Lethal Practice (17 page)

In seconds they had reached the consensus that I was as useless as I felt, so they went back to arguing with the nurses and doctors. That freed me to start getting mad. I lit out down the corridor of reaching hands and sheeted misery and blasted open my outer office door so hard, Carole jumped and tangled herself in a Dictaphone wire.

“Get me that lawyer in Albany I talked to yesterday,” I ordered while marching into my office. “If he’s not in, tell them I need him now, even if he hasn’t finished lunch.” Then I dialed Hurst on my other line.

“Office of Dr. Paul Hur—

“This is Garnet in emergency,” I blurted out without letting his secretary finish. “Tell him to get down here now!”

“I’m sorry. Dr. Garnet, but he’s in a meeting with senior management, and I couldn’t possibly interrupt—”

“Get him to emergency in two minutes or he can senior-manage my calling the media and warning the public away from this meltdown!” I slammed down the phone before the gasp. Carole was at the door indicating she had the lawyer on the line. She discreetly reminded me of his name before I punched the button to speak with him.

“Bill! Earl Garnet here. About that problem I asked you about yesterday. It’s really hit the fan and I’ve got to move. Any luck?”

His answer started with “Well, here’s what I found.” The next few minutes were taken up by my saying “yeah” a lot and scribbling a few notes.

At the end I asked for a formal letter containing the substance of our conversation and thanked him. I meant it. He’d just given me the weapon I needed.

Back in the corridor I saw Hurst surrounded by the same desperate clutch of patients, husbands, wives, lovers, children, and friends of patients who justifiably had found me of no use before. While he worked his kind, concerned routine, I caught his eye and gave a mock salute, and left him there. I could sense his hatred pelting my back all the way out the door, where I quickly felt a lot less cocky. I hadn’t seen Hurst since Sean had voiced his suspicions and expanded my own wild speculations about him as well, but instinctively I feared him now. I’d no new inkling whether he had murdered Kingsly, or was taking our usual political skirmishes to a new extreme for some other hidden reason. Nor had I any better idea what he was capable of doing to me, or what he was up to. But until I knew why he had tried to make me a suspect, even challenging him on the bed cuts could be dangerous.

I didn’t have any destination at the moment, just the intent to let Hurst simmer in the mess he’d helped create while I planned my next move and the best way to use what our insurance agency lawyer had given me. Suddenly I realized my name was coming over the PA. I got to a wall phone and learned that Watts wanted to see me in his lab. I waited while they transferred me through to his private line.

“Earl?” he said on picking up.

“Yeah, Robert, what’s up?”

“Are you busy?”

“Am I ever. I’ve got a meltdown in the ER, and I just suckered Hurst into an unscheduled meeting with all our angry users. Let him explain budgets and bed closures.”

“I think you’d better come down here and see something.”

“Hey, Robert, I always learn from your sessions, but this just isn’t a good time.”

“You’ve got to see this now!” he said abruptly, and hung up.

It was unusual for Robert to press. Immediately worried, I walked quickly to the elevator, found it an inordinately long wait, and took the stairs instead. As I descended to the basement, then trudged through the tunnel passages that led to the autopsy room, I wondered with increasing dread what my usually friendly mentor wanted to show me that was so urgent.

Watts and I had grown to respect each other’s clinical skills, having met regularly about cases over the past twenty years. During the last eight, we’d managed to kid each other through the absurdities of hospital politics as well. In the interludes, with a comment here, a joke there, we had become friends of sorts, not close, but still friends. I knew he loved sailing and planned to escape to it when he retired. His last child had left home years ago and recently had started a surgical residency. One time, waiting for some useless meeting to begin, he’d leaned over and announced, “My wife and I were alone in the house for the first time in thirty years last night. It was weird.” Then, a little more than two years ago, his wife died. Colon cancer. Widespread metastases. She was dead within three months of the diagnosis.

I had found it hard to comfort him. His broad shoulders so bent with pain brought a lump to my throat. What could I say? Finally, I had chosen the ancient Irish phrase I’d heard from farmers at my father’s funeral: “I’m sorry for your troubles.”

His gray eyes had filled with tears, and he’d turned away. A week later he was back at work. We never spoke of it again.

These patches of insight made a collage more than a portrait. I didn’t really know him. But we faced pain and death together, and we exposed our triumphs and failures to each other. Now and then, when it was most needed, we told each other, “You did good.” Watts was a guy I laughed with, a guy I liked a lot.

He met me at the door of his autopsy suite in full protective garb and made me stop by the lockers in the changing area to replace my white coat with a green OR gown. I also put on a mask, pulled on a hair cap, and slid a pair of paper slippers over my shoes. He advised me we wouldn’t be cutting tissue, so I needn’t put protective goggles over my glasses, but that I should double-glove for handling organs. Since the resurgence of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis in America’s inner cities, most of these precautions were protection against airborne organisms as well as parenteral agents such as the viruses causing AIDS or hepatitis. We would also practice reverse isolation on the way out, carefully depositing our protective garb in a bin at the door, to avoid carrying lethal strains of anything into the rest of the hospital.

Stepping into the brightly lit autopsy suite, I noted he had two corpses there, and both were cut open. The insides of the bodies looked the same, the postmortem having reduced them to basic colors. Their trunks were slit from the top of the breastbone to the pubis and the halves spread to expose two red pods streaked with yellow fat and white sinew. The lungs were blue with pollution, and in each abdominal cavity a purple liver and an ochre spleen lay atop a glistening tangle of intestines. On one, the breasts had been parted and laid to each side. On the other, a limp and bedraggled penis hung down between withered legs.

The heart had been removed from the male, but was left in place in the female.

Watts hadn’t yet opened the craniums, but in the male, the scalp had been given an incision around the back of the head and peeled over his face. A small circular bone saw lay on a nearby instrument table ready for use. On the left-hand counter by the male were two rows of labeled tubes and small specimen jars containing various body fluids ready for toxicologic testing. Other bottles stood empty and would be used for tissue samples taken later. An open Tupperware container in the bottom of one of the deep sinks held the removed heart. More containers were stacked on wall shelves and would eventually hold other vital organs. On the right-hand counter by the female lay a complete set of tubes and jars, still empty. Over each dissecting table, large venting hoods hummed, doing their best, but the fumes of formaldehyde and other toxic reagents stung my eyes. And, in spite of my mask, there was, of course, the smell of dead flesh.

But I was puzzled. It looked like he was partway through a complete autopsy on me male, then stopped, and had done only a partial “limited look” at me heart, lungs, and abdominal cavity of the female. I waited for him to explain.

Watts pointed to the female. ‘This is the Jane Doe you got yesterday,” he began in his familiar, professorial way. “And this,” he added, turning to the male, “is the John Doe from Monday.”

He caught my surprise.

“I know,” he continued, sounding abject, “I didn’t take your concern about the mark on his chest seriously. But when we got the Jane Doe yesterday, I called the medical examiner and he confirmed there really have been too many of these DOAs all over the city lately. He’s going to start having all the hospitals look closely at them. Since I had John here on ice as well, the ME said to give him a thorough autopsy.” He was putting a heavy apron on as he talked.

“There was nothing unusual on Jane there.” He nodded toward her corpse. Then he leaned over John and reached into his chest cavity to what was left of the cut-open sternum, or breastbone.

I was getting a funny feeling.

Watts was folding back in place the two halves of the chest wall he had cut open to start the post. There, like a dancing marionette wire, quivered a thin stylet identical to the one he’d used earlier to trace Kingsly’s mortal wound.

“Unfortunately, Earl, you were right. That small mark you noticed was a scab over a puncture mark. Except the needle had been inserted and withdrawn cleanly, unlike in Kingsly’s case, so it was even less perceptible. I doubt anyone else but you would have noticed it, even after Kingsly’s murder. I feel like a fool for having ridiculed you, because right now we have to assume it’s possible the chief executive officer of this hospital and this down-and-out homeless John Doe were both murdered with a needle to the heart, and I delayed the police finding out by forty-eight hours.”

It was insane. Crazy. Despite having initially found the mark myself, I was sure he had to be wrong. I started grasping at logical explanations. “Someone must have tried resuscitating him prehospital and it wasn’t recorded.”

“That was my first thought too, but I already double-checked with MAS. It was a DOA picked up in an alley. Long dead. There was no attempt at resuscitation made.” Watts seemed weary and paused, then added, “I know it’s hard to accept. I’ve run it over and over looking for some other explanation myself. But the entry wound on the heart in that container over there is in perfect position. John Doe was stabbed same as Kingsly, by an expert. Of course, I’ll need my tissue samples to confirm whether the needle went in before or after death, but without the history of a resuscitation attempt, murder, however inexplicable, has to be our working diagnosis. I’m just kicking myself for not following up on your first impulse.”

The shock left me nervous. Since I was a kid, a serious situation had always made me giggle; I didn’t giggle, but my next crack was its verbal equivalent. “Maybe John and Kingsly were drinking buddies?”

                                            * * * *

Detective Bufort was not a happy man. We’d pulled him out of the hospital’s finance department, where he was hovering over a group of men uniformly dressed in white shirts, gray slacks, and black shoes. Only the ties varied. They had taken their raincoats off, giving a slightly new meaning to the term “plainclothes,” and resembling more the members of a firm of certified public accountants than cops.

With all the focus on the hospital books, I realized Bufort must have figured Kingsly’s death had something to do with money. I wondered if that was why Gil Fernandez had looked so frightened. But a dead vagrant didn’t exactly fit the financial crimes profile.

“Impossible!” Bufort had spat out as we described our find on the way to the morgue. Having to put on full protection against airborne infections made him even more irritable. Actually seeing the guide wire tracing the needle stab to the heart seemed to make him angry.

“Preposterous!” He glared at Watts. “You must be wrong. This goes against everything we’ve found so far in our investigation. You’ve obviously made a mistake.” He was nearly stuttering, he was so upset.

“My big mistake,” said Watts, sounding miserable, “was ignoring Dr. Garnet when he suggested I take a look at this mark two days ago. I practically laughed him out of the room.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

Bufort swung around to face me. “You reported this two days ago! And you didn’t tell me?”

“Detective Bufort!” interrupted Watts. “I said the delay was all my fault. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Garnet being so alert—”

“Dr. Watts, I’m not interested in your very noble and entirely predictable defense of a colleague,” snapped Bufort without taking his eyes off me. “I’m very interested in the fact that Dr. Garnet has once again attempted to withhold information from me.” His face was flushed, and the blacks of his eyes widened until his irises became thin brown rims.

“Now, wait a minute,” I protested. “I reported a very unlikely possibility to the hospital’s pathologist—a mole or dirt on that DOA. Why should either of us have told the police such a wild idea until it was confirmed? You wouldn’t have believed us then, and you don’t seem ready to accept the finding even now.” My accusation sounded a bit hollow, since I, too, was having trouble accepting that the derelict could have been murdered with a cardiac needle.

Bufort turned back to Watts. “I don’t accept your verdict, Doctor, because according to our investigation so far, it makes no sense. And with all due respect, while we appreciate the help you gave us with Kingsly, you’re not a forensic pathologist. You may be perfectly adequate discovering why people die from natural causes, but to go so far as proclaiming this derelict was murdered in the same way that Kingsly was, well, clearly, you can’t know what you’re talking about.”

Now Watts’s eyes dilated, and his cold stare fixed on Bufort. Many a poor fool, resident and staff alike, had invited his or her own humiliation by challenging one of Watts’s clinical pronouncements. He struck the pose of a readied cobra I’d seen in previous bouts, but this threatened to get physical. “Would you care to repeat that accusation?” The level of menace in his voice alarmed even me, and I instinctively placed my hand on his arm. He was shaking with rage. With deliberate slowness Watts reached up and switched on his overhead dictating microphone.

Bufort swallowed. He was a tough cop, pompous, close-minded and maybe incompetent, but I suspected he was also a canny bureaucrat. A tape recorder probably frightened him more than a gun. An official record, even on his best behavior, could be scrutinized, picked apart, and twisted against him by the press, or even by someone in his own department settling an old score.