Animals: Chapter Four and Five

WHEN SURGEONS OPERATE ON PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED IT, HOW FAR WILL THEY GO TO PROTECT THE SECRET AND KEEP THE MONEY COMING IN?

Chapter Four

October 2024

Karen took the Turnpike out of the city, then 78 west into the valley, NPR on low, the kind of listening that’s less about content than about the company of voices. October light came in flat and gold across the dashboard.

Sam’s information had done what information does when it lands in the wrong place. It answered nothing and made the questions heavier. She was seasoned enough to know smoke wasn’t fire. She’d worked enough files that looked like something and turned out to be nothing to know that the appearance of pattern is not pattern. A legitimate death benefit claim was a legitimate death benefit claim. A medical group that had dissolved badly six years ago was a medical group that had dissolved badly six years ago. That they shared a file on her desk did not make them one story.

She knew all of that. The nagging thing didn’t care.

Bethlehem came on gradually, the scale dropping, the streets narrowing, the buildings taking on a solidity and age the highway towns didn’t have. She saw the old blast furnaces from the old Bethlehem Steel rising over the south side like rusted monuments to another century, still massive, repurposed into something that looked like maybe a museum. Then the GPS pulled her up into the hills, the campus appearing through the trees, stone and brick set into the north slope of South Mountain and set her down in a visitor’s lot at nine-twenty.

She sat a moment with the engine off.

Sam’s words echoed in her head: walk in assuming they’ve already decided what you’re going to learn. It was why she’d come without calling a third time. You might not be able to take preparation away from people like this, but you could decline to schedule it.