despite himself.
Harrison did.
“She’s growing on me.”
“Both of you can leave.”
Neither did.
Police arrived that afternoon.
The detective assigned to the case was named Dana Cho. She wore an inexpensive gray suit and apologized because she had coffee breath.
Adrian appreciated both details.
People with expensive suits often wanted something from him. People who apologized for coffee breath usually wanted to finish a long shift.
Cho listened without interrupting.
When Adrian finished, she said, “I need to be careful about one thing.”
“Which thing?”
“You keep saying Evelyn poisoned you.”
“I said she injected me.”
“You also said she prevented your recovery.”
“Harrison said that.”
“Harrison said the reaction could mean someone never wanted you to recover. That’s not the same as proving Mrs. Moore intentionally caused or prolonged your disability.”
Adrian looked at Harrison.
“Apparently the police have discovered nuance.”
Cho ignored him.
“We’ve secured the phone she left at the house. We’ve asked your staff not to touch the medication room or security system. Your private security director is unhappy with us.”
“He’s unhappy with most forms of government.”
“Good for him.”
She turned a page in her notebook.
“Did Mrs. Moore normally inject you?”
“No.”
Harrison answered at the same time.
“Possibly.”
Adrian looked at him.
“What?”
Harrison rubbed his forehead.
“Your medication administration record shows injectable treatment under the heading of nocturnal spasticity management.”
“I don’t have spasticity.”
“You did early in rehabilitation.”
“Not for months.”
“I know.”
Cho looked up.
“Who prescribed it?”
“That’s the problem,” Harrison said.
He handed her a printed page.
“The order shows my electronic authorization.”
Adrian stared at him.
“You prescribed it?”
“No.”
“Your name is on it.”
“I can read.”
Cho held out her hand.
Harrison gave her the paper.
“I did not sign that order.”
The hospital room became quiet again.
Adrian looked at him.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Could you have forgotten?”
Harrison’s expression almost offended him.
“I forget where I leave my glasses. I forget why I walk into kitchens. I do not forget authorizing repeated injections into the leg of a patient with a spinal cord injury.”
Cho read the page.
“Can a signature like this be copied?”
“It’s not a signature. It’s an electronic credential.”
“Who has access?”
“My practice staff. In theory, nobody else.”
“In practice?”
Harrison looked toward Adrian.
“In practice, we’re about to find out.”
That evening, toxicology returned preliminary findings that indicated a local anesthetic compound in Adrian’s blood at a concentration Park called “medically significant but not, by itself, explanatory.”
Adrian hated that phrase too.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it may account for some temporary sensory suppression,” she said. “It does not explain fourteen months of disability.”
“So I really am injured.”
“Yes.”
The answer should not have hurt.
May you like
He had known it.
Yet part of him had spent the day constructing a fantasy in which the entire paralysis vanished as soon as the drug cleared. He would stand. Walk out. Fire everyone. Return to his office Monday.
