Public Anatomy Page 22

  “If you really want me to improve my surgical skills, Dr. French, I need someone to practice on.”

  They were both too close.

  Liza took a step back, called out for Layla. There was no answer.

  “She won’t be of much help to you anymore,” he said.

  Liza pointed at him. “Get out of my house.” Then to Cate. “Go call the police.”

  Cate laughed. “I don’t think so. We should have called the police six months ago.”

  Liza looked only at Cate now. Mentor to student. Woman to woman. Hoping to find some answer of what was happening. Their faces mere inches from each other.

  “Six months ago?” Liza asked.

  The man stepped close and stared at Liza, waiting for her reaction.

  “Yes, six months ago,” Cate said. “When you killed our mother.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Liza stared at Cate in disbelief. “Your mother?”

  “She trusted you.” Cate’s eyes glistened with tears. “Said you were the only doctor who could make her better.”

  What at first made no sense now hit Liza like a wall.

  The first patient who died was Cate’s mother!

  Liza could see the slight resemblance she had not noticed before. How Cate’s fair skin, her high cheek bones, were exactly like the face of the woman who for the last six months haunted Liza’s dreams.

  “Why, Cate? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The man stepped in. He pointed a gun at Liza’s face.

  “Because we wanted you to pay, bitch.”

  Liza stepped back. Cate had not said my mother but rather our mother. This man she had picked up at the bar had staged the whole thing. He knew she would be at Alex’s Tavern, knew that she was prone to leave with a partner. So he had planted himself next to her at the bar. This man, who was in her face, calling her bitch, was Cate’s brother.

  He grabbed both of Liza’s arms, hands wrapping full around her biceps, and lifted her straight in the air. Liza’s feet dangled and she went for his groin with a quick kick, but he anticipated this and blocked her foot with his knee.

  Liza could feel his anger building, his fingers tighten even more, pinching her skin. She screamed. Then he slammed her down on the operating table. Her back hit first, then her head whiplashed against the rock-hard surface. She blacked out for a few seconds, enough time for him to bind her to the table. She screamed again when she came to and felt the leather straps pulled tight across her chest.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Eli and Lipsky approached Liza’s house from the street. Before stepping onto her front walk, Lipsky stopped.

  “My mother used to bring me here.”

  “You had a mother?”

  “Yeah, a damn good one, actually. My father was a piece of shit, but my mom was a saint. She wanted me to be cultured so she taught me about all this stuff. How to arrange a place setting at the table with lace doilies. About fancy Victorian furniture. How to dance proper.”

  “Did you say doilies?”

  “Yeah, what about them?”

  “Nothing,” Eli said. He wanted Lipsky’s story to end so they could find Liza.

  Lipsky went on.

  “She used to drag me in and out of these old houses.” He pointed. “We would go on all the tours. I’d have to listen about Victorian antiques, crap like that.”

  “You loved every bit of it,” Eli told him.

  Lipsky nodded. “You’re right.”

  Eli kept moving toward the house. Lipsky didn’t.

  “This old house next door, a shipping merchant owned it. He would stand on top of that balcony up there and watch for his ships floating down the Mississippi. That’s pretty damn cool, isn’t it?”

  Eli tried to maintain forward momentum.

  “I’ve been here several times.” Lipsky pointed to the top of Liza’s house. “See that upper window, with the light on?”

  “Yes, Lipsky, I see it.”

  “The French maids stayed up there. It was a secret chamber.”

  As much as he wanted to move on, Eli had to ask. “French maids?”

  “Hell, yeah. Know anything about Victorian sex?”

  Eli wiped a line of sweat off his forehead. He just wanted to find Liza, talk with her, and leave.

  “No, not particularly.”

  Wrong answer.

  “I bought a book on it.”

  “That’s all you got out of this, a book on twisted sex?”

  “They liked their secret chambers, know what I mean?”

  “Yes I do,” Eli said and picked up his pace toward the house.

  Lipsky followed him, kept talking. “They would serve tea. I hated tea. But my mother would pack us a lunch and we would eat out on the lawn. She tried to raise me up proper, my mother.”

  Eli put a hand on his shoulder. “She did a fine job.”

  “Shut up.”

  Just as they reached the steps to Liza’s house, a scream cut through the stale night air.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Fear accelerated Liza’s thoughts and brought clarity in the face of chaos. The death of Cate’s mother on the operating table was an accident. Even though the robotic equipment was new to Liza and the operative team, the robotic device functioned just fine. The vascular injury occurred during what should have been routine removal of the abdominal trocars. After the fatal event, everything got crazy, fast.

  The hospital’s attorneys and risk management officers descended, trying to save face for the hospital and everyone involved. Liza tried to contact the patient’s family. She was told a daughter was out of town and unavailable. During the urgent meeting with hospital officials, one of the nurses from the operation paged Liza and told her a son was waiting. Liza sent the nurse to talk with him until she could get away. The nurse took the young man to see his mother’s body in a makeshift “family” room.

  When the meeting with risk management was over, Liza went to find her patient’s son. But he’d already left the hospital. The nurse told Liza, “The man was very upset and angry that the main doctor had not come to tell him of his mother’s death.” There had been no contact with the man or any family since. Until now.

  Liza wrenched her body against the leather straps. They didn’t budge. He had pulled them so tight she could barely breathe. She tried to kick her feet, but he had bound them as well.

  It was clear to her now that the most recent operative death was not an accident. Cate was the medical student who’d scrubbed for the operation. That was no accident either. She and her brother had somehow orchestrated the death of her patient to cause all of Liza’s problems.

  All of that hardly mattered now. Liza had to convince them that their mother’s death was an accident. Otherwise, she knew the next death would be her own.

  Cate stood at the side of the table, her arms crossed in front, as if holding herself to stop the shaking.

  Liza stopped struggling.

  “It was an accident, Cate. You have to believe me,” Liza pleaded. “The instrument malfunctioned. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’ve heard enough.”

  The son was back in her face, with the gun.

  “Shut the hell up.”

  Cate took a step back but her brother stopped her. “Inject her with the drugs, Cate. Then I’ll take her to her final scene.”

  Cate removed a syringe from her pocket. She removed the cap from the needle but she was crying now. Her hand shook uncontrollably.

  The man grabbed the hem of Liza’s capris pants and ripped the fabric to expose the skin of her thigh.

  “You can do this, Cate. Think of Mother. How she suffered.” His voice grew louder. “How this bitch made her suffer.”

  Cate stopped crying. Liza watched as her medical student raised the syringe, ready to make the stab.

  Liza made herself not scream but she yelled, “Wait!”

  Cate pulled the syringe back. She had been trained to obey her attending surgeon.

&n
bsp; Liza knew that her next words were her last chance. Her voice quivered, but she said the words clearly.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  After the second scream, Eli and Lipsky, outside the house, heard a male voice shout from an upper floor, “Shut the hell up.”

  They found the front door locked, of course. When Eli suggested breaking the windows, Lipsky pushed Eli aside, took a step back, and with a quick kick shattered the door beneath the dead bolt.

  “I’ve been waiting for a chance to do that,” he said.

  Splintered wood lodged in the frame, but with one more kick Lipsky knocked it completely open.

  Eli went through first and immediately found a body face-down on the marble floor. Eli knew it was Layla even before he rolled her over and saw her blood-stained face. He felt for a carotid pulse and confirmed she was dead.

  Lipsky sprinted up the spiral staircase with Eli a few steps behind.

  Cate held the syringe inches above Liza’s skin.

  “She’s lying, Cate,” her brother said. “Don’t listen to her. Do it.”

  “Please, just don’t hurt my baby,” Liza begged. “Please.”

  Cate let the syringe drop to the floor. Then she felt the house shake, heard the crash of someone kicking in the front door.

  Without hesitation, her brother picked up the syringe and released the leather straps. Cate watched him drag Liza out onto the fire escape. Instinctively, Cate started to wipe the tears off her face, then decided against it. Instead, she tore open the top part of her blouse.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Lipsky held the gun above his head with both hands. Eli followed the detective into the room and was surprised that the only person there was the female medical student who had received publicity for founding the free clinic. He remembered meeting her in the emergency room.

  “Cate?”

  Lipsky scanned the room and saw the open door at the fire escape.

  Cate was on her knees, sobbing.

  Eli knelt beside her. She appeared physically unharmed but emotionally distraught.

  “He was going to kill us,” she said. “He was going to kill both of us.”

  Finding no one on the fire escape, Lipsky reentered the room, his gun lowered at his side.

  Eli lifted Cate’s chin with his hand. “Where’s Liza?”

  Cate pointed to the study’s back door. “He dragged her out there.”

  “Who the hell is he?” Lipsky asked.

  Cate shook her head, still sobbing.

  They heard a car squeal away. Lipsky ran to the window to see the taillights of a black Trans Am.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  Lipsky raced to his car and called in an APB on a black Trans Am headed in the direction of the medical center.

  Eli stayed with Cate for another few minutes though he wanted to follow Lipsky, fearing that the detective might leave without him. But he felt obligated to console Cate. He asked, again, who had done this to her. But she just pulled her torn blouse together at her throat and rocked back and forth in a state of traumatic shock.

  Eli glanced around the room at the robotic surgical instruments and the actual operating table in the center. The instrument table was in disarray, the operating table askew, with the top leather strap folded back but the bottom strap locked. When he saw the scalpel on the floor, Eli knew the Organist had captured his final victim. And just as Salyer predicted, he had chosen a female for dissection.

  Cate tried to talk. Eli leaned closer to hear.

  “Please go—and find Dr. French.”

  That was the release Eli needed. At the door, he heard Cate again. She was standing now and had stopped crying.

  “What Cate?”

  She hesitated a moment, then said, “You have to hurry. Dr. French said she was pregnant.”

  Lipsky pulled away from the curb. Eli ran in front of the car’s headlights to stop him. Lipsky slammed on the brakes and Eli jumped in the front.

  “Wondered if you were coming.” Lipsky made a U-turn in the street.

  “I know what he’s doing,” Eli said, between breaths.

  “He being the Organist, I presume?”

  “French is pregnant.”

  Lipsky laughed. “Thought you doctors knew about contraception.”

  “It’s not mine, Lipsky. Will you shut up and listen.”

  “All ears.”

  “The final book is the reproductive system, the female organs, the uterus.”

  Lipsky passed a car in the left lane.

  “The title page of Vesalius’s work shows a public dissection on a female cadaver. Some scholars believe the woman in the illustration had been accused of a crime and sentenced to death. To avoid this penalty, she claimed she was pregnant.”

  “And your point is?”

  “After the hanging, with a crowd of public officials and townspeople to provide evidence for or against her claim, Vesalius dissected her uterus.”

  Lipsky shrugged. “You’re telling me—”

  “Yes, he’s going to recreate the scene—with Liza as his subject.”

  “To cut out her uterus?”

  “The Organist is after his last organ,” Eli said.

  “This is some freaky shit.” Lispky shook his head. “French is probably already dead.”

  “I don’t think so, Lipsky. The patient in the operation six months ago was alive when her uterus was removed.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’m talking about the first patient of Dr. French who died. So far, he’s killed everyone who was a part of that operation, except Liza. This is his final revenge.”

  “So why didn’t he already kill her?”

  “He will—but he wants her to suffer like he thinks the first patient did before she died.”

  “He’s going to remove her uterus while French is still alive?”

  “Yes,” Eli said. “Question is—where’s he taking her?”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Cate’s brother dragged Liza up a hill covered in dead grass. This time, she screamed from pain, not fear, as her hip scraped the corner of a flat tombstone. He stopped and slapped her in the face. The blow numbed her so she merely moaned when he grabbed her hair and kept pulling her up the hill.

  When they reached the top, the Organist smiled at what he saw. The men from Cate’s clinic had come through for him. They may be homeless, he thought, but they’re damn reliable. Especially when they get a fifth of whiskey and some cash.

  Altogether, he counted seven men sitting on the concrete stage beneath the cemetery’s Corinthian columns. He had hoped for ten, but this would do. Foster had brought the dog. It pulled against its leash and tried to greet the others.

  “Good,” the Organist said. At least it’s close to the scene Vesalius created. There was no monkey, as in the original illustration, but at least the dog was among the audience, an insult to Galen and his canine-based anatomical knowledge. He thought of his mother’s painting of the sixteenth-century public anatomy and how he was recreating the scene in real life.

  She would be so proud of me.

  If she was still alive.

  Sadness turned to rage, a familiar, comforting feeling.

  He knelt beside Liza, grabbed her shoulder-length hair and yanked it back. “You’re the last one. All the others are dead. They will never, ever, kill another patient. No one else will have to lose a mother, like Cate and I did.” He twisted her head toward him. “Do you hear me? I have saved the world from those incompetent nurses and doctors. Now, it’s your turn.”

  Liza struggled against him. “Don’t kill my baby.”

  He released her hair, as though her pregnancy made her toxic.

  “You’re lying, bitch. There is no baby. But we shall soon see. Like the great anatomist before me, I will cut your womb and see for myself.”

  He gently rocked Liza’s head back to show her the colonnaded stage and the men who waited.

  “That’s
where you die.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  The call came through on Lipsky’s radio. He had notified the entire Memphis police force to be on the lookout for a black Trans Am. It didn’t take long. A car fitting that description was seen heading south on Dudley Street at a high rate of speed. Problem was the officer who spotted the car was unable to keep up.

  Lipsky responded to the call. “Where did they lose him?”

  “Last seen at the corner of Dudley and Crump,” the dispatcher said.

  Dudley and Crump. Eli knew this area well. South side of town. Warehouses. Somewhat deserted. Eli and Henry traveled south on Dudley Street once a year, in August, with a single peach-colored rose, their mother’s favorite.

  Before Lipsky answered the police dispatch, Eli stopped him. “I know where he’s going.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Liza began to fight him, her fingernails scrapping five lines of flesh from the side of his neck. The Organist hit her hard in the face and she fell against the concrete platform. From his pocket he removed the syringe of drugs Cate had stolen from her clinic. He stabbed it into Liza’s thigh and depressed the plunger, delivering the full load of strong sedative. She continued to kick at him for a couple of minutes. He held her down until the horse-dose of medicine kicked in, and she became flaccid and unconscious.

  The Organist had told the men from Cate’s clinic they were getting paid to be in a movie scene. So-called extras. He needed them for thirty minutes, no longer. He would then give each of them cash and enough liquor for a week—or at least a night. He had given Foster a cell phone so he could communicate with the men before he arrived. Foster answered after the first ring.

  “Tell them to stand by the columns and keep their places.”

  A full moon reflected off the Corinthian columns and white cement steps. It cast a pleasant light. Even so, the Organist had given Joey the Flicker a two-million-candle-watt lamp, which sat at the edge of the platform and lit the place like a real movie set.