Public Anatomy Page 11

  The modeling gigs paid good money for a while, but gradually the work opportunities became more infrequent. He faced big-time debt to get through four years of medical school. Then another modeling opportunity came to him. This time no underwear was required. The magazine wanted not only full frontal but a head shot as well. He refused to put his anonymity at risk. The magazine editor compromised by allowing him to wear a surgical mask that at least partially hid his face. This seemed to work.

  After a year of this, Greenway left the modeling world behind him. Now two things consumed his life: training to be an OB/GYN, and training for the triathlon. He had replaced showing his body with training his body—and for one of the most grueling competitions known to the individual athlete. The Annual Memphis Wolfpack Triathlon was only three weeks away.

  Then a girlfriend found a proof of one of the photos in his apartment. She could see beyond the mask—and more. She liked the idea of dating a male model. And she promised not to tell anyone. Except one of her medical school girlfriends. Then everyone knew. Including the producers of Secret Lives of Doctors. Greenway refused to meet with them. So they went to him.

  Shelby Farms is an expansive park in the center of Shelby County. More than four thousand acres, it is the largest urban park in the United States. In the mid-1990s, the farm supported prisoners from the county penal system who grew their own food and sold the surplus. The park boasts activities such as riding horses, taking aim at a pistol and rifle range, or windsurfing on sixty-acre Patriot Lake. With a 10K cross-country running course, Shelby Farms provides a superb environment to train for marathons and triathlons.

  After unsuccessful attempts to arrange any interviews on the medical school campus, the staff at Secret Lives went looking for Thomas Greenway. They asked his fellow residents where he spent his off hours. All answers were the same, and the staff found him swimming laps in the brownish-gray water of Patriot Lake. Without his permission, they filmed his lean body cutting the water, and then waited for him on the shore.

  Dressed in a dark suit and looking hot in both meanings of the word, Carol Baylor, the show’s executive producer, smiled at Greenway when he emerged from the lake. Rivulets of water streamed down his tanned, firm abdominals and dripped from a body-tight pair of swimming briefs. She said to her cameraman, “This is going to be good.”

  Greenway reached into his bag, removed a shirt, and slipped it over his head. The shirt fit tight on his wet skin and he had to inch it over his chest.

  The producer of the newest medical reality show watched every move. “I’m Carol Baylor from The Secret Lives of Doctors.”

  Greenway knew that a television show had been conducting interviews at the medical center. He pulled a pair of running shorts over his Speedo. “I know who you are.”

  “How’s the water?”

  He looked back at the lake. “Muddy.”

  “We’d like to interview you about your training. A doctor who does triathlons would interest our viewers.”

  “A lot of doctors do triathlons.” He picked up his bag, started to walk off. “I know what you’re after, and I’m not interested.”

  She followed. “Look, I know what you’re thinking. We’ll only film your training and a few shots at the hospital.”

  The look he gave her was pure skepticism.

  “That’s all,” she added. “Nothing from the past.”

  “And why should I agree to do this?”

  “There’s good money in it for you. Enough for a year’s worth of rent.”

  “How do you know I rent?”

  “We’ve done our homework.”

  He shrugged. “Good for you.”

  “And a Cervello racing bike.”

  This got his attention.

  “A Cervello?”

  “We know that you train with an old bike. We’ll give you a brand new P3 Carbon. It’s top of the line.”

  “I know it’s top of the line.”

  Then she went for the kill. “And a year’s membership at David’s Gym. Have you ever worked out there?”

  Any serious athlete in Memphis knew that David’s was the best-equipped, most exclusive gym in the city.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “It will put you in top form for the triathlon.”

  She extended her hand. “Deal?”

  He shook her hand.

  “And,” she added, with a wink, “you can keep all your clothes on.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A throng of darkly dressed adults stood on the steps of Madison Avenue Episcopal Church and slowly inched their way inside. Across the street, Eli stood beside his Bronco and watched. The two-o’clock sun seemed to melt asphalt and metal. Eli felt his shirt begin to cling to skin beneath his black suit.

  He had not been to a funeral since his father’s, two years ago. Elizer Branch had not wanted a church funeral. Instead, a sterile memorial service was held at a sterile funeral home. Only a handful of people traveled to Elmwood Cemetery for brief graveside remarks before Eli’s father was buried beside his mother.

  Eli crossed the street. The small crowd had entered the church. He wanted to slip in, take a seat in the back row, and pay his respects to a woman he had known ten years ago, and more recently during intense moments at Gates Memorial Hospital.

  Organ music filled the church as he entered and slipped past the ushers to find an empty space in the back. The church was not full, but those attending were positioned such that the sanctuary appeared occupied. When his eyes adjusted to the darker room, he began to recognize a few of the people in attendance. Robert Largo, Gates Memorial’s Chief of Staff, sat near the front. Next to him, Eli recognized the director of nursing and the nursing supervisor from the OR. They stared at the closed casket as the organist continued to play. Across the aisle, a few pews up, a young nurse whom Eli recognized from the OR turned and looked at him. She smiled briefly and then looked away. The music stopped and the priest addressed the congregation.

  As words blurred into liturgy and ritual, Eli wondered why he had come to Virginia Brewer’s funeral. He tried to convince himself that he was there as a friend of a woman who had been somewhat like a mother to him. But his mind flashed to her death and the death before her, and he became aware that the real reason he was in this church was to attempt to make sense of the two murders with which somehow he’d become involved.

  The first two pews, where the family sat, had been sectioned off with gold rope. A man, who Eli assumed was Virginia’s husband, sat by an older woman with thin gray hair. Beside her were a young man and woman, both in their mid-twenties, likely Virginia’s children.

  When the service was over, Eli stayed behind in his seat until most of the gathering had filed out down the center aisle. He had no desire to speak with Robert Largo, the administrator who had signed the papers that officially suspended Eli’s clinical privileges at Gates Memorial. Nor did he care to see any of the nurses or other hospital personnel whom he’d recognized during the service. He wanted to talk with no one, a plan that backfired as he left the church a few minutes later.

  “Dr. Branch?”

  A stocky man with red, swollen eyes walked up the steps and shook Eli’s hand. It was the man Eli had seen in the front pew, Virginia’s husband.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Virginia spoke of you often. She thought the world of you.”

  Unprepared for this confrontation, Eli searched for the right words. “Your wife was a special lady, and an incredible nurse.”

  Long, awkward moments of silence followed. The small group of family members stood by cars lined up behind the hearse. The funeral attendants stood with hands clasped in front of them, watching Eli and beckoning the husband so that the procession could depart.

  Virginia’s husband lingered, as if he had more to say.

  “My wife had been upset about the death in the hospital. She was there that day, working as a nurse in the operating room.” He shook his head. “She even talked about
quitting her job. It was so unlike her. And now this. Someone took her life. There’s no sense to it.”

  Eli took the man’s hand, held it with both of his own. “I’m so sorry.”

  The man remained there another moment, searching Eli’s eyes as if hoping Eli had some information that would ease his pain. When Eli said nothing, the man descended the steps toward the waiting hearse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Liza French entered the basement corridor of Gates Memorial Hospital. She looked each way before fully stepping from the stairwell into the hallway. A sheen of moisture glistened from the concrete flooring. She considered it appropriate that the basement was reserved for pathologists and other personnel who attended the dead—the precise reason she never ventured to the basement. She had no reason to. Until now.

  She wandered through a maze of halls until she found a solitary MORGUE sign with a thick black arrow pointing the way. She passed a janitor, stepping around his mop, which jutted from a bucket of brown water, and soon reached a set of double glass doors. PATHOLOGY was printed on the left door, SUITE on the right.

  Inside, she found a heavyset woman sitting behind a desk, looking at her over the top of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. She adjusted her eyewear and gazed at Liza’s leopard skin skirt, her high heel pumps.

  “This ain’t Macy’s,” Ms. Conch told her. “You lost, sweetheart?”

  “Is this where I can sign a death certificate?”

  “Death certificate? You might find that here. Who’s asking?”

  “I’m Dr. French. Liza French.”

  Ms. Conch stood, which raised her up only a foot or so, a portion of that gained from the thick soles of her shoes, part business pump, part army boot. She took in a full view of the female chief of OB/GYN. “Well, I’ll be.”

  “I’m here to sign the death certificate on—”

  “I know which one,” Ms. Conch said, interrupting her. “Everybody and their dog knows about that death.”

  “Gee, thanks. Can you just get it for me?”

  “Sure.” Ms. Conch continued to stare at Liza’s shoes. “Just like they say.”

  “What?”

  “You are quite a sight.”

  Liza snapped her fingers. “The certificate, please.”

  Ms. Conch turned, waddled toward a filing cabinet, and returned with a thin stack of papers.

  “Death certificate’s on top, autopsy reports on the bottom.” Ms. Conch pointed at the papers in Liza’s hand. “Might want to read the report, so you put the correct cause of death.”

  Liza smirked. “I’ve done this before.”

  “So I hear.”

  Liza thumbed through the pages until she found the autopsy summary page.

  Ms. Conch sat at her desk pretending to work at her computer until Liza interrupted the silence.

  “That bitch.”

  “Scuze me?”the Conch said.

  Liza riffled through the pages again. “Where is this doctorrrr—Daily?

  “She’s not in at the moment. Something I can help you with?”

  “This report, it’s screwed up.”

  “Screwed up?” Ms. Conch asked, her furry eyebrows scrunched toward her nose, as though she was actually concerned. “You must be mistaken. Screwed up best describes what happened in the OR.”

  “Get her out here,” Liza demanded.

  “Something wrong with those ears? I said she’s not here.”

  From the autopsy room rang the sharp clang of steel on steel.

  They both looked toward the door.

  Then at each other.

  “Sometimes,” Ms. Conch said, “they’re not as dead as we think.”

  Liza made a quick move toward the autopsy suite.

  Ms. Conch tried to block the way but succeeded only in knocking over her chair. “You can’t go back—”

  But Liza was already through the swinging doors. “You’ve got to change this report,” she said, shaking the papers in the air.

  Ms. Conch was right behind her. “I told her she couldn’t come back here, Dr. Daily.”

  Meg stood behind a table of instruments. She continued to wipe an autopsy knife with a towel, linear crimson stripes staining the cloth.

  “Your description,” Liza said, “is all wrong.”

  Meg stepped from behind the table, wiping her gloved hands on the dirty towel.

  “Dr. Daily calls it as she sees it, Frenchie.”

  Meg held up one hand. “I’ve got this, Ms. Conch.”

  The bulky receptionist turned to leave, then glanced back at Liza French. “Hope Formalin seeps into that leopard skirt and you stink to high heaven.” She let the double doors swing freely behind her.

  Meg stood not three feet from Liza. “You’ve got a problem with my autopsy report?”

  “Reading this,” Liza said, waving the report in Meg’s face, “you make it sound like I practically killed the woman.”

  “The patient’s aorta was skewered with a long instrument,” Meg declared. “I just report what I find.”

  “What I found,” Liza said, inching closer to Meg’s face, “as her doctor, was a diseased, bleeding uterus. That’s what caused her death.”

  “Are you suggesting I change my report?”

  “Not suggesting,” Liza said, slapping the papers against Meg’s chest. “Ordering.”

  Meg glanced down at Liza’s hand, felt the pressure of Liza trying to push her backward. Then Meg swiped the bloody towel across Liza’s face.

  Ms. Conch banged through the doors. “I’ve called security on her, Dr. Daily.”

  Liza wiped her face and spit in the direction of Ms. Conch. “I’ll take care of this myself,” she said, and flattened the death certificate against the wall. She filled in the cause of death and signed it. As she left the autopsy suite, she threw the papers at the battle-ready shoes of Ms. Conch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Eli felt a gradual sense of relief as he departed Memphis. The heat intensified a degree or two as he traveled south on Interstate 55 through northern Mississippi. Abandoned warehouses and low-income housing changed to flat, rich Delta farmland. The toll taken by the drought and scorching heat was evident. Whole fields of soybeans curled their leaves trying to hide from the sun. Even King Cotton, normally resistant and thriving in such conditions, had this year made only hard white knots of fruit.

  After discussing the two murders with Meg, and seeing the bodies firsthand, Eli now had postmortem confirmation of the sequence of removed body parts—bone, and then muscle—a sequence he hoped could be interpreted by an old professor and colleague in Oxford.

  It wasn’t the mere detail of a bone removed that had triggered his trip from the Bluff City. It was Meg’s confirming identification of the bone as the navicular. The sleek bones of the femur or humerus, prone to fracture during sporting events or motor vehicle accidents, and commonly splinted in a plaster cast, served as models for display and illustration of the entire bone family. The navicular bone, however, was a small, oddly shaped, underappreciated bone in the foot named for its resemblance to a boat. From his comparative anatomy course at University College London, Eli remembered that the navicular was an important bone in the horse, located in the hoof just behind the coffin bone. But in humans, it was just one of a handful of bones in the foot. Of all the ways to mutilate a body, to show the conquest of murderer over victim, why take the time to locate, dissect, and remove the entire navicular bone?

  Eli had developed his appreciation for anatomical detail as a young boy from his father, an anatomist at the medical school, who emphasized the importance of proper nomenclature and precise details of origin and insertion of muscle into bone. When it came time for Eli to enroll in college, his father arranged for him to study under Dr. Aldous Salyer at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. A scholar in the history of anatomical dissection and anatomical art, Dr. Salyer had served on the faculty at the medical school in Jackson for nearly twenty years, when his personal habits began to
interfere with his teaching. He’d been asked to leave. He landed in the history department at the undergraduate campus in Oxford.

  At Ole Miss, Dr. Salyer’s classes soon became legendary for their full-scale productions, including detailed drawings of historical dissections projected on the wall. To the delight of his students, Salyer brought the dissections to life by contorting his own body, arching his back, and twisting his neck sideways, imitating anatomical art.

  The students laughed the first time Salyer performed his demonstrations, until they realized that it was no joke, that he was absolutely serious. A thin man with a wiry, muscular build, Salyer used his physique to illustrate the location of a muscle or even demonstrate its function, lifting his pants leg to show the gastrocnemius, rolling his sleeve and locking his triceps, showing too much skin at times around his protruding hip bone.

  Always one to make class interesting, Salyer had each student examine his or her own body before the course was over. The snuffbox, for example. Open the palm of your hand like you’re about to shake hands with someone. Then rotate your hand back against your wrist. A small pocket develops between the base of your thumb and wrist, just big enough for a pinch of salt, or a dip of snuff.

  As the son of Elizer Branch, professor of anatomy at the University of the Mid-South Medical School, Eli was already known to Salyer before he attended Ole Miss. At Ole Miss, Eli was drawn to Salyer’s passionate study of anatomy and anatomical dissection and he enrolled in the professor’s class as a sophomore. He would have enrolled his first year except that freshmen were not allowed to take the class.

  Salyer became his mentor and Eli his graduate student, assembling scholarly papers—even substituting for him in class when Salyer’s absences became more frequent. Although Eli always credited his father, it was upon Salyer’s urging that Eli applied for and was accepted in a prestigious comparative anatomy fellowship and year abroad at University College London, a crucial step in his path to becoming a surgeon.