Devil's Waltz by Jonathan Kellerman

from my waist. We began walking.
    “Who’s the other guy?” I said. “Mr. Gray Suit.”
    “Oh, him.” She looked unnerved. “That’s Huenengarth —
Presley
Huenengarth. Head of security.”
    “He looks like an enforcer,” I said. “Muscle for those who don’t pay their bills?”
    She laughed. “That wouldn’t be so terrible. The hospital’s bad debt is over eighty percent. No, he doesn’t seem to do much of anything, except follow Plumb around and
lurk
. Some of the staff think he’s spooky.”
    “In what way?”
    She didn’t answer for a moment. “His manner, I guess.”
    “You have any bad experiences with him?”
    “Me? No. Why?”
    “You look a little antsy talking about him.”
    “No,” she said. “It’s nothing personal — just the way he acts to everyone. Showing up when you’re not expecting him. Materializing around corners. You’ll come out of a patient’s room and he’ll just
be
there.”
    “Sounds charming.”
    “
Très
. But what’s a
girl
to do? Call Security?”
     
     
    I rode down to the ground floor alone, found Security open, endured a uniformed guard’s five-minute interrogation, and finally earned the right to have a full-color badge made.
    The picture came out looking like a mug shot. I snapped the badge onto my lapel and took the stairs down to the sub-basement level, heading for the hospital library, ready to check out Stephanie’s references.
    The door was locked. An undated memorandum taped to the door said new library hours were three to five P . M ., Monday through Wednesday.
    I checked the adjoining reading room. Open but unoccupied. I stepped into another world: oiled paneling, tufted leather chesterfields and wing chairs, worn but good Persian rugs over a shoe-buffed herringbone oak floor.
    Hollywood seemed planets away.
    Once the study of a Cotswolds manor house, the entire room had been donated years ago — before I’d arrived as an intern — transported across the Atlantic and reconstructed under the financial guidance of an Anglophile patron who felt doctors need to relax in high style. A patron who’d never spent time with a Western Peds doctor.
    I strode across the room and tried the connecting door to the library. Open.
    The windowless room was pitch-dark and I turned on the lights. Most of the shelves were empty; a few bore thin stacks of mismatched journals. Careless piles of books sat on the floor. The rear wall was bare.
    The computer I’d used to run Medline searches was nowhere in sight. Neither was the golden-oak card catalogue with its hand-lettered parchment labels. The only furniture was a gray metal table. Taped to the top was a piece of paper. An inter-hospital memo, dated three months ago.
     
TO: Professional Staff
FROM: G. H. Plumb, MBA, DBA, Chief Executive Officer
SUBJECT: Library Restructure

In accordance with repeated requests by the Professional Staff and a subsequent confirmatory decision by the Research Committee, the Board of Directors in General Assembly, and the Finance Subcommittee of the Executive Board, the Medical Library reference index will be converted to a fully computerized system utilizing Orion and Melvyl-type standard library data search programs. The contract for this conversion has been put out to competitive bid and, after careful deliberation and cost/benefit computation, has been awarded to BIO-DAT, Inc., of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a concern specializing in medical and scientific research probe systems and health-care workstation integration. BIO-DAT officials have informed us that the entire process should take approximately three weeks, once they are in full receipt of all relevant data. Accordingly, the library’s current card files will be shipped to BIO-DAT headquarters in Pittsburgh for the duration of the conversion process, and returned to Los Angeles for purposes of storage and archival activity, once the conversion has been terminated. Your cooperation and forbearance during the conversion