"GUESSWORK"
- Chapter Six -
"Needle In A Haystack"
At 2:30 in the morning, most of the city was tucked in for the night. Streets were pretty much deserted, and even traffic lights in outlying areas flashed red and amber. All-night convenience stores, hunched low on corner lots, tickled their rundown neighborhoods with blinking neon. All of it beckoned to night dwellers with smells of hot dogs and strong coffee, and tempted people's tobacco addictions with oversize cigarette signs.
Wilson drove cautiously, as usual, not pushing it, taking time to ponder the unexpected emptiness of Gregg House's apartment, and the puzzling question of where in hell the man might have gone.
PPTHospital loomed near the center of town, its symmetrical rows of windows lighting the wards brightly, while leaving office areas nearly dark with ghostly glow from the hallways. Light standards in the institution's parking lots were slightly dimmed in the late night hours, but the circle of the emergency room entrance gave the illumination of midday to the area below.
Wilson drove the Volvo around back and parked in the employees' garage. He left the car in its designated space, got out and slammed the door a bit harder than he'd meant to. His action and subsequent movements attested to his state of mind, and his brain whirled in double time as he sought a solution to his friend's sudden disappearance. The answer he was seeking did not lie back at the apartment, and therefore must be somewhere in the fourth floor diagnostics department, in House's office, a few doors away from his own.
Wilson strode through the hallway and into the almost empty lobby. He made a beeline for the same elevator he'd ridden down in earlier, and pressed the "up" button. The car had been resting vacant, and its doors opened immediately. He jabbed the control for the fourth floor and rode it up there with an impatience he seldom experienced.
He wondered what it was he expected to find. If he actually did find anything, would he notice its significance? Or would he pass on by, unaware? He was a little concerned, more than a little worried, and highly uncertain of his own ability to ferret out whatever it was that might tell him what he was looking for.
His brain didn't work like House's. Would he pick up on a clue if he found one?
As a rule, Gregory House was constitutionally incapable of keeping his mouth shut about anything that coursed through his labyrinth of a mind. If he thought it, he almost always spouted it to Wilson. Groused about it, rolled it around on his tongue and thought about it out loud until sometimes Wilson could hear Gregg's grumblings in his dreams.
But in the last month before House finally took himself off to rehab, he had been experiencing an unusual amount of leg pain. His verbal excursions had pretty much diminished behind icy personal barriers.
Wilson's keys jingled against the heavy plate glass of the door to the diagnostics suite, and the oncologist slid inside and crossed to House's desk. He pulled out the expensive ergonomic office chair and flopped down in it wearily, glancing around the deserted room.
Where in the hell do I start?
He sat motionless for a few minutes, facing the window where a string of streetlights spread dim phosphorescent shadow images across the carpet and partway up the opposite wall. Objects in the room stood out in bas-relief in the backlight from the street, giving them an otherworldly glow. Wilson stared, unseeing, lost in thought.
This section of the fourth floor was quieter than most, because this particular wing was given over to office space for the hospital's department heads and their staffs. There was no hustle-bustle here, as could be found on the wards in the opposite wing at the end of the hallway where his cancer patients fought their unending battles.
Wilson studied the neatly kept expanse of Gregory House's private office with an appraising eye. It was Spartan in many ways, unless one knew how to interpret Gregg's eclectic tastes. There were no framed photographs of friends or family members, no diplomas or professional commendations adorning the walls. There was a noticeable lack of mementoes and keepsakes from grateful patients, and nothing that spoke particularly of personal pride, passion or sentimentality.
Yet, there was a sense of guarded elegance throughout. It was a self-contained masculine landscape of well-chosen artifacts that, if one understood how to interpret it, shouted its occupant's long dedication to the profession that governed his life and sustained his deeply guarded, solitary soul.
Wilson understood this completely, and in the understanding, he allowed House every leeway, every concession of which he was capable. After many years of deep respect and awed admiration, there was nothing James denied his unique friend. There was nothing of his own that he would not sacrifice to protect this brilliant child-man from his own machinations, and from the dark, uncaring world that sometimes threatened to destroy him.
Wilson sighed deeply and stood up. He removed his coat and hung it neatly over the back of the chair. He stood for a minute in the middle of the floor, facing the hallway, and drew a hand thoughtfully across the back of his neck, wondering where to begin. He pulled off his necktie and draped it over his coat; began rolling up his sleeves. Again.
This could take all night!
And in the meantime, Gregory House might return home and never realize Wilson had been there. Not likely, but possible.
To his right, the barrister's bookcase with its glass-enclosed shelves invited him closer with the sheer mass of the materials it housed. He looked through the dust-fogged glass at the contents, realizing immediately that there was nothing within it that had been disturbed for at least a year. Maybe longer. Some of the dog-eared folders and pamphlets looked to be more than ten times that old. There was no use even opening the thing to check it out. No, he was looking for something much more recent than that.
He moved around to his right, past the glass balcony door where the two of them would often look across the expanse of brick and mortar and concrete to check on the activities of the other. He sidestepped slowly beyond the three-tiered teacart that held the ancient television set, the VCR-DVD combination and a stack of old phonograph albums.
Nothing there.
The large combination bookcase-worktable beneath the expanse of windows with their long, vertical blinds, was a storehouse of medical artifacts and promising folders. Wilson knelt down and ran his fingers across the bindings of materials on the first shelf.
Most of them were case files from times more recent … since House's fellows had been added to the mix. Most contained DDX notes and patient stats. He could see notations in Cameron's neat script, Chase's illegible scrawl, and Foreman's dark and heavy hand. There was nothing there that suggested further exploration.
He moved to the second shelf and encountered more of the same. Many of the folders there contained pages and pages of notes that Wilson was surprised to discover were actually lined-notebook pages of his own chicken scratch. Frowning, he found that these long-completed files, all grouped together in colorful folders, included most of his own theories and suggestions on cases that indicated requests for cancer scans.
Why in the world would House bother to keep these?
He shrugged and replaced the folders where he'd found them, still baffled by their existence. He moved on.
The bottom shelf contained a text on Lupus, an old Gray's Anatomy, a textbook on Nephrology, and another stack of old record albums.
He still had no leads that might provide a solution to the problem.
There were only two more places to look: the file cabinet beneath the Sota turntable, and House's computer. Wilson moved to the sleek metal file cabinet and sat down on the floor in front of it. He opened the top drawer and fingered his way through the neatly arranged procession of files. Obviously the touch of Cameron. Correspondence, case files, diagnostic results. Nothing there. Wilson put everything back in order and closed it up. Opened the bottom drawer.
Again, the files were neat and in order. He walked his fingers through them, front to back. Stopped on a folder titled: "Research". The tab was marked in red, in House's distinctive spidery handwriting. Light bulbs went off in Wilson's head. He knew he'd finally hit pay dirt.
The folder contained a single page of computer printout, and it was dated September 12, 2005.
It was a small article in a year-old issue of JAMA, entitled: "Rural Doctor Making Dramatic Strides in Pain Management".
Raleigh NC:
"Recent studies have revealed some insight into the areas of medical technology and the study of chronic pain management," says Kevin 'Kip' Bernoski, M. D., director of Paramar Clinic near here.
Bernoski, a native of nearby Wake Forest, and a graduate of North Carolina State University, and Cornell University Medical School, stopped to talk with this reporter Monday afternoon.
"We have made significant strides in the areas of pain control, which will be of great interest to people with muscle and nerve damage, previously uncontrolled through pain therapy and other pain medications. Microscopic surgical implants, inserted into damaged muscles and/or muscle groups, have shown promising results in test subjects. Studies are continuing and are showing signs of increasing success," Bernoski stated.
"People living with chronic pain cannot wait much longer for some kind of progress to be made in this greatly misunderstood area.
"Those in chronic pain do not get better, do not improve with time, and do not have an obligation to put up a brave front to an indifferent world which simply does not care to take the time to understand.
"The work we do at Paramar is centered on the goal of not pain management, but pain eradication."
Bernoski did not elaborate further.
More information may be obtained at www//http. gathered his long legs under him and sat Indian fashion, staring into space and letting his brain begin to reach outward, to fit itself around this astounding information. He had not been aware of this article, or others like it before, and Gregory House had certainly not confided in him about it.
The small amount he had read previously about Nano-technology and its many medical possibilities, were noncommittal in scope. He knew there were cancer studies being conducted at Sloan-Kettering and other large cancer institutions, nationally and internationally, utilizing this radical technology, but he had heard nothing about a breakthrough that would bring relief for many sufferers of constant debilitating pain.
Like House!
James had never tossed this type of information around recklessly. Instilling false hope in people often proved fruitless, and tended to do more harm than good.
He picked up the article, read through it again, and felt an icy shiver of trepidation skitter down his backbone. House was not normally a man who jumped at straws or followed blindly along a path of miracle cures. What was he missing here that motivated Gregg to strike out on a long, cold motorcycle journey? House probably had little hope of using any of this for his own problem. What was it?
In truth, the quadriceps muscle in House's right leg was missing. The nerves in that area had been short-circuited by invasive emergency surgery. The leg would never be normal again. His pain was debilitating and ongoing. Was he that desperate to find a way to put an end to it?
Wilson sighed sadly. It was possible that Gregg was just exactly that desperate. A long journey in the cold, on a damn motorcycle, was a dangerous and foolish thing to do, no matter how desperate you were.
He sat for a few more minutes, fighting tears that threatened to overcome him. He had not seen this coming. House had said nothing about it to anyone … especially not to him. No one had come to him with subtle questions about what it was House might be up to, or why he was acting suddenly mysterious.
After awhile, Wilson got to his feet and flopped back into the big office chair at Gregg's desk. He reached to Gregg's computer stack and turned it on, then activated the modem as his worry escalated. It was a fact of life that he spent a lot of time fretting about Gregory House, but right now, the hairs at the back of his neck were standing straight up.
The monitor screen popped to life with a saucy, full-length photo of Carmen Electra, posed in a skimpy costume that left little to the imagination. Wilson snorted with ironic laughter. House's devious mind could be so freaking literal!
He held the article in his hand so that he could see the URL in the dim light, then typed in Gregg's password that he had laughed like hell about when House first told him about it: "IBSteveMcQueen2".
Of course! House changed his passwords more often than Wilson changed his socks. Fortunately, he hadn't changed it again before doing his disappearing act.
Wilson typed in the address of the medical site, and the screen flipped to an image of tiny metal spiders parading like toy soldiers, smaller than grains of sand, across an exposed human arm. The site was titled: "Paramar Clinic, Raleigh, North Carolina: Promising Breakthroughs in the Management of Chronic Pain. How You Can be a Part of Our Team".
Wilson read over the information voraciously for a little over fifteen minutes. He read some of it twice … three times. Four.
If any of this innovative medicine-related stuff lived up to the expectations of the researchers, and if it was authentic and on the recommended lists with AMA, he could readily understand House's desire to learn more …and also his need to keep it to himself for the time being.
This was something House would never allow himself to be talked out of by someone with a suspicious nature, such as himself. This was why House got sneaky about going to North Carolina to check it out. Six hundred miles, straddling a metal Popsicle in twenty-degree weather. And he, with a crippled leg that he could never keep warm enough anyway, and subsisting on medications that would barely keep the worst of his pain at bay!
Wilson clicked the "print" icon and made himself copies of the clinic's list of research grants and the corporations that had given them. He printed two copies each of the materials he had just read, and the names of the physicians who had lent their names and their talents to the infant program. He folded them and put them into his jacket pocket, and then shut down Gregg's computer.
James Wilson hurried back to the ground floor and let himself into Lisa Cuddy's office with the master key few people knew he possessed. He walked calmly across to her desk and lifted the corner of her desk blotter. He placed a copy of each paper there, trusting that she looked under it seldom. Immediately thereafter, he left again and locked up behind himself. Bases covered!
The little wheels inside Wilson's brain did not shut down. They did not even slow down.
He retraced his steps and drove back to his drab hotel room with a plan beginning to germinate in the back of his mind. He got out a pad and pencil and commenced writing:
He needed to grab his laptop, his medical bag and the charger for his cell phone … and he needed to get a pile of supplies ready to make tracks out of there.
While he was at it, he needed to call a rental agency somewhere and reserve a car that looked nothing like a clunky silver Volvo.
In the middle of the damn night!
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
32