Page 78 of Mob Star

I look around, but I see no one. This isn’t exactly the busiest place in the hospital. And that’s just as well. I push through another set of doors that aren’t secured. I still see no one.

“Dr. Wazir?”

I call out to the pathologist I know works down here a lot. She’s more likely to page me than the medical examiner. Maybe not.

“Dr. Moffet?”

The ME doesn’t respond either. No one just wanders around down here, so why doesn’t someone respond? I head to the room where I know they take neonates— newborns —and the stillborn. I hate coming down here. Like with the fiery passion of a thousand suns when I think about that. I cried after every visit down here during my first year of residency.

“Ted, I don’t know who paged me or why.” I look up at my guard, who’s scanning the area, doing a three-sixty.

“Should we leave, Dr. Gallagher?”

“Let’s check two other places. This is bizarre.” It’s graduated from strange.

I check the doctors’ office and the autopsy room. No one. We head back to the elevator, and it dings before Ted or I can press the button.

“Dr. Gallagher, what are you doing down here?” At least Dr. Wazir greets me with a smile. I see she ran to get lunch.

“I got a page to come down here, but I don’t know why.”

“I didn’t page you, and Dr. Moffet isn’t in today.”

The hairs on the back of my neck go up again. I pull my pager from my scrub pants’ waistband and show it to my colleague. Sure enough. The message is to come down here. I didn’t misread or imagine it.

“I don’t know who sent that, but I didn’t need you or any of the neonatologists. So that wasn’t meant for someone else either.”

What more can I do than nod? “Thanks, Khadija.”

“No problem. Have a good day.”

“You, too.” What the fuck is going on?

Ted and I ride up to my floor together, and he asks me two more times if I’m all right. I’m not, but I smile anyway. I head into an unoccupied postpartum patient room rather than straight into the NICU and close the door behind me. I unlock my phone and tap on the screen.

“Cailín, how are you?”

“Finn, I’m a little freaked out.”

“What happened? Where are you?”

Well, that wasn’t the smartest way to start a conversation with a man like Finn. I’m certain I just heard chair legs scraping a floor.

“I’m all right, Daddy.”

I pray I’m not on speakerphone, and I look over my shoulder in case the door magically opened.

“Then what do you mean you’re freaked out?”

“I’ve gotten four pages today that have sent me on a wild goose chase. They’re all to places with someone dying or already dead. But no one at any of the units or the morgue paged me. I don’t know who is.”

“The morgue?”

“Yeah. The first three pages were to patients in distress or had just died. The one to the morgue is obvious. Ted went to the basement with me. But I met him on the first floor. A guy got on the elevator a floor below me with no hospital badge or visitor sticker. He bumped into Ted as Ted headed toward me. I watched. They didn’t exchange anything, and Ted checked his coat and pants pockets. Nothing.”

“How did you and Ted wind up on separate floors?”

“I didn’t plan to leave the NICU, so he’d just gone down to grab lunch from the food cart. He didn’t even get a chance to pick something.”

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