Free Red 1-2-3 by John Katzenbach

done everything Detective Clark had told her. She had called a security company—they were scheduled to install an alarm system in her house the next day. She had gone over patient files, looking for some error that might have led to a threat.
    She had racked her memory for any slight, real or imagined, that might translate into “ You have been selected to die .” She had even checked out the website of the local animal shelter to see if they had some big mean dog for adoption. She had looked up the numbers of some private detectives, checked with various consumer ratings programs to see who received the best reviews, and written down the telephone numbers of two different men. She had half-dialed one number only to stop and hang up her telephone.
    Above all, Karen despised panic. Or even the appearance of panic.
    In medical school, doing her internship rotations, she had seriously considered a career as an emergency room physician, because even with blood spurting, cries of agony, and the need to move quickly to save a life she had always found herself preternaturally calm. The more things were disintegrating around her, the more her own pulse would slow. She thought that her response to the threatening letter should have been precisely the same as when some accident victim arrived in front of her, rav-aged and in imminent danger of dying.
    53
    JOHN KATZENBACH
    She liked to think of herself as a completely rational person, even with her comedy half occasionally surfacing. But since she’d opened the letter, she had been unable to even consider a comedy routine. Not a single joke, no sarcasm, no play on words or clever political observation—nothing that was the usual stuff of her routines had leapt into her thoughts. Her nighttime dreams had been tortured, which made her tired and angry.
    She leaned back and rocked in her desk chair. She was shaking her head back and forth, as if disagreeing with something she’d told herself, when the door to her office opened.
    “I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t want to disturb you . . .”
    “No, no, it’s okay. I was just a little lost in thought.”
    Karen looked over at her nurse. Only two other people worked in her small practice: a young nurse two years out of a college program who had only recently, and hesitantly, asked Karen how to have the tattoo of a sun rising on the back of her neck removed, and her longtime receptionist, an older woman who knew many of the patients and their ailments far better than Karen did.
    “Last patient of the day,” the nurse said. “She’s been waiting in exam room 2 for a couple of minutes and . . .”
    She let her voice trail off before any sort of rebuke passed her lips.
    Karen understood two things: The nurse wanted to get home to her EMT
    boyfriend and Karen shouldn’t keep the last patient of the day waiting no matter how unsettled she felt. She took a deep breath and jumped out of her chair, launching herself into her attentive doctor mode.
    “It’s just a routine follow-up exam,” the nurse said, “She’s already been checked by her cardiologist. His report is in her file. She’s doing fine. This is just a follow-up physical. Nothing too important.”
    She handed Karen a clipboard with a file folder attached. Karen didn’t even look at it, feeling suddenly a bit guilty for making a patient wait unnecessarily. She adjusted her white lab coat and hurried down the hallway into the exam room.
    The patient was seated on the exam table, wearing a johnny-gown and a smile. “Hello, Doctor,” she said.
    54
    RED 1–2–3
    “Hello, Mrs . . .” Karen glanced quickly at the folder to grab the woman’s name. She hurriedly said it, trying to cover up her failure to greet her as she did all her patients: with a familiarity that implied that she had spent the entire day studying whatever medical issues the patient had.
    Ordinarily she had no trouble remembering the names of her patients, and inwardly she berated herself for the lapse.