Nightshift 41: Doctor's Office 2

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

[from here]

While Pierson worked on the second door, Indy went back to playing lookout and wondering why the hell Landel had left the first office so easy to get into. Even if they were confident that the patients wouldn't get anything useful out of that computer, the flimsy lock and the unguarded room still left it open to damage. It didn't look like it would be cheap to replace, either.

He took the lead into the second office, too, but his flashlight turned up neither an assailant nor anything else--the office was empty. Strike two.

Comments

[oldest-man.livejournal.com]

"Perhaps they have trouble keeping their staff," Methos murmured as he looked over the empty room. Something about it sent a chill along his spine; it was too dark, too quiet, too utterly unfurnished and still. It seemed odd that it wasn't even being used for storage while it awaited a new occupant, but was just being left to languish empty.

"I wonder what happened to the last one." So far, the staff didn't seem to be overly concerned by the strange injuries or disappearing patients, so he doubted whoever had occupied the office last was a departure from the pattern. Possibly the institution was new enough that they were still filling positions. It couldn't be that easy to find passably competent psychiatrists who were also willing to sign off on human experimentation without the buffer of being in an area with no medical ethics board, could it?

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

Pierson's voice was echoing unusually loudly, to Indy's ears--probably just all that tile in the empty space. Why was the office empty? The place was so thoroughly emptied that he couldn't tell whether there had been a previous occupant or not, let alone how recently that last tenant had cleared out if so.

What got you fired at Landel's? Suddenly developing a moral compass? Getting mauled by King Kong? Slipping a cigarette or two to your charming patient? Whatever it was, Indy had a hard time picturing this Landel guy as an employer you could just walk away from. The good doctor might not have to worry about references.

"You said you didn't get much out of yours during that 'therapy session,' right?" he asked. "Did you get any sense of whether those doctors are the same ones doing the experiments at night?"

[oldest-man.livejournal.com]

"I couldn't call it for certain," Methos warned, and took several seconds to run over the brief interaction with the doctor in his mind. Nothing stood out to indicate participation in experiments better classed, from all he'd heard, as torture. Of course, looking at his own history, he knew better than to assume anything by necessity would.

"If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say no, but he could just as easily be practiced at obfuscating." Methos smiled a little grimly and added, "Or genuinely believe it's all for the greater good. It's amazing how well humanity as a whole can delude itself, not to mention the individuals."

[its-the-mileage.livejournal.com]

"Can't argue with that," replied Indy, who couldn't. He could think of a whole lot of people with deluded ideas about the "greater good." But whatever they believed about the righteousness of what was going on here, the doctors had to be complicit with it--the signs would be too obvious to miss.

"There's no obvious place for doctors to sleep on-site," he mused. "It might make sense for there to be two sets of doctors, on one level--sort of a 'good cop, bad cop' approach." Or would it be even better for the experiment if the patients had to face therapy sessions with the very people who had experimented on them the night before?

The answer wasn't in here, anyway. Indy headed back out to the hallway.

[to here (http://community.livejournal.com/damned/636942.html?thread=54180878#t54180878)]