Angels on the Night Shift by M.D. Robert D. Lesslie Page A

entrance and thinking that none of them seemed very ill. Maybe they were just visiting.
    Virginia caught my eye, then motioned with her hand for me to join her.
    I finished drying my hands, tossed the paper towel in the trash can at the nurses’ station, and walked over to her office.
    She was just sitting down behind her desk when I entered. I closed the door behind me and walked over.
    “Have a seat, Robert,” she said, motioning to the remaining chair in front of her desk. In the other chair sat Walter Stevens. He had on a long-sleeved white shirt and wore a bright-red bow-tie. In one of his hands was a legal pad filled with scribbled notes. When he noticed me looking down at it, he quickly flipped it over in his lap.
    “Dr. Lesslie,” he intoned with an air of gravity. “It’s good to see you.”
    He held out his hand and I shook it. I was struck once again by the damp weakness of his handshake. I had met the twenty-eight-year-old when he had first arrived at Rock Hill General. He had just finished his MBA program at some small school in eastern Kentucky and had struck me then as being a little too sure of himself, and a little too smug. Nothing seemed to have changed.
    “Walter, good morning,” I told him, sitting down and turning to face Virginia. “What’s going on?” I asked the two of them.
    The head nurse put her palms down on the desk in front of her and leaned toward the two of us.
    “Walter and I have been discussing the matter of the missing narcotics,” she began. “And I think he may have some ideas.”
    There was little enthusiasm in her face, and less in her eyes.
    “What makes you sure they’re missing?” I asked. “I had hoped this was simply an oversight. Has there not been some simple explanation?”
    “There is an explanation, to be sure,” Walter intoned. “But it is not simple.”
    Virginia turned in her chair, reached behind her, and picked up a small box from the bookshelf behind her.
    “Take a look at this,” she said, sliding the plastic-wrapped container over to me.
    I recognized it immediately. It was a medication container—a two-and-a-half-inch cube shrink-wrapped in plastic. It contained 25 glass vials of some type of medication, arranged neatly in five rows of five vials each. The tops of the vials were all that was visible, the rest being surrounded by a paper box. Each vial was protected from the others by a thin, cross-hatched insert. One side of the container read Demerol—100 mg . I turned the box over in my hands, examining each side. It looked to be brand-new and unopened.
    I thought Virginia might be testing me, and I thought of something. Looking down once more, I checked the expiration date. It was still current.
    Putting the box down on her desk, I said, “Looks like a box of unopened Demerol to me, Virginia. Is there something important here?”
    “You didn’t look quite closely enough, Dr. Lesslie,” Walter Stevens said, snatching up the box of medicine and holding it in front of me. He oriented the cube so that the bottom of it was right under my nose.
    The guy was starting to get on my nerves, but when I glanced over at Virginia, she gave me a brief nod of her head.
    Reluctantly, I looked once more at the Demerol, this time focusing more intently on the bottom of the box. Again, it looked fine to me, with the plastic perfectly in place. There didn’t seem to be any evidence of tampering, or of someone trying to open it.
    Wait a minute.
    “Let me hold that a second,” I said to Stevens, taking the box out of his hand and moving it around in the light.
    There, just to the right of dead center. I looked closer, not wanting to believe this and needing to be sure.
    But there it was—a small hole, almost invisible. And there was another one, about half an inch away. And another. I counted six holes in the bottom of the box. I flipped it over and examined the vials that were sitting above these holes, looking at them closely. Just what I was afraid