Trauma

CHAPTER 45

Gabby, the little girl with pigtails, gave Carrie a delightful, gap-toothed smile and hugged her knees only because she was not tall enough to reach higher. Gabby’s surprise embrace tugged at Carrie’s heart. This complete sweetie pie paid no attention to Carrie’s injuries. To her innocent eyes, Carrie was just a friend of her “Uncle David,” as she called him, nothing more. There was no judgment, no pretense, nothing but total acceptance.

Carrie’s heart warmed more when Gabby turned to David and gazed up at him with wide-eyed reverence.

“Can you play with me?” Gabby asked.

“In a little bit, sweetheart,” David said. “I have some grown-up talk to do first.”

Emma and Gabby had come up to David’s apartment a minute or so after Carrie had arrived. At first Carrie felt a spark of jealousy when she saw how pretty Emma was, how put-together she seemed in her hip-hugging jeans and cute turquoise top, but the feeling passed quickly. Emma and David had an undeniable intimacy, but Carrie got the vibe it was not based on any romantic love. Try as she might, Carrie could not quite figure out what David did not see in Emma, or Emma in David, but she was not going to question it. She knew what she felt for David, and suspected he felt the same. Something was going to happen between them. She could see it in the way he looked at her, and feel it in the way his look made her skin tingle.

David took Carrie’s phone and sent Emma the picture she’d taken.

Emma glanced at her phone’s display and showed the photo to David and Carrie for confirmation. “This is the guy?”

The picture Carrie had taken included part of Cal Trent, but Bob Richardson was front and center.

“That’s him,” David said. “How good is the facial recognition software at the DMV?”

“Very good,” Emma said. “We’re required to run a one-to-many comparison before issuing a driver’s license, permit, or ID.”

“What’s a one-to-many comparison?” Carrie asked.

Emma said, “One-to-many compares photos of an applicant with all the other customers on file at DMV. We get alerted if there are possible matches between customers under different names. We examine the possible matches to determine whether it’s simply very similar-looking individuals, or possibly the same individual under different names.”

“Sounds good to me,” David said.

“Me too,” Carrie said. “But what if he’s not a licensed Massachusetts driver?”

Emma shrugged. “We have a new data-sharing initiative to give law enforcement agencies more access to our data. I’ve helped with the rollout, so I have contacts who could do a search for me if I don’t get any local hits. I used it before to locate Rita Abington’s address. Give me a few days on this,” Emma said.

“Thanks,” David said. “I really appreciate it.”

Emma collected Gabby from the toy corner, and together they left David’s apartment with some substantial protests that could be heard while the pair descended the stairs.

“She’s such a cutie pie,” Carrie said.

“She’s the best,” David said. “Her dad doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

Carrie suspected David would make a terrific father, someone who would be patient, kind, and capable. The thought made him more attractive to her. David’s cozy apartment was similar to her old place in Brookline. It was bright, airy, and sparsely furnished. She wanted to take a closer look at the many photographs lining his wall, but that would have to wait. They had business to discuss.

“Tell me about the VR before we listen to the recording,” David said.

Carrie recounted her experience in the neurology unit conference room in considerable detail.

David seemed troubled by what he heard. “There was no position tracking?” he asked after she had finished.

“No, it was more like watching a movie. The view didn’t change when I moved my head.”

“This is DARPA,” David said, sounding incredulous. “You’d think they would have the most sophisticated technology available. A completely immersive experience.”

“That’s what I thought, too. Something didn’t seem right about it.”

“Let’s have a listen to those recordings,” David said.

He set up the two portable speakers on a scuffed coffee table and plugged in a connecting cable. While this was going on, an orange tabby cat padded out from the bedroom, gracefully leapt from the floor onto the sofa, and immediately began to knead the cushion with its claws.

“That’s Bosra,” David said. “This is his favorite spot. Well, mine too. We nap here a lot.”

Within a few seconds the cat had condensed into a tight ball, so that no part of its body existed outside the beam of sunlight that streamed through the tall bay window. Bosra purred delightedly when Carrie scratched behind the ears.

“How long have you had him?” Carrie asked.

“Her,” David corrected. “About a year. She’s a rescue.”

Carrie imagined David and Bosra taking long naps together on this very couch, and believed it had enough room for all three to partake.

As if reading her thoughts, David sat down on the other side of Carrie so Bosra would not be disturbed. He pressed Play on the recording device and a burst of static gave way to the sound of a phone ringing.

“It’s noise-activated,” David explained. “So there may be a lot of ringing phones before we hear any actual dialogue. Hopefully we won’t have to listen to your colleague, Evan, having sex.”

Carrie knew all about Evan’s sexcapades in Goodwin’s office, as well as David’s gravity-defying stint underneath the desk. It was a glimpse into the lengths he would go for the story, and gave Carrie a keener understanding of how David had ended up a prisoner of the Syrian opposition forces.

The recorded phone rang once more. Somebody answered on the second ring, and Carrie knew the woman’s voice immediately — Goodwin. Though Carrie was privy to only half of the conversation, she could tell it was a vendor calling about an intracranial pressure monitoring device. Goodwin sounded uninterested from the start. She ended the call with the terse parting words, “Let me get back to you when I have time.”

A number of unrelated conversations had been recorded over several days, and Carrie and David listened to each without learning anything especially interesting about Goodwin. She chatted with Evan pleasantly enough, always about the VA. It was utterly unrevealing. Goodwin gave a resident some thoughtful advice, which Carrie thought a bit out of character for the ice queen. Twice Goodwin spoke by phone with her mother, and Carrie got the distinct impression a vendor call would have been more welcome.

It was not until the third day of recordings that Carrie heard a new voice, an older voice she recognized: Cal Trent. It took Carrie just a few seconds to realize Goodwin had an edge to her voice.

“Hello, Cal,” Goodwin said. “Have a seat.”

According to the time stamp on the recording device, the conversation took place two days after Carrie’s accident.

“Thanks, Sandra. How are you?”

“I’m fine. Need anything to drink?”

“No, I’m fine. What’s up? Why the urgency?”

“I’m worried,” Goodwin said. “I think we need to scale back. Even go dark.”

Cal’s laugh expressed his utter contempt for the idea. “Good one,” he said. “What’s next on your agenda, Sandra?”

“Please, Cal.”

“The pipeline is full. We’re moving forward. That’s the plan.”

Carrie glanced at David’s notepad, where he jotted the word “pipeline” and put a question mark after it.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Goodwin said on the recording.

“And how will the board take it when we pull funding for your movable prosthetics initiative?” Trent asked. “How many of the millions we’ve committed to the VA have already been spent? That’s not something your bosses are going to give up on easily. A lot of questions will be raised. A lot of fingers will be pointed at you. And then I think you’ll point them back at me. And we can’t have that, can we? I’m not trying to be subtle or coy here, Sandy. I think you get my meaning. I’ve got a pipeline of patients to send your way and we’re going to send them. You get that DBS surgery done. That’s your job. And you let me do the rest.”

Silence.

“Are we all set here?” Trent asked.

“We’re all set,” Goodwin said, her voice going soft.

Carrie and David heard background noise as Trent got up from his chair, opened the office door, and closed it. The recording picked up Goodwin’s labored breathing and other sounds: a desk drawer opening up, a squeaking chair, and the click of Goodwin’s keyboard as she furiously typed a message.

David shut off the recorder and turned to face Carrie. “What exactly is a movable prosthetic?” He glanced at his notes. “I’m assuming it’s not what’s commonly out there.”

David’s eyes had gone wild. Bosra perked up her head, yawned, stretched, climbed down off the sofa, and padded away. Evidently the energy in the room had become too much for her to handle.

“I’m sure he’s talking about reliable neural-interface technology, RE-NET,” Carrie said. “I’ve attended a few lectures about it at different neurosurgery conferences over the years. One lecture showed a video demonstration of a man using targeted muscle re-innervation to pick up a coffee cup.”

“Re-innervation?” David repeated for confirmation. “Is that like the re-animation of nerves?”

“Very much so,” Carrie said, nodding. “There are still nerves firing even after a limb is severed. It’s just that the signal doesn’t go anywhere. With computers, robotics, and a whole lot of sophistication, a prosthetic can learn to recognize these signals and contract the muscles like a working limb. TRM-controlled prosthetics is very cutting-edge stuff.”

“And there’s nothing like it at the VA currently?”

She shook her head. “Not that I know of, but I’m just a technician, remember.” Carrie said “technician” with exaggerated contempt.

“Is it possible that Trent is getting his DBS patients from outside the system?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Carrie said. “Patients come to the VA through a very bureaucratic process. If someone is bypassing that system, there’s got to be a good reason for it.”

“Maybe Goodwin wanted to minimize your role at the VA to keep you from finding out what that circumvention was all about?”

Carrie processed David’s words. “Maybe the last DBS surgeon got too close to that answer,” she said.

Now it was David’s turn to process. “What have you gotten yourself into here, Carrie?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Carrie said. “I really don’t know.”

They listened to hours of Sandra being Sandra, and found nothing of further interest on those recordings — nothing incriminating, nothing to explain what she and Cal were doing.

David put his hands behind his head, stretched, and looked to the ceiling.

“Anneke is going to be pretty ticked off at me,” David said.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” Carrie asked.

“Because I got a feeling this story is going to take a hell of a long time for me to write.”