Do No Harm (2002) Page 23

  The formalin made his eyes water. The rows of bodies, dangling from hooks like sides of beef, the crossed scissor clamps pinching the ears--how could he have forgotten?

  Holding his breath, he walked into the immense refrigerated room, unsure what he was looking for. His foot struck a bucket, and he looked down to see a detached brain swaying in the cloudy water, hanging from a taped string. He walked forward, his eyes picking through the bodies. His shoulder struck a corpse and set it pivoting slowly until it looked down at him, blue-faced and undignified.

  He took his time, walking slowly up and down the rows, searching the floor between the red and blue plastic drainage tubs for any sign that Clyde had been there. In the back, a chunky cadaver was suspended from her oversized head. She'd retained fluids in her belly and extremities before dying. David stepped closer, examining the mid-sternal incision on her chest. A recent cardiac surgery. Probably died of heart failure. He glanced down, looking for the telltale linear incision along her inner leg from which they would have harvested her saphenous vein for the bypass.

  Four emergency room restraints floated in the liquid that had pooled inside the tub beneath her. Hard restraints. David felt his heart quicken.

  He crouched down and studied them.

  He'd learned enough from old Columbo episodes to know not to handle anything and compromise evidence. He removed a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of his white coat and pulled them on.

  Stainless steel abounded inside the crypt and the prep room. Many good surfaces, David imagined, off which to lift fingerprints. But it would be difficult; Clyde's escape was nearly twenty-four hours ago, and a decent amount of traffic moved through the area each day. Further disappointment set in when David remembered that Clyde had escaped still wearing his surgical gloves.

  David finished perusing the crypt, found nothing else of note, and went out and sat at the small wooden desk in the corner of the prep room. He had little more to go on himself, so it didn't make sense to contact Ed. He'd just have to inform Yale and take the resultant reprimand for involving himself in the case further.

  Reaching for the phone, he scooted forward in the chair, one of the legs knocking over a small metal waste bin. He leaned over and righted the bin, then retrieved a few pieces of crumpled paper and a banana peel from the floor. A small foil square had slid a short distance under the desk, and David bent down farther and reached for it, unsuccessfully.

  It appeared to be the casing for a pill--Imodium, perhaps--torn from a larger sheet. The lettering caught his eye just before he touched it: Noblemen's Zinc Lozenges--orange.

  David froze, his arm awkwardly extended beneath the desk. That was the smell he had picked up on Clyde's breath--the distinctive odor of orange-flavored medicinal tablets. He withdrew his hand quickly. Maybe the lozenge had been Clyde's, and he had eaten it here while he'd been hiding.

  David dug quickly through the drawers until he found a packet of Sudafed. He removed a foil sheet and tried unsuccessfully to peel off the backing while leaving his gloves on. He removed a glove, then used his thumbnail to lift the corner of the foil, the print of his bare forefinger pressing firmly against the small square.

  Even if Clyde had been wearing gloves, he'd have had to take them off to get at the lozenge. Which meant that the discarded square under the desk--the plastic top with the foil half attached--would likely bear his fingerprint.

  David felt the same rush of pleasure that a good diagnosis gave him. Pulling Ed's card from his pocket, he dialed the number and was greeted with three short beeps. A pager. The telephone number of the prep room phone was scotch-taped to the receiver, and David punched it in and hit the pound key. He'd barely hung up when the phone rang.

  "Hello?" David heard nothing but silence. "It's David," he said. "David Spier."

  "Look," said a gruff voice. "Just because I give you a phone number doesn't mean you have to call it at three in the fucking--"

  "I have a fingerprint," David said. "I think."

  There was a long pause. And then, "You'd better fill me in."

  After David did, there was another long pause, and David thought he might've lost the connection. "Hello?"

  "Still here. Listen carefully. Do not touch the wrapping. Find a pen or a ruler or something, and push it into a bag. Don't touch anything else in the room, and leave immediately. I'll meet you on the corner of Le Conte and Westwood in fifteen minutes. Stand near the curb."

  "But what about the police? Don't they need to get here for a more thorough look?"

  "I'll place an anonymous call. Right now. So clear out."

  "Will you turn over the fingerprint to them if we get a--?" David realized Ed had already hung up. Down on his hands and knees, he carefully followed the procedures Ed had laid out, using a tweezers and a Ziploc specimen bag he found in a drawer.

  Fifteen minutes later, he stood out on the corner of Le Conte and Westwood, hands pushed into the pockets of his white doctor's coat, feeling as if he'd just stumbled into a Cold War thriller.

  He clutched the plastic bag with the lozenge packaging in his pocket, watching the occasional car speed by. All of a sudden, the street was empty. A sheet of newspaper fluttered in the wind.

  A red Pathfinder with tinted windows pulled into view, slowing as it neared David. David pulled the bag from his pocket and stepped off the curb. The opaque driver-side window glided slowly down, and Ed's hand reached out and plucked the bag from David.

  "Look," David said. "I was wondering if--?"

  The window slid back up and the Pathfinder pulled away, leaving David standing foolishly at the curb.

  Chapter 38

  THE bent metal lamp on the scarred tabletop gave off a low hum as the bulb flickered on and off. Beside it, Clyde sorted through a mound of generic gelcap pain relievers. His swollen fingers sifted through them, knocking the empty plastic bottle on its side. It rolled off the table, bouncing out of sight.

  Behind him, the rain tapped against the window like hundreds of little fingers.

  He dipped a moist soupspoon into a jar of instant coffee and brought it carefully to his mouth. He chewed the grounds slowly, scowling, then gulped water from an oversize McDonald's cup featuring Mark McGwire. His shirt was off, his flabby chest marred with weeping burns and small cuts, most of them well on their way to healing.

  He grasped one red and yellow capsule, careful not to crush it, and gently twisted it so the two halves came apart. He dumped out the white powder and set the hollow capsule halves to one side. His lips moving quickly and silently, he repeated the procedure over and over until he had a small pile of empty capsules.

  Reaching into the metal footlocker, he retrieved a carton of DrainEze and a bare razor blade. He popped the lid of the carton and sprinkled some of the solid-form alkali onto the tabletop. The little rocks glittered white and blue. He picked up the razor blade and sorted the alkali into thin strips, like lines of cocaine.

  Licking his pink lips, he held an empty yellow gelcap half so its tiny open mouth was level with the table. Using the width of the blade now, he swept one of the alkali lines off the table, catching most of it in the capsule half. He repeated the process, filling a red capsule top. Careful not to spill, he fitted the red top over the yellow bottom and screwed it a half turn into place. Closing one eye and raising the perfect capsule between his thumb and forefinger, he appraised his work like a jeweler. He bent over the table, picked up the razor blade and another empty capsule half, and went back to his painstaking work.

  There was still much to be done before sunrise.

  Chapter 39

  AT dawn, David pulled a pillow over his head and attempted to prolong his few hours of sleep, but the stresses of the past week pulled him from any thoughts of slumber. It was his first full day off since the attacks had begun, and he wasn't about to waste it in bed. Reaching for the phone on the nightstand, he paged Ed immediately.

  He trudged into the study and removed the drape from the large brass birdcag
e. Two glassy black eyes stared out at him from beneath the fan of the bright salmon crest. The cockatoo's beak disappeared into its breast feathers, preening.

  David sighed. "Hello, Stanley."

  "Where's Elisabeth?" the cockatoo squawked. "M&M's. Where's Elisabeth?"

  "Ran off and joined Cirque du Soleil."

  The cockatoo's head tilted, then straightened. "Where's Elisabeth?"

  "Moved to Memphis with a blues band." David took care not to spill any birdseed this time as he angled a handful through the bars of the cage into the plastic cup.

  The cockatoo shifted from foot to foot, then dashed over and picked at the birdseed. Before David could leave the room, it raised its head again. "Where's Elisabeth?"

  David paused by the cage. "Ice fishing in Alaska."

  Taking the cordless phone and moving to the living room, he paged Ed again, then collapsed into a plush leather chair. Above the mantel hung a signed de Kooning print--Woman I. A violent depiction with rough, haphazard brush strokes, the painting portrayed an archetypal woman with a gleaming, devouring crescent of a mouth and a mess of broad, bloody strokes where her hips should be. It had been his mother's favorite painting.

  Arrayed on the Oriental cabinet to one side were a Waterford vase and several photographs in silver frames. A picture of Peter with David's mother from late in her tenure as chief of staff--her head was tilted slightly back, suggesting royalty or aloofness. His favorite shot of Elisabeth, in the tub, only her head and knees visible in the wash of bubbles. A photo from the ER retreat to Catalina--David talking to Diane on the ferry over to the island, her smile just becoming a laugh. For the first time, it struck him as noteworthy that he kept a framed picture of himself and Diane on the cabinet with his personal photos. The mind moves before it is aware.

  The phone rang and he picked it up on a half ring, eager to get an update from Ed.

  "David, it's Diane."

  "What's wrong?"

  "It's Carson. We had a seventy-year-old stroke victim in early this morning. He was putting her in the sniffing position to tube her and accidentally snapped her neck. She died a few minutes later. David? Are you there?"

  "Jesus, that's awful. How's he doing?"

  "Not great. Dr. Lambert screamed at him for five minutes in front of the whole staff, called him a killer, and kicked him out of the ER. He was a mess. I'm stuck here all day, then I'm covering Marcy's late-night shift. I thought maybe you might want to--"

  "What's his address?" David found a slip of paper and jotted it down. Carson lived in a little apartment complex at the top of Barrington near Sunset with which David was familiar. "I actually have to take care of some things around the hospital today. I'll stop by his place this afternoon--he could probably use some time alone now anyway."

  "Okay. Swing by the floor if you get a chance."

  "Will do."

  "I've never seen Carson like this." A long pause. "I have to go figure out how to take a history from a deaf-mute."

  David felt sick when he hung up the phone.

  He dressed quickly and fixed himself a quick breakfast. He left the LA Times out on the doorstep, not wanting to see the day's blaring headlines, but he couldn't resist turning the radio on during his drive to the hospital. The news about the case was mostly high drama and rehash. He wasn't sure what to make of the fact that Ed hadn't returned his pages; he found himself second-guessing whether turning over to him a key piece of evidence had been a wise call. Maybe Ed hadn't even placed an anonymous call to the police, as he'd claimed he would.

  David parked and hurried up to the seventh floor, pausing outside the anatomy lab.

  Students milled in clusters, sporting backpacks weighed down with books. Inside, students were bent over cadavers with scalpels and tongs, slicing and prodding. In the corner, a frail student with a prominent Adam's apple enacted the timeless ritual of making the skeleton talk, manipulating the mandible so it moved up and down as he attempted a bad pirate accent. He stopped abruptly when he noticed David.

  David had almost reached the door to the prep room when it swung open with a gust of formalin, revealing Yale and Dalton. A nauseated expression on his face, Dalton paused outside the door, leaning slightly on a chair.

  Yale regarded David suspiciously. "What are you doing up here?"

  "I was coming by to see the Lab Tech," David said. "There are a few maneuvers I'd like one of my med students to practice on a cadaver."

  Yale snapped his gum. "Uh-huh," he said.

  "What are you guys doing here?"

  Yale said, "We got an anonymous tip to this location."

  "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" Dalton added.

  Unaccustomed to lying, David shook his head, hoping he looked convincing. "Find anything interesting?" he asked.

  "Capone's gold. Lindbergh's kid." Yale flashed a quick smile. "O.J.'s other glove."

  Dalton's look was firm and piercing. "We don't want to find you anywhere around this case, Doc," he said. "Remember that."

  David stepped around them, entering the prep room and closing the door behind him. Horace looked up from the body he was working on, bloody saw in hand. A goofy smile lit his face. "Hey, Dr. Spier, how ya doing?" He offered David a blood-caked glove but then glanced down at it and withdrew it before David had to protest. Bits of gray matter clung to his eye shield, which he shoved atop his head with a forearm. His eyes were large, buglike, and somehow endearing. "Good to see you. Goddamn, has it been crazy in here. The kids are hyper because it's their last day of anatomy, on top of which the cops had me sealed out for four hours this morning. Dusting and picking and prying. Then the questioning." He rolled his eyes. "I guess after all that, they didn't find a single goddamned print they liked."

  A police flier sat on the wooden desk, the composite of Clyde staring up from it. Horace followed David's eyes and nodded. "The cops brought that with them. I guess they went out through the hospital, but I haven't picked up my mail yet today."

  "So he does work here?"

  "Worked here. Crazy, huh? I always knew the guy was a few nerves short of a full plexus."

  David's mouth went dry. "What's his name?"

  "Douglas DaVella. He worked here up until a few months ago, as an orderly. His job was to bring the corpses up from the hearses and help me hang 'em."

  So Clyde was a fake name, as David had considered. "What else did he do?"

  "He ran specimens, got them to the appropriate labs."

  That would mean he'd had a worker's pass, and would have known the codes to most of the Omnilock doors in the facility. Running deliveries--moving from stretch of corridor to stretch of corridor--would've taught him his way around the hospital. Transferring cadavers had been how he'd learned to operate a gurney; David had been wrong in making inquiries about the orderlies who dealt with patients.

  Horace walked over and opened a cabinet below the sink, removing a plastic container of DrainEze. He plunked it down on the embalming table beside the cadaver lying inert and gray, a fresh hole sawed through its chest. "Trade secret." He grinned. "I have to special-order it. Which means Douglas probably stole it right from here."

  "What was he like?" David asked. "DaVella."

  Horace shrugged. "Not much into hygiene, if you catch my drift. For our lower-skilled positions, we like to hire people a bit disadvantaged." A glint of pride showed in Horace's face, the pride of a self-taught man who has pulled himself up the job ladder. "I'll tell you, he smoked with a vengeance, two at a time sometimes. You know, like trying to calm himself down. Willing himself to hold together. But he didn't."

  "What happened?"

  "He started coming undone. Showing up late. Not reporting back from runs. I found him once in the crypt, standing among the bodies. Wasn't doing anything weird, just swaying on his feet. Said the stillness calmed him."

  "Any trouble with the corpses? Any of them . . . violated or anything?"

  "No, no. Nothing like that." Horace drew back his head a
s if he'd just been exposed to a bad odor. It was the first time David had seen him wear an expression of disgust.

  "Was he fired?"

  "I finally had to let him go," Horace said. "I didn't have a choice," he added defensively. "Things weren't getting done."

  David wondered if Clyde was avenging the fact he'd been fired. He'd told David, I just want them to be sorry. "Did he seem pissed off when you fired him?"

  "No. Not really. Kind of sad, maybe."

  "Did he interact well socially?"

  "Boy, you ask a different breed of question than the cops," Horace said. David resisted the urge to ask him what Yale and Dalton had inquired about, letting Horace continue. "Douglas avoided students like the plague. Especially the girls. He liked to come in during off hours, when the place was empty." He gestured to the door, behind which the lab clamored with students picking at bodies. "They harassed him, now and then. Pretty upsetting, when you think about it, them being future doctors. But I'll tell you, doctors ain't the picture of empathy these days. Not like it used to be." He nodded deferentially.

  "How would they harass him? The students?"

  "Well, it didn't happen much, to be fair. But now and then they'd stop him, try to get him to talk, assess his speech patterns, posture, things like that. You know how med students are--thought they were being subtle and helpful. He found the scrutiny unbearable. A girl tried to practice on him with her ophthalmoscope once. Reduced him to tears. She got apologetic after, of course, but it didn't seem to help." Horace's eyes traced over the split body before them. "Poor bastard."

  When Horace looked up, David was surprised to see that he seemed upset.

  "I've worked hard for this job. Hard like you wouldn't believe. And when Douglas started going loose on me, I had to protect my position. There was nothing else I could have done." His face looked tired, maybe from his working on guilt, or guilt working on him.

  Before David could respond, Horace revved up the saw and turned back to the body. David left quietly.