Public Anatomy Page 8

  Eli opened the door of the North Research Building. He knew the custom was for the first person in the morning to leave it unlocked for the next. At Gates, as at most medical center complexes, all buildings were connected internally by bridges, hallways, and tunnels. An intruder had to know only which doors were left unlocked and unattended. Eli was willing to take the risk. A code of strict patient continuity and follow-up had been instilled in him since his early days as a medical student. He planned to find his patient, the young boy, and make his rounds, hospital privileges or not.

  In the main corridor of the research building, he passed the door to the laboratory that he’d occupied for all of two weeks before his dismissal from the medical center. The door was locked. He peered through the small square window to see long, empty Formica-topped lab benches.

  The research building connected to the hospital by a series of underground hallways used primarily by housekeeping and power plant operators. He entered a passage used to transport the hospital’s newly dead toward the morgue—a separate building altogether, lest the dead and the living cross paths.

  A few turns later, the bare concrete floor changed to carpet and Eli reached the radiology department, a signal he was in the main hospital. Three short flights up and he would be in the surgical ICU. He opened the door to the stairwell.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  A security guard stood behind him. The timing was bad, but to Eli’s advantage the guard was young. Eli was betting on less than six months on the job.

  “Yes. Can you tell me how to get to the intensive care unit? My brother’s there,” Eli lied. “His nurse just called me for visiting hours.”

  Confused, the guard checked his watch.

  “He’s on life support,” Eli continued. “They said I could spend some time with him.

  “Up the stairs to the third floor, take a left.”

  Inside the ICU, Eli located the boy’s assigned name on the whiteboard. He remembered the randomly selected name as the nurse called it out on the way to the OR the previous night.

  Stat Virgo.

  Room six.

  The staff chose astrological signs for their currently unidentified patients. Next would be automobile types (Stat Taurus) followed by colors (Stat Mauve) and then it would cycle back again to the cosmos.

  Eli went straight to room six. If he walked through the ICU corridor with purpose, like he was supposed to be there, he knew the staff would be too busy to stop him. At least it had worked when he’d entered the emergency room thirty-six hours earlier. But at that time he rode in on a gurney, administering open cardiac massage to the patient he straddled. Hard to detain someone in that position.

  Stat Virgo was indeed hooked to life support, tubes in every orifice and out both sides of his chest. All a good sign. Meant that the boy had survived the night. Eli reached under the sheets and found the boy’s wrist. A radial artery catheter was secured to his skin. Eli gently squeezed his patient’s hand.

  “Good morning.”

  A doctor Eli didn’t recognize stood behind him flipping through the patient’s chart. “Cardiovascular Surgery” embroidered his long white coat in red letters. He put the chart down, approached the patient’s bed opposite Eli, did a double-take.

  “You’re Branch, aren’t you?”

  Eli extended his hand.

  The cardiac surgeon shook it, pointed to the patient, and said, “Don’t know how the hell you did it, but you saved this boy’s life.”

  “Lucky,” Eli said. “But I’m glad he made it.”

  “He made it all right. That contraption you rigged, pretty clever. I’ve read about using a catheter balloon to plug a cardiac injury, but I’ve never seen it.”

  “It was long shot,” Eli conceded.

  In silence they stared at the boy, who was in a drug-induced coma, his chest rising rhythmically with each breath.

  “One of my fellows plans to write this case up for the next big trauma meeting,” the cardiac surgeon said. “We want you to be one of the authors.”

  Flattered, Eli was pulled back to the lure of academic surgery for a moment. Trips to research meetings, journal publications—all in the name of publicity for the surgery department and the hospital. But publicity was exactly the problem.

  “Thanks,” Eli said, “but don’t bother. I no longer have an academic affiliation. Hell, I’m not even supposed to be in the hospital.”

  The patient’s nurse entered the intensive care room. She nodded to the cardiac surgeon, glanced at Eli, and hung another bottle of IV fluid.

  The surgeon asked, “Did our patient have any fever overnight?”

  Eli took advantage of the distraction. He had accomplished what he came for. At a time of multiple, often disjointed specialties caring for the same patient, but with little primary care, it seemed natural, a necessity really, for at least one of these doctors to actually lay hands on the patient.

  As Eli stepped from the room, the cardiac surgeon nodded to him. He planned to leave the hospital through the emergency room. Enough chaos there that no one would impede his exit. The emergency room staff secretly hoped everyone would leave. It was those trying to get in that attracted attention.

  Entering the ER, Eli saw that current attention was directed to a young, pregnant girl being wheeled in on a stretcher. She appeared to be in active labor. Beside the girl, a young woman escorted the gurney. Eli recognized her as the medical student lauded in the newspapers for starting a free medical clinic. Located in Midtown, as Eli remembered. Primarily for the indigent.

  A male OB resident intercepted them and took hold of the gurney. “We’re taking her straight to Labor and Delivery,” the resident announced.

  The medical student kept a firm grip on the gurney.

  The resident stopped pushing the stretcher. “We’ve got her, Cate. Thanks.”

  Cate let go and watched the gurney disappear into the elevator.

  Eli knew exactly how she felt, having watched his own patient disappear into that elevator the day before.

  Cate stood near the exit. Eli passed her. Then he stopped.

  “Is the girl from your clinic?”

  Cate stared at the elevator doors. She breathed fast as though just finishing a sprint. “I’m sorry. What?”

  Eli introduced himself. “I read about your clinic in the paper. Are you doing high risk OB there, too?”

  She smiled. “I’m Cate Canavan. And no, teen deliveries are a little much for us.”

  Eli turned to leave.

  Cate stopped him.

  “Dr. Branch, we really need a surgeon to be involved with the clinic—if you have any time.”

  Eli thought about it. The free clinic couldn’t be any worse than working the ER. He turned, winked at Cate, and said, “Maybe I’ll stop by.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The old wrestling arena was empty. Rows of folding chairs encircled the ring, which was elevated four feet off the concrete floor. A single bare bulb illuminated the mat, casting shadows off the ropes to the ghost audience.

  The sight of the ring flooded Lipsky with the glory days of professional wrestling in Memphis. In the early seventies, there were two kings in Memphis—Elvis, of course, and Jerry “The King” Lawler, who was blazing a trail of destruction through every smoky warehouse, arena, and state fair in the Mid-South. And in his wake came Jerry Jarrett, Tojo Yamamoto, and the feared but fallen Masked Executioners. Lipksy smiled when he imagined Lawler in the ring, his arms wrapped around the tree trunk belly of Plowboy Frazier, who wore nothing but a pair of overalls.

  There was no loud music, no pyrotechnics back then, just bare strength and a metal turnbuckle in each corner stained with scalp blood. The bell would ring, two wrestlers would bounce on the mat, and the ass whooping began.

  Of course, every now and then, a metal chair came into play. Or a chain appeared, wrapped tight on a fist. And when things got serious—Lipsky took a deep breath and closed his eyes when he thought of this—they
stepped inside for the steel cage match, a totally enclosed chain-linked chamber of mayhem with Ric Flair and Austin Idol climbing the walls like animals.

  In those days, when he was off duty as a rookie police officer, Lipsky would buy tickets to at least one match every month. And when he couldn’t attend, Lance Russell and Dave Brown brought the action live on Channel Thirteen. It was through Saturday morning television that Lipsky first introduced the sport to his four-year-old son. That was before his wife packed up the car in a rage and left town with the boy to go live with her mother in Oklahoma.

  Lipsky stood by the ring and wrapped both hands around one of the ropes. The sheath of leather over the rope was old and dry and cracked, but it felt good pressed into the detective’s palms. Lipsky tugged on the rope, gave it a quick shake, and watched the wave travel through all four sides. Putting all his weight on the rope, he flipped his left leg up and onto the mat. His foot made it but his shoe caught the edge and he lurched forward, logrolling across the mat’s surface.

  As if he were Jerry Lawler himself bounding from the locker room, Lipsky sprang to his feet and bounced along the edge of the ring, fists thrust high in the air as though he’d just annihilated the Masked Executioners.

  Above the creak of rusty springs, Lipsky heard applause. A two-fingered whistle blended in with his wrestling fantasy. He stopped.

  Off to the corner, light from an open corridor illuminated the silhouettes of his fans—two police officers enjoying the show.

  One yelled, “Looking good, boss.”

  Lipsky waited for the final ripples in the mat to subside. He leaned on the ropes as the officers approached.

  The more senior officer commented, “Always thought you looked like a wrestler.”

  The younger officer joined in, “Are you winning up there?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lipsky said. “Just help me down, will you.”

  They eased him under the ropes and he jumped to the floor, smacking flat-footed on concrete. Lipsky tucked his shirt back in and said, “Lead the way.”

  They left the small arena and walked through a concrete corridor decorated with posters of the giants in the history of professional wrestling. The corridor opened to a foyer with empty concession stands and a ticket window. Along the wall, a series of arrows and signs with “Smoking” in red capitals directed them outside. They were greeted with a breath of hot air laced with stale cigarette smoke. A smoking hut the size of a one-car garage had been constructed on the outdoor concrete patio. Motion-sensing sliding glass doors parted as they approached. Lipsky thought of all the smoke-filled wrestling matches he had attended as a child. How times changed. Now smokers had a separate house of their own equipped with a wheelchair-accessible door. Nice.

  The room held two rows of picnic tables, four on each side. Metal pails filled with sand sat on top of each table. Ashtrays. In the back, a soft drink machine stood against the wall next to an automatic coffee dispenser that squirted stale cappuccino into a paper cup for ninety-five cents.

  In the back next to these machines, a body hunched over a picnic table. She was seated on the bench, her upper half sprawled face down across the tabletop. Her arms stretched out in front, fingers lapping the far edge of the table as though reaching for something, or someone.

  The lingering smell of tobacco smoke permeated the room. Lipsky moved closer. The victim wore jeans and a brown leather vest. She was of stocky build, arms full and muscular, fair skin with a cracked heart tattoo on her left bicep. A recent sunburn was fading somewhat in death. She was older than what Lipsky considered average for a wrestling fan. Could have been someone’s grandmother.

  “Who found her?” Lipsky directed his question to McCormick, the senior officer. Twenty years on the force afforded him an accurate detection of experience.

  “Cleaning crew,” McCormick said. Then he corrected himself. “I say crew. Really, just one old man here early to empty the ashtrays. Called nine-one-one when he saw the body.”

  “From a cell phone?”

  “Yeah, think so.”

  Lipsky looked at the officer who hadn’t said a word. “Them things come in handy, don’t they?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The victim’s face was hidden by a tangled mass of reddish-brown hair that fell forward, bathing in a pool of saliva and blood.

  Lipsky leaned in close. “What do we know?”

  “Turns out, the old man knew her. Said she’s a big wrestling fan. Volunteers in the ticket office to promote the matches.”

  Lipsky removed a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. Gently, he raised the woman’s head by pulling back on her hair. Her face was smashed with creases from the hard boards of the table. She appeared to be in her mid- to late fifties but the lines made it hard to tell. The saliva-blood pool had started to thicken and congeal, and a gelatinous bridge ran from her mouth to the table. There were no visible signs of trauma, except that her mouth gaped open. Her jaw was slack, too slack.

  Lipsky let the head fall back into place and looked at the ash bucket on the table. It was in the same location as the others, center of the table, a couple of feet from the victim. Instead of showing the butt-end of cigarettes crammed into sand, a white handkerchief covered the metal bucket. Lipsky saw a thick paper card propped against the bucket, similar to the one found by the victim in the cotton warehouse. The card sat slightly askew as if the sides were uneven. The detailed drawing on it made Lipsky wonder what he was about to find. He looked at the younger officer, whose crew cut was so close Lipsky could see his scalp.

  “We haven’t touched it.”

  Lipsky reached for the corner of the handkerchief. His stomach drew tight up in his chest.

  Beside old cigarette butts, an oval-shaped piece of meat lay on the sand. Smooth on the surface and rounded on one end, it was the size of a four-ounce steak. A jagged cut had severed the other end, and nubbins of tissue, like ligaments, splayed across the sand.

  McCormick leaned over the table to get a better look. “What the—?”

  “It’s her tongue,” Lipsky said. The drawing on the thick paper card depicted exactly what Lipsky saw in the bucket.

  Crew cut pulled his head back quickly and let out a long grunt. “Her tongue?”

  “Yeah.” Lipsky pointed at the tissue attachments. “It’s been cut way back at the base.”

  “What the hell’s that about?” McCormick asked.

  Lipsky said nothing. He thought about the warehouse victim. How a bone from the foot had been cut out and set apart, as if on display. Similar type case. Except this was a female, missing her tongue.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  At five a.m., Thomas Greenway parked his Mazda on the side street beside Liza’s house. Looking west, toward the river, he saw a blue-gray hint of dawn surfacing at the horizon. But among the houses of Victorian Village, night still dominated. Greenway did not ring the doorbell. He didn’t knock. Nor did Layla let him in. The chief resident entered Liza’s house with a key given to him by its owner. He climbed the stairs to the third-story office, not pausing at the bedroom of Layla, whom he assumed was fast asleep.

  The door to Liza’s office was cracked open, a faint light from inside. Liza sat at her desk wearing a fleece robe pulled close to her neck. Both hands were wrapped around a cup of coffee, as though it were mid-winter and not the middle of a heat wave. She showed no surprise upon seeing him.

  “What did you tell them?”

  He stepped inside the room and closed the door. “I told them you were a hot piece of ass.”

  Liza sipped her coffee. “They already knew that. What else?”

  “That you liked it when I—”

  “Shut up and just tell me.”

  He sat in a chair in front of her desk. She, the attending surgeon. Him, the resident reporting for duty. He leaned over the desk, arms folded across a thick slab of dark oak.

  “I told them the death occurred because of an equipment malfunction. Device failure. ‘Th
e robot,’” he put that term in quotation marks, “did not respond to your input, doctor. Isn’t that what you told me to say?”

  “And their response?”

  He shrugged. “They’re a bunch of damn lawyers. They just wrote in their yellow notebooks. What did you expect them to say?”

  “Do you think they bought it?”

  He leaned back in the seat. “Yeah, I think they did.”

  This seemed to please her. Liza stood. She walked to the front of her desk and sat sideways with one foot on the floor, one foot dangling. Her robe parted up to her hip. “Did you tell them what else I liked?”

  His eyes followed the curve of her thigh until it was obvious the robe was all she had on. She twisted, raised her foot off the floor until it rested in his lap. Using the tips of his thumbs, he kneaded the ball of her foot, slow circular motions that made her writhe.

  Liza pressed the tips of her fingers into her lower abdomen and straightened her back, took a few shallow breaths through pursed lips.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Liza relaxed her shoulders and exhaled. “I’ve had a few sharp pains.”

  “You should have it checked out.”

  “I did,” she said. “I had Brenner do an ultrasound in the clinic.” She rubbed a spot at her waistline and smiled. “Everybody’s fine.”

  Liza continued to smile at him.

  “What?”

  “You’re worried about us.”

  “Look, Liza. I’m glad for you. I really am. But for me, it was a business transaction. Nothing more. You wanted this. I agreed to help.”

  “To help? I think you did more than help.”

  “I don’t want to be involved. That was the agreement.”

  Liza rolled her eyes. “So technical. Agreements. Transactions.” She ran her foot down the side of his leg. “To use your terminology, our little merger was not only successful—but fantastic as well.”