Chapter 102: Mandated Reporter
Dr. Elias Moreno saw me at ten past seven on the ninth of January, after the last patient, in the room with the giraffe decal on the wall.
He had the log printed out and spread across the exam table because there is no screen in that office wide enough for it.
Nineteen rows. Date, onset time, duration in seconds, color, recovery, intervention.
Seventeen of the nineteen with the same three conditions in the same three columns.
He had drawn a box around those seventeen in green highlighter, in March, and the highlighter had faded to yellow.
“Before you start,” he said, “I’m going to tell you what I have already done, so you don’t spend an evening asking me to do it.”
“All right.”
“Sixteenth of September. I called the hotline. That is not a choice, it is a statute.”
“A mandated reporter with a fractured radius in a fourteen-month-old and an inconsistent history has one telephone number and no discretion.”
“I know. I gave a statement to Ms. Pryce.”
“Then you know how it came out.” He put his glasses on the counter. “Indicated on the foyer. Unfounded on everything else.”
“Unfounded.”
“A term of art. It does not mean it didn’t happen. It means the investigator found no credible evidence within sixty days.”
“She had a log kept by a suspended employee, a humidifier that no longer existed, and a household that answered every question through counsel.”
“The tank.”
“The tank was emptied and the unit replaced. Purchasing record, fifteenth of September. There is nothing to test and there never will be.”
“Stop hoping about the tank. It is the single most important thing in this, and it is gone.”
I looked at the seventeen boxed rows.
“Second thing,” he said. “The third of December I wrote to the Medical Examiner.”
That I had not known.
“Dr. Sallis. Deputy chief. Her office took the second post-mortem on Ana Reyes-Blackwood on the fifth of November.”
“Mr. Blackwood’s—”
“Yes. His petition, his money, his signature.” Moreno rubbed his eye. “I wrote her four pages. I set out the pattern in this child, the seventeen, the conditions they share, and I asked her to hold it alongside whatever she is looking at.”
“Can you do that?”
“Anyone can write to the Medical Examiner. That is the whole of my power.”
“I am a physician. I can report and I can write. I cannot compel one human being to hand me one piece of paper.”
“How long.”
“Toxicology on a fifteen-month-old embalmed decedent is ten to fourteen weeks if they like you. February, I would think.”
I wrote FEB in the notebook and underlined it twice, which was optimism and I knew it at the time.
Then I put the sleeve on the counter and showed him the coding sheet and the certified copy, and I told him about Vukovich and the word standing.
He read them with his glasses back on and his head tilted the way he does.
“Eighty-five thousand,” he said.
“Yes.”
“For nothing.”
“For nothing that anyone has written down.”
He handed them back.
“I can’t help you with this. I want to be clear about that so you don’t leave here thinking I’m working on it. I have four hundred patients and a practice with six exam rooms.”
“I didn’t come for—”
“You came for something.” He looked at me. “Everyone who comes here at ten past seven came for something.”
I told the truth: I did not know anyone else in the city who would sit in a room with those papers and not ask where I got them.
Moreno was quiet for a moment.
Then he tapped the log, the printed sheet with the boxed seventeen.
“Do you understand what this is?”
“It’s a record.”
“It is the best pediatric respiratory event log I have had from a caregiver in twenty-two years. Times to the minute. Durations in seconds. No adjectives.”
“That’s not—”
“Let me finish, because I’m going to say something unkind.”
I waited.
“Every time this document is put in front of somebody who matters, the first thing out of their mouth is going to be: who kept it, and what are her qualifications.”
“I know.”
“And the answer is three years and no license.”
“You will spend forty years being the most competent unlicensed person in every room you enter. That is not an insult. It is a diagnosis, it has a treatment, and the treatment is unbelievably boring and takes about two years.”
I did not write that one down. I did not have to.
“February,” I said, at the door.
“February,” he said. “And in the meantime, find the person with standing, because it isn’t me and it isn’t the State’s Attorney and it certainly isn’t you.”
I got the bus at Montrose with the log rolled in a mailing tube under my arm, and I already knew who it was.
I had known since the eighteenth of December. I had simply been avoiding it for twenty-two days.