Public Anatomy Page 24

  The four men who waited in line for the clinic to open appeared content in the cool morning. Two of them sat crossed-legged on the pavement. Eli joined them, standing at the back of the line. They regarded him with suspicion at first. He asked if they had seen Mr. Norman Felts. They didn’t know who this was until he said the name Tobboganhead.

  They hadn’t seen him. Two more patients arrived and stood behind

  Eli. He waited a few more minutes and the door of the clinic opened.

  Cate stood in the doorway wearing a white coat. Her hair was pulled back, very professional. He understood why the clinic was so popular. The patients looked to Cate as their doctor. The free clinic made a direct impact on the homeless and impoverished. She was doing a good thing.

  By the sudden change in Cate’s expression, he knew that his presence alarmed her. She approached the line of patients.

  “Dr. Branch, I’m so glad you could make it.”

  Upon hearing that he was a doctor, those in front of Eli turned to face him.

  Cate motioned to the door. “Please come in.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  Eli followed Cate inside the clinic.

  She shut the door behind them.

  “How are you?” Eli asked.

  Tears welled in her eyes. She collapsed into a straight-backed chair, hands covering her face.

  Eli had a lot of questions for Cate. He decided to let her talk.

  “I had to come to the clinic today,” she said, removing her hands from her eyes. She kept them cupped over her mouth. “It’s the only thing that could get my mind off last night.”

  Eli nodded. “When I’m in the operating room, that’s all there is. Just me and the patient, everything else doesn’t matter.”

  Cate seemed to wait for more words of encouragement from Eli—anything, he guessed, that moved away from the subject of the previous evening.

  “What happened last night?”

  Cate stood and walked to the window. She was quiet for a moment, watching as more patients walked across the parking lot. “Dr. French has been a good friend to me. More than a friend, really. She’s a role model. The reason I chose OB/GYN.”

  Even though Lipsky had read Cate’s police statement to Eli, he wanted to hear it for himself. “Why were you at her house last night?”

  “She’s writing a letter of recommendation for my fellowship. Dr. French wanted to discuss it with me.”

  Eli knew this was odd. A letter of recommendation would be discussed in an academic office during regular hours. Not at a faculty member’s home at night. He planned to confront her about the intruder. Cate beat him to it.

  “That man broke into her house. We didn’t hear him coming. He just appeared.”

  The line outside was getting longer. The patients saw Dr. Cate in the window and started tapping the pane, wanting to come in. When Cate went to the door and explained to the patients that they’d have to wait a few more minutes, Eli went into the break room and unlocked the back door.

  Cate returned and continued her story. “I thought it was a joke at first. Dr. French didn’t seem alarmed, like maybe she knew him. He started touching her. And she let him do it. Maybe she was scared, I don’t know, but I just wanted to get out of there. That’s when I saw the gun.”

  Cate was remarkably calm as she said this, a blank stare past Eli.

  He had seen this look on assault and abuse victims in the emergency room. The icy stare as they told of the violence against them.

  “He pointed the gun at me and told me to strap Dr. French to the table.” Cate described how she’d tried to fight him but he hit her, kept hitting her. “Then, he made us—”

  A pulsing screech from Cate’s beeper made her jump and stop mid-sentence. She checked the number.

  So far, Eli thought, everything checked out. The details were the same as in her statement to the police. Eli wondered what she would have said next, without the interruption.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Branch. I really need to answer this and then see my patients.”

  She reached for the clinic phone, but Eli pulled out a cell, flipped it open, and presented it to her.

  “Please, use this one.”

  She took the phone, ready to enter the number from the pager, but came face-to-face with her picture on the small screen. It was a little out of focus, the brown clinic building in the background, her in a white coat as the doctor in charge.

  Cate looked at Eli, her expression showing that she remembered the picture being taken. Against her steady protest, Mr. Felts—Tobbagan head—had insisted on it, said he had a new picture phone he wanted to try out. But she wasn’t the only person in the photo. It was one of the few days her brother had been at the clinic with her. In the small picture, he was there, behind her, a side shot in profile, but unmistakable.

  Cate attempted a smile, as though Dr. Branch might not know of this detail.

  Eli wasn’t smiling. “This man tried to kill Dr. Liza French. The newspapers call him the Organist. He’s your brother, Cate.”

  Cate looked again at the photo captured on the cell phone. “Our father left us when I was seven. Nathan was a few years older. I barely remember the man, just that he was mean to our mother. She had to work two jobs. Put us in the best schools. Nathan was always smarter than me. Always. But he had a chip on his shoulder, bitter that our father abandoned us. He stayed in trouble, spent six months at a juvenile detention center.”

  Cate told Eli how her brother had too many incidents from his past for acceptance into medical school. How their mother was disappointed, Nathan felt rejected, and they didn’t speak to each other for years.

  Patients were knocking on the door now. Gentle taps at first that grew louder. Faces filled the window. The patients were restless and called her name, not understanding why Dr. Cate was ignoring them.

  “Just before Mom’s operation, she and Nathan came back together. The wounds healed. We were a family again.”

  Cate looked up at Eli.

  “Then she died. In the operating room. Under Dr. French’s care.”

  The patients were shouting now, asking Dr. Cate what she was doing with that new doctor.

  “After the shock of it, we both felt incredibly guilty. My brother for the way he detached himself from our mother during the last years of her life. Me, for not being there. I was away on a senior externship at UNC in Chapel Hill. I wanted to fly back for her operation, but I was afraid that leaving during the rotation would affect my grade.” Cate lowered her head. “It seems so stupid now.

  “Dr. French didn’t even come out to tell Nathan our mother had died during the operation. She ran off to meet with her lawyer, trying to save her own butt. One of the nurses came out to tell him. By then he already knew.”

  Eli had remained quiet, until now, when he felt obligated to say something.

  “He already knew?”

  “My mother’s operation was webcast over the Internet. Some high school kid had a laptop in the waiting room. He was waiting on a family member in surgery, logged onto the Gates Memorial website, and saw the advertisement for the operation. Started watching it. Freaked out when he saw the blood. Everyone ran over to see. That’s how my brother found out.”

  Revenge deaths, Eli thought. The Organist wanted revenge, not only against Liza, but the whole operating room team. Anesthesia, nurses, surgery resident. He killed all of them, except Liza.

  Cate became very quiet. Eli wanted her to keep talking.

  “My mother died six years ago,” he said. “She had cancer. But that didn’t kill her. It was the treatment, the chemotherapy.” Eli hesitated, measuring his words. “Her doctors miscalculated the dose. Gave her ten times the normal amount. The membranes in her mouth and GI tract peeled off. She died in a pool of spit and blood.”

  Eli stopped. He made sure Cate was listening to him. She was, intently.

  “The doctors never told me about the mistake. They covered it up instead. Two weeks after her funeral, a p
harmacist came forward. I knew medical errors occurred. But the fact they lied about it, I …I was so mad I wanted to kill them. I filed a lawsuit. But I was a surgery resident then. I had no money, and taking time off from my surgery residency to pursue the lawsuit was not an option. So at the last minute, I withdrew the suit.”

  While Eli told this, Cate inched closer and closer to him until they stood only a couple of feet apart. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Eli chose this moment to strike. “You were there during the most recent operation, when the death occurred.”

  Cate wasn’t expecting this. She took a step back.

  “Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?” Eli said.

  Another step back.

  “Or is it?” Eli followed her retreat. “After your mother’s death, you went to Dr. French. Became her protégé. Gained her trust. She even mentioned that you could be her partner, after your training. You set it up, made sure you could be there for the next operation after her period of probation was over. That operation was webcast, live, just like your mother’s operation. That was your revenge, Cate. To shatter the career of Liza French by another operative death.”

  Cate’s chin began to quiver. She clenched her jaw.

  “Dr. French taught you about the robotic equipment. You knew which part of the procedure carried the most risk. You could make it appear that it was the robot’s fault.”

  Cate shook her head.

  Eli went on.

  “During the final moments of the operation there was a distraction. A phone call from a prospective patient’s husband. It was all captured in the transcript. The caller was your brother, Cate. No one was watching when you were supposed to remove the instruments, when instead you jammed the trocar into the patient’s aorta and killed her.”

  Cate stared at the picture on the phone.

  “But it didn’t stop there, did it, Cate? Your brother couldn’t stop until every member of the team from your mother’s operation was dead.”

  Eli took the phone from her. He held the screen to her face, visual evidence of Cate’s connection to the Organist, her brother.

  “And then you both went after Liza.”

  Cate began to plead. “You know what it’s like, Dr. Branch, to have someone you love taken away by doctors who don’t even care. It has to stop.” She looked again at the phone. “We had to stop it.”

  Eli waited. He waited for her to realize what she was saying. That killing these five people was somehow justified.

  But Cate was defiant.

  She pointed at the cell phone. “So what if we’re both in this picture, that doesn’t mean a damn thing. And besides, you could never prove that I caused the patient’s death.”

  With that statement, Eli knew they had enough evidence. He turned toward the back of the clinic. In the doorway of the break room, Lipsky appeared.

  “It proves quite a lot, Ms. Canavan,” Lipsky said. The detective walked slowly but purposefully toward her.

  Cate stood and announced that she must start seeing her patients. She marched through the front door into those waiting to see her. But she didn’t stop. She ripped off her white coat, slung it to the ground, and took off in a dead run across the pavement.

  Through a window in the free clinic, Eli and Lipsky saw flashes of sunlight reflected off glass as two police cars lurched forward and stopped Cate at the edge of the parking lot.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  The police wanted to close the clinic. All the patients had watched as Cate was escorted to the back of a squad car and driven away. But rather than leave, the patients kept their place in line. They knew another doctor waited for them inside.

  Lipsky remained at the clinic, said he needed to search the place for evidence.

  “Evidence?” Eli said. “What more evidence do you need?”

  A second officer stayed behind as well. He looked through drawers and cabinets.

  “You never know,” Lipsky said. “Anything we find might be important.”

  Eli watched them. The clinic was so sparsely furnished there weren’t many places to hide evidence if you wanted to.

  “We have the killer,” Eli told Lipsky. “He’s in the hospital. He will probably live, but he’s not going anywhere. And we have Cate’s confession. She was there during the second operating room death, the only member of the operative team, other than French, who survived. She knew all the team members and knew enough about their personal lives so her brother could hunt them down.”

  The officer found a stethoscope in one of the drawers and was playing doctor, with the prongs in his ears, listening to his own heart.

  “Maybe she didn’t think it would go this far,” Eli said. “Maybe she even tried to stop her brother. Who knows? But five people are dead. Cate confessed the motive—revenge for her mother’s death. And we’ve apprehended both individuals responsible.”

  Eli waited until Lipsky stopped rummaging through papers and looked at him. “It’s over, Lipsky.”

  The detective returned to the drawer, removed a tangled blood pressure cuff, replaced it. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” he said. “We’re still going to search the place. So lock the doors and tell those hobos out there to go home.”

  Through the window, Eli counted eleven people, including a woman who had just arrived and stood at the end of the line. She was holding a baby.

  “Search all you want,” Eli said. “But these people have been waiting and deserve to be seen. I’m not closing the clinic.”

  Lipsky and the officer continued their search.

  After the night rain’s brief respite from the heat, a full sun returned and bore down hard on the people outside the clinic. The newcomer stepped away from the line and Eli could see her more clearly. She was an older than average white woman who carried a black baby.

  The woman appeared to be talking nonstop. A man whom Eli recognized immediately stood near them. Tobogganhead reached over to shield the baby’s eyes and the woman slapped his hand.

  Eli opened the door and motioned for the woman to bring the baby inside. He expected complaints from those at the front of the line, but they were glad to see the clinic open. They made way for the woman, but she yelled at them anyway.

  “Get away from my baby, you liquor breaths.”

  Tobogganhead followed behind. When he saw Eli, a big smile lit up his face.

  “Dr. Branch. So good to see you.”

  Eli shook his hand. “Mr. Felts.”

  “Norman!” the woman snapped. “I’m talking with the doctor.”

  Tobagganhead rolled his eyes.

  Eli had forgotten his first name. Norman. And they seemed to be a couple. Speaking of odd.

  “My baby’s sick,” the woman said. “Been vomiting all night.”

  “Come in, please.” Eli closed the door behind them. It had been over ten years since he’d treated a newborn. But he was all they had.

  “I try to give him milk but he spits it back at me.”

  Tobagganhead tried to add to the story, but she stopped him each time.

  “How old is your baby?” Eli asked.

  “About one week,” the woman said. Then, for clarification. “He’s not our birth baby. We adopted.”

  “Oh?” Eli said. “I would have never guessed.”

  They made quite the adoptive parents. The mother with an obvious psychiatric problem. And Norman Felts, the father, with who knows what kind of animal living on his head under his toboggan. How in the world had they become the guardians of this child?

  “His birth mother abandoned him,” the woman said. “You know, teenage drug addict.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Eli found a thermometer to take the baby’s temperature. “How did you adopt so quickly?” he asked.

  Tobogganhead tried to answer. “We didn’t really adopt, we—”

  But the woman cut him off again. “Hush. Let me tell it.” She kissed the baby on top of the head, bounced him up and down even though he was already content. Then she pla
ced the infant on a small examining table, reached up, and repositioned the overhead light.

  “Mary’s a nurse here at the clinic,” Tobogganhead said.

  Eli tried to hide his surprise. “Oh, really.”

  “It’s all official,” Mary said. “The doctor said we could keep it.”

  Eli held the thermometer steady under the infant’s arm. “The doctor?”

  “After the drug addict girl delivered, Dr. Canavan and I were taking her home with the baby when she decided she didn’t want it. Handed the child to me in the parking lot.”

  She looked at Tobogganhead and smiled, all of a sudden the loving couple.

  “The drug addict mother didn’t have any parents. She was a runaway. So we saved this little baby’s life. Dr. Canavan said as long as we came to the free clinic for the baby’s check-ups and didn’t go to any other hospital, we could keep him.”

  “She did, did she?” The story was so hard to believe that somehow it all made sense. Eli removed the thermometer. The baby’s temp was perfectly normal. He was smiling and cooing.

  Eli noticed a shriveled nubbin of tissue at the outside tip of the baby’s foot. Gently, he flicked the tissue with his finger and watched as it fell off, rolled to the edge of the table, and landed on the floor. The “mother” stepped back and put her hand over her mouth. Eli looked at Tobogganhead. He was grinning at the sight of the mini-amputation procedure. Other than the sixth toe, their child was the healthiest baby Eli had ever seen.

  “Wait right here,” Eli said and went to the break room.

  The officer was searching a cabinet under the sink. Lipsky was reading a memo posted on the wall. It was from the dean of the medical school and addressed to Cate Canavan, medical student director of the free clinic. “Doc. You know all these patients can come here and get free medical care. Completely free. Just like that.”