“Sorry. I’m not making the connection.”
“Bleeding ulcers are common in alcoholics. He didn’t tell anyone about his ulcer,” Calhoun continued. “Maybe he was embarrassed that he was a drunk. There’s a reason for patient intake forms, and this is it.”
“So you’re saying it was death by omission.”
“Exactly! Now, are we finished?”
“Not quite,” I said.
A young man was brought into the ER on a gurney. I saw blood oozing from a gunshot wound to the leg, and the kid was screaming. I stepped in front of Calhoun before she could brush past me.
“Was Dr. Garza in the hospital when Ruffio was admitted?”
“I really don’t remember. I have no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I will. Do you know about the buttons an orderly found on Ruffio’s eyes postmortem?”
“Buttons? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant. But Anthony Ruffio didn’t die from buttons. His bleeding ulcer got him.”
Chapter 97
THE NEXT MORNING, I sat inside my battered Explorer thinking about the long hours I’d just spent with CSU and Jacobi, mulling over Ruffio’s dead body.
Now I watched the light silver rain in my headlight beams as a pale sun rose over the skyline.
I pulled out of the parking lot onto Pine, still wondering if Ruffio’s death had happened as Calhoun had described it—a medical accident. Not the hospital’s fault.
I remembered the despair on Calhoun’s face when she said “superthin blood,” her expression as well as her words sticking with me.
I knew this for sure: no fewer than sixty hospital employees had been near Ruffio as he lay unconscious in the ICU, a respirator doing his breathing for him.
Someone could have injected Ruffio’s IV bag with an overdose of heparin before or after his surgery.
Garza could have done it before he left work for the evening.
But one piece of the puzzle troubled me.
How could Garza have put buttons on the dead man’s eyes?
Chapter 98
CINDY WAS AT HER DESK in the City room at the Chronicle, fine-tuning her story, tweaking it again. She was on deadline, but still, she was glad when the phone rang and she saw the name on her caller ID.
She picked up the line, thinking, Great. Maybe we’ll grab a quick lunch.
“Cindy, what the hell?” Lindsay barked, almost shouted, over the phone. “I asked you please not to do a story on Garza and you agreed!”
“Linds, I had to do it,” Cindy said, keeping her voice low so that everyone in the world didn’t tune in. “My source at Municipal has told me that Garza is being questioned by the board —”
“That’s not proof of anything, Cindy.”
“Did you read the story? I wrote, and I quote, ‘Suspicion has fallen on ER chief Dr. Dennis Garza.’ Suspicion means speculation with foundation. Jeez, Lindsay. Last week the guy completely melted down in court. He warrants some ink of his own!”
“What if he’s guilty of more than malpractice? What if the spotlight you just threw on him drives him underground? What if he packs up and leaves San Francisco?”
“What do you mean ‘more than malpractice’?”
“I don’t know what I mean,” Lindsay said, her voice stiff with pique. “I’m working on it.”