The Conspiracy Club by Jonathan Kellerman Page B

returned to his office.
    Angela had called thirty minutes earlier. He paged her, was transferred to Thoracic Medicine, where a ward clerk told him Dr. Rios had just been called to an emergency lung surgery.
    That puzzled him. Angela was a medical resident, not a cutter. No doubt, there’d be an explanation.
    He glanced at the sheaf of scolding papers, left to collect his mail. A hefty stack, today; he sorted through the usual memos, solicitations, announcements of conferences and symposia, came to a large, brown interoffice envelope at the bottom.
    This one had been sent from the Department of Otolaryngology. No name in the recipient blank. He’d last consulted on an ENT case several months ago — an inner ear tumor that had proved fatal — wondered what they wanted, now.
    Inside the envelope were photocopied pages that had nothing to do with ears, noses, or throats.
    A seventeen-year-old article reproduced from an ophthalmology journal.
     
    Ablation of corneal tissue using the CO2 Vari-Pulsar
4532 2 nd Generation Laser Scalpel . . .
     
    The authors were a surgical team headquartered at the Royal Medical College of Oslo. An international team — Norwegian names, Russian names, English names. None of them meant a thing to Jeremy.
    Obviously a mistake; he’d gotten someone else’s mail, not a rare occurrence for the parcels that zipped through the mail tubes veining the hospital’s moldy walls. Perhaps some secretary had confused psychology with speech pathology.
    He phoned Otolaryngology and spoke to a male secretary who hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. Tossing the article in the trash, he put aside the envelope for further use. Fiscal responsibility and all that. Financial Affairs had issued yet another order to tighten up.
    As he folded it, something rattled inside. Something had wedged at the bottom, and he pulled it out. A small, white index card, a typed message.
     
    For your interest.
     
    He took another look at the envelope. No name in the recipient blank; this had to be a mistake. He rarely saw eye patients, couldn’t recall one in ages — the last, he was fairly certain, had been five years ago, a blind woman who’d decided to curl up and die. After two months of psychotherapy, Jeremy believed he’d helped her, and no one had told him different. No, there could be no connection to this. Why in the world would he have an interest in lasers?
    He retrieved the article from the wastebasket, read it, found it to be typical medical jargondygook, stuffed with numbers and tables, barely comprehensible. He cut to the summary. The main point was that seventeen years ago laser scalpels had been judged to be a good, clean way to cut.
    Cutting techniques . . .
Humpty-Dumpty
. . . no, that was silly. If his mind hadn’t been addled by the last night’s booze and confusion and pontification about criminality, he’d never have stretched that far.
    What a strange night. In retrospect, comic and surreal. He smiled painfully, remembering his acute bout of neediness. Why had he ever cared what a group of elderly eccentrics thought of him? Even if they asked him back, he wouldn’t accept.
    Tomorrow was Tumor Board. He was curious how Arthur would treat him.
    Then a thought occurred to him: Perhaps
Arthur
had sent the article.
    No, the pathologist handwrote with a fountain pen, used that heavy, blue rag paper. A traditional man — an antiquarian, as witnessed by the vintage suits, the old car, the quaint vocabulary.
    A typed message on anything so mundane as an index card would be out of character.
    Unless Arthur was being coy.
    The obliqueness fit — that would be just like the pathologist. Gregarious one day, frosty the next.
    A game player, everything a puzzle. Was this a challenge to Jeremy to figure out?
    Ablation of corneal tissue? Laser eye surgery? Had Arthur assumed Jeremy would share his eclectic interests? The old man hopped around from butterflies to carcinomas to Grand Discussions of